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In Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan blogs about Obama coming clean about some of the dirt in Obamacare.

There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage of President Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat today, but I haven’t seen anyone focus on the President’s rather stunning admission about the Democrats’ health care legislation (Video):

“The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.” [emphasis added]

…This was one of the core debates on health care throughout last year: Would President Obama and the Democrats’ legislation allow government to come between citizens and their choice of doctors and insurers? Obama promised it wouldn’t. Republicans said it would, and this was one of the aspects of the legislation that led them to characterize it as a government takeover of health care – the same characterization that Obama chastised the GOP for today.

So it’s a bit of shock to find out now – from the President himself, no less – that one or both of the bills that passed Congress late last year (the House passed its version in late November, the Senate on Christmas Eve Day) contained language that would have violated this pledge.

Daniel Foster, in the Corner, posts on how close we were to having Obamacare.

This is how close we were to the “precipice” the president once spoke about:

Sen. Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election. . . .

Harkin (D-Iowa), who attended healthcare talks at the White House, said negotiators were on the cusp of bringing a bill back for final votes in the Senate and House.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15. …

John Steele Gordon comments in Contentions about a post from Jennifer Rubin.

Jennifer referred this morning to the columns of Gail Collins and Charles Blow in the New York Times, in which they complain that the problems the Obama administration face are due to: 1) the wretched selfishness of Americans in general and Republicans in particular; and 2) the intellectual inadequacy of Americans in general and Republicans in particular. If the American people were only of a higher quality morally and intellectually, everything would be just fine, and President Obama would be sailing majestically toward an overwhelming re-election.

This sort of thinking reminds me of a dictum coined by Oscar Hammerstein I, the great theatrical impresario of the turn of the 20th century (and grandfather of the eponymous lyricist). After a play he had produced flopped badly, a friend commiserated with him and blamed it on the Broadway audience. Hammerstein looked at him and said, “When the audience doesn’t like the play, there is something wrong with the play, not the audience.”

Good advice, not likely to be taken.

In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne recommends caution in assessing the stock market and the economy.

As a former army parachutist with a bad head for heights, I recall standing in the doorway of an aircraft while my jumping instructor shouted: “Don’t look down!” He understood that my unease with parachuting combined with the sight of thousands of feet of open air could be enough to elicit panic. Many investors in today’s American stock and bond markets appear to be getting the same advice. While in my predicament, I had a parachute and a rudimentary understanding of how to use it, I fear that American investors have nothing to break their fall.

Looking down from the lofty nominal heights of today’s American stock and bond markets, there is cause for real concern.

First, the Dow has risen 62% over the past ten months.[i] Despite the fact that a market collapse appears to have been averted – for a time, at least – this normally would be considered an unhealthy speed. This rapid rise may be the result of government and media cheerleading, which have been based in part on government statistics whose accuracy gives additional cause for concern. In short, the stock markets appear to be heavily overbought.

Second, the somewhat surprisingly solid earnings posted by American companies over the past year have been achieved largely by savage labor cuts, inventory depletion, margin reductions and reduced research and advertising expenses.[ii] It is doubtful that such cuts can be continued over the longer term. At the same time, the top-line revenues of many companies have been in decline, threatening future earnings. These are not the types of metrics that would normally inspire long term confidence. …

In the National Review, Jay Nordlinger reviews the break-up of the global warming conspiracy.

…In truth, the science was not quite settled. The hockey stick had been called into grave question by those two inconvenient Canadians. When McIntyre first saw the graph, his curiosity was piqued. He had spent his career in mineral exploration, and had witnessed his share of spectacular claims. Dot-com rackets would forecast big profits, using hockey sticks. Most of the time, the forecasts proved bogus. It was necessary to examine the raw data behind a hockey stick. McIntyre had never even heard of the IPCC — how many of us had? — but he was determined to look into its stick. And he was astonished to discover something: No one had challenged that stick, had put it to the test. Was the world to accept the IPCC’s claims about global warming, and alter its economies accordingly, without due diligence? …

…In 2003, he linked up with Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, west of Toronto. McKitrick had co-authored a book called “Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.” Together, the two M’s formed a kind of Team B, doing a rigorous check or audit of the “A” team’s work. McKitrick points out that this is perfectly normal, even mandatory, in business — in the engineering fields, for example. You don’t attempt to put a new plane in the air, or a new space shuttle, without a serious Team B — or C or D — effort. Shouldn’t the U.N.’s climate panel have the soundest information possible, before spooking the world with a hockey stick? Shouldn’t the world’s governments be on the soundest footing possible before spending billions and upsetting their arrangements?…

…But the e-mails were eye-opening to journalists, he says, some of whom were “shocked.” “They’ve been reporting the standard global-warming line for years, and I’ve learned in conversations with them that they had no idea that this group of scientists acted this way.” Hence, the “loss of innocence.” McKitrick says that Climategate “pried the lid off the process behind the IPCC reports and what goes on in journals, and forced people to realize that this is not a pure, rarefied search for truth” but “a very partisan and distorted process.” Reporters, he says, are more respectful to him now. Before, it was basically, “Why don’t you believe what all the world’s scientists are saying?” Now they are humbler, asking more intelligent questions. …

Roger Simon posts on Scientific American getting to eat crow. Cold.

Pity Scientific American. Little did the magazine’s editors know when putting together their February issue that their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate”: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts, for some reason needing a FOIA to cough up data that should be public record in such a scientific endeavor. The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!

Mark Steyn points out the foreign press is reporting all the new global warming embarrassments. Our press – not so much.

You have to assume that America’s dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried “environmental correspondents” on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating “scientific consensus” on “climate change”? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.

But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of “settled science” is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler reports on more trouble for the IPCC. Apparently they also cited a fifth-grader’s science report as proof of their global warming scams. Not really, but awfully close.

…It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters.  Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work.  Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim.  In response, the IPCC now claims it “carefully followed” its official procedures. Yet as Roger Pielke Jr., one of the researchers whose work is misrepresented in the report, responds, this claim is simply false as the IPCC “relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section,” ignored the complaints of reviewers, and fabricated a defense of the claim. Indeed, when the then-unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper upon which the IPCC purported to rely was eventually published, it rejected the climate-disaster loss link asserted by the IPCC.

But wait, there’s more.It turns out that other claims in the IPCC’s WGII report were also based upon non-scientific sources, including magazine articles and reports by advocacy groups.  For instance, the IPCC’s claim that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest is based upon a report issued by an environmental advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and the advocacy report misrepresented peer-reviewed studies to reach its conclusion.  It also appears other IPCC claims about glaciers in the Andes and Alps were based upon a magazine article and student’s dissertation. …

And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:

Reporters largely ignored it, but the Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that Head Start’s positive effects peter out by the end of first grade. The study included 44 tests, of which 42 found no statistically significant and lasting improvement. Some positive results are to be expected when you run that many tests, and a footnote points out that the two apparently lasting results disappear after correcting for that tendency. Andrew Coulson and Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute point out that school choice, on the other hand, appears to have lasting positive results. Naturally, the Democrats have expanded funding for Head Start while ending school choice in D.C.

In a region traditionally known for producing loud, blustery autocrats who champion failed economic policies (Castro, Ortega, Chávez), Chile is a quietly remarkable success story. On January 11, it signed an accession agreement to become the first South American member of the OECD. Less than a week later, Chilean voters elected a conservative government for the first time since General Pinochet stepped down 20 years ago. The victory of presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire airline mogul, ends two decades of rule by the center-left Concertación coalition, whose multiple governments largely maintained the free-market economic reforms that were adopted under Pinochet. In recent years, Chilean officials moved away from pro-growth policies and toward greater social spending, but they also saved much of their copper windfall during the commodity boom, ensuring that they were in a strong fiscal position when the global financial crisis erupted. Piñera will inherit a well-run economy — one that has the potential to grow much faster. His election, like that of Ricardo Martinelli in Panama last May, affirms that not all Latin American countries are moving left.

Miep Gies used to say she was just an ordinary housewife. Austrian by birth, and Catholic, she married a Dutchman named Jan Gies and lived in Amsterdam. In the war, Miep and Jan helped hide Otto Frank and his family in a secret room, daily risking their own lives to do so. For Miep, Otto Frank’s young daughter Anne was a girl “full of the joy of just being alive,” and she remembered seeing Anne writing her diary with a look of utter intensity in her face. When the Gestapo rounded up the Franks, Miep kept Anne’s diary safe. She also respected Anne’s privacy. If she’d read those pages, she would have found references to herself and Jan, and might well have destroyed the lot for fear that the Gestapo in another search would incriminate them. After the war Otto Frank returned, and he was with Miep when he heard that his wife and daughters were dead. Miep took out the diary, saying, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.” More than that, it is a legacy to us all. The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in millions of copies in dozens of languages. Miep had her part in rescuing a human document that touches the heart like no other. This admirable lady lived to be 100. The world could do with a lot more ordinariness like hers. R.I.P.

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Claudia Rosett has an article on the UN. When corruption and schemes to enrich UN employees are rife, it is hard to understand why we give them money.

…The U.N. already collects billions in both dues and voluntary contributions from the governments of the developed world–first and foremost from the U.S., which typically foots the bill for roughly one-quarter of most major U.N. activities. The actual U.N. budget is a slippery number. The book-keeping is opaque, often tardy or incomplete and spread across many parts of the U.N. archipelago, with no single U.N. office fully accountable for the entire system. In 2006 then-Secretary General Kofi Annan said the U.N. system-wide budget was about $20 billion; by now, with ever-expanding U.N. operations, funding appeals and hazily defined “partnerships,” it is certainly larger. But for U.N. spenders this torrent of other people’s money is not enough.

Since its founding in 1945, as essentially a diplomatic talking shop headquartered in the U.S., the U.N. has ballooned into a sort of post-colonial global empire, involving scores of thousands of staff, peacekeepers, agencies and proliferating agendas worldwide. With that has come a voracious hunger for money, in which U.N. planners keep casting an acquisitive eye at global commerce, looking for ways to tap in and open the spigots straight into the U.N.’s coffers. …

…These campaigns have yet to pan out into the full bonanzas the U.N. hopes for. But for the U.N., there is little cost to trying again and again, gaining traction here and there. All it usually takes is the ability of ambitious U.N. bureaucrats to put together a conference. The planning group for the conference becomes a secretariat. That secretariat becomes the seed of the next U.N. mandate, department or initiative, with the next suite of tax proposals on the table. …

Toby Harnden discusses Andrew Young’s book about John Edwards.

…The story matters because Edwards, a fabulously wealthy lawyer who made his fortune bringing lawsuits against major corporations, could easily have become president. He was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and in 2008 came very close to winning Iowa, beating Hillary Clinton into third place.

…The title of Young’s book is The Politician. That’s appropriate because it’s become a term of abuse and derision. During a Capitol Hill hearing on Wednesday when Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, was being given a good kicking by all, an Ohio congressman thundered: “I want to assure you… that you are absolutely a politician.”

…Against this backdrop, the Edwards scandal merely feeds the sense of cynicism about the American political class that has been gathering pace for years.

Edwards talked about his love for his wife while he was entertaining his mistress in the marital bed. He championed the poor while expressing contempt for them. Obama made promises about televising health care negotiations and then did everything behind closed doors.

Well, Americans ask, what do you expect? They’re politicians.

WSJ has reviewed the new book on John Edwards written by his flunky Andrew Young. A Corner Post by Jonah Goldberg picked up the only paragraph you need to see.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has another article that will turn your stomach. While almost 1 in 5 Americans is unemployed or underemployed, 1 in 5 government workers are drawing six-figure salaries. We aren’t sure of the actual unemployment numbers because no one in the government is making enough money to take on the task of reporting accurate statistics.

LAST MONTH, the US economy shed another 85,000 jobs. It marked a miserable end to a calamitous year in which an estimated 4.2 million American jobs were liquidated, and unemployment rose to 10 percent. In addition, more than 920,000 “discouraged workers’’ left the labor force entirely, having given up on finding work and therefore not included in official unemployment data.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans who do have jobs have been compelled to work part-time or at reduced wages; many others have not seen a raise in years. But not everyone is having a rotten recession.

Since December 2007, when the current downturn began, the ranks of federal employees earning $100,000 and up has skyrocketed. According to a recent analysis by USA Today, federal workers making six-figure salaries – not including overtime and bonuses – “jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months.’’ The surge has been especially pronounced among the highest-paid employees. At the Defense Department, for example, the number of civilian workers making $150,000 or more quintupled from 1,868 to 10,100. At the recession’s start, the Transportation Department was paying only one person a salary of $170,000. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees were drawing paychecks that size. …

In the National Review, Kevin Richardson reviews some ways that unions, politicians, and the minimum wage hurt blacks.

…Asked about the recently defeated plan to convert the gigantic fortress that looms over his neighborhood into a shopping mall, C says he hasn’t heard about it. If the plan had gone through, Manhattan-based developer Related Companies would have received about $50 million in tax subsidies for a project that would have created as many as a thousand retail jobs and, during its construction, employed a thousand or more highly paid union hardhats. But the city council killed the project. The Bronx delegation demanded that Related enforce upon its leaseholders a requirement that all of the jobs in the mall pay at least $10 an hour, plus benefits, much more than the prevailing wage in the Forever21-and-food-court racket, to say nothing of the $7.25 minimum wage. So a $300 million project, and a couple of thousand new jobs in a neighborhood that needs them, never happened. Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. infamously declared: “The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies.” The New York Post pithily pointed out that when it comes to real jobs, Diaz has never had one — not in the private sector, anyway — and neither has any other member of the Bronx’s city-council delegation: All are lifelong politicians, many of them having held elected offices or political appointments since their early 20s. Diaz himself has been an officeholder since he was 23 years old. It’s good work, if you can get it. …

…Democrats will defend everything from partial-birth abortion to distributing gay porn in the classroom, but some subjects are too hot for them to touch: The effect of their minimum-wage enthusiasm on black unemployment is one, and racial discrimination by their organized-labor constituents is another. You’d think that the Democrats would put jobs for blacks at the top of their list — after all, black voters pull the “D” lever about 90 percent of the time. But political calculations are perverse things: Black voters are a cheap date for Democrats, who know that they can sell out the interests of their most loyal constituency with impunity. One of Barack Obama’s first actions in office was to gut a hugely popular school-choice program in Washington, D.C., that benefited black students almost exclusively, and he did so at the behest of the one of the most destructive unions in the country, one that has done more to undermine the future of black Americans than any other and whose members have inflicted more damage on black Americans than Bull Connor and George Wallace ever dreamed of. But the teachers’ unions represent one in ten delegates to the Democratic National Convention, so they have job security — something many, if not most, of the young black men in their classes will never have.

George Will comments on the Supreme Court decision reinstating first amendment rights to corporations. Corporations may use money to express political opinions, but corporate contributions to campaigns is still prohibited.

…How regulated did political speech become during the decades when the court was derelict in its duty to actively defend the Constitution? The Federal Election Commission, which administers the law that rations the quantity and regulates the content and timing of political speech, identifies 33 types of political speech and 71 kinds of “speakers.” The underlying statute and FEC regulations cover more than 800 pages, and FEC explanations of its decisions have filled more than 1,200 pages. The First Amendment requires 10 words for a sufficient stipulation: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

Extending the logic of a 1976 decision, the court has now held that the dissemination of political speech requires money, so restricting money restricts speech. Bringing law into conformity with this 1976 precedent, the court has struck down only federal and state laws that forbid independent expenditures (those not made directly to, or coordinated with, candidates’ campaigns) by corporations and labor unions. Under the censorship regime the court has overturned, corporations were even forbidden to send political communications to all of their employees.

The New York Times calls the court’s decision, which enables political advocacy by (other) corporations, a “blow to democracy.” The Times, a corporate entity, can engage in political advocacy because Congress has granted “media corporations” an exemption from limits.

The Washington Post, also exempt, says the court’s decision, which overturned a previous ruling upholding restrictions on spending for political speech, shows insufficient “respect for precedent.” Does The Post think the court incorrectly overturned precedents that upheld racial segregation and warrantless wiretaps? Are the only sacrosanct precedents those that abridge (others’) right to speak? …

In the NY Times, Judy Battista writes about Kurt Warner’s retirement.

…The humble beginning to Warner’s career — he did not start his first N.F.L. game until he was 28 — gave way to one in which, with surgical precision, he resurrected two also-ran franchises, carrying both to the Super Bowl while also becoming known as one of the league’s most charitable players. Warner, his wife, Brenda, and their seven children routinely select a family at a restaurant and anonymously pay their dinner tab, as a way to teach the children charity.

In 1998, the St. Louis Rams gave Warner the break he needed. Having signed him the previous December, they allocated him to N.F.L. Europe, where he led the league in several statistical categories. By 1999, the Rams had made him the backup to Trent Green. When Green tore a knee ligament during the preseason, the unknown quarterback was thrust into the starting job, and the Greatest Show on Turf was born. He was the league and Super Bowl most valuable player that season. He was the league’s M.V.P. again two years later, when the Rams lost the Super Bowl in the final seconds to a burgeoning dynasty from New England.

“We all learned great lessons from Kurt’s humility, dignity and grace,” the Rams’ owner, Chip Rosenbloom, said in a statement. “We will forever be thankful for the success he brought us and the unparalleled generosity he has shown the St. Louis community and beyond.” …

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We start today like we started last Thursday night, with John Fund introducing us to Scott Brown. This time John has an interview with the new senator.

…Massachusetts’ senator-elect says he had always admired JFK as a president who “wanted to help everybody,” and when he and his staff pored over that president’s speeches his defense of tax cuts leaped out. “That’s what we need now. Across-the-board tax cuts,” he says. “A payroll tax cut would have been better than any government stimulus.” …

…Nonetheless, Mr. Brown is clearly sensitive—and a tad defensive—about his state’s own universal health-care system. It now covers about 95% of the population; but it has also led to the nation’s highest insurance premiums. It is driving hospitals towards bankruptcy and making it more difficult for people to see a doctor. Mr. Brown voted for the system in 2006 when it was proposed by then-GOP Gov. Mitt Romney. “Of course, it can be made better,” Mr. Brown says today. “But it was bipartisan and it fit our local needs. We were being eaten alive by health-care costs.” Universal coverage hasn’t changed that, however. …

…Mr. Brown says it frustrates him that too many politicians still believe that people will be fooled by what they’re proposing. “People aren’t stupid, and leaders should figure out they’re better informed now than ever.” Perhaps that explains how Scott Brown was able to pull off his improbable Cinderella story.

Back in September, picking up on the rising tide of public anger over health reform, excessive spending, and one-party arrogance, he fashioned a simple, compelling narrative to deal with it: no to a rushed, confusing health-care bill, yes to a freeze on federal spending and to introducing some sunlight into government. Mr. Brown repeated it over and over with the inner confidence that his message would eventually resonate. It did.

Mark Steyn discusses The One-Hit Wonder. Is more government Obama’s only answer to every question?

…when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? …

Peter Schiff comments that Obama’s policies worsen the state of the union.

…To lead us back to brighter days, he articulated a vision of a centrally planned recovery, where clean energy and a Soviet style five-year plan to double our exports would make our economy preeminent once more. He fails to understand that the only reason our economy rose to the top in the first place is that the government left it alone.

In the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Since our President cannot even learn from the mistakes of his immediate predecessor, to say nothing of those he made himself while in the Senate or during his first year as president, we are surely doomed to repeat them, perhaps more quickly than Santayana could have imagined.

Rather than tightening the reins on the reckless monetary policy that undermined our savings, diminished our industrial output, inflated asset bubbles, and led to reckless speculation on Wall Street and excess consumption on Main Street, we are loosing them further. Rather than repealing regulations that distort markets and create moral hazards, we are adding new ones that do more of the same. Rather than cutting government spending to reduce the burden it places on our economy, we are increasing both the amount of the spending and the size of the burden. Rather than making government smaller so that the private sector can grow, we are making government bigger and forcing the private sector to shrink. Rather than paying off our debts we are taking on even more. Rather than encouraging people to save we are enticing them to spend. Rather than creating jobs, we are merely creating unemployment benefits.

As a result, instead of seeding the soil for a real recovery we are setting the stage for a prolonged depression.

Randy Barnett makes a number of excellent points in his article in the WSJ. He says that Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address was wrong in judgment and in fact.

…Then there is the substance of the remark itself. It was factually wrong. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United concerned the right of labor unions and domestic corporations, including nonprofits, to express their views about candidates in media such as books, films and TV within 60 days of an election. In short, it concerned freedom of speech; in particular, an independent film critical of Hillary Clinton funded by a nonprofit corporation.

While the Court reversed a 1990 decision allowing such a ban, it left standing current restrictions on foreign nationals and “entities.” Also untouched was a 100-year-old ban on domestic corporate contributions to political campaigns to which the president was presumably referring erroneously.

That is a whole lot to get wrong in 72 sanctimonious words. Clearly, this statement had not been vetted by the president’s legal counsel. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, for example, would never have signed off on such a claim. Never. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks on the matter in the Corner.

The president attacked the Supreme Court at the State of the Union, which I believe is unprecedented. …

The court actually is at that event not for pleasure and not even as a duty — it’s not required — but as a sign of respect for the other branches, for the presidency and the Congress. And to subject it to a direct attack in a setting in which it can’t respond, I thought, was a breach of etiquette which shouldn’t have happened.

On the substance, when the president said that it [the Court] was breaking a 100-year precedent, it was wrong. As even Linda Greenhouse, the liberal Supreme Court reporter of the New York Times pointed out, the ruling 100 years ago was the prohibition of a direct sending of money from corporations into the treasuries of candidates. That remains illegal. It was not touched in this decision. So there was no overturning of that precedent. What it dealt with is a question of corporations funding speech attacking a candidate. …

In the New York Times, Samuel Pisar speaks about his experiences at the hands of the Nazis, and the importance of the Holocaust victims sharing their stories with the world.

…It took a long time for the news of the American-led invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous. The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before.

One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.

We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.

Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun. …

In Friday’s Pickings, Marty Peretz pointed out that Obama had neglected to mention Israel’s significant contribution to Haiti disaster rescue operations. Today, Peretz responds to criticism from Time’s Joe Klein’s.

I am glad Joe Klein tried to take me to task for criticizing the president about his not giving Israel the respect it deserved for its efforts in Haiti. … But, in fact, Obama passed over Israel entirely in his enumeration of especially worthy aid providers. Here’s what Bill Clinton said about Israel’s contribution: “I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital in Haiti.” Israel’s operational unit was, Clinton noted, the only facility capable of performing surgeries and advanced examinations. Meanwhile, that unit is staying on with a change of personnel and is relocating its field hospital to an orphanage. CBS, in a moment of exaggeration, called the Israeli facility the “Rolls-Royce” of the entire aid effort.

Despite his carping, Joe concedes that I was correct. That, in fact, the president should have mentioned Israel and should do much more with the Jewish state to balance his courting of the Arab world (which hasn’t done his presidency or his policies any good).

So what is Klein’s bitch with me? He writes in his “Swampland” blog–yes, that’s what it’s actually called, and I must concede that it’s aptly titled–that Obama’s omission had no meaning and was not the result of any decision at all. So what was it? It was “an oversight.” Oh, I see. This administration which crosses every ‘t’ and dots every ‘i’ just forgot to mention Israel. You know what I say to that?  …

Ben Webster at the Times, UK, reports that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri knew about the glacial inaccuracy for two months before he was pressured into addressing it. Hey, why stop the gravy train?

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. …

In the WaPo, Neely Tucker writes that the meteorite that recently landed in Northern Virginia is stirring up some drama.

…The doctors who were nearly bonked on the head by the thing when it came plummeting from the asteroid belt into Examining Room No. 2 in the Williamsburg Square Family Practice, gave it to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In return, Smithsonian officials planned to give them $5,000 in appreciation. The doctors, Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, planned to donate the money to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. The Smithsonian planned to put the meteorite on prominent display and study it as a 4.5 billion-year-old postcard from the formation of the solar system. …

…But in an extraterrestrial soap opera still unfolding, the landlords of the Virginia building that houses the doctors’ office now say they are the rightful owners of the meteorite. Museum officials said the landlords informed them, midday Thursday, that they were coming to take the stone out of the Smithsonian by sundown. …

…The remnants are valuable to scientists, particularly when discovered just after impact, because they have not been subject to the gravity, erosion and atmospheric pressures of Earth, and thus can offer insights about what the solar system looked like long ago. …

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The election of Scott Brown was the most important event of the last year, and it came out of the blue. Today’s Pickings starts out with a retrospective of our items on that Massachusetts race. The first mention was January 6th when John Fund had an piece in Political Diary, joined by John Steele Gordon with an item in Contentions. It was such a long shot, we almost failed to pass them on thinking there was no sense creating false hopes. It’s fun to look back at these posts and watch things develop. Today we went without the normal pull quotes. We just did our introductions and then the complete posts are after the summary.

Afterwards there are some current items and a great day of cartoons.

January 6th …

John Fund focuses our attention on the Senate race that could, if we are very lucky, be the undoing of Obamacare.

Comments on the same race from John Steele Gordon in Contentions.

January 10th …

We opened with a piece by Mark Steyn about America in decline. Then posted this;

Maybe the country will decline the decline. New poll shows the Mass. US senate race a toss up. We shall see if voters in Massachusetts are going to send a thunderbolt to the White House. Corner post by Daniel Foster with the details.

January 11th …

Scott Rasmussen analyzes the Massachusetts race.

January 12th …

Michael Barone looks at the polls in Massachusetts.

John Fund posts on that race.

Corner post too.

January 13th …

Scott Brown, running for the senate in MA is fast on his feet. The Corner has the story.

January 14th …

Politico gives us another view of the Mass. senate race by looking at the Dem candidate, Martha Coakley.

January 17th …

Jennifer Rubin blogs about Martha Coakley and Tuesday’s vote in Mass.

January 18th …

Power Line posts on dueling rallies in Mass.

Jake Tapper has another report on the Mass. race.

January 19th …

Mark Steyn posts on the Mass. race.

Back to the present day, there was a state of the union speech last night. Here’s a Corner reaction from Marc Thiessen who led two state of the union writing teams.

… It was quite possibly the most partisan, condescending State of the Union address ever. Tonight, Obama was unpresidential. The permanent campaign continues. In the long run it will backfire.

Marty Peretz notices a stunning Obama omission. Seems the One, while listing the Haiti helping countries overlooked the extraordinary Israeli 500 bed hospital contribution David Warren wrote about in January 26th Pickings.

I’ve just read the transcript of the president’s remarks about Haiti, the ones he made on January 15. He noted that, in addition to assistance from the United States, significant aid had also come from “Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others.” Am I missing another country that truly weighed in with truly consequential assistance? Ah, yes. There it is. Right there “among others.” Yes, the country to which I refer is “among others,” that one.

The fact is that, next to our country, Israel sent the largest contingent of trained rescue workers, doctors, and other medical personnel. The Israeli field hospital was the only one on the ground that could perform real surgery, which it did literally hundreds of times, while delivering–as of last week–at least 16 babies, including one premature infant and three caesarians. The first 250-odd Israelis were real professionals, and they were supplemented by others, also professionals. And to these can be added the many organized Jews from the Diaspora who, in solidarity with Israel, also went on a work pilgrimage, an aliyah, in solidarity with Haiti. …

According to Beltway Confidential in Washington Examiner Obama is now saying he had no part in any of the slimy deals for ObamaCare.

… But the Washington Post reported on December 20 that Obama’s top aides were involved in the negotiations with Nelson:

“Schumer, who spent more than 13 hours in Reid’s office Friday, said the Medicaid issue was settled around lunchtime, and the final eight hours of the talks focused on the abortion language. Boxer estimated she spent seven hours in Reid’s offices — without ever once sitting in the same room, even though they were all of 25 steps apart.

Reid and Schumer kept up the “shuttle negotiation” between the leader’s conference room and his top aide’s office, Boxer said. Keenly aware how tense the talks were, the White House dispatched two aides who together have decades of experience in the Senate — Jim Messina and Peter Rouse — to work with Nelson. They relayed their intelligence to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who monitored the talks from a dinner in Georgetown.” …

The Corner provides Krauthammer’s Take on the spending freeze.

It’s not a hatchet. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a Q-tip. It’s a fraud. This is a miniscule amount. It excludes Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs. It excludes all the entitlements, which are 60 percent of the budget. It excludes stimuli past and future — the two thirds of the near trillion-dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded.

The Anchoress has a post that explores some of the increasing strangeness of Obama.

Necessity being the mother of invention, it appears that Barack Obama has needed, and thus invented, the Portable President Kit, consisting of two teleprompters with accompanying equipment and a traveling Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am-I-Am-The-President-That’s-Who Podium With Presidential Seal, which Barack Obama takes with him, everywhere he goes.

That means he brings it to an elementary school, for use in addressing the press (something past-and-moronic presidents did not have to do), who are then weirdly dismissed and unable to witness his talk to the children. …

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Abe Greenwald, in Contentions, discusses the president’s pathological self-regard.

…For all this, Obama makes a tremendous show of his cool nerves. “I don’t rattle,” he said. In a way, that’s true. Blaming Republican failings for the Massachusetts Republican victory, for example, is not a sign of being rattled. It’s a sign of disconnected logic, a much more exotic subconscious defense. It requires a lot of psychological reapportioning not to get rattled while flailing on the world stage. Instead of losing your cool, you indulge in excessive denial or projection or sublimation. Something, after all, has got to give. It’s becoming clear that something is giving. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Sherman Frederick put it, “this kind of weird delusion is consistent with the unbounded hubris of Team Obama.”

During the campaign, we heard endlessly about Barack Obama’s “presidential temperament.” But a few observers thought of it more as a strange placidity. What, in fact, is presidential about terminal aloofness? He’s the chief executive of a country that’s fighting two wars, struggling to get out from under an unprecedented financial breakdown, staring a near-nuclear Iran in the face, and on the constant receiving end of terrorist threats. Yet the most fired up we’ve ever seen Obama was when he decided a Cambridge Massachusetts police officer was “stupid” for inconveniencing his friend with a request to show ID. His second most animated moment came when some nobodies crashed his dinner party. What’s worrisome in this pattern is the president’s attachment to the personal. If we acknowledge that Obama weighs everything first by the degree to which it redounds on him personally, his failings are not so mysterious. If Obama has not conveyed to Americans that he hears their concerns, it may be because he doesn’t hear them. He merely hears pointers for his perpetual image upkeep.

Which makes you wonder where it ends. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by external force. But for Obama, it’s all internal, personal. …

Peter Wehner blogs about an arrogant comment spoken by The One.

Rep. Marion Berry, yet another retiring Democrat, gave an interview to Jane Fullerton of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. According to Fullerton:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ …

…Whatever strengths Mr. Obama brought to the job as president — and they now appear to be quite limited — they are overwhelmed by, among other things, his massive ego and otherworldly arrogance. It is leading him and his staff into a state of self-delusion. Mr. Obama’s self-regard is not only utterly unwarranted, especially given his failed first year; it is downright dangerous. He is a man whose wings are made of wax; if he’s not careful, a long fall into the deep blue sea awaits him.

It appears that Obama has not understood anything the electorate has said. Jennifer Rubin comments.

It is only fitting that Obama’s first significant personnel change in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle is to hire back his campaign manager. No, really. …

…Not a new economic team. Not a new chief of staff. Not even a new national security staff to replace the gang that dropped the ball on the Christmas Day bomber. No, with the Obami, it is never about substance or getting the policy right. It’s not about governance. It is about the perpetual campaign. So the campaign manager gets the emergency call.

Plouffe, not coincidentally, authors an op-ed in Cillizza’s paper arguing that ObamaCare was a fine idea, just misunderstood. (”It’s a good plan that’s become a demonized caricature.”) He says Democrats better pass it, or the public won’t understand how wrong Sarah Palin was. (I’m not making that up: “Only if the plan becomes law will the American people see that all the scary things Sarah Palin and others have predicted — such as the so-called death panels — were baseless.”) …

…You see the problem. This is what passes for inspired advice, and this is the personnel slot that Obama fills first. It’s hard to believe that the candidate who ran against stale politics is now, a year into his presidency, a hackneyed pol happy to push this sort of pablum on an already disgusted public. Well, it sure does explain how Obama wound up in his current predicament.

We have a couple of shorts from Streetwise Professor.

Jennifer Rubin thinks that Congress should try to pass some real healthcare reforms.

It is not clear whether anyone has the stomach for more health-care negotiations.  For the Democrats, it would be like revisiting the site of a traumatic auto accident. It is where the pain started, and it will only remind voters where the Democrats got off course. Republicans might just as soon move on to other issues rather than throw Democrats a lifeline. But there are good reasons, both substantive and political, to move forward. …

…In a similar vein, James C. Capretta and Yuval Levin urge Republicans to move forward on three fronts:

First, they should seek to address the problem of insuring Americans with preexisting conditions through state-based high-risk pools, not cumbersome insurance regulations that try to outlaw basic economics.  … Second, they should propose to help doctors and patients limit some of the burden of rising costs with medical malpractice reform. … Third, they should argue that the states be given the lead role in developing more detailed reforms of how and where people get their insurance—to cover more people and slow the rise of costs. The overall goal should be to build well-functioning marketplaces in which insurers and providers compete to deliver the best value to cost-conscious consumers. The federal government should remove bureaucratic obstacles to state experimentation on this front, and offer support where possible, but not design one mammoth new program.

Well, it sounds like they and the Washington Post editors could hammer something out in an afternoon. But alas, the same crew who came up with ObamaCare would be negotiating with the Republicans, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Nevertheless, as a political matter, it makes sense, if not now then in a couple of months, for both Democrats and Republicans to give it a try. Democrats don’t want the last chapter of health-care reform to be the Cornhusker Kickback and the mandate to make everyone buy policies they don’t want from Big Insurance. And Republicans, who are auditioning for control of Congress, want to show what real reform looks like and how the “party of no” was another liberal fable cooked up while Democrats were trying to convince voters the choice was between ObamaCare and nothing at all. (The voters liked the “nothing at all” option better.) …

Jennifer also points out Obamacare was big business and big government railroading the American people.

Mara Liasson on Fox News Sunday makes a key point that the Obami aren’t likely to appreciate:

This is not a revolt of special interests killing the health care bill like with Hillary-care. You have big pharma, you have the insurance companies basically inside the tent, bought into this idea that they’re going to get a big new market in exchange for being highly regulated.

This is not only accurate but also highlights the phoniness of Obama’s newfound populism. The populists — yes, including those “angry” tea party protesters whom Obama pretended to ignore — are arrayed against Obama and his statist, big-government agenda. They aren’t protesting that special interests have blocked health care; they’re mad that an unholy alliance of big business, big labor, and big government has formed with little concern for the interests of seniors (whose Medicare would get slashed) or middle-class voters (who would be taxed on Cadillac plans, forced to buy insurance, etc.). Obama may be donning the lingo of those who elected Scott Brown, but he’s missing the point.

Obama’s own agenda is fundamentally anti-populist. What could be worse for the little guy than to be told to go buy a big, expensive health-care plan from a big insurance company? It’s the sort of thing Democrats would rightly mock Republicans for coming up with, had the GOP the nerve to come up with such a scheme in the first place. …

John Stossel blogs about Obama’s belief that he didn’t talk to the American public enough last year.

Obama said it was his hard work creating public policy that caused him to lose a direct connection to Americans.

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year it’s that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are…”

Excuse me? We know what our core values are. It is presumptuous for a politician to presume that he must lecture us about them. …

…Blogger Denny Hartford asks, Obama needs to talk to us even more?

Talk about revisionism. For this statement comes from a fellow who was constantly on our television screens, in the headlines, and on the magazine covers. Indeed, only 21 days in the whole doggone year did he not have a public appearance or splashy press event!…

Mark Steyn essentially asks if the government can do anything with common sense and efficiency.

A couple of days after the Christmas Day Pantybomber tried to light up his gusset on the approach to Detroit, I was at a small airport in Vermont shuffling through the line to what they call the “sterile” area. Anyway, I handed over my driver’s license and, as he had done with all the previous passengers, the Transportation Security Administration agent examined it. And examined it. And examined it some more. He had a loupe, one of those magnifying glasses jewelers use to examine diamonds for any surface blemishes or internal flaws. In this case, he was deploying it to examine how the ink lies on the paper. And when he’d finished doing that he got out his UV light to study the watermark on my license.

And, looking down at his bald patch as he went about his work with loving care, I was overcome by a sudden urge to point out that nobody had ever blown up a U.S. airliner with a fake driver’s license. Why bother going to all that trouble when a real one is so easy to get? On Sept. 11, 2001, four of the terrorists boarded the flight with genuine, valid picture ID issued by the state of Virginia and obtained through the illegal-immigrant day-workers’ network run out of the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church. Almost two years earlier, Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, had been arrested on the British Columbia-Washington state border travelling on a genuine Canadian passport. In that instance, the terrorist had been stopped because the guard thought he seemed nervous when she looked him in the eye. …

…Question: what do the 9/11 killers, the Shoebomber, the Heathrow plotters, the Pantybomber, the London Tube bombers, the doctors who drove a flaming SUV through the concourse of Glasgow Airport and the would-be killers of Danish cartoonists all have in common? Answer: they’re Muslim. Sometimes they’re Muslims with box cutters, sometimes they’re Muslims with flaming shoes, sometimes they’re Muslims with liquids and gels, sometimes they’re Muslims with fully loaded underwear. But the Muslim bit is a constant. What we used to call a fact. But America’s leaders cannot state that simple fact, and so the TSA is obliged to pretend that all seven billion inhabitants of this planet represent an equal threat. …

David Harsanyi examines Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s sudden change of conviction on Obamacare.

…For a case study on malleable values, take Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. In December, CNN host John King asked him if “every piece of evidence tells you, if you support that bill, you will lose your job, would you cast the vote and lose your job?”

Our hero answered, “Yes.” The senator even commemorated his own gutsiness via press release. He then voted for the Senate health care bill — a surprise to no one.

Well, this week, the political world, as it tends to, was upended. And only hours after the president capitulated to the will of voters and called for a slowdown, Bennet — by mere happenstance, no doubt — chimed in that, you know what, he too believed Congress should slow down. …

…Bennet, like many others, had a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate independence by voting “no” on government-run medicine. Bennet had a chance to overcome his ethical misgivings regarding transparency and fishy deals then. Now, however, he is about political survival — the real message taken from Massachusetts. …

Christopher Hitchens discusses the revelations about the Clintons in Game Change.

The inevitable grumbling and grunting about the use of unattributed quotations in Game Change, the engrossing new campaign book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has been accompanied by a more or less grudging general admission that nobody cited in these pages has so far complained of being misrepresented. To this suggestive point I would add, from comparatively limited experience, that where the authors discuss anything that I know about, they have it right. In fact, what they say is often less sensational than what they might have said.

Surely this is particularly true of the most notorious rapid-response operation in modern political history: the infamous Clinton team and its eager outriders and propagandists. I am astonished at how relatively little attention this has received. If the book is to be believed, then the following things occurred:

1) After his wife’s third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Bill Clinton telephoned Sen. Edward Kennedy in pursuit of an endorsement and, according to Kennedy’s own account as given to a friend, said of then-Sen. Barack Obama: A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee. …

The Economist has figured out there is a problem with government growth.

…Rising government spending is not the only manifestation of growing state power. The spread of regulation is another. Conservatives tend to blame the growing thicket of rules on unwanted supranational bodies, such as the European Union, and on the ever growing industry of public-sector busybodies who supervise matters like diversity and health and safety. They have a point. But voters, including right-wing ones, often demand more state intrusion: witness the “wars” on terror and drugs, or the spread of CCTV cameras. Mr Bush added an average of 1,000 pages of federal regulations each year he was in office. America now has a quarter of a million people devising and implementing federal rules.

…In these circumstances, hard rules make little sense. But prejudices are still useful—and this newspaper’s prejudice is to look for ways to make the state smaller. That is partly for philosophical reasons: we prefer to give power to individuals, rather than to governments. But pragmatism also comes into it: there is so much pressure on the state to grow (bureaucrats building empires, politicians buying votes, public-sector workers voting for governments that promise bigger budgets for the public sector) that merely limiting the state to its current size means finding cuts.

And cuts can be found. In the corporate world, slimming a workforce by a tenth is standard fare. There’s no reason why governments should not do that too, when it’s needed. Sweden and Canada managed it, and remained pleasant countries with effective public services. Public-sector pay can be cut, given how secure jobs are: in both America and Britain public-sector workers are on average now paid more than private-sector ones. Public-sector pensions are far too generous, in comparison with shrunken private-sector ones. Entitlements can be cut back, most obviously by raising pensionable ages. And the world might well be a greener, more prosperous place if the West’s various agricultural departments disappeared. …

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David Warren takes a philosophical look at our judgments of events, and how they can change.

…The victory of Scott Brown, in the Massachusetts byelection, has brought the Left agenda — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in White House and Congress — to an abrupt halt. And it has done so before that much damage could be done.

In the bluest of all American blue states — the one which already had a taste of progressive “Obamacare” at state level — people realized they’d made a horrible mistake. A vote swing of more than 30 per cent changed the complexion of a Senate seat that had belonged to the Kennedy family since 1952.

Debt is not the answer to economic problems, there or here; more bureaucracy is not the answer; nor is the further empowerment of public sector unions to hold taxpayers to ransom.

And as to terrorism and foreign threats, Mr. Brown was able to play, before the most politically correct constituency in the U.S., variations on the theme: “American taxpayer dollars should go to buying weapons to kill terrorists, not pay for lawyers to defend them.” …

Thomas Sowell celebrates Scott Brown.

Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don’t have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.

Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment — both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media — were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can’t do anything else right, they can count votes.

It was the same story with the government’s health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.

Then Scott Brown got elected to the “Kennedy seat” in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless. …

Mary Katherine Ham blogs in the Weekly Standard about Medicare-related issues.

…But Barack Obama needed senior support on Obamacare, so back in October, he sent out a senior stimulus— $250 per Social Security recipient coming to a total of $13 billion. He didn’t get their support (as we now know), but the checks went out, supported by some Republicans and criticized by deficit hawks and many conservatives.

Today, when answering an Ohio woman’s question, Obama edged indelicately close to the political truth about programs for seniors: “We never forget seniors because they vote at very high levels,” he said to light laughter before realizing the response was a bit crass. He then hastened to add that we appreciate seniors because they “changed our diapers.” It was a cynical moment for the hope-and-change merchant.

The admission is a political truth we all know, and the reason Republicans have (unwisely, I think) painted themselves into a fiscal corner by bashing the idea of Medicare cuts in the fight against Obamacare. What’s telling is how clumsy the president has become in his rhetoric. As the constant pitch for flailing health-care becomes more and more tired, the Great Orator does himself less and less good with each outing.

It’s always interesting to see the MSM eat crow. Mort Zuckerman has another commentary on the deflation of Obama’s popularity. Since the health care monstrosity was such a near miss, we are right to wonder where Zuckerman was when we really needed him.

…Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and healthcare plans were voted on so quickly that the lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama’s chief of staff essentially asserting that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two Band-Aids and an aspirin.

Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country’s anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to “boil the ocean” and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons … and the beat goes on.

This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public’s distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn’t seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama’s lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits. …

The Economist reviews the undoing of The One, and suggests a course correction.

…One thing, though, is clear. The brief era in which the Democrats felt they could push through anything they wanted, courtesy of their thumping majorities in the House and the Senate and their occupancy of the White House, is over. Once Scott Brown is seated in the Senate, Mr Obama will lose his supermajority there, so a determined opposition (which this one certainly seems to be) will be able to block anything it wants to. Making deals with the Republicans once again becomes a necessity, not a luxury. That should not be a disaster; most presidents have to govern with far fewer than 60 Senate votes.

It is not obvious, though, that the Olympian Mr Obama knows how to do this, despite all his fine words along the campaign trail about “a new politics”. What he now has to understand is that he is in a weak position: he needs the Republicans more than they need him. To get what he wants, he will have to learn to give them much more of what they want. For instance, he could now offer the Republicans tort reform and genuine cost-control to bring them on board for a slimmed-down health bill: that might be an offer they could not refuse. Likewise, any hope of getting a climate-change bill through Congress will probably have to involve more nuclear power.

Bill Clinton grasped all this after the disaster of 1994, when the Republicans took back Congress; the result was a stream of good laws that outraged many leftish Democrats, from welfare reform to free-trade deals to deficit-reduction. Mr Clinton won an easy re-election and his presidency, despite his own best efforts to destroy it, was a pretty successful one. Mr Obama, who is now faced with the possibility of a similar electoral catastrophe, needs to copy the great triangulator.

Peter Schiff describes how government intervention has destroyed American Samoa’s economy and standard of living. People who abuse the power of the state never learn the law of unintended consequences.

…For generations, American Samoa offered strong advantages for tuna canners. The close proximity to vast Pacific tuna schools, the islands’ good port facilities, political association with the United States, and an abundance of relatively inexpensive labor (by American standards) enticed StarKist and Chicken of the Sea to locate their primary canning facilities in American Samoa. Although the workers were paid, in recent years, wages that were below the U.S. minimum, given the low taxes and living costs, these wages were enough to offer the average worker a standard of living that was superior to the denizens of other islands in that area of the Pacific.[ii]

But then, in 2007, Washington came to the “rescue.” As part of its efforts to provide a “living wage” for all Americans, Congress passed a law to step up the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour across all U.S. states and territories by 2009.[iii] Understanding that such a law would devastate American Samoa by raising canning costs past the point where the companies could maintain profitability, the non-voting Samoan member of the U.S. House of Representatives convinced Congress to allow an exemption for the islands. However, Republicans raised allegations that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in whose district both Chicken of the Sea and StarKist had corporate offices, had caved to pressure from big donors and was allowing the continued “exploitation” of Samoan workers. Facing a sticky political situation, the exemption was removed.

The Samoan representative desperately sought to fend off what he was sure would be an economic calamity. He asked the Department of Labor to issue a report examining the potential consequences of the law upon the islands’ economy. The report explained that “nearly 80 percent of workers covered by the FLSA earned under $7.25 per hour. By comparison, if the U.S. minimum wage were increased to the level of the 75th percentile of hourly-paid U.S. workers, it would be raised to $16.50 per hour.” Therefore, the study continued, “there is concern that [the tuna canneries] will be closed prior to the escalation of the minimum wage … and that production will be shifted to facilities outside the U.S.” Ultimately, the Department of Labor concluded that “closure of the tuna canneries will cause a total loss of 8,118 jobs – 45.6 percent of total employment.” (emphasis mine) [iv]…

Roger Simon blogs about the latest Climategate “science” scandal.

Sitting here in Barbara Jordan Terminal, waiting for my plane home and surfing the net, I came upon yet more Climategate/Glaciergate news from the the superb ongoing Telegraph coverage. Now they reveal the UN IPCC’s head climate honcho Rajendra Pachauri has hired the very scalawag who lied to us for years that the Himalayan glaciers were receding, the very “finding” from which Pachauri has suddenly been trying to distance himself. (Two weeks ago it was just the opposite. Don’t we all wish we had Pachauri’s bank account?)

So it goes. Anthropogenic Global Warming is rapidly morphing into the greatest scandal in the history of science since the belief in a flat earth – and people had a lot more excuses for that. Not that the Obama administration is even beginning to acknowledge it. Who knows what they say to each other behind the scenes? They have enough to worry about.

But speaking of climate scalawags, how about my Congressman Henry Waxman of Waxman-Markey fame? The reified liberalist lifer undoubtedly is incapable of understanding the science for himself – in fact he admitted as much in front of his committee, saying he “relied” on scientists for that – but it would be funny to watch if and finally they do make a public rollback on this nonsense. Fortunately for sclerotic Henry, this will probably be avoided, since virtually no one is making noises about the risible cap-and-trade legislation any more. And Al Gore appears to have conveniently vanished from the public eye, a John Edwards of climate. (Actually, I’m surprised Gore hasn’t turned up in Haiti to do “pro bono” work to resurrect his reputation.) …

Jeremy Page, in the Times, UK, reviews all the errors discovered in the IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers.

…The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

…The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

…leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalayan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources. …

Walter Russell Meade, in The American Interest, gives more reason to pull the plug on UN funding.

The London Times continues to follow the glaciergate story–and it keeps getting worse.

The latest disclosure: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s (formerly) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known as the IPCC), may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

According the the London Times, Pachauri’s institute got money from the European Union and the US-based Carnegie Corporation to investigate a prediction that never had any scientific backing whatever, and one which all serious glacier scientists instantly recognized as impossible. The bogus claim was frequently repeated in the fundraising efforts — and reiterated as recently as January 15 when the IPCC was already under intense pressure to admit it had blundered.

This is now more than an example of eye-popping incompetence and gross neglect of elementary scientific standards by a body on whose authority the world is expected to make multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting every business and every person on the planet.

It is now, potentially, a criminal issue.  If Pachauri knew the claim was bogus and allowed these grant applications to go forward, he could find himself facing criminal charges. …

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Peter Robinson says hats off to the Tea Partiers.

…In short, our forty-fourth chief executive sought to end America’s two-and-a-third centuries as a truly exceptional nation—more patriotic, more dynamic, more enterprising and freer than any other—to turn the republic into a kind of enervated satellite of Western Europe. Barack Obama’s America, a supersized Belgium.

And but for one vote in the Senate—one vote—Obama would have succeeded. …

…To whom, then, do we owe our gratitude? Broadly speaking: the unstylish, the unschooled and the uncool. In other words, the tea partyers.

If you had to choose one moment as the inception of the tea party movement, you’d select February 19, when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli suddenly and gloriously lost his temper on the air. On the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli, reporting an Obama housing measure, began ranting about the unfairness of penalizing ordinary Americans in order to bail out mortgage deadbeats. What the country needed, Santelli announced, was a “Chicago tea party.” Within hours, tea party Web sites had sprouted online. Meeting one another through Facebook and Twitter, tea partyers began organizing protests. On Tax Day, April 15, more than half a million tea partyers participated in protests at 800 locations around the nation. The soccer mom in Maine, the truck driver in Canton, the schoolteacher in Orlando, the farmer in Chico—all had found their voice. …

…Will Barack Obama follow the example of Bill Clinton, who, after the electorate rebuked him in 1994 by handing control of the House back to the GOP, moved to the center? Or will Obama instead remain on the left and fight, turning the remainder of 2010 into a raw struggle for power? Beats me. But I do know this—and by now Obama knows it, too: The most potent political force in America is still an ordinary citizen who has finally had enough.

David Bernstein blogs in Volokh Conspiracy about one disadvantage to Scott Brown’s victory.

Like others who oppose much of President Obama’s legislative agenda, I’m pleased that Scott Brown won, and even more pleased that he won relying on generally libertarian themes.  There is a downside, however.  From what I can tell, the swing vote for Brown, and more generally against Obama these days, is senior citizens who want to protect Medicare in its current, bloated form; Brown himself argued that he wanted to defend Medicare from Obama.

In a sense, this serves the Democrats right.  For decades, any time a Republican suggested any sensible Medicare reform, the Democrats responded with a barrage of (very effective) political propaganda accusing the Republicans of wanting to eviscerate Medicare.  As a result, Medicare became politically sacrosanct; the only major Republican-led reform of recent years was a massive Medicare expansion under President Bush. …

…The problem, of course, is that Medicare is utterly unsustainable in it present form.  One hopes that a bipartisan solution, that will be blamed on both (or neither) party can be achieved.  More likely, I’m afraid, politicians will have learned that even liberal Democrats dare not mess with Medicare, and the program will gradually  (further) bankrupt the country.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports that key national security departments were not consulted on the decision to give the pantybomber constitutional rights. It appears that Attorney General Eric Holder has a lot to answer for.

…So who decided to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian, read him the Miranda warning, and provide him with a government-paid lawyer — giving him the right to remain silent and denying the United States potentially valuable intelligence that might have been gained by a military-style interrogation?

This week that simple question — Who? — became more complicated after several of the administration’s top anti-terrorism officials testified on Capitol Hill. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, said he wasn’t consulted before the decision was made. The director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, said he wasn’t consulted, either. The secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said she wasn’t consulted. And the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, said he wasn’t consulted. …

…So on Thursday all seven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Holder asking for a full explanation: Who made the decision and why, and whether the administration now has “a protocol or policy in place for handling al Qaeda terrorists captured in the United States.” …

The WaPo editors originally backed the Obami decision to give terrorist Abdulmutallab the constitutional rights of the US citizens that he was seeking to murder. Now that it has come to light that many departments and agencies were left out of the loop, the editors are questioning the decision. Some liberals believe that if there is a thorough discussion or summit of some kind, the decision must be a good one. Such logic gives further creedence to the conservative belief that liberals do not know how to keep Americans safe.

UMAR FAROUK Abdulmutallab was nabbed in Detroit on board Northwest Flight 253 after trying unsuccessfully to ignite explosives sewn into his underwear. The Obama administration had three options: It could charge him in federal court. It could detain him as an enemy belligerent. Or it could hold him for prolonged questioning and later indict him, ensuring that nothing Mr. Abdulmutallab said during questioning was used against him in court.

It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.

…In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, all said they were not asked to weigh in on how best to deal with Mr. Abdulmutallab. Some intelligence officials, including personnel from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were included in briefings by the Justice Department before Mr. Abdulmutallab was charged. These sessions did provide an opportunity for those attending to debate the merits of detention vs. prosecution. According to sources with knowledge of the discussions, no one questioned the approach or raised the possibility of taking more time to question the suspect. This makes the administration’s approach even more worrisome than it would have been had intelligence personnel been cut out of the process altogether. …

Stephen Spruiell takes exception to Paul Krugman’s assessment of the economy. There’s a Krugman quote here from 2002 when he was suggesting the Fed should create a housing bubble. So, how’d that work out?

…And who could forget this gem from 2002?

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

(Important note: I did not make that one up.)

Can we please stop taking recession-fighting advice from Paul Krugman? Really. Any day now.

Sabrina Eaton in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer writes about an Obama fan/activist using deception to get letters to the editor published.

Ellie Light sure gets around.

In recent weeks, Light has published virtually identical “Letters to the Editor” in support of President Barack Obama in more than a dozen newspapers. Every letter claimed a different residence for Light that happened to be in the newspaper’s circulation area.

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.

…Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro. Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses. …

Seems the pajamas news media-types are helping root out another liberal deception. Patterico is compiling the newspapers and websites that published the Ellie Light letter. Can we get some Russian hackers to track “Ellie Light” down?

…Like Ben Smith at Politico.

And the Washington Times.

And a blog at USA Today.

And the Sheboygan Press in Wisconsin. And the Stevens Point Journal in Wisconsin — listing an address of Algoma, Wisconsin.

…And in TheUnion.com, listing an address of Grass Valley, CA.

…On an unrelated note, recall that recently, Glenn Greenwald flagged the fact that Obama’s pal (and head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) Cass Sunstein recently wrote this paper suggesting something sounding a lot like Astroturfing:

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).

…P.S. If you find other examples, please leave them in comments with a link. Many more updates in the extended entry.

…And my current favorite so far, The Bangkok Post — the “World’s Window to Thailand.” No hometown provided.

Eric at Classical Values has a little fun with “Ellie Light”. You’ll have to see the photo to get the joke.

Chris Hafner at Car Lust Blog celebrates the internal combustion engine and the gasoline-powered car.

…Think of a one-gallon container of liquid–a typical milk container, for example. With only that much gasoline, depending on conditions and driving style, a brand new Honda Fit will drive 40 miles, possibly more, before it runs out of fuel. …

In absolute terms, 40 miles is a significant amount of distance. Think of the most common means of transportation before cars became common. Forty miles represents six hours of travel from a sailing ship traveling at a steady six knots. It represents five hours of travel from a horse trotting at a steady eight mph. It represents two days of travel from a cross-country wagon train. A late 19th-century train could cover 40 miles distance nearly as quickly as the Fit, but it would would need 1,000-4,000 pounds of coal to do so.

Let’s take a look at the other side of the equation. The Fit is capable of covering those 40 miles on one gallon of fuel, within 40 minutes or less, without drama, and in comfort. The driver would be swaddled in an environment that includes a comfortably upholstered chair, a high-quality sound system with decent acoustics, and with filtered and climate-controlled air. And while we consider the Fit a relatively small and efficient car, it is capable of remarkable utility–it is a 2,500-pound car with a modern safety cage, seating for a family of five, and room for gear. It only takes eight fill-ups and 80 gallons of gas, costing the driver roughly $240, to propel this 2,500-pound object from one side of this continent to the other. That’s an amazing accomplishment for a relatively small amount of fuel. …

Rob Long in the WSJ tells of the passing of a pioneer in the field of hypnotism.

…Dr. Herbert Spiegel—a Freudian analyst who became a trailblazing hypnotist—had died at 95.

Dr. Spiegel treated anxiety, smoking, posttraumatic stress syndrome—and a host of other disorders that I probably also have—with hypnosis. In the 19th century, doctors had experimented with the method—Franz Mesmer more or less invented hypnosis, and Sigmund Freud practiced it in his early days. …

…And there was something disturbing about Dr. Spiegel, too: his efficiency. He put you under, you had a therapeutic conversation, he snapped his fingers, and . . . done. Pay the lady on the way out.

Actors came to him for help with stage fright. People afraid to fly found themselves, after treatment, happily boarding planes. Smokers were cured. In other words, people got better.

And Dr. Spiegel got famous. Well, not famous famous, but known in Manhattan media and political circles as an interesting, effective and fast-acting healer. He even had a regular table at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side hangout with its heyday in the ’60s and ’70s. The names of his clients are confidential, yet when one recalls a few of the more notorious Elaine’s regulars—Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and George Steinbrenner among them—it’s clear he could have had a lot to work with. …

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In the Corner, John Miller lists all the reasons why liberals have had a tough week.

1. The Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, sending their health-care takeover efforts into a tailspin.

2. The Supreme Court wiped out the central feature of McCain-Feingold, in a victory for free speech.

3. Air America declared bankruptcy.

UPDATE: A reader notes the arrival of this anniversary:

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. …

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 22, 2009. …

Mark Steyn discusses trucks and other liberal issues.

…”The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry, and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.” …

…Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.

…As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell To Obama.” …

…The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. …

Mort Zuckerman is one of the disenchanted liberals.

…In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.

Five states got deals on health care—one of them was Harry Reid’s. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It’s a bizarre form of political corruption. It’s bribery. I suppose they could say, that’s the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it. …

…One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.” …

Der Spiegel reviews commentary from German newspapers on the political landscape that Obama faces.

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“Of course the president rejects the interpretation that the Massachusetts election was a referendum on his first year in the White House. But he cannot ignore the fact that his health care reform package is not popular, the situation of the country’s finances is seen as threatening and many voters blame the high unemployment rate on the party in power — on the Democrats, led by Obama. The result is a second year in office full of very different challenges than the first. To save what there is to be saved, Obama will have to be prepared to fashion a bipartisan compromise on health care — a compromise with a Republican Party which has tasted blood and can now dream once again about a return to power.”

Charles Krauthammer shreds the liberal spin.

…After Coakley’s defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that … it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull’s-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don’t Mirandize terrorists. Don’t raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests. …

More bad news for Obama. Yuval Levin blogs about it in the Corner.

…You know an administration is in trouble when prominent officials let it be known to the press that they disagreed with one of the president’s major decisions. It happens to every president, and it’s always a very bad sign. Usually it comes after some policy goes terribly awry, and sends senior advisors running for cover. But sometimes, in the very worst cases, it happens as soon as a decision is made, before the policy in question has even had a chance to be tested—and it reveals more than dissent about one particular decision, but a broader sense that things are not well at the top.

That is why this Reuters story from yesterday was so striking. It describes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s opposition to the bank limits President Obama announced. It seems that on the very day of the announcement, Geithner decided he needed to dispatch people close to him to make it known (anonymously) that he did not agree with the decision, and indeed that he agreed with the two key arguments offered by its staunchest critics. …

Jonah Goldberg comments on Yuval Levin’s post.

Reading Yuval’s post about the Treasury Secretary’s unease with the president’s bank plan, it seems pretty obvious that the political shop is running policy at the White House. …

…. But it does remind me that a lot of folks thought it was just terrible for Karl Rove to have any role in policy formation in the White House. Whatever the merits of this bank plan, is there any doubt that David Axelrod is playing just such a role here?

However galling the cynicism, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of the White House’s turn may be, I’m hardly scandalized that politics is influencing policy. That’s what politics is all about. My bigger concern is that such populist scapegoating rarely makes for good policy over the long haul.

Roger Simon is concerned about Obama’s next moves.

I don’t think it’s accident that the Stock Market is tanking after a very short rally that coincided with the then coming victory of Scott Brown. The business world is scared – as is evidently our Secretary of the Treasury who has wandered about as far off the reservation as cabinet officers normally go, allowing the world to know his skepticism about Obama’s new reining in of the banks. (How long before Geithner goes under the bus now?)

The scary thing is that many of us believe the President hardly knows much of anything, certainly not economics, and is surrounded by an increasingly paranoid and defensive group of advisers. It’s shades of Nixon, but worse. Tricky Dick, at least, knew what he was doing and could accomplish things. Obama is the biggest windbag to ever ascend to the presidency. He has no idea what he is doing and now things are getting rough. Frankly, I’m worried for our country because this man doesn’t really understand what the public is telling him. He just thinks we’re “angry.” He’s wrong – we’re furious and we’re furious because he blames everyone but himself and seems psychologically incapable of taking responsibility. One can imagine a ninety-year old Obama stumbling around in some rest home shaking his walking stick at George Bush. But for the moment Bush is being replaced boy. Now evidently it’s the banks’ fault. The evil bankers are to blame. It’s capitalism, stupid.

Problem is, we’ve been there, done that, a thousand times. The alternative to capitalism is socialism and it has never worked. Not once, in all its myriad permutations. In fact, it most often hurts those it was intended to help, bankrupting the society and leaving the lower classes destitute. The Soviet Union collapsed. China was deeply impoverished until it turned essentially capitalistic . Everybody knows that now, and has for years, except maybe our president. He’s after the banks and is so clueless he thinks that will impress us. Of course, it won’t. Nobody believes anything he says anymore. But he is the President and he can take executive actions. And with those actions, like a wounded animal, he may pull all of us down with him. I am deeply afraid of that because Barack Obama has never had to deal with any personal adversity in his adult life. He has lived a completely privileged existence. This is a first for him. There’s no telling how he will behave. Watch out, buckle up and hold on to your seats.

Jennifer Rubin discusses some comments that will make you cringe.

In an interview this week Obama admits that he really didn’t have a clue on how the Middle East works:

I’ll be honest with you. A: This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get. …

Really hard?? The hubris is remarkable, isn’t it? One supposes that he imagined all the dolts who preceded him in the Oval Office to just not have been smart enough or him enough to get the job done. It seems as though he “overestimated” the impact of his mere presence on the parties. Really, who knew there were underlying political realities that would render the parties immune to his charms? But there is no sign he’s going to do much, if anything, differently (”we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution”). But now he knows it’s hard.

…He is, it seems, so fixed in his preconceptions of the word that basic geopolitical realities come as a surprise or disappointment. If only the world worked the way his university-professor pals and George Mitchell told him it would. …

In Commentary, Michael Totten says that the Middle East has been hard for a long time.

…The Middle East’s “Berlin Wall,” so to speak, may have cracked, but it didn’t fall. Iraq all but dismembered itself after its successful election. Hezbollah blew up the Levant and put Lebanon’s “March 14″ revolution on ice. Palestinians elected Hamas and transformed Gaza into a suppurating jihad state. It could be a while before I allow myself to feel upbeat and sunny again. The Middle East makes suckers of everyone who feels upbeat and sunny.

…The entire Middle East is difficult and dysfunctional. There is no peaceful political mainstream. Ethnic and religious violence is normal — not just between Arabs and Israelis, but also between Arabs and Persians, Arabs and Kurds, Kurds and Turks, Kurds and Persians, Muslims and Christians, and Sunnis and Shias. The idea that peace is likely to break out there any time soon was memorably ridiculed in the Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. “They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years,” said the main character’s mother. “It can’t be much longer.” …

…If the “peace process” is sure to fail right now — and it is — announcing it as a foreign-policy priority only sets Obama up as a weak leader who can’t deliver the goods. His credibility suffers, and so does America’s leverage. He ought to focus on conflict management and damage control, and try not to make anything worse.

David Harsanyi hits a home run.

…Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).

This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. …

…Now, I am under no grand illusions about democracy. The electorate can be mercurial and irrational — as nearly every election proves. Nor do I believe any ethical politician should abandon his or her core values simply because polls tell them it would be expedient.

I say, keep fighting, Mr. President. Those of us who believe in capitalism need you. …

David Warren offers his thoughts on Haiti and on giving.

…Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works. …

…This problem is exacerbated by our “culture of narcissism,” which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to “do something now.”

The impulse to “write a cheque” to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies. …

Leading off the cartoons is a Corner Post from Jack Fowler.

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner contrasts Bush and Obama in foreign policy.

…Hence, the hallmarks of Obama’s foreign policy have been the naive engagement of an array of odious dictatorial regimes, grovelling apologies before foreign audiences, lamb-like timidity in the face of intimidation, the ending of the War on Terror, and the trashing of traditional alliances. But has this liberal foreign affairs revolution succeeded in advancing American interests and security across the globe? Hardly. Under Obama’s leadership the United States now appears significantly weaker and far more vulnerable, faced with an array of deadly threats that grow more menacing by the day.

When President Bush was in power he may not have been hugely popular abroad, but the United States was widely feared on the world stage, her enemies were hunted to the ends of the earth, and her real allies were treated with respect. As Barack Obama is discovering to his cost, the world stage is not an extension of the set of American Idol, and global leadership is not about winning popularity contests. The doctrine of “smart power” looks increasingly like an empty shell, a naive approach that has reaped no dividends and threatens to usher in an era of American decline, unless it is reversed.

I’ve outlined below ten areas where George W. Bush’s international leadership was considerably smarter than that of his successor. As I noted in an article at the end of the Bush presidency, ten or twenty years from now, historians will view Bush’s actions on the world stage in a more favourable light. President Bush, like Ronald Reagan, understood that American global leadership rests heavily upon the projection of hard power as well as diplomacy, and the United States can only lead effectively if it is willing to aggressively confront its enemies and defeat them. …

Spengler discusses what has been on the minds of voters, and lays out some of the strategies he feels will help the economic situation.

…When Reagan took office in 1981, the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s, America had a 10% savings rate, the current account was in surplus, and America was the world’s largest net creditor nation. Reagan was able to cut taxes and finance an enormous budget deficit because the world’s demand for US Treasury securities was correspondingly large. In 2010, the baby boomers are in their 50s and 60s, America has saved nothing for a decade, the current account remains in severe deficit and the world is choking on the existing supply of Treasury securities. Cutting taxes to stimulate the economy is not as simple this time round.

Professor Reuven Brenner and I argued in the December 2009 issue of First Things that fundamental changes in American economic policy are required to emerge from the Great Recession. We proposed that the United States fix the dollar to the Chinese yuan and other currencies in order to re-orient trade flows to the developing world. We added, “We have been borrowing in order to consume; we need now to save in order to invest. We need to shift the tax burden, moving it away from savings and investment and toward consumption. We should replace individual and corporate income taxes with consumption-based taxes.”

Americans need to be told that they will need to invest before they can consume, and that the cure will take years rather than months to take effect. It’s not a happy message, and no one in politics is willing to deliver it – if indeed anyone in politics understands it.

The WSJ editors have an interesting piece on where Americans are moving.

Every day thousands of Americans vote with their feet on the best places to live and work, and these migration patterns can tell a lot about state economies—and economic policies. United Van Lines has released its annual report for 2009, based on those the moving company has relocated across one state line to another…

…The next two biggest net losers were Illinois and New Jersey, while California and New York also continued to have far more departures than arrivals.

Ten states gained net arrivals: Oregon, Arkansas, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Texas and North Carolina. Of those, only Oregon sways decidedly to the political left and it has benefited from the economic refugees fleeing California.

…As for the biggest winner, well, our readers won’t be surprised to learn that it was Washington, D.C. by a large margin. United Van Lines moved nearly seven families to the federal city last year for every three it moved out. As always when the feds gear up the income redistribution machine, the imperial city and its denizens get a big cut of the action. …

Peter Wehner gives his thoughts on the political landscape after the Massachusetts special election.

4. I suspect we will see a damaging split emerge between the Democratic leadership — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid — and other Democratic lawmakers. The former will talk tough; they will say its time to redouble their efforts, that now is not the time to turn away from their agenda, that reconsidering it in the wake of the Massachusetts election would be a sign of weakness and a path to defeat in November. “This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official told Politico.com. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.”

Many Democratic lawmakers will think this counsel to be deeply unwise, bordering on insane. They will argue that the public has sent a message as emphatically as it possibly can: embracing ObamaCare and Obamaism is politically lethal. Give it up. And so the Democratic caucus will politely — and in some instances not-so-politely — decline to follow Obama, Reid, and Pelosi over a cliff.

6. There is a slew of bad data for Democrats to pour through in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s victory. But here is the most frightening data point of all: Mr. Brown won unaffiliated voters by a margin of 73 percent to 25 percent, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen. This 3-to-1 margin comes after independents broke for Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie by 2-to-1 margins in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively. This is a stunning, and for Democrats an ominous, development. More than anything else, it explains why they now face the prospect of losing both the House and the Senate in November.

8. The radiating effects of the Massachusetts election will be enormous, including its effects on GOP recruitment and Democrats who opt to stay on (or retire to) the sidelines.

If you are a Republican, you now understand that this may be your best opportunity ever to run and to win; outstanding candidates who might otherwise not throw their hat into the ring will now do so. Conversely, many well-qualified Democrats, seeing the Category Five storm that is now hitting shore, will decide to take a pass at a run. We are seeing a virtuous cycle and a vicious cycle play itself out simultaneously. …

John Steele Gordon points out the irony of the political maneuvering by the Massachusetts legislators.

Among the many lessons to be learned from yesterday’s election in Massachusetts is that politicians should not play games with established law for short-term political advantage.

Like most states, Massachusetts law called for the governor to appoint someone to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat until the next general election. But in 2004, Republican Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and Democratic Senator John Kerry was running for president. To prevent Romney from appointing a Republican in the event of a Kerry victory, a bill was submitted to the General Court (as Massachusetts calls its legislature) to strip the governor of this power and require a special election to be held from 145 to 160 days after the seat became vacant. The bill stalled in the legislature, however, until Senator Ted Kennedy personally pushed for its passage. Governor Romney vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden by the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. …

…Had the Massachusetts Democrats and Senator Kennedy simply left the law alone in 2004, this election would not have taken place, and the Democrats’ 60-seat majority in the Senate would still be intact. Had the Massachusetts Democrats, Senator Kennedy, and President Obama left the law alone in 2009, the Senate would have been forced to bargain with Republicans to secure passage of the health-care bill. A bill might have emerged that would have had more public support, and the president and the Democrats might have escaped an epic political disaster.

Jennifer Rubin wonders whether any of the ersatz political advisors at the White House will get the boot.

Yuval Levin raises an interesting point about the Obami:

They have made it impossible for themselves to change course without a massive loss of face and of political capital. But however costly, that change will now need to come. You have to wonder if the people responsible for setting this course—and especially Rahm Emanuel and the House and Senate leadership—will still be standing when it’s all done with.

Obama isn’t big on firing people. It took a weekend of angst before Van Jones was shown the door. No one lost his job over the national security debacle that resulted in the Christmas Day near-catastrophe. So will he now clean house, after his domestic agenda has blown up in the Bluest State, his approval rating has plummeted, his party has formed a circular firing squad, and his congressional majorities are at risk? It seems that the Obama political brain trust — which thought its expertise extended to Afghanistan war strategy and the Middle East “peace process” — wasn’t very good at the jobs in which they were supposedly expert. Rahm Emanuel understood Congress. David Axelrod understood political salesmanship. But they, along with Obama of course, made a perfect mess in only a year.

It might be smart for Obama to toss some of them out. For starters, it might elevate the tone of the White House, which has been languishing in the partisan sewers for a year. And it might signal to panicked Democrats in the House and Senate that Obama doesn’t intend to plow them under. But most of all, it would be a message to the country that the president has learned a lesson and is setting a new direction. …

Rubin continues her thoughts on White House housecleaning.

Dana Milbank reminds me that there’s another White House aide who deserves to be shown the door: the ever-snide Robert Gibbs. Milbank explains:

Gibbs acts as though he’s playing himself in the movie version of his job. In this imaginary film, he is the smart-alecky press secretary, offering zippy comebacks and cracking jokes to make his questioners look ridiculous. It’s no great feat to make reporters look bad, but this act also sends a televised image of a cocksure White House to ordinary Americans watching at home.

This is the most visible manifestation of a larger problem the Obama White House has. Many Obama loyalists from the 2008 race still seem, after a year on the job, to be having trouble exiting campaign mode. They sometimes appear to be running a taxpayer-funded rapid-response operation.

Sometimes? We’ve been treated to attacks from Gibbs on Fox, Gallup, radio talk-show hosts, and CNBC reporters. As Milbank describes, he waves off reporters’ legitimate inquiries with the back of his hand — the perfect metaphor for the contempt with which this White House treats critics.

The WSJ has an editorial on what your taxes (and the taxes of your children and grandchildren) are paying for. Apparently just because his climate theory was debunked doesn’t mean that Michael Mann shouldn’t receive more taxpayer dollars to create more climate science baloney.

As for stimulus jobs—whether “saved” or “created”—we thought readers might be interested to know whose employment they are sustaining. More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.

Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public.

Mr. Mann came by his grants via the National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money. Last June, the foundation approved a $541,184 grant to fund work “Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing,” which will contribute “to the understanding of abrupt climate change.” Principal investigator? Michael Mann. …

So, what does a liberal think of the Mass. mess? John Judis, senior editor of the New Republic thinks Obama’s lucky to get the message about his disastrous policies so soon.

Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won–and by ten points or more.

There were no network exits polls, only a limited sample by Rasmussen , but some of the polls taken beforehand bear out Obama’s role in Coakley’s defeat. In the final January 17 poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning North Carolina outfit that picked up Brown’s surge early in the month, 20 percent of the respondents who voted for Obama in 2008 said they’d vote for Brown. Among those voters, only 22 percent approved of Obama’s presidency, and only 13 percent backed his health care plan. (Click here to read Thomas B. Edsall: ”Why Health Care is the Graveyard of Democratic Dreams.”)

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52 percent of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue–a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national and not merely state terms. …

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Abby Thernstrom blogs about the change in the political scene in Massachusetts.

…When we left the greater Cambridge fallout area two years ago and migrated to Virginia, we were well-known and heartily disliked by the Harvard chosen — although not by Steve’s adoring students. But our car in a Harvard parking lot regularly prompted questions about a little American flag decal; it was a clear sign of disloyalty to the “right” values. The Harvard version of unpatriotic. We had long ceased to be invited to Harvard dinner parties. Steve had remained unfailingly polite and respectful; not me.

But every election night we had a tiny crowd of Republican intellectuals over to watch returns. Roughly 25 friends would come. And everyone who walked in the door would mutter some variation on the theme: OMG, you must have every Republican intellectual in the whole state here.

Harvard is undoubtedly unchanged, but my old friends from that tiny crowd tell me the atmosphere in much of the state the last few days has been nothing short of electrifying. One pal recently drove through an intersection in suburban Wayland; on all four corners supporters held Scott Brown signs high, despite the freezing weather. Cars were honking in celebration. Others have been drawing the same picture. …

In the Corner, Shannen Coffin has a post on the Dems political maneuverings in the Massachusetts state legislature.

Massachusetts Democrats changed the rules of the game after Ted Kennedy’s death, granting to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint an interim Senator pending today’s special election — a power that it had expressly denied to Republican Governor Mit Romney in the 2004 election cycle.  The reason was to maintain the 60th vote on the President’s health care legislation and cement Ted Kennedy’s “legacy.”   The plan didn’t work on that front, since Democrats couldn’t come to an agreement on the specifics of the bill in the time allotted.  And the political maneuvering in the State legislature had enormous political ramifications, feeding a sense of foul play by the Democratic establishment.   As much as anything, this unfair play helped propel Scott Brown to a competitive position — and he and Martha Coakley have done the rest.  We’ll find out tonight whether Brown will succeed, but you have to wonder whether some state Democrats are second-guessing their decision to change the rules of the game after Kennedy’s death.

Rich Lowry posts an e-mail exchange with a reader, in the Corner.

E-mail:

Hey Rich. I haven’t seen anyone point out that if Scott Brown wins, he’s the logical choice for the nominee for President in 2012. A state senator, followed by 2 years of experience in the US Senate! Aren’t those the job requirements now?

…

I’m not so sure.  Was Brown ever a community organizer?

Also he needs to be careful not to actually *serve* in the US Senate, but rather to start running for President tomorrow morning and show up for his day job as little as humanly possible.  That will help him avoid any inconvenient legislative fingerprints for the haters to pick away at.  (Come to think of it, his actual service in the state legislature, where he worked instead of just killing time until he could reach for the next rung on the ladder, may disqualify him entirely.)

Jonah Goldberg comments on Rich Lowry’s post.

Rich — It’s funny, I had a very similar conversation with the missus last night.

About a year ago, I was up in New York to do a panel for Commentary magazine (I was sitting in for you, I believe). I was talking to John Podhoretz beforehand and he was saying how Bill Kristol was probably right: The lesson of Barack Obama may well be that none of us have even heard of the next Republican standard-bearer. After all, prior to his 2004 DNC keynote, Obama was a political “nobody,” too. A year ago, I thought how implausible it was that there really could be someone who was not a familiar name, at least to professional political junkies, could be the next GOP nominee. Then again, I also thought that the Democrats were going to be in strong shape for a very long time. But here we are.

Now, I do not actually think that Brown — if he wins — is obvious presidential material (Indeed, I think a senator should actually be a senator for a while, rather than use the title to run for president as Obama did).

But how well known was Bob McDonnell a year ago? The point is we are living in amazingly fluid times, politically. Who knows what’s coming next?

Mark Steyn likes Scott Brown’s speechwriters.

…By contrast, Scott Brown seems to deliver very nice lines on a regular basis:

“It’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s the people’s seat”: Brilliant. Popular democracy vs the House-of-Lords Democrats.

“Scott Brown believes in evolution, but in the case of Bob Kerrey he’s willing to make an exception”: Lovely. A genial throwaway response to a demented line of attack that makes the attacker look ridiculous.

“The leader of the free world is talking about my truck“: Bullseye. It underlines the David-vs-Goliath nature of the race, and also reminds you that, by having to intervene to prop up his flailing candidate, the President of the United States demeaned himself. …

From the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden has election thoughts.

… So if Scott Brown does beat Martha Coakley what will it mean? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Health care reform is dead. Even if there was (and it’s doubtful) some procedural way the Democrats could push it through, such a move would be political suicide.

2. Obama will have failed to achieve his signature reform despite Democrats having had a healthy majority in the House and a 60:40 advantage in the Senate. That is a huge blow and could render him not just a one-term President but a one-year President in terms of his political authority.

3. Obama’s will have failed to achieve his signature reform in such a way as to destroy any chances of fulfilling a signature pledge: to bring a new bipartisanship to Washington. By pushing through a bill on a party-line vote in the Senate, he left himself vulnerable to an electoral surprise or a death – it was a win-or-bust strategy. …

Also from the Telegraph, Gerald Warner.

It takes a real mental effort to come to terms with the notion of a man named Brown being an effective and worthwhile politician, but in Massachusetts that is the reality. Brown created an electoral insurgency. He articulated all the resentment of decent Americans against the liberal establishment. In doing so he has overturned the Democrats’ 60-seat presence in the Senate which until last night made them invulnerable to a Republican filibuster and made it possible for them to railroad Obama’s insane, statist, totalitarian health care “reforms” through Congress.

No more. If the Democrats even attempted to use procedural tricks to rush the healthcare dog’s breakfast through before Brown takes his seat, America would not stand for such a blatant evasion of the popular will on so controversial a measure. It simply isn’t going to happen. Nor is any of the rest of the Obama fantasy. The Republicans are now poised to take control of the House in November. Obama has had his year of power, but now he is a busted flush.

And what a year it was. Retreat, abasement and blunders in every area of foreign policy, from North Korea to sell-out to Russia on nuclear weapons. This blog always insisted Obama would be a one-term president. Even I, however, had not counted on his being a one-year wonder. Even Anne of the Thousand Days had a longer run than that. Americans have proved they can spot a phoney in 12 months. That shames Britain’s record: the deluded electorate here voted three times for the Great Charlatan Blair.

To see the pricking of the Obama balloon is delightful. Congratulations, America. Happy anniversary, Mr President.

The WSJ editors comment on the Left’s self-destruction.

…What explains this precipitous political fall? Democrats and their media allies attribute it to GOP obstructionism, though Republicans lack the votes to stop anything by themselves. Or they blame their own Blue Dogs, who haven’t stopped or even significantly modified any legislation of consequence.

Or they blame an economic agenda that wasn’t populist or liberal enough because it didn’t nationalize banks and spend even more on “stimulus.” It takes a special kind of delusion to believe, amid a popular revolt against too much government spending and debt, that another $1 trillion would have made all the difference. But that’s the latest left-wing theme. …

…The lesson of Mr. Obama’s lost first year is that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to exploit. As they have each time in the last 40 years that they have had total control of Washington, Democrats are proving again that America can’t be successfully governed from the left. If that is the lesson Mr. Obama learns from Massachusetts, he might still salvage his Presidency.

Mike Allen’s piece in Politico shows that liberals are going to try the same community-activist inspired political tactics.

…But the president’s advisers plan to spin it as a validation of the underdog arguments that fueled Obama’s insurgent candidacy.

“The painstaking campaign for change over two years in 2007 and 2008 has become a painstaking effort in the White House, too,” the official said. “The old habits of Washington aren’t going away easy.” …

…Already Obama’s rhetoric is reflecting what aides acknowledge is a strong undercurrent of populist anger. By these lights, impatience with the status quo — rather than any rightward turn in the mood of the electorate — is what would fuel a Brown victory.

Reflecting his new tone, Obama last week announced a new fee on big banks by vowing, “We want our money back, and we’re going to get it.”…

Jennifer Rubin comments on one of the divisive issues in Obamacare.

The Democrats have long insisted that ObamaCare can be sold to the public if only the poor, uninformed masses understood what was in it. But with every revelation about the specifics of ObamaCare, one is obliged to exclaim, “How could they vote for that?” A case in point is Medicare Advantage. Jeffrey Anderson explains:

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, in its real first ten years (2014 to 2023), Obamacare would cut Medicare Advantage benefits by $214 billion. Medicare Advantage plans vary by company and region, so cuts would vary from person to person. But, on average, Obamacare would cut Medicare Advantage enrollee’s benefits by $21,000 — per person.

As Anderson notes, Medicare Advantage — which allows patients to choose their own private providers — won’t be fairly and equally administered if the Cash for Cloture backroom deals go into effect. “Thanks to the ‘Gator Aid’ deal that Sen. Harry Reid struck behind closed doors with Sen. Bill Nelson, seniors in South Florida would be exempt.” So seniors in California represented by Sen. Barbara Boxer and those in Pennsylvania who rely on Sen. Arlen Specter to look out for them will get a worse deal, and worse health-care coverage, than the Gator Aided seniors. Where’s the “reform” in that? …

Bret Stephens explains how aid given to a poor country destroys the local economy.

…For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

…But this still fails to get at the real problem of aid to Haiti, which has less to do with Haiti than it does with the effects of aid itself. “The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape,” James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, told Der Spiegel in 2005. “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

Take something as seemingly straightforward as food aid. “At some point,” Mr. Shikwati explains, “this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the U.N.’s World Food Program.” …