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In NewsBusters, Tom Blumer reviews the bad economic news that the media isn’t reporting.

…The government almost always runs an April surplus because it’s the biggest month for tax collections. Individual filers have to settle up what’s left of their previous year’s liabilities with Uncle Sam on April 15, and the first installments of current-year individual and corporate estimated taxes are also due.

But as seen in the chart that follows, April receipts have cratered during the past two years by stunning amounts compared to April 2007 and 2008. The April 2010 plunge continues a nearly unbroken trend of year-over-year declines in monthly receipts going back almost two years…

In Real Clear Markets, John Tamny explains the reason why oil prices haven’t fallen.

…In each instance commentators mistake the symptom of expensive oil for its true cause. Von Mises frequently touched on money values in his brilliant expositions on markets, and it’s because the dollar has no true value or fixed definition that oil is presently expensive. In short, oil is dear because the dollar in which it’s priced is cheap. …

…The good news, however, is that this can be fixed. As evidenced by the dollar’s major decline versus gold this decade, the dollar is very cheap. The dollar’s debased nature explains expensive spot oil prices, high prices at the pump, and most important of all, it helps explain a difficult job outlook. With so much soggy money flowing into commodities least vulnerable to dollar weakness, the entrepreneurial economy where most jobs are created is losing out. …

Peter Wehner comments on a lecture he heard given by General Petraeus about the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.

…It is fashionable in some circles to emphasize the limits of policy when it comes to improving everyday life in a nation, particularly in one as shattered as Iraq was. That is of course sometimes the case. But in other instances, when the intellectual foundation is right and when the correct lessons from history and human experience are drawn, things can unfold much faster and much better than we anticipate.

A second lesson to draw from General Petraeus’s lecture is that we are witnessing one of the most remarkable, far-reaching reforms of an institution in our lifetime. (David Brooks devotes his column to this topic.) All large institutions are difficult to reform. Old habits are hard to uproot. People become settled in their ways, invested in policies they have advocated. Thinking becomes rutted. And there is of course a widespread human reluctance to engage in searching self-examination and to admit mistakes. All of which makes the transformation we are witnessing amazing. The intellectual orientation of the Army is significantly different from what it was less than a half-decade ago. How that occurred, and precisely how the (intellectual) tectonic plates shifted, is something that will be studied for decades to come. …

David Brooks also attended the lecture and writes about the change that occurred within the Army.

…Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas. …

…The process was led by these dual-consciousness people — those who could be practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next. They were neither blinkered by Army mind-set, like some of the back-slapping old guard, nor so removed from it that their ideas were never tested by reality, like pure academic theoreticians.

It’s a wonder that more institutions aren’t set up to encourage this sort of alternating life. Business schools do it, but most institutions are hindered by guild customs, by tenure rules and by the tyranny of people who can only think in one way.

Spengler is not a fan of General Petraeus.

…Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money. Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use them.

Petraeus’ “surge” of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the available Sunni fighters into an American-financed militia, the “Sons of Iraq,” or Sunni Awakening. With American money, weapons and training, the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime have turned into a fighting force far more effective than the defunct dictator’s state police. And now the American military is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and, under General Keith Dayton, in Palestine. America is pouring money – which is to say weapons – into disputed areas of Afghanistan, and building the core of a Palestinian army. The latter’s mission is to impose a pro-Western Palestinian government on a population of whom two-thirds oppose the two-state solution. It more likely will end up fighting Israel. …

…Petraeus made his reputation on the surge, and needs someone to blame for its prospective failure. His choice is Israel. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Petraeus’ March 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which the CENTCOM commander blamed the Israel-Palestine conflict for inflaming Muslim sentiment against the United States. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam discusses the oil spill and energy alternatives.

…We only have one non-terrible option for reducing our reliance on oil, and that’s sharply increasing our reliance on nuclear power. As Peter Huber observes in the latest issue of City Journal, the success of antinuclear activists in killing the 100 nuclear power plants that were in the pipeline as of 30 years ago has led to an increase in coal consumption in the neighborhood of 400 million tons a year. …

David Warren gives his thoughts on the British election.

…The pound took its beating in world currency markets at the prospect of a “hung parliament.” This is because the people holding the debt know that big bold changes are required — deep spending cuts, or vertiginous new taxes, or both — to restore solvency. They know a minority government can’t deliver such goods, and they are now looking hard at lethal violence in response to mere half-measures in Greece. The financiers may not have a very nuanced picture, but they do get the gist. …

Mark Steyn also weighs in.

…And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:

This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected. …

In the Corner, Peter Robinson follows up on a Steyn comment.

“I seem to recall,” Mark Steyn writes below, that when a couple of months ago David Cameron and his Tory Party still commanded an enormous lead over Gordon Brown and Labour, “more than a few Republican ‘reformers’ were recommending the Cameronization of the Republican Party.”  Now that Cameron has blown his lead to produce the first hung Parliament in more than three decades, Mark seems to suppose, no one will ever again hold up the present Tory Party as a model for the GOP.

Silly him.

Herewith David Brooks on the NewsHour, not 24 hours ago, speaking of the “impact” of the British election “on the Republican Party”…

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In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews recent political and strategic events involving the Middle East. Says to get ready for war.

…Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km. range. This week, Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

…From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four-front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country, aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores. …

In the WSJ, Gerard Baker discusses the UK’s election results, and what lies ahead. Remember Baker? He wrote for the London Times until a year ago when the Journal snagged him for some administrative post where, unfortunately he rarely writes. The piece is a good tour de farce.

… But others, like Terry Marsh, hope to make a more serious point.

Angry at the failures of Britain’s political system, Mr. Marsh, a former light-welterweight world boxing champion, wanted to cast a vote by which he could signal his disdain for all the major parties. But under electoral rules it was not possible to formally register a protest vote on a ballot and have it counted. So Mr. Marsh instead paid the 5,000 pounds needed to run as a candidate, changed his name officially to None Of The Above X—the X marking the character the British still use to cast their votes in ink on paper ballots—and registered as a candidate in his local district of Basildon, in Essex, just outside London.

In the event, Mr. X, as he is presumably now known, secured a mere 100 votes out of the 45,000 cast in the district.

But in a larger, much larger, sense, as the results of Thursday’s election trickled and flowed in through the early hours of Friday, it became clear that the cause represented by the Man Formerly Known as Marsh was the real victor in Britain’s most unpredictable election in a generation.

None of the Above won Britain’s election this week. …

…You don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that this historic election result marked something much more than the usual seductive appeal of the Time for a Change message. In fact it has been known for a while now that what is going on in the old country is not just some spasm of reaction to bad economic data, but the flowering of a deep-rooted popular disgust with the entire political class.

Last year’s toe-curling exposure of corruption in high and low places (and everywhere in between) in the political system damned almost all politicians in the eyes of the electorate. The spectacle of members of parliament enriching themselves by exploiting taxpayer-paid expense loopholes in a magnificently English, class-based farce—from the Labour MP’s 88 pence ($1.30) bath plug, to the Conservative who claimed for a moat for his country castle—enraged the recession-weary voters. …

…The U.K. has, according to data from the European Commission published last week, the largest fiscal deficit in the European Union, at 13% of national income, even larger than the U.S. deficit. The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s. …

David Harsanyi makes some important points about giving the government more power when the government isn’t using the current laws appropriately to protect us against terrorists.

…McCain must be aware that the FBI can invoke, as it did in Times Square, the “public safety exception,” which allows officials to postpone Miranda warnings to suspects while they investigate clear and present danger to the public at large. They have the tool. …

…We often misunderstand Miranda. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (who would likely disagree with this column) explained, “Miranda and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause are strictly about whether confession evidence gets admitted at trial . . . they just mean that you can’t use against the person any non-Mirandized statements he gives.” …

Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on the government’s response to the most recent terrorist.

…Let us hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call to those who have nothing better to do than predict violence from critics of ObamaCare. There are forces in this country that really do want to kill and intimidate dissenters – and they are not shy about their jihad. Witness a prominent death threat against Comedy Central because of its “South Park” cartoon portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. …

David Goldman (Spengler) comments on the Great Euro-Bail Out.

Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.

The banking system really was about to come down. The reason is that sovereign debt is a bigger problem than subprime mortgages ever were. ..

… Now the government are going to bail out the banks again, with money raised–from the banks. I’m holding my gold positions. This is truly ludicrous and may lead to a decline in confidence in all major currencies.

Why Greece matters by Robert Samuelson.

What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” Vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only to a point. …

Jennifer Rubin has Elena Kagan thoughts.

Although records from her years in the Clinton administration may raise other concerns, at this stage the most significant vulnerability for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is her position in opposing giving military recruiters access to Harvard Law School because of the armed services’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This is problematic in two respects.

First, as Bill Kristol observes, the level of invective directed at the military is noteworthy: …

More on Kagan from Daniel Foster in The Corner.

Roger Simon comments on the demise of Newsweek.

…The Washington Post would have to pay me to take Newsweek off its hands – and a substantial sum, in the neighborhood of sixty million.  You figure it out. In 2008, the magazine lost $16.1 million; in 2009, that went to $29.3 million.  Not a promising proposition.

And what is Newsweek anyway?  In recent years it’s been nothing more than a semi-leftwing propaganda rag for Upper West Side dentists – chock full of the kind of opinion you can get for nothing on the Huffington Post or even the Daily Kos. …

No one’s interested in paying to read liberal opinions, writes John Podhoretz.

…For years, Newsweek was a liberal journal of opinion masquerading as a news publication that attempted to sell itself to a mass readership with a lot of health-care, entertainment, and lifestyle fluff. As a vehicle for news analysis, it was entirely conventional; as a purveyor of sociological fluff, it was kind of fun, though often enragingly so; as a journal of opinion, it was to actual journals of opinion as tofutti is to gelato, flavorless and bland and mock. Last year, Meacham and Co. ditched much of the news analysis and sociological fluff in favor of more and more opinion.

It will not surprise you to know that much of the opinion dealt with the ways in which Barack Obama was right and noble and good and strong and tough and resourceful and a good symbol and an agent of change and so is his wife, by the way — and when it was not about that, it was primarily about how the right is at war with itself and torn and in conflict and dominated by anger and full of rage and presumptively racist and anti-gay and anti-women and anti-media. That was to be expected. But there was really almost nothing else in there, and what was there as a matter of ideological coloration wasn’t especially tough or good or interesting or novel. …

Scott Johnson has some good Newsweek quips in Powerline.

Linking to this story regarding the Washington Post’s efforts to unload Newsweek, NRO’s Jim Geraghty tweets: “Newsweek’s latest promo: With a 12-month subscription, they’ll throw in the entire organization for free.” More Geraghty tweets (and laughs) here.

UPDATE: This just in: A Dartmouth reader reports:

Just read your brief post this morning about the declining fortunes of Newsweek magazine. As it happens, this is pledge week at Vermont Public Radio (the Hanover area’s main NPR affiliate). VPR is now offering free Newsweek subscriptions as a giveaway for contributions made to VPR — something I do not recall ever occurring during our 22 years living in the Upper Valley and listening to public radio here.

Newsweek: The perfect companion to Democrat State Radio.

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Mark Steyn pokes fun at the government’s and the media’s assertions about American society and Islam.

…As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the past nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Barack Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” – rather than the rights of the ever-lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized and murdered for not wanting to be covered. …

…And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg, a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Maj. Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in –slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit? …

Pickings first took note of Obama’s nastiness on February 3, 2010 when a Corner post noted the proposed budget eliminated a one million dollar scholarship program named in memory of Bart Stupak’s son. This was when Stupak was one of the holdouts on Obamacare. We have the summary from that day. Following that a number of our favorites note Obama’s talk about ”civility” and then contrasts that to his actual behavior.

February 3, 2010;

Robert Costa blogs in the Corner about one of the few budget cuts that the White House has proposed. It is in education, no less. It is not much, only one million dollars. But, what it does show is what a nasty piece of work Barack Obama is. The program to be cut is a scholarship program named after the deceased son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich). Rep Stupak did not toe the ObamaCare line.

With tax hikes dominating today’s budget debate, you will not hear much about the smaller federal grants that President Obama is hoping to slash. One proposed cut sticks out: Obama’s budget eliminates a $1 million scholarship program for aspiring Olympic athletes at Northern Michigan University. Here’s why it matters: In 1998, the program was renamed to honor B. J. Stupak, the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who committed suicide in 2000. Is the cut related to Stupak’s playing hardball on health care last year?

Stupak won’t speculate on the politics of the decision, but he does tell National Review Online that he is “disappointed” to hear about the cut. He says he found out about it through the media, not the president or the Democratic leadership. He notes, however, “that in the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, never has a presidential staff called me to tell they are cutting something. Usually everyone around here scrambles after a budget is released.”

Stupak pledges to fight for the grant to be reinstated into the budget. “I’ll do my appropriations request and put in testimony. I want it to be funded on its own merit. President Bush did the same thing, and we always restored it. We need to do a better job explaining the program.” Stupak adds that with the Winter Olympics approaching, it is “time to remind Congress why it is important to provide educational assistance to aspiring young Olympic athletes. We’ll all be cheering our athletes next month, but we should remember that programs like this give a major boost to those training for the games. Shani Davis, the first black speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, credits the scholarship with keeping in him school. There are hundreds of stories like that. This program has become a small farm team for Olympic education.”

John Fund gives an example of incivility from the president.

…In his new book on President Obama’s first year in office, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter reports on the president’s frustration with united GOP opposition to many of his programs. Mr. Alter quotes Mr. Obama as saying the unanimous House Republican vote against his stimulus bill “helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

“Tea bagger,” the term used by Mr. Obama, is an extremely crude sexual term that has been used by many liberals as a derogatory description of Tea Party protestors. Anderson Cooper of CNN was compelled to apologize for using it on-air back in April 2009. “It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means.”

A decade or so ago, Democrats and many others were outraged when Indiana Rep. Dan Burton referred to President Clinton as a “scumbag” for his behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Perhaps President Obama would do well to more carefully follow his own calls for civility.

Karl Rove suggests that the president take his own advice.

…For example, last week Mr. Obama suggested that Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell was “cynical and deceptive” in arguing that the administration’s financial regulation bill would allow more bailouts “when he knows that it would do just the opposite.” Does implying the Senate GOP leader is a hypocrite and a liar make reaching compromise easier?

Mr. Obama even draws on the Bible for political attacks. In a teleconference with religious groups supporting health-care reform, he accused opponents of the legislation of “bearing false witness.” Or take last September when, in a health-care speech to Congress, the president—in a single paragraph—accused his critics of spreading “bogus claims” and “lies” and of being “cynical” and “irresponsible.” …

…If Mr. Obama wants his Ann Arbor words to be taken seriously, then he needs to rein in his party, his staff and himself. Presidential leadership matters as much as presidential words, perhaps more. Mr. Obama should back up his inspiring call to civility with action.

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery writes Obama an open letter.

…You say insufficient regulation of banks caused the crash, but you ought to say also it was bad government policy, if well-intended, and that when the president asked for more government oversight, you were one of those voting against. If you want to be civil, you might try telling the truth, and the whole truth, not what makes you look better. Only a thought.

You say “listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship,” and we agree. But we wonder what you had in mind last year when you tried to attack, marginalize and possibly silence a number of commentators, along with the network Fox News. …

…Wasn’t it just weeks ago that you sneered at the rallies on Tax Day, and dared the people who want health care repealed to “Go for it!” to a howling, partisan crowd? …

The Streetwise Professor thinks we are seeing the president’s true temperament.

…FDR was a SOB in private, but a charmer in public.  Obama is an SOB in public.  And people are noticing.

But Obama doesn’t.  Jennifer Rubin hits the nail square and true:

“Frankly, this gets back to a lack of self-awareness. This is a president who derides political opponents, fails to engage them on the merits, and has perfected the straw-man and ad hominem attacks. It was his White House that declared war on Fox News. So it is the height of hypocrisy for him to now tell the rest of us to up the tolerance and intellectual diversity quotient in our lives. It’s sort of like Tom Friedman telling us to consume less and reduce our carbon footprint.” [A Twofer!  Slamming Obama and Tom Tool Time Friedman in the same paragraph.  Way to go, Jennifer.] …

In Roll Call, Morton Kondracke thinks that Obama is merely a misguided ignorant liberal.

…But blasting business is not confined to insurance. Last weekend, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar twice said the administration intended to keep its “boot on the neck” of BP over the Gulf oil spill.

But then what do we make of Obama at the University of Michigan last week, saying that “vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise”?

My own hunch is that Obama, at heart, is not a socialist but a liberal without the slightest idea of how private enterprises create wealth — and deeply suspicious of their practitioners. …

Michael Barone continues his series on the DemocRats Leaving the Sinking Ship. This time it is David Obey.

The Associated Press is reporting that Congressman David Obey, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, will not run for reelection.

This is pretty shocking news.

Obey is one of the most senior members of the House; he was first elected in a special election in 1969 to replace Republican Mel Laird, who had been appointed Press (Defense) Secretary by Richard Nixon. Obey had served in the Wisconsin legislature before that. He is known for his angry temper, particularly at House colleagues or members of the public he considers ill-informed. I see him as something of a “happy warrior” in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, a true believer in expanding government to serve the little guy, rough hewn perhaps but also a hard worker and a master of detail.

In the WSJ, William McGurn looks at some interesting First Amendment issues.

…Because Mr. Chen reported on the new iPhone for his website, Gizmodo.com, the seizure of his computers has renewed a heated debate about whether bloggers are real journalists. Traditionally, many in the mainstream press have disparaged bloggers, though in this case at least some press organizations—including the parent company that runs Mr. Chen’s blog—argue that he is a full-time journalist whose home is his newsroom. The irony is how few connect Mr. Chen’s First Amendment freedoms to those for corporations that were recently upheld in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. …

…The classic view of the First Amendment holds all Americans are entitled to its rights by virtue of citizenship. These days, alas, too many journalists and politicians assume that a free press should mean special privileges for a designated class. The further we travel in this direction, the more the government will end up deciding which Americans qualify and which do not. …

Peter Schiff says that the problems facing Greece and the US are more similar than we would like.

…Of course, the negative effects on the economy of run-a-way inflation and skyrocketing interest rates are worse than what otherwise might result from an honest restructuring or even out right default. It is just amazing how few economists understand this simple fact.

Just because we can inflate does not mean we can escape the consequences of our actions. One way or another the piper must be paid. Either benefits will be cut or the real value of those benefits will be reduced. In fact, it is precisely because we can inflate our problems away that they now loom so large. With no one forcing us to make the hard choices, we constantly take the easy way out.

When creditors ultimately decide to curtail loans to America, U.S. interest rates will finally spike, and we will be confronted with even more difficult choices than those now facing Greece. Given the short maturity of our national debt, a jump in short-term rates would either result in default or massive austerity. If we choose neither, and opt to print money instead, the run-a-way inflation that will ensue will produce an even greater austerity than the one our leaders lacked the courage to impose. Those who believe rates will never rise as long as the Fed remains accommodative, or that inflation will not flare up as long as unemployment remains high, are just as foolish as those who assured us that the mortgage market was sound because national real estate prices could never fall.

Illinois legislators vote against the kids and for the unions. Then they tried to hide the record. But the ChiTrib found them out. The New Editor has the story.

The Illinois House Wednesday voted down a measure to allow as many as 30,000 kids in Chicago’s worst public schools get tuition vouchers. …

…From a Chicago Tribune editorial:

“Twenty-two Democrats and 26 Republicans in the Illinois House voted Wednesday to let up to 30,000 children escape Chicago’s worst schools. But 44 Democrats and 22 Republicans voted against tuition vouchers for those kids. One opponent, Rep. Monique Davis, D-Chicago, said she was standing with teachers unions and principals. Sponsor Kevin Joyce, D-Chicago, told The Capitol Fax Blog: “It’s job protection for the union leadership.” He’s right. …”

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Mark Steyn has troubling news from Great Britain. You’ll have to read the article to see what Big Brother is up to.

The British election campaign didn’t do much to catch the attention of Americans, but one little item feels pertinent — although it attracted remarkably little attention even across the pond. In Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, a lady called Phyllis Delik received a postcard from Gordon Brown’s Labour party. On one side, there was a photograph of a woman suffering from breast cancer saying “It’s the sort of thing you think will never happen to you.” On the reverse, there was a question: “Are the Tories a change you can afford?” — followed by a warning that the Conservatives would scrap a Labour guarantee that any woman diagnosed with breast cancer is entitled to see a specialist within two weeks.

(Yes, yes, I know that lingo still sounds a little strange to Americans: Government bureaucrats announce “targets” for the length of time between seeing your family doctor and seeing your specialist, or between getting your MRI and getting your operation. But don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it.) …

John Podhoretz wants public servants to tell us the truth.

…Instead of acknowledging this truth, government officials believe it is their role to provide reassurance even when they cannot do so. And they’re simply wrong about that. The American people are far more sophisticated about these things than those officials appear to believe, and they can be talked to like adults. That was the lesson, in part, of the immediate aftermath of September 11, when Rudy Giuliani simply said that the “number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.” He sugar-coated nothing. And that is the truth of crises and crisis management. When it is done well, there should be no sugar-coating. The impulse to sugar-coat is a mark of the conviction among politicians that they are in the same relation to the body politic as a parent is to a child. In our system, a politician is an employee, not a parent. For a rational employer, an employee who gives it to you straight will always be someone you take more seriously than an employee who pretends that everything is fine when everything isn’t.

Jonah Goldberg posts an email from a reader who did not like Mayor Bloomberg’s assumption about the latest would-be bomber.

…Bloomberg later told CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric that the suspect behind the bombing attempt could be a domestic terrorist angry at the government who acted alone. “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything,” he said.

A mentally deranged person or someone who did not like the healthcare bill?

Why is he so damned anxious to blame this on white conservative America?  …

Mark Steyn also discusses how public servants look for answers everywhere except in the most obvious direction.

Whenever something goofy happens — bomb in Times Square, mass shootings at a US military base, etc. — there seem to be two kinds of reactions:

a) Some people go, “Hmm. I wonder if this involves some guy with a name like Mohammed who has e-mails from Yemen.”

b) Other people go, “Don’t worry, there’s no connection to terrorism, and anyway, even if there is, it’s all very amateurish, and besides he’s most likely an isolated extremist or lone wolf.”

Unfortunately, everyone in category (b) seems to work for the government. …

David Harsanyi lends some sarcasm to the commentary.

…If I had to guess 25 cents, I’d bet the administration makes no mention of fundamentalist Islam even when it reluctantly admits we’re dealing with “terror.” …

…After all, the administration has never been scared to call out despots and extremists, such as insurance companies, Wall Street executives, Tea Party activists and the Israeli government. This is the Department of Homeland Security that issued a report alerting us to potential violence from “right- wing extremists” who are ginned up about “illegal immigration,” “federal power,” and the Second Amendment. (So at least half of you qualify.) …

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell reviews a fascinating new book about who really has the power in the United States. It may surprise you.

…What does it mean, the inability or unwillingness of either party to change or discipline the big banks in any way, even after all the havoc they have lately caused? In the year and a half since the implosion of Lehman Brothers, Simon Johnson, who was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, is the only person to have come up with a plausible explanation. He has done so by examining the United States as an IMF analyst would examine some bankrupt basket-case of a country in what used to be called the Third World. Johnson believes that the leaders of the American finance industry have turned into the sort of oligarchy more typical of the developing world, and that they have “captured” the government and its regulatory functions. Johnson laid out this bombshell thesis in the Atlantic a year ago.

There are many ways for countries to blunder their way into big economic trouble: Kleptocracy, capital flight, or a commodity-price crash can all spark a panic or collapse. Nevertheless, Johnson wrote, “to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work.” In a gripping new book, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, 304 pages, $26.95), written with his brother-in-law James Kwak, Johnson explains why those changes aren’t happening in the United States.

Most countries rescued by the IMF are marked by tight links between the business elite and the political elite. They are oligarchies. Johnson defines oligarchy as a system whereby economic power can be translated into political power (and vice versa). When you try to fix a country dominated by an oligarchy, you immediately hit a frustrating paradox: Rescue plans make the oligarchy more powerful. An IMF loan is a lifeline. Somebody has to decide which banks and industries get to use it, and which ones are set adrift. In this process, the cement company owned by the finance minister’s cousin does better than the cement company run by some schmuck in the hinterland. And it is not just that politically favored companies get the original infusion of IMF cash. Private investors can see what is going on and realize that it is “best to invest in the firms with the most political power (and hence the most assurance of being bailed out in a crisis).” So if the politically connected rich don’t pay, who does? “Most emerging-market governments,” according to Johnson, “look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.”

This is a terrifying truth, if you think about it. It means that you cannot take for granted that “once burned, twice shy” will describe the aftermath of an oligarchy-driven financial crisis. Serious reform is not inevitable. On the contrary: The “reforms” that follow a bubble-binge-bailout cycle tend to consolidate the privileges of the oligarchs who caused it. That is why the IMF tends to judge the good faith of a country seeking debt relief by whether it is willing to “squeeze at least some of its oligarchs,” in Johnson’s words. Back in the day when the United States was on its moral high horse, our bankers and government officials derided the fledgling market economies of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe as havens of “crony capitalism.” We demanded not just the squeezing of oligarchs but the squeezing of government. Freewheeling monetary policy and write-downs were anathema. Discipline was the order of the day. …

What Johnson thinks we should have done is take those banks over—“nationalize” them, if you like—and put the banks’ overvalued assets on the government’s books, where we could wait patiently to sell them, making depositors whole but letting shareholders take the loss. Then we should have broken them up, on grounds similar to the ones Theodore Roosevelt used for breaking up big industrial trusts, to ensure that none of them was too big to fail. “A central pillar of??…??reform must be breaking up the megabanks,” Johnson and Kwak write. They would limit assets to 2 percent of GDP (about $285 million) for investment banks and 4 percent for all banks (roughly what Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and NationsBank each had in the mid-1990s). Some people think that large banks provide economies of scale. Johnson and Kwak think the evidence is mixed. The evidence of the problems that big banks can cause, however, is now unambiguous. …

Peter Wehner shares his thoughts on an Obama speech about civility in public discourse.

…So President Obama lacerates his critics for engaging in the very activity he denounces. And he does so in the haughtiest way imaginable, always attempting to portray himself as hovering above us mere mortals, exasperated at the childish and petty quality of the political debate, weary of the name-calling. How hard it must be to be the embodiment of Socratic discourse, Solomonic wisdom, and Niebuhrian nuance in this fallen and broken world.

Here is the rather unpleasant reality, though: our president fancies himself a public intellectual of the highest order — think Walter Lippmann as chief executive — even as he and his team are accomplished practitioners of the Chicago Way. They relish targeting those on their enemies list. The president himself pretends to engage his critics’ arguments even as his words are used like a flamethrower in a field of straw men. It’s hard to tell if we’re watching a man engaged in an elaborate political shell game or a victim of an extraordinary, and nearly clinical, case of self-delusion. Perhaps there is some of both at play. Regardless, President Obama’s act became tiresome long ago. …

In WSJ Blogs, Dan Neil reports on the most expensive car ever sold.

Some time last week, the estate of Dr. Peter D. Williamson sold the late car collector’s prized 1936 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic to the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Ca., for between $30 million and $40 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Any figure in that range would make the Williamson Atlantic – a heartbreaking piece of European automotive sculpture, considered the epitome of French Deco styling – the most valuable car known to have changed hands. …

…The Atlantic’s price is, of course, staggering, even to automotive historians and experts. …

Scott Ott makes a good point.

Although Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had initially said she had no evidence to indicate the attempted Times Square bombing was anything other than a “one-off” event, an unnamed Homeland official today contradicted that assessment based on “one compelling piece of evidence.”

“We knew that we were dealing with a coordinated attack, involving perhaps dozens of co-conspirators and robust technological capabilities,” the anonymous source said, “And we knew he wasn’t a lone wolf based on a single fact: the driver of the bomb-filled SUV actually found a parking space in Times Square.”

While officials called the bomb itself “crude” and “amateurish”, they now privately acknowledge that the preparation, advanced espionage and meticulous orchestration of events required to insert a Sport Utility Vehicle into a curbside parking space anywhere in New York City reflects a high-level of intellectual and technical sophistication.” …

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Robert Samuelson discusses global market shifts as developing countries increase consumption.

…China, India, Brazil and many “emerging-market” countries escaped the worst consequences of the Great Recession. Their economies are generally growing much faster than ours (6.4 percent annually in 2010 and 2011, compared with a 2.9 percent rate for the United States, reckons the International Monetary Fund). This boosts their demand for the advanced equipment, instruments and basic industrial supplies (chemicals, coal) that constitute two-thirds of U.S. exports. Of Boeing’s 3,350-jet backlog, 77 percent will go to foreign customers.

Domestic spending is strengthening in emerging markets, as incomes and tastes — for cars, clothes, computers, cellphones — expand. In 2002, the consumption spending of these countries (including Brazil, China and India) was 23 percent of the world total and the U.S. share was 36 percent, estimate economists David Hensley and Joseph Lupton of J.P. Morgan Chase. By 2008, developing countries were 32 percent, the United States 28 percent. …

Radio Free New Jersey has a message for the Greek protestors.

Morons,

There is no money. There is no one else’s pocket left to pick. You can’t borrow anymore, you can’t print anymore, and you can’t steal anymore from anyone else. The people who will be paying the bill to keep you from reentering the 15th century are, unlike you, working very hard. They deserve better than you spoiled pampered children are giving them.

You object to the bond market, but the bond market is just the voice of reality calling. It’s telling you that 2 plus 2 is still 4, no matter what your union bosses would have you believe. Your bosses tell you that ‘the people’ didn’t spend the money, but it’s not true. That’s exactly who has wasted the money, and now the bill is coming due. Right now the Bond Market is actually your very best friend. It’s telling you what a horrible mistake you’ve made, and giving you a chance to undo it, before it’s too late. …

Christopher Hitchens surveys Britain’s political landscape.

…There’s a whole sector of the British professional class that probably knows Tuscany and Provence better than it knows large areas of post-industrial Britain. But this “Europeanized” layer is not large enough to swing an election, especially at a time when the stupendous size of Britain’s debt puts it at risk from the same continentwide factors that have ruined the Greek economy. This, in turn, is why some of those who rate bonds have been warning that a so-called hung Parliament, unable to arrive at swift or difficult decisions, would endanger the stability of sterling and cause a crisis of confidence in Britain’s decisive financial system. And a hung Parliament is precisely the contingency that Nick Clegg’s sudden emergence makes many times more likely. …

In Forbes, John Tamny explains why we won’t become Euro-Weenies.

…To understand why the U.S. will be fine over the long run, we have to remember that we’re a “nation of immigrants.” This is an important distinction, because as Johns Hopkins professor John D. Gartner says in his 2005 book, The Hypomanic Edge, “a ‘nation of immigrants’ represents a highly skewed and unusual ‘self selected’ population.”

We’re for the most part descended from the kind of individuals who possessed what historian John Steele Gordon referred to as the “get up and go” that drove them to leave the comforts of home in order to make their highly uncertain way in the new world that was the United States. We’re different because we’re descended from those who had the courage and drive to leave feudal, excessive taxing, warmongering governments. Simple as that.

…This American restlessness, the unrelenting drive for something better, reveals itself most notably in the entrepreneurial nature of the average American. Driven to work hard by our restless minds, Americans elevate starting a business far more than individuals in most countries do. According to a poll cited by Gartner, when asked “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?”, 91% of Americans polled said yes vs. 28% of British and 8% of Japanese respondents. …

In the Corner, Kevin Williamson wants to hear Mark Steyn’s response to John Tamny’s opinion.

…Americans love Big Government. But it’s not a blind love — it all depends on the direction the arrow is pointing on the cashflow chart. Ask George W. Bush, who got himself crucified for trying to reform Social Security. Ask anybody who has touched Medicare,  or even idly thought aloud about doing so. Ask a farmer or anybody marching in the Small Business Administration pork parade.

Steyn’s fear, which I share, is that Americans, like the British before us, will become used to  government-run health care, will consequently come to fear the uncertainties of a market-based system and — above all — will come to dread the need for be personally responsible for their own health care. Tamny’s take does not account for how a giant new entitlement can change the character of the American people. He is correct, I think, that today’s Americans are very different from today’s Europeans. But today’s Europeans are very different from their recent forebears. …

Thomas Sowell looks at resentment in the context of race and achievement.

Recent stories out of both Philadelphia and San Francisco tell of black students beating up Asian American students. This is especially painful for those who expected that the election of Barack Obama would mark the beginning of a post-racial America. …

…Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements are more deadly than envy of wealth. …

…These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype about differences that are translated into “disparities” and “inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under their more prettied-up name of “social justice.” …

… People who call differences “inequities” and achievements “privilege” leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady gives a current example of how top-down governing of markets doesn’t work. The buffoon Hugo Chávez provides the example.

The late Milton Friedman once quipped that “if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Friedman was using hyperbole to make a point about central planning. Or so I thought until Hugo Chávez put himself in charge of Venezuela’s coffee sector. Last year, for the first extended period of time in the country’s history, Venezuela did not produce enough of the little red berry to satisfy domestic demand. It has now become a coffee importer and is facing serious shortages. …

In the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti wonders why the Dems have become such thugs.

…There’s a word for this sort of overbearing, priggish intimidation: bullying. And like a lot of bullying, the Democrats’ behavior seems to stem from deep-seated insecurities. Maybe the Democrats are not as confident in government as they appear. Maybe they worry about the massive deficits and the hemorrhaging public debt. Maybe they read the same polls we do, the ones showing the public shifting right, Republicans leading the generic ballot, Republican-leaning independents returning to the GOP, congressional approval and support for incumbents at record lows, and the conservative base in a state of wild enthusiasm. Maybe the bully party, in other words, is simply acting out.

The Economist relates stories about jade auctions that will interest Antiques Roadshow types.

… Mr Axford is head of the Asia department in a small provincial English auction house called Woolley & Wallis, in the southern town of Salisbury. A year ago, he offered for auction a Qianlong-period green jade buffalo that belonged to Lady Diana Miller, daughter of the 5th Earl of Yarborough. The buffalo had lain in a bank vault since the Battle of Britain in 1940 and was still wrapped in wartime newspaper when Mr Axford saw it for the first time.

The internet has done much to change the auction business. No longer do small country auction houses have to languish in obscurity. Good photographs posted on the web now reach potential buyers all over the world.

On the day of the sale last May, Woolley’s auction room was full of bidders who had made the journey from London, and even from as far afield as Hong Kong and mainland China. Bidding for the buffalo opened at £150,000 ($230,000) and rose to £3.4m (£4.2m including commission and taxes). The buyer was Daniel Eskenazi, the son of London’s pre-eminent dealer in Chinese treasures, who was bidding on behalf of Bruno Eberli, a Swiss foreign-exchange specialist based in New York. The sale brought Mr Axford considerable publicity. The 88-year-old Lady Diana was delighted, and resolved to buy herself a racehorse. …

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John Fund warns about the coming VAT war.

Expect the coming debate over an American VAT to be especially nasty. Soaring spending and deficits have prompted Democrats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker to suggest creating a European-style Value Added Tax. President Obama himself recently declined in an interview to rule out a VAT despite his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $200,000.

The debate is already becoming bitter. …

Mort Zuckerman points out the role congress had in the financial crisis explains mortgage-backed securities.

Corn and hogs in the Midwest seem a long way from condos in Florida. There is, in fact, a direct link and it’s one worth contemplating in light of the pursuit of Goldman Sachs by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. //

Derivatives—the new bad word—used to be called “futures.” They’ve existed since the Civil War, invented basically to protect farmers, traders, and merchandisers from ruin when they could not sell a crop to cover their costs because a bumper harvest created a glut, or, conversely, to protect buyers when a bad harvest led to price inflation. Hence the creation of contracts with third parties who agreed to buy or sell at a certain price, whatever the future might bring. This stabilized the market and freed farmers from looking around for a buyer in what might be a frantic market. …

…But we also need to understand how the housing market got as hot as it did. Why did it keep rising, generating more and more derivatives geared to a rising market? It turns out that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration had financed a lot more subprime and Alt-A (alternative documentation) loans than anyone realized, mostly as a result of congressional mandates. Indeed, of their total outstanding mortgage portfolios of $10.6 trillion, roughly half turned out to be of low quality. Had this been known, it would have been clear that the American public’s capacity to assume this amount of housing debt was at great risk.

That is at the heart of the now-famous Goldman-Paulson saga. Hedge fund manager John Paulson judged that the housing market was a bubble, so he shorted the securities through Goldman Sachs and an insurer called ACA, which sold the package to a German bank. The buyers judged that it was safe to count on housing prices continuing to rise. They chose which mortgage securities would be bundled by Goldman. And they have paid a heavy price for their judgment.

The American public has hereby had a peek into the bewildering complexities of the world of finance. The natural instinct is for the public to blame the housing decline on those who shorted. But it is the other way around. They should be blaming those who let the market get pumped up, inviting a dramatic and painful correction that took most people by surprise. …

Jennifer Rubin looks for information on one possible Supreme Court nominee.

Elena Kagan is the prohibitive favorite for the Supreme Court. She has made it through one confirmation hearing for her current post as solicitor general and possesses academic credentials, a reputation for collegiality with conservatives, and a limited paper trail. Moreover, she is the closest we have to a stealth candidate among the front-runners. As Tom Goldstein notes, “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.”

Casual observers assume that a dean of Harvard Law School and a domestic-policy aide in the Clinton administration must have a sizable body of work reflecting her legal views. But not so. Paul Campos has read all there is to read — and it’s not much:

“Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn’t take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she’s published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. …”

There are lots of interesting Shorts from National Review. Here are three:

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 to work for the freedom of political prisoners. Over the years, it has expanded its activities to oppose capital punishment, torture, and detention without trial. Recently, however, AI has latched onto Moazzam Begg, a hard-core Taliban jihadist who peddles cockamamie tales of being tortured at Guantanamo. That decision was too much for one AI officer, who protested the incongruity of embracing as a human-rights defender a man who committed violent acts of terror in support of an ideology that subjugates millions of women. In return, she was suspended. AI’s secretary general, Claudio Cordone, explained that “jihad in self defence” is not “antithetical to human rights,” and that in any case, Begg is innocent until proven guilty (a principle Cordone does not apply to the U.S. military). While AI’s condemnations have often been questionable, it was always scrupulous about playing no favorites among the regimes it called oppressive. Now the organization seems to feel that some human-rights violators are more equal than others.

Andy Stern is leaving his $306,388-a-year position fighting against the nation’s fat cats on behalf of the working stiffs at the Service Employees International Union, an organization that shook enough change out of its sofa cushions to throw down $60 million to put Barack Obama in the White House. Among the candidates vying to replace Stern are Change to Win president Anna Burger ($252,724/year) and SEIU executive Mary Kay Henry ($231,348 per annum). SEIU executive and Democratic Socialists of America leader Eliseo Medina ($242,286) is strangely absent from the running. Maybe he is weary of the endless self-sacrifice that being a modern labor leader entails.

Jaime Escalante was the ultimate hero teacher. At Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, he taught calculus to poor Mexican Americans and achieved astonishing results: Scores of his students, written off by other educators, passed Advanced Placement exams. They were so successful that test administrators wrongly accused them of cheating. The Bolivian-born Escalante became the subject of Stand and Deliver, an inspirational film starring Edward James Olmos. Hollywood did not make a sequel, which is unfortunate — because what happened next is instructive. Escalante clashed with education-blob bureaucrats who resented his success. The teachers’ union cracked its whip because Escalante had violated a contract rule that restricted classes to 35 students — a rule that Escalante did not want to break, except when it meant putting his students in classrooms with teachers he considered inadequate. The frustration eventually overwhelmed him. Escalante left Garfield, and the program he had spent years to build, and moved to Sacramento, where he tried to replicate his earlier success with mixed results. He generated further controversy for his outspoken opposition to bilingual education. Dead at 79. R.I.P.

In the WSJ, Timothy Aeppel reports on the inroads being made by plastic corks.

…Cork was first adapted to close bottles of sparkling wine by a French Benedictine monk named Dom Perignon in the late 1600s. For the next four centuries, cork was considered the ultimate wine stopper: Its cellular structure makes it easy to compress into the neck of a bottle, where it expands to form a tight seal. Wine also benefits from “breathing,” which is facilitated by cork’s cell structure. An air-tight seal on a wine bottle can cause another set of problems and is one factor that limited the use of plastics and screw caps in the past. …

…Although it was long known that cork could sometimes ruin the taste of wine, the problem wasn’t well understood until the early 1980s. Then, chemists finally pinpointed the main cause of cork taint: The powerful chemical 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole or TCA. It can get into wine through contaminated cork, tainted barrels or pallets and render bottles undrinkable.

By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. “No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase—and that’s what happened to us,” says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim. …

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David Harsanyi looks at the encroachment of federal power on states’ rights. There are significant merits to state power: more fiscal responsibility, legislation tailored to regional issues, and less encroachment on individuals’ liberty.

…The most tangible policy issue that highlights this loss of control is education. When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to shut down the Department of Education, arguing that the issue was the bailiwick of locals. But by 2001, a Republican president, George W. Bush, was championing a hyper-centralized Washington role in local education — increasing the Department’s budget 70 percent between 2002 and 2004. Today, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition hands out an additional $4.35 billion in “incentive” money (funded by the Recovery Act) to states that most closely adhere to the reforms favored by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the president. …

…More significantly, states are for the most part organic. They are geographically, culturally, socially and economically unique. Road rules in Nevada don’t make sense in New York City. Gun laws in Portland aren’t made for Muskogee. New Englanders won’t want the high school textbooks of Texans and Coloradans won’t want the energy policy of West Virginia. Power changes hands, and so does the focus of Washington.

So the continued growth of central power should be concerning to all. Because each time we are mandated or cajoled to cede to the wishes of Washington, we are surrendering our rights today, and tomorrow.

There is more criticism for the Bush and Obama administrations. Peggy Noonan discusses society’s growing distrust of government.

…In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law—say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces—and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.

Instead, our national establishments deliberately allow the crisis to grow and fester, ignoring public unrest and amusing themselves by damning anyone’s attempt to deal with the problem they fear to address. …

…If the federal government and our political parties were imaginative, they would understand that it is actually in their interests to restore peace and order to the border. It would be a way of demonstrating that our government is still capable of functioning, that it is still to some degree connected to the people’s will, that it has the broader interests of the country in mind. …

Many on the right wish to pillory the Obama administration for a slow response to the BP oil spill. This is no doubt “tit for tat” after the abuse W took for Katrina. John Hinderaker of Power Line has a more grown up look at the issue. Perhaps one of the problems here is that we have pushed these rigs into deeper and deeper water rather than allow drilling on the Continental Shelf where there would be easier access to drill sites. Good thing Obama allowed more drilling a month ago. Now he will defend that because he is never wrong.

A reader who works “on the inside,” as he put it, in dealing with disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill, writes to defend the government’s actions so far:

“I am also no fan of the Obama Administration, and while I normally enjoy it when he catches grief, in this instance the criticism is undeserved.

The federal and industry response to this disaster was appropriate and timely. What you heard on FNS from the senior officials was completely accurate. We (BP and the CG and MMS and NOAA) knew from the first day the disastrous potential of this thing and began to respond immediately with an appropriately huge amount of resources. As the
problem unfolded, we threw more and more resources at it.

Most people cannot appreciate the technical challenges and daily miracles of deepwater drilling and production. It is in many respects more difficult than manned spaceflight or planetary exploration. It’s an endeavor on the very leading edge of human capability, and when things go wrong, our capabilities are severely tested.

I wish the collective psyche of America would frame this as an Apollo 13 moment instead of an Exxon Valdez moment, but I know that will never happen.

Sadly, the ignorance about drilling is matched by an ignorance about oil spill response and cleanup. The average American does not understand oil spill response and the oil spill liability and compensation regime in this country.

Unlike the rest of the world, the US system is based on polluters cleaning up their own messes, with government oversight. This system has worked well in the years since the Exxon Valdez spill. OPA 90 is one of the best pieces of legislation ever passed by our hapless Congress. The number, frequency, and gallons of oil spilled in the US has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years because of this law.

I also note with some dismay that there appears to be a nationwide misconception that DOD always has a silver bullet for every sort of contingency. That is simply not true in the world of oil spills. The nation’s expertise for managing oil spill response lies (in order) with the CG, industry experts like the Obrien’s Group and MSRC, the EPA, and NOAA. … “

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone asks where the center-left has gone.

…The left parties have reacted to their unpopularity by playing the race card. Democrats have tried to portray Tea Partiers as racist and Brown called a lifelong Labor voter who questioned his policies a “bigoted woman.”

Blaming the voters is the last resort of a party in trouble. Old Labor and the Obama Democrats may not yet be finished. But they’re not doing as well as their “third way” predecessors.

Roger Simon says Al Gore may have decided to take the money and run.

Al Gore’s purchase of a near nine million dollar Montecito mansion with an almost comical carbon footprint  (nine bathrooms!) probably means that he has given up on the global warming movement and decided to become a Hollywood producer (not that he ever made much of a distinction between two). …

…Well, maybe not quite that much, but Al is not alone and we could go down a long list of rich enviro-phonies who, added up, would easily reverse AGW, assuming you believe  it.  But I have a different suspicion. Most of them don’t believe it anymore.  They won’t admit that, of course.  But Lindsey Graham’s withdrawal from the latest iteration of cap-and-trade is just a signal of what’s ahead.  Get out while the getting is good.  And make sure you get out the side door, if possible. …

In the Corner, Ralph Reed comments on Charlie Christ’s exit from the Republican party.

…Second, voters across the board — from tea-party activists to party rank-and-file to anxious independents — are hungering for authenticity. Crist’s political calculation and chameleon-like shifts on the issues (and now party affiliation) repel far more voters than they attract. Voters would rather support a politician with convictions, like Marco Rubio, even as they may disagree with him on some issues, because they know where he stands and they trust him to tell them what he really believes. This is the essence of leadership, especially in a moment of crisis.

Finally, Crist still does not grasp that the country wants a check on Obama, not an enabler in Republican or independent skin. The backlash over spending, soaring debt, government take-over of major industries, and Obamacare calls for a new breed of GOP leaders who are unafraid to stand in the gap and stop the Obama agenda. Crist’s failure to understand that is what sunk his candidacy in the GOP and will likely do so in the general election. It also explains why John McCain is moving to the right so swiftly in his primary with J.D. Hayworth in Arizona — causing whip-lash for his former base, the media. …

Heather Mac Donald, in the City Journal, dissects a NY Times editorial criticizing the Arizona immigration legislation.

…The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.

There is reason for caution in municipal bond investments, says Nicole Gelinas in Investor’s Business Daily.

…To get a glimpse of the possible future of Muniworld, look to Vallejo, Calif., about 30 miles north of San Francisco. Like many municipalities, this city of 120,000 residents found itself hard hit by the housing bust, with property-tax revenues falling by more than a quarter. …

…Vallejo violated the first principle of municipal-finance conventional wisdom: that cities and towns will do anything to avoid default. …

…Throughout its bankruptcy, Vallejo has not paid the full amount it owes on its municipal bonds. …What’s more, it has proposed, in its exit plan, to defer payments on its bonds, investing in infrastructure before paying lenders in full. …

The Economist reports on the new direction in electric car technology.

There are many innovations turning up in the latest experimental and production electric cars, affecting everything from batteries to motors to control systems. The need to make them all work together is prompting a complete rethink about the way cars should be designed and manufactured, and it is unclear which technologies will dominate as the constraints imposed by internal combustion engines give way to the new limits and possibilities associated with electric propulsion. But one group of engineers have stuck their necks out and declared that a particular technology, the electric hub motor, is likely to become the most widely used drive system.

A hub motor, as its name suggests, is built into the hub of a wheel and drives it directly, rather than having a single motor driving the wheels via a mechanical transmission. It is an idea pioneered by Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the carmaker of the same name, more than 100 years ago. …

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Caroline Glick analyzes whether Obama is the reason for the loss of Democrat support for Israel, in the Jerusalem Post.

Bipartisan support for Israel has been one of the greatest casualties of US President Barack Obama’s assault on the Jewish state. Today, as Republican support for Israel reaches new heights, support for Israel has become a minority position among Democrats.

Consider the numbers. During Operation Cast Lead – 11 days before Obama’s inauguration – the House of Representatives passed Resolution 34 siding with Israel against Hamas. The resolution received 390 yea votes, five nay votes and 37 abstentions. Democrats cast four of the nay votes and 29 of the abstentions.

In November 2009, Congress passed House Resolution 867 condemning the Goldstone Report. The resolution urged Obama to disregard its findings, which falsely accused Israel of committing war crimes in Cast Lead. A total of 344 congressman voted for the resolution. Thirty-six voted against it. Fifty-two abstained. Among those voting against, Thirty-three were Democrats. Forty-four Democrats abstained.

In February 2010, Fifty-four congressmen sent a letter to Obama urging him to pressure Israel to open Hamas-ruled Gaza’s international borders and accusing Israel of engaging in collective punishment. All of them were Democrats.

In the midst of the Obama administration’s assault on Israel over construction for Jews in Jerusalem, 327 congressmen signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for an end to the public attacks on the Israeli government. Of the 102 members who refused to sign the letter, 94 were Democrats.

These numbers show two things. First, since Obama entered office there has been a 13-point decline in the number of congressmen willing to support Israel. Second, the decrease comes entirely from the Democratic side of the aisle. There the number of members willing to attack Israel has tripled. …

…To date, both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied the existence of a partisan divide. This has been due in part to their unwillingness to contend with the new situation. One of Israel’s greatest assets in the US has been the fact that support for the Jewish state has always been bipartisan. It is hard to accept that the Democrats are jumping ship. …

… Like the Israeli government itself, Republican House members express deep concern that blowing the lid off the Democrats will weaken Israel. As one member put it, “I don’t want to encourage the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attack Israel by exposing that the Democrats don’t support Israel.” …

We have a couple of blog posts on Gordon Brown’s faux pas.

In the Corner, John O’Sullivan gives an update on British election campaigning.

… Then, with eight days to go before the election, the second game-changer occurred. Yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown — unaware that he was speaking on a still-open neck-microphone, described a Labour-voting woman who had ventured mild criticism of high immigration levels in an otherwise friendly chat as “bigoted.” This was played out in full on television — even the horribly embarrassing moment when Brown buried his head in his hands as he heard his own words played back to him. Brown apologized, but to little avail. Today’s headlines run as follows: “She went out to get bread and came back with BROWN TOAST!” …

In Contentions, Ted Bromund discusses the British immigration issue and the British election.

Shades of Frank Drebin: Gordon Brown may have sunk his chances in Britain’s general election with an unguarded comment into a microphone he didn’t realize he was still wearing. After campaigning in Rochdale in northern England, he muttered, amid a stream of invective directed at his aides, that 61-year-old Labour supporter Gillian Duffy was a “bigoted woman” for questioning him about the impact on the British job market of immigration from Eastern Europe.

Brown’s since made an in-person apology and e-mailed a fulsome “personal” letter to all Labour activists, but the damage seems to have been done. As one commentator put it, showing a nice grasp of British understatement, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to call voters bigots.”

On one level, of course, it’s possible to have some sympathy for Brown. This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re around microphones so much: few of us would want our every comment recorded and aired in prime time. On another level, as Andrew Rawnsley points out, this is just another example of one of Brown’s more unattractive attributes: his volcanic temper and his eagerness to pour vitriol on his aides and anyone else who gets in his way. …

Three of our favorites write on immigration.

Mark Steyn writes about some of the ironies that the governing class have created.

…The same day … I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop – black body armor, helmets and visors – as they marched down the street. Naturally I assumed they were Arizona State Troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill, facing down a group of genial Tea Party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts.

If I were a member of the Quincy PD I’d wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.

And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers …

David Harsanyi believes that immigration isn’t the issue.

…Very few Americans, on the other hand, are inherently opposed to immigration. For the most part, the controversy we face isn’t about immigration at all. It’s about the systematic failure of federal government to enforce the law or offer rational policy. There’s a difference.

…The uplifting tale of the hard-boiled immigrant, dipping his or her sweaty hands into the well of the American Dream, is one thing. Today, we find ourselves is an unsustainable and rapidly growing welfare state. Can we afford to allow millions more to partake?

When the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman was asked about unlimited immigration in 1999, he stated that “it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. …

Debra Saunders looks at several immigration issues, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

…It’s easy for San Franciscans, from 700 miles away, to sneer at Arizonans. Folks here don’t live in a state where cross-border drug violence has led to highway gun battles.

The Arizona Republic editorialized Wednesday that the bill was “ugly and indefensible.” The paper also noted, “The feds did nothing while Phoenix became the kidnapping capital of the country. The feds did nothing as rancher Robert Krentz was murdered on his border-area ranch.” …

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Thomas Sowell thinks it distorts history to treat slavery as America’s original sin.

… today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

Nile Gardiner compiles a list of Obama’s top ten insults towards Israel.

Last week Israel celebrated its 62nd year as a nation, but there was major cause for concern amid the festivities as the Israeli people faced the looming menace of a nuclear-armed Iran, as well as the prospect of a rapidly deteriorating relationship with Washington. The Israel-bashing of the Obama administration has become so bad that even leading Democrats are now speaking out against the White House. New York Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Barack Obama’s stance towards Israel in a radio interview last week, stating his “counter-productive” Israel policy “has to stop”.

At the same time a poll was released by Quinnipiac University which showed that US voters disapproved of the president’s Israel policy by a margin of 44 to 35 percent. According to the poll, “American voters say 57 – 13 percent that their sympathies lie with Israel and say 66 – 19 percent that the president of the United States should be a strong supporter of Israel.”

I recently compiled a list of Barack Obama’s top ten insults against Britain, America’s closest ally in the world. This is a sequel of sorts, a list of major insults by the Obama administration against America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. …

Abe Greenwald does a nice job on Obama’s ”let’s pretend” summits.

Yesterday’s kick-off of the “Entrepreneurship Summit” in Washington DC, intended, according to Jake Tapper, “to help deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world” is the fourth hollow and stage-managed “summit” organized by Barack Obama.

First there was the Beer Summit, during which we watched the president, the professor, and the policeman pretend to resolve what the president and the professor pretended was a problem. Next up, the Health-Care Summit, during which we watched the president and his Democratic friends pretend to listen to hours of suggested solutions to a real problem. This was followed by the Nuclear Security Summit, during which participants pretended that the real problem of nuclear security could be tackled without even mentioning the problem’s main source, Iran.

These make-believe endeavors have all the effective heft of Model-UN confabs.

Yet for Barack Obama, there is no issue – be it as insignificant as a localized grievance or as towering as nuclear war – that cannot be addressed with a pantomime summit.

Noemie Emery says not to expect the willfully ignorant media to understand the tea parties.

… The Tea Party is a popular, not a populist, movement, a grass-roots uprising against the cost and expansion of government power. It fears that the debt has become unsustainable. Do not expect Dionne or Beinart to recognize this.

Don’t expect from New York magazine’s John Heilemann either, who told a panel on Chris Matthews’ program that the protesters’ motives were all Greek to him. “What is the focus, what is the cause of this? You think back to 1994, there was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. There were triggering incidents. There’s been nothing like that.

“The only thing that’s changed in the past 15 months is the election of Barack Obama. As far as I can see, in terms of the policies that Obama has implemented, there’s nothing,” he said.

Under the heading of “nothing” would be debt in the trillions, Greece going bankrupt, California tanking under the weight of public service unions and their extravagant benefits, other states foundering, and massive entitlements being added on in the midst of a recession.

Other than that, of course, there’s nothing to see here. Nothing. Nothing at all.

The UN’s IPCC gets caught with more global warming fraud. IBD editors have the latest.

Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.

It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment.

After fraudulent claims about Himalayan glaciers, African crop harvests and Amazon rain forests, plus a 2007 assessment report based on anecdotal evidence, student term papers and nonpeer-reviewed magazine articles, the panel’s doomsday forecast for Bangladesh has been exposed as its latest hoax. …

Barron’s Op-Ed warns of a second leg down if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.

… Among Milton Friedman’s greatest contributions to economics was his Permanent Income Hypothesis, which found that people, by and large, weren’t drunken sailors. Their spending depends on their long-term income prospects, so a one-shot boost has little impact on the economy.

Conversely, the coming tax hikes are permanent and are likely to have lasting effects. Even if the hikes are confined to couples making over $250,000, who comprise just 5% of the population, this cohort accounts for 30% of personal income, Wieting and D’Antonio point out.

“Also note that the highest income brackets represent a preponderance of small businesses, and account for a disproportionably large share of spending. So, sharply raising tax rates in the top brackets should have a quite measurable, large effect on the economy, far in excess of the population share. This then affects employment and income more broadly,” they write.

As for the impact from the increases on taxes on capital, the question is how negative they will be. There’s no telling, given that nobody knows what future taxes on dividends and capital gains are likely to be.

That uncertainty alone has a cost, the Citi economists say. The worst case — dividends taxed as high as 39.6% and a 3.8% additional Medicare tax on top earners starting in 2012 — would reduce the present value of the U.S. stock market by 10%-15%, they estimate.

None of this takes into account the impact of monetary policy. …

Democracy in America, written in the early 1800′s by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, is part of the American Canon. Slate recently had a snarky review of one of the many books about the book. Jillian Melchior reviews the review for Contentions. Jillian happened to graduate last year from one of the few schools that provide a course on de Tocqueville’s classic. I allude to Hillsdale College.

… Furstenberg’s criticism centers on class and race, both of which Tocqueville treats at length. He repeatedly takes out of context Tocqueville’s writings on race relations. “[Tocqueville] bumped into Native Americans being expelled from the eastern states on the infamous Trail of Tears. But he didn’t make much of it, failing to connect that experience to his own reflections on the danger of the tyranny of the majority,” writes Furstenberg.

He must have somehow missed Tocqueville’s lengthy analysis of the injustices committed against the Native Americans, to be found in Volume 1, where he describes how, through trickery and coercion, American settlers “obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase. … These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.” In fact, Tocqueville portrays the Native Americans as the last remnants of the noble warrior-aristocracy, and he bemoans their degradation and the loss of their civilization.

Yet Furstenberg continues with his race-based criticism. He wrongly implies that slavery was not a big issue for Tocqueville:

“Clearly Tocqueville, unlike Beaumont, believed that slavery and racism did not touch on “the essential nature of democracy,” as Damrosch puts it. … When he did turn his mind to the subjects [of race and slavery], moreover, Tocqueville was exceedingly gloomy, convinced that a multiracial democracy was impossible. If slaves ever gained their freedom, he predicted a genocidal war: ‘the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps the destruction of one of the two races.’ … One of the most striking features of emancipation, as it actually happened a generation later, was the lack of violence foreseen by Tocqueville and many others.”

But Democracy in America clearly outlines Tocqueville’s strong concern about slavery and its consequences for the future of American democracy. He describes slavery as a “permanent evil,” a “calamity,” and a “wound thus inflicted on humanity.” The consequences of slavery would be even more far-reaching and disastrous, Tocqueville supposes, because “the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” He expects that “the moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude, — the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.”  …

Now that the Cape Wind project has been approved by the Feds, there’ll be more interest in windmills. Slate had a piece on windmill design.

The federal government has green-lighted the nation’s first offshore wind farm, to be built off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass. Opponents claim that 130 white, three-bladed turbines will detract from the natural beauty of Nantucket Sound. Why do all modern windmills look the same?

So they’re unobtrusive. A windmill’s noise is directly proportional to the speed of its rotor tips. Two-bladed turbines have to spin faster than their three-bladed competitors to generate the same amount of energy. As a result, the whooshing sound they emit is somewhat louder. Two-bladed windmills would be a sensible choice for a remote, offshore wind farm like the one in Cape Cod, since they’re just as efficient as the three-bladed models and cheaper to produce. But manufacturers—who cater to the densely populated and wind-power-oriented countries of Europe—have switched almost exclusively to producing the latter. …

The approval of Cape Wind reminds of a Instapundit post from two years ago.

Okay, we’ve heard a lot about the greenhouse effect, etc., but I’m reading Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb’s Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound and I’m beginning to doubt the political class’s serious commitment to this cause. The book’s a treasure trove, but here’s a description of how what was supposed to be a wide-open democratic town meeting on the Nantucket Sound wind power project was taken over by the astroturf brigades of the project’s well-heeled opponents: …

The Economist has the story of a Persian carpet that measures 5 feet by 11 and 1/2 feet. It sold at auction for $9,500,000.

THERE is nothing that excites a professional art dealer more than the thought that he may have found a lost work that has slipped through the auction-house system, misidentified, misattributed or simply misunderstood.

Second to that is buying a work on a hunch that it might be much rarer and more special than the vendor realises—and making a killing once a little additional research proves it to be a piece of exceptional importance.

At the beginning of this year Christie’s received a call from a European dealer. He had a suspicion that a carpet he had recently bought was no ordinary Persian rug, but one of the famed “vase” carpets from Kirman. Made in the city that dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries, “vase” carpets are easily identifiable by a pattern of swirling branches, foliage and flowers arranged in vases.

This particular carpet, though, had no vase on it; only a continuing pattern of intricately joined leaves that gave the design an unusual energy and charm. But it was the weaving technique that alerted the dealer to the fact that it might be a “vase” carpet all the same. …

New Scientist says whale poop is important. Really!

Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.

So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found “huge amounts of iron in whale poo”. He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.

Previous studies have shown that iron is crucial to ocean health because plankton need it to grow. “If you add soluble iron to the ocean, you get instant phytoplankton growth,” says Nicol. The amount of iron in whale faeces means that protecting Antarctic whales could swell populations of phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide.

As further proof Pickerhead will read anything, we have some information from Wikipedia on coprolites – fossilized animal dung. We’re doing this for the cartoon we snagged.

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Mort Zuckerman shows how radical Obama’s policy is towards Israel.

Thanks to a deadlock engineered by the U.S. government, the Middle East peace process is stalled. President Obama began this stalemate last year when he called for a settlement freeze, and he escalates it now with a major change of American policy regarding Jerusalem.

The president seeks to prohibit Israel from any construction in its capital, in particular in a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem called Ramat Shlomo. This, despite the fact that all former administrations have unequivocally understood that the area in question would remain part of Israel under any final peace agreement. Objecting to any building in this East Jerusalem neighborhood is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem before final status talks with the Palestinians even begin.

From the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support. He uses the same term—”settlements”—to describe massive neighborhoods that are home to tens of thousands of Jews and illegal outposts of a few families. His ambiguous use of this loaded word raises the question for Israelis about whether this administration really understands the issue.

It certainly sends signals to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority followed the president’s lead and refused to proceed with planned talks until Israel stops all so-called settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem.

President Obama’s attitude toward Jerusalem betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the city. …

David Harsanyi does a great send-up of the Dems financial regulation package.

… How many voters are aware that the pending Senate reform bill includes a payback to unions in the form of a “proxy access” that would allow labor to manipulate company boards? How many are aware that the bill may give the Treasury Department the right to seize private property and businesses without any significant judicial review?

How many Americans are aware that the reform bill might create a so-called “consumer protection board” that would slather another needless layer of federal red tape on a wide range of businesses — businesses, incidentally, with far less culpability in creating the housing bubble than members of the Senate Banking Committee?

At the same time, the board may also ban private, voluntary arbitration agreements between consumers and financial firms. Why?

How many voters are aware that the Senate reform bill clamps down on “angel investors” — wealthy individuals who invest in startups with few regulatory guidelines. From Google to Facebook, it was angel investors who undertook the initial risk. …

… No crisis is ever wasted. And for those reflexively averse to risk, profit and markets, this is an opportunity like no other.

We need financial reform. What we’re being offered, it seems, is another piece of command-and-control legislation fast-tracked to avoid the midterm elections — and honest discussion.

IBD editors on the Dem’s legislative frenzy.

… But like Thelma and Louise when they knew the jig was up, the Democratic Congress has decided it might as well put the pedal to the metal and go over the precipice with a crash and a bang. Unfortunately, they’ve got an already pummeled economy in the back seat with them.

No one should misinterpret the rearranging of the cap-and-trade and immigration deck chairs on the Democrats’ Titanic. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid want both — bullying industry in the name of saving the planet and buying Hispanic votes with amnesty for illegal aliens. …

Reihan Salam says our economy is not out of the woods yet.

… We are propping up the most rotten sectors of the economy and diverting talent that would otherwise shift into the new interrelated systems that are slowly emerging—and this emergence will prove very slow indeed once the inevitable tax burden required to prop up aging yet politically powerful sectors hits. One can hope, like Gross, that those new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that propel growth will take shape here at home. They could just as easily emerge in China or India or, for that matter, Canada, a country that has pursued more sustainable fiscal policies.

Mike Dorning of Bloomberg BusinessWeek focused more narrowly on the success of the president’s stimulus package. But it’s hardly surprising that a massive debt-financed stimulus has led to an uptick in economic activity. The question is whether or not it will enhance long-term growth in light of the impact of a heavy public debt burden going forward. Has it moved the economy in the right direction by facilitating the liquidation of bad bets made during the housing boom, a process that might dampen GDP expansion in the short term while enhancing long-term growth? That is an entirely different question. As Jeffrey Sachs has argued, the United States has been engaging in extreme policy swings throughout the Greenspan era, veering from recession to bubble and back again. By running a double-digit budget deficit, we’ve severely limited our options in the face of the next economic crisis, all without making the painful adjustments—to tax rates, to spending, to the bloated financial sector—that would make another crisis less likely.

That’s my case for economic pessimism. I sure hope I’m wrong. But I get the distinct impression that we’re walking into a decade-long buzzsaw.

Clive Crook in the Financial Times on how Obama might salvage his administration after he gets whumped in the November vote.

… Beyond this lies the fundamental question: can Mr Obama reconcile the US to permanently higher public spending and permanently higher taxes? He has yet to come clean about that choice, but voters can see where things are heading. He set out to nudge the country to the left. In the end, this is what nudging the country to the left means.

He has his work cut out. Democrats mock the Tea Party movement, but this is a mistake. The preferences it expresses are widely held. According to one recent poll, more Americans agree with the Tea Party movement on taxes and spending than with Mr Obama. Among independent voters, support for those positions is even stronger. A large part of the country sees the Democratic party as fundamentally at odds with its idea of good government.

Must it therefore end badly for Mr Obama? Not necessarily. Opinion can shift – if it does not, the president can. Suppose the Democrats are crushed in November. Mr Obama would be forced to moderate his policies, like Bill Clinton after the rout of 1994. Healthcare reform would stand as his historic achievement; then, focused on 2012, he could turn fiscal conservative and govern with the grain of the country. Economic recovery might do the rest.

Mr Obama would have allowed voters to tame his own party – a task he shirked. Democrats get thumped in 2010; he wins in 2012. As seen from the White House, not such a bad result.

George Will reminds us of one of America’s sins, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans.

Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito’s parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas. …

Ross Douthat covers the South Park Muhammad episode.

Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of “South Park” entitled “Super Best Friends,” in which the cartoon show’s foul-mouthed urchins sought assistance from an unusual team of superheroes. These particular superfriends were all religious figures: Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Taoism’s Lao-tse — and the Prophet Muhammad, depicted with a turban and a 5 o’clock shadow, and introduced as “the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame.”

That was a more permissive time. You can’t portray Muhammad on American television anymore, as South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, discovered in 2006, when they tried to parody the Danish cartoon controversy — in which unflattering caricatures of the prophet prompted worldwide riots — by scripting another animated appearance for Muhammad. The episode aired, but the cameo itself was blacked out, replaced by an announcement that Comedy Central had refused to show an image of the prophet.

For Parker and Stone, the obvious next step was to make fun of the fact that you can’t broadcast an image of Muhammad. Two weeks ago, “South Park” brought back the “super best friends,” but this time Muhammad never showed his face. He “appeared” from inside a U-Haul trailer, and then from inside a mascot’s costume. …

The city of San Francisco has 27,000 employees. One third make more than $100,000 per year. The story from the Chronicle.

More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco’s nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year – a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.

The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn’t include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.

The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and “other pay,” a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.

Leading 2009′s $100,000 Club was the Police Department’s Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.

His total payout was $516,118, …

A trip to New York is not complete without perusing the offerings at sidewalk booksellers. The Economist had a piece on the most popular offerings at these stands.

High in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building at the New York Public Library–a sprawling Beaux-Arts pile on Fifth Avenue—is a series of murals that tell the story of the recorded word. Painted by Edward Laning and unveiled in 1940, the four panels begin with Moses carrying the tablets down Mount Sinai and end with Ottmar Mergenthaler inventing the lino-type machine in 1884. But one scene is notably absent. Nowhere in Laning’s paintings is there anyone selling a book on a street corner.

Sidewalk booksellers are an essential part of New York street culture, the intellectual wing of an alfresco economy that includes coffee carts, peanut roasters and break-dancing buskers. In a number of locations across the city, determined men—and the odd woman—endure the periodic atrocities of the climate and set up trestle tables laden with secondhand books.

Arriving in New York from Britain to study for a master’s, I spent a lot of time hanging around these stalls and soon saw the same titles cropping up time and time again—in particular literary American fiction by writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. And so last autumn I set out to discover the most common title on secondhand bookstalls in New York, as a way to gauge literary tastes and trends. …