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Fred Barnes say Obama is clueless about job creation.

… Obama yearns for a hefty increase in hiring by state and local governments. If hiring were “on par to past recoveries, the unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower than it is right now.” Restoring “huge cuts in state and local government” is “part of the challenge we have in terms of growth.”

The lesson here is that Obama has learned no lesson from what Edward Lazear of the Hoover Institution has called the “worst economic recovery in history”—that is, the Obama recovery. The economy has grown at a rate of 2.4 percent since the recession ended in June 2009, a full percentage point below average long-term growth. But the president is sticking with his plan for a government-led economic boom. This is Obamanomics: If it doesn’t work, then double down.

Obama once told a group of investors that the private sector didn’t need incentives to invest because his administration’s massive subsidies of green technology would lead the way. Now the mention of “green jobs” has become a laugh line. The main news from the green sector is another company bankrolled by Obama going belly-up.

In The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Noam Scheiber describes the president’s “obsession” with green jobs. Eco-nomic adviser Christina Romer “would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. ‘I don’t get it,’ he’d say. ‘We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean there are no jobs?’ But the numbers rarely budged.” …

In order to correct the president’s economic ignorance, James Pethokoukis suggests some time travel.

President Obama disagrees with the past 30 years of U.S. economic policy. As he said during his Osawatomie, Kansas, speech last December:

“… there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. … But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

As I was mulling over this issue, I ran across a great blog post by economist Scott Sumner:

“Suppose you had gotten a room full of economists together in 1980, and made the following predictions:

1. Over the next 28 years the US would grow as fast as Japan, and faster than Europe (in GDP per capita, PPP.)

2. Over the next 28 years Britain would overtake Germany and France in GDP per capita.

And you said you were making these predictions because you thought Thatcher and Reagan’s policies would be a success. Your predictions (and the rationale) would have been met with laughter. Indeed around that time most of the top British economists signed a petition asserting that Thatcher’s policies would fail.

For those of you not old enough to remember 1980, let me explain why. Labour rule of Britain had reduced their economy to a shambles. The government ran the big manufacturing corporations and labor unions were running wild. They had 83% [marginal tax rates, 98% on capital.] There was garbage piling up in the streets of London. Britain had been the sick man of Europe for decades, growing far more slowly than Germany, France and Italy.

The US wasn’t doing as badly, but certainly wasn’t doing that well either. We had also been growing much more slowly than Europe and Japan. Unlike Britain, we were still richer than most other developed countries, so this convergence was viewed as partly inevitable (the catch-up from WWII), and partly reflecting the superior economic model of the Germans and Japanese.”

And here’s what happened over the following decades, as expressed in a chart looking at per capita income in terms of purchasing power parity:…

Bill Kristol posts on what Reagan really said.

… Barack Obama’s appeal to Ronald Reagan is illuminating in a number of ways. It’s illuminating that today’s liberals need to appeal to the example of Reagan to sell their policies. That’s a posthumous victory for Reagan, and an important contemporary victory for Reaganism. Even more, it’s illuminating because it gives us reason to go back and read the Reagan speeches Obama cited and see how compelling they were and how thoroughly the president misrepresented them.

Did Reagan, as Obama claimed, “travel across the country pushing for the same concept” as Obama today? No. Reagan was pushing for comprehensive tax reform, at the center of which was an across-the-board tax rate reduction combined with elimination of tax shelters. The idea was to simplify the system, out of respect for citizens and for the health of the economy. Obama, by contrast, has never risked offering a serious big tax reform proposal. What he does want to do is raise marginal tax rates on many American families.

Obama cited two Reagan speeches from June 1985. Just before that, on May 28, 1985, Reagan had addressed the nation from the Oval Office, kicking off the effort that would produce the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The heart of his argument: “By lowering everyone’s tax rates all the way up the income scale, each of us will have a greater incentive to climb higher, to excel, to help America grow.”

Reagan followed up on June 6, speaking at Northside High School in Atlanta. He did note “the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share” and that “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.” He called them “crazy.” That’s the part of his predecessor’s speech Obama chose to recall.

Here’s what else Reagan had to say: He ascribed the economic comeback of the previous few years, in which “hope has returned, and America’s working again,” to the fact that we “cut tax rates and trimmed federal spending.”

Why didn’t President Obama quote that? And what about Reagan’s explanation for why his administration had cut rates? 

“What’s really important is what inspired us to do these things. What’s really important is the philosophy that guided us. The whole thing could be boiled down to a few words?—?freedom, freedom, and more freedom. It’s a philosophy that isn’t limited to guiding government policy. It’s a philosophy you can live by; in fact, I hope you do.”

Somehow, Obama neglected to quote that. …

“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” That comes to mind when looking at stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. David Harsanyi takes them on.

Whenever a situation appears to be a conspiracy, the explanation is likely to be happenstance. But, looking at how often (and how much) BLS has revised its unemployment numbers, we have a rather strange trend that is certainly worth noting.

More Americans “than forecasted” filed applications for unemployment benefits this week — first we heard that the jobless claims fell by 2,000 but now the revised numbers show 6,000 above the initial forecast. As Ed Morrissey notes, “That number got revised this week, but the real story is in the 4-week rolling average.  Just three or four weeks ago, that number was in the 360K range.  Now it’s close to 375K, roughly the same level as last spring’s stagnant economic conditions.”

Without even taking into account the incredible shrinking job force, this portends bad economic news. Yet, the bad news always seems to be tempered by the Labor Department.

According to Bloomberg:

Revisions to previous data have been larger than normal and the government is trying to determine the cause, a Labor Department spokesman said as the figures were released to the press.

A lot more than normal, actually. According to Dow Jones, the Labor Department had revised its estimate of seasonally adjusted jobless claims upward in 56 of the past 57 weeks. That’s unprecedented.

Fact is, initial estimates draw the most reaction from media, while the revisions are treated less newsworthy, despite their relative significance. …

Blog post from Pope Center suggests the economic value of education is worth questioning. 

The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, for many people, increasing their level of education pays off in higher earnings and lower unemployment rates.

Looking at the chart (which appears on the BLS site) it seems obvious that the path to financial success is to get a college degree—and then an advanced degree. The more education you have, the better off you’ll be. High school graduates, for example, are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as college graduates, and they earn substantially less money per week.

Justin Wolfers, an associate professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School used the BLS data to tweet, “Hey kids, stay in school. What would happen if we put this poster in every classroom?”

Wolfers was reiterating the conventional wisdom, reinforced by the BLS data, that the longer an individual stays in school, the better off he’ll be.

Unfortunately, he missed a crucial detail. All of these statistics are the median—representing the person separating the higher half of a sample from the lower half. It’s a mistake to assume that the median tells us what most people in that group will experience.

Thinking of the median as “typical” masks a lot of important details about educational outcomes. …

LA Times article says meat eaters might have been doing the evolutionary heavy lifting.

If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday.

When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child’s brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. That provided a distinct competitive advantage for early humans when limited resources and a small population made it difficult for them to thrive. “Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,” said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. “This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.” …

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Some thoughts about the Space Shuttle flying over DC from Charles Krauthammer. 

As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again.

It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor.

The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)

China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025.

They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

Who cares, you say? …

Joel Kotkin, who is in these pages frequently, was the WSJ Interviewee of the week by Allysia Finley.

‘California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be.

Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin’” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax. …

You’ll love what Mark Steyn does to the guys who should know how to be secretly serviced.

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Elliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold, grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars, less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded, public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on its head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of 126 billion. The feds’ half-a-billion to Solyndra would have been a mere 18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope … and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Alas, young Miss Suarez, just 24 and with a nine-year-old son and a ravenous pimp to feed, didn’t care for the cut of her Secret Service man’s jib. He made the fairly basic mistake – for an expensively trained government operative – of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor and Dania caused an altercation, whose fall-out has brought the Secret Service to its knees; which isn’t how these encounters usually go. …

… “Some are saying they were women at the bar.”

Amazing to hear government agents channeling Dudley Moore in Arthur:

“You’re a hooker …? I thought I was doing so well.” It turns out U.S. Secret Service agents are the only men who can walk into a Colombian nightclub and not spot the professionals. Are they really the guys you want protecting the president? …

Now he tells us! VA senator Jim Webb says Obama did the health care thing all wrong. So where was Webb and the other “independent” VA senator when they could have done some good? Webb didn’t have any problem being tough on W. Too bad he declined to run so we won’t have the pleasure of throwing this bum out. Karen Tumulty has the story.

President Obama’s new health-care law will be his greatest liability as he attempts to once again win the critical swing state of Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) warned Wednesday.

“I’ll be real frank here,” Webb said at a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News. “I think that the manner in which the health-care reform issue was put in front of the Congress, the way that the issue was dealt with by the White House, cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader.

Webb voted for the law, but also for more than a dozen GOP-offered amendments to it.

“If you were going to do something of this magnitude, you have to do it with some clarity, with a clear set of objectives from the White House,” added Webb, who opted not to run for a second term this year. “…It should have been done with better direction from the White House.” …

Is there anything it can’t do? More wonderful news about aspirin. Theodore Dalrymple has the story.

… Three recent papers in The Lancet propose the benefits of low-dose aspirin both in the prevention of certain cancers and in their spread once they have developed. Professor Rothwell, of Oxford University, was the main author of all three papers, but this should not affect their validity or otherwise.

The first of the papers compared the rates of cancer deaths in those who took part in randomized controlled trials of daily low-dose aspirin to prevent cerebrovascular events (strokes). The risk of cancer death was reduced by something like 15 percent in those who took long-term aspirin. The longer the aspirin was taken, the stronger the protective effect. …

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Craig Pirrong commented on the supposed crackdown on the supposed gasoline price manipulation.

Yesterday Obama delivered another of his it-must-have-been-some-other-body-it-wasn’t-me (h/t Chuck Berry) speeches on energy.  And, true to form, he delivered another clarion call to round up the usual suspects: evil speculators, whom he confabulates manipulators with speculators.  (And I am being generous, because confabulation is inadvertent, whereas I Obama’s slander is almost certainly deliberate): …

… He used the word “manipulate” or “manipulation” 11 times in his relatively brief remarks.  In typically dishonest fashion, he isn’t responding to specific, credible evidence of manipulation; he provides no evidence that manipulation is rampant or is at all responsible for current price levels.  Hell, he can’t even come up with a current example, having to reach back more than a decade to Enron (itself a dubious example).  He merely insinuates and implies.  But the average listener or reader will conclude from his remarks that manipulation is causing their pain at the pump.  Rather than encouraging a sober and realistic appraisal of the role of speculative trading in energy, he is feeding suspicions and encouraging a witch hunt.

Moreover, note the repeated and casual identification of manipulation and speculation.  This is itself a manipulative use of language.  Manipulation is not even a proper subset of speculation: hedgers can be some of the most dangerous manipulators.  It further encourages the popular suspicion that financial trading in commodity markets is inherently dishonest and crooked. …

Washington Post editors were not impressed either.

President Obama is fond of saying that there is no silver bullet to bringing down gasoline prices. On Tuesday, however, he went into the silver bullet business.

Yet another Obama insult to Great Britain. He doesn’t have the courage to do this directly, so he indulges in the passive aggressive use of the Argentinean word for the Falklands. Andrew Malcolm has the story.

OK, picture this: President George W. Bush, he of the cast-iron Texas tongue, at a news conference concluding an international summit.

He’s asked about a dispute involving Argentina and Great Britain, our closest overseas ally, the one that’s lost 408 soldiers by our side in Afghanistan, where we’ve fought a decade together to prevent a second 9/11.

In his answer, Bush refers to the disputed territory by the wrong name, misplacing the islands by some 8,000 miles. Worse than his geographic ignorance, instead of backing Britain, whose prime minister he just buddy-buddied at an NCAA game and White House state dinner, Bush says, Well, that’s not really something he thinks the United States would take sides on.

Britain?

Or Argentina?

Seriously?

Do you think there might be some prolonged outraged news coverage back home about the latest Bush blunder, this time a two-fer?

Well, Bush never did that. But Barack Obama did last weekend.

We’ve seen ample coverage of the Colombian prostitute situation since. But have you been impressed by the media mockings of this latest international stupidity by the 44th United States president, who’s previously talked about such things as the Austrian language, the president of Canada, E Pluribus Unum the national motto and traveling all 57 states? …

… Apparently in the Colombian news conference Obama was seeking to use the Spanish term Malvinas for the islands, as Argentina prefers. Instead, he said Maldives, which are islands off India. But the attempted use of Argentina’s name over Britain’s and Obama’s support for bilateral negotiations about what London regards as a closed matter is prompting strong feelings across the pond.

Nile Gardiner wrote this week in Britain’s Telegraph:

“A stance of ‘neutrality’ is an act of cowardice by Barack Obama in the face of Latin American pressure, and another slap in the face for Britain.” He refers to widespread suspicions in the U.K. that as the son of a Kenyan socialist, Obama harbors ill feelings toward that country’s former colonial ruler. …

Toby Harnden has fun with the Maldives slip.

President Barack Obama managed to commit two major gaffes in a single sentence by attempting to refer to the Falkland Islands as the Malvinas while instead calling them the Maldives, which are 8,123 miles away.

Mr Obama was speaking at a joint press conference with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, on Sunday when he was asked about ‘Cuba and the Malvinas’.

The American president attempted to use the Spanish word for the Falklands – a snub to Britain – but managed to botch it by instead referring to the Maldives, a group of atolls to the south of India. …

Chris Cillizza with an interesting chart about public perceptions of the Supreme Court.

 …A majority of people don’t know the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. More frightening? Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall, who not only was never the Chief Justice but also died in 1993. And let’s not even talk about the four percent who think Harry Reid, a Senator not a member of the Supreme Court, is the Chief Justice. …

If you are smart and ignore the news, you might have missed the major of chuckle over dogs. You see, years ago the Romney family went on vacation carrying their dog on the roof of the car. Bien pensants have been outraged everywhere. Gail Collins has mentioned the incident in 50 columns over the past four years. Turns out someone actually read one of Obama’s two autobiographies and learned The One dined on dog when he lived in Indonesia. James Taranto gives us all the delectable delicious details.

… In a more serious vein, Lincoln Mitchell of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute writes at the Puffington Host: “For many voters, treating a dog this way is unimaginable and could only be done by somebody who has a problem empathizing with others.”

But then Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller’s resident wag, picked up his dog-eared copy of “Dreams From My Father,” Obama’s 1995 autobiography, and sniffed out this passage from the second chapter. If Axelrod’s tweet was a dog whistle, Treacher’s post is a dinner bell:

“With Lolo [Obama's stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

It reminds us of the conclusion of the sci-fi tale “A Boy and His Dog”: “It’s a cookbook.”

The jokes write themselves. 

#ObamaDogRecipes: Yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread.

“So, Mr. President, where shall we go to eat?” “I know a great Spot.” …

In another more serious vein, why has it taken so long for the main stream media to read Obama’s book? Or, did they read it and were just continuing to cover for him? Tim Stanley asks the question in a London paper.

… But the really big question here is why didn’t we know about this earlier? Like me, I’m sure many journalists just didn’t get far enough in to Dreams from My Father to spot the faux pas. If you could grind that book down and bottle it, you’d have a cure for insomnia. Couple it with a couple of grams of Edward Heath’s autobiography and you’ve got an elephant tranquilizer.

But given the mainstream media’s intense study of Romney’s life and its constant regurgitation of its many errors, it’s odd that this shaggy dog story slipped through – especially given that Dreams from My Father has been gathering dust on the bookshelves since 1995. Where did it come from when it finally broke on Tuesday night? The Romney campaign and the conservative site Daily Caller. That’s right: Republicans have to break and publicise stories themselves if they want to get them heard. The mainstream media either ignores a lot of anti-Obama stuff or dismisses it as inconsequential.

Maybe, as the Romney campaign suggests, this trading of dog anecdotes is just a silly distraction from the serious issues of jobs and healthcare. But while the economy is certainly struggling, all the media wants to talk about is character, character, character. On Monday, Ann Romney sat down to an interview with Diane Sawyer and what did they discuss? Seamus the dog. And what were all the headlines about following the discussion? Seamus the dog. This constant focus on trivialities might be more sufferable if it were at least balanced. But it’s always the conservatives who are repeatedly asked “What would you do if your son was gay?”, “What newspapers do you read?”, or “Why do you hate black people so much?” Yet Barack Obama – who went to the church of an anti-American radical loon, messes just about everything up and eats dogs – gets a free pass.

Or course, there’s a new website named Dogs Against Obama. Instead of the normal cartoons, we have many of their items.

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John Fund explains how Obama got the individual mandate so wrong.

President Obama insists that the public would rise up in anger should the Supreme Court strike down all or part of his health-care law. James Carville, a former strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton, claims a death sentence for Obamacare would benefit Democrats.

Such arguments border on fantasy. The reaction to the closely watched Supreme Court oral arguments on Obamacare shows that the law lost ground with the public the more the public followed the issue. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll pegs support for the overall law at 39 percent, the lowest level of backing since this poll first began tracking the issue in 2009. Only about half of Democrats want the entire law upheld.

In contrast, approval of the Supreme Court has increased following the roughing up it gave Obamacare. A new Rasmussen Reports survey found that the percentage of likely voters who rate the court as good or excellent went up 13 points in a month, to 41 percent. A full 42 percent of independents and unaffiliated voters rank the court highly, up from 26 percent only a month ago.

Even some liberals acknowledge that when it comes to public opinion, the law resembles the dead parrot in that old Monty Python skit. When the Daily Beast asked media and policy experts how the law could be better marketed, the general sense was that it was too late. “Medicare was marketable because it was understandable,” says Lawrence O’Donnell, the liberal MSNBC host who was staff director of the Senate Finance Committee when it debated Hillarycare in the 1990s. “I have never met anyone, outside of the government, who can describe what the new health-care law is. You cannot market something that is indescribable.” …

April 12th Pickings ended with a story about a left coast whale watch tour operator, Nancy Black, who is facing prison for inadvertently “bothering” whales. A Real Clear Markets blogger compares her predicament to Jon Corzine who will most likely get away with being a party to stealing hundreds of millions from his customers.

Justice may be blind, but who works overtime to make it deaf, dumb, and stupid?

Which would you imagine might attract more aggressive enforcement from the Justice Department: the theft of $1.2 billion from supposedly segregated customer brokerage funds, or lying about an alleged incident of whistling to attract the attention of a whale so that whale watchers could get a better peep? If you said the latter, then you appreciate the extent to which federal law enforcement priorities have run off the rails.

We know for a fact that enormous sums of money legally off limits have disappeared into the maw of disgraced Senator John Corzine’s gambling counterparties, all of whom seem to have taken the oath of omerta. We know that Corzine personally asked employees at MF Global, the financial firm he headed until recently, to transfer the funds. We know that his underlings balked at signing false statements attesting the transfers to be legal. So how is it that the man ultimately responsible for this brazen theft and spectacular bankruptcy gets away with performing a perfunctory Sergeant Schultz “I know nothing” routine in front of his old Senate buddies, after which he is left free to walk out the door without handcuffs?

Meanwhile, marine biologist and whale watching ship captain Nancy Black faces 20 years in prison, not for “harassing” whales (which believe it or not is a crime), but because she has been charged with lying to Justice Department prosecutors investing allegations that some of her crew members whistled at a whale to keep it hanging around their boats.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Title 18, Section 1001 of the United States Code is the successor to the False Claims Act of 1863, originally intended to punish crooked Civil War contractors. It has since metastasized into an all-purpose bludgeon that federal prosecutors routinely use to squeeze fines and plea bargains out of anyone unfortunate enough to become ensnared in one of the hundreds of thousands of regulations that govern everything from selling goldfish to the volume of your toilet flush.

As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg characterizes it, Section 1001 has conferred “extraordinary authority” for prosecutors to “manufacture crimes.” …

Reuters says the green jobs have been slow to sprout.

Three weeks ago, President Barack Obama stood in front of a sea of gleaming solar panels in Boulder City, Nevada, to celebrate his administration’s efforts to promote “green energy.”

Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive backdrop for the president.

Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its kind in the United States. Its 1 million solar panels provide enough energy to power 17,000 homes.

And it employs just 10 people. 

Three years after Obama launched a push to build a job-creating “green” economy, the White House can say that more than 1 million drafty homes have been retrofitted to lower heating and cooling costs, while energy generation from renewable sources such as wind and solar has nearly doubled since 2008.

But the millions of “green jobs” Obama promised have been slow to sprout, disappointing many who had hoped that the $90 billion earmarked for clean-energy efforts in the recession-fighting federal stimulus package would ease unemployment – still above 8 percent in March.

Supporters say the administration over-promised on the jobs front and worry that a backlash could undermine support for clean-energy policies in general. …

In April 16th Pickings we had an item by Neal Boortz suggesting Scott Walker was going to do well in Wisconsin. Jonathan Tobin has some polls to the same effect.

The decision by Democrats and their union allies to try and defeat Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker via recall is increasingly looking like a bad bet. The latest poll numbers out of the Badger State show that Walker leads all possible Democratic challengers in the vote that is scheduled for June 5.  The best showing of the four Democrats in the race was from Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who trailed Walker 50-45 percent. Walker bests Kathleen Falk by seven points and both Doug La Follette and Kathleen Vinehout by ten points. The Public Policy Polling survey conducted for the Daily Kos also showed that while Wisconsin voters are nearly evenly split about Walker’s job performance, 51 percent approve of him.

By bowing to the dictates of an angry labor union movement and pushing for a recall, Democrats gambled that they could knock off Walker and set the stage for a reversal of the 2010 Republican tidal wave that swept the governor and a GOP legislative majority into office. But if they fail in June, it will not only encourage Republicans to think they might steal the state from President Obama in November, they will have immeasurably strengthened Walker.

In the last two months, Ford sold exactly none of the electric Focus. None. Story from Detroit News.

Electric vehicle sales have been slow out of the box, despite marketing hype, government incentives and the hopes of green car advocates.

Total sales last year were 17,425, which is less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. car and light truck market.

Nonetheless, automakers show no signs of pulling back their multibillion-dollar bets: They need electric cars to meet tough new fuel-efficiency standards. About a dozen new plug-ins and fully electric cars will go on sale in the next year. …

WSJ article tells the real cost of batteries for electric cars.

One of the auto industry’s most closely guarded secrets—the enormous cost of batteries for electric cars—has spilled out.

Speaking at a forum on green technology on Monday, Ford Motor Co. F -1.01%Chief Executive Alan Mulally indicated battery packs for the company’s Focus electric car costs between $12,000 and $15,000 apiece.

“When you move into an all-electric vehicle, the battery size moves up to around 23 kilowatt hours, [and] it weighs around 600 to 700 pounds,” Mr. Mulally said at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference in California.

“They’re around $12,000 to $15,000 [a battery]” for a type of car that normally sells for about $22,000, he continued, referring to the price of a gasoline-powered Focus. “So, you can see why the economics are what they are.”  …

A good start to the humor section is having David Harsanyi finding Barney Frank quoting Frederick Hayek. It is out of context of course, but it is still The Road to Serfdom in Barney’s hands; wish he would read it and could understand.

… It’s nice, if not a bit odd, that Frank just happens to have a copy of Road to Serfdom within reach and that he just happens to open it to the page that features an out-of-context position that caters so neatly to his imaginary analysis of Tea Party conservatives. Hayek is good for “these purposes” — as in the purpose of reinforcing perceptions that New York readers have about these progress-impeding bible thumpers in far off lands.

Well, here’s a bit more of that Hayek’s quote: “In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other.”

One could argue that much of the legislation Frank has backed is neither intelligently designed nor continuously adjusting — as much as it is continually growing and deliberately interfering. I’m no Hayek scholar, of course, but in this quote, the (in)famous Austrian economist seems to be talking about a legal framework that allows for peaceful trade, not an assertive government that creates fabricated marketplaces, restricts trade so environmentalists can feel good about themselves, uses taxation as a tool of “fairness,” etc …

And as Brian Doherty points out, “Yes, F.A. Hayek is not an anarchist.”

But here’s Frank’s (and Obama’s and Krugman’s and …) formulation: cutting a dollar from the federal budget is unfairly enriching the wealthy, deregulation is unfairly enriching the wealthy, opposition to regulation that does not yet even exist means you’re unfairly enriching the wealthy and doing nothing at the same time. …

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Jennifer Rubin posts on how good Romney’s prospects are for 270 electoral votes. Pickerhead thinks if Obama continues to sink in the polls, we can expect him to dump Biden and put Hillary on the ticket.

The electoral map reveals how perilous is President Obama’s grip on the White House. Let’s start, as RealClearPolitics does, with a base of 170 electoral votes for Mitt Romney. It’s hard to imagine that Obama could win any of even the less-red states that comprise that batch (e.g. Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Montana). To get 100 more and seize the presidency, Romney only needs some states that routinely went Republican before the 2008 race (Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia) and needs to hold on to a few that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) managed to win (Arizona, Missouri). This gets Romney to 273.

In other words, Romney doesn’t need to win (but he might) in New Hampshire or New Mexico. He would love to, but isn’t required to, break through in states like Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin or Michigan. (The first and last would seem the most likely.)

It may come as a shock to liberals when you break it down by the only measure that matters (electoral votes), but Romney can do worse that George W. Bush did in 2004 (when he won Iowa and New Mexico) and still win the White House. …

Peter Schiff worked his way to commenting on the president’s legal scholarship.

Last  week, responding to President Obama’s latest populist assault on the wealthy, I issued a commentary in which I explained why his ideas about American economic history were fundamentally flawed. As dangerous and erroneous as those views are, at least I can cut the President some slack for commenting on a subject in which he really has no basis for expertise. Hailing from academia and local community organizing, Barack Obama likely did not spend huge amounts of time boning up on economic history. However, there are other subjects where he should find firmer footing. Constitutional law certainly comes to mind. After all, Obama rose to national prominence based on his status as a legal scholar.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He went on to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, one of the top ranked schools in the country.

Based on these achievements, it is simply stunning that he made so many fundamental errors last week in his analysis of the Supreme Court’s review of his sweeping health care legislation. Not only did he make grossly inaccurate statements with regards to the health care legislation, and the history of Supreme Court decisions that relate to it, but he also showed little understanding of the very purpose that the Court serves within the constitutional framework of the U.S. government.  These remarks either indicate that a Harvard degree isn’t worth the paper it’s written on or that there is nothing Obama won’t say to advance his political agenda.

In his apparently off-the-cuff remarks he stated that “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what will be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Before even turning to the more nuanced parts of that statement, I would ask the President what he considers to be a “strong majority?” His health care legislation (dubbed “Obamacare” by Republicans), passed the House of Representatives in March 2010 on a nearly party line vote of 220-215 (some would call this result “a squeaker.”) What’s more, just six months later, the slim majority that voted to pass the legislation was voted out of existence. Not only would the law stand no chance of passage in the current Congress, the majority of Americans still show misgivings about the expansion of federal power that the law involves.  So much for a groundswell of national support. But that’s just the appetizer. …

And Peter Ferrara notes the community organizer’s understanding of taxation.

President Obama has a community organizer understanding of America’s taxes. His rhetoric doesn’t recognize that under our tax system the earnings from capital investment are taxed not once, but multiple times.

First, by the corporate income tax, then again by the individual income tax through the tax on dividends, then if you sell the capital investment, through the capital gains tax, then when you die, by the death tax. When he complains that the rich are not paying their fair share, he is just looking at the rate on any one of these taxes, and not considering all of the others. So he wants to raise them all for those making over $1 million per year to what he considers the tax rate paid by the middle class, which he calls the Buffett rule.

As a result, Obama would increase the top capital gains tax rate by 100%, increase the top tax rate on dividends by 100%, increase the top two income tax rates by nearly 20%, and increase the death tax rate by nearly 60%, while the corporate tax rate remains the highest in the industrialized world. The capital gains tax rate under the Buffett Rule would be the fourth highest among OECD nations, as the Wall Street Journal noted on Wednesday.

The Heritage Foundation explained it like this on Wednesday. The taxation of capital is like a trip on a toll road, where you have to pay $3.50 to get on the road, then $3.50 at a toll booth on the road, then a $1.50 toll to get off the road. Obama’s understanding of the tax code is like saying the toll for this trip is $1.50, which is somehow unfair to those who take the bus on the same route for a $3.50 total fare (assume the bus is exempt from the tolls). So he thinks the toll to get off the road should be $3.50 as well.

But Warren Buffett is more than happy with Obama’s proposals. That’s because his Berkshire Hathaway is effectively the largest tax shelter in the nation, partially shielding its investors precisely from the multiple taxation of capital. So raising tax rates sharply to make that multiple taxation far worse will just mean more customers for him. Buffett’s company is like a subway next to the road that only charges $1.50 total fare. …

WaPo OpEd calling for $10 million loans for everyone shows how ridiculous our situation has become.

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.

For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.

So why not let everyone participate?

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

Think of what we can do with all that money. We can pay off our underwater mortgages and replenish our retirement accounts without spending one day schlepping into the office. With a few quick keystrokes, we’ll be golden for the next 10 years.

Of course, we will have to persuade Congress to pass a law authorizing all this Fed lending, but that shouldn’t be hard. Congress is really good at spending money, so long as lawmakers don’t have to come up with a way to pay for it. …

Even the NY Times understands we’re heading for serious problems.

ON Jan. 1 of next year, the federal tax bill for a typical middle-class household — making in the neighborhood of $50,000 — is scheduled to rise by about $1,750. This increase, which would come from the expiration of both the Bush tax cuts and the Obama stimulus, would follow a decade of little to no income growth for many people. As a result, inflation-adjusted, after-tax income for the median household could fall next year to its 1998 level, in spite of the continuing economic recovery.

The middle-class tax increase is just the beginning of budget changes set to take effect at the start of 2013. Poor families would see their taxes rise somewhat, too. Total federal taxes for top-earning families would rise by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Spending cuts would also take effect, squeezing domestic programs — education, transportation, scientific research — and the military.

All in all, the end of 2012 will be unlike any other time in memory for the federal government.

The tax increases and spending cuts are the result of Washington’s having previously kicked the can down the road, to use a phrase that is popular here. Rather than pass a plan to cut the deficit, policy makers have put off tough decisions. With the Bush tax cuts, lawmakers deliberately made them temporary, to avoid running afoul of budget rules intended to hold down the deficit.

Not surprisingly, leaders of both parties now say they are opposed to letting the changes happen on Jan. 1. Economists are also frightened of what such a sharp shift in government policy might do to a still fragile economy. Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has referred to the various expirations as “a massive fiscal cliff.” Congressional aides, quoted in The Washington Post, call it “taxmageddon.”

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Peter Wehner says the administration is running on empty.

Everyone from President Obama to Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to Politico’s Jim VandeHei, agree that the so-called Buffett Rule is a gimmick that has almost no bearing on the budget deficit. And for good reason. The Treasury Department confirms that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5 percent of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and, over the next decade, 0.1 percent of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend (for more, see here). By one estimate, the “Buffett Rule” would cover 17 days of the president’s next decade of deficits. So it’s not, in any sense, a serious or meaningful proposal. And yet it has, as the New York Times reports, become a “centerpiece” of the Obama re-election campaign.

So there you have it. The Obama presidency has reached the point where a policy that virtually everyone (including the president) concedes is a gimmick is now a centerpiece of Obama’s campaign.

There are many ways to measure the intellectual exhaustion of the Obama presidency. This isn’t a bad place to start.

Andrew Malcolm notices the hyper-partisanship of the president.

Has anyone seen Barack Obama recently?

You know, the optimistic hopeful fellow with the charming smile who promised so many positive things four and five years ago, how he was going to change the harsh, partisan tone of our nation’s capital and bring the country together as its first African American president.

Even allowing for political hyperbole, his empty resume and the invisible witnesses from the past, Obama was such a Real Good Talker that even some who didn’t vote for him still had hope that he could change some things for the better in what seemed a sadly-splintered society.

WTH did that Obama go? Have you listened recently to this Chicago Doppelganger who’s replaced him? This 2012 Obama is strident and mean, even deceitful, divisive, telling half-truths after half-truths. He’s using Air Force One as his personal Brinks truck with wings to collect cash all over the country, disguising the trips as official.

He tries to intimidate the Supreme Court, an equal branch of government, when its thinking might stray from his. He distorts history, and if no one calls him, then it’s true. If he’s caught, this Obama says you obviously mis-heard. Because, as everyone knows, he could never mis-speak.

The economy, like everything else adverse, is someone else’s fault. But if only we borrowed and spent a trillion dollars, unemployment would stay beneath 8%, Obama promised. It soared far above. It’s still above. No apology. No acknowledgment. Now, he hails any dip as proof of progress when, in fact, it comes because so many just give up seeking work. …

Charles Krauthammer goes after the “Buffett Rule.”

… As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again this week. “It will help us close our deficit.” Does he really think we’re that stupid?

Hence the fallback: The Buffett Rule is a first step in tax reform. On the contrary. It’s a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn’t touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to. The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with reelection.

As such, it’s clever. It deftly channels the sentiment underlying Occupy Wall Street (original version, before its slovenly, whiny, aggressive weirdness made it politically toxic). It perfectly pits the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Indeed, it is OWS translated into legislation, something the actual occupiers never had the wit to come up with.

Clever politics, but in terms of economics, it’s worse than useless. It’s counterproductive. The reason Buffett and Mitt Romney pay roughly 15 percent in taxes is that their income is principally capital gains. The Buffett Rule is, in fact, a disguised tax hike on capital gains. But Obama prefers to present it as just an alternative minimum tax because 50 years of economic history show that raising the capital gains tax backfires: It reduces federal revenue, while lowering the tax raises revenue.

No matter. Obama had famously said in 2008 that even if that’s the case, he’d still raise the capital gains tax — for the sake of fairness. …

Mark Steyn too.

… Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes. Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden? As the Great Magician would say, pick a number, any number. Sorry, you’re wrong. Whatever you’re willing to bear, he’s got more lined up for you.

Even if you’re absolved from federal income tax, you, too, require enough people willing to keep the racket going, and America is already pushing forward into territory the rest of the developed world is steering well clear of. On April Fools’ Day, Japan and the United Kingdom both cut their corporate tax rates, leaving the United States even more of an outlier, with the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world: The top rate of federal corporate tax in the US is 35 percent. It’s 15 percent in Canada. Which is next door.

Well, who cares about corporations? Only out-of-touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who – hmm, let’s see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat – put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That’s where your gran’ma will be under the Republicans’ plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt, in what’s generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama’s plan to use the Buffett Rule to “close the deficit” this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.

But Mitt’s not wrong. In the end, a corporation doesn’t pay tax. The marble atrium of Global MegaCorp’s corporate HQ is indifferent to the tax rate; the Articles of Incorporation in the bottom drawer of the chairman’s desk couldn’t care less. Every dollar of “corporate” tax has to be fished out the pocket of a real flesh-and-blood human being, whether shareholder, employee or customer.

And that’s the problem. For what Obama’s spending, there aren’t enough of them, or us, or “the rich” – and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third-wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the Government of the United States, they would blow through it within four-and-a-half days. OK, so who’s the fourth-richest guy? He’s French. And the fifth guy’s a Spaniard. No. 6 six is Larry Ellison. He’s American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States Government going for a week. …

Daniel Henninger gives the background for the attacks on Paul Ryan. 

With the presidential battle begun, the Obama campaign has revived the Cold War nuclear strategy of launch on warning. At any suggestion that a conservative idea might be threatening its ideological fortress, the American left now launches ICBMs of rhetorical destruction.

So it was after the Supreme Court’s hearings on the Obama Affordable Care Act, which put in jeopardy the federal command to buy health insurance. After the president green-flagged the assault, the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy” was in play. The Roberts Court, wrote one blogger, is “on trial.”

On current course, House GOP Budget Chairman Paul Ryan himself may exhaust their entire thermonuclear arsenal before November. Once again, the Campaigner in Chief threw the switch himself, calling the Ryan House budget “social Darwinism,” “a Trojan horse” and “antithetical to our entire history.” Rev. Samuel Rodriquez of the Hispanic Evangelical Association said the poor would be “budget-war collateral damage.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Ryan pushed back. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said that in fact the Catholic Church’s “social magisterium” had informed his House budget. One goal of that teaching, he said, is to prevent the poor from staying poor. Nor, he added, should individuals become lifelong dependents of their government.

Just as the left thought the regulating reach of the Commerce Clause was beyond serious challenge, it long ago decided that none dare question the moral case for public spending. That social Darwinism speech Barack Obama is giving now in defense of federal programs isn’t merely a public-policy statement. It’s a Democratic encyclical. Paul Ryan’s ideas are worse than wrong. They are heresy. …

A word for the defense of the slimy sleazy John Edwards. This from Jonathan Tobin.

… John Edwards is an easy man to despise. His treatment of his wife and family and friends was awful. But these are private failings. The willingness of the press to avoid coverage of his personal conduct while he was a viable contender for his party’s presidential nomination was the real public scandal here.

There’s no question that Edwards behaved immorally by arranging for two wealthy friends and supporters to provide money for his mistress so his wife wouldn’t discover his affair. But the money given to Rielle Hunter, the equally sleazy campaign videographer who gave birth to Edwards’ child, was not a crime in the sense of the word that we normally use when discussing the court system. Gift taxes were paid on the money that was not funneled through Edwards’ presidential campaign accounts. The government’s attempt to treat this arrangement as an illegal campaign contribution for which he can be sent to jail for decades is an unprecedented attempt to expand the scope of laws that already require candidates to hire lawyers just to understand.

While the Justice Department will attempt to treat this case as the unraveling of a criminal conspiracy, what they are really doing is capitalizing on a tabloid scandal. The only reason Edwards is on trial is because he is a rich, famous and extremely unpopular person. Ambitious prosecutors believe they can convince a jury that is likely to view Edwards with as much disdain as the rest of the country that because his behavior was wrong and money was involved, that it was somehow a criminal affair.

What they are doing here is a classic case of prosecutorial overreach in which the government attempts to criminalize conduct that is worthy of censure but doesn’t actually constitute a violation of the law. Even worse, by expanding the reach of campaign finance laws, a guilty verdict against Edwards would strengthen the ability of the government to criminalize virtually any aspect of a candidate’s life. In the hands of unscrupulous officials, these laws could become a weapon to use against political enemies in a manner that could place even the most ethical politicians in the dock. Rather than give the government more power over this sphere, we need to pare back the byzantine maze of regulations.

John Edwards may well be the epitome of all that is wrong with American politics. But his prosecution symbolizes everything that is corrupt about the justice system.

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm. 

Fallon: Harvard Law School will soon offer a class called, ‘Understanding Obama.’ While Barnum & Bailey Clown College will offer a class called, ‘Understanding Biden.’

Conan: Rick Santorum has returned to his previous job: Traveling to small towns across America and forcing them to outlaw dancing.

Leno: The New York Daily News says some airline passengers recently found maggots in an in-flight snack mix. How amazing is that? An airline still serving snacks.

Fallon: Joe Biden has a new Twitter account for campaign trail updates. His most recent update: ‘They still won’t let me on the campaign trail.’

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Jennifer Rubin interviews Ed Gillespie who recently signed on with the Romney team.

I caught up with the newest addition to the Mitt Romney campaign, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. He was on the road, but in a series of e-mail exchanges he gave Right Turn his take on the race. He is joining the campaign as a senior adviser, although he’s volunteering his time.

His experience in helping Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell win in a landslide may be more useful than he ever imagined. He tells me, “Bob McDonnell showed that a principled conservative can win big in a swing state, and he did it by talking about not only the features of conservative policies but the benefits. In other words, he didn’t just talk about keeping taxes low, he said that would help create jobs and enable people to decide for themselves how best to spend their hard earned money. We called it ‘finishing the sentence,’ and there is a valuable lesson in Gov. McDonnell’s success.”

Although Gillespie didn’t mention it, McDonnell also avoided getting bogged down in social issues in a race in which Democrats strained to raise wedge issues. That’s a wise pattern for Romney to follow as well.

Unlike President Obama, who seems determined to veer left, Gillespie has his eye on critical independent voters. …

Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost looks carefully at polls and sees Obama on thin ice.

Yesterday, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll seemed to confirm the meme that Barack Obama is pummeling Mitt Romney among women, helping the former open up a 7-point lead in the general election horse race.

What to make of this?

Well, for starters, the poll has an inexplicably large Democratic advantage – the party breakdown in the poll is 34 percent Democratic, 23 percent Republican, and 34 percent independent. As a point of historical comparison, the party spread in four of the last five elections since 2002 has basically been an even split between the two sides. In 2008, a “perfect storm” of bad news for the GOP, the party ID advantage was “only” +7. So, a Democratic advantage of +11 is an unjustifiable number, at least in terms of what the electorate is thinking.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey did a solid job of dressing down the pollsters for such an absurd Democratic skew, and I encourage you to read his response carefully. I’ll just add that I am always amused when pollsters find an advantage for Democratic candidates that is less than their Democratic oversample. In this case, ABC News/WaPo finds Obama’s job approval at +5 (50 percent approve to 45 percent disapprove), but that is not nearly so impressive in a D+11 sample!

Polls like this are useful, however, in a kind of “Nixon goes to China” sense. Put another way, if Democrats look weak in polls that are so ridiculously pro-Democratic, you know they are in trouble. …

How’s things in Wisconsin? This vote will be in a few months and might be a harbinger of things to come in November. Neal Boortz says Scott Walker can relax.  

Well, I think he can relax.  Pretty sure, actually.  

Governor Scott Walker is facing a recall election in Wisconsin as a result of a pretty impressive union petition drive.  Unions aren’t happy about losing some of their collective bargaining rights and actually having to pony up almost as much as private sector workers for their health insurance.  Oh! The humanity!  But I’m going on record here (oh yeah, Boortz on the record; now THAT’S news) saying that Scott Walker will win, as will the people of Wisconsin.

You’re right in wanting a little analysis here to go along with my prediction, and I’m only happy to oblige.  The problem the Wisconsin unions have in bringing about a successful recall election is rooted in the very way they managed to get enough petitions signed to bring about the election in the first place.  It’s also the reason unions want their unionization-by-intimidation (card check) law so badly.  Fact is, the union activists collected a good number of those signatures on those petitions through intimidation — and those who were intimidated can’t wait to express their true feelings on election day. 

To expand on the reason Walker has nothing to worry about, let’s focus on the methodology behind union elections and labor leaders’ dreams of card check …

Pickerhead was hoping Santorum would hang around long enough to get beat in Pennsylvania. Then we would be spared anymore of him. Toby Harnden notes his graceless departure.

Rick Santorum has bowed to reality by suspending his long-shot presidential bid. He had no hope of overhauling Mitt Romney’s delegate lead and the general election campaign against President Barack Obama had effectively already begun.

In dropping out, Santorum avoided the very real prospect of losing his home state of Pennsylvania, a loss which, combined with his 18-point Senate re-election loss there in 2006, would have been devastating to his future national prospects. Having won 11 states, Santorum had the opportunity to withdraw graciously, congratulate Mitt Romney – now his party’s presumptive nominee – and call for Republican unity in working to defeat President Barack Obama in November. A full endorsement was not necessary – Hillary Clinton did not immediately back Obama in 2008 – but an acknowledgement that Romney was the victor would have been an important first step towards party healing after a bruising primary battle.

Instead, Santorum blew it. His rambling 14-minute speech in Gettysburg, site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, barely mentioned Obama or the economy. …

We are not used to sensible items coming out of the World Bank, but City Journal has found a Bank report showing how free markets have created wealth in the poorest parts of the world.

The most significant events often escape media attention. How many would know from reading their daily newspaper or watching television that we live in an unprecedented economic period when the number of people living in extreme poverty is declining fast? According to a just-published World Bank report, the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 per day—or its local equivalent—has plummeted from 52 percent of the global population in 1981 to 22 percent in 2008. The World Bank doesn’t provide more recent data, but other indices show that the 2008 financial crisis did not interrupt this trend. For millions of households, crossing the symbolic $1.25 threshold means leaving destitution behind and moving toward a more dignified life—no trivial achievement. Moreover, this escape from poverty happens while the global population continues to grow. Doomsday prophets who warned about a ticking “population bomb” have not been vindicated, to say the least. Global warming messiahs, beware: human ingenuity proves able to cope with the predicaments of Mother Nature.

Thirty years ago, half of the planet lived in utter misery, and many commentators argued that poverty was destiny. At best, most pundits conceded that pockets of poverty could be alleviated through international aid. Only a handful of economists begged to differ: Theodor Schultz, Milton Friedman, and Peter Bauer were the mavericks advocating free-market policies for every nation as the way out of poverty. They have been proven right. China’s economy has been growing since the mid-1980s—when Deng Xiaoping, its de facto leader, abandoned central planning, opened the borders for foreign investment, and promoted entrepreneurship at home.

In 1991, after the Soviet economic model proved bankrupt, India left behind its socialist ideology, opened its borders to foreign competition, and deregulated its economy. The economies of the two most populous countries on earth have grown without interruption ever since. Remember, too, that South Korea and Taiwan understood the virtues of free markets long before China or India discovered them. Many smaller countries, across a huge range of cultures, soon followed suit. African governments, too, converted to free-market economics with significant results— Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, among others. …

Christopher Booker says the magazine Nature is one of the chief propagandists for the fading global warming theories.

Since the fading belief that the world is in the grip of runaway man-made global warming still threatens us with the biggest bill in history, it is rather important to know how far we can trust the science which is said to support that belief. One of the most vociferous cheerleaders in the cause has been the Nature, which calls itself “the world’s most prestigious weekly journal of science”.

Whenever some landmark event in the story is approaching – such as a world climate conference or a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – Nature can be relied on to come up with a new paper purporting to refute one of the more embarrassing objections to the orthodox theory. However thoroughly such a paper is then dismantled by expert critics, it will remain established as a pillar of the orthodoxy.

In 1996, as the Kyoto treaty approached, it was a paper claiming to show how the “fingerprint” of warming – the part of the atmosphere where it was most obvious – confirmed that it must be due to human activity. Two scientists promptly explained how the data showed precisely the opposite – warming that was man-made should be greatest in the upper troposphere and not, as it actually is, on the earth’s surface. The chief author of that bid to defend the orthodoxy was Ben Santer. It was his last-minute rewriting of a key passage in the IPCC’s second report – contradicting the text agreed by all the scientists responsible – that provoked the IPCC’s first real scandal. Frederick Seitz, the eminent US physicist who exposed this flagrant breach of the rules, described it as the most “disturbing corruption of the peer-review process” he had come across in all his 60 years as a scientist. …

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We have been hearing about the “radical” Ryan budget. Would you believe it is 46% higher, in real terms, than Clinton’s last budget? Investors.com has the story. Yes, we ran this last week. It is worth repeating.

Even in a city known for hyperbole, the attacks by Democrats on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan stand out.

It’s “bad news in every single direction,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and “extreme and divisive,” according to Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the budget is “not a statement of our national values,” and her second in command, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, claimed the plan “represents a bleak future for America.”

President Obama went furthest, saying in a speech this week that Ryan’s “draconian cuts” would “impose a radical vision on our country” and that it was “antithetical to our entire history.” It is “so far to the right,” he said, “that it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.”

So does Ryan’s budget proposal live up to this radical billing?

Not at all. That is, not unless you’d call Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, an even more extreme radical.

Under Ryan’s plan, the federal government would be 46% bigger in real terms than it was in 2000, which was President Clinton’s last year in office.

Neal Boortz details the instructions given to the media by the president.

Now, is Paul Ryan’s plan perfect?  Absolutely not.  It doesn’t cut spending enough.  It doesn’t call for the elimination of the Department of Education.  It doesn’t call for severely reigning in the EPA.  Ryan’s plan is still, in a sense, a big government plan … but it provides for smaller, big government.  Yet Obama labels this as “radical” and then has the audacity to scold his very own ObamaMedia for not giving him more credit in this battle.  He says …

“I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing that they are equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general.  This is not a situation where there is equivalence.”

Are you hearing this?  Obama is telling the ObamaMedia that they are not understanding that this budget impasse is not his fault.  Nope.  …  In this case, disagreement is because the Republicans are being unreasonable, unlike Dear Ruler.  He continues …

“So, as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember, the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we’d been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions.  What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party. That’s certainly true with the budget.”

Now we get it!  Obama is a reasonable man who is not saying anything different than he has said from the beginning.  The Republicans, however, are the ones who have become more radical over the years.  I, the great and powerful Obama, am a centrist, while the Republicans are the radical extremists.  Got it? 

Debra Saunders puts the lie to the claim Obama is a centrist. 

President Obama chastised the media last week. “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” the president chided those attending the American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon.

Obama also claimed that he holds positions that 20 or 15 years ago “would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party.” Oh, and Ronald Reagan “could not get through a Republican primary today.”

Yet many in the media don’t ask: Where are the moderate Democrats?

When the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in Obamacare, court observers expect all four U.S. Supreme Court justices appointed by Democrats to back Obama. If any justices depart from their ideology, it will be Justice Anthony Kennedy (appointed by Reagan) and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts.

So how did Obama vote on Roberts after President George W. Bush nominated him to the big bench in 2005? The Senate approved Roberts in a 78-22 vote. Good liberals like Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who no longer serve in the Senate, were among the 22 Democrats who supported Roberts. Other yes votes – Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman – probably can’t win and aren’t running for re-election.

Obama voted no on Roberts. Vice President Joe Biden also voted no. In 2006, when the Senate approved Justice Samuel Alito 72-25, Obama and Biden voted against him, too. The Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., voted against Roberts and Alito. …

Karl Rove says we can count on the president taking the low road.

… He will distort beyond recognition his opponent’s arguments. For example, he explained to news executives at the AP that Republicans want to “convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts—especially for the wealthy.” Actually, no one has suggested that.

No honest differences are possible with Mr. Obama. He will impugn the motives of any who disagree with him. As he told the AP, his opponents want to “let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity.” His agenda “isn’t a partisan feeling . . . [it]isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea. It’s patriotism.” To disagree with him is unpatriotic. That’s to be expected from Republicans, whom Mr. Obama says stand for “thinly veiled social Darwinism . . . [that is] antithetical to our entire history.”

Mr. Obama will build entire edifices on top of one fake premise, all dressed up in one big phony assumption. Take the House GOP budget plan. It increases federal outlays from roughly $3.6 trillion this year to nearly $4.9 trillion in 2022. In the AP speech the president called this a “cut” because he wants to increase spending to $5.8 trillion in 2022.

He warned that if the GOP’s “cuts . . . were to be spread out evenly across the budget,” then “Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS” research would be slashed, 10 million college students denied assistance, and “thousands” of researchers and teachers “could lose their jobs.” But Republicans don’t cut across the board. Instead, their focus is on waste, duplication, programs that do not work, and on reform.

As he did Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University, Mr. Obama will attack “these same trickle-down theories” about taxes that almost led to “a second Great Depression.” But if the Bush tax cuts were so evil, why didn’t Mr. Obama repeal them during his first two years, when his party controlled both houses of Congress? Instead, in December 2010 Mr. Obama agreed to extend them for two more years. …

The “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life” kerfuffle gets Jennifer Rubin’s treatment.

Overnight President Obama’s faux “war on women” attack on Mitt Romney blew up in his face. It is fitting that a gimmick should boomerang this quickly and this severely, maybe giving Romney the first big break of the race.

By now you’ve probably heard that Hilary Rosen, a sometime White House adviser and frequent visitor, on CNN attacked the most popular person in the campaign, Ann Romney, with a cartoon version of left-leaning feminism, declaring that the mother of five who has battle multiple sclerosis and cancer “never worked a day in her life.” (Query why the conservative on the panel sat there like a lump on the log. Maybe a few more conservative women on CNN would balance the coverage. He claims to have “missed it.” Indeed.) No, this really happened. Honest. But it didn’t stop. Rosen took to Twitter to dig her hole deeper and deeper, never apologizing. (At this point Republicans should be humming Dayenu.)

But it didn’t end there. Obama political hacks David Axelrod and Jim Messina took to Twitter to condemn the remarks and to call on Rosen to apologize, thereby making Rosen seem closer to the president’s campaign (and the campaign more responsible for her gaffe than might otherwise be the case). And — yup — it didn’t end there. Ann Romney now is on Twitter and got a gazillion followers in just hours. Her first tweet was a keeper: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”

Needless to say, the “war on women” has taken on a whole new tone. Let’s count the ways this is just awful for Obama and/or Democrats more generally. There are a few, so find a comfortable seat.

First, Obama, as a conservative pundit put it, just went a long way toward solidifying Romney’s base, especially among social conservatives who loathe elites who look down on stay-at-home moms.

Second, it feeds into the cliche that liberals love humanity but hate people. In this case they love womanhood but treat their own employees and conservative women like dirt. …

This is ironic. Alana Goodman says Hillary Rosen was hired to get Debbie WasserFace to tone down her combativeness.

On “Anderson Cooper 360? last night, Hilary Rosen slammed Ann Romney for “never actually work[ing] a day in her life.” Within two hours, both David Axelrod and Obama campaign manager Jim Messina were scrambling to distance themselves from Rosen’s comments on Twitter.

Why is the Obama campaign so concerned? Apparently Rosen was enlisted in February to advise Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on public relations (h/t Jim Geraghty’s invaluable Morning Jolt). The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 16 that Rosen was brought on to “tone down” DWS’s image:

Obama advisers have occasionally told [Wasserman Schultz] to “tone it down” and “back off a smidgen,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz says. She agreed with them to enlist two seasoned Democratic female pros, Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen, to begin giving her occasional political advice and media training, advisers say. “I’m glad to get constructive criticism,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz says. …

You know things aren’t going well for Obama, when Dana Milbank thinks the “Buffett Rule” is a gimmick.

President Obama admits it: His proposed “Buffett Rule” tax on millionaires is a gimmick.

“There are others who are saying: ‘Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit,’ ” Obama declared Wednesday. “Well, I agree.”

Actually, the gimmick was apparent even without the president’s acknowledgment. He gave his remarks in a room in the White House complex adorned with campaign-style photos of his factory tours. On stage with him were eight props: four millionaires, each paired with a middle-class assistant. The octet smiled and nodded so much as Obama made his case that it appeared the president was sharing the stage with eight bobbleheads.

And if that’s not enough evidence of gimmickry, after his speech Obama’s reelection campaign unveiled an online tax calculator “to see how your tax rate stacks up against Mitt Romney’s — and then see what the Buffett Rule would do.”

Obama argued that his plan to make sure that those earning north of $1 million a year don’t pay a lower tax rate than average Americans — although gimmicky and insufficient — is an advance. “The notion that it doesn’t solve the entire problem doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it at all,” he explained.

That’s true, to a point. But Obama’s claim that the Buffett Rule “is something that will get us moving in the right direction toward fairness” would be more convincing if he took other steps in that direction, too.

Three years into his presidency, Obama has not introduced a plan for comprehensive tax reform — arguably the most important vehicle for fixing the nation’s finances and boosting long-term economic growth. …

Good News! WSJ says there are twice as many Emperor Penguins as previously thought. The next question is how come we didn’t know this before? If we have just come to our senses on the penguin census, what else don’t we know?

Antarctica has twice as many emperor penguins as scientists had thought, according to a new study using satellite imagery in the first comprehensive survey of one of the world’s most iconic birds.

British and U.S. geospatial mapping experts reported Friday in the journal PLoS One that they had counted 595,000 emperor penguins living in 46 colonies along the coast of Antarctica, compared with previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000 penguins based on surveys of just five colonies. The researchers also discovered four previously unknown emperor-penguin colonies and confirmed the location of three others.

Researchers are using satellite data to track penguins and seals across the coldest region on earth without disturbing them – and without leaving home. WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports.(Originally published 04/2010).

“It is good news from a conservation point of view,” said geographer Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, who led the penguin satellite census. “This is the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.”

Although all of Antarctica’s wildlife is protected by international treaty, the emperor penguins are not an officially endangered species. But they are considered a bellwether of any future climate changes in Antarctica because their icy habitat is so sensitive to rising temperatures. …

The humor section starts with Joe Biden who did not get the memo. This from The Corner.

This week, Hilary Rosen, who is to communications what Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (We know him as Baghdad Bob) was to information, said this:

“Can we just get rid of this word, “war on women”? The Obama campaign does not use it, President Obama does not use it — this is something that the Republicans are accusing people of using, but they’re actually the ones spreading it.”

Although a huge number of Democrats have used the phrase — Jim Geraghty has compiled an excellent list — Rosen was technically correct that the Obama team hadn’t used it.

Until yesterday, that is. Enter Joe Biden, right on cue:

Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday he believes the right’s “war on women is real” and could be particularly salient during the multiple Supreme Court appointments he expects to come during the next president’s term.

“I think the war on women is real,” Biden said in an interview he sat for with MSNBC’s Ed Schultz as part of a campaign trip to New Hampshire to talk up the Buffett rule. “And, look, I tell you where it’s going to intensify: The next president of the United States is going to get to name one and possibly two or more members of the Supreme Court.”

As Jonah Goldberg brilliantly chronicles in the latest issue of National Review, Biden can pretty much always be relied upon to ruin everything. Still, the second part of his speech gives an insight into one of the framing tactics the Obama administration is going to employ in the run-up to November, especially if Obamacare is struck down.

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We have been hearing about the “radical” Ryan budget. Would you believe it is 46% higher than Clinton’s last budget? Investors.com has the story. 

Even in a city known for hyperbole, the attacks by Democrats on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan stand out.

It’s “bad news in every single direction,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and “extreme and divisive,” according to Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the budget is “not a statement of our national values,” and her second in command, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, claimed the plan “represents a bleak future for America.”

President Obama went furthest, saying in a speech this week that Ryan’s “draconian cuts” would “impose a radical vision on our country” and that it was “antithetical to our entire history.” It is “so far to the right,” he said, “that it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.”

So does Ryan’s budget proposal live up to this radical billing?

Not at all. That is, not unless you’d call Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, an even more extreme radical.

Under Ryan’s plan, the federal government would be 46% bigger in real terms than it was in 2000, which was President Clinton’s last year in office.

Josh Kraushaar says the president’s trash talk could hurt him.

If President Obama loses reelection in November, the seeds of his defeat will have been planted in his fiery, populist campaign kickoff speech at the Associated Press luncheon last week. It was a negative, overly political address at sharp odds with his optimistic 2008 campaign message of hope and change. It seemed petty at times, mocking Mitt Romney for using the word “marvelous” and exaggerating proposed conservative entitlement reforms as “Social Darwinism.” All  of this while giving a supposedly nonpolitical, non-campaign address.

Ideologically, the speech was a throwback to the Democratic rhetoric of decades past. Despite sops to Ronald Reagan, Obama laid out his ideological argument at the outset, stating his “belief that, through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” That’s a far cry from “the era of big government is over” mantra that President Clinton advanced in his reelection campaign.

In one sense, the speech previewed how fiercely the president’s team will be fighting for another term and how nasty the expected contest between Obama and Romney is likely to be. As Obama’s advisers have indicated, the president’s campaign strategy is to portray the opposition as so extreme that voters will hold their noses and vote for the incumbent even if they’re dissatisfied with the country’s direction. To eke out a victory in a slow-growing economy, Obama needs to turn out his base and turn off independents to Romney.

But the president is seriously miscalculating if he believes that the key to winning the hearts and minds of independents is “us-against-them” rhetoric that hails back to a bygone Democratic era. He ably mounted a withering attack on the Republicans’ austerity proposals but offered no alternative vision to deal with the growing debt. When Clinton campaigned for a second term in 1996, he likewise castigated congressional Republicans for proposing entitlement cuts and shutting down the government, but he also championed a just-passed bipartisan welfare-reform law and a balanced budget that reduced the size of government. With Obama’s speech, there was no centrist recalibrating to reassure worried independents that he’s not too ideological; no sugar to sweeten the tough talk.

That’s no trivial concern, according to the results of a poll analyzing the sentiments of the swingiest independents from battleground states, commissioned by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. The survey showed those voters narrowly favoring Obama (44 percent) over Romney (38 percent), and showed the president with respectable overall favorability scores. But it also revealed some red flags that if the campaign continues driving home the “people-versus-the-powerful” message, it could cost the president down the road. While these swing voters still like Obama personally, they are closer to Romney ideologically.

The polling found that a message centered on income inequality was a flop with these swing voters, who said they were much more anxious about rising debt and with regulations and taxes on businesses. …

John Fund details the latest sting by James O’Keefe. This is the one where Eric Holder’s ballot was offered to a John Doe.

Attorney General Eric Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them “unnecessary” and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina, citing the fear they would discriminate against minorities.

I wonder what Holder will think when he learns just how easy it was for someone to be offered his ballot just by mentioning his name in a Washington, D.C., polling place in Tuesday’s primaries.

Holder’s opposition to ID laws comes in spite of the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008, authored by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, that upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s tough ID requirement. When groups sue to block photo-ID laws in court, they can’t seem to produce real-world examples of people who have actually been denied the right to vote. According to opinion polls, over 75 percent of Americans — including majorities of Hispanics and African-Americans — routinely support such laws.

One reason is that people know you can’t function in the modern world without showing ID — you can’t cash a check, travel by plane or even train, or rent a video without being asked for one. In fact, PJ Media recently proved that you can’t even enter the Justice Department in Washington without showing a photo ID. Average voters understand that it’s only common sense to require ID because of how easy it is for people to pretend they are someone else

Filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is on Tuesday when he dispatched an assistant to the Nebraska Avenue polling place in Washington where Attorney General Holder has been registered for the last 29 years. O’Keefe specializes in the same use of hidden cameras that was pioneered by the recently deceased Mike Wallace, who used the technique to devastating effect in exposing fraud in Medicare claims and consumer products on 60 Minutes. O’Keefe’s efforts helped expose the fraud-prone voter-registration group ACORN with his video stings, and has had great success demonstrating this year in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota just how easy it is to obtain a ballot by giving the name of a dead person who is still on the rolls. Indeed, a new study by the Pew Research Center found at least 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote. They aren’t likely to complain if someone votes in their place.

In Washington, it was child’s play for O’Keefe to beat the system. O’Keefe’s assistant used a hidden camera to document his encounter with the election worker at Holder’s polling place: …

As the public safety goobers become more and more adversarial, attempting to cooperate with them comes fraught with more and more risk. Perhaps the safer course is to say nothing. WSJ story on the perils of testifying.

When federal prosecutors can’t muster enough evidence to bring charges against a person suspected of a crime, they can still use a controversial law to get a conviction anyway: They charge the person with lying.

The law against lying—known in legal circles simply as “1001″—makes it a crime to knowingly make a material false statement in matters of federal jurisdiction. Critics across the political spectrum argue that 1001, a widely used statute in the federal criminal code, is open to abuse. It is charged hundreds of times a year, according to court records and interviews with lawyers and legal scholars.

Thanks to a far-reaching federal statute, marine biologist and orca expert Nancy Black is facing a potential 20-year prison sentence for her work. Clare Major reports from Monterey, Calif.

Nancy Black, a marine biologist and operator of whale-watching boats, recently became ensnared by 1001. When one of her boat captains whistled at a humpback whale that approached the boat a few years ago, regulators investigated whether the incident constituted harassment of a whale, which is illegal.

This past January, Ms. Black was charged in the case—not with whale harassment, but with lying about the incident. She also faces a charge of illegally altering a video of the whale encounter, as well as unrelated allegations involving whale blubber. Together, the charges carry up to 20 years in prison.

She denies all wrongdoing, including lying. “I wasn’t charged with anything about the dealings with the humpback,” says Ms. Black, 49 years old. “So why would they charge me with lying about it? It makes no sense.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The law against lying, officially Title 18, section 1001 of the United States Code, is “a bread-and-butter” statute for Justice Department prosecutors, says Thomas O’Brien, the former U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. The law’s breadth makes it useful for nabbing wrongdoers, particularly in cases where suspected crimes are complex and tough to prove, he says. …

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Mark Steyn writes about the latest Exodus.

As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens fire on “the other,” his deeply ingrained racism inflamed by the tide of toxic right-wing hate infecting our public discourse. Alas, in Florida, the angry white male turned out to be a registered Democrat and half Hispanic — or, as the New York Times put it, a “white Hispanic,” a descriptor never applied by its editors to, say, Sonia Sotomayor or Gloria Estefan or indeed any other person living or dead. And in Toulouse the angry white male turned out to be yet another Muhammad.

Oh, well. Better luck next time, although the pickings seem likely to get thinner: Pitch the Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.

The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools, synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all that to the side and consider only the situation in France . . . No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran . . . No, put all that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails . . .

Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about avoiding troubled neighborhoods. . . . The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and patrol units for the first time.”

This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st century. …

Now that the Supreme Court’s polls are up, Ross Kaminsky wants to know if the president thinks the attack worked for him.

On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a survey of likely voters showing that in less than one month the percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court’s job performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an all-time low of 28 percent to a two-and-a-half year high of 41 percent. This time frame includes the Court’s hearings on Obamacare as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to strike down his signature law.

In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the Court is there for, they are more positive about its theoretical and actual function.

In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among Republicans has gone from 29 percent favorable to 54 percent favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren’t on board the Supreme Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn’t give the numbers but says that Democrats’ “views of the court are largely unchanged.”

Most important politically, “among voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties, good or excellent ratings for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now.”

Also among the poll results — and more bad news for Democrats — twice as many Americans believe that the Supreme Court “does not limit the government enough” (30 percent) as those who think it “puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do” (15 percent).

How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President? …

Victor Davis Hanson says the president reveals himself in unscripted moments when there is no teleprompter to guide him.

… His lack of judgment is not evident on the teleprompter, but is only fully illustrated when he is off it and his more extreme ideas are candidly expressed.

All presidents reveal glimpses of themselves through gaffes and off-the-cuff candor. Richard Nixon’s various paranoias were most evident on the secret White House audiotapes. Reagan’s anti-Soviet feelings were behind his open-mike joke  “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When George W. Bush blurted out “Dead or alive” or “Bring ’em on,” the impromptu bombast seemed to reflect his cowboy image.

Such revelations are all the more striking in Obama’s case since rarely has a president’s ideology been so at variance with his public persona. His real views have been gleaned mostly from unguarded moments when he talks confidently without prompts — and therefore sounds conniving and shallow.

We learn about Obama’s views toward Israel not from campaign speeches, in which he soars with platitudes to raise money from the Jewish community, but when he is caught on an open mike with French president Sarkozy rudely ridiculing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, or in a leak about snubbing the Israeli leader at the White House, or in a statement by the Palestinian foreign minister to the effect that administration officials had advised the Palestinian leadership to “sit tight” during the present election year — until Obama no longer need face the electorate and thus its displeasure for forcing concessions upon the Israelis.

For all the talk about the need for federal courts to audit errant state immigration legislation or to strike down the Defense of Marriage law, Obama does not believe in either an inactive or an active judiciary, only in one that parrots his own ideology. When jurists do this, they become sober and judicious; when they might not, then we hear an impromptu screed that Supreme Court justices are “an unelected group of people” who should not “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law” — “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Are we worried about Obama’s naïveté in dealing with the Russians on arms control, short-changing the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, and not quickly dropping the failed reset diplomacy? We should be, but we know that only because we have ignored his scripted rhetoric about Russia and listened instead to his embarrassing gaffe when he was caught on another open mike assuring President Medvedev that after the election our president would be more flexible with Putin, in a fashion that most Americans would find disturbing. ….

Three cheers for Debbie WasserFace. She supported an aide who was embarrassed by a six year old Facebook mistake. Jonathan Tobin has the story.

We don’t often have occasion to say anything complimentary about Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In her designated role as President Obama’s attack dog, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has made a specialty of taking cheap shots at her opponents. When not attempting to demonize Republican positions on the deficit and entitlements, she has even stooped to blame conservatives for the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. But as unfair as she has been to those on the other side of the aisle, that doesn’t justify treating Wasserman Schultz or anyone on her staff in a similar manner. And that is exactly what happened to Danielle Gilbert, a DNC staffer who has been pilloried lately for some silly pictures she posted to her personal Facebook account six years ago when she was in college. But despite reports of pressure from the White House, Wasserman Schultz has refused to dump Gilbert. To that we can only say, good for her.

It is true the picture in which Gilbert is seen kissing money and referring to herself and some friends as “Jewbags” was in poor taste. But the posting by Gilbert, who is the daughter of prominent Jewish contributors to the Obama campaign and now works as the DNC’s outreach liaison to the Jewish community, was a joke and nothing more. …

We found an intelligent discussion about gasoline prices in Mining.com.

Gasoline consumption in the United States has been dropping for years. In the last decade, vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 20%, and the combination of that shift and a weak economy of late has pushed gasoline demand to its lowest level in a decade.

At the same time, US oil production is at its highest level in a decade. Deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and horizontal fracs in the Bakken shale have turned America’s domestic oil production scene around. After 20 years of declining production, US crude output rates started to climb in 2008 and have increased every year since.

With production up and demand down, the basics of supply and demand indicate that oil prices should be falling. Americans should be paying less at the pump.

Instead, the average US price at the pump reached US$3.80 per gallon on March 5, after 27 consecutive days of gains. That’s 26.7¢ above the old record for March 5, set last year. The price of gasoline has climbed 32¢ or 9.3% since February 1; analysts expect prices to continue rising, reaching a national average of something like US$4.25 per gallon.

What gives? Is it all about Iran? Are speculators manipulating the market? Do any politicians have good ideas on how to “fix” the high cost of gasoline? And is there relief on the horizon?

What gives is a combination of forces. Rising tensions in the Middle East are part of the problem, but so are deficiencies in North America’s oil infrastructure that are causing price discrepancies across the nation. Some of the refineries being forced to pay premium prices for oil are shutting down, and that limits gasoline supplies in parts of the country. Speculation is also a factor, as it is an ingrained part of the market, but it is not the driving force behind America’s fuel-price problems.

If you’re wondering, there aren’t any politicians with novel, sound ideas on how to reduce fuel prices. Newt Gingrich’s promise to bring prices below $2.50 a gallon is as attainable as Michelle Bachmann’s plucked-out-of-the-air promise of $2 gasoline.

Thankfully though, there is some relief on the horizon. First, we’ll tackle the issues. Then we’ll outline some developments that should ease the pain. …

Interesting background to the WWII story about the Man Who Never Was. 

It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France. Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.

Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam. …