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Mark Steyn has an excellent article on Turkey. We touch here on only a small portion of the information he imparts. It didn’t take long for the world to take the measure of our reckless feckless president.

…Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims. Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now but just a few years ago there was talk about whether Gen. Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat.

…Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as “the post-American world”? Well, look at it as if you’re sitting in the presidential palace of some or other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO’s only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria. And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.

David Warren on the failure of appeasement. Perhaps current generations of Americans and Israelis will witness and learn from the increased violence and unrest that appeasement brings.

…The arguments above should have been made loudly and unambiguously by the U.S. State Department, not left to me. By being aloof when a crucial ally is under attack, the U.S. is actually encouraging Israel’s enemies to pile on.

This is the universal problem with an appeasement policy: why it has a 100 percent failure rate. You do not get peace by encouraging mortal enemies to attack your ally. You get peace by making your support of that ally crystal clear. You do not “win friends and influence nations” by leaving your allies to hang. By broadcasting weakness, confusion, indecision, and incompetence, the Obama administration is quickly squandering the U.S. ability to prevent wars. …

…We need a serious inquiry into the Turkish government’s instigation of this incident. The broader question ought no longer to be whether Turkey should be let into the EU, but whether she should remain in NATO.

Ed Morrissey has more on non-government statistics that reflect the true state of the economy.

…Why did the unemployment rate go down?  People have begun exiting the labor force again (via Jonah Goldberg):

The unemployment rate fell to a seasonally adjusted 9.7% in May from 9.9% in April, according to a separate survey of 60,000 households. Economists were expecting the jobless rate to sink to 9.8%.

The decline wasn’t particularly good news, however, because the drop was due to 322,000 people dropping out of the labor force. While unemployment dropped by 287,000 to 15 million, employment also fell, dipping 35,000 to 139.4 million. …

Mort Zuckerman comments on the economy and jobs. More reason to cut back on government spending, and restrictive taxing and regulation that is preventing economic growth.

…Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April – unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May – raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement. If we were, employment would already have reached a new high and made up all of the jobs lost, as it did during the previous postwar recessions. This time we remain short of the old peak of employment, by an astounding 8.4m jobs. One in six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. This is not a normal cycle when compared with a typical recession, which sees no more than 2m to 3m jobs lost.

Wages are falling; wage cuts are spreading as employers continue to curb costs and remain reluctant to hire. And the amount of excess labour continues to increase. … The headline unemployment rate is back up to slightly under 10 per cent, but this covers only people who sought a job in the previous four weeks.

What is the result of an excessive number of people seeking work, with an average of 5.6 people vying for each job opening? Wage deflation. Average hourly pay has not budged since the turn of the year, including one month in which we had a 0.1 per cent decline in average hourly earnings, something that has not happened since April 2003. …

In the WSJ, Arthur Laffer says to brace yourselves for 2011.

…On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.

Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there’s always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.

Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.

Also, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 into 2010. In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has. When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe “double dip” recession. …

George Will discusses the “emergency” aid to states for education: more pay to government workers while the rest of the economy founders.

…But before Congress is stampeded into spending yet more (borrowed) billions, it should read “The Phony Funding Crisis” in the journal Education Next by James W. Guthrie, a professor at Southern Methodist University, and Arthur Peng, a research associate. They say:

“For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year.” Indeed, public schools have been so insulated from economic downturns that “there have been 11 periods during which GDP declined but mean total real per-pupil revenues still increased.”

…We are witnessing a familiar government dance, the Prosperity-to-Hysteria Two-Step: When revenue grows, governments put in place permanent spending streams; when revenue falls, governments exclaim that any retrenchment, even back to spending levels of a few years ago, is a “catastrophe.” …

In the Washington Examiner, Hugh Hewitt discusses upcoming topics on his radio show, including an interview with Arthur Brooks on his new book. The 70/30 concept of our nation makes a lot of sense. The sensible 70 percent of the country has allowed a takeover by the 30 percent composed of malcontents and people who think they’re superior and thus entitled to run everyone else’s lives

…Brooks’ book is a relatively short, very sharply argued explanation of how the 30 percent in this 70/30 nation of ours has come to control the federal government and many of the largest state governments, and in the process driven us to the point of a national fiscal stroke.

The 30 percent are the statists, the chattering class and their colleagues in academic and government employ, plus the government-dependent and a very large slice of the youth vote. Brooks details who they are and how they intend to grow their grip on the country.

The 70 percent are the rest of us, a mass that is coalescing into a potent political force that will be revealed fully on Nov. 2, 2010.

Brooks makes a compelling moral case for rolling back the vast creep of the 30 percent, whose regulatory and tax policies have spread like the oil slick in the Gulf, inexorably and continually for a very long time, creating enormous damage across the country, but damage that can and must be repaired. …

Pickerhead’s philosophy of running his business is this; if everything looks to be running well, you’ve obviously overlooked something. Robert Samuelson explains human response to success and how this caused BP’s disaster and our financial meltdown.

…Cost-cutting by BP, careless rig operators and lax regulators have all been fingered as plausible culprits in the blowout. President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the causes, and the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation. There will be extensive analyses. But the stark contrast between the disaster’s magnitude and the previous safety record points to another perverse possibility: The success of deepwater drilling led to failure. It sowed overconfidence. Continuing achievements obscured the dangers.

This pattern applies to other national setbacks. Consider the financial crisis. It was not the inherent complexity of subprime mortgages or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that caused the crisis. It was the willingness of presumably sophisticated investors to hold these securities while ignoring the complexity and underlying risks. But this behavior was understandable at the time. …

There’s a cycle to our calamities or, at any rate, some of them. Success tends to breed carelessness and complacency. People take more risks because they don’t think they’re taking risks. The regulated and the regulators often react similarly because they’ve shared similar experiences. The financial crisis didn’t occur so much because regulation was absent (many major financial institutions were regulated) but because regulators didn’t grasp the dangers. …

…It is human nature to celebrate success by relaxing. The challenge we face is how to acknowledge this urge without being duped by it.

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The federal structure of the U. S. might be our undoing. Robert Barone has a scary post in Minyanville about relative levels of debt between us and say, Greece. An analysis that imputes to Americans all debt; federal, state, and local, puts us in the spendthrift lead.

… All of the public debt was originated by governments and most of the private debt by banks or other financial institutions. In feudal times, serfs owed a significant portion of their toil to their lords. Have times really changed? The lords are now the politicians and “Too Big to Fail” bankers. Many ordinary people are serfs, highly indebted either voluntarily (private debt) or involuntarily (public debt). Looking at debt in this way helps to explain the unholy alliance between Washington and Wall Street (see The Unholy Washington-Wall Street Alliance) and why the “Too Big to Fail” and Washington politicians get richer and richer at the public’s expense.

While US citizens are drowning in debt, the political system appears incapable of reducing it. In fact, the politicians continue to expand it in the erroneous belief that more debt will help. There are only two ways out: years of austerity or currency devaluation/inflation. The political system won’t allow the former. Buy Gold!

Jay Nordlinger has two fascinating Corner posts that start with Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winning agriculturist and end with Andrei Sakharov’s Oslo tribute to the green revolutionists who were just then going out of fashion with the genetic food fascists.

Here are some comments Nordlinger posted from Norman Borlaug:

…“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny [the miserable] these things.”

Can I give you something else? Borlaug was asked what he had to say to advocates of organic farming. He replied,

“God bless you. Use all of the organic matter you want. But don’t deceive the world into believing that we can feed 6.2 billion people with organic matter alone. If we tried to do this, we would plow up all of these marginal lands, cut down much of our forests, and much of that would be productive for just a few years. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it.” …

And here is part of Nordlinger’s post discussing Andrei Sakharov.

…And I have something extraordinary for you. Five years after Borlaug won the peace prize, Andrei Sakharov won it. He was not allowed to travel to collect it, of course. But he wrote a Nobel lecture, delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who happened to be out of the country anyway: She was in Italy, for medical treatment. As you can imagine, Sakharov had a lot to say, about the Soviet Union, human rights, nuclear weapons, and geopolitics. But he also found time for the Green Revolution, and its attackers:

“It is not so very long since men were unfamiliar with artificial fertilizers, mechanized farming, toxic chemicals, and intensive agricultural methods. There are voices calling for a return to more traditional and possibly less dangerous forms of agriculture. But can this be put into practice in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are suffering the pangs of hunger? On the contrary, there is no doubt that we need increasingly intensive methods of farming, and we need to spread modern methods all over the world, including the developing countries.”

Isn’t that something? With all the rest that Sakharov had to think about . . . (For his complete lecture, go here.)

Let me add this, please: Because Sakharov was one of the greatest dissidents, resisters, and human-rights champions of all time — because he was one of the most noble human beings we have ever known — we tend to forget that he was one of the greatest scientists of his age: the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicist, the father of its thermonuclear weapons. He sacrificed his scientific career — his privileges, his dachas, his laboratories, all of it — to do what was most right. What a man.

Roger Simon wants you to vote for Helen Thomas’ press credentials to be withdrawn.

…As for myself, I wish I felt I had that luxury. Unfortunately, I don’t. The vitriol is too much, not just from one old lady, but from too many corners of the globe. This is not a time for intellectual parsing, but for action — action against anti-Semitism before we are returned to an era we thought we would never see again.

Toward that end, PJTV has put up a short survey. It asks the question “Should the White House revoke the press credentials of Helen Thomas?” I guess you already know how I voted. If you would like to vote, please go here.

At the close of this post, Marty Peretz reminds us that the president’s first trip abroad was to Turkey. So they knew first what a jerk he is. We should have a law requiring him to stay home.

… But, for the moment—the long moment—the story is Turkey and its prime minister, the more-than-nutsy Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is dragging his country backwards, backwards, backwards. To long before the Ataturk era. Robert L. Pollock has a devastating column, “Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks,” also in this morning’s WSJ.

You may think that “backwards” does not mean the Islamic orbit. But I do. In any case, it means the route away from reason and scientific civilization. The road to darkness, where the Muslim world has been stuck for centuries.

Barack Obama put his trust in Erdogan on his first trip abroad. Two days in Turkey. What a waste.

Mark Steyn comments on recent anti-Semitic events.

In contrast to the general directions of Helen (“Go back to Germany and Poland“) Thomas, the peace-lovers aboard the Mavi Marmara were more specific:

In response to a radio transmission by the Israeli Navy warning the Gaza flotilla that they are approaching a naval blockade, passengers of the Mavi Marmara respond, “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz” and “We’re helping Arabs go against the US, don’t forget 9/11″.

Such amusing conversationalists.

These are not “humanitarian” “peace” “activists”. These are, in any objective sense, a party to the conflict. They’re not trying to bring “peace”, they’re trying to help their side win. That’s their choice, and may the best man win, but the media collusion in presenting them as “humanitarian” “aid” workers is Orwellian – and all the more so in a world in which the Turkish Prime Minister accuses Israel of killing children on the beach and in which the doyenne of the White House press corps no longer recognizes Israel’s “right to exist”. …

We also have Mark Steyn writing about the changing tactics of anti-Semitism.

…There is a kind of logic about this. As paradoxical as it sounds, Muslims have been far greater beneficiaries of Holocaust guilt than the Jews. In a nutshell, the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. Holocaust guilt is a cornerstone of the Muslim Europe arising before our eyes. The only minority that can’t leverage the Shoah these days is the actual target. …

…when the flotilla hit the fan, a couple of readers wrote to me to ask why the British and European media were always so eager to be led up the garden path. Because, when it comes to Israeli “atrocities,” they want to believe. Because, even in an age of sentimental one-worldism, the Jews remain “the other.” If old-school Euro-Judenhass derived from racism and nationalism, the new Judenhass has advanced under the cover of anti-racism and multiculturalism. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.

In the NY Post, Kirsten Powers discusses the executive branch law-breaking actions.

…Many Beltway talkers are claiming that the president actually has the “right,” as head of the party, to clear the field in primaries. Sorry, the only people with the right to choose a nominee are primary voters. We live in the United States, not some Middle Eastern dictatorship (or, apparently, Chicago).

When I voted for Obama, I voted for him to be president, not for him to use government jobs or perks to drive out qualified challengers in Democratic primaries. …

In the WSJ, Kimberly Strassel writes about another law that was broken by the enthusiastic Obami job recruiters.

…No phrase is more feared in Washington than “quid pro quo,” and Beltway politicians carefully avoid any hint of it. There are winks and nods, yes. But you’d have to be crazy to put something in an email. Crazy, or from Chicago, where it is simply understood that the political machine decides elections and hands out consolation prizes accordingly.

…Yet as Scott Coffina, associate counsel to George W. Bush, has noted, the White House may have blundered into a separate charge.

“The Hatch Act,” writes Mr. Coffina in National Review Online, “makes it illegal for a federal employee to use his official position or authority to interfere with or affect the result of an election.” He notes that among Mr. Bauer’s justifications for the Sestak talk was that Democrats had a “legitimate interest” in avoiding a primary. “Advancing the interests of a political party is not a ‘legitimate’ use of one’s official government position,” says Mr. Coffina, yet Mr. Bauer is on record saying that was the goal. …

Michael Barone offers insights into how Obama’s behavior in office has been a demonstration of Chicago politics, where the ruling class has legalized their larceny.

…Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

…So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder. …

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The country elected somebody who had done nothing to be our president. How ironic he’s in trouble for something he did nothing to cause. Just how serious is the spill? Popular Mechanics lists the largest oil spills in history. No, the Exxon Valdez which spilled 10.8 million gallons did not make the list. The BP spill doesn’t make the list either. PM also informs us about the long-term damages caused by these spills. In the short-term, when calculating the costs to the Gulf Coast, the spill is devastating. It is entirely possible the livelihoods of millions of people will be wiped out for a couple of years. Long-term though, mother earth is a tough old broad.

In discussing the oil spill, David Broder compares the leadership skills of Obama and Carter.

…Obama keeps popping up in new settings, sounding as if he is in command, and he has refused to be confined to the White House as Carter was by the hostage crisis. His good-guy Coast Guard retired admiral has not melted under the pressure, and the BP execs we’ve seen on TV refuse to play cartoon capitalists, instead conveying the sense that they grieve over the accident.

As a result, this saga, painful as it is, has not yet become the simple demonstration of monumental futility and incompetence that the hostage crisis became for Carter, who let his personal frustration become the nation’s humiliation. When he finally mounted a rescue effort, and the helicopters crashed into each other in the desert before reaching the hostages, it was the final proof that he was cursed in anything he tried to do.

…Nothing is going to help Obama unless and until the engineers come up with a method for shutting down this gusher of pollution. He clearly couldn’t prevent it, and he was slow in signaling its severity. But he owns it now, and until it is over, the man who aspired to be the next John Kennedy or maybe Franklin Roosevelt will have to hope he doesn’t end up as Jimmy Carter.

John Fund has an interesting post on the bigger picture surrounding an Obama speech.

They’re calling it President Obama’s “malaise” speech, a reference to the infamous 1979 address in which President Jimmy Carter gave a downbeat assessment of America’s future. Yesterday, President Obama lamented that for many citizens today, there was a “feeling of not being in control of your own economic future, the sense that the American dream might slowly be slipping away.”

Mr. Obama’s speech at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University drew a sharp rebuke from Alan Meltzer, a leading economist at the school. He issued a statement saying it was the president’s tax and spending policies that were putting the country in peril. Mr. Obama’s “rhetoric was divorced from current reality,” he wrote. …

What was most visibly striking about Mr. Obama’s speech was who wasn’t there for it. … Lame-duck Senator Arlen Specter was there, but no other members of Congress attended — all pleaded other engagements. Joe Sestak, the congressman who defeated Mr. Specter in the Democratic primary last month, stayed in Philadelphia. For a state that Mr. Obama carried with 55% of the vote just a year and a half ago, the absence of prominent Pennsylvania Democrats clearly marked the decline of the president’s political fortunes. …

Charles Krauthammer writes an excellent analysis of Israel’s foreign policy and the abject stupidity of the UN’s responses.

…But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry. …

…Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land — evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam looks at historical tensions behind the flotilla propaganda.

…The fact that Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Turkish aid organization behind the flotilla, has explicitly aligned itself with Hamas and has ties to global jihad networks was hardly encouraging, not least because Hamas has been receiving weapons transported by sea. Hamas recognizes that Turkish public opinion is crucial to its efforts to undermine Israel’s international legitimacy. After a long and fruitful period of close collaboration between the Israeli and Turkish militaries, Turkey’s AK Party government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has bolstered his political standing at home by loudly condemning Israel in international forums, and now his government is demanding that the U.S.condemn Israel. What appears to be a simple humanitarian mission was in fact part of a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to divide the NATO alliance and strengthen Hamas’ grip on Gaza. But no evidence will persuade the Turkish public that Israel had every right to enforce its blockade. The country’s political elites have every reason to direct the disaffection and anger of Turks away from themselves and towards Israel, a tactic also embraced by rulers throughout the region. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on continued foreign policy bungling.

Unmitigated chutzpah is the only way to characterize this, which comes via David Ignatius:

The Obama team recognizes that Israel will act in its interests, but it wants Jerusalem to consider U.S. interests, as well. The administration has communicated at a senior level its fear that the Israelis sometimes “care about their equities, but not about ours.”

Has Israel “condemned” the U.S.? Has Israel sought to reorient itself away from the U.S.? Demanded unilateral concessions by the U.S.? Snuggled up to foes of the U.S.? Or snubbed its president repeatedly?

The arrogance is stunning, even for the Obama crowd. …

Jennifer Rubin highlights the difference between the current administration stance on the flotilla propaganda and Marco Rubio’s response.

Contrast Obama’s testiness with Israel over the Jewish state’s temerity to defend itself with the sentiments of Marco Rubio, who writes, “Of course, we should stand with Israel.” It is worth reading Rubio’s comments in full, but this is particularly noteworthy:

As many in the international community use this flotilla incident to predictably rally against Israel, it is important to stand firmly behind our ally. In no way can the U.S. allow a path to be cleared that would enable the United Nations or any international body to discredit and diminish our democratic friend and partner. If Israel’s right to self-defense is undermined by misguided efforts to lift its legal and necessary blockade of Gaza, which serves to stop Hamas from arming itself with deadly weapons, there will be lasting consequences not only for Israel, but also for the U.S. and the entire world.

Make no mistake: while we await all the facts to emerge about this incident, it is clear the sponsors and participants of the Free Gaza Movement’s Flotilla have been thoroughly documented in their support of violent extremism. A far cry from being “humanitarian relief workers,” the activists on board the Mavi Marmara had a cache of bulletproof vests, night vision goggles and gas masks. This was no humanitarian mission.

No equivocation, no hand-wringing, no second-guessing. The un-Obama approach to our ally Israel.

The Obama administration has set the bar so low that we are delighted when it at least withholds judgment. But that is the wrong standard. …

Written just before the flotilla clash, Claudia Rosett gives us background on the Islamist terrorists that control Gaza, and the hypocrisy of the United Nations.

…Recall that in 2002, trying to stop the violence of Yasser Arafat’s second intifada, former President George W. Bush proposed a “roadmap” for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In the multilateral haggling that followed, Israel in pursuit of that peace withdrew in 2005 from Gaza–a move that required Israeli authorities to forcibly drag some Jewish residents from their homes. But peace did not follow. In the ensuing Gaza elections in January 2006, Palestinian voters gave a large majority to Hamas. Five months later an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped into Gaza. Today, almost four years later, he has still not been released.

In 2007 Hamas in a bloody coup ousted the remaining parliamentarians of the rival Fatah party and after a spree of murdering fellow Palestinians took complete control of Gaza. During 2008, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, terrorists in Hamas-run Gaza fired 1,750 rockets and 1,528 mortar bombs into southern Israel. This was a gross and deliberate provocation which the United Nations and its constituent members of the so-called international community did nothing effective to stop. In late December 2008 Israel finally launched Operation Cast Lead, sending troops into Gaza for just over three weeks to try to shut down the attacks.

Hamas has not renounced its aim of destroying Israel. On the contrary, Hamas has been receiving military training and smuggled weapons from Iran, where the nuclear-wannabe rulers have openly expressed interest in wiping Israel off the map. In February 2009 Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who operates out of Damascus, openly praised Iran for helping Hamas fight Israel. …

In the Corner, Daniel Foster explains how the government statistics show increased employment because the government counted short-term jobs with the Census in their “official” numbers.

New jobs numbers released this morning show the economy added 431,000 jobs in may as the unemployment rate fell to from 9.9 to 9.7 percent. But as with all employment reports, the government arithmetic shouldn’t fool you — these are disappointing numbers.

All but 20,000 of the 431,000 jobs added were temporary hires for the U.S. Census, and the dip in unemployment rate is the result of the continued exodus of Americans from the ranks of the job-seeking to the merely jobless — 322,000 in May. By contrast, employment decreased by 35,000 to 139.4 million…

David Harsanyi offers some additional sarcasm on the jobs-for-dropouts affair.

…But let’s pose broader questions regarding the Andrew Romanoff and Ron Sestak affairs: Why is it illegal to offer a position for a favor in the first place? What’s the big deal? Happens all the time. After all, it’s not as if our vast government bureaucracies employ a strict merit-driven hiring process.

If they did, would Ken Salazar be deemed the most capable person in the nation to lead the Department of the Interior? Solar-powered platitudes, empty threats and a cowboy hat can get you so far. What could possibly be the reason for a union-lackey like Hilda Solis running the Department of Labor? Labor in this case means actual jobs, right?

And, sadly, I have more business managing the Transportation Department than Ray LaHood, who believes cars are immoral, planes are unsafe and bicycles hold the key to solving the nation’s congestion. …

Scott Adams In Dilbert’s blog has a funny piece on the value of execution over ideas.

…Evaluating whether an idea is good enough for a movie is a bit like an automobile expert saying a certain brand of car doesn’t taste good. It’s absurd. …

…For example, here’s the world’s worst idea for a movie: Titanic. It did okay at the box office.

…The self-appointed movie critics went on to point out that Office Space was already a movie, so there was no room left in the universe for a Dilbert movie. That’s a bit like saying there’s no point in creating a romantic comedy because someone already did that one. …

… How about a Broadway musical about a bunch of frickin’ cats? Done!

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Don’t miss the cartoons today. They’re awesome.

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Our favorite Davids look at the Middle East today.

David Warren starts by giving us more of the picture related to the Israeli raid on the pretend humanitarian mission to Gaza.

…From start to finish this was a violent political stunt, designed to inflict as much harm as possible on Israel’s existential interests. To defend it requires obtuse hypocrisy.

Consider: the embargo on Gaza is not Israel’s alone. Egypt also enforces strict controls on what enters and leaves Gaza, and for the same obvious reason. The territory is controlled by Hamas, and they are trying to import lethal weaponry, from Iran and other rogue sources. But Egypt is conveniently left out of the propaganda picture. …

David Goldman (Spengler) looks at what this incident tells us about Israeli foreign policy and the intentions of the Turkish government.

Israel mishandled the Gaza “humanitarian aid” flotilla through extreme forbearance, and will suffer a marathon of tongue-clicking and hand-wringing by diplomatic hypocrites who know better. The Jewish state lost the propaganda battle the moment the floating time bomb disguised as a humanitarian mission sailed from Turkey. If Israel had denounced the matter as a provocation and withdrawn its ambassador from Turkey, warning that the object of the exercise was to provoke violence and open the way for weapons deliveries to Hamas, the outcome might have been quite different. …

…There is a curious symmetry between Israel’s reluctance to call out the Turks for their sponsorship of the provocation, and the seemingly explicable reluctance of the Israeli military to treat the threat with the seriousness it clearly deserved. The Israeli navy commandos walked into a trap for which they clearly were unprepared. …

…Evidently, Israel has trouble accepting the reality on the ground, just as other governments do. There is not going to be a peace negotiation, but rather a war, and that the war will be terrible and bloody. Israel has lost Turkey as an ally; the United States, for that matter, has lost Turkey as an ally, as the leaders of Ankara compete with the mullahs of Tehran for the leadership of Islamism. …

David Harsanyi makes a number of good points, including turning the tables on the MSM.

…Still, commentators like Alan Colmes opine: “To speak out against this despicable act isn’t to hate Israel, but rather to love it, and peace.”

So why don’t left-wing pundits love Turkey for a while? That nation, after all, not only instigated this event but is home to more than 25 million Kurds living in occupied territories. Kurds who deal with daily human rights abuses: torture, mass disappearances, assaults on their language and culture.

No emergency sessions at the United Nations for them. …

…And no U.S. administration is pressuring Turkey to give Kurds their own state. …

In the Enterprise Blog, Marc Thiessen comments on the job no one wants.

Little noticed before the holiday weekend was this piece in the Washington Post,  where Obama administration officials bemoaned the fact that they can’t find anyone to accept the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). After floating the name of General James Clapper, the Obama administration is apparently looking elsewhere because of pressure from Capitol Hill to appoint a civilian. Problem? Apparently no qualified civilian intelligence experts are interested. The Post quotes an intelligence official saying, “Nobody who knows this stuff wants this job.”

Now why is that? Could it be the fact that the Obama administration has effectively declared war on the intelligence community—taking away the tools our intelligence professionals need to protect the country and then blaming them for their failure to anticipate and prevent plots like the Christmas Day and Times Square attacks? …

Theodore Dalrymple discusses how foreign aid can sustain a parasitic government class that has destroyed the economy and the wealth of the population. Below he discusses Julius Nyerere’s socialization of Tanzania.

…But Nyerere knew what to do for them. In 1967, he issued his famous Arusha Declaration, named for the town where he made it, committing Tanzania to socialism and vowing to end the exploitation of man by man that made some people rich and others poor. …So Tanzania nationalized the banks, appropriated commercial farms, took over all major industry, controlled prices, and put all export trade under the control of paragovernmental organizations.

…The predictable result of these efforts at preventing the exploitation of man by man was the collapse of production, pauperizing an already poor country. Tanzania went from being a significant exporter of agricultural produce to being utterly dependent on food imports, even for subsistence, in just a few years. …

…Thanks to foreign aid, a large bureaucracy grew up in Tanzania whose power, influence, and relative prosperity depended on its keeping the economy a genuine zero-sum game. A vicious circle had been created: the more impoverished the country, the greater the need for foreign aid; the greater the foreign aid, the more privileged the elite; the more privileged the elite, the greater the adherence to policies that resulted in poverty. Nyerere himself made the connection between privilege and ruinous policies perfectly clear after the International Monetary Fund suggested that Tanzania float its currency, the Tanzanian shilling, rather than maintain it at a ridiculously overvalued rate. “There would be rioting in the streets, and I would lose everything I have,” Nyerere said. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors remind us of the damage caused by the Clinton administration.

Statism: Like that of termites, the full damage from suit-and-tie radicals manifests years after their “reforms.” Only now, for example, are we seeing the devastation caused by the last Oval Office infestation.

Like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton also campaigned as a moderate. Once elected, however, he surrounded himself with some of the most radical leftists ever appointed to the Cabinet. (Many of them have re-enlisted with this administration.)

Behind the scenes, they worked furiously to undermine the system. And now, decades later, we’re seeing the results. Clinton’s policies — not just his unethical conduct — were recipes for disaster. …

John Stossel jumps into the fray regarding Rand Paul’s remarks on discrimination.

…It wasn’t free markets in the South that perpetuated racism. It was government colluding with private individuals (some in the KKK) to intimidate those who would have integrated.

It was private action that started challenging the racists, and it was succeeding — four years before the Civil Rights Act passed.

Government is a blunt instrument of violence that one day might do something you like but the next day will do something you abhor. Better to leave things to us — people — acting together privately.

Roger Simon posts on Joe McGinniss.

One thing you have to say for Joe McGinnis, he knows how to get himself some publicity for a book on the most over-exposed subject in America – Sarah Palin. Yawn, and triple yawn. …

…I write this, to be clear, as one of those, apparently rare, people who is mostly neutral on Palin. And rather bored with her (as I tend to be with many politicians who are so constantly in our faces, repeating the same ideas over and over). But her pathological enemies like McGinnis make me want to support her. McGinnis is manufacturing Palin supporters on a small level in much the way Obama, in a far larger and more important way, is manufacturing libertarians.

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In the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden discusses last week’s events that have landed Obama in hot water with even more voters.

…Lo and behold, it turns out that none other than former President Bill Clinton was asked by Obama’s chief of staff and Chicago enforcer Rahm Emanuel to offer Sestak a place on a presidential board.

Whether or not the law was broken, the cynicism of this is breathtaking. Obama offered a break from the Clinton-Bush past and an end to the shoddy backroom deals of Washington. So what does he do? He tries to deny Pennsylvania voters a chance to decide for themselves by using his former foe Clinton to offer a grubby inducement.

It was perhaps a fitting end to one of the worst weeks of Obama presidency, in which a Rasmussen one poll pegged his popularity at a new low of 42 percent. In an environment in which Americans are disillusioned and cynical about Washington and all it stands for, the Clinton-Sestak manoeuvre could be a political calamity for Obama. …

Michael Barone looks at primary results and what this may mean for the November elections.

The year 2010 is proving “a tough year for the overdog,” as I wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column. Coincidentally, National Journal’s Charlie Cook wrote a column published the same day entitled “Incumbents Face Twin Furies.” Cook noted that 12 House incumbents had won their primaries with 70 percent or less of the vote. Given the enormous advantages that House incumbents usually enjoy, which usually net them 80 percent or more in primaries against little-known challengers, that is a low percentage. It’s also a sign of genuine weakness and potential vulnerability in later primaries or, in districts that are not one-sided in partisan terms, in the general election. After all, the incumbent has been elected at least once before, and in many cases many times, and every primary voter shares a partisan affiliation with the incumbent. While Democratic spin doctors have been arguing that this is an anti-incumbent rather than an anti-Democratic year, Cook argued that both anti-incumbent and anti-Democratic winds are blowing this year.

Since Cook and I wrote, primaries have been held in five more states, bringing the total of states holding primaries to 12 so far this year: Illinois, Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Idaho. Those states elect 133 of 435 members of the House of Representatives, nearly one-third of the total; they also elect 9 of the 36 senators who will be chosen this year. …

In Real Clear Politics, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie outlines his plan to resolve the fiscal crisis faced by his state.

…Over the last ten years, municipal spending has grown by 69 percent, and property taxes have grown by 70 percent, until New Jersey property taxes are now the highest of any state in the nation.

This is an unsustainable course. …

…First and foremost, we have to impose discipline on every level of the political system. I propose that we start with Cap 2.5, a constitutional amendment to cap property tax increases at no more than 2.5 percent per year. …

…I believe in less government, lower taxes, and empowering local officials who act on behalf of the people who elected them. I came here to do what the people sent me to do. …

…Last week, I had a town hall meeting in Hoboken, and I talked to a family-a husband and wife and three boys-who had a property tax increase last year of $2000. That’s an incredible financial hit for any family to take, especially in one year. It’s not as if you can go to your employer and say, Hey, I need another $2000. …

…Instead of paying the mortgage, or a making a down payment on a car, or saving for college, or taking a vacation, or just keeping up with what it costs to live, another $2000 of their paycheck got sucked up in that ten-year, 70 percent increase in property taxes.

…We’re long past the point where politicians in Trenton can justify that kind of ever-increasing drain on a family’s income. …

The Newark Star-Ledger editors comment on Andrew Cuomo’s agenda to save New York.

Read Andrew Cuomo’s 250-page manifesto (relax, it’s big type on small pages), and you could come to the conclusion that Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, and Chris Christie did their homework together during study period.

Their ideas on how to rescue their states from financial ruin while reframing the rotting political and institutional structures are remarkably similar:

No tax increases. No more borrowing or budget gimmicks to camouflage historic deficits. A cap on property tax increases. A freeze on public workers’ salaries. A revision of pension benefits and a demand for workers to make larger contributions toward health care packages. More charter schools. Much smaller state government.

Their agreement underscores that today’s historic economic challenges must be met head-on, purged of partisan politics. …

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David Warren comments on the dynamics of liberal elites seeking to enslave us with taxes and regulations.

…To the mainstream media — to that liberal elite generally — the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some “middle ground” or scrimmage line — itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this “progress” — which they could understand — but want no part of the game.

Their lives are centred on family and church and productive labour, not on politics. They are often poorly informed about things they care little about; poorly researched on current rights and entitlements; real boobs when they stray into debates about such things; and thus, hicks to the politically sophisticated. The latter, in turn, know little enough about family and church and productive labour.

The problem arises between these two amorphous groups when the latter take the former to be their milch cows.  …

In response to a Peggy Noonan article on her disillusionment with Obama, Ed Morrissey writes about the bad mix of an inexperienced, charismatic candidate and a biased media.

…In other words, the President has been voting “present” for most of the first five weeks of the disaster.  It’s not as if it’s the first time Obama tried to avoid responsibility for an issue or refuse to show leadership.  Many of us wrote extensively about Obama’s pattern of avoidance during the election — and suggested that Democrats try Obama in a lesser executive position first, such as Governor of Illinois, before nominating him for the top spot, in order to make sure he was up for the job.

Unfortunately, some conservatives such as Noonan rebutted those arguments, choosing instead to see cool competence instead of complete inexperience and a pattern of avoidance.  One can do that as a legislator with few ill effects, because in the end others will choose to lead.  When that person assumes the top executive job, especially without any experience and seasoning for the job, things fall apart when disaster strikes as they have here.  Only those who willingly allowed themselves to be enchanted by charisma and public relations could possibly act surprised when inexperience leads to incompetence. …

…We need strong leadership, especially in times of crisis, not a man who prefers to vote present rather than lead.  And we probably wouldn’t have elected Obama or even nominated him this time around if the national media had done half of the job vetting Obama that they did with Sarah Palin, an atrocious failure documented best by John Ziegler in his film Media Malpractice. …

Roger Simon comments on the Sestak allegation and how most of the media hasn’t done their jobs.

…The real issue is our media — the Fourth Estate that we all are supposed to depend on to vet these people. When Nixon was president, they did so with an alacrity hitherto unseen. With Obama, as we all know, it has been completely the reverse. The press’ record on investigating the president — as a candidate and in office — has been nothing short of embarrassing. Even at the recent press conference, the first in months, only Fox News’ Major Garrett and ABC’s Jake Tapper disported themselves as genuine journalists. The rest appeared like Izvestia wannabes at a Moscow presser circa 1962, only slightly better dressed.

So now the time has come. The public has turned against the president. The media has nothing to lose but its sad preconceptions and its laughable elitism. And there are plenty of things to investigate. Sestak is the least of it (although Dick Morris thinks it a felony). So too is the oil spill (an accident). These are not even the big stories. The big ones are about an economy that is in free fall, a foreign policy that allows dictators to flourish around the world and a Justice Department that has gone miles off the reservation. (Pajamas Media will be looking into that last one. Stay tuned.) Will new Woodwards and Bernsteins appear in the mainstream media to investigate any of these subjects? Or are they too much “true believers” to dare? So far, there is no reason to be optimistic.

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler fills in some of the blanks in the Sestak story.

…The initial White House response was to deny that Sestak was ever offered a job, yet Sestak stuck to his story.  So someone was lying.  After a week or so of Administration officials saying nothing more than there nothing “inappropriate” occurred, the President has now promised an “official” response.  Oddly, the President insists that “nothing improper” happened, but is unable (or unwilling) to provide the details — details he should have at his command if he is in a position to assure the press that “nothing improper” occurred.

In the meantime, the Washington Post reports Sestak’s brother (and campaign counsel) has recently met with White House folks about the allegations and the planned White House response.  What’s the point of this if not to make sure everyone gets their stories straight so the issue will go away.  This sort of thing only strengthens Senate Republicans’ demand for a special prosecutor.  (Of course, one wonders why Sestak told reporters about his brother’s contacts with the White House.  Doesn’t he know when to shut up?  Or does he have it in for someone in the White House?) …

In the WaPo, Chris Cillizza explains how White House stonewalling has strengthened the Sestak story.

…”How do you make something out of nothing?,” asked one such operative who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the matter. “By acting guilty when you’re innocent.” …

…Their argument is that the White House could have pushed out an answer to the Sestak job controversy quickly but, in so doing, would have run the risk of not having all the facts of a relatively complex situation straight — making it a real possibility that they would be bludgeoned by the press if there was a mistake or inconsistency in the original statement.

Instead, they chose to conduct an exhaustive review, which led to what we expect to be a detailed document from the White House counsel’s office later today, in order to take the public relations hit and quickly move on. …

More trouble for the Obami. David Harsanyi notes that Sestak was not the only candidate to be offered a job to drop out of a Democrat primary.

…If the Democratic Party’s choice for the Senate in Pennsylvania is a fabulist — as Axelrod is effectively saying — why does Sestak’s story sound so familiar to one in the Democratic Senate primary in Colorado?

In September 2009, an article headlined “D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff” by the Denver Post’s Michael Riley reported that Andrew Romanoff, former speaker of the Colorado House who was then still contemplating a run again against the governor-installed, administration-sanctioned foot soldier Michael Bennet, received an “unexpected communication” from a renowned kingmaker in Washington.

“Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop,” wrote Riley at the time, “suggested a place for Romanoff might be found in the administration and offered specific suggestions, according to several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the bad timing for the Dems.

…And boy, did they pick the wrong election cycle to pull this. The underlying gambit is bad enough, but the roll out of the explanation is potentially worse and will be thrown in Sestak’s face in the election. The stall. The lawyer swooping in with the cover story. The process of getting everyone on the same page. It is precisely what the voters are screaming about: backroom deals, evasive pols, lack of transparency, and dishonesty. …

…Obama has been compared to Jimmy Carter (in his misguided notions about the world), to Richard Nixon (in his sleazy backroom dealing and lack of transparency) and to LBJ (in his infatuation with government). Unfortunately, it appears that he embodies the worst of three unsuccessful presidents. And like all three, he may manage to drag his party down with him.

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In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick discusses Netanyahu’s upcoming White House visit in light of recent Obama actions.

The Democratic Party is feeling the heat for US President Barack Obama’s hostility towards Israel. In an interview with Channel 10 earlier this month, Democratic Party mega-donor Haim Saban characterized the Obama administration as ideologically aligned with the radical Left and harshly criticized its treatment of Israel.

Both Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonot reported this week that Democratic congressmen and senators are deeply concerned that the administration’s harsh treatment of Israel has convinced many American Jews not to contribute to their campaigns or to the Democratic Party ahead of November 2’s mid-term elections. They also fear that American Jews will vote for Republican challengers in large numbers.

It is these concerns, rather than a decision to alter his positions on Israel specifically and the Middle East generally, that now drive Obama’s relentless courtship of the American Jewish community. His latest move in this sphere was his sudden invitation to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to visit him at the White House for a “warm reception” in front of television cameras next Tuesday.

It is clear that electoral worries rather than policy concerns are behind what the White House has described as a “charm offensive,” because since launching this offensive a few weeks ago, Obama not changed any of his policies towards Israel and the wider Middle East. In fact, he has ratcheted up these policies to Israel’s detriment. …

… AS PART of the administration’s attempt to woo American Jews back into the Democratic Party fold despite its anti-Israel policies, last week a group of pre-selected pro-Obama rabbis was invited to the White House for talks with Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and with Dan Shapiro and Dennis Ross, who hold the Palestinian and Iran dossiers on Obama’s National Security Council, respectively. According to a report of the meeting by Rabbi Jack Moline that has not been refuted by the White House, the three men told the Democratic rabbis that the administration has three priorities in the Middle East. First Obama seeks to isolate Iran. Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the US military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

These priorities are disturbing for a number of reasons. First, isolating Iran is not the same as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. By characterizing its goal as “isolating” Iran, the administration makes clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not its goal. Moreover, as Iran’s deal with Brazil and Turkey makes abundantly clear, Iran is not isolated. Indeed, its foreign relations have prospered since Obama took office.

In his write-up of the meeting, Moline indicated that Ross and Emanuel view Obama’s rejection of Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in Jerusalem as motivated by his goal of isolating Iran. So in the view of Obama’s Jewish advisers, his preferred method of isolating Iran is to attack Israel. …

Abe Greenwald has a surprising post about the aftermath of the Kuwait oil spill.

If it’s remotely possible, let’s inject some sanity into the oil leak that’s stopped the world from spinning. In 1991, as Saddam Hussein’s forces retreated from Kuwait, they dumped 8 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. That still stands as the biggest oil spill in history. So, what were the lasting catastrophic effects? According to this New York Times article, written just two years later, there were none:

“The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say. …”

…Even if you take the highest estimates, the current spill would have to last for nearly a year before it did that kind of nonexistent ecological damage.

Mark Steyn discusses the arrogance of the governing class, who are mostly exempt from the misery they cause.

…Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government. Why has BP got oil wells 5,000 feet underwater in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico? Because government regulated them off-land, off-coast and ever deeper into the briny. … BP, not to mention its customers, would have been better to push back against government policies that drive energy suppliers into ever more unpredictable terrain in order to protect the Alaskan breeding grounds of the world’s largest mosquito herd. …

…It’s the same in Europe . Greece’s problem isn’t so very difficult to diagnose. Like many Western nations, its government has spent tomorrow today. As in New York and California, public-sector unions have looted the future. This is the entirely foreseeable consequence of government policy.

So what’s the solution? The international bailout (including a hefty contribution by U.S. taxpayers) is a massive subsidy to the Greeks to carry on doing all the stuff that’s got ‘em into their present mess. …

…The princelings of the new ruling class rarely have to live with the consequences of their narcissism. Nancy Pelosi can monkey with your health care, but hers will still be grand. Greek bureaucrats can regulate your business into the ground, but they’ll still have their pensions and benefits. …

Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the oil spill.

Here’s my question: Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep — to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That’s a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all.

The other culprits are pretty obvious. It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure. …

If you listen to Obama, you’ll hear that in the make-believe world of the pretend president, the BP spill could have been prevented if only the government was more involved. WSJ Editors have some thoughts.

… “I take responsibility,” President Obama said at his press conference yesterday—though responsibility for what? As he explained it, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was predominantly a failure of government, namely, the “scandalously close relationship between oil companies and the agency that regulates them.” Mr. Obama is referring to the Minerals Management Service, or MMS, and he claims the Administration had a plan to end this putative regulatory capture.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “was in the process of making these reforms,” Mr. Obama continued. “But the point that I’m making is, is that, obviously, they weren’t happening fast enough. If they had been happening fast enough, this might have been caught.” In other words, this is really the fault of the Bush Administration, like everything else.

It would certainly be interesting to hear more details about this no doubt ambitious and unprecedented reform that no one knew anything about until this oil disaster. Mr. Obama made no mention of it when he announced in late March that new offshore areas would be opened to oil and gas development. …

In the New York Post, Charles Hurt comments on Obama’s faux responsibility.

…In a rare appearance before his adoring fans in the press corps yesterday, President Obama repeatedly took “full responsibility” for the blundering efforts to clog up the geyser of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico coating everything in sight.

At the same time, Obama repeatedly denied that his administration was complicit in allowing the catastrophe to happen in the first place, slow to realize the devastating nature of it, or ham-handed in the five-week effort to try to stem the toxic tide.  …

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This Memorial Day, we can pause and consider the following from Pickings March 1, 2090;

“Marine Private First Class Chance Phelps was killed in Rumadi, Iraq Good Friday 2004. Nine days later he was buried in Dubois, Wyoming. His escort home was Lt Col. Michael Strobl whose recollections formed the basis for an original HBO film Taking Chance which first aired in February 2009. Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the film for the WSJ.

It was impossible to imagine, beforehand, all the ways a film like “Taking Chance”  could work its power. There are no conflicts, no warring sides, no mysteries of character — the usual stuff of drama. The story’s outcome is clear from the beginning. Yet it’s no less clear that “Taking Chance” is not only high drama, but a kind that is, in the most literal way, breathtaking — watching parts of it can make breathing an effort, and those parts come at every turn. It’s no less obvious that this film, about a Marine killed in combat, could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways and did so in none of them. There is in this work, at once so crushing and exhilarating, not a false note.

The credit for that belongs to Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, U.S. Marine Corps, on whose journal the film is based; to producer, writer and director Ross Katz; and, not least, to Kevin Bacon, whose portrayal of the devoted Col. Strobl is a masterwork — flawless in its fierce economy, eloquent in its testimony, most of it wordless, to everything that is going on. …”

This year, 2010, there are four times you can watch this film on HBO over the weekend - Sunday May 30, 2010 at 11:30am on HBO2, 9:00pm on HBO. Memorial Day you can watch at 12:00am on HBOWest and at 4:30pm on HBO  Barack Obama diminishes himself by ignoring our success in Iraq. He would do well to watch this film. Perhaps he would come to understand some things about this country that, so far, have escaped his notice.

A Pickings reader sent a similar story from the point of view of an airline captain.

My lead flight attendant came to me and said, “We have an H.R. on this flight.” (H.R. stands for human remains.)

“Are they military?” I asked.

‘Yes’, she said.

‘Is there an escort?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I already assigned him a seat’.
‘Would you please tell him to come to the flight deck. You can board him early,” I said..

A short while later, a young army sergeant entered the flight deck.. He was the image of the perfectly dressed soldier. He introduced himself and I asked him about his soldier. The escorts of these fallen soldiers talk about them as if they are still alive and still with us. …

And on Memorial Day will the president be at the Tomb of the Unknowns? An answer from Contentions. Perhaps if there was a golf course at Arlington National Cemetery …

For someone who ran so successful a campaign, Barack Obama sure seems to have a tin ear for American politics.

How else can one explain his decision to take a vacation rather than attend the annual service at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington on Memorial Day? This will not bother his liberal friends, of course. David Corn asks, “does it matter if Obama throws some leaves on a tomb?” But it is likely to bother millions of average Americans — you know, the ones who cling to God and guns — and it powerfully reinforces Obama’s image as an American president who is fundamentally anti-American. …

Time to turn our attention to North Korea. David Warren is first.

… Perhaps the greatest tactical error in diplomacy is to make a threat you are not prepared to act on.

The Bush administration earned a reputation for being as good as its word, alas at the sacrifice of much public support. On North Korea, however, Bush was at a loss. But he didn’t make the kind of pointless threat we’ve now heard from the Hillary Clinton State Department: that it is mulling over punitive measures, all of which Pyongyang knows will be toothless.

The Obama administration has already squandered its predecessor’s legacy. In any paragraph of any Obama speech on foreign affairs, the reader will discover that the new policy is walk softly and throw away the big stick. The recent obscene display of joint anti-American crowing from the leaders of Brazil, Turkey, and Iran, is the sort of thing that could not have happened under previous U.S. administrations. It was a frightening harbinger of things to come.

The wilful naïveté reaches fatuous heights in the current U.S. demand that North Korea should find, try, and punish the perpetrators of the torpedo attack. Do they seriously expect the politburo in Pyongyang to put itself on trial for crimes against humanity? Don’t make them laugh.

South Korea’s government has taken several small steps to express its displeasure, and impose some modest costs on the murderers. It has withdrawn from several minor cooperative agreements with the North, and will resume propaganda radio broadcasts that were stopped as part of a previous paper agreement.

Pyongyang upped that ante yesterday, by theatrically severing relations with the South, thus sending Mrs Clinton into another begging frenzy towards Beijing.

A more effective response, from the West, would be to calmly allow that all previous agreements with Pyongyang are abrogated, and all negotiations concluded. Then, without eagerly consulting Beijing, silently but visibly build the allied military presence (including intelligence operations) in theatre. Instead of wondering what they will do next, let them wonder what we will.

The Times is next.

Something has snapped in Seoul. That something is the hope, clung to against abundant evidence to the contrary for most of the past two decades, that Kim Jong Il’s iniquitous regime could somehow be tamed by South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of aid and economic co-operation. The torpedo that sank the warship Cheonan in South Korean waters and sent 46 South Korean sailors to their deaths has shaken the country more than North Korea’s nuclear bomb-making, more than its testing of long-range missiles.

It is the lack of obvious motive for this unprovoked attack that has most rattled nerves. The order almost certainly came direct from the ailing “Dear Leader”, who was later seen promoting the military unit that carried out the attack. …

Ever wonder how Western governments got so broke, so fast? Mark Steyn has some thoughts.

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. For the more ideologically committed, there’s always the awareness-raising rock concert: it’s something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

That works for a while. …

Joel Kotkin thinks Houston points the way out.

Do cities have a future? Pessimists point to industrial-era holdovers like Detroit and Cleveland. Urban boosters point to dense, expensive cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco. Yet if you want to see successful 21st-century urbanism, hop on down to Houston and Texas, the Lone Star State.

You won’t be alone: Last year Houston added 141,000 residents, more than any region in the U.S. save the city’s similarly sprawling rival, Dallas-Fort Worth. Over the past decade Houston’s population has grown by 24%–five times the rate of San Francisco, Boston and New York. In that time it has attracted 244,000 new residents from other parts of the U.S., while older cities experienced high rates of out-migration. It is even catching up on foreign immigration, enjoying a rate comparable with New York’s and roughly 50% higher than that of Boston or Chicago.

So what does Houston have that these other cities lack? …

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Many are making the case for the oil spill becoming Obama’s Katrina. Here’s Karl Rove expounding on the subject. It doesn’t seem fair to drop this on the kid president, but we suppose it is a healthy thing when people have growing understanding about the limits of government. Just like it was a good thing when Bill Clinton’s antics lowered respect for the political class.

… Initially, Team Obama wanted to keep this problem away from the president (a natural instinct for any White House). It took Mr. Obama 12 days to show up in the region. Democrats criticized President George W. Bush for waiting four days after Katrina to go to New Orleans.

Now the administration is intent on making it appear he has engaged all along. But this stance is undermined by lack of action. Where has its plan been? And why has the White House been so slow with decisions?

Take the containment strategy of barrier berms. These temporary sand islands block the flow of oil into fragile wetlands and marshes. Berm construction requires approval from the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Louisiana officials asked permission on May 11. They have yet to hear back. The feds are conducting a review as oil washes ashore.

The federal government was even slower on the question of dispersants, chemicals used to break up the oil and hasten its evaporation from the surface of the water. On May 8, Louisiana sent a letter to BP and the EPA begging BP not to use dispersants below the surface of the water. Subsurface use of dispersants keeps oil slicks from forming. But when it doesn’t come to the surface to evaporate, the oil lingers below, gets into underwater currents, and puts at risk fisheries that supply a third of America’s seafood.

On May 13, EPA overruled the state and permitted BP to use dispersants 4,000 feet below the surface. Then, a week after BP released 55,000 gallons of dispersants below the surface, EPA did an about-face, ordering BP to stop using the dispersant and to “find a less-toxic” one. Louisiana officials found out about this imprecise guidance in the Washington Post. BP refused, EPA backed off, and Louisiana’s concerns about their marine fisheries remain. …

Tunku Varadarajan will have none of Rove’s arguments saying it’s not Obama’s fault. However Tunks does say the president has been running around for years saying the government can fix anything.

… let me note that “shit happens.” And there is no way known to man to predict everything that can go wrong. Milton Friedman (as the sage Henry Manne reminded me in a recent conversation) had a notion that the euro would collapse; but Friedman thought that it would happen not because of any excess or fraud by any one or more countries—he believed the European Central Bank had some possibility of controlling fiscal policy in the E.U. countries—but by the inability of a central bank to adjust to differing monetary needs. He did not foresee the Greek debacle, and no U.S. government seems to have foreseen the Gulf oil spill.

But back to basics: BP did the dastardly deed, of this there is little doubt; and yet Obama is getting pilloried, especially by his own side. James Carville—than whom there is no man on American soil (or even in American coastal waters) more partisan—has lit into his president, saying, “The president doesn’t get down here in the middle of this… I have no idea why they didn’t seize this thing.” (Seize what, fistfuls of oleaginous goo?) Carville went on, bizarrely, to say that Obama “could’ve demanded a plan in anticipation of this”—(my underline, and I want what the Ragin’ Cajun is smoking!) He added, for caustic measure, that “it just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this.”

Proof, at last, that Carville is deranged, but proof also of another thing: Once you set out, as a president or a party, to propagate a message that the government has (or is) the panacea for all ills, then failure to deal with an ill leads to your being hoist with your own panacea-petard. …

Tony Blankley shares his thoughts on some primaries, and on the mood in Washington.

…Democrats look fearfully westward across the Potomac River, wondering how harsh will be the people’s judgment against them for their disgraceful behavior.

Republicans look fearfully inward, wondering whether their own inadequate performances in the preceding decade entitle them to the public trust. (The answers are: to the Democrats, very harsh, and to the Republicans, no, they are not entitled to the trust.) …

Peter Wehner posts on Obama’s remarks about the success in Iraq.

…I’m delighted Obama was wrong in both his analysis and his predictions and that, unlike so many things since he’s been president, in Iraq he has not made the situation he inherited markedly worse. And perhaps at some point, Mr. Obama — who promised that, unlike past presidents he would be quick to admit the errors of his ways — will admit he was profoundly mistaken about the surge. If he had had his way, after all, the Iraq war would have been lost, mass death and genocide would have engulfed that nation by now, and jihadists would have chalked up their most important victory against America.

It’s also worth pointing out, I suppose, that a gracious, classy, and large-spirited president would have tipped his cap to his predecessor, whose political courage and wisdom on the surge has made success in Iraq possible. But that would require Obama to act against his basic character.

Apparently the president is still charming to some people. In the Jerusalem Post, Shmuley Boteach comments on a meeting with Jewish representatives.

…An invitation to the White House is a big deal and can play all kinds of tricks on people’s convictions, which might explain why so many of those who visited emerged with newfound praise for the president even though the administration has changed none of its positions on Israel. The president is still demanding that Jews build no new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood that is entirely Jewish. He has yet to repudiate his administration’s position that the Arab-Israeli conflict, and by implication Israeli intransigence, fuels the Taliban and other Arab extremists. And he has yet to apologize to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the humiliating treatment he dished out in March.

Most of all, the president has not reversed his biased policy of apportioning the blame for the lack of movement in the peace process squarely on Israeli settlements rather than decades-old Arab refusal to accept Israel as a permanent and legitimate fact. We have yet to hear the president forcefully condemn the Hamas charter calling for the destruction of the State of Israel or the Palestinian Authority recently naming a public square after Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road terrorist massacre which killed 37 Israelis.

Still, some rabbis seemed quite swayed. Rabbi Aaron Rubinger, for example, who runs a Conservative synagogue in Orlando, said, “Our president is every bit as committed to Israel’s safety and security as any previous administration.” …

Rick Richman gives reasons why Obama won’t be giving a speech to the Israelis. His fourth reason is the showstopper.

…Fourth, even if Obama gave a comparable speech, it would not be believed. His actions — reneging on his pledge of an undivided Jerusalem; failing to honor U.S. understandings regarding settlements; ignoring the commitments in the 2004 Bush letter, given in exchange for the Gaza withdrawal; failing to visit Israel when he visited Turkey, failing again when he visited Egypt, and failing again over the past 12 months; slurring Israel in his Cairo speech; telling U.S. Jewish groups that closeness to Israel had resulted in “no progress” in the peace process; attempting to attend the Durban II conference; awarding a presidential medal to Durban I’s Mary Robinson; granting legitimacy to the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Council; demanding compliance with Palestinian preconditions for peace negotiations; repeatedly humiliating Israel’s prime minister during his U.S. visits; castigating Israel for planning Jewish homes in the Jewish area of the Jewish capital; endless patience with Iran combined with public impatience with Israel; etc. — represent a record that cannot be corrected merely with a speech, even if it begins with “Let me be clear.” …

In light of the sinking of a South Korean ship, Christopher Hitchens writes about North Korean aggression.

…North Korea is thought to have enough purely conventional weapons to destroy South Korea’s capital, Seoul, which is located very close to the cease-fire line or “border.” It has also built a series of dams, which, if opened or blown, could flood and drown a good part of South Korea. (A recent apparently accidental such flood, on a smallish scale, at least served to remind the South Koreans what the stakes were.) So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.

Another version of our complicity with the Dear Leader is to be found with his oppression and starvation of his “own” people. It is felt that we cannot just watch them die, so we send food aid in return for an ever-receding prospect of good behavior in respect of the Dear Leader’s nuclear program. The ratchet effect is all one way: Nuclear tests become ever more flagrant and the emaciation of the North Korean people ever more pitiful. We have unwittingly become members of the guard force that patrols the concentration camp that is the northern half of the peninsula. …

Thomas Sowell explains that discrimination is not the cause of all inequality.

A heartbreaking social statistic is that children on welfare have only about half as many words per day directed at them as the children of working-class families– and less than one-third as many words as children whose parents are professionals. This is especially painful in view of the fact that scientists have found that the actual physical development of the brain is affected by how much interaction young children receive.

…Inequalities have so many sources that this fact undermines the simple dichotomy between believing that some people are innately inferior and believing that discrimination or other social injustices account for economic and social differences. Yet people who are afraid of being considered racists, or believers that the lower classes are born inferior, often buy the notion that only the sins of “society” can explain why some people end up so much better off than others. …

Ed Morrissey doesn’t think that reminding the electorate about Bush will score the Obami any votes.

…Gee, maybe that’s because Obama has had the job himself for those sixteen months, and most people don’t see any improvement in the economy.  Instead, they see a runaway Democratic Congress making George Bush look like Ebenezer Scrooge, while noting that terrorist attacks have suddenly started coming to fruition after a year of political correctness run amuck in counterterrorism efforts.  National debt is skyrocketing, and Obama’s planned budget deficits dwarf anything seen during the Bush years. …

Peter Wehner has a fascinating post on the drop in crime.

…The New York Times begins its story by saying, “Despite turmoil in the economy and high unemployment, crimes rates fell significantly across the Unites States in 2009.” Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said, “That’s a remarkable decline, given the economic conditions.”

Actually, it’s not all that remarkable. Crime rates, for example, fell significantly during the Great Depression. As David Rubinstein of the University of Illinois has pointed out, if you chart homicide beginning in 1900, its rates began to rise in 1905, continued through the prosperous 20s, and crested in 1933. They began to decline in 1934, as the Great Depression began to deepen. And between 1933 and 1940, the murder rate dropped by nearly 40 percent, while property crimes revealed a similar pattern. One possible explanation is that times of crisis, including economic crisis, create greater social cohesion. …

Sending the kids outside to play may help them do better in school. The Times of India has the story. They want the kids to get down and dirty.

The finding will be presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

“Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature,” says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.

Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety. …

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Spengler writes on one of the great differences between Islam and the West. It is Islam’s acceptance of violence towards women.

More than the Koran’s sanction of wife-beating, the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law. The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost. Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence. Islam’s legal system is radically different: the father is a “governor” or “administrator” of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children. That is the self-understanding of modern Islam spelled out by Muslim-American scholars – and it is incompatible with the Western concept of human rights.

The practice of wife-beating, which is found in Muslim communities in Western countries, is embedded too profoundly in sharia law to be extracted. Nowhere to my knowledge has a Muslim religious authority of standing repudiated wife-beating as specified in Surah 4:32 of the Koran, for to do so would undermine the foundations of Muslim society.

By extension, the power of the little sovereign of the family can include the killing of wayward wives and female relations. Execution for domestic crimes, often called “honor killing”, is not mentioned in the Koran, but the practice is so widespread in Muslim countries – the United Nations Population Fund estimates an annual toll of 5,000 – that it is recognized in what we might term Islamic common law.

Muslim courts either do not prosecute so-called honor killings, or prosecute them more leniently than other crimes. Article 340 of Jordan’s penal code states, “He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” Syria imposes only a two-year prison sentence for such killings. Pakistan forbids them but rarely punishes them. …

…In Islam, the family father has the ability to be a petty tyrant in his own home. That may explain the great mystery of modern Islam, namely why nearly a billion and a half human beings have failed over eight centuries to produce scientific or cultural figures whose names the world recognize. Even in Joseph Stalin’s Russia, individuals could find refuge in their families, and in creative pursuits not discouraged by the state, for example pure science and classical music. Islam can make the family itself an oppressive institution.

Now, we have four items from fly-over country; Denver, Las Vegas, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.

David Harsanyi, when looking at the Rand Paul flap, asks, “Didn’t we have enough to debate?”

… The fact is, nearly everyone — including, it seems, most libertarians and Paul himself — agree that the Civil Rights Act was necessary in untangling repressive, government-codified Southern racism. The problem is that some of this kind of well-intentioned and important legislation has been used to validate the infinite creep of Washington intrusion into commerce and life.

While it is inarguable that many in the South used the Constitution as a pretext to solidify their racism then, today it is often the mainstream left that uses racism to smear those with an earnest belief in the document.

After all, today’s political battles are about “extremist positions,” issues like socializing medicine, nationalizing the energy sector and other various hyper-regulatory projects that are baking in Washington’s oven.

We’ve got plenty on our plates without debating the past.

In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sherman Frederick wants to know the truth.

I’d like to hook up the president to a lie detector and ask him this one simple question:

“On any given day, Mr. President, do you wake up feeling more proud of, or more embarrassed by, the United States of America?”

…The position of the United States, as now articulated by the Obama administration, is China’s widespread crackdown on Internet use, free speech and religion, its use of prisoners for organ harvesting, its persecution of Tibet and the execution of more people than all other countries in the world combined, is on par with Arizona’s immigration law? …

In the Kansas City Star, E. Thomas McClanahan looks at reasons why the Obami are embarrassed by American exceptionalism.

…Since the ’60s at least, those on the leftish end of the spectrum have had an annoying tendency to place themselves above the nation and what it stands for. They have a profound discomfort with the notion that the country must be defended, an effort that sometimes requires military force.

Some of the more exotic of the species, the Jane Fondas and Susan Sontags, blatantly identified with our adversaries. In the late 1960s, both of these characters popped up in Hanoi and blathered about the nobility of the North Vietnamese struggle against the vile imperialist Amerikans.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of the people who came to Washington with Obama carry intellectual residue from this era. How else to explain the comical difficulty they have in coming up with a straightforward term for an enemy that turned airlines into missiles and revels in the slaughter of innocent civilians?

For decades, various people on both the right and left have mined this rich lode. One of the latest is Paul Berman, a member of the editorial board of Dissent, the leftist magazine, and author of the new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Berman is also an increasingly rare species: He is a liberal hawk. …

In the Indianapolis Star, Deroy Murdock comments on how out of control and out of touch the government is.

…As if from a ruptured pipeline, Washington continues to gush taxpayer dollars.

The Education Department requested $26 billion in emergency funds on May 13, supposedly to prevent 300,000 teacher layoffs. This is atop last year’s $100 billion in stimulus spending for school districts, including $48 billion to prevent teacher layoffs.

Meanwhile, Obamacare — essentially DisneyWorld for federal busybodies — will require $115 billion more than advertised in March. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if lawmakers appropriate all of this legislation’s promised spending, its price will leap from $938 billion to $1.053 trillion, an anticipated 12.5 percent cost overrun just six weeks after enactment.

About the only budget cut Obama has managed is a $53.2 million, 25 percent slash in New York City’s counter-terrorism funding, unveiled 11 days after the Pakistani Taliban successfully sent terror suspect Faisal Shahzad to Times Square to park a car bomb just outside “The Lion King.” …

Fred Barnes interviews Jeb Bush who is optimistic about the road ahead for Republicans and for America.

…“My guess is, post-November, should things go well, you’re going to see the emerging Cantor-Ryan wing of the Republican party—the policy activists—in their ascendency,” Bush says. “They’ll be in the ascendency in the Senate as well. And you’ll have activist conservative governors. In 2011, I think you’re going to see all sorts of efforts to act on the belief in entrepreneurial capitalism and limited government.”

He’s read Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” for reform, “all 95 pages of it. It’s fantastic. Paul Ryan is the only elected official that’s actually laid out a plan. He has a very thoughtful, realistic approach to dealing with this fiscal crisis, and he’s the only guy out of 300 million people that I’ve seen that has done so.” …

…Bush has done a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what an economic growth strategy could produce. Obama’s policy won’t generate more than 1.5 percent growth annually, he says. But with “lower taxes, more rational regulation, limiting the power of government in general, particularly in Washington, investing in research, innovation, education—and get out of the way, trust capitalism to work and you can achieve easily 2 percent more per year,” Bush insists. “You end up with $3.5 trillion of extra economic activity, more than the entire economy of Germany.”

Not bad, and there’s an additional benefit: unifying conservatives. “We have all these factions inside the conservative cause, people focused on social issues, or libertarian leave-me-alone issues or paleocons or neocons or traditional conservatives,” Bush says. “It seems to me if you ask what is the one thing that we all agree on, [it’s] that we passionately agree that entrepreneurial capitalism works.” …

Michael Barone says there’s a gathering revolt against government spending.

…The rebellion against the fiscal policies of the Obama Democrats, in contrast, is concentrated on spending. The Tea Party movement began with Rick Santelli’s rant in February 2009, long before the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2011.

…The Tea Party folk are focusing on something real. Federal spending is rising from about 21 percent to about 25 percent of gross domestic product — a huge increase in historic terms — and the national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of GDP within a decade. That is a bigger increase than anything since World War II.

…Will Republicans come forward with a bold plan to roll back government spending? …

…Unlike the Conservatives, Republicans have no elected party leader. But House Republicans like Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Peter Roskam are setting up web sites to solicit voters’ proposals for spending cuts, while Paul Ryan has set out a long-term road map toward fiscal probity. Worthy first steps. I think voters are demanding a specific plan to roll back Democrats’ spending. Republicans need to supply it.