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WSJ report on soldiers who were children on September 11, 2001.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Corey Shaffer was in fourth grade at Cutler Ridge Christian Academy in Miami. Because his mother was cafeteria manager, he was at school early and was enjoying a bowl of Lucky Charms when news of the terrorist hijackings flashed on the television screen. He remembers being confused. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” he said.

It wasn’t until he was in middle school that the significance became clear, when he read about the attacks in his history book. Now he’s 19 years old and a Marine infantryman, fighting in the longest war in his nation’s history.

The conflict in Afghanistan has dragged on so long that the young Americans fighting on the front lines today often have little personal memory of the event that sparked it in the first place. Since the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush has completed two terms and retreated to private life. The World Trade Center is again New York’s tallest building and Osama bin Laden has been dead for almost exactly one year.

The newest wave of troops hitting the Afghan battlefields are 19 or 20 years old, meaning they were roughly between 8 and 10 when al Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The fourth- and fifth-graders knew something big had happened but were often unable to understand why it mattered until years later. Such a mismatch hasn’t happened since the country was founded, largely because its greatest wars have tended to be brief interludes, not semipermanent features. …

Peter Wehner calls out attention to last week’s column from George Will.

George Will has a lovely tribute to his son Jon, who is a Washington Nationals fan who also happens to have Down syndrome.

Apart from his evident love and appreciation for his son, Will takes aim at the “full, garish flowering of the baby boomers’ vast sense of entitlement, which encompasses an entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps, and to a perfect baby.” He goes on to write about Jon’s gift of serenity. “With an underdeveloped entitlement mentality,” Will writes, Jon has “been equable about life’s sometimes careless allocation of equity. Perhaps this is partly because, given the nature of Down syndrome, neither he nor his parents have any tormenting sense of what might have been. Down syndrome did not alter the trajectory of his life; Jon was Jon from conception on.” …

Here is Will’s column.

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago — on May 4, 1972, his father’s 31st birthday — the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable.

The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon’s parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have necessarily bleak futures. Whether warehoused or just allowed to languish from lack of stimulation and attention, people with Down syndrome, not given early and continuing interventions, were generally thought to be incapable of living well, and hence usually did not live as long as they could have.

Down syndrome is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect — an extra 21st chromosome. It causes varying degrees of mental retardation and some physical abnormalities, including small stature, a single crease across the center of the palms, flatness of the back of the head, a configuration of the tongue that impedes articulation, and a slight upward slant of the eyes. In 1972, people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids.

Now they are called American citizens, about 400,000 of them, and their life expectancy is 60. Much has improved. There has, however, been moral regression as well. …

Daniel Gross of the WSJ explores the trend to renting.

… In the American mind, renting has long symbolized striving—striving, that is, well short of achieving. But as we climb our way out of the Great Recession, it seems something has changed. Americans are getting over the idea of owning the American dream; increasingly, they’re OK with renting it. Homeownership is on the decline, and home rentership is on the rise. But the trend isn’t limited to the housing market. Across the board—for goods ranging from cars to books to clothes—Americans are increasingly acclimating to the idea of giving up the stability of being an owner for the flexibility of being a renter. This may sound like a decline in living standards. But the new realities of our increasingly mobile economy make it more likely that this transition from an Ownership Society to what might be called a Rentership Society, far from being a drag, will unleash a wave of economic efficiency that could fuel the next boom.

While downgrading the place of ownership in the American psyche may sound like a traumatic task, the cold, unsentimental fact about the American dream is that Americans never really owned it in the first place. For the past three decades, especially, consumers haven’t so much bought their quality of life as they’ve borrowed it from banks and credit card companies. And since the Great Recession, Americans have been busy rebuilding their balance sheets and avoiding new financial encumbrances. When American consumers can’t—or won’t—borrow to purchase the goods and services they’ve come to consider part of their standard of living, how does the economy get back on its feet?

The answer lies in consumers following the example of corporations—that is, becoming more efficient. The reaction to extended leverage and foolish borrowing isn’t to stop consuming and buying; it is to consume and buy more intelligently. That’s what the Rentership Society is all about. And it starts at home. Literally. Housing is the biggest single component of consumption in the U.S. economy and the source of much of our present misery. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical consumer spends about 32% of his or her budget on shelter. In the last decade, that generally meant borrowing a lot of money to take “ownership” of a home. …

Joel Kotkin writes on how a baby bust will turn Asia’s tigers toothless.

For the last two decades, America’s pundit class has been looking for models to correct our numerous national deficiencies. Some of the more deluded have settled on Europe, which, given its persistent low economic growth over the past 20 years and minuscule birth rates, amounts to something like looking for love in all the wrong places.

More rational and understandable have been those who have looked for role models instead in East Asia. After all, East Asia has been the world’s ascendant power for the better part of past 30 years. It is home to both China and Japan, the world’s second and third largest economies, as well as the dynamic “tiger” economies of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Thomas Friedman, long enamored by authoritarian leviathan China, recently praised the tiger countries as exemplars of forward thinking. He traces their strong emphasis on “highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students” as keys to turning their resource-poor countries into first world successes.

Yet for all their laudably good school test scores, these tigers could turn somewhat toothless in the future. Already Japan, which fashioned the first great Asian model, is beset by a series of massive challenges including a lack of technological competitiveness and disastrously declining demographics. …

Interesting piece from Discover on last year’s efforts by the Army Engineers’ to control the Mississippi floods. Interesting that is, if you can get by the first person pronouns. Maybe he just wants to be president.

We knew it was going to be a challenging flood year. I was working in an operations center aboard the Mississippi, the largest motor vessel on the river: 241 feet long, with five decks

We have a comprehensive flood plan that dictates what to do when water reaches certain levels—where we need to allow controlled flooding to save cities downstream. By April 9 the flood gauges at Cairo, Illinois, which straddles the Missouri and Kentucky borders, exceeded allowable limits. We were supposed to open the nearby Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway when the water reached 61 feet, and on the night of May 1, the forecast level climbed to 63 feet. The decision was clear. If I didn’t open that floodway and relieve the pressure, levees would have broken somewhere else—but the angst level was very high. We planned to submerge 130,000 acres of farmland, and Missouri’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to stop the operation, but the court refused the request. I gave the order and we blew up the floodway on May 2. …

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Mark Steyn compares Julia and Liz Warren.

Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here!

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In “Dreams from My Father,” the world’s all-time most-unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend:

“When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough…”

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend – “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at age 3 through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams From My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself – and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite – a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface makeup and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F—kin’ Chief Dances With Plugs. …

Speaking of Warren, we have another post from Volokh Conspiracy.

Aside from Brian Leiter, whose contention that being Native American provides no affirmative action edge in law school hiring fails the straight-face test, it is obvious to everyone else why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years–which was to get an edge in hiring.  Even less plausible, of course, is her own explanation–that she was looking for people to have lunch with (once she got to Harvard was it that she no longer was interested in having lunch with other Native Americans or that the strategy was so successful that she had just had too many lunches through the years?).  Larry Sabato states the obvious:

“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”

So assume the only reasonable explanation–that contrary to Leiter’s statement she did this to get a leg up in hiring and contrary to her own statement she didn’t do it to find lunch partners. …

Leaving BS in the academic field, we find another area where it reigns supreme. Thomas Sowell explains how unions lie.

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do.

Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric. However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off.”

That mask has been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration, and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very dangerous.

First there was the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” that the administration tried to push through Congress. What it would have destroyed was precisely what it claimed to be promoting — a free choice by workers as to whether or not they wanted to join a labor union. …

More from Thomas Sowell.

A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.

If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the President of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested in the same thing.

In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places. …

A few years ago Pickerhead went to the Social Security office to sign up. Was it filled with a bunch of old people? Nope, all youngsters. James Pethokoukis explains why.

Now that the labor force participation rate is at its lowest level since 1981, it’s a good time to take another look at how the rising number of disabled Americans affects the official size of the workforce. Here are disturbing facts from Bloomberg:

– The number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance jumped 22 percent to 8.7 million in April from 7.1 million in December 2007, Social Security data show.

– That helps explain as much as one quarter of the decline in the U.S. labor-force participation rate during the period, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

– Disability recipients may account for as much as 0.5 percentage point of the more than 2 point drop since the end of 2007, the economists calculate, and that contribution could grow when some extended unemployment benefits expire at the end of this year.

– More than 99 percent of all SSDI beneficiaries remain in the program until retirement age, David Greenlaw, a managing director in New York at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a March research note, citing government data. The program provides an average of $1,111 in monthly income to eligible workers with a physical or mental impairment that will last at least 12 months or result in death, according to Social Security. …

Der Spiegel takes us on a visit to the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea.

… Visitors who managed to slip into the country past the authorities’ careful scrutiny … can see the results in the capital Pyongyang. The new apartment blocks were built at a breakneck pace, buildings that are 12 to 15 stories high, ranging from structures resembling public housing in the West to avant-garde apartment towers to huge blocks of houses that look almost inviting with their terraced roof decks.

It was a massive undertaking. The government was ruthless as it moved forward with its plans, reports a European Union envoy in Pyongyang. To obtain the necessary land, people were “collectively thrown out” of their old apartments. An entire residential neighborhood of four-story buildings on the banks of the Taedong River, in a prime downtown location, was leveled in a single weekend.

According to the EU envoy, a column of military trucks arrived one Saturday morning. The residents were forced to load up their belongings in next to no time and were then taken away to relatives. Two circular apartment towers painted gray and blue now stand on the site, within full view of the few guests at the Yanggakdo International Hotel across the river.

To visitors, Pyongyang’s modern skyline looks impressive at first glance, seeming to belie descriptions of North Korea as a poverty-stricken realm stuck in the stone age of communism. But there is a catch: These new buildings are off-limits, even to diplomats.

The supposed proof of the success of the “aspiring nation” quickly turns out to be nothing but Potemkin villages. The new residential towers are often uninhabited and little more than empty shells. The country has had problems with its energy supply. There was even less electricity this past winter than in the year previous, and heating systems were not working well. In the cold months, many families burned wood in small, homemade ovens to at least keep one room warm, report foreigners in Pyongyang.

Because of insufficient water pressure, there is often no running water on the upper floors of the apartment towers. To get water, residents carry buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetch their water from the polluted river. …

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Charles Krauthammer says Obama has become the “divider in chief.”

Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.Once again he’s been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his “train wreck” defense of Obamacare’s individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law.

The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn’t a state help the federal government enforce the law? “You can see it’s not selling very well,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Verrilli never had a chance. This was never a serious legal challenge in the first place. It was confected (and timed) purely for political effect, to highlight immigration as a campaign issue with which to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic.

Hispanics, however, are just the beginning. The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone.

What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills and a forest of straw men.

Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6 to 3, the majority including the venerated liberal John Paul Stevens.

Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black? …

Jennifer Rubin lists the president’s five favorite canards.

President Obama would like to talk about anything — Osama bin Laden, women, George Bush, “Forward” — rather than the economy. And when he does, his major themes are built on shaky facts or out-and-out untruths. Let’s look at five of them.

1. Income inequality worsened, leading to a credit boom and bust and now is slowing our recovery. Jim Pethokoukis quotes from the second study in recent months to debunk this:

“Using data from a panel of 14 countries for over 120 years, we find strong evidence linking credit booms to banking crises, but no evidence that rising income concentration was a significant determinant of credit booms.

Narrative evidence on the US experience in the 1920s, and that of other countries in more recent decades, casts further doubt on the role of rising inequality.”

Pethokoukis observes: “A long period of economic moderation made people both richer and overconfident about the economy’s stability in the future. So they took too many risks. Oh, and the Fed may have left interest rates too low for too long. So now we have this study. And we have an earlier blockbuster study from researchers at Cornell University that found median household income — properly measured — rose 36.7% from 1979-2007, not 3.2% like inequality alarmists (and White House faves) Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez argue.”

Obama seeks “fairness” and soaking the rich for ideological reasons. It is not a plan for increasing economic growth. …

Alana Goodman says the White House’s bin Laden bragging has brought out a “swift boat” contingent. 

The group is called Veterans for a Strong America, and they’ve already released one ad blasting President Obama’s handling of the bin Laden death anniversary. BuzzFeed reports there’s more on the way:

‘In the wake of a warm conservative reception for a web video trashing the president for “spiking the football” on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, the conservative group Veterans for a Strong America plans to gather Navy SEALs and Special Forces operators to criticize the White House during the 2012 campaign.

“We’re looking to [put together] a coalition, to field SEALs and operators that want to come out publicly,” executive director of Veterans for a Strong America, Joel Arends, tells BuzzFeed. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with former SEALs and current SEALs. I’ve been talking to operators in the community. There is palatable discontent.” ‘ …

Here’s the video produced by the Veterans for a Strong America.

Kimberley Strassel on the modern day “enemies list.” 

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for “betting against America,” and accuses you of having a “less-than-reputable” record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Are you worried?

Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.

Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them. …

OK back to Elizabeth Warren a story we cannot leave alone. John Fund says she was just looking for a play date.

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate running against Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, claimed for a decade in law-school directories that she was Native American even though her only evidence for her status was family “lore.”

After days of stonewalling, she now says she claimed minority status only in order to find others with tribal roots. “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off,” she told reporters this week. …

Chris Cillizza says she won WWW – Worst Week in Washington.

… Warren’s campaign, sensing crisis, sought to stamp out the controversy by noting that she is proud of her heritage and that identifying as a Native American had nothing to do with her hiring at any job.

And yet, there was Warren on Wednesday offering an extended — and personal — riff on the role that her Native American ancestry had played in her life. The story involved a picture on her mantel of her grandfather and his “high cheekbones” (really!).

Elizabeth Warren, for turning a small hole into a yawning political ditch, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.

Jim Geraghty says Harvard tried to help. They should have stayed quiet.

Harvard University tries to help Elizabeth Warren, and only hurts themselves in the process:

Harvard Law School lists one lone Native American faculty member on its latest diversity census report — but school officials and campaign aides for Elizabeth Warren refused to say yesterday whether it refers to the Democratic Senate candidate.

Warren — who has been dogged by questions about whether she used her claims of Cherokee lineage to further her career — has insisted she never authorized Harvard Law to count her as a Native American in the mid-1990s, when the school was under fire for not having enough minority professors.

Here’s the current faculty directory. Anyone else stand out as a potential Native American? (Although I suppose that the example of Warren demonstrates that someone who does not look like a Native American, have a Native American name, or have any known work on Native American issues could still be considered a Native American under university criteria.) …

Howie Carr weighs in. 

… Who can forget Elizabeth Warren’s “rise from poverty.” That hasn’t been mentioned much since we found out that by 1965, her family had three cars, one of which was Granny’s white MG, a car that was, the Globe sadly informed us, “beat up.”

And you say Pocahontas Warren hasn’t got a right to sing the blues?

Then there was Granny’s $168,000 gig working for Travelers Insurance when they were trying to fend off lawsuits from victims of asbestos poisoning. Kind of like Deval Patrick being on the board of subprime monster Ameriquest, or Barack’s dealings with convicted racketeer Tony Rezko.

All of them, they’re better than you, because you’re an oppressor. They’re the oppressed — they went to Harvard Law

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One well researched piece by Chris Francescani of Reuters has quelled the lynch mob atmosphere surrounding George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL.  It is long but well worth your time.

A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.

The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law’s dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show.

“Don’t use pepper spray,” he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend. “It’ll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second for the dog to jump you,” he said.

“Get a gun.”

That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December, another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight weapon.

By June 2011, Zimmerman’s attention had shifted from a loose pit bull to a wave of robberies that rattled the community, called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. The homeowners association asked him to launch a neighborhood watch, and Zimmerman would begin to carry the Kel-Tec on his regular, dog-walking patrol – a violation of neighborhood watch guidelines but not a crime.

Few of his closest neighbors knew he carried a gun – until two months ago.

On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns, race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States.

During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because he was black. After Zimmerman was finally arrested on a charge of second-degree murder more than six weeks after the shooting, prosecutors portrayed him as a violent and angry man who disregarded authority by pursuing the 17-year-old.

But a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters investigation into Zimmerman’s past and a series of incidents in the community in the months preceding the Martin shooting.

Based on extensive interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors, schoolmates and co-workers of Zimmerman in two states, law enforcement officials, and reviews of court documents and police reports, the story sheds new light on the man at the center of one of the most controversial homicide cases in America.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. …

The only American publication that did a reasonable job of reporting on George Zimmerman was the Washington Post. Here’s a piece they ran one month before the above item from Reuters.

…In Manassas, where Zimmerman lived in the 1980s and 1990s with his parents and two siblings, neighbors tended to define the family based on their spiritual profile. “Very Catholic .?.?. very religious,” their neighbor Jim Rudzenski recalled Thursday. The children attended All Saints Catholic School on Stonewall Road through the eighth grade before going to Osbourn High School. George became an altar server and evening receptionist at All Saints Catholic Church. The Zimmermans “were known and respected in the community for their dedication and service,” said Robert Cilinski, pastor of All Saints Catholic Church.

The father, Robert Zimmerman Sr., is a retired military man. He could be strict. And the children’s grandmother, who lived with the family, also kept a watchful eye, said Kay Hall, who lived across the street from the Zimmermans in a neighborhood just west of Sudley Road for about 20 years. George and his siblings “didn’t play with the neighborhood kids,” Rudzen­ski said. “They had to stay home and play.” It was always “Yes, ma’am,” “No, ma’am,” Hall said.

Zimmerman’s life was not without difficulties. In 2001 — when he was 17 or 18 — he was the victim of a minor criminal assault, said Manassas police Sgt. Eddie Rivera. The city’s computer records do not provide details of the crime.

In school, Zimmerman hinted at ambitions in the business world. He joined a Future Business Leaders of America club. And in his senior yearbook, he wrote: “I’m going to Florida to work with my godfather who just bought a $1 million business.”…

Telegraph, UK has more on the series we’ve had on the Air France jetliner that fell out of the sky over the Atlantic.

… Mercifully, data recordings and impact damage on debris confirm the Airbus was still more or less level when it hit the sea. Some of the passengers might have dozed throughout the descent; others may have attributed it to violent buffeting. Those in window seats would have seen only darkness. There is reason to hope that there was not too much panic on board, but this is small consolation.

It seems surprising that Airbus has conceived a system preventing one pilot from easily assessing the actions of the colleague beside him. And yet that is how their latest generations of aircraft are designed. The reason is that, for the vast majority of the time, side sticks are superb. “People are aware that they don’t know what is being done on the other side stick, but most of the time the crews fly in full automation; they are not even touching the stick,” says Captain King. “We hand-fly the aeroplane ever less now because automation is reliable and efficient, and because fatigue is an issue. [The side stick] is not an issue that comes up – very rarely does the other pilot’s input cause you concern.”

Boeing has always begged to differ, persisting with conventional controls on its fly-by-wire aircraft, including the new 787 Dreamliner, introduced into service this year. Boeing’s cluttering and old-fashioned levers still have to be pushed and turned like the old mechanical ones, even though they only send electronic impulses to computers. They need to be held in place for a climb or a turn to be accomplished, which some pilots think is archaic and distracting. Some say Boeing is so conservative because most American pilots graduate from flying schools where column-steering is the norm, whereas European airlines train more crew from scratch, allowing a quicker transition to side stick control.

Whatever the cultural differences, there is a perceived safety issue, too. The American manufacturer was concerned about side sticks’ lack of visual and physical feedback. Indeed, it is hard to believe AF447 would have fallen from the sky if it had been a Boeing. Had a traditional yoke been installed on Flight AF447, Robert would surely have realised that his junior colleague had the lever pulled back and mostly kept it there. When Dubois returned to the cockpit he would have seen that Bonin was pulling up the nose.

There is another clever gizmo on the Airbus intended to make life simpler for the pilots but that could confound them if they are distracted and overloaded. Computers can automatically adjust the engine thrust to maintain whatever speed is selected by the crew. This means pilots do not need to keep fine-tuning the throttles on the cockpit’s centre console to control the power. But a curious feature of “autothrust” is that it bypasses the manual levers entirely – they simply do not move. This means pilots cannot sense the power setting by touching or glancing at the throttle levers. Instead, they have to check their computer screens. Again Boeing have adopted a different philosophy. They told the Telegraph: “We have heard again and again from airline pilots that the absence of motion with the Airbus flight deck is rather unsettling to them.” In Boeing’s system the manual handles move, even in automatic mode.

All the indications are that the final crash report will confirm the initial findings and call for better training and procedures. With the exception of Air France, which has a vested interest in avoiding culpability, no one has publicly challenged the Airbus cockpit design. And while Air France has modified the pitots on its fleet, it has said nothing about side sticks.

It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be another disaster quite like AF447. Crews have already had the lessons drummed into them and routine refresher courses on simulators have been upgraded to replicate AF447 high-level stalls. Airbus has an excellent safety record, at least as good as Boeing, and the A330 is an extremely trustworthy aircraft. Flying is easily the least dangerous way to travel, far safer than a car. But while more of us take to the air each year, a single crash is enough to damage confidence.

Critics of side sticks may now argue that Airbus should return to the drawing board. A feature designed to make things better for pilots has unintentionally made it harder for them to monitor colleagues in stressful situations. Yet there is no sign that the inquiry will call for changes to the sticks and Airbus remains confident about the safety of its technology. It will resist what it regards as a retrograde step to return to faux-mechanical controls. The company is unable to speak openly during the investigation, but a source close to the manufacturer says: “The ergonomic systems were absolutely not contrived by engineers and imposed on the pilot community. They were developed by pilots from many airlines, working closely with the engineers. What’s more, it has all been tested and certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency and regulators in the United States, and approved by lots of airlines.”

As Captain King points out, a belief in automation and the elegantly simple side sticks in particular, is integral to the Airbus design philosophy: “You would have to build in artificial feedback – that would be a huge modification.”

A defender of Airbus puts it thus: “When you drive you don’t look at the pedals to judge your speed, you look at the speedometer. It’s the same when flying: you don’t look at the stick, you look at the instruments.”

There is a problem with that analogy. Drivers manoeuvre by looking out of the window, physically steering and sensing pressure on the pedals. The speedometer is usually the only instrument a motorist needs to monitor. An airline pilot flying in zero visibility depends upon instruments for direction, pitch, altitude, angle of climb or descent, turn, yaw and thrust; and has to keep an eye on several dozen settings and lights. Flying a big airliner manually is a demanding task, especially if warnings are blaring and anxiety is growing.

Multimillion-euro lawsuits could follow any admission of liability and it is certainly preferable from Airbus’s point of view that Air France should shoulder the blame for the night when AF447 plunged into the void.

However, no one would suggest that, when it comes to the aircraft we all rely on every day, commercial considerations should come anything but a distant second to safety.

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Walter Russell Mead posts on the NY Times coverage of the June 5th vote in Wisconsin. This continues to be good news and we can hope victory there will be a precursor of November’s vote.

The New York Times has a long piece on the political situation in Wisconsin this morning, and in some ways it is reasonably balanced. The reporters note, for example, that the Koch brothers own a factory in Wisconsin that is unionized and that the union and management at the factory seem to have a reasonably productive relationship. It also gives controversial Governor Scott Walker some space to contest the arguments of his detractors.

Even so, it is a journalistic disaster: it tells you everything you need to know except the one thing you really need to know, and it reveals the soft pale underbelly of establishment journalism in America today.

The headline captures the focus of the piece: “Recall Election Tests Strategies For November.” The reporters look at how private and public sector unions on the one side and various conservative organizations on the other are organizing for the election over the petition to recall Governor Scott Walker and at how both sides think the issues and strategies shaping the recall will influence the outcome in November.

The piece does a reasonable job at getting the views of both sides, but no reader of the Times will be surprised to see that it wears its heart on its sleeve. The piece closes with a paean to the hope that labor will beat back the Republican challenge, calculated to warm the hearts of the NYT faithful: …

… But somehow the reporters and editors who put together this long story on the implications of the Wisconsin recall for American politics now and in November failed to take note of one tiny little fact: Governor Walker is increasingly favored to win the June recall.

Intrade, a site where people can in effect bet on political races, shows Walker with a 68.5 percent chance of re-election as of Sunday morning. …

One of Elizabeth Warren’s fans breaks with her in the Boston Herald.

… I just can’t shake the ridiculous image of you, Liz — a blue-eyed blonde almost as pasty white as me — letting yourself be described as a minority professor, a Native American, for years.

You’ve played the Indian card. You’ve grabbed for minority cred without enduring the minority grief. It’s poached diversity. It’s glommed onto, what, five generations removed, assuming there were some facts way, way back when, as your campaign aides claimed last night.

How long before wise guys in feathered headdresses start dancing around parking lots at your events? Somebody told me yesterday your campaign needs to lie low and “circle the wagons.” Whoops. That same someone quickly realized it was the pioneers who circled the wagons when your Cherokee ancestors were blazing across the prairie on the warpath.

Here’s the problem for you, Liz: We’re not talking some elaborate, arcane, confusing financial irregularity here that nobody can understand. Everybody gets this. It’s letting everyone think you’re something that you’re not. It’s letting stand the idea that you’re part of an aggrieved class of people. It’s a sin of omission, which is not as bad as a sin of commission — like, you know, the typical political ploy of pumping up resumes with fake claims of combat heroism and purple hearts. …

Peter Kirsanow asks some questions of the president at The Corner.

What was the thought process behind having Bill Clinton — who reportedly missed and/or bypassed more than one opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden — narrate a campaign ad suggesting  Mitt Romney would not have given Seal Team Six the order to kill the terrorist?

Is your campaign staff giving any consideration to using Mr. Clinton to impugn Mr. Romney’s marital fidelity? How about Reverend Wright to subtly raise suspicions about Mr. Romney’s faith? Or Tony Rezko to attack the governor’s business dealings?

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Clinton ad.

Suffice it to say that when David Brooks, my colleague Dana Milbank and President George W. Bush’s attorney general Michael Mukasey all agree that President Obama is going overboard on partisanship, the president might want to reconsider if he’s misjudged the public’s appetite for partisanship.

Brooks bemoans the tenor of the entire campaign, but this is as tough a rebuke of the president as he has leveled: “Part of the ad was Bill Clinton effectively talking about the decision to kill the terrorist. But, in the middle, the Obama people threw in a low-minded attack on Romney. The slam made Clinton look small, it made Obama look small, it turned a moment of genuine accomplishment into a political ploy, but it did follow the rules of gangland: At every second attack, at every opportunity, drive a shiv between the ribs.” From philosopher-king to thug in less than four years. It’s something when those who once held you in the highest esteem are now the most biting critics. …

Peter Wehner calls it disastrous political overreach.

Something fascinating–and potentially important–is happening in the 2012 presidential campaign.

The Obama campaign’s crass politicization of the killing of Osama bin Laden seems to have struck a nerve in just about everyone – from expected quarters (like the Wall Street Journal editorial page), to moderately conservative ones (like David Brooks of the New York Times), to liberal ones (like Dana Milbank of the Washington Post). But perhaps the most important criticisms are being made by Navy SEALs themselves, as Alana points out.

This cannot be what the Obama campaign predicted; and the fact that they would take their most notable achievement and employ it in a way that would be potentially counterproductive is a sign that the mindset of all the president’s men is so aggressive, so hyper-partisan, so mean-spirited and so desperate that they are acting in ways that are amateurish and self-defeating. It might also be a sign that Obama has so few genuine accomplishment to his name that when he actually is able to identify one, he mishandles it. They don’t have enough practice to know what to do with a real achievement. …

Here’s Alana Goodman’s post about the SEALS reactions.

Listening to the Obama campaign gush about the president’s courageous decision regarding the Osama bin Laden raid, you might think he was the one who piloted the helicopter, raided the compound, and fired the legendary shot. But what do the actual American heroes who risk their lives in these types of missions think? The Daily Mail spoke to several Navy SEALs who are mystified by the argument that President Obama’s decision was uniquely heroic: …

Goodman also points to the opposition of Ariana Huffington. 

Via Beltway Confidential: When even Ariana Huffington isn’t buying the premise of Obama’s campaign ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have ordered the Osama bin Laden raid, it’s probably time to re-evaluate that message:

“I agree with the Romney campaign, that using the Osama bin Laden assassination killing the great news that we had a year ago, in order to say basically that Obama did it and Romney may not have done it,” said Huffington. “It is one thing to celebrate the fact that they did such a great job…but to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do.”

If the message is so tasteless that it’s even offending Obama’s strident defenders, why did the campaign go ahead with it in the first place? Remember, this wasn’t just one commercial. Vice President Biden also brought up something similar in his foreign policy speech last week when he declared that “bin Laden is dead and GE is alive…If Romney was president, could we have used that same slogan in reverse?” …

Steven Malanga writes in the WSJ about states like Illinois that will soon be broken by the cost of their pension promises. 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently offered a stark assessment of the threat to his state’s future that is posed by mounting pension and retiree health-care bills for government workers. Unless Illinois enacts reform quickly, he said, the costs of these programs will force taxes so high that, “You won’t recruit a business, you won’t recruit a family to live here.”

We’re likely to hear more such worries in coming years. That’s because state and local governments across the country have accumulated several trillion dollars in unfunded retirement promises to public-sector workers, the costs of which will increasingly force taxes higher and crowd out other spending. Already businesses and residents are slowly starting to sit up and notice.

“Companies don’t want to buy shares in a phenomenal tax burden that will unfold over the decades,” the Chicago Tribune observed after Mr. Emanuel issued his warning on April 4. And neither will citizens.

Government retiree costs are likely to play an increasing role in the competition among states for business and people, because these liabilities are not evenly distributed. Some states have enormous retiree obligations that they will somehow have to pay; others have enacted significant reforms, or never made lofty promises to their workers in the first place.

Indiana’s debt for unfunded retiree health-care benefits, for example, amounts to just $81 per person. Neighboring Illinois’s accumulated obligations for the same benefit average $3,399 per person. …

Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, columns in NY Post about student debt.

With student-loan rates set to double, President Obama has been busy posing as Mr. Fixit. Too bad it’s just a pose.

The country has a serious student-debt problem, and also a student-loan problem. But they’re two different things.

The student-debt problem is that too many students are borrowing too much money to finance educations that won’t earn them enough to repay the loans. This leads to misery.

A recent Wall Street Journal story noted that many students are postponing marriage, children and home-buying because of the difficulty — in some cases, the impossibility — of keeping up student-loan payments.

This is bad for them and the economy, because they won’t be available to soak up the excess houses built during the housing bubble, which also was fueled by cheap government loans.

If they postpone having kids, fewer taxpayers will exist to fund Social Security and other programs in a few decades. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Burger King vows that all of its chickens and pigs will be raised cage-free. The animals replied, ‘Cool, now let’s talk about the part where we get turned into sandwiches.’

Conan: Kanye West is dating Kim Kardashian and recently had dinner with Kim’s whole family. There was an awkward moment when Kim’s parents told Kanye they expect him to do the right thing: Fake marry their daughter. And get the night on video.

Conan: Pizza Hut has a new pizza with multiple cheeseburgers stuffed into the crust. It’s the first pizza that comes with your choice of soda or an intervention.

Conan: Obama doesn’t want to criticize the Secret Service. Today he called the agent who refused to pay the prostitute “fiscally responsible.”

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Joel Kotkin shows how California progressives are strangling the state’s middle class.

Few states have offered the class warriors of Occupy Wall Street more enthusiastic support than California has. Before they overstayed their welcome and police began dispersing their camps, the Occupiers won official endorsements from city councils and mayors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Irvine, Santa Rosa, and Santa Ana. Such is the extent to which modern-day “progressives” control the state’s politics.

But if those progressives really wanted to find the culprits responsible for the state’s widening class divide, they should have looked in a mirror. Over the past decade, as California consolidated itself as a bastion of modern progressivism, the state’s class chasm has widened considerably. To close the gap, California needs to embrace pro-growth policies, especially in the critical energy and industrial sectors—but it’s exactly those policies that the progressives most strongly oppose.

Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend. From 2007 to 2010, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, income among families in the 10th percentile of earners plunged 21 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 14 percent. In the much wealthier 90th percentile of California earners, income fell far less sharply: 5 percent, only slightly more than the national 4 percent drop. Further, by 2010, the families in the 90th percentile had incomes 12 times higher than the incomes of families in the 10th—the highest ratio ever recorded in the state, and significantly higher than the national ratio.

It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the California 10th-percentile families were earning less than their counterparts in the rest of the United States—$15,000 versus $16,300—even though California’s cost of living was substantially higher. A more familiar statistic signaling California’s problems is its unemployment rate, which is now the nation’s second-highest, right after Nevada’s. Of the eight American metropolitan areas where the joblessness rate exceeds 15 percent, seven are in California, and most of them have substantial minority and working-class populations.

When California’s housing bubble popped, real-estate prices fell far more steeply than in less regulated markets, such as Texas. The drop hurt the working class in two ways: it took away a major part of their assets; and it destroyed the construction jobs important to many working-class, particularly Latino, families. The reliably left-leaning Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy found that between 2005 and 2009, the state lost fully one-third of its construction jobs, compared with a 24 percent drop nationwide. California has also suffered disproportionate losses in its most productive blue-collar industries. Over the past ten years, more than 125,000 industrial jobs have evaporated, even as industrial growth has helped spark a recovery in many other states. The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 40 percent of its industrial positions during this period, the worst record of any large metro area in the country. In 2011, while the country was gaining 227,000 industrial jobs, California’s manufacturers were still stuck in reverse, losing 4,000.

Yet while the working and middle classes struggle, California’s most elite entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are thriving as never before. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And what a world it is. Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value.” Meanwhile, in nearby Oakland, the metropolitan region ranks dead last in job growth among the nation’s largest metro areas, according to a recent Forbes survey, and one in three children lives in poverty. …

Boston’s Howie Carr revels in the campaign contradictions of Liz Warren, faux populist.

There’s a reason why most would-be politicians start by running for lesser offices, as Massachusetts Democrats are finding to their chagrin this spring, as their anointed US Senate candidate springs one unpleasant surprise after another.

Elizabeth Warren, a 62-year-old Harvard Law School professor, seemed to have all the right stuff to regain the lost Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy from Republican usurper Scott Brown.

In this bluest of states, she remains competitive, out-fund-raising the incumbent 2 to 1 in the last quarter. In recent statewide polls, she’s been running even or slightly ahead. Yet her campaign is sputtering, as she slips on one banana peel after another.

It’s turning out that she’s not quite the working-class heroine her worshipers in the limousine-liberal crowd thought she was.

Last week, news broke that Harvard Law had cited Warren as a minority hire — a Native American — when it was under criticism for lack of faculty diversity in 1996. Asked Friday for proof of her Indian ancestry, Warren’s said it’s part of her family “lore.”

She also said she couldn’t “recall” if she’d ever claimed minority status when applying for a job and that she’d never known of Harvard’s 1996 boast until Friday. …

David Bernstein, from Volokh Conspiracy, spots some Warren BS. Or as he politely put it; her “disingenuousness.”

A controversy has broken out in Massachusetts over the fact that Harvard Law School has claimed professor and current senatorial candidate Elizabeth as a minority member of the faculty based on apparent (but as yet unconfirmed) Native American ancestry. The Brown camp seems to think this is big news [update: the campaign has called on her to apologize for allowing Harvard to claim her as a “minority”; this, as we’ll see, doesn’t make any sense, because at the time Warren was claiming herself as a minority, and Harvard was only following her lead], Warren responds that she’s unaware that Harvard claimed her as a minority professor, but that she’s proud of her Indian ancestry. Her colleague Charles Fried, who was chair of the appointments committee when she was hired, claims that Warren’s Native American ancestry never came up in the hiring process, and that he only became aware of it later.

My contribution to this controversy is that there seems to be some disingenuousness going on. Warren says that she could not “recall” ever listing her Native American background when applying for college or a job.

The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.

So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.

But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.

Hmmm.

Jammie Wearing Fools Blog says the president is holding a record.

Let’s look at the bright side. When he’s out there shaking down his fatcat supporters he’s not actually working, so there’s the chance he’s actually doing less damage. But I guess in keeping with his adoring media we can call this historic and unprecedented.

“Barack Obama has already held more fundraising events to build cash for his re-election bid than all five Presidents since Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book.

Obama is also the only president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in his first year of office.

The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.

Doherty, who has compiled statistics about presidential travel and fundraising going back to President Jimmy Carter in 1977, found that Obama had held 104 fundraisers by March 6th this year, compared to 94 held by Presidents Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined.

Since then, Obama has held another 20 fundraisers, bringing his total to 124. Carter held four re-election fundraisers in 1980, Reagan zero in 1984, Bush Snr 19 in 1992, Clinton 14 in 1996 and Bush Jnr 57 in 2004.”

Can’t wait to see how many golf outings he’s had in comparison with his predecessors. That’ll be another record-breaker, no doubt.

And Matthew Continetti says the press is calling BS on the administration.

… Damage control time: The president scheduled appearances at three colleges located purely by coincidence in swing states, and booked a guest spot on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show. His objective? Promise to keep loans cheap and, as always, slam the GOP. And do all of this not as a candidate but as a president. Otherwise he’d have to spend some of the cash in his Chicago money bin.

Campaign events? Not at all, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Wednesday morning, while refusing to say when the events will begin. But the visuals from the campuses—showing Obama preening and asking, “Can I get an Amen?” as hordes of squealing teenagers answered his call—was too much even for the liberal media to stomach.

“How much longer do we have to pretend these POTUS events aren’t campaign events?” tweeted MSNBC’s Mike O’Brien. “This is campaigning. Just call it that,” said the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. They were echoing ABC’s Jake Tapper, who noted last week that the White House “seemed offended” when asked whether “electoral factors” determined Obama’s travel. Seizing an opportunity, the Republican National Committee lodged a formal complaint with the Government Accountability Office, alleging that the White House was using official funds for electioneering.

The sudden refusal by the media and RNC to participate in the charade got Obama’s attention. By Wednesday evening David Axelrod and Jim Messina were on the phone telling reporters that the president’s reelection would officially kick off Saturday, May 5, with rallies at Ohio State and Virginia Commonwealth University. Just like that, the lie that Obama hasn’t been “campaigning” came to an end. But does anyone seriously doubt that Obama would have postponed his campaign’s official kickoff for as long as possible, if his traditional allies in the media hadn’t called him on it?

Perhaps this is only the beginning. Perhaps the frustration expressed in those tweets augurs a fresh look by the media at Obama’s threefold lie regarding his signature achievement: that Obamacare will lower premiums; “bend the cost curve downward”; and not cause individuals to lose their insurance. Perhaps they will begin noting that Obama’s proposals never bring the budget into balance, that the rationales for the Buffett Rule make absolutely no sense, that it is hard to say the president has been good on national security when Iran continues to arm itself, Syria commits atrocities, Egypt and Iraq go to the dogs, and Russia is ruled by a mafia boss. …

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Charles Krauthammer writes on the “atrocities board.”

Last year President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing “would have been a betrayal of who we are,” explained the president.

In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.

Obama has said that we cannot stand idly by. And what has he done? Stand idly by.

Yes, we’ve imposed economic sanctions. But as with Iran, the economic squeeze has not altered the regime’s behavior. Monday’s announced travel and financial restrictions on those who use social media to track down dissidents is a pinprick. No Disney World trips for the chiefs of the Iranian and Syrian security agencies. And they might now have to park their money in Dubai instead of New York. That’ll stop ’em.

Obama’s other major announcement — at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, no less — was the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board.

I kid you not. A board. Russia flies planeloads of weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies money, trainers, agents, more weapons. And what does America do? Support a feckless U.N. peace mission that does nothing to stop the killing. (Indeed, some of the civilians who met with the U.N. observers were summarily executed.) And establish an Atrocities Prevention Board.

With multiagency participation, mind you. The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody. …

Fouad Ajami has more.

Little more than a year into their terrible ordeal, the Syrians are a people unillusioned. “We have been forsaken by the world,” a noted figure of the opposition recently told me in Istanbul.

Days later, in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Antakya, in a tent city a stone’s throw from their tormented homeland, ordinary Syrians reiterate the same message. The ongoing Kofi Annan diplomacy and United Nations-brokered “cease-fire” are seen for what they are—an alibi for the abdication of Western powers, and a lifeline for the regime.

Abu Muhammad, a propertied man in his mid-60s from the town of Jisr al-Shughur, now in this camp with his family for more than 10 months, says the world knows all it needs to know about the Damascus regime but prefers to turn a blind eye to its savagery. Two of his sons have been killed in the protests, a third is missing. He is weary of the pronouncement of the mighty.

In the Syria deliberations, deliverance is always around the corner. American diplomacy is always on the verge of making Russia see its way to the proper path. In these tortured discussions, there is no end to finesse and to the parsing of things.

Syria is not Libya, the Obama officials opine. Homs is not Benghazi, they note. The air defenses of Syria are thick when compared with those of Libya, the army of the Damascus regime is mightier. And then there is the mother of all alibis—the borders of Syria are more sensitive, and they preclude a rescue operation akin to the one that delivered the Libyans from the grip of their tyrant.

The truth is that the air defense system of the Syrians can be dismantled with ease. And that mighty army of the House of Assad? The Syrians refer to it as jaysh abu shahatta (the army in slippers). The Sunni recruits are worn out, terrified and underfed, thrown into assignments they abhor and dread—the killing of their fellow Sunnis. …

California is slowly collapsing its economy. Joel Kotkin wonders why the administration would want to follow its lead.

Barack Obama learned the rough sport of politics in Chicago, but his domestic policies have been shaped by California’s progressive creed. As the Golden State crumbles, its troubles point to those America may confront in a second Obama term.

From his first days in office, the president has held up California as a model state. In 2009, he praised its green-tinged energy policies as a blueprint for the nation. He staffed his administration with Californians like Energy Secretary Steve Chu—an open advocate of high energy prices who’s lavished government funding on “green” dodos like solar-panel maker Solyndra, and luxury electric carmaker Fisker—and Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who thrived as CEO of a regulated utility which raised energy costs for millions of consumers, sometimes to finance “green” ideals.

Obama regularly asserts that green jobs will play a crucial role in the future of the American economy, but California, a trend-setter in the field, has yet to reap such benefits. Green jobs, broadly defined, make up only about 2 percent of jobs in the state—about the same proportion as in Texas. In Silicon Valley, the number of green jobs actually declined between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is the nation’s third highest, behind only Nevada and Rhode Island.

When Governor Jerry Brown predicted a half-million green jobs by the end of the decade, even The New York Times deemed it “a pipe dream.”

Obama’s push to nationalize many of California’s economy-stifling green policies has been slowed down, first by the Republican resurgence in 2010 and then by his reelection considerations. But California’s politicians, living in what’s become essentially a one-party state, have doubled down on green orthodoxy. As the president at least tries to cover his flank by claiming to support an “all-in” energy policy, California has simply refused to exploit much of its massive oil and gas resources.

Does this matter? Well, Texas has created 200,000 oil and gas jobs over the past decade; California has barely added 20,000. The state’s remaining energy producers have been slowing down as the regulatory environment becomes ever more hostile even as producers elsewhere, including in rustbelt states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, ramp up. The oil and gas jobs the Golden State political class shuns pay around $100,000 a year on average. ….

The dog thing blew up in their faces, so next the Dems tried polygamy. Mark Steyn explains.

… For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democrat governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Gov. Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.

Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Gov. Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democrat hypocrisy but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives. Jeremy Funk and Gov. Schweitzer reflexively believe that their dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy’s dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack being 6 or 10 years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and 10 years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other. …

John Steele Gordon posts on EPA administrators gone wild.

It is often said that the definition of the word gaffe in Washington-speak is when someone accidentally tells the truth. Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator for Texas and surrounding states, certainly made a gaffe when he said in a speech in 2010, that the best way to enforce environmental laws was to crucify a few oil companies so that the rest will fall in line. He noted that the Romans used this technique when they conquered a new town, crucifying the first five people they could get their hands on so that the place would be very easy to manage for the next few years. (I expect that that is actually a slander against the Romans, although they had no scruples against selling whole populations into slavery.)

Armendariz was, let us hope, using a metaphor. But his actions indicate that he is all too willing to act first and get, well, evidence of wrong doing, later. The New York Times reported on December 8th, 2010, that he had signed an emergency order:

Dallas-based EPA Regional Director Al Armendariz issued an emergency order yesterday against Range Resources Corp., charging that its drilling in the Barnett Shale contaminated at least two water wells with methane and benzene. The order gave Range 48 hours to provide clean drinking water to affected residents and begin taking steps to resolve the problem.

Armendariz’s order is not simply an action against the company, but a slap at regulators at the Texas Railroad Commission, whom he accused of not doing enough to help the people living near the drilling operations in the Fort Worth area.

Earlier this month, the EPA finally withdrew the order, having been able to produce no evidence whatever that Range Resources was in any way responsible.  (It might be noted in passing that while the emergency order was a major story in the Times, its withdrawal was not news fit to print. Nor is the news of  Armendariz’s recently revealed remarks.)

The United States, which invented both the petroleum industry, in 1859, and the transportation of natural gas over long distances by pipeline, in 1891, is on the cusp of what could be the greatest boom in energy production in its history, a boom that would not only reduce the price of energy—a major input into the struggling economy–but would greatly improve the country’s trade balance, help the dollar, and improve America’s foreign policy options.

The Obama administration, in thrall to the anti-capitalist environmental lobby, is doing everything possible to prevent it.

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Andrew Malcolm fills us in on the folks who will be the talking heads this morning.

Because the Obama administration is not interested in taking yet another victory lap over the SEALs killing Osama bin Laden almost a year ago, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, will get up early to be on several Sunday morning shows to recount how dramatic the incident was for those folks watching it unfold from the safety of the White House basement.

You remember Brennan as the one rushed out to the White House briefing room the next day to provide the hungry media with their cherished tick-tock account of the commandos’ penetration into Pakistan and the slaying of the instigator of 9/11.

Unfortunately, so eager was the administration to tell its story quickly, that Brennan’s premature enunciation of the event contained numerous details later adjusted or contradicted, detracting from the anticipated accolades.

By now, however, most of the raid confusion is cleared. And everyone knows that the successful killing was mainly the result of Obama’s brave decision, although the SEALs, the stealth helicopter pilots and the Air Force electronic cloaking crews probably helped a little.

Oh, look, it’s an election year!

Anyway, Brennan will tell his boss’ tale on Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union and ABC’s This Week. Perhaps he’ll also be asked about the TSA’s effectiveness in fighting terror and causing ridiculous patdowns. …

Noemie Emery says the Dems are running from the Healthcare bill like it carried the plague. 

Two years and one month after it passed — and two years and three months after it might have proved useful — Democrats are regretting the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now that we know it is nothing if not unaffordable, the act is itself the main danger from which they seek political protection and shelter.

Why now? Perhaps to get a jump on things before the act is ruled unconstitutional, or before it causes even more Democrats to lose in November, or before President Romney repeals it in 2013. “I think that the manner in which the issue was dealt with … cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader,” said Sen. James Webb, D-Va. Webb, who voted for passage and is retiring after one term, added that if Obama had gone for a small, simple measure, he could have won some Republican votes.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who is also retiring, remarked that “[w]e would all have been better off if we had dealt first with the financial system” and said Democrats wasted time and political capital creating problems that dragged the economy down.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., who is also retiring, said the bill should have been done in “digestible pieces,” and they should have ‘figure[d] how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure[d] out what they could afford.”

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., of all people, says the Democrats should have stopped after Scott Brown won his election. …

David Harsanyi outlines the latest Obamacare fraud.

If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we’d probably have a program worth saving.

But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of services against 10 years of taxes, and it has continued with an avalanche of waivers that shield friends of the White House from the cost of the very law they helped pass.

We now have another unsavory example of how government-controlled health means politicized health care.

If the law had been followed as written, Obamacare should have slashed the popular market-oriented Medicare Advantage program this year. The cuts are needed to divert funding to a Medicaid expansion that will provide coverage to millions of uninsured — the central case for the creation of Obamacare.

It’s no surprise that Medicare’s most market-focused program pushes down premiums and enrollment up. So rather than allow millions of enrollees in vital swing states, such as Florida, to experience a major benefit cut right before an election, the administration founded an $8.3 billion pilot program. This year, for example, the program offsets about 70 percent of the cuts in Advantage. The cost will be paid from the Medicare trust fund (which had a $288.3 billion shortfall this year). The consequences will be put off, conveniently, until after the election. …

Steven Hayward takes a shot at explaining the education bubble.

I haven’t had much to say here about the higher education bubble, a favorite topic of Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit.  But with total student loan debt topping $1 trillion (higher than total credit card debt I believe), this is looking like the next major financial disaster.  Among other things, student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many debt-happy students are coming out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage before they get a job.  The consequences of this are easy to see; among other things, it will slow the long-term prospects for the housing market, as millions of young graduates will have to put off home ownership because they won’t be able to qualify for home loans.  Meanwhile, Obama, and the New York Times, say: Let’s do more of this!  (The headline for the New York Times editorial seems written deliberately to make satire more difficult: “Subsidize Students, Not Tax Cuts.”  I mean really, do they have to make my job this easy?)

Student loans, among other factors, have contributed significantly to the outsized increase in college costs, which have risen faster than housing prices during the bubble, or health care costs.  Here’s how I explain it in common sense terms.  When I attended college in the late 1970s, tuition and room and board were a little less than $6,000 a year.  Round up slightly and you have a four-year cost of about $25,000.  If you went to a state university, your price tag was about half of that, and student loans might be, say, $10,000.  That $25,000 cost was in the ballpark for first-year starting professional salaries for a new college graduate in 1980, when I took my diploma; most banks and other businesses I interviewed with in those days had jobs starting around the $18 – $24K range.  In other words, your first year starting professional wage was about equivalent to the total cost of your BA.

Today, a good private college costs between $40 and $50K a year; many state universities will run you over $20K a year.  Total cost for four year now: $150K or more. …

Jonathan Tobin has more on the bad day the administration had last week at the Supreme Court.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. may have been outclassed when he went up against Paul D. Clement arguing the case to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare before the Supreme Court of the United States. But today, when the pair once again matched up in the same forum when the high court met to hear arguments about the state of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, it appears that the result was much the same. As the New York Times reports, even the liberal justices inclined to be on the same side of the administration, which wants the law struck down, gave the impression that they thought the solicitor general was something of a flop.

While Verrilli’s second humiliation — even Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so unimpressed with his presentation that she felt the need to tell him,  “You can see it’s not selling very well” — was noteworthy, even more important was the fact that it appeared that the key provision of the Arizona law would not only be upheld but that most of the justices — even the liberals — seemed to agree that there was nothing unreasonable about it. Given the opprobrium that the mainstream media has heaped on Arizona and the way that most of the chattering classes had spoken of the law and its supporters as racists, the reaction of the court must be a shock to the administration and to its liberal supporters. …

Peter Ferrara has a good piece on how the poor are always the first hurt by the economic fallacies of the left progressives.

Persistent economic fallacies hurt working people and the poor the most.  They are the ones most in need of the new jobs and higher wages that capital investment and economic growth produce.  And they suffer the most from unemployment and declining wages and incomes when the economy falters.  Self-styled Progressives are the source of the economic fallacies that are hurting working people and the poor today.

One common fallacy popular among self-proclaimed Progressives is to reply to the point that America now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40% with the counter that the average effective corporate tax rate is only around 25%.  But it is the marginal tax rate on the next dollar earned, not the average rate, that influences new investment, business expansion, and hiring.

Pro-growth tax reform would involve reducing that top rate in return for closing many of the loopholes that make the average rate so much lower.  The average rate would rise as a result.  But the lower marginal rate would increase incentives for more capital investment, business expansion and job creation.

Another fallacy among Progressives is to argue that America has enjoyed historically low taxes under President Obama with federal revenues around 15% of GDP compared to the long-term, postwar average of 18.3%.  But that is due to the persistent weakness of the economy under Obama, which lowers federal revenues as a percent of  GDP, as bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers pay little or nothing in taxes.

Again, what influences the capital investment, business start ups, and business expansion that creates jobs and bids up wages for working people and the poor are the marginal tax rates, not taxes as a percent of GDP.  Obama has persistently focused on raising those marginal tax rates across the board, the exact opposite of what Reagan did with so much success, which is a main reason Obama is getting the opposite results of Reagan.  Obama has recently taken to citing Reagan for the opposite of what he believed and implemented as President, in claiming his support for the so-called Buffett Rule.  But the real economy will not be fooled, and working people and the poor will not benefit from dishonest rhetoric. …

WSJ OpEd on what we can learn from tax policies of different states. 

Barack Obama is asking Americans to gamble that the U.S. economy can be taxed into prosperity. That’s the message of his campaign for the Buffett Rule, which raises income-tax rates on millionaires to a minimum of 30%, and for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He wants to raise the highest income tax rate by 20%, double the rate on capital gains, add a new 3.8% tax on all capital earnings, and nearly triple the dividend tax rate.

All this will enhance “economic efficiency,” insists a White House economic report. As for those who disagree, says President Obama, they’re just pushing “the same version of trickle-down economics tried for much of the last century. . . . But prosperity sure didn’t trickle down.”

Mr. Obama needs a refresher course on the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and even the 1990s, when government spending and taxes fell and employment and incomes grew rapidly.

But if the president wants to see fresher evidence of how taxes matter, he can look to what’s happening in the 50 states. In our new report “Rich States, Poor States,” prepared for the American Legislative Exchange Council, we compare the economic performance of states with no income tax to that of states with high rates. It’s like comparing Hong Kong with Greece or King Kong with fleas.

Every year for the past 40, the states without income taxes had faster output growth (measured on a decadal basis) than the states with the highest income taxes. In 1980, for example, there were 10 zero-income-tax states. Over the decade leading up to 1980, those states grew 32.3 percentage points faster than the 10 states with the highest tax rates. Job growth was also much higher in the zero-tax states. The states with the nine highest income tax rates had no net job growth at all, and seven of those nine managed to lose jobs. …

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John Hinderaker posts on the administration’s bad day in court yesterday.

Some years ago, I worked on a big case in Alaska and spent a lot of time there. At that time, the local bar was buzzing about a lawyer who had a really bad day in court: he was kicked to death by a moose in the parking lot of the federal courthouse in Anchorage. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli didn’t have that bad a day today in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Arizona’s immigration law is invalid by virtue of federal pre-emption, but he was kicked about a good bit by the justices.

On Twitter, Byron York asked: “Question for legal types: Is Donald Verrilli bad at his job or just burdened by having to defend the indefensible?” You can read the entire argument here and draw your own conclusions, but in my opinion, the problem was not with Verrilli but rather with the quality of the arguments that he was required to make by his client, the Obama administration.

Mort Zuckerman, who voted for Obama, now outlines the president’s economic failures.

America has long been a country where almost everyone, including the poor and unskilled, could get a job. Given the will to do a reasonable day’s work, a job was a passport to economic and social well-being; it was the fount of self-esteem and the foundation of family life. Indeed, work was Life.

More than 15 million Americans no longer have that passport to Life. Think of it as roughly the entire population of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, all standing idle—every man, woman, and child. The traditional breadwinners, namely men between the ages of 25 and 54, are among those hardest hit. According to an Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll, some 25 percent of households include someone who is unemployed and looking for work. As well as laying waste to work, to the equivalent of losing every job created in the last decade, the Great Recession has visited us with reduced incomes, declining home equity, and a growing contraction in credit.

For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession’s start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It’s the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.

Discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force make the unemployment rate look fractionally better, but the 8.2 percent headline masks the misery. It is a reflection of the U-3 statistic, which counts only people who have applied for a job in the last four weeks. Among the jobless army, a staggering 42 percent of them are long-term unemployed, without jobs for six months or longer. Look instead at the more relevant U-6 statistic, which counts the number of people who have applied over the last six months. U-6 also includes those who are involuntarily working on a part-time basis. That U-6 unemployment is now in the range of 15 percent. Since 2008, some 3 million people have dropped out of the job market. If they hadn’t, the unemployment rate would be about 10.8 percent. In March, the unemployment rate seemed to fall a tenth of 1 percent, yet the number of people who are actually employed dropped by 31,000. Why? Because the number of people who looked for a job dropped by 164,000 and they are not considered unemployed. Not to mention that half the new jobs are in temporary help agencies. …

Joel Kotkin and two other dudes write in American.com about some areas in the Midwest that are doing well.

The Midwest’s troubles are well-known. The decline of manufacturing has resulted in job losses and dying industrial towns. The best and brightest have fled the flatlands for more exciting, sunnier, mountainous, or coastal places where the real action is. Even Peyton Manning has left the heartland for the Rockies.

This narrative is so deeply embedded both in and outside of the Midwest that many people overlook the ways in which parts of the region are bouncing back. The Midwest’s story is important because it serves in significant ways as a regional microcosm of how growth and opportunity should look in America today.

In a recent study we look at trends that upend the conventional wisdom about the Midwest. We find that it is neither doomed to a slow and dirty demise like an old house on an eroding slope, nor forced to reinvent itself Dubai-style in order to compete with Silicon Valley or Manhattan. The Midwest’s future is rooted very much in its past—but with some important updates.

What do we mean? For starters, this means capitalizing on Americans’ desire to reside where the cost of living and doing business is favorable. As the last Census showed, Americans move in droves to regions where the cost of living is low, businesses face fewer obstacles, and workers have choices. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin have shown, this goes for 25- to 35-year-olds as well as 55- to 65-year-olds. People want options and a good quality of life at a price they can afford.

In the Midwest, these trends have favored placed like Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana. …

Roger Simon says forget about the Pulitzer, the Walter Duranty Prize is available for the media.

We try not to be sore losers at PJ Media.

So after our first ever attempt at a Pulitzer Prize for Christian Adams & Hans von Spakovsky’s series “Every Single One” – revealing how every single Obama Justice Department appointee has been a liberal — lost this April, you won’t hear a peep out of us.   We will not complain even though a 2007 Pulitzer was awarded to a similar series that detailed how 57 percent of Bush’s Justice Department appointments went to conservatives. (Okay, that’s maybe a peep.

We know the biases of the Pulitzer Prize and did not expect to win.

No, at PJ Media we don’t get mad or complain… we get even

Starting this year, PJ Media, in conjunction with our good friends at The New Criterion, will be awarding the first annual Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity

Walter Duranty – it will be recalled — was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor) and many other aspects of Soviet oppression

Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his efforts

Despite numerous attempts by Ukrainian organizations and others, the prize has never been revoked. Duranty’s photograph remains in its honored place on the New York Times’ wall along with the newspaper’s other Pulitzer winners. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the small minded Santorum.

Just about every name Republican at this point has endorsed Mitt Romney. He is, after all, the only guy in the race who can and will win his party’s nomination. So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) both gave their stamp of approval on Tuesday.

But there is a holdout among household-name Republicans: Rick Santorum. I know, the tension is too much to bear: When, oh when, will he announce he is throwing the legion of his supporters to the man whom 90 percent of Republicans already support? He’s still in self-delusion land, it seems. The National Journal reports: …

John Tamny wants to know what in the world conservatives saw in Santorum.

Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday. Almost to a column, editorial and news account, the analysis centered on Santorum’s somewhat successful capture of conservative voters.

And there lies the mystery. How could a man seemingly so opposite of conservative have entranced so many voters who label themselves just that?

The easy answer is that as someone who made his religion such a prominent part of his campaign strategy (at one point saying “we need a Jesus candidate”), religious types who tend toward conservatism perhaps felt they’d found their man. The answer to this is why?

Figure Jesse Jackson is very religious, as is presumably Rev. Al Sharpton, and then President Obama, though he suffered much grief for the church he attended in Chicago, is presumably another politician who can claim being a man of faith. About all three, self-described conservatives arguably don’t find much to like.

After that, government throughout the centuries has arguably been religion’s greatest enemy, so it seems religious conservatives wouldn’t very much concern themselves with the faith of any candidate; their lone interest in a candidate his or her desire to protect the right of all who are religious to practice their faith without persecution. More to the point, it seems true religionists would correctly fear a “Jesus candidate.”

The truly religious would because just as a nation could elect someone of faith who might incorporate their religion into all aspects of government, that same nation could theoretically elect an atheist who would do the opposite. In short, there’s nothing conservative about a democracy that animates its operations with religion. If Santorum is a believer that may be great for some, but religious conservatives should more realistically prefer freedom of religion over someone eager to foist their values on a nation that at least at inception granted the federal government and executive branch rights limited to protecting individual freedom. …

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Matthew Continetti says the dog wars have been fun, but Romney should not spend all his time trading tweets.

The worst thing Romney could do is step into the net. Let aides trade Tweets with Obama spokesmen now and then, but don’t make it a priority. Let others take the low road.

When David Axelrod mentions the dog, remind the country that this is the worst recovery in history. When David Plouffe mentions the rich, let Americans know that everyone’s taxes should be low, that everyone’s taxes are scheduled to spike on Jan. 1, that Obamacare includes numerous taxes on every American, and that the middle class has fared the worst in the Obama economy. When Debbie Wasserman Schultz sneers that Republicans are coming after women, stress the importance of a culture of life and Obamacare’s threat to religious liberty. Ask every audience Reagan’s question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Unless the audience is filled with TARP recipients and government workers, the answer will be no.

The deeper into the year we get, the more desperate Obama is likely to become. There will be incendiary rhetoric. The smears will be over the top. The hits will be exaggerated; some may draw blood. The Twitter Trap will beckon. But Romney can’t succumb. He can’t flinch.

Because it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And only the Alpha gets the win.

Similar thoughts about focus from Craig Pirrong.

… Welcome to the Five Minutes of Hate Campaign, brought to you by the Great Uniter.

Actually, we would be blessed if there were only five minutes of hate per day.  It is going to be more than that, and the duration and frenzy of the attacks will only  grow in the coming months.

And the campaign will be suitably Orwellian, because it will try to use hate to paint Republicans as haters.

Don’t take the bait folks.  Do the thing that Obama desperately wants you to avoid.  Focus on the record.  The litany of failure.  From spending to Obamacare to Frankendodd.  Do that, and exploit the contrast between the soaring rhetoric of 2008 and the viciousness of 2012.

Jennifer Rubin posts five things we have learned about the Romney campaign.

There were a spate of polls last week, which rudely shook the left from its blissful obliviousness. This will be a close election, and Mitt Romney has a level of credibility on the economy, which happens to be President Obama’s biggest weakness. We also learned five things about the Romney campaign.

Walk and chew gum at the same time. Conservatives fretted that Romney was becoming too “reactive” and getting lured into fights on Twitter-level inanities. But it turns out that Romney could punch back while still advancing his core message: Obama has failed in his most important task, restoring American prosperity. In a campaign stop in Arizona on Friday he told the crowd: “I think Obama is a nice person. I just don’t think we can afford him any longer.” With a blah economy, Romney’s message — Obama’s policies have slowed the recovery — has some resonance.

The campaign knows what it needs. …

Short from The Hill on troubles raising money for The One.

Priorities USA, a super-PAC focused on reelecting President Obama, has asked former President Bill Clinton to help them pick up the pace on fundraising.

Democratic donors have been resistant to giving to the group. This is partly because of liberals’ hesitation about super-PACs in general and partly because Sean Sweeney and Bill Burton, the two former White House staffers heading the group, aren’t as plugged in to the fundraising world as those helping some of the Republican groups, which include heavy-hitters like Karl Rove and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R).

If Clinton decides to help Piorities USA that could go a long way toward wooing some rich donors off the sidelines. According to Businessweek, he’s leaning towards aiding them.

The group, which is headed by former Obama White House staffers, has struggled to keep pace with pro-GOP outside groups. It has raised $8.8 million with $5 million in the bank, according to new reports, while the pro-Romney Restore Our Future has brought in $51.9 million and still has $6.5 million left after an expensive primary.

The pro-Republican American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have raised nearly $100 million and plan to spend a total of $250 million on this election. If Priorities USA and other pro-Democratic super-PACs can’t pick up the fundraising pace Democrats and their allies could be vastly outspent by their opposite groups this year.

John McCormack in the Weekly Standard provides an overview of the contest in Wisconsin.

Governor Scott Walker is facing the fight of his political life. On June 5, in the third gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history, Wisconsin voters will either choose to keep Walker in office or elect a Democrat. Polls show a tight race with Walker hovering at or slightly below 50 percent and holding a small lead over potential opponents. Walker won’t know which Democratic opponent he’ll face until May 8, when the recall primary is held. Meanwhile, he’s letting the state of Illinois serve as a stand-in.

Speaking on April 19 to machinists in blue-collared shirts, jeans, and boots at the Trace-A-Matic Corporation, Walker contrasts Wis-consin’s record with that of its neighbor to the south. “A year ago their unemployment rate was above 9 percent,” he says. “And today, a year later, it’s still above 9 percent because they made some poor choices. They raised taxes on businesses and individuals. On individuals, believe it or not, they raised it by 66 percent.”

And Wisconsin? Unemployment has dropped from 7.7 percent to 6.9 percent since Walker took office. Property taxes are down for the first time in 12 years. A $3.6 billion deficit was eliminated without lots of layoffs. The message resonates with the machinists. Almost all applaud enthusiastically for Walker.

“Unions had a place in history,” says Mike Payne, one of Trace-A-Matic’s machinists. “But I think it went to the other extreme. And I think to diminish them a little bit is to really benefit us because that brings things back to a fairer level.”

Sitting in one of his campaign offices later in the day, Walker considers whether he might have avoided a recall. “If I hadn’t gone so far, would I face a recall? I don’t know,” Walker tells me. “But if I hadn’t gone as far as I did, I wouldn’t have fixed it.” And fixing Wisconsin’s fiscal problems is what matters, he says. “I’m running a campaign to win. And I aim to win. But I’m not afraid to lose.” …

The WSJ Editors celebrate that the EPA had a chance to do more stupid things and didn’t. 

The Environmental Protection Agency once again invited itself to do tangible economic harm—this time to the hydraulic fracturing that is transforming American energy—and somehow . . . it didn’t. In the annals of the unlikely, the EPA’s new fracking rules fall somewhere between a Nobel Peace Prize for George W. Bush and a supply-side tax plan from Warren Buffett.

The first-ever federal fracking rule that the EPA released on Wednesday is also the first time the agency has shown restraint under the Clean Air Act since at least 2005 or 2006, about when the Bush Administration gave up on environmental regulatory reform. Given the agency’s track record, any self-control is notable—though in particular on the unconventional oil and gas extraction that the green lobby would prefer to shut down because those fuels contain demon carbon. …