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Matthew Continetti has an interesting take on the president’s Court attack.

… The strangest moment of the speech was when Obama mocked Romney’s vocabulary. The former Massachusetts governor had correctly called Ryan’s budget “marvelous.” Obama’s brilliant rebuttal: That’s “a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget. (Laughter.) It’s a word you don’t often hear generally. (Laughter.)”

The president’s transparent motive was to suggest that Romney is somehow weird or out of touch for using the m-word. This is an argument likely to thrill the legs of Washington correspondents, who heartily laughed along with the president, but unlikely to provide independent voters with any reason whatsoever to support a second Obama administration.

Are we really to believe that Romney is disqualified from the presidency because of his word choices and support for the only serious plan to restore sustainability to the welfare state while promoting economic growth? What is Obama’s alternative? Never to say “marvelous” in public while raising taxes, foisting an unpopular health plan on a recalcitrant public, empowering an unelected board to set prices for Medicare and Medicaid, and delivering the worst economic recovery in history?

One hopes that when the media inevitably scold Americans for conducting the “most negative campaign ever,” they will acknowledge who, exactly, got the ball rolling. From targeting successful private citizens to claiming falsely that the Ryan plan “ends Medicare” to belittling Romney’s wealth and demeanor, the Obama campaign has signaled that it recognizes the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act of 2009 is not a legislative achievement on which one might base a campaign. Obama’s problem is that with the stimulus a failure, Obamacare on the ropes, Solyndra a national punch line, the national debt exploding, and his only significant proposal an increase in taxes, Lily is all he has.

All these facts will be on display in the fall when Romney debates Obama and (hope springs eternal) Ryan debates Biden. The two sides will spar. One will emerge as serious about the challenges facing the country and the policies necessary to promote freedom and prosperity; the other will be exposed as embittered and clinging to a dilapidated welfare state. The truth will be there for all to see. And it will be marvelous.

Robert Samuelson with a history of social security mission creep.

Would Franklin Roosevelt approve of Social Security? The question seems absurd. After all, Social Security is considered the New Deal’s signature achievement. It distributes nearly $800 billion a year to 56 million retirees, survivors and disabled beneficiaries. On average, retired workers and spouses receive $1,839 a month — money vital to the well-being of millions. Roosevelt would surely be proud of this, and yet he might also have reservations. Social Security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed.

It has become what was then called “the dole” and is now known as “welfare.” This forgotten history clarifies why America’s budget problems are so intractable.

When Roosevelt proposed Social Security in 1935, he envisioned a contributory pension plan. Workers’ payroll taxes (“contributions”) would be saved and used to pay their retirement benefits. Initially, before workers had time to pay into the system, there would be temporary subsidies. But Roosevelt rejected Social Security as a “pay-as-you-go” system that channeled the taxes of today’s workers to pay today’s retirees. That, he believed, would saddle future generations with huge debts — or higher taxes — as the number of retirees expanded.

Discovering that the original draft wasn’t a contributory pension, Roosevelt ordered it rewritten and complained to Frances Perkins, his labor secretary: “This is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress .?.?. to meet.”

But Roosevelt’s vision didn’t prevail. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Congress gradually switched Social Security to a pay-as-you-go system. Interestingly, a coalition of liberals and conservatives pushed the change. Liberals wanted higher benefits, which — with few retirees then — existing taxes could support. Conservatives disliked the huge surpluses the government would accumulate under a contributory plan.

All this is well-told in Sylvester Schieber’s “The Predictable Surprise: The Unraveling of the U.S. Retirement System.”  …

Short item from David Harsanyi on the real victims of deficits and inflation. Of course, it is the very people the bien pensants claim to help.

Why does Paul Krugman, a guy who fashions himself guardian of the working class and poor, feel so comfortable advocating for the devaluing of all our savings and retirement accounts? Why does he want to see a spike in food, clothing and fuel costs? (Now, if we employed his writing style, we could simply accuse him of hating the poor.)  

In the New York Times today, he tells us he fears that Republican might be bullying Ben Bernanke into bad policy. What we need, the Nobel winner explains, is for the Fed to induce more inflation.

The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Hey, central banks have injected almost $7 trillion into the economy. So stingy. But you know the drill: a “modest” increase in inflation would help the nation ease its debt obligations by devaluing tomorrow’s dollar against the one (or 15 trillion) that was borrowed yesterday. There is no other way out of this mess, they say. And if you trust that the Fed can control inflation this all might sound like a brilliant plan to you.

Krugman argues that the Fed will “choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery.” I’ll let economists argue over the upside and downside of inflation. But you’ll note that in today’s world, “We need more inflation” or “Don’t Worry About Deficit That Will Heal Itself” are the positions of serious people, while advocating for spending cuts or a sound dollar is considered deeply radical and/or immoral. For Krugman, Paul Ryan’s budget was a set of “inconceivably cruel priorities” (inconceivably!) and even fans of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan (as the president pretends to be) are members of a “cult“.

For any economist — considering how often they are spectacularly wrong — to be so dogmatic on something so enigmatic is pretty amazing. Especially when you consider inflation’s potential consequences. Another problem for Krugman is that mere non-wonks (and investors) are increasingly concerned about inflation and debt. Perhaps if there was any evidence that previous rounds of quantitative easing had helped spur any growth the Plebs would be more impressed. Instead, they are all in for decades of exploding debt, and, if the New York Times columnist had his way, higher prices on nearly everything.

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Jay Nordlinger’s book on the Nobel Peace Prize.

What went wrong with the Nobel Peace Prize?

The same is often asked of the United Nations, another godly enterprise that sometimes proves less than human. Certainly, the luster of the “most famous and controversial prize in the world” seems to have been tarnished in recent years. The 2002 winner, Jimmy Carter, opportunistically campaigned for the award. He did that mostly by trying to embarrass sitting U.S. presidents, whether Bill Clinton, by undercutting his efforts to isolate North Korea, or George W. Bush, by venomously attacking him over Iraq. The latter machinations were cited approvingly by the prize’s chief judge, Gunnar Berge, who praised Carter’s back-dealing as a much-needed “kick in the leg” to Bush.

So much for any disinterested evaluation of quantifiable criteria. Indeed, European anger at Bush may also have helped Mohamed ElBaradei, the international nuclear-arms watchdog, to win in 2005, after his fierce criticism of the American effort in Iraq, and his serial assurances that Iran, contrary to the Bush administration’s protestations, was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Loud animosity toward Bush proved a sort of Nobel talisman in 2007, as well: In the old pre-recessionary and pre-Climategate days, the Nobel judges awarded Al Gore (“Bush lied!”) the prize for his global-warming activism — and perhaps also in recognition that he had unfairly lost the presidency in 2000 to Bush only through the peculiarities of the American Electoral College. Many Americans see these politically driven awards, granted to those who either have done little to further world peace, or a lot to disrupt it, as a sort of betrayal of a noble institution, in contrast to the less controversial and more deserving early-20th-century prize winners.

In this evenhanded, original, and engaging history of the 110 years of Alfred Nobel’s peace prize — the first co-winners were the pacifist Frederic Passy and the humanitarian Henry Dunant in 1901 — Jay Nordlinger demonstrates that such current popular impressions are only in part true. …

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Tonight is the Jewish holiday of Passover. Or as we call it here in LA, Cinco de Matzo.

Fallon: Connecticut police were called to a sex shop when a customer locked himself in handcuffs. He’d have called his girlfriend, but she wasn’t inflated yet.

Conan: Dartmouth College has named its medical school after Dr. Seuss. Because nothing is better than hearing your doctor say, “You don’t have cancer on your nose, you don’t have cancer on your toes. There’s no cancer in your underwear, There is no cancer anywhere.”

Leno: A lot of people are disappointed with that huge lottery. Your chances of winning were 176 million to one. Same odds as the Supreme Court will uphold ObamaCare.

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Mark Steyn comments on the Chicago Thug’s week.

… Headlines in which the executive “warns” the courts are usually the province of places like Balochistan, where powerful Cabinet ministers are currently fuming at the Chief Justice’s determination to stop them kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom – literally, that is, not merely figuratively, as in America. But, here as there, when Obama “warns” the Supreme Court “over health law,” it’s their health prospects he has in mind. He cautioned the justices – “an unelected group of people” – not to take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: as the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an “unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the Court’s legitimacy.”

All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, “Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

A nation can have formal “checks and balances,” but in the end free societies depend on a certain deference to the proprieties. If you’re willing to disdain those, you can drive a coach and horses through accepted norms very easily. The bit about “a democratically elected Congress” was an especially exquisite touch given Obama’s recently professed respect for the democratic process: as he assured Vladimir Putin’s sock puppet the other day, he’ll have “more flexibility” to accommodate foreign interests after he’s got his “last election” and all that tedious democracy business out of the way. His “last election,” I hasten to add, not America’s.

Aside from his contempt for judicial review and those rube voters, what other checks and balances doesn’t he have time for? Well, he makes “recess appointments” when the Senate isn’t in recess, thus circumventing the dreary business of confirmation by that “democratically elected” legislature he likes so much. But, hey, it’s only members of the National Labor Relations Board and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so why get hung up on constitutional niceties?

By the way, have you heard of this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No? Don’t worry, no big deal, it’s just a new federal agency. Because we can always use another of those, right? What’s one more acronym jostling in the ever more crowded alphabet soup of federal regulation? CFTC, CPSC, CNPP and now CFPB. Not to be confused with CFPB-FM, the Inuit radio station just south of the Arctic Circle in the Nunavut village of Kugaaruk, where in 1975 the world’s all-time coldest wind chill was recorded: minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the world’s all-time coldest wind chill. That’s what you’re going to be feeling at this point in an Obama second term. If you like his contempt for judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny and representative democracy now, wait’ll you see how “flexible” he’ll get starting in January 2013. …

David Harsanyi makes a point about the courts.

… Democrats have fought hard to undo safeguards against direct democracy, attaching a morality to a process that can do both good and bad. They have created ballot measures to do away with the Electoral College. They’d like Washington, rather than localities, to dictate nearly everything. The mere mention of states’ rights puts you in league with the Ku Klux Klan.

Why not? Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking — so it’s no wonder so many politicians thrive in it. The Supreme Court, however, should rise above democracy, not give in to it. That’s the point.

George Will has some VP ideas for Mitt.

… Faux realists will belabor Romney with unhistorical cleverness, urging him to choose a running mate who supposedly will sway this or that demographic cohort or carry a particular state. But are, for example, Hispanics nationwide such a homogeneous cohort that, say, those who came to Colorado from Mexico will identify with a son of Cuban immigrants to Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio)? Do these realists know that, according to exit polls, Nevada’s Hispanic Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, won only about a third of the Hispanic vote in 2010?

Furthermore, in the 16 elections since World War II, 10 presidential candidates have failed to carry the home state of their vice presidential running mates. Gov. Earl Warren could not carry California for Tom Dewey in 1948; Sen. Estes Kefauver could not carry Tennessee for Adlai Stevenson in 1956; former senator Henry Cabot Lodge could not carry Massachusetts for Richard Nixon in 1960; Rep. Bill Miller could not carry New York for Barry Goldwater in 1964; Gov. Spiro Agnew could not carry Maryland for Nixon in 1968; Sargent Shriver could not carry Maryland for George McGovern in 1972; Rep. Geraldine Ferraro could not carry New York (or women, or even her congressional district) for Walter Mondale in 1984; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen could not carry Texas for Michael Dukakis in 1988; Jack Kemp could not carry New York for Bob Dole in 1996; Sen. John Edwards could not carry North Carolina for John Kerry in 2004.

For the next decade, American politics will turn on this truth: Slowing the growth of the entitlement state is absolutely necessary and intensely unpopular. In this situation, which is ripe for a demagogue such as the Huey Long from Chicago’s Hyde Park, Romney’s choice of running mate should promise something Washington now lacks — adult supervision. 

In NR James Pethokoukis reviews some books that try to figure why Obama has done so poorly.

You are not alone. Some of President Barack Obama’s own crackerjack advisers are surely as surprised and dismayed as anyone by America’s persistently weak economic recovery. Back in the spring of 2010 — just before the White House launched its ill-timed “Recovery Summer” publicity offensive right smack into a summer swoon — I visited a top White House economist. I asked if the nascent recovery had any real momentum. After giving me a lengthy and thorough survey of the major macroeconomic indicators, the economist concluded that “all the lights on the dashboard are flashing green.” Let the Obama boom begin.

A similarly rosy sentiment was expressed to me by another member of the Obama economic team at roughly the same time. This adviser, since returned to academia, had little patience for any suggestion that the anemic rebound evidenced a sluggish, “new normal” economy burdened by too much government debt. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have found that financial crises are usually followed by sharply higher government debt and significantly lower economic growth; but this White House economist was having none of it, arguing that no economy in history is comparable to America’s due to its global dominance and control of the world’s reserve currency. Past poor results do not guarantee future underperformance. And besides, the president’s 2009 stimulus package was really beginning to work its magic. America was going to be okay.

But sitting there, listening to all that West Wing optimism, I was reminded of Richard Nixon’s famous observation that the U.S. economy was so strong “it would take a genius” to wreck it. Indeed, the Obama administration was filled with geniuses, a veritable all-star team, no, dream team of superstar liberal economists: Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Alan Krueger, Jared Bernstein. And don’t forget Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Indispensable Man of the financial crisis, a figure so highly regarded back in the fall of 2008 that he just might have led President John McCain’s Treasury Department had the election gone the other way.

Just how Team Obama’s economic policies went so wrong — and how its optimism was so misplaced — despite such accumulated brainpower and supposed expertise is the subject of two books covering much the same ground and reaching similar conclusions: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, 528 pp., $29.99), by Ron Suskind, which came out last September, and The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $28), by Noam Scheiber, published in February. The liberal-talking-point regurgitators on CNN and MSNBC would no doubt dispute such a negative characterization of Obama’s economic record — as would, of course, the Obama White House. But the Obama Recovery after the Great Recession pales when contrasted against the Reagan Recovery after the Long Recession of 1980–82.

In the first ten quarters of the Obama Recovery, real GDP is up a total of 6 percent, versus 16 percent in the Reagan Recovery. Or to put it another way, after ten quarters of recovery, the Reagan annual GDP-growth rate was 6 percent versus Obama’s 2.4 percent (versus 4.6 percent for the average post–World War II expansion). In the 32 months of the Obama Recovery, the economy has added about 2 million net new jobs, versus 9 million during the first 32 months of the Reagan Recovery. …

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John Steele Gordon says the anger is showing through. 

Is this the week the Obama administration’s remarkable incompetence begins to be the narrative? If so, he’s toast.

The president’s astonishing, not to mention indefensible, lecture to the Supreme Court this week, in which he turned 200 years of American constitutional history on its head, has been the talk of the blogosphere. But it’s not just the fact that he pretends to have not heard of Marbury v. Madison, it’s the anger behind his remarks that he is having trouble concealing. Even his old professor at Harvard felt he had to weigh in.

It is not hard to see why he might be angry. His single major domestic accomplishment, Obamacare, is in mortal peril in the Supreme Court. InTrade has the chances of its being overturned at 63.8 percent this morning. And it remains deeply unpopular with the public at large. His other domestic efforts have been largely a bust. The stimulus did not produce the promised economic boost and recovery from the recession remains stubbornly slow and unemployment stubbornly high. Green energy is failing and failing and failing. The price of gas has nearly doubled since he became president, despite the recession, while domestic production of oil and natural gas has been rising despite his policies, not because of them. …

Charles Krauthammer reacts to the president’s attack on the Court.

“Unprecedented”? Judicial review has been the centerpiece of the American constitutional system since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. “Strong majority”? The House has 435 members. In March 2010, Democrats held a 75-seat majority. Obamacare passed by seven votes.

In his next-day walk back, the president implied that he was merely talking about the normal “restraint and deference” the courts owe the legislative branch. This concern would be touching if it weren’t coming from the leader of a party so deeply devoted to the ultimate judicial usurpation — Roe v. Wade, which struck down the abortion laws of 46 states — that fealty to it is the party’s litmus test for service on the Supreme Court.

With Obamacare remaking one-sixth of the economy, it would be unusual for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation so broad and sweeping. On the other hand, it is far more unusual to pass such a fundamentally transformative law on such a narrow, partisan basis.

Obamacare passed the Congress without a single vote from the opposition party — in contradistinction to Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, similarly grand legislation, all of which enjoyed substantial bipartisan support. In the Senate, moreover, Obamacare squeaked by through a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation that was never intended for anything so sweeping. The fundamental deviation from custom and practice is not the legal challenge to Obamacare but the very manner of its enactment.

The president’s preemptive attack on the court was in direct reaction to Obamacare’s three days of oral argument. It was a shock. After years of contemptuously dismissing the very idea of a legal challenge, Democrats suddenly realized there actually is a serious constitutional argument to be made against Obamacare — and they are losing it. …

John Podhoretz spots something he liked a lot in a Romney speech last week.

Something changed on Tuesday night with Mitt Romney’s three primary state victories, and it wasn’t just the all-but-universal acknowledgment that he’ll be the Republican nominee.

In his speech in Wisconsin, Romney finally found the right argument to use against Barack Obama — indeed, located the very specific dividing line between the president and his opposition that Republicans and conservatives have been trying to draw for four years now.

The president, Romney said, has “spent the last four years laying the foundation for a new government-centered society.”

“Government-centered society” isn’t the most felicitous phrase, nor the most memorable sound-bite. But that may be for the best. What it lacks in mellifluousness, it makes up for in deadly accuracy.

Every major initiative of the Obama presidency has placed the government at the center of the policy the president wishes to effect and the change he wishes to see. Its policies have not necessarily put government in charge, or given government total control; but they have made government a dominating presence.

First came the stimulus package in 2009 — a direct $860 billion infusion into the economy. The lion’s share of those dollars did not go toward lubricating the machinery of job growth but rather directly into the coffers to state and local governments to balance their books.

The $100 billion bailout of two US auto companies led to the president and his team literally choosing which kinds of cars those companies should be making — determining the level of union compensation and unilaterally changing the rules of the private contracts into which the companies had entered with their debtors.

And finally and most directly, ObamaCare uses government power to direct every American to purchase a health-insurance policy. …

The problem with the president, says Peter Schiff, is he does not know how wealth is created.

As this fall’s presidential election takes shape as a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the rhetoric out of both camps is becoming sharper and more ideological. Looking to exploit Governor Romney’s increasingly close association with Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan (who has been mentioned as a potential vice presidential nominee), the President dedicated a lengthy address earlier this week to specifically heap scorn on Ryan’s budget plan (Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee). The attack lines used by the President not only reveal a preview of the fall campaign but also offer a glimpse of Obama’s skewed views of the social and economic history of the United States.

The President laid bare his beliefs that America’s source of economic strength has been her historical embrace of collective action, wealth redistribution, and government policies that have protected workers from the ravages of the wealthy. To reiterate, he was talking about the United States, not Soviet Russia. He asserted that prosperity “grows outward from the middle class” and that it “never trickles down from the success of the wealthy.” Accordingly, he concludes that our recent struggles stem from the Republican-led abandonment of these successful policies. … 

… Obama believes that prosperity came only in the 20th century after the government began redistributing wealth from rich people like Henry Ford to the middle and lower classes. He ignores the fact that America’s greatest growth streak occurred in the 19th rather than the 20th century, and that America had become by far the world’s richest nation before any serious wealth redistribution even began.

The unfortunate part for the President is that wealth must first be produced before it can be redistributed. But redistribution always creates disincentives that result in less wealth being created. All societies that have attempted to create wealth through redistribution have failed miserably. This should be obvious to anyone who spends more than a few minutes studying world economic history. But the President is on a mission to get reelected and his ace in the hole is to fan the flames of class warfare. It’s a tried and true political strategy, and he looks ready to ride that hobby horse until it breaks.

Jennifer Rubin explains how Obama defames his opponents.

David Brooks insists President Obama “is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue” who acted out of character when he excoriated Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. (“[H]e unleashed every 1980s liberal cliché in the book, calling the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinists. Social Darwinism, by the way, was a 19th-century philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples.”)

Let’s be clear about two things. The supposedly erudite Obama labeled Ryan a race supremacist. That’s what his staunchest moderate defender, Brooks, points out. And he’s right. Either the president is ignorant of the term he used or he’s getting an early jump on playing the race card. In either event, it’s uncalled for and repulsive. The liberal crowd that shrieks when some Republicans call Obama a “socialist” should clean up their own house.

David Boaz of the Cato Institute remarked:

“Is “social Darwinist” within some bound of propriety that “socialist” violates? I don’t think so. After all, plenty of people call themselves socialists — not President Obama, to be sure, but estimable figures such as Tony Blair and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Members of the British Labour Party have been known to sing the socialist anthem “The Red Flag” on the floor of Parliament.

But no one calls himself a social Darwinist. Not now, not ever. Not Herbert Spencer. The term is always used to label one’s opponents. In that sense it’s clearly a more abusive term than “socialist,” a term that millions of people have proudly claimed.”

How was the president’s use of the term not a controversy unto itself? Charitably we can say the media don’t have a clue what the term implies; more cynically we can say the media are once again playing interference for Obama. …

Here’s David Brooks trying to insist this is all an aberration.

President Obama is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue. But every once in a while he tries to get politically cute, and he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask.

I suppose it’s to his credit that he’s most inept when he tries to take the low road. He resorts to hoary, brain-dead clichés. He wanders so far from his true nature that he makes Mitt Romney look like Mr. Authenticity.

That’s pretty much what happened this week in Obama’s speech before a group of newspaper editors. Obama’s target in this speech was Representative Paul Ryan’s budget.

It should be said at the outset that the Ryan budget has some disturbing weaknesses, which Democrats are right to identify. The Ryan budget would cut too deeply into discretionary spending. This could lead to self-destructive cuts in scientific research, health care for poor kids and programs that boost social mobility. Moreover, the Ryan tax ideas are too regressive. They make tax cuts for the rich explicit while they hide any painful loophole closings that might hurt Republican donors.

But these legitimate criticisms and Obama’s modest but real deficit-reducing accomplishments got buried under an avalanche of distortion. The Republicans have been embarrassing themselves all primary season. It’s as if Obama wanted to sink to their level in a single hour.

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Jennifer Rubin’s post on her Friday Question reminds of the great week.

Last week was definitely a newsworthy one, thanks to three days of Supreme Court argument, the president’s open mike gaffe, the passage of the House Republicans’ budget and the consolidation of GOP support behind Mitt Romney. Some readers marveled, as Tuscany1 did, at the “historic nature” of the Supreme Courts arguments. Marylandmama put it this way: “Whatever they decide will have major implications for health care in the future and for the Presidential race in the fall.” Jafco wrote of the Supreme Court hearings: “The Court arguments, wherever they lead, exposed our exalted Constitutional Instructor as knowing about as much about the Constitution as he does about ‘shovel ready jobs.’ He’s further exposed as incompetent.”

But Jafco ( “The open mic incident suggests he’s completely untrustworthy”)and many more readers considered the hot mike incident as the one with long-term political ramifications. Timmy84 writes:

“The “hot mic” was the most important development because it gives substance to the conservative fear that the President does have a more unpopular agenda in mind for his second term (else why be concerned about electoral repercussions?). Now when the GOP nominee stumps with the claim that Obama needs to be stopped from another term of failed and unpopular policies, there is an actual event of the President’s own making to hold up as a glimpse into the future.” … 

Breitbart’s Big Government reports on the real power in the White House – Valerie Jarrett. She tells him to attack the Court, and he does.

… Obama was not Valerie Jarrett’s only project. She saw to the appointment of Van Jones as White House “green jobs” czar, noting that “we’ve been watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.” (That activity included an anti-American rally on Sep. 12, 2001.) Her authority in the White House is almost unchallenged, and on visits to Chicago, local Democratic judges, officials and activists flock to see her and curry influence.

Jarrett attended the Supreme Court last week as it heard arguments on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Her presence as the president’s “eyes and ears” was noted by Breitbart.com’s Ken Klukowski. Jarrett had also led the administration’s media charge in advance of the Supreme Court arguments, arguing that Obamacare is necessary because it protects women’s health in particular, shaping the case to fit Democrats’ narrative of a Republican “war on women.”

As more moderate, pragmatic voices have abandoned the White House to attend to the actual business of governing–Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel being only one of many defectors–Jarrett has remained and her influence has grown. 

Jarrett endorses the idea that Obama is still a “community organizer” in the White House, and the administration’s Alinksyite tactics of race and class division bear her fingerprints as much as his own.

Daniel Foster notes Keith Olbermann’s passage from The Current.

… We don’t yet know the details of the dispute that led to Olbermann’s apparent ouster barely more than forty weeks into his five-year, $50 million contract, though the Times says Current cut him loose for failing to honor the terms of his contract. But, seriously, what kind of awful luck does he have that he keeps running into these unreasonable, unprofessional, two-timing, back-stabbing television executives? I mean, network after network after network, the same kind of low-down, no-good greedy fatcats who wouldn’t know a visionary news commentator if it bit them on the ass. Why can’t Keith just meet one nice network head who loves him for him, who understands what a precious little snowflake he is? …

Howard Kurtz airs some of Olbermann’s dirty laundry.

It was a terrible marriage from the beginning.

Just weeks after Keith Olbermann launched his nightly program on Current TV last June, his team was complaining that the network founded by Al Gore and attorney Joel Hyatt wasn’t living up to its promises to support a professional cable news show. 

The arguments escalated for months, with Olbermann directly appealing to the former vice president on three or four occasions, until relations had become so poisoned that, on Friday, Current fired Olbermann for breach of contract. He has vowed to take the matter to court and questioned the ethics of Gore and Hyatt.

Some of the disputes are fundamental—such as missing days of work—and some sound petty, but they add up to a portrait of a dysfunctional alliance that was doomed from the start. Where Current management viewed Olbermann as a chronic complainer who had clashed with the bosses before leaving his previous jobs at MSNBC and ESPN, the liberal commentator came to believe that he had joined a rinky-dink operation, even if the channel was committed to paying him $50 million over five years.

On Aug. 2, 2011, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, Olbermann’s manager, Michael Price, sent Hyatt a list of about 40 “deficiencies” that needed to be corrected. Six days later, Price told Hyatt that the problems required “immediate attention” and that “we are not aware of any demonstrable effort to address the issues.”

One of management’s complaints was that Olbermann would not participate in some press and marketing events, even though he was contractually obligated to promote the network. Executives grew upset when Olbermann balked at touting the programming that followed his 8 p.m. show, Countdown. In the email, Price explained that reluctance by saying the host was being given wrong information about what was to air. It was “inexcusable,” he wrote, to repeatedly have Olbermann “identify incorrect programming following Countdown. If people cannot trust him to correctly identify the programming, his credibility on larger matters comes into question.” …

… No issue was too small to precipitate a fight. A continuous argument over which car service would ferry Olbermann, who doesn’t drive, was emblematic of the deteriorating situation. Olbermann wound up using eight different car services, finding fault with each one, sometimes objecting when drivers talked to him. …

Popular Mechanics on what it’s like to drive an electric car.

Fully charged on a brisk March morning, the all-electric Mitsubishi i’s range meter estimated that the battery pack had enough energy to travel 56 miles. That’s plenty, I thought, for the several-stop route I planned to a neighboring town and back. But as I pulled out into traffic, I flicked on the heat and watched the range meter recalibrate, dropping the estimated range down to 37. I did a quick mental calibration: A few miles to the first stop, 12 miles on the highway, 12 to return, another five to the next location, and so on. I then had a choice to make: Either shiver in the car or risk getting stranded. I chose the former.

Of course I could have made the ride a more comfortable if I’d used the car’s little remote fob to preheat the interior while it was still plugged in. The trouble is that the little receiver, which has a tiny antenna like something from a 1970′s-era sci-fi movie, isn’t at all clear. I thought I had engaged the pre-heat function, but when I got inside, the interior was the same 30 degrees as the ambient air.  …

A peek inside the North Korean GULAG from Readability.com’s review of Escape From Camp 14.

Nine years after watching his mother’s hanging, Shin In Geun squirmed through the electric fence that surrounds Camp 14 and ran off through the snow into the North Korean wilderness. It was January 2, 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do it.

He was 23 years old and knew no one outside the fence.

Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in Southern California.

Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight — five feet six inches, about 120 pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labor. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer’s fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard’s punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

Shin is roughly the same age as Kim Jong Un, the chubby third son of Kim Jong Il who took over as leader after his father’s death in 2011.

Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. His mother beat him, and he viewed her as a competitor for food. His father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His older brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. …

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From The Tablet, the story of another diary contemporaneous to the Holocaust. The description here of Himmler is interesting. 

David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.

Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian at Toronto’s York University and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.

Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis. …

John Fund leads off our look at the, “President Petulant.”

I spoke last night at a symposium on “The Obama Presidency” at the University of California at Berkeley. In a radical city known sometimes for its liberal anger, it won’t surprise you, many of those in the audience were upset at the prospect of the Supreme Court’s overturning part or all of Obamacare. After all, Berkeley voted 88 percent for Obama in 2008. But almost no one present at the symposium was as petulant as President Obama was yesterday, when he incorrectly claimed that if the Court rules against his landmark legislation it would be taking “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” 

The implication of his statement was that he hasn’t heard of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court laid down the doctrine of judicial review in 1803, and by which the Court can strike down unconstitutional laws. Indeed, since 1981, the Court has struck down 57 specific legislative acts of Congress, an average of two per year. 

The president’s statement was so extraordinary that a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the administration indeed respects the right of court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. As CBS’s Jan Crawford reported, Judge Jerry Smith became “very stern,” telling the lawyers arguing a separate case on the constitutionality of Obamacare that it was not clear to “many of us” whether the president believes such a right exists. He also noted Obama’s remarks yesterday in the Rose Garden about judges being an “unelected group of people.” The court was clearly not amused.

There appear to be few limits on how far President Obama will distort facts. In truth, his health-care plan passed the House by only 219 to 212, despite that body’s overwhelming Democratic majority. It was the first major piece of social legislation within memory to pass Congress without a single vote from the opposition party.

Even some liberals believe the president went too far yesterday. Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer who covers the Supreme Court for the Washington Post, said Obama’s assault “stopped me cold . . . for the president to imply that the only explanation for a constitutional conclusion contrary to his own would be out-of-control conservative justices does the court a disservice.” It was a mistake for Obama to “declare war” on the court, says Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of Time magazine. Voters don’t like hearing assaults on the Supreme Court itself, probably because Americans believe “life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.”

So it is surreal for Obama, a former constitutional-law professor and president of the Harvard Law Review, to go after the court as if he were a demagogue seeking reelection. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “Obama’s inner community organizer seems to be winning out over the law professor.” …

Steve Hayward continues the theme.

I’m grateful for the favor Obama did for us yesterday of exposing his extreme constitutional ignorance, with his comments on how it would be “unprecedented” for the Court to strike down a law passed by a “strong majority” in Congress.  (As if a House margin of seven votes is a “strong” majority.)  True, he walked back the comment today, but surely because his statement was not merely indefensible but outright embarrassing to his media defenders.

I’ve been growing weary of hearing people mention that he’s a “constitutional scholar,” since he never published a single thing on the subject either as editor of the Harvard Law Review or as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School.  But hey—he taught constitutional law, didn’t he?

Not really.

His course on constitutional law, one of several constitutional law courses on the U of C curriculum, dealt exclusively with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment—the favorite, all-purpose clause for liberal jurists to use to right wrongs and make us more equal by judicial fiat.  There is no evidence that Obama ever taught courses that considered other aspects of constitutionalism, such as executive power, the separation of powers, the Commerce Clause, or judicial review itself.

I have a copy of one of his final exams.  It is a long hypothetical involving civil rights, which begins thus: …

We stuck a relevant cartoon in the text, perhaps because Bart Simpson stars in it.

John Hinderaker has more.

… Is there any truth to Obama’s claim that the Supreme Court hasn’t invalidated any statutes that are “economic” and relate to “commerce” since Lochner v. New York, which was in 1905? Of course not. To name just a few examples a great deal more recent than 1905, the Court ruled unconstitutional provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that had permitted only “for cause” removal of members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2010; the 1990 Mushroom Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act in 2001 (this case was actually quite similar to Obamacare because the Court held unconstitutional provisions that required mushroom growers to contribute to mushroom promotion programs); provisions of the Patent and Plant Variety Remedy Clarification Act, the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act, and the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act in 1992; the Harbor Maintenance Tax Act in 1998; the Transfer Act which authorized the transfer of operating control of Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport from the Department of Transportation to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in 1991; and many, many more dating back to 1905.

One could be charitable and say that Barack Obama is a bullshitter who makes stuff up whenever he is in a tough spot, or one could say that he is a habitual liar. Take your pick.

Michael Walsh thinks it is all of one piece.

Jonah’s cited this below, but be honest: Tell me you ever expected to read a second-day lede like this on an American news site. From CBS:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president’s bluff — ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

“In the escalating battle…” Even making allowances for normal journalistic hyperbole, this is a remarkable admission that something is seriously amiss in our politics; it’s like we’re suddenly living back in 1937. The president of the United States is actively waging a war of words against the federal judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular. And, right on cue, comes a horde of lefties suddenly concerned about “unelected” justices, whether Marbury v. Madison was properly decided back in 1803, and whether it’s not time to revisit it in the interest of, you know, “social justice.” You don’t have to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows — especially when the hot air is emanating from the White House. Good for the 5th Circuit to call them on it.

Many have commented that last week was the worst week (so far) for the Obama administration, but I don’t think the apparatchiks have quite yet realized how bad things are going to get for them. The decision to insult and attack the Catholic Church was spectacularly stupid, even as a crass political tactic, since there are some 77 million Catholics in the country, representing about a fifth of the population. True, Catholics tend no longer to vote as a bloc (the old FDR coalition has splintered as the Irish and Italians moved out of the cities and up in the world), but a thumb in the eye to one is a thumb in the eye to all, especially when that one is the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York. …

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John Fund profiles Saul Alinsky and shows Obama’s ties to him.

… What exactly are the connections between Obama and Saul Alinsky’s thought? In 1985, the 24-year-old Obama answered a want ad from the Calumet Community Religious Conference, run by Alinsky’s Chicago disciples. Obama was profoundly influenced by his years as a community organizer in Chicago, even if he ultimately rejected Alinsky’s disdain for electoral politics and, like Hillary Clinton, chose to work within the system. “Obama embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life,” wrote Peter Slevin of the Washington Post in 2007. That same year, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza found Obama still “at home talking Alinskian jargon about ‘agitation’” and fondly recalling organizing workshops where he had learned Alinsky concepts such as “being predisposed to other people’s power.” …

… Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased many Alinsky methods. “Obama learned his lesson well,” David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, wrote in the Boston Globe in 2008. “The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board.” 

In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival: “The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”

You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.

NY Sun editors answer the president’s attack on the Court.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard a presidential demarche as outrageous as President Obama’s warning to the Supreme Court not to overturn Obamacare. The president made the remarks at a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. It was an attack on the court’s standing and even its integrity in a backhanded way that is typically Obamanian. For starters the president expressed confidence that the Court would “not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Reuters’ account noted that conservative leaders say the law was an overreach by Obama and the Congress. It characterized the president as having “sought to turn that argument around, calling a potential rejection by the court an overreach of its own.” Quoth the president: “And I’d just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

It is outrageous enough that the president’s protest was inaccurate. What in the world is he talking about when he asserts the law was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act barely squeaked through the Congress. In the Senate it escaped a filibuster by but a hair. The vote was so tight in the house — 219 to 212 — that the leadership went through byzantine maneuvers to get the measure to the president’s desk. No Republicans voted for it when it came up in the House, and the drive to repeal the measure began the day after Mr. Obama signed the measure.

It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton. …

In American.com, Edward Pinto performs admirable detective work in showing how the sub-prime crisis was a federal government enterprise. He quotes Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee who had this to say in a 2007 NY Times OpEd.  

… [t]he three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans. These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their newfound access to capital.

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” It has allowed them access to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.

And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted. …

Matthew Continetti’s post at the Free Beacon allows us to relive our wonderful time last week.

… As it happened, the hot microphone mess was the least of the president’s troubles. The gaffe was still in the news when oral arguments over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act began at the Supreme Court. The first day of proceedings concerned whether the Court could rule on the law at all since the individual mandate will not be enforced until 2014. But even those arguments went poorly for the administration and its hapless solicitor general, Donald Verrilli Jr., who was unable to explain how the mandate could be a “penalty” one day and a “tax” the next day.

Yet the liberal panic did not truly begin until Mar. 27, when the Court heard arguments over the mandate’s constitutionality and even the president’s most hardened supporters had to acknowledge his signature policy was in trouble. No sooner had the proceedings concluded than a hysterical Jeffrey Toobin fled the courtroom, screaming that Obamacare was in “grave, grave” condition. The flimsiness of the administration’s arguments had transformed Toobin into a Henny Penny in drag, running around Capitol Hill and warning his fellow liberals that the Court could overrule Obamacare in “one big package” and that at the very least the mandate is “doomed.”

The administration and its friends in the media found themselves in a truly helpless position. If Toobin is proven right and the Court overrules Obamacare in part or in whole, Republicans will pounce, the president will look like a loser, and Democrats will be both demoralized and radicalized (not a winning combination). If Toobin is proven wrong, however, he will look like an idiot, Republicans and Tea Party activists will mobilize for the fall, and Democrats still will have to defend an unpopular law whose consequences grow worse with each passing minute.

The liberal reaction to this dilemma has been a predictable combination of spin and scapegoating. The noted legal mind Chuck Todd, who seems to have missed the class on Marbury v. Madison, asked guests on his show whether a Court decision against the health care overhaul might not be an unprecedented intrusion of one branch of government over the elected branches. Meanwhile, James Carville and Harry Reid lamely suggested an anti-Obamacare ruling would be good for the president and his party. The White House was reduced to using Newspeak, referring to the mandate as the “personal responsibility clause.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Charlie Sheen says he cringes watching his crazy rants from last year. Sheen says he’s moved on and is now focused on his new career as a JetBlue pilot.

Conan: Rumors of a secret meeting between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Apparently, Romney asked if Gingrich would consider being his running mate and Gingrich asked Romney, “Are you going to finish those fries?”

Leno: After this week’s arguments it looks like Obama now expects the Supreme Court to throw out his healthcare plan. Today he started calling it Bidencare.

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Peggy Noonan says the president is coming across as devious and dishonest.

… The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. …

Liz Peek at Fiscal Times says Obamacare derailed the economic recovery.

Here we go again. All eyes are on the Supreme Court as it wrestles with whether or not President Obama’s healthcare bill is constitutional. The country is divided on the merits of the law, but this we can say with certainty: Obamacare profoundly gummed up our recovery from the financial crisis.

Like every predecessor, President Obama has made mistakes. Perhaps none will cloud his legacy more that his decision to focus on overhauling our healthcare system early in his administration – before our economic recovery had gained enduring momentum.

Assuming that the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, would work the magic promised by his economics team, Mr. Obama set off on his quest to guarantee healthcare for every American. The resulting food fight over the legislation – the ugly parceling out of favors in return for votes and lies told to justify passage — permanently damaged President Obama’s reputation, divided a country desperate to heal, and distracted the White House from further efforts to build employment. It was a terrible decision, and the country continues to pay for it.

It was, ironically, a decision made by a president eager to secure his legacy. Undaunted by the abject failure of Hilary Clinton to win support for universal healthcare, Mr. Obama took up the quest with enthusiasm. Just as he admitted to excessive optimism about bringing peace to the Middle East in an interview in Time Magazine, dubbing that effort “really hard,” Mr. Obama naively staked his presidency on healthcare reform. Here’s a shocker: remaking 17 percent of the economy is also “really hard.”

James Pethokoukis agrees that the president can be blamed for the weak recovery.

Not even the most die-hard, partisan Democrats would dare argue that the Obama recovery has been especially vigorous. Instead, they argue that the new president was dealt an impossible hand.

But was he?

Nearly three years after the Great Recession officially ended, the jobless rate is still above 8 percent — the longest stretch of such high unemployment since the Great Depression. Add back in all the discouraged job seekers and the part-timers who wished they had full-time gigs, and the unemployment rate is just shy of 15 percent.

While the economy is growing, it’s not growing rapidly. At this point in the typical post-World War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5 percent. The Obama recovery has managed just over 2 percent average annual GDP growth.

Indeed, take-home pay for US workers, adjusted for rising prices, has actually fallen over the last year.

Then there’s the moribund housing market. …

Kevin Williamson catches Elizabeth Warren at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast/roast in South Boston. This profile from National Review should convince you support for Scott Brown is almost as important as defeating the kid president. After all, she claims to have “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the Occupy crowd.

Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. She goes bulling her way through a crowd of faces the color of 2 percent milk, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Southie Irishness, or rendered rosy by the effects of seriously draining down a full bar that opened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, plowing through like she’s just graduated from a seminar in Advanced Executive Body Language, all exaggerated masculine gestures and “Yes! I am very seriously paying attention to you!” head bobs and vigorous “This is what Sincerity looks like . . . approximately!” power nods, complemented by “Move along, sir!” shoulder grips followed by quick and vigorous “Back the Hell Off” chest pats when some florid Southie denizen moves in for a hug — she is like Moses parting the kelly green sea. She is a populist in search of a people, and the wall-eyed gang shout-singing “Southie Is My Home Town” and chasing their eggs and rashers with Jameson on the rocks isn’t it. St. Patrick’s Day, as state senator Jack Hart (“Senator Hot,” in the local pronunciation) reminds the crowd, is also celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, and Warren looks like she is in dire need of an emergency airlift back to Cambridge. …

Villains must be identified and crucified, plain facts be damned. And that is really the truth that Elizabeth Warren is speaking when she says of Occupy Wall Street: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren is everything her admirers say she is — smart, tough, principled — and almost everything her critics say — out of touch, ideological, narrow. The one inaccurate barb thrown at her is that she’s homely — “Granny Warren,” Senator Brown’s factota call her. She isn’t. If she were lined up at a party with a representative cross section of 62-year-old American women, Warren would be the one you’d ask to dance. But there is a meanness in her, a nasty little puritanical streak gone left, and her secularized Puritanism is probably the most Massachusetts thing about her. Like Hillary Clinton, she has Methodist roots and cites the Wesleyan approach as key to the development of her political thinking.

The Dem mayor of Boston is not backing her according to The Hill.

Popular Boston Mayor Tom Menino — an influential Democrat many have credited with bringing the party’s convention to his hometown in 2004 — told WBZ this week that he wasn’t taking sides in Massachusetts’s high-profile Senate race.

But Menino’s reluctance to put the weight of his campaign operation behind Harvard professor and consumer rights activist Elizabeth Warren is a tough blow for the Democrat, who is hoping to upset incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown. …

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We can’t keep our hands off the open mic kerfuffle. Our favorites continue. Here’s Charles Krauthammer. 

You don’t often hear an American president secretly (he thinks) assuring foreign leaders that concessions are coming their way, but they must wait because he’s seeking reelection and he dares not tell his own people.

Not at all, spun a White House aide in major gaffe-control mode. The president was merely explaining that arms control is too complicated to be dealt with in a year in which both Russia and the United States hold presidential elections.

Rubbish. First of all, to speak of Russian elections in the same breath as ours is a travesty. Theirs was a rigged, predetermined farce. Putin ruled before. Putin rules after.

Obama spoke of the difficulties of the Russian presidential “transition.” What transition? It’s a joke. It had no effect on Putin’s ability to negotiate anything.

As for the U.S. election, the problem is not that the issue is too complicated but that if people knew Obama’s intentions of flexibly caving on missile defense, they might think twice about giving him a second term.

After all, what is Obama doing negotiating on missile defense in the first place? We have no obligation to do so. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a relic of the Cold War, died in 2002.

We have an unmatched technological lead in this area. It’s a priceless strategic advantage that for three decades Russia has been trying to get us to yield. Why give any of it away?

To placate Putin, Obama had already in 2009 abruptly canceled the missile-defense system the Poles and Czechs had agreed to host in defiance of Russian threats. Why give away more?

It’s unfathomable. …

The GAFFE has moved Marty Peretz to write a column.

… But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Additional “give” to Moscow on the nuclear issue was not something he admitted to the relevant senators that he was contemplating when they were weighing and approving the New Start Treaty a bare year ago. Yet it is a matter of deep interest to the Kremlin which, without any moral credit and without much material credit either, seems to be charting the cartography of another Cold War. (Remember, it pursued the last one from an impoverished base.) Mr. Obama’s pliancy on the matter will encourage them to think that we are, in this matter, a patsy.

And not only in this matter, alas: Mr. Obama is presiding over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century—for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life. You might say that he dislikes the 20th century and refuses to accord the lessons of its bitter experiences any pride of place in his view of the world.

I don’t mean to say that the president is altogether against the use of force. In his counterterrorism policy he has been relentless. But his stewardship of the wars he inherited reveals a leader unsure of his beliefs, or else ruled by an almost cynical devotion to his own political survival. …

Craig Pirrong remembers back in the day when Obama thought he could drive a wedge between Putin and his toady Medvedev.

… We know Barry is a slow learner.  Actually, he is a no learner.  Exhibit 1: energy.  Exhibit 2: this whole Russian fiasco. BHO is proceeding blithely as if nothing has changed.  Well, nothing has really changed, because Putin was always in charge, but Barry apparently didn’t understand that.  So if Obama was sincere in his earlier statements (I know, I know), he should believe that things have changed-and he should adjust course accordingly.   But apparently not.  He is proceeding with his grandiose Russian schemes that were predicated on exploiting an imagined split in the Russian power structure, even though it is now evident even to the dimmest of the dim that said split never existed. And he is willing to do so by actively concealing his intentions from the American people.

It is bad enough to pursue a policy that is based on a delusion that anyone remotely familiar with Russia should have known to be such.  It is beyond bad to continue to pursue that policy once it has been proven to be based on a delusion. And to do so in such a deceptive way staggers the imagination.

But that’s our Barry.

The NYT is of course utterly clueless on the subject, but even the WaPo, normally in the Obama Tank, can’t swallow this. Neither should anybody else in possession of their sanity.

Andrew Malcolm says it was the open mic comments that convinced Marco Rubio he should go ahead and endorse Romney.  

… “It’s been weighing on my mind all week,” Rubio told Lewis, adding: 

“I’ve never thought about this as a political calculation. I’m just sitting back here and watching a president that just got back from overseas — where he told the Russian president to work with him and give him space so he can be more flexible if he gets re-elected.”
 
“The stakes are so high,” Rubio noted.
 
The senator said there are others he wished had run. But they didn’t. And he concluded that given the Obama threat, that Romney was “plenty conservative” and ”way better than the guy who’s there right now.”

While Rubio endorsed Romney, Malcolm notes Medvedev endorsed Obama.

… Strangely, Medvedev went on Russian TV Tuesday to defend Obama, which should set off car alarms across this country. ”There are no secrets here,” he said at a Seoul news briefing. He endorsed President Obama as “a very comfortable partner,” which you may not see on any Obama TV ad.

And the Russian leader had some advice for American politicians, presumably Romney since the other two are out of the picture now and the third never was in it. 

“All U.S. presidential candidates (should) do two things,” Medvedev said. “Use their head and consult their reason.” He said cliched criticism “smacks of Hollywood,” adding that whatever party Obama’s critic belongs to, Medvedev suggests he look at the calendar: “We are in 2012 and not the mid-1970′s.”

Well, that’s reassuring isn’t it? In the eyes of the outgoing Russian president, who’s been doing what he’s told all these years by the incoming Russian president, a former KGB leader looking out for his dream of empire-rebuilding, Russia is not America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” as Romney called it.

All the more reason for Americans to relax then, spend more money on teachers’ unions and drastically reduce national defense spending, including cuts to U.S. troop strength of at least 100,000, as Obama vows. …

American Crossroads has a new ad using the open mic faux pas.

Time to look at the other half of our wonderful week. Mark Steyn on the healthcare court hearings.

… A land of laws decays almost imperceptibly into a land of legalisms, which is why America has 50 percent of the world’s lawyers. Like most of his colleagues, lifetime legislator John Conyers (a congressman for 47 years) didn’t bother reading the 2,700-page health care bill he voted for. As he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did:

“They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Rep. Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit. So let’s take him at his word that it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. Who does read the thing? “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

He was making a narrow argument about “severability” – about whether the court could junk the “individual mandate” but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege microregulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can ever hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

If the Supreme Court really wished to perform a service, it would declare that henceforth no law can be longer than, say, 27 pages – or, at any rate, longer than the copy of Playboy Congressman Conyers was reading on that commuter flight.

C’mon, Justice Kennedy. Obamacare vs. Playboy: It would be a decision for the ages – and an act of bracing constitutional hygiene.

Jennifer Rubin too.

I’m with David French on this:

“While we still don’t know the outcome of the Obamacare case, that hasn’t stopped some on the left from piling on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli for allegedly “choking” during oral arguments. While I haven’t argued in front of the Supreme Court, I’ve had more than my share of state and federal appellate arguments, and these armchair quarterbacks are overlooking a few factors.

First, it’s tough for any advocate to compare well to Paul Clement. Virtually any fair-minded liberal or conservative can tell you that Clement is just about the best in the business — one of the great oral advocates of our generation. This was his Superbowl, and he delivered a performance about as “clutch” as anyone can deliver.

Second — and more importantly — it’s tough for anyone to perform brilliantly when your argument is weak on the merits.”

I’ll add a few final thoughts and look forward to the opinion in a few months.

First, the desire to impugn Verrilli stems, maybe understandably, from the frustration on the left ( How can we be losing this?!) and the lack of understanding as to how courts make their decisions. Many eloquent advocates lose a lot of Supreme Court cases because a good advocate can make a marginal case better but rarely can he save one with a central defect. At this level of judicial advocacy it’s too hard to hide the ball. …

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Toby Harnden starts off the coverage of the open mic in Korea.

Caught on an open mic during a photo op with outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul, President Barack Obama did something very, very stupid. He got caught committing what is known in Washington as the ‘Kinsley gaffe’ – being accidentally caught telling the truth – which is, naturally, the most damaging type of all.

‘On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space,’ he told Medvedev, who responded: ‘Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…’

Barack Obama was chatting with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul Obama then cut him off to stress, ‘This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility’ before tapping the Russian reassuringly on his forearm. Medvedev indicated that the message had been received loud and clear: ‘I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.’

Great. So once the election is over, Vladimir Putin, the incoming Russian president, will know that a re-elected Obama can abandon all his campaign promises about taking a tough line with the Russians blah blah because he will never again have to face voters. …

Andrew Malcolm enjoys the flap too.

Barack Obama has, like most in public life, made his share of gaffes–the president of Canada, 57 states, the Austrian language, E Pluribus Unum, the pronunciation of corpsman, among others. To be sure, they are stunning signs of ignorance of things that are common wisdom for most, even Harvard alums.

Closet Obama supporters will seek to downplay the incident. But his Monday mis-step is huge politically and may well come to haunt and hurt him as Republican Mitt Romney rolls out the attack plan for this fall’s campaign and before. Of all the GOP wannabes, Romney has been Obama’s most outspoken critic, especially on the Democrat’s “failed leadership” in foreign policy.

A main strain of Romney’s assaults has been basically, Given the spending, chronic ineptness and apologies for America, can you imagine what Barack Obama would do in a second term unrestrained by any need to face voters ever again?

That’s an effective line because it leaves the worst things possible to voters’ imagination. And there is no response. What can Obama say, “My secret plans aren’t as bad as you think.”

What makes Obama’s Monday blunder so bad is that it doesn’t come from any sort of dismissable ignorance by someone who spent formative childhood years in Indonesia. It was clearly backstage conniving on Obama’s part and feeds directly into Romney’s ‘Can you imagine’ line.

Plus, it fits with the suspicions of millions that the community organizer has unspoken plans to take America in a transformative direction involving much more government. How else to explain his baldly touting more domestic energy while reducing federal drilling permits and torpedoing the Keystone pipeline? …

More on this from Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor, who has a more sophisticated understanding of Russia and its place in the world.

… Obama is trying to deceive someone.  He is either deceiving the American people, by his refusal to be honest with his intentions regarding missile defense, or he is attempting to deceive Medvedev (and Putin-the “him” referred to in Obama’s “give me space” remark), by insinuating that he will make a deal after the election.  But even the latter interpretation involves an attempt to dodge the US electorate: if he convinces Russia to tone down its rhetoric on BMD, he takes this issue-and the issue of Russia generally-away as a campaign matter.  This relieves him of the necessity of dealing honestly and forthrightly with a potentially contentious issue, and permits him to avoid accountability for the complete lack of concrete results arising from the vaunted Reset.  If the Russians continue to be cantankerous about missile defense, the Reset looks like a sham.  (Well, it is, but it will be obvious to everyone.) If Putin tones it down, based on Obama’s wink and stroke, Obama can continue to claim that he has improved relationships with Russia.

But given the fact that Obama is obviously playing somebody, do you really believe that Putin will conclude that Obama is playing the American electorate, and not Putin?  Given Putin’s suspicions of the US, I doubt it.

But I think that Americans have to take seriously the possibility that Obama is planning to conceal actively his intentions regarding a second term.  If he is willing to be “flexible” after the election-i.e., if he is willing to do things after the election that are contrary to what he says before it–about Russia and missile defense, what else is he being “flexible”-i.e., lying-about?

In other words, this exchange with Medvedev raises serious additional questions about his sincerity and honesty.  I don’t think he deserves space.  He deserves to be pressed repeatedly on his intentions, and this video provides a perfect pretext for the pressing.

The exchange with Medvedev was also notable for its confirmation of Medvedev as Putin’s errand boy: “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”  How embarrassing, mainly because Medvedev says that without a trace of embarrassment.  He is well and truly whipped. He has his mind right.  He knows who is boss.

In fact, pretty much anybody paying attention knew who was boss from day 1.  But Obama predicated the Reset on the idea that Medvedev was a rival of Putin’s.  How’s that looking now? …

Karl Rove has advice for the GOP on how to handle the open mic.

… Just as Senator John Kerry’s explanation in 2004 that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” exposed the Massachusetts Senator as a pandering flip-flopper, so may Mr. Obama’s private-turned-public remarks confirm doubts that he’s not shooting straight with the American people. It may also contribute to a belief that he holds voters in thinly disguised contempt.

Is Mr. Obama also concealing unpopular domestic policies he’ll spring on the country in a second term? What the president calls “flexibility” with Russian autocrats, Americans voters will likely view as a lack of candor with them. If that’s the case, it could seriously undermine the president’s chances for reelection.

This won’t all happen by itself. To make the most of Mr. Obama’s statement, Republicans will need to raise it again and again in speeches, ads, videos and debates. After all, Mr. Kerry’s March 2004 remark became an issue only when repeated endlessly in ads and on the stump by the GOP’s surrogates. Then and only then did it become the “a-ha!” moment that shaped perceptions of the Democratic nominee and helped bring about his defeat.

Alana Goodman deals with excuses from Obama and the NY Times.

… Read the New York Times coverage of Obama’s explanation this morning to get an idea of how fast the media is trying to sink this story. The spin is that Obama was simply being pragmatic. Of course he can’t deal with an issue as complex as missile defense during an election year, what with all those radical Republicans in Congress trying to sabotage his chances in November, and the media jumping all over every little perceived controversy. “I think the stories you guys have been writing over the last 24 hours is pretty good evidence of that,” Obama told reporters this morning. Can you believe the nerve of the press to actually report on the president’s hot-mic conversation with Medvedev?

If Obama had been caught on the hot mic saying, “This is my reelection year. After my election, I can actually get something done on this,” that might mesh with his excuse today that he can’t “get this stuff done” because the politically-charged election year “is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.”

But Obama didn’t say that. He said: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” That doesn’t sound like someone who is primarily concerned about reaching a bipartisan agreement with Congress. That sounds like someone implying that he can personally offer more after he’s no longer beholden to voters (the key words being “my last election”). …

For a change of pace we have a few items on Mitt Romney’s success lately. Bloomberg News says the GOP is beginning to get behind him.

Republican leaders across the party’s ideological spectrum are lining up behind front-runner Mitt Romney in an escalating effort to conclude the presidential primary battle and close ranks before the general election.

Even as Rick Santorum vowed from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) to continue his challenge to Romney, calls for an end to the contest echoed yesterday across Capitol Hill. Some Republicans fear a prolonged fight could damage their party’s prospects in November.

“Every day we continue to have a protracted primary is one less day you can get prepared for the big race in November,” Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who hasn’t endorsed a candidate, said in an interview.

A series of elected officials, business leaders and party activists have raised similar concerns in recent days, urging Republicans to unite around Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, to avoid further damaging the standing of their nominee against President Barack Obama in the November election. …

According to Naomi Decter at Contentions, Romney was a big hit on Jay Leno two nights ago.

Did my ears deceive me? Was that the “Tonight Show” audience Tuesday night giving Mitt Romney big ovations? On everything from foreign policy to health care and the tax code to Rick Santorum?

They cheered when Mitt said President Obama shouldn’t have hinted to Dmitri Medvedev – even away from a hot mic – that there would be more “flexibility” on missile defense once Obama was reelected. They cheered when Mitt said that if Vladimir Putin was really on our side, he would be fighting for freedom, not for oppression. They cheered when Mitt said he hopes to be the Republican nominee (and laughed when he spontaneously suggested Santorum as press secretary in a Romney administration). They cheered when Mitt said we should encourage businesses to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. They even cheered when Mitt said it’s a dangerous world, and we shouldn’t reduce the size of our military! Oh, and there was a smattering of applause for Marco Rubio; maybe a few tourists from Florida? …

Andrew Malcolm brought us the transcript of the Romney/Leno dialogue.

JAY LENO:  Now, this whole election, at least to me, it seems to be about the economy, or it should be about the economy. What would you change about the tax code? What would you do there?

MITT ROMNEY: What I want to do with tax code is create more growth that creates more jobs, and puts more people in a position to have rising incomes, and to pay their taxes. So how do you create a tax code that encourages small businesses to hire? 

And the answer is, you bring down the marginal rates, at the same time you get rid of some deductions and exemptions, or you limit them, so that you stay with a code that’s progressive. But you bring down those top tax rates, you get rid of some of the special deals, and by doing that you encourage investment and hiring of American workers.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO:  You said something interesting a while back. What is the tax rate for corporations in most of the rest of the world?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, it’s in the 20s. Some nations are lower than that. Our corporate tax rate is 35 percent. So I would want to bring that rate from 35, down to 25. Get rid of some of the special breaks and special deals so we keep the same revenue coming in, but have a lower tax rate so it’s a more attractive place for people to come and invest. But do you know that 54 percent of American workers in the private sector work in business that are taxed at the individual tax rate, not the corporate tax rate?

JAY LENO:  Right.

MITT ROMNEY: So when the President says he wants to raise that tax rate from 35 to 40 percent,    he’ll kill jobs and small business. And I want to take that tax rate, bring it down to 28 percent so we can create more jobs.

(Applause.) …

Thomas Sowell has nice things to say about Jerry Rivers. Oh wait, I meant Geraldo Rivera.

It is not often that I agree with Geraldo Rivera, but recently he said something very practical and potentially life-saving, when he urged black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies.

There is no point in dressing like a hoodlum when you are not a hoodlum, even though that has become a fashion for some minority youths, including the teenager who was shot and killed in a confrontation in Florida. I don’t know the whole story of that tragedy, any more than those who are making loud noises in the media do, but that is something that we have trials for.

People have a right to dress any way they want to, but exercising that right is something that requires common sense, and common sense is something that parents should have, even if their children don’t always have it.

Many years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, there was a warning to all the students to avoid a nearby tough Irish neighborhood, where Harvard students had been attacked. It so happened that there was a black neighborhood on the other side of the Irish neighborhood that I had to pass through when I went to get my hair cut.

I never went through that Irish neighborhood dressed in the style of most Harvard students back then. I walked through that Irish neighborhood dressed like a black working man would be dressed — and I never had the slightest trouble the whole three years that I was at Harvard. …

Turns out popcorn is a very healthy snack. At least that’s what the Daily Mail says.

As well as being a great diet food, popcorn also contains a high level of antioxidents, which help fight harmful molecules.

Plain popcorn has already been hailed as a great diet food for its low calorie content but now a group of scientists claim it may even top fruits and vegetables in antioxidant levels. Antioxidants – known as polyphenols – have huge health benefits as they help fight harmful molecules that damage cells. Popcorn was found to have a high level of concentrated antioxidants because it is made up of just four percent water while they are more diluted in fruits and vegetables because they are made up of up to 90 percent water.

Researchers discovered one serving of popcorn has up to 300mg of antioxidants – nearly double the 160mg for all fruits per serving. …

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Mark Helprin was in the Journal yesterday wondering why the president wishes to emulate Europe. 

Both in his re-election campaign and as the core principle of his presidency, Barack Obama asks America to cast off reliance on the free market—because, in his characterization, the free market “doesn’t work”—in favor of the European model of ever-tightening, ever-regulating, ever-expanding governance. This he does, astonishingly, at the very moment of the European model’s long-predictable crisis, collapse, bankruptcy, and devolution.

With his trademark certainty he proposes—indeed, at times commands—that we follow him over the Niagara to which his back is turned. The writer Henry James cautioned that, “It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” Promiscuous endorsement of things European, inveterate in the president’s academic coterie, has long been characteristic of American snobs. As Harvard once dispatched missionaries to better the savages, it now sends students abroad so they might better us. To be wrong on both counts requires congenital blindness to the facts, which suggest that despite our own grievous failings Europe is hardly worthy of imitation.

As a museum of culture, it has few competitors. Europeans make better movies; their cuisine is better (except in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia, England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland); and they do a better job of suppressing modern architecture, for which they are to be commended.

But in suppressing and over-engineering their economies they court national bankruptcies. Just as reckless are their efforts to ameliorate economic stagnation via the all-guzzling welfare state. Shall we create more jobs by aping Europe, which since 1990 has averaged 9.16% unemployment while ours was 5.95%?

European structural unemployment is supposedly tolerable in the context of less income inequality and greater social analgesia, but although income equality may be the socialist ideal, isn’t the more civilized object to provide as abundantly as possible rather than to annihilate the potential for envy? Incomes are perfectly level in the Gulag, whereas in Boston and Singapore they are not. …

Bill McGurn of the WSJ was featured in a recent issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. His subject was public employee unions.

These days, when conservatives get together to discuss the debilitating role played by government workers, we reassure ourselves with statements by FDR and labor leader Samuel Gompers about the fundamental incompatibilities between a union of private workers working for a private company and a union of government workers laboring for our city, state, or federal governments. We also trace the line of expansion to various events, including John F. Kennedy’s executive order that opened the path for collective bargaining for public employees at the federal level.

I don’t want to rehash that today. Today I want to talk about the situation as we find it, and suggest that the first step toward a cure is to diagnose the illness accurately. This means changing the way we think of public sector unions. And in what I have to say, I will concentrate on public sector unions at the state and local levels. …

… Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. New Jersey has been telling here. Look at our former governor, Jon Corzine. …

… When workers at Rutgers University were planning to unionize, he (Jon Corzine) turned up at their rally. This was too much even for the liberal Star Ledger, which—in an article entitled “Jon Corzine, Union Rep?”—noted that Mr. Corzine’s appearance at the rally raised the question whether he truly understood that “he represents the ‘management’ side in ongoing contract talks with state employees unions.”

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money. …

… My second point relates to my first. Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them.

Take the case of Northvale, a small, affluent town of about 4,600 people at the northeast tip of New Jersey. Its median income is about $99,000, comfortably above both the New Jersey and national levels, and its budget is $21.8 million. Of this, $13.2 million—or nearly two-thirds—goes to the schools. The lion’s share of that, of course, goes to salaries and benefits.

Northvale’s school budget is voted on in the spring. That’s part of the scam, because turnout for these elections is much lower than it is in November for the regular elections. With lower turnout, it’s easier for teachers and other interested parties to dominate the elections. Thus the great bulk of Northvale’s budget is not determined in the regular elections, or by the mayor and city council. Effectively, it is determined by the education lobby and school officials—who in turn are chosen in elections involving only 20 percent of the electorate. …

.. My father was a federal employee, as an FBI agent. I spent some time as a government worker in the White House. I also know many fine and devoted people on the public payroll who work hard, are good at what they do, and earn everything they get. But there are also those who work without results. I believe Americans are a generous people who can recognize the difference. We need to restore our public sector to a place where those in charge can make those distinctions and allocate rewards and resources accordingly.

In the meantime, I think the best thing we can do is speak honestly. That is what Mr. Christie is doing in New Jersey. His style isn’t for everyone. Yet his popularity suggests that Americans appreciate a politician willing to talk about the reality of public employee unions today—and the unreasonable costs they are imposing on our society.

We’ll never return to the ideal of public service until the rest of us start speaking honestly as well.

It was October 2009 when a reporter asked Pelosi about the constitutionality of the healthcare law. She answered, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”  The NY Times profiles the law professor who led the charge that became the very bad day the Affordable Care Act had yesterday at the Supreme Court.

When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.

But over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.

“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”

On Monday, as the court began three days of arguments, questioning by the nine justices suggested they were ready to review the law now rather than wait until it has fully kicked in. That lays the groundwork for arguments for the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.

Professor Barnett, who watched Monday from the spectator seats, was not the first to raise the constitutional critique of the health law, but more than any other legal academic, he is associated with it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.