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Mark’s column is on the new front in the war on terror – the tea parties.

I suppose the thinking runs something like this. All things considered, the polls on Obamacare aren’t totally disastrous, and the president’s approval numbers seem to have bottomed out in the low forties, and when you look at what that means in terms of the electoral map this November, you’ve only got to scare a relatively small percentage of squishy suburban moderate centrists back into the Democratic fold, and how difficult can that be?

Hence, Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing Tea Partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the Tea Partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both “Tim” and “Tea” are three-letter words beginning with “T”: Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you’re for him and he’s for thee, completely interchangeable.

To lend the point more gravitas, President Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he’s trying to determine whether that’s his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.

Will it work? For a long time, Tea Partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending” that that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson. …

Tunku Varadarajan takes a dim view of the helter skelter push for financial reform.

… But Obama’s invitation to debate, here, is akin to his conversation on health-care reform: It is a call to all to come to him, and to drink deeply of his wisdom. Of a piece with this method is Harry Reid’s assertion Thursday that he will move ahead with a vote on financial reform as early as Monday: “I’m not going to waste any more time of the American people while they come up with some agreement,” Reid said, of the Republicans. “The games of stalling are over.”

Yet ill-conceived reform would be just as bad as no reform at all, and the Republicans have every reason to resist knee-jerk legislation fueled largely by a populist consternation with the way Wall Street does business. As the sage Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times Wednesday, “halting the financial doomsday machine is going to involve fundamental changes in policy towards—and the structure of—the financial system.” …

O’Rourke nails it. Why it’s so annoying to be governed by a bunch of A students.

… America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students—A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Now there’s health care reform—just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? …

David Malpass in Forbes says Washington is possessed.

My Nov. 10, 2008 column warned that big government was walking away as the knockout winner over the private sector in the financial crisis. But it’s going much further than I’d feared. The federal government has accelerated its takeover of the economy, adding a mega-trillion-dollar health care entitlement, despite the damage to health care and the national debt this will cause. Washington is frenetically cutting unfunded checks. Capital is being channeled away from small businesses toward big government. Looming on the horizon is the bailout of state and local governments, which will concentrate more and more of the nation’s debt onto the diminishing base of federal taxpayers.

Washington’s excess spending is now running $1.5 trillion annually, and both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are relying heavily on short-term credits for funding. The marketable national debt has ballooned to more than $8 trillion, but wait … the Obama Administration has budgeted an increase to $20 trillion over the next few years, bringing it to more than 90% of GDP. Even that huge sum–$100,000 for every working-age American–doesn’t include the rapidly escalating debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the government’s unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare. And to keep the debt estimate down the budgeteers are making wishful assumptions that millions of high-paying jobs will reappear and health care reform will pay for itself.

Every month Congress adds more federal powers and debt, voting as if its allegiance were to Washington, city of cranes, instead of to the voters and taxpayers. …

And Bill Gross from the bond-dealer Pimco knows who has possessed Washington; people who cannot stop spending and borrowing. Joel Achenbach from WaPo has the story.

Bill Gross is used to buying bonds in multibillion-dollar batches. But when it comes to U.S. Treasury bills, he’s getting nervous. Gross, a founder of the investment giant Pimco, is so concerned about America’s national debt that he has started unloading some of his holdings of U.S. government bonds in favor of bonds from such countries as Germany, Canada and France.

Gross is a bottom-line kind of guy; he doesn’t seem to care if the debt is the fault of Republicans or Democrats, the Bush tax cuts or the Obama stimulus. He’s simply worried that Washington’s habit of spending today the money it hopes to collect tomorrow is getting worse and worse. It even has elements of a Ponzi scheme, Gross told me.

“In order to pay the interest and the bill when it comes due, we’ll simply have to issue more IOUs. That, to me, is Ponzi-like,” Gross said. “It’s a game that can never be finished.”

The national debt — which totaled $8,370,635,856,604.98 as of a few days ago, not even counting the trillions owed by the government to Social Security and other pilfered trust funds — is rapidly becoming a dominant political issue in Washington and across the country, and not just among the “tea party” crowd. President Obama is feeling the pressure, and on Tuesday he will open the first session of a high-level bipartisan commission that will look for ways to reduce deficits and put the country on a sustainable fiscal path. …

Remember last week GM’s CEO trumpeted the payback of debt? Would you be surprised to learn that was a lie? Shikha Dalmia has the details for Forbes.

… But when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion–the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that’s not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can’t pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

GM claims that the fact that it is even using the escrow money to pay back the loan instead of using it all to shore itself up shows that it is on the road to recovery. That actually would be a positive development–although hardly one worth hyping in ads and columns–if it were not for a further plot twist. …

More on Iceland’s volcanoes. This time from the Economist.

… And Katla is not the only game in town. Iceland has others capable of even greater nastiness. The eruption of Oraefajokull in 1362 may have been almost as large as that of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which was the largest eruption of the 20th century. The Laki eruption of 1783 sent poisonous gases far and wide across Europe. And there is evidence that some of the island’s volcanoes, especially those under the central ice cap, (which, other things being equal, will produce more dusty and explosive plumes if they break through) may be in cahoots, their average activity rising and falling in a cycle of about 130 years. On this analysis, the past few decades have been one of the quiet patches. It seems likely that the first 50 years of jet travel across the North Atlantic enjoyed, in historical terms, particularly clear skies.

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Jennifer Rubin has news that some Dems are tired of the Obami’s treatment of Israel.

Wow. Yes, Chuck Schumer – who’s angling for Senate majority leader if/when Harry Reid loses in November — has had enough with the president’s Israel-bashing. …

…one suspects that Schumer has gotten nowhere in private and is now forced to unload in public. It seems that while Schumer cares what American Jews think, Obama is unmoved by quiet persuasion. …

Kimberley Strassel knows what the real Republican divide is.  And Pickerhead says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ T party to take us back to the Trent Lott and Tom Delay show”.

Marco Rubio appeared on a Sunday talk show this month to say something remarkable. The Republican running for Florida’s Senate seat suggested we reform Social Security by raising the retirement age for younger workers. Florida is home to 2.4 million senior citizens who like to vote. The blogs declared Mr. Rubio politically suicidal.

The response from Mr. Rubio’s primary competitor, Gov. Charlie Crist, was not remarkable. His campaign slammed Mr. Rubio’s idea as “cruel, unusual and unfair to seniors living on a fixed income.” Mr. Crist’s plan for $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities? Easy! He’ll root out “fraud” and “waste.”

Let’s talk Republican “civil war.” Not the one the media is hawking, that pits supposed tea party fanatics like Mr. Rubio against supposed “moderates” like Mr. Crist. The Republican Party is split. But the real divide is between reformers like Mr. Rubio and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who are running on principles and tough issues, and a GOP old guard that still finds it politically expedient to duck or demagogue issues. As Republicans look for a way out of the wilderness, this is the rift that matters. …

In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger has been looking forward to an article on baseball from Charles Krauthammer.

I see that Charles Krauthammer has at last written his baseball column — and it is a real beauty. Lyrical, smile-making, and sharp. Last fall, I interviewed him and wrote a piece for NR. Toward the end, it said,

Every columnist writes a “soft” column now and then — a column about sports, or fashion, or maybe a beloved former teacher. All summer long, Krauthammer was wanting to write a column about the Washington Nationals, the baseball team. But he never had the opportunity, because “Obama keeps coming at me like a fire hose.” The president is always giving a conservative columnist something to warn about, correct, or condemn.

Obama hasn’t taken a break, unfortunately. The Swedenization of America is a full-time job. (Is that hate speech? An incitement to violence?) …

And here is Charles Krauthammer’s column on the Washington Nationals.

Among my various idiosyncrasies, such as (twice) driving from Washington to New York to watch a world championship chess match, the most baffling to my friends is my steadfast devotion to the Washington Nationals. When I wax lyrical about having discovered my own private paradise at Nationals Park, eyes begin to roll and it is patiently explained to me that my Nats have been not just bad, but prodigiously — epically — bad.

As if I don’t know. They lost 102 games in 2008; 103 in 2009. That’s no easy feat. Only three other teams in the last quarter-century have achieved back-to-back 100-loss seasons. …

…And for a losing baseball team, the calm is even more profound. I’ve never been to a park where the people are more relaxed, tolerant and appreciative of any small, even moral, victory. Sure, you root, root, root for the home team, but if they don’t win “it’s a shame” — not a calamity. Can you imagine arm-linked fans swaying to such a sweetly corny song of early-20th-century innocence — as hard to find today as a manual typewriter or a 20-game winner — at the two-minute warning. …

John Fund looks at voter irregularities in Wisconsin.

…Democratic leaders also worried that a popular amendment to require photo ID at the polls would have been attached to their measure. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has vetoed three previous photo ID laws, even though Democrats such as state Sen. Tim Carpenter of Milwaukee supported them saying he’s seen “eye opening” public support for the idea.

That backing is based on real evidence. In 2004, John Kerry won Wisconsin over George W. Bush by 11,380 votes out of 2.5 million cast. After allegations of fraud surfaced, the Milwaukee police department’s Special Investigative Unit conducted a probe. Its February 2008 report found that from 4,600 to 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots. Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once.

Much of the problem resulted from Wisconsin’s same-day voter law, which allows anyone to show up at the polls, register and then cast a ballot. ID requirements are minimal. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 “same day” voters were invalid. …

In the Hit and Run Blog from Reason, Radley Balko blogs on government failure. Read the post for Balko’s twists on the topic.

…I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.

I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government. …

It appears that Obama is not going to help the Democratic candidate who wants to fill Obama’s Senate seat. Jennifer Rubin explains.

…There are good reasons for Obama’s reticence. For starters, Obama has enough sticky connections to the Illinois corruption racket, so he’s wise to stay away from his former hometown. It seems he might, in fact, have had a conversation with the former governor about that Senate seat and another with a union official to relay his preferences to Blago. (If true, this is at odds with what Obama and his “internal review” related to the public when the Blago story first broke.) Blago’s lawyers are now trying to drag the president in to testify in Blago’s case — which will be going to trial this fall. Yikes!

Moreover, Giannoulias is in deep trouble, and it’s far from certain that Obama can help him. After all, he didn’t help Martha Coakley, Creigh Deeds, or Jon Corzine. Coming up short in his own state would prove embarrassing and tend to confirm that he lacks political mojo. Sometimes it’s better to just stay home. …

John Stossel discusses why capitalism is good.

…I was glad to see the publication of “The 5 Big Lies About American Business” by Michael Medved.

“You can only make a profit in this country by giving people a product or a service that they want,” Medved recently told me. “It’s the golden rule in action.” …

…”This is the suspicion of the profit motive — the idea that if somebody is selflessly serving me, they’re going to treat me better than somebody who wants to make a buck,” Medved said. But “(i)f you think about it in your own life, if somebody is benefiting from his interaction with you … it’s a far more reliable kind of interaction than someone who comes and says I’m in this only for you. …

Speaking of the good of free markets, today is an anniversary of Adam Smith’s first book; The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His namesake blog has the story.

On this day, in 1759, Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was an instant sensation. Since the Greeks, philosophers had tried to work out the basis of human ethics: what it was that made some actions good and others bad. Many, in the age of Enlightenment, thought there must be some rational, logical explanation, and perhaps even some way of measuring the goodness or badness of an action, almost mathematically. Such efforts did not lack ingenuity, but never met with great success.

Smith’s breakthrough was to see ethics as an issue of social psychology. …

David Harsanyi comments on South Park creators stirring up more controversy.

…There is nothing inherently wrong with self-censorship, per se. If slighted groups have the ability to mobilize crowds of people, generate enough negative press and economic pressure to induce a show to rethink its content, hey, that’s the way it works.

We’re only talking about an animated show. But if those who bankroll satirists can be so easily intimidated, shouldn’t we all be troubled about the lesson that sends religious fanatics elsewhere? And what does it say about us?…

Generally it’s good to ignore Chris Matthews, but sometimes he’s partisan to the point of parody. When he is it’s good to use him to kick off the humor section. Lately he has decided to say the GOP voter’s apparent decision to rid the party of RINO’s (Republican’s In Name Only) like Arlen Spector or Charlie Crist is “Stalin-esque” suggesting the party is involved in a purge. A couple of Corner posts deal with this. Jonah Goldberg polishes it off.

… But even here, as Matthews dilutes the meaning of Stalin-esque to nine parts water and one part 2% milk, Matthews still comes out a buffoon. Because if you take out the murder, butchery, and genocide from Stalin-esque, you’re still left with a purge from above. And that is the opposite of what is happening. Arlen Specter is a careerist hack who switched parties because — as he pretty much explicitly explained — he thinks his career is more important than the will of the Republican party. Crist, too, is afraid not of some metaphorical  Commissar with a gun in his desk arbitrarily purging him, but of the voters in his own party, voters he’s counted on, voters he’s raised money from, voters he’s lied to.

It would be Stalin-esque (again in the very watered down sense) if Michael Steele unilaterally booted Crist, et al., from the party over the objections of the rank and file. Instead, the rank and file are turning on the long-anointed establishment candidates. This “purge” is a lot closer to what some romantics call “democracy” than what super-geniuses like Matthews call “Stalin-esque.”

Earlier in the month Matthews had complained about Rush Limbaugh describing the administration as a “regime.” Byron York disposes of that bit of Matthews hypocrisy.

… Perhaps Matthews missed all of those references. If he did, he still might have heard the phrase the many times it was uttered on his own network, MSNBC. For example, on January 8 of this year, Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak said that, “In George Bush’s regime, only one million jobs had been created…” On August 21, 2009, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz referred to something that happened in 2006, when “the Bush regime was still in power.” On October 8, 2007, Democratic strategist Steve McMahon said that “the middle class has not fared quite as well under Bush regime as…” On August 10, 2007, MSNBC played a clip of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan referring to “the people of Iraq and Afghanistan that have been tragically harmed by the Bush regime.” On September 21, 2006, a guest referred to liberals “expressing their dissatisfaction with the Bush regime.” On July 7, 2004, Ralph Nader — appearing with Matthews on “Hardball” — discussed how he would “take apart the Bush regime.” On May 26, 2003, Joe Scarborough noted a left-wing website that “has published a deck of Bush regime playing cards.” A September 26, 2002 program featured a viewer email that said, “The Bush regime rhetoric gets goofier and more desperate every day.”

Finally — you knew this was coming — on June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror. “Let’s go to the Reverend Al Sharpton,” Matthews said. “Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?” …

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Michael Barone knows what a gangster government looks like.

Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration’s decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.

This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folks got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,” I wrote. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, when the Securities Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, alleging that the firm violated the law when it sold a collaterized debt obligation based on mortgage-backed securities without disclosing that the CDO was assembled with the help of hedge fund investor John Paulson.

On its face the complaint seems flimsy. Paulson has since become famous because his firm made billions by betting against mortgage-backed securities. But he wasn’t a big name then, and the sophisticated firm buying the CDO must have assumed the seller believed its value would go down. …

We have a few items on New Jersey’s new Guv, Chris Christie. First is by George Will.

The bridge spanning the Delaware River connects New Jersey’s capital with this town where the nation’s most interesting governor occasionally eats lunch at Cafe Antonio. It also connects New Jersey’s government with reality.

The bridge is a tutorial on a subject this government has flunked — economics, which is mostly about incentives. At the Pennsylvania end of the bridge, cigarette shops cluster: New Jersey’s per-pack tax is double Pennsylvania’s. In late afternoon, Gov. Chris Christie says, the bridge is congested with New Jersey government employees heading home to Pennsylvania, where the income tax rate is 3 percent, compared with New Jersey’s top rate of 9 percent.

There are 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey, but in November Christie flattened the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. Christie is built like a burly baseball catcher, and since his inauguration just 13 weeks ago, he has earned the name of the local minor-league team — the Trenton Thunder. …

John Fund, noting school funding election results, says the people are with Christie for now.

Overtaxed New Jersey voters sent a clear message in yesterday’s voting on 479 public school budgets: Enough is enough. A stunning 54% of the budgets went down to defeat, the most since the recession year of 1976. The results have clear implications for a bitter power struggle between New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie and the state’s powerful 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs on Christie.

… No wonder labor leaders are going berserk. If Christie wins, Big Labor will get its comeuppance, New Jersey will prosper, and once again liberal governance will be replaced by something better — responsible fiscal conservatism.

Daniel Foster in National Review says you haven’t made it in New Jersey until the unions want you dead.

You haven’t made it in New Jersey until organized labor wants you dead. By that measure, Chris Christie is already one of the most influential governors in the Garden State’s — shall we say, colorful history. Just a few months into his term, Christie has taken the fight to the blood-engorged leech of a public sector so quickly and so hard that one teacher-union apparatchik sent an e-mail to thousands praying for his untimely demise.

But Chris Christie lives. And nearly two-thirds of the state’s bloated school budgets are not so lucky, having perished at the polls — the local tax levy proposed by each school district in New Jersey is subject to voter approval — in greater proportion than in any year since 1976. This is undoubtedly a win for New Jersey taxpayers, who recognize the necessity, if not the palatability, of Christie’s strong fiscal medicine in a state that teeters on the brink of bankruptcy even as it pays the highest tax burden in the nation.

Faced with an $11 billion hole in a $30 billion budget, Christie used his broad constitutional discretion (New Jersey’s is arguably the most powerful governorship in the Union) to wield not a scalpel or an axe, but a scalpel the size of an axe against a Trenton machine rivaled only by Chicago and Albany in sheer size and scope. …

Governor Christie was on the Don Imus show Friday morning. Whatever you think of the iMan, he can do a good interview. Click here to see the two parts of the interview.

Stuart Taylor continues his series on the upcoming Scotus pick. This time he gushes over Merrick Garland.

I recently asserted that any of the four people on the list initially leaked by the White House would be an excellent nominee to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. (See “An Excellent Supreme Court Shortlist,” 4/10/10, p. 15.) Now I’d like to argue that the wisest choice would be Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

I hasten to add that the consensus that Garland would be the least controversial, most easily confirmed nominee is the least of my reasons for praising him.

Nor is my personal relationship with Garland a substantial factor, although full disclosure is in order: We became friendly in law school, working together on the law review in the mid-1970s. We had dinner at each other’s homes years ago and, more recently, have met for lunch once or twice a year. He invited my wife and me, among many others, to his chambers to watch President Obama’s inauguration. Garland has been guarded about his views, and I know nothing about them beyond the public record. But I can testify — as can many others — that he is about as fair-minded, judicious, and straight as a straight-arrow can be.

To be sure, ranking Garland and the three other shortlisters — all people of outstanding integrity and intellect — is a close call. …

Rush Limbaugh has on op-ed in WSJ following along on the Clinton/Obama slander of tea party people.

The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the halls of Congress, from the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq to the anticapitalist protests during International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, we’re used to seeing leftist malcontents take to the streets. Sometimes they’re violent, breaking shop windows with bricks and throwing rocks at police. Sometimes there are arrests. Not all leftists are violent, of course. But most are angry. It’s in their DNA. They view the culture as corrupt and capitalism as unjust.

Now the liberals run the government and they’re using their power to implement their radical agenda. Mr. Obama and his party believe that the election of November 2008 entitled them to make permanent, “transformational” changes to our society. In just 16 months they’ve added more than $2 trillion to the national debt, essentially nationalized the health-care system, the student-loan industry, and have their sights set on draconian cap-and-trade regulations on carbon emissions and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Had President Obama campaigned on this agenda, he wouldn’t have garnered 30% of the popular vote. …

Instapundit tells us how our leaders celebrated Earth Day. They took separate jet entourages to NY.

… On a day when many Americans will be reflecting upon how they can reduce their impact on the environment, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden boarded separate jets in Washington on Earth Day morning to fly 250 miles up the east coast to New York, where they will land at separate airports to attend separate events within a few miles of each other. …

Writing in the Journal, Richard Lindzen says when it comes to global warming, the political class doesn’t get it. Actually, they do. They’re in it for power.

In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the Internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a view into the world of climate research that was revealing and even startling.

In what has come to be known as “climategate,” one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation. The Climatic Research Unit is hardly an obscure outpost; it supplies many of the authors for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Moreover, the emails showed ample collusion with other prominent researchers in the United States and elsewhere.

One might have thought the revelations would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small. …

In the Daily Beast, Mark McKinnon compares the media’s treatment of golfing presidents.

… And here’s how ABC reported an outing after Obama had just returned from a trip to Germany visiting the horror of the Holocaust camps: “Nobody would fault Obama for taking Sunday to catch up on sleep and unwind after the breakneck travel schedule. But instead of vegging out on the couch, Obama returned to the White House for only about 90 minutes, then hopped in his motorcade and went right back to Andrews to get in nine holes of golf at one of the three courses on the base.”

And how about this headline from The Washington Post: “Just the Sport for a Leader Most Driven.” Richard Leiby reports, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.” The article then quotes a sports psychologist who said Obama seemed able to play golf despite the grim reports by the media about the wars and the economy.

That bears repeating. Here is a journalist remarking about Obama that he is “able” to play golf despite war casualties and economic disaster. For Bush, the press couldn’t believe that he would dare golf at such a time, but for Obama they marvel that he can.

Now that’s a double standard that unfortunately we’ve come to expect. When it comes to press coverage of Bush vs. Obama, it’s become par for the course.

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Mark Steyn uses incendiary sarcasm to incite liberals.

Actually, there is a lot of incendiary hate out there — here, for example. The voiceover is by U.S. citizen (and spiritual mentor, most recently, to Major Hasan) Ayman al-Awlaki. He is explaining the rationale for killing identified individuals, including the creators of South Park.

Mr. al-Awlaki says things like, “Harming Allah and his messenger is a reason to encourage Muslims to kill whoever does that.”

Maybe he’d get a worse press if he were to stop pussyfooting around and explicitly incite violence by saying something openly hateful like “I’m becoming very concerned about federal spending.”

David Harsanyi takes a positive view of Americans’ skepticism.

…News of the Pew poll triggered much hand-wringing from enlightened scribblers, unable to comprehend how the “paranoid” electorate wasn’t appropriately enchanted by the Department of Commerce. But as Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill put it, “Distrust of government is an all-American activity. It’s something we do as Americans and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Indeed. Actually, with another ideological perspective, you could easily see the Pew poll as positively uplifting. The survey, after all, finds that Americans have an increasingly healthy attitude, embracing limited government over an “activist government” which, according to a majority, “has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system.”

So an alternative national headline for the “trust” story might have read: “More and more, citizens turn to free enterprise over regulation.” …

Bill Clinton has stirred up a hornet’s nest. In Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson reviews events at Waco.

Bill Clinton’s invocation of Timothy McVeigh in connection with the Tea Party movement caused me to recall my review of a book on the Waco massacre that was a motivation for McVeigh.  The book under review was (by) Reavis, The Ashes of Waco, and it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995.  Re-reading it for the first time in many years, I was struck by this section…

…The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

…I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

Ilya Somin says that Timothy McVeigh can’t be called a libertarian.

…you might think that Timothy McVeigh and friends were libertarian foes of big government who hoped that their terrorist attacks would somehow lead to tighter constraints on government power.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. In reality, McVeigh was a neo-Nazi and his attack was inspired by the Turner Diaries, a 1978 tract that advocated the use of terrorism to overthrow the US and establish a government explicitly based on Nazi Germany. If you suffer through the experience of actually reading The Turner Diaries, as I did, you will find that author William Pierce did not support anything remotely resembling limited government; indeed, he explicitly repudiated limited government conservatism in the book. …

…The bottom line is that Clinton and others have drawn an unwarranted connection between “anti-government” movements that seek to limit government spending and regulation and a very different set of groups that have no real objection to big government as such. Instead, they seek to use massive state power to enforce racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazi totalitarianism. No one should confuse that with a genuine anti-government ideology motivated by concerns about the fate of “American freedom.” …

Tony Blankley has seen Clinton’s tactic before.

…By chance, I was on CNN’s “Situation Room” on Friday to comment on Mr. Clinton’s latest attempt to smear anti-tax, anti-big-government grass-roots efforts. Unlike in 1995, now I had the advantage of being familiar with subsequent statements by Clinton aides and others. So, on the show, I quoted from Mr. Clinton’s chief speechwriter in a 2000 interview on PBS’ “Frontline.”

Michael Waldman said, describing Mr. Clinton’s words immediately after the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, that “he also very skillfully used the moment to begin the process of making people wonder about the Republican revolution on Capitol Hill. … And very subtly and appropriately, by planting the national flag in opposition to that (GOP rhetoric and the McVeigh bombing) began to turn the political tide as well.”

…I quoted from a 2001 Associated Press article about McVeigh’s execution, which included his own words: “The siege at Waco (ineptly carried out by Mr. Clinton’s Justice Department) was the defining event in his (McVeigh’s) decision to retaliate against the government with the bombing. … ‘If there would not have been a Waco, I would have put down roots somewhere and not been so unsettled with the fact that my government was a threat to me. Everything that Waco implies was on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years.’ ” Ouch. …

Roger Simon looks at some interesting poll numbers.

…According to a poll published this week by McClaughlin & Associates, 46 percent of Jewish voters would prefer someone else than Obama in the presidency, compared to 42 percent who would re-elect him. That’s only a meagre four percent separation, but that number is stunning considering Obama got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in November. That’s a difference of 32 percent between now and then. Has there been another voting block with that large a swing? There may have been, but I doubt it. Something is clearly going on here. …

But in the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone found that the votes went the other way.

Democrat Ted Deutch has won the Florida 19th district special election over Republican Edward Lynch, apparently by a 62%-35% margin. …

…This is one of the most heavily Jewish congressional districts in the nation, and Deutch’s performance suggests that Barack Obama’s harsh criticism of the Israeli government has not hurt Democratic candidates among Jewish voters. Similarly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election January 19, I found that the Democratic percentages held up pretty well in the most heavily Jewish towns (Brookline, Newton, Sharon). …

In the Huffington Post, Sam Stein reports on the latest Republican strategizing on the Finance Reform bill.

Nine months after he penned a memo laying out the arguments for health care legislation’s destruction, Republican message guru Frank Luntz has put together a playbook to help derail financial regulatory reform.

In a 17-page memo titled, “The Language of Financial Reform,” Luntz urged opponents of reform to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes, and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.

“If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated,” Luntz wrote. “This is your critical advantage. Washington’s incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support.”…

From the White House Blog, Deputy Communications Director Jen Psaki gives the administration’s line.

…One false criticism we’re hearing is this: that the Senate bill will allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial firms.  What they won’t tell you is that they are taking their marching orders from a partisan political consultant who has told them that the best way to oppose real reform is to link it to the bank bailouts.  In fact, the polling memo they’re working from explicitly states that “the best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.”  No matter what the bill actually does, they’re going to call it a bailout because that’s what the polls tell them to do. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts Frank Luntz’s response to the White House spin.

… When we presented dial session participants the Financial Reform legislation as it was written in the House, they reacted most negatively to the bailout provisions contained within the bill.  This shouldn’t be surprising.  In the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and other major financial publications — as well as from some of this country’s leading economic experts — they too have highlighted the bailout provisions and called the legislation a “gift to big banks.”

…Unfortunately, the leaders of this Congress are hell-bent on pushing through legislation without reasonable public information, and that has to stop.  Too many mistakes are made when important legislation is rushed.  Even President Obama, who first denied there was a bailout, is now asking that the $50 billion bailout administrative fund be eliminated from the Senate bill.

Why eliminate a bailout fund if it didn’t exist?  Because the legislative process was slowed, people got a chance to read it, review it and comment on it.  Better to do it right than do it fast. …

Also on the Corner, Daniel Foster comments.

You’ll be surprised to hear that the Dodd bill apparently has a loophole or two in it. But don’t worry, one anonymous lobbyist told HuffPo what you’ll need to do to get your financial firm into one of your own:

“Obtaining a carve-out isn’t rocket science,” said a Republican financial services lobbyist. “Just give Chairman Dodd [D-Conn.] and Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] a s***load of money.”

Ah, markets at work: Wall Street has a s***load of money and needs loopholes, Washington has a s***load of loopholes and needs money.

Michio Kaku, in the WSJ, gives possible scenarios for the Iceland volcano. Check out the amazing photos that came from The Boston Globe.

…The worse case scenario, which is unlikely, involves this eruption triggering another, larger eruption. There are 35 active volcanoes in Iceland, and one eruption has been known to set off another. The worse case happened in 1783, with an eruption lasting eight months. That eruption killed off much of the livestock and agriculture in Iceland, which in turn caused the death of about 25% of the island’s population.

The eruption also eventually killed tens of thousands of people on the Continent. Benjamin Franklin was in Paris at the time and was one of the first to connect the rapid change in local weather that collapsed European agriculture with a volcanic explosion. 1783 became known as the horrible “year without summer.” Europe plunged into a period of poverty that lasted for years. Some historians believe that this may have contributed to the French Revolution of 1789. …

Christopher Hitchens paints a portrait of Icelandic culture.

…Until very recently, you had your elemental choice between lamb and cod if you were an Icelander—the near-tundra of the interior (where the Apollo mission trained in the world’s closest approximation to a moonscape) has a few swaths of grass for hardy sheep. The same simplicity on the seashore: “Fish or Die” was the motto until the big shoals began to run out. Such was Iceland’s work ethic that on contact with the European Union, it soon became a dynamo of startups and finance, winning international plaudits until the implosion of its banking system very nearly ripped through the euro two years ago and forced Britain to seize Icelandic assets using anti-terrorist legislation. If Iceland were a mouse, it could be said to have roared, and more than once. …

In Yahoo News, Carlo Piovano discusses the worst-case scenario.

…Scientists fear tremors at the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano could trigger an even more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano — creating a worst-case scenario for the airline industry and travelers around the globe.

A Katla eruption would be 10 times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbor, which has already brought European air travel to a standstill for five days and promises severe travel delays for days more. …

Also in Yahoo News, Andrea Thompson writes about the phenomenon behind the dramatic lightning in the volcanic clouds.

…Scientists don’t know exactly how lightning is created in an ash cloud, however. But they expect it’s a result of particles rubbing together, generating friction and electrical charges.

The volcano lightning may be generated in a similar way to that in normal thunderstorms in a process scientists have dubbed “dirty thunderstorms.” In a normal thunderstorm, ice particles rub together to generate an electrical charge; in the case of a volcano, rock fragments, ash and ice may all rub together to produce this charge. …

In the Corner, Michael Rubin passes along some Icelandic humor.

…Iceland goes bankrupt, then it manages to set itself on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it.

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Using his knowledge of slavery around the world, Thomas Sowell has interesting thoughts about the limits of power.

… Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.

The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.

Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.

Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.

Mark Steyn looks at the decline of British society.

… In the United Kingdom, “civilized society” cedes turf remorselessly: the highest drug use in Europe, highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. Britain’s social disintegration ought to be a major election issue, but the governing class is always the most insulated and thus the last to notice, even when the “underclass” is all over the map. Alan Jay Lerner’s biggest hit concerned a man who took a “creature from the gutter” and transformed her into an English lady. Today, an entire country is downwardly mobile. …

We have four items on the Clinton/Obama attempt to hang the Oklahoma City bombing on the Tea Parties. The NRO staff posted some of Charles Krauthammer’s comments.

…On Bill Clinton’s comparing the rhetoric preceding the Oklahoma City bombing to that of the Tea Party movement:

…When a Republican is in power, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And when a Democrat is in power, dissent is near treasonous and a call to mutiny and insurrection. This is really disgraceful.

Peter Wehner also criticizes President Clinton for his comments.

…The problem for Mr. Clinton is that his concern about the dangers of incendiary rhetoric seems to have taken flight during the two terms of the Bush presidency, as well as during his own. Regarding the former, there was, for starters, the 2006 film, The Death of a President, on the assassination of President Bush. Mr. Clinton did not, to my knowledge, condemn the movie in a front-page story in the New York Times or in a major speech.

Moreover, George W. Bush was, during his two terms in office, routinely called a war criminal, an international terrorist, and compared to Hitler [see a photo gallery here and here]. Signs with bullet holes in Bush’s forehead, with blood running down his face, were all part of the fun and games. The president was accused of moral cowardice by Al Gore, of being a liar and the anti-Christ, and of being a totalitarian and dictatorial leader. Members of Congress such as Keith Ellison compared the attacks on September 11 to the Reichstag fire.

…And now Mr. Clinton is preaching to us about not demonizing our opponents and about the importance of not crossing rhetorical lines. Can a Clinton sermon on the importance of fidelity and the gift of celibacy be far behind? …

Jennifer Rubin addresses the reason for Clinton’s agitation.

…You don’t see the liberal attack machine getting this bent out of shape over nothing. As Bill [Kristol] remarked, “The Obama administration has given rise to a more powerful conservatism than has existed for 20 years, since Ronald Reagan in this country.” And it’s not the GOP Beltway crowd that has done this — it’s ordinary citizens. I don’t think Bill was exaggerating when he said: “The Republican establishment is the threat to the future of the Republican Party and conservatism. The Tea Party is the best thing that’s happened for conservatives.” (You need look no further than the Florida Senate race, where the insiders picked the hapless Charlie Crist, and the Tea Party amateurs identified Marco Rubio as a rising star.) And so the liberals attack and make ludicrous connections to murders like Timothy McVeigh or concoct racist allegations that do not stand up to scrutiny.

The irony is great, of course. The community organizer has stirred the sleeping beast and is now the object of its ire. The Democrats want to shush them all up. I suspect the more the Democrats shush, the more irate the citizen protesters will become. It is proof of how disconnected the ruling party is from popular sentiment and how scared the Democrats are of their own constituents.

Debra Saunders addresses Clinton’s faulty logic.

…When a former president seizes such a tragedy for partisan purposes, it is no wonder a new Pew Research poll found that a modest 22 percent of voters say they trust Washington to do the right thing most of the time. …

…Think about that for a minute: If anyone were to cast blame for the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 dead, or any other attacks within American military bases on the anti-war movement, then that assertion would be followed by howls of outrage, and deservedly so. It would be absurd to suggest that opposition to the war be misconstrued as promoting violence against U.S. troops. …

Ed Morrissey discusses the economic effects of one insurance mandate in New York.

Perhaps the New York Times needs to change its well-known motto to All the News That’s Fit to Print … Eventually.  In today’s edition, buried in its Regional section, comes an analysis of the health-insurance reforms imposed by the state of New York over fifteen years ago.  Like ObamaCare, the state required insurance carriers to issue policies to people with pre-existing conditions as a means of making the industry more “fair” and imposed community pricing rather than risk-based premiums.  How did that work for New Yorkers?  About the way ObamaCare critics predicted:

“…New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.

Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.” …”

David Broder fills us in on Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker. Says there might be another GOP upset.

Before there was a Scott Brown, amazing the political world by capturing Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, there was a Charles D. Baker Jr., challenging the Democratic grip on Beacon Hill by announcing that he would try to deny Barack Obama’s favorite governor, Deval Patrick, a second term.

Baker, a 53-year-old Harvard grad, was no run-of-the-mill candidate. His GOP credentials were established during the years that he worked as the budget chief for Republican Govs. William Weld and Paul Cellucci, and his business background was augmented by his more recent service as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the second-largest insurer in the commonwealth.

But on the day he entered the race last July, Baker said he supported abortion rights and same-sex marriage. “My brother’s gay, and he’s married, and he lives in Massachusetts, so I’m for it. Is that straight enough?” he told the Boston Globe. …

Roger Simon does a travelogue on his trip to foreign lands – Texas and Nascar.

I was standing in the center of the Texas Motor Speedway Monday morning, staring up at my … now I guess I could say friend … Governor Rick Perry of Texas as he was giving a brief welcome for the annual Sprint Cup, when he boomed out the words with his fist thrust in the air:

“In Texas, we love our guns, religion and NASCAR!”

The crowd went wild and I knew I wasn’t in the Hollywood Hills anymore, Dorothy. I was in reddest of red state America and this blue state boy — born in NY, father from Massachusetts, educated in New Hampshire and Connecticut, most of his life in LA — was lovin’ it. …

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Rick Richman comments on the lack of discussion about one of the most important issues of the day.

Mark Steyn predicts future historians will marvel at the omission of any discussion of Iran at this week’s Nuclear Security Summit:

“For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany. …”

…It was all there: the self-referential view of history, the rhetoric divorced from reality, the disingenuous let-me-be-clear assurance, the implicit denigration of his country for its supposed sins, the celebration of the moral leadership he would bring to the world, the panoply of proposals – all delivered while rockets were fired and centrifuges were spun, with no U.S. response other than a conference at which the rockets and centrifuges were not discussed.

Nile Gardiner says that missing the funeral of Poland’s president should have been handled differently.

…The White House did subsequently announce that the president would attend the funeral ceremony in Krakow this past weekend, but like many world leaders he was unable to do so due to the grounding of flights over much of Europe.

One would have thought that President Obama might have used the time he would have spent in Poland paying his respects to the Polish fallen. For example he could have visited the recently erected Victims of Communism memorial in Washington, or at the very least have signed the condolence book at the Polish Embassy. But what did he choose to do instead? Play yet another round of golf. …

Robert Samuelson discusses government spending and the VAT.

…Europe’s widespread VATs aren’t models of simplicity. Among the European Union’s 27 members, the basic rate varies from 15 percent (Cyprus, Luxembourg) to 25 percent (Denmark, Hungary and Sweden). But there are many preferential rates and exemptions. In Ireland, food is taxed at three rates (zero, 4.8 percent and 13.5 percent). In the Netherlands, hotels are taxed at 6 percent. An American VAT would stimulate ferocious lobbying for favorable treatment. …

…A VAT is no panacea; deficit reduction can’t be painless. We’ll need both spending cuts and tax increases. A VAT might be the least bad tax, though my preference is for energy taxes. But what’s wrong with the simplistic VAT advocacy is that it deemphasizes spending cuts. The consequences would be unnecessarily high taxes that would weaken the economy and discriminate against the young. It would become harder for families to raise children. VAT enthusiasts need to answer two questions: What government spending would you cut? And how high would your VAT rates go?

In City Journal, Steven Malanga gives us an eye-opening look at the state employees’ unions that have brought California to its knees. He reviews how the unions got started and some of the stunts they have pulled. Below he explains some of the legislation and the politics that have created the fiscal crisis.

…Perhaps the most costly was far-reaching 1999 legislation that wildly increased pension benefits for state employees. It included an unprecedented retroactive cost-of-living adjustment for the already retired and a phase-out of a cheaper pension plan that Governor Wilson had instituted in 1991. The deal also granted public-safety workers the right to retire at 50 with 90 percent of their salaries. To justify the incredible enhancements, Davis and the legislature turned to CalPERS, whose board was stocked with members who were either union reps or appointed by state officials who themselves were elected with union help. …

…The second budget-busting deal of the Davis era was the work of the teachers’ union. In 2000, the CTA began lobbying to have a chunk of the state’s budget surplus devoted to education. In a massive rally in Sacramento, thousands of teachers gathered on the steps of the capitol, some chanting for TV cameras, “We want money! We want money!” Behind the scenes, Davis kept up running negotiations with the union over just how big the pot should be. “While you were on your way to Sacramento, I was driving there the evening of May 7, and the governor and I talked three times on my cell phone,” CTA president Wayne Johnson later boasted to members. “The first call was just general conversation. The second call, he had an offer of $1.2 billion. . . . On the third call, he upped the ante to $1.5 billion.” Finally, in meetings, both sides agreed on $1.84 billion. As Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters later observed, that deal didn’t merely help blow the state’s surplus; it also locked in higher baseline spending for education. The result: “When revenues returned to normal, the state faced a deficit that eventually not only cost Davis his governorship in 2003 but has plagued his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Having wielded so much power effortlessly, the unions miscalculated the antitax, anti-Davis sentiment that erupted when, shortly after his autumn 2002 reelection, Davis announced that the state faced a massive deficit. The budget surprise spurred an enormous effort to recall Davis, which the unions worked to defeat, with the SEIU spending $2 million. At the same time, union leaders used their influence in the Democratic Party to try to save Davis, telling other Democrats that they would receive no union support if they abandoned the governor. “If you betray us, we won’t forget it,” the head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor proclaimed to Democrats. Only when it became apparent from polls that the recall would succeed did the unions shift their support to Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who finished a distant second to Schwarzenegger. Taxpayer groups were euphoric.

But as they and Schwarzenegger soon discovered, most of California’s government machinery remained union-controlled—especially the Democratic state legislature, which blocked long-term reform. Frustrated, Schwarzenegger backed a series of 2005 initiatives sponsored by taxpayer groups to curb the unions and restrain government growth, including one that made it harder for public-employee unions to use members’ dues for political purposes. The controversial proposals sparked the most expensive statewide election in American history. Advocacy groups and businesses spent a staggering $300 million (some of it, however, coming from drug companies trying to head off an unrelated initiative). The spending spree included $57 million from the CTA, which mortgaged its Sacramento headquarters for the cause. All of the initiatives went down to defeat. …

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Writing in National Review, John Bolton has thoughts on the treaty with Russia.

On April 8, in Prague, the United States and Russia signed what they call the “New START” bilateral arms-control agreement, important specifics of which, in hallmark Obama-administration fashion (see health care), were still being negotiated. Nonetheless, the president and his acolytes are calling for the treaty’s swift ratification.

The Senate would better protect our country’s future by actually deliberating before rushing over the precipice. A vital constitutional imperative, the Senate’s role in making binding treaty commitments, is at stake. While some consider it passé to insist that legislators read and understand what they vote upon, senators should insist on their constitutional prerogatives, drawing a line in the sand on this national-security issue.

In fact, there is no compelling reason for the Obama-Medvedev treaty, and there are many reasons to fear its impact. Since the still-incomplete text has just become public, continuing careful analysis will be necessary before we can come to definitive understandings and conclusions. Nonetheless, our very uncertainty lights the road ahead for arduous questioning, ranging from the assumptions of the negotiators to the consequences of implementing the treaty’s provisions. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino provides some background to the charges behind “Goldman’s Fall From Grace.”

Before Goldman Sachs was lampooned in the media, famously labeled by Rolling Stone magazine the evil “vampire squid,” and became the symbol on Main Street for all that was wrong on Wall Street, the big firm was already the most hated investment bank among investment bankers.

But now Goldman has even bigger problems, having been accused by the SEC of securities fraud. The SEC claims that Goldman sold a complex type of mortgage bond, known as a collateralized debt obligation, to investors without alerting them that hedge-fund manager John Paulson had selected the same bonds as likely to default.

Paulson made money because he was actually shorting the bonds (a trade that becomes profitable when prices decline), as Goldman was selling the bonds to investors, suggesting they buy them because the housing market would continue to boom.

These allegations only further the case for Goldman’s dismal reputation on the Street. …

Another Goldman has had a fall from grace; sort of. We refer to a kerfuffle between two of our favorites; David Goldman (AKA Spengler) and John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and the Contentions blog. Goldman wrote a particularly harsh post about Obama on April 9th. Most everything Goldman writes finds its way into Pickings. This did not; in part because of the language and because the occasion for the post was a story in the Israeli Daily Maariv which we could not confirm and which later proved to be incorrect in substantive areas. See Roger Simon. There is enough reason to be aghast at the policies of this administration without getting personal. And, in fact, given Obama’s family background, it is proof of some extraordinary strengths of the man to have left that milieu behind and fashioned a good marriage and nurturing home for his children.

Our guide for this will be Michael Ledeen who is, more or less, sympathetic to David Goldman’s point of view.

… David has been saying these things for quite a while, and has offered plenty of evidence to explain why he believes them.  John hasn’t felt obliged to pick a fight before,  and I think he would have done better if had taken a bit of time to study the facts of Obama’s life.  Contrary to John’s dismissal of any Indonesian influence (he was only there for “less than a year”), for example, young Barack spent four important years (from age 6 to 10) there, and attended a Muslim school (which wasn’t “very Muslim” actually, but I digress).  And his characterization of Mrs Obama’s family as “lower middle class from Mercer Island, Washington” is not quite right either:  the parents were from Kansas, and lived briefly on Mercer Island (which is a pretty pricey neighborhood, at least in recent years);  the mother was a bank vice president, and I can’t find an account suggesting that Obama’s mother had an economically challenged childhood.  That came later, as a result of moving to Indonesia.

I totally agree with John–indeed I have written it myself–when he says that Obama’s view of the world is of a piece with the political correctness now rampant in American colleges and universities.  His mother was a trailblazer in this regard, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say it.

I’m baffled when John accuses David of somehow trying to make the president “responsible” for his mother.  It’s surely important to pay attention to biography, as John no doubt agrees in calmer moments.  I don’t understand his complaint about “speculation about…sexual history.”  It’s not speculative to say that she married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, and produced children from both. …

More on this from Jonah Goldberg and Corner readers.

… This strikes me as a not unreasonable conjecture given Obama’s own narrative in Dreams from My Father, and given that it has been a commonplace on the hard left since at least Vietnam to affect—and internalize—an alienated stance against America. Obama’s come out of a more ideologically pure left-wing environment than any major Democratic figure in a while. That he might share its tendency to prefer America as it should be to America as it is isn’t out of left field. It might be wrong, but it’s not loony.

I mean, all of this is kind of silly psychoanalytic speculation, but if we understand Goldman’s clunky phrase “third-world anthropologist” to mean someone’s whose consideration of American society and politics is sort of at a abstracted distance and whose emotive sympathies lie more with the damnés de la terre than the bitter Sky-God, boom-stick clingers…I don’t see where it’s wrong, per se, or where it fails to explain his conduct. …

Christopher Booker says we need to keep exploring climategate.

If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)

Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever. …

Telegraph, UK has comments on our new space program.

A few years ago, on a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, I was surprised to see dozens of vultures perched on fences outside the museum. Apparently, they’re permanent residents. Were I to return today, I suspect those vultures would look very different. What were once ugly birds are now potent symbols. NASA is dying.

Doom has come in the form of President Barack Obama, who yesterday unveiled plans for a stripped-down space agency during a speech at the Kennedy Space Centre. The speech was more like a funeral oration than a new policy announcement, since the president’s intentions have been made abundantly clear over the past two months. Nevertheless, while there was little surprise in what Obama said, the sense of betrayal felt in Florida was no less bitter. …

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Some of our favorites continue to find fault with last week’s faux summit. Mark Steyn first.

In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand …but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.

Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. …

… In a characteristic display of his now-famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, “You would think they should be saying ‘thank you’” – for all he’s done for them. Right now, the fellows saying “thank you” are the mullahs, the Politburo, Czar Putin and others hostile to U.S. interests who’ve figured out they now have the run of the planet. …

Charles Krauthammer next.

… So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium.

What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what might have ensued.

Let us stipulate that sequestering nuclear material is a good thing. But, it is a minor thing, particularly when Iran is off the table and Pakistan is creating new plutonium for every ounce of Canadian uranium shipped to the United States.

Perhaps calculating that removing relatively small amounts of fissile material from stable, friendly countries didn’t quite do the trick, Obama proudly announced that the United States and Russia were disposing of 68 tons of plutonium. Unmentioned was the fact that this agreement was reached 10 years ago — and, under the new protocol, doesn’t begin to dispose of the plutonium until 2018. Feeling safer now?

The appropriate venue for such minor loose-nuke agreements is a meeting of experts in Geneva who, after working out the details, get their foreign ministers to sign off. Which made this parade of world leaders in Washington an exercise in misdirection — distracting attention from the looming threat from Iran, regarding which Obama’s 15 months of terminally naive “engagement” has achieved nothing but the loss of 15 months. …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon notes the garbage the administration’s house economists must spew. His targets are Krugman and Summers.

If an astronomer were to casually claim that Ptolemy was right and the sun revolves around the earth, or if a paleontologist were to suddenly subscribe to Archbishop Ussher’s idea that the world was created as we know it now in the night preceding October 23, 4004 BCE, they would be laughed out of their disciplines. The evidence for the modern understanding of such matters is, after all, overwhelming. So to make such a claim would require massive and unequivocal data to back it up.

However, if an economist does the equivalent, the entire profession, instead of collapsing in laughter, says, ” . . . . oh, look! A squirrel!” Economists, it seems, suffer no loss of respect by their peers if they utter ex cathedra pronouncements that are in flat contradiction of the most basic tenets of the discipline. All they have to do is to be advancing a political agenda at the time, and all — no matter how ridiculous — is forgiven. …

David Harsanyi looks at Tea Party folks.

Yesterday, I waded into a mass of Tea Party protesters gathered at the front of Colorado’s Capitol and completely forgot to brace myself for a “small-scale mimicry of Kristall- nacht” (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich once characterized these events).

As it turns out, earlier I happened to peruse a new CBS/New York Times poll detailing the attitudes of Tea Party activists, who, it turns out, are more educated than the average American, more reflective of mainstream anxieties than any populist movement in memory and more closely aligned philosophically with the wider electorate than any big city newsroom in America.

What seemed to be the biggest news derived from the poll nationally? A plurality of Tea Party activists do not deem Sarah Palin qualified for the presidency — proving, I suppose, that some people have the ability to be exceptionally fond of a political celebrity without elevating her to sainthood. …

Robert Samuelson says when it comes to taxes, today might be the good old days.

Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.

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Why? For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren’t paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent. By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don’t pay. (Of course, this doesn’t mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)

The personal exemption and standard deduction, combined with the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, shield many poor and middle-class families from the income tax. In 2009 they got extra protection from President Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit, which was $400 for single workers (phasing out at $75,000 of income) and $800 for a couple (phasing out at $150,000 of income). Without that credit, probably only 40 percent of households or less wouldn’t have paid income taxes. President Obama has proposed that the credit be renewed for 2011. But given the massive federal budget deficits, there’s a good chance that the credit will someday expire.

So that’s one pressure for higher taxes. But it’s peanuts compared to the real threat: an aging America. …

A couple of Corner Posts from Mark Steyn. One on Obama’s latest biography and one on Apartheid practiced by Palestinians.

… Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israel Defense Forces general who now serves as Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic affairs minister, posed the following query in an interview published in the Jerusalem Post: “If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews? Why do those areas have to be Judenrein? …

The next appointment to the Court is critical, right? Stuart Taylor says not so much.

At both ends of the ideological spectrum, politicians, activists, journalists, and academics like to stress how big a change the next Supreme Court justice could make in the course of the law. The appointment will, says the conventional wisdom, be among President Obama’s most important legacies.

Many also stress how far to the right (say liberals) or left (say conservatives) of center the Supreme Court has been in recent years, the better to dramatize the need to correct the perceived imbalance.

And the dominant media image has been of “the conservative Court” (recent articles in The Washington Post), or “the Supreme Court’s conservative majority” (New York Times editorials), or a Court “as conservative as it’s been in nearly a century” (Newsweek commentary by my friend Dahlia Lithwick).

All this brings to mind three contrarian theses.

First, it simply won’t make much difference in the next five or so years — if ever — whom Obama picks from the lists of moderately liberal, extremely liberal, and just plain liberal candidates leaked by the White House.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single case or issue that would foreseeably be decided differently depending on whether the nominee turns out to be the most or the least liberal of those under serious consideration. …

WSJ’s Weekend Interview is with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

‘I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer,” explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal’s editorial board. “And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I’ve done, they figure: ‘He’s just crazy enough to do it.’”

Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall’s campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie’s size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy—that he wasn’t serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.

Listen to Mr. Christie’s take on the state of his state: “We are, I think, the failed experiment in America—the best example of a failed experiment in America—on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times.” New Jersey’s residents now suffer under the nation’s highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven’t come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011. …

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Jake Tapper noticed one of the “accomplishments” of the recent nuclear summit was a retread. This reminds Pickerhead of his first trip to Moscow. It was a trade mission that allowed my visit to pose as a business expense. After one general meeting that accomplished little beyond creating hot air, I remarked to my interpreter, “This is nothing but a circle jerk.” Soon as I said that, I knew I had tasked his English skills too much. But, that’s what we had in Washington this week.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced today that Russia would shut down its final plutonium reactor, the ADE-2 reactor that has producing weapons-grade plutonium for nearly 52 years in Zheleznogorsk, a once-secret city in Siberia.

According to 2008 report from the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the ADE-2 reactor was originally supposed to shut down last year, after construction of a replacement plant in Zheleznogorsk was completed. …

Corner post from Seth Leibsohm is a good summit summary.

… And if you want to know how badly our foreign muscle has weakened, this story in the Brazilian press this morning informs you: “Brazil has joined forces with Turkey in opposition to sanctions against Iran.”

So, in sum: We had a summit that accomplished nothing except a) angering the American and international press corps, b) closing down Washington for two days, and c) misleading everyone for 24 hours that China and others were on board with something to help stop Iran when that just wasn’t true. This just isn’t serious foreign or defense policy. In fact, it’s a dangerous, even Neronian policy — except it won’t be Rome that will burn.

More summit summations from Nile Gardner in Telegraph Blogs, UK. He contrasts the summit to Netanyahu’s speech at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

… Netanyahu’s warning about the dangers of appeasement is exactly the message the world needs to hear. In contrast, the Nuclear Security Summit has largely been a feel-good exercise by a president who consistently projects weakness over strength, and for world leaders who enjoyed an extravagant, two-day foreign junket at US taxpayers’ expense in the capital of the free world. …

… large political summits don’t necessarily make the world safer, but strong American leadership in the face of tyrannical regimes definitely does, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated. Unfortunately that kind of backbone is in short supply at the White House today, with a president more concerned with PR spin than confronting and defeating evil on the world stage.

Marty Peretz has finally seen the light and understands what a foreign policy disaster this administration has become. The occasion for this revelation was knowledge Syria has armed Hezbollah with Scud missiles. They have a range of 430 miles and can strike Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israel’s nuclear installations at Dimona.

I don’t know whether I should have ended the headline above with a question mark or an exclamation point. The first of my options would suggest that the president might actually learn from his palpable mistakes. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, to tell you the truth, I felt that would be playing with my readers. My alternative would hint—more than hint, I suppose—at my utter exasperation with Obama’s foreign policy. I don’t really want to go there. Still, are you not really exasperated with him and with it? Or are you one of those who care only about domestic affairs? …

… And, thinking about the utter collapse of American policy in so many areas of the world, I wonder why there is so little oversight and even so little questioning of the diplomatic apparatus by the Senate.

Peretz also says that Obama’s opinion on Iranian sanctions is just “blather.”

Sometimes a journalist grasps an intricate situation and explains it in just one simple sentence. Here is what the distinguished Timesman John Vinocur has to say in today’s International Herald Tribune about Obama’s policy of sanctions:

“The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which, although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to give the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep.” …

When it comes to Obama and the Mid-East, no scales were coming off Roger Simon’s eyes.

Barack Obama has an Israel problem. I won’t say a Jewish problem, because that wouldn’t be “politically correct.” As we all know, anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism (or is it?).

Anyway, the President’s Israel problem couldn’t be more obvious and it seems to have increased, or should I say metastasized, in parallel with his popular decline, almost in the way that classic Jew hatred increased during times of economic downturn (Weimar Republic, etc.) Not that anyone who spent two decades in Reverend Wright’s church with its hero worship of Louis Farrakhan and generally racist tinge was likely to be philo-Semitic. But things have gotten worse. Indeed, his very close friends at the New York Times are now reporting that the President, in the wake of the supposedly surprise announcement of new Jewish housing units in Jerusalem, “has seized control of Middle East policy himself.” They go on to note : “Mr. Obama, incensed by that snub, has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a list of demands, and relations between the United States and Israel have fallen into a chilly standoff.”

Incensed by the snub? List of demands. Chilly standoff? In other words, as we say in Hollywood, this time it’s personal. …

… his behavior has certainly not won the hearts and minds of the Israeli public. A gigantic 91% oppose Obama’s possible attempt to impose a deal on Israel, an unheard of number in opposition to an American president – and that from a populace that tends to the liberal, a country where one of the few, if only, socialist successes ever flourished, the kibbutz.

Of course, Obama’s actions are making every Israeli into a dreaded Likudnik. Why wouldn’t they? When a man acts on inchoate impulses tinged with rage, there’s no telling what he will do. If this goes on much longer, he may even change the voting patterns of the American Jewish public. Stranger things have happened. Just wait.

Jonah Goldberg says Sarkozy is not giving up France’s nukes. A reader writes him;

… Sarkozy’s announcement on nukes demonstrates that we’ve crossed some sort of line, and not a good one. This is one of those ‘you know you’re in trouble when…’ moments. You know we’re in trouble when the president of France makes more sense on national security than the president of the United States.

A couple of our favorites look at the Supremes. David Harsanyi is wondering if the American people think like Justice Stevens.

… Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that government should continue to use racial quotas and preferences rather than allow citizens the freedom to succeed or fail on their own merits — or even their own luck — rather than color of their skin?

Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that local government should be permitted to throw American citizens off their own property and out of their homes? Do they concur that government should then be able to hand that property over to other private citizens simply because they can pay more taxes? Because, in Kelo vs. City of New London, Stevens, writing for the majority, radically expanded the idea of property as “public use.”

It’s no mystery why Leahy would want to turn the tables on conservatives and make the confirmation hearing about corporations rather than the Constitution or the reckless manner in which justices like Stevens treat it. I would do the same if my agenda’s success was intricately tied to the pliability of the document.

In a very interesting piece, Stuart Taylor thinks he knows why many GOP appointments turn out to be duds like Stevens, or Souter, or Warren, or O’Conner, or Kennedy, or …….

… Blackmun and O’Connor as well as Stevens, on the other hand, clearly “evolved,” as liberal journalists and academics have said approvingly. Their ideological drift has to some extent mirrored the direction of general public opinion, such as diminishing bias against gay people. But the public has never moved sharply to the left — as has Stevens and as did O’Connor and Blackmun — on abortion rights, racial preferences or church-state issues such as school prayer.

While many liberals see this trend as a case of acquiring wisdom on the job, conservative critics including Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have claimed that their more liberal Republican-appointed colleagues have been moved neither by wisdom, nor by legal principle, nor by general public opinion, but by the leftward march of the intellectual elite, especially in the media and academia.

While I would not dismiss the liberal view, the conservative critique seems more plausible. Indeed, it would be only human, as I wrote in a 2003 column, for justices who arrive without settled ideological convictions to evolve in a liberal direction.

The justices’ reputations are determined in large part by mostly liberal news reporters, commentators and law professors and by liberal feminist, civil rights and professional interest groups such as the American Bar Association. Newly appointed justices who vote conservative are often portrayed as uncompassionate right-wing ideologues. Those who move leftward win praise for enlightenment. (“I ain’t evolving,” the aggressively conservative Thomas has reportedly told clerks.) And the bright young law clerks — the justices’ closest professional collaborators — tend to come from elite law schools where conservative professors are rare birds and general public opinion is widely seen as benighted. …

J. Rubin posts on a Marco Rubio. He might be a modest politician. Is there such a thing?

… Rubio has a bright future that will only get brighter if he proves to be a thoughtful and knowledgable force in the Senate. That he sees himself as not remotely ready for the White House is further evidence of his good character and common sense, qualities in short supply among many pols.

Joel Kotkin says families are not dying out and in fact, are becoming more important.

For over a generation pundits, policymakers and futurists have predicted the decline of the American family. Yet in reality, the family, although changing rapidly, is becoming not less but more important.

This can be traced to demographic shifts, including immigration and extended life spans, as well as to changes of attitudes among our increasingly diverse population. Furthermore, severe economic pressures are transforming the family–as they have throughout much of history–into the ultimate “safety net” for millions of people.

Those who argue the family is less important note that barely one in five households–although more than one-third of the total population–consists of a married couple with children living at home. Yet family relations are more complex than that; people remain tied to one another well after they first move away. My mother, at 87, is still my mother, after all, as well as the grandmother to my daughters. Those ties still dominate her actions and attitudes.

Critically, marriage, the basis of the family, is also far from a dying institution. …

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics speculates about how good it might be in the November elections. We will see if there are enough people who want to do the work.

Though Election Day is still months away, pundits have already begun to speculate on possible outcomes for this year’s midterms. There’s a general consensus that Democrats will lose seats in November, but beyond that opinions vary widely on how big those losses might be. Some argue that because of the advance notice, passage of health care, and an improving economy (or some combination of all three), Democrats will be able to limit their losses significantly. Others are predicting a repeat of 1994, when Democrats lost 50+ seats and control of the House.

So how bad could 2010 get for the Democrats? Let me say upfront that I tend to agree with analysts who argue that if we move into a “V”-shaped recovery and President Obama’s job approval improves, Democratic losses could be limited to twenty or twenty-five seats.

That said, I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility …

The Economist says people can listen to your keyboard clicks and find out what you’re typing. Yipes!

CLATTERING keyboards may seem the white noise of the modern age, but they betray more information than unwary typists realise. Simply by analysing audio recordings of keyboard clatter, computer scientists can now reconstruct an accurate transcript of what was typed—including passwords. And in contrast to many types of computer espionage, the process is simple, requiring only a cheap microphone and a desktop computer. …

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In Commentary, Michael Totten discusses Iran with a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name “Wally” inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he’s issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.

…A military attack against Iran should be rolled out only if every conceivable peaceful solution fails first. Striking Iran would, in all likelihood, ignite several Middle Eastern wars all at once. Hamas and Hezbollah would bombard Israel with missile attacks. Lebanon and Gaza would both come under massive counterbattery fire. The war could easily spill over into Iraq and put American soldiers at risk.

The above scenario may sound like the worst, short of nuclear war, but it isn’t. The worst-case scenario is a regional war that fails to stop Iran’s nuclear program while keeping the regime in place. If the Israelis decide to use force, the nuclear facilities should not be the target. The government should be the target. And the U.S. should back Israel’s play and even assist it, no matter how enraged American officials might be. The last thing any of us needs is a bloodied Iranian government with delusions of invincibility that later acquires the weapons of genocide and then sets out for revenge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “If you shoot at a king you must kill him.” …

Jennifer Rubin has more on foreign policy, this time on South Korea.

It really doesn’t pay to be an ally of the U.S. these days. That status confers on a nation’s leaders the opportunity to be publicly berated and to see prior agreements evaporate (e.g., the Bush-Sharon settlement deal, the missile-defense arrangement with Eastern Europe). And when it comes to our allies’ security and economic needs, Obama nearly always has some higher priority. A case in point (another one) is South Korea. Fred Hiatt writes:

In a world of dangerously failed states and willful challengers to American leadership, South Korea is an astoundingly successful democracy that wants to be friends. But will America say yes? That seemed to be the question perplexing President Lee Myung-bak when I interviewed him here last Wednesday, though he described relations at the moment as excellent. …  The two nations have signed a free-trade agreement that Lee believes would — in addition to bringing obvious economic benefit to both sides — seal a crucial alliance and promote stability throughout Northeast Asia. But President Obama has yet to submit the agreement to Congress for ratification or say when he might do so…

The Economist has a short on the complexity of the tax code.

…The federal tax code, which was 400 pages long in 1913, has swollen to about 70,000. Americans now spend 7.6 billion hours a year grappling with an incomprehensible tangle of deductions, loopholes and arcane reporting requirements. That is the equivalent of 3.8m skilled workers toiling full-time, year-round, just to handle the paperwork. By this measure, the tax-compliance industry is six times larger than car-making.

Every year, the national taxpayer advocate issues a report begging Congress to simplify the system. In her most recent one, published on December 31st, Ms Olson frets that she is repeating herself. She refers Congress to what she said the previous year. An incredible 82% of taxpayers are so flummoxed that they pay for help. Some 60% hire an accountant or tax preparer, while another 22% use tax software. She might have added that even the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, gets someone else to do his taxes. …

We applaud Thomas Sowell’s view of things.

…If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.

But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Michael Barone says that Obamacare will be a central issue for the upcoming SCOTUS nominee.

…One is the constitutionality of the health care bill’s mandate to purchase private health insurance. The federal government has never before commanded citizens to buy a commercial product. Could the government command you to buy breakfast cereal?

Some 14 state attorneys general are trying to raise the issue in court, and pending state laws outlawing mandates could raise the question as well. Those state laws are obviously invalid under the supremacy clause unless the federal law is unconstitutional. Is it?

…Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.

Jennifer Rubin comments on polling numbers for repealing Obamacare.

Three weeks after Congress passed its new national health care plan, support for repeal of the measure has risen four points to 58%. That includes 50% of U.S. voters who strongly favor repeal.The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters nationwide finds 38% still oppose repeal, including 32% who strongly oppose it.

It’s startling that fifty percent strongly favor its repeal. It is not simply that Obama hasn’t sold his signature health-care legislation; attitudes are hardening even before the tax hikes, premiums increases, and Medicare cuts go into effect. …

…It has, however, reinvigorated and revived the conservative movement. That’s no small accomplishment.

David Goldman says that small business indicators are not optimistic.

Meanwhile the NFIB’s business optimism index fell to 86.8 in March from 88 in February. Bloomberg quoted an NFIB economist as follows:

The measure of earnings expectations showed the biggest decline in March, falling 4 points to minus 43 percent. Thirty- four percent of respondents cited “poor sales” as the top business concern, the same as in February, and the net percent of owners projecting higher sales, adjusting for inflation, fell to minus 3 percent.

How do we square this with what appears to be a big improvement in employment according to the Household Survey for March? For March, the household survey has a seasonally-adjusted total employment number of 138,905 and an unadjusted unemployment number of 137, 983. Unemployed s.a. are 15.008 million vs. 15,678 million before seasonal adjustment. There is something squirrelly in seasonally-adjusting data in the midst of tectonic shifts in the structure of the economy.

In the WSJ, Burton Folsom, Jr. and Anita Folsom explain how the Great Depression ended.

…Instead, Congress reduced taxes. Income tax rates were cut across the board. FDR’s top marginal rate, 94% on all income over $200,000, was cut to 86.45%. The lowest rate was cut to 19% from 23%, and with a change in the amount of income exempt from taxation an estimated 12 million Americans were eliminated from the tax rolls entirely.

Corporate tax rates were trimmed and FDR’s “excess profits” tax was repealed, which meant that top marginal corporate tax rates effectively went to 38% from 90% after 1945. …

…By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the U.S. had received during the war years, when tax rates were higher. Price controls from the war were also eliminated by the end of 1946. The U.S. began running budget surpluses. …

Ralph Kinney Bennett, in the American.com, writes an ode to the Jeep.

…Born of war and now in its 70th year, its brilliant design has propelled it into a new century with an undiminished reputation. It is an engineering landmark, the epitome of functional simplicity, and yet nobody is entirely sure who designed it or gave it its name.

What eventually became the Jeep was originally conceived in the 1930s as a light, rugged “reconnaissance car” to provide speedy movement of key personnel and equipment in the rear and on the battlefield. The U.S. Army vaguely envisioned something bigger than a motorcycle, smaller than a truck, and undaunted by the most difficult terrain. …

…The appeal of the basic Jeep is visceral, profound, beyond explanation. Not even a Volkswagen Beetle is as instantly recognizable. Older Jeeps continue to be recycled through new bodies, new engines, giant wheels and tires, hard tops, soft tops, no tops. They become dune buggies, beach buggies, ball buggies on golf driving ranges, and windshield-down stump jumping go-to-hell cars. They do everything but die. As to the military originals of the Second World War, I have often seen veterans simply break into tears in the presence of a restored one. …