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Stuart Taylor writes again on Sotomayor with even stronger condemnation of her affirmative action views.

Conservative critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor may be digging themselves into a hole if they keep hurling the tired old “liberal activist” slogan at her. The reason is that her supporters can plausibly retort that these days, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are as activist as the liberals, especially on racial issues.

But conservatives and like-minded centrists can win the political debate if they focus not on buzzwords but on in-depth, civil discourse about the very big issue on which Sotomayor and her liberal supporters are most at odds — and the conservative justices most in tune — with the vast majority of Americans.

That issue is racially preferential affirmative action. By this, I mean the many forms of supposedly benign discrimination against whites and Asians that have been engineered over the past 45 years to advance blacks and Hispanics in the workforce, in college admissions, and in government contracting.

The long-standing public disapproval of such preferences was documented yet again by a major Quinnipiac University poll released on June 3, showing that American voters, by a lopsided margin, want them abolished. …

Abby Thernstrom wants to know when Obama is going to get past race.

Some of us thought the election of Barack Obama as president might signal a fading away of the old identity politics.

The assumption that fundamental lines of division in politics are set by race and ethnicity would seem to be a bit passé when 43 percent of white voters cast their ballots for a proudly “post-racial” African-American.

But the president himself has made identity politics front-page news with his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his Supreme Court nominee. She played an important role in the New Haven firefighters’ case (Ricci v. DeStefano) now awaiting decision by the Supreme Court. …

Given the way Obama treated Roberts and Alito, David Broder says he has nothing to complain about when Sotomayor gets slammed.

… Based on the Obama precedent, the White House can hardly complain if Republicans push beyond the question of Sotomayor’s qualifications and examine her values — and her biases.

Someday, the Senate may again be satisfied to examine only professional credentials, recognizing the uncertain dynamics of a nine-person bench. But while the Bork and Obama precedents live, that is not likely.

Victor Davis Hanson wants to know if it’s going to be race and resentment all the time.

… One would have thought with the presidency, or nomination to the Supreme Court, or with the office of Attorney General, or First Lady, such hurt feelings and old grievances might wane; but instead the resentment seems to be ubiquitous, and growing, and the lectures will be with us for the next four years in almost every imaginable circumstance. If the administration is not careful, millions of Americans are going to begin feeling that they are caricatured pretty much as those once were in rural Pennsylvania.

VDH says she can her resentments and he’ll have his reservations.

… I think Team Obama will have to retract any characterization that Sotomayor “misspoke,” given that she seemed to say it ad nauseam over the years — at some point how can one really suggest that she did not believe what she so often proclaimed?

Despite the solid credentials of Justice Sotomayor, and her winning personality, I still think all this is going to be a lot more serious than Obama thinks, since the president is essentially saying to the American people that their next Supreme Court justice on regular occasions, in print and before the public, has reiterated that race and gender make someone intrinsically a better or worse judge — precisely the opposite ideology from what Obama embraced in his hope-and-change, no-blue/no-red-state rhetoric.

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making. …

Ed Whelan Corner posts on Soto’s Puerto Rican nationalism and her public cheerleading for Obama.

In a speech that she delivered to the Black, Latino, Asian Pacific American Law Alumni Association on April 17, 2009 — two weeks before news of the Souter vacancy broke — Judge Sotomayor made a number of references to President Obama that seem surprisingly and disturbingly partisan coming from a sitting federal judge:

“The power of working together was, this past November, resoundingly proven.” (p. 6)

“The wide coalition of groups that joined forces to elect America’s first Afro-American President was awe inspiring in both the passion the members of the coalition exhibited in their efforts and the discipline they showed in the execution of their goals.” (p. 7)

“On November 4, we saw past our ethnic, religious and gender differences.” (p. 10)

“What is our challenge today: Our challenge as lawyers and court related professionals and staff, as citizens of the world is to keep the spirit of the common joy we shared on November 4 alive in our everyday existence.” (p. 11)

“It is the message of service that President Obama is trying to trumpet and it is a clarion call we are obligated to heed.” (p. 13)

Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges provides that a judge “should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Sotomayor’s public cheerleading for Obama seems clearly to violate that ethical obligation.

Jennifer Rubin closes the Sotomayor section.

… Obama and his team, not without good reason, have a nearly unlimited confidence in their ability to control the narrative and direct the national debate. But from time to time, whether on Guantanamo or the stimulus plan, reality swamps the spin. The voters can assess for themselves what is being sold. On Sotomayor they can decide whether she and, by inference, the president are selling a vision they don’t like.

Along the way they may discover that the president and his nominee are, how shall we say it, not at all empathetic toward the victims of race preferences.

David Harsanyi says if Coloradans are not careful their state will be broke just like California.

… Colorado’s dynamic economy relies on a multitude of factors, but none of those factors happens to be the presence of wise governors or legislators. Sensible governance is made compulsory by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) and other state spending limits — which keeps government lean and responsible, yet also allow the state the flexibility to ask voters for more funding.

Now, politicians abhor few things more than the unpleasant task of justifying their spending to the riff-raff. Even more distasteful is dealing with bothersome spending limits that retard an elected official’s transcendent powers to help you out.

Accordingly, the bellyaching over spending caps in Colorado is ceaseless. How anyone but a shyster politician could argue that allowing a budget to grow 6 percent over the previous year’s total (and more if you count transportation and capital projects) is unfair is yet to be determined. Few Colorado families or businesses, I am relatively sure, enjoy that kind of latitude.

Yet, this week — only days after California voters overwhelmingly rejected their state’s bid at economic anarchy — Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed legislation to eliminate Colorado’s spending limit, which henceforth will be referred to as the “Californiacation.” …

It turns out Wal-Mart is helping people eat better. This from Forbes.

One might think that “everyday low prices” for food would mean that people would eat much more–stuff themselves, even. So one would expect to see more obese folks in places where Wal-Mart does more business. Right? Think again. Research tells a different story.

The University of North Carolina-Greensboro’s Charles Courtemanche and I are finishing a study of big retail stores and obesity. In our first round of statistical analysis we found that greater consumer access to a Wal-Mart store was associated with lower body-mass indexes and a lower probability of being obese.

As we gathered more data on Wal-Mart discount stores, Wal-Mart Supercenters, warehouse clubs like Sam’s Club, Costco and BJ’s Wholesale Club, and other outlets, we found that the correlation holds up under a variety of different circumstances, with a clear relationship between warehouse clubs and better eating habits emerging over time. Further, we found that Wal-Mart’s effect on weight is largest for women, the poor, African-Americans and people who live in urban areas. …

According to Scrappleface, Sotomayor says a “wise Latina” would not have picked her.

… President Obama said he would not comment further on the controversy, “since matching wits with a Latina woman is above my pay grade.”

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Mark Steyn thinks the fall of GM, and the speech, are indications of decline.

… And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.

There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.

Charles Krauthammer’s thoughts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

National Review conducted on online symposium on the Cairo speech. Here are a few participants.

Mansoor Ijaz.

… Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself — to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?

Islam’s worst enemies are within it. If wealthy Gulf Arabs want peace for Palestinians with Israel, why don’t they take a fraction of their profligate spending (in nightclubs in Geneva, at bars in London, at boutiques in Milan) and redirect it to rebuilding Palestinian enclaves with schools, hospitals, food-production facilities, and manufacturing plants? We might then have durable peace possible in the Middle East. Why didn’t Obama say that? …

Angelo M. Codevilla.

Just imagine: After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization have trod opposite paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward relations between the sexes and the role of work in life — and after a half-century during which Muslims have murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians, to the cheers of millions of their own — suddenly a young American seems to believe he can conjure up a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” How could anyone imagine he possesses such a “reset button”? The answer only starts with Yuppie hubris. …

Amir Taheri.

The speech could do a lot of harm. Obama endorsed the basic claim of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Ali Khamenehi, who divide the world  into Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) and Dar al-Harb (House of War).

By abandoning Bush’s Freedom Agenda, Obama could encourage despots whose brutal role has given radical Islamists, acting as opponents of the established order, a certain legitimacy.

Obama’s position on women in Islam was pathetic. …

Andrew McCarthy.

President Obama’s Cairo speech should have been called “a pretend beginning” rather than “a new beginning.” To the extent it wasn’t dangerously naïve, it provided little more than warmed-over left-wing dogma: Obama portrayed Islam and the world as he and other progressives would have them (the president said “progress” eleven times), rather than as they are — under the risible claim that his desired “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”

In Obama’s bowdlerized Islam, the Koran teaches merely that “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.” Quite apart from the fact that the president simply purged the very next inconvenient verse (which, as Robert Spencer points out, mandates the crucifixion or mutilation of those who fight against Allah and Muhammad), many in the Muslim world — not just terrorists — subscribe to a supremacist interpretation of scripture that does not regard non-Muslims as “innocents.” …

Regarding Andrew’s above lines from the Koran, Lisa Schiffren notes their roots in the Jewish Babylonian Talmud.

As a cornerstone of the case that Islam is the religion of peace, the Koranic sura which Andy cited, 5:32 (“The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”), has more problems than the mere fact that it is entirely contradicted by the following verse (i.e., the one promising execution, crucifixion, or decapitation to those who oppose Allah and his messenger).

It is one of the suras that comes straight from another religion. Not that they teach this in Al Azhar, but the original occurrence of the line is found in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 4:5. You know, the book in which the ancient rabbis interpret Jewish law. It reads …

Caroline Glick comments on the speech.

From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel.

Rhetorically, Obama’s sugar coated the pathologies of the Islamic world — from the tyranny that characterizes its regimes, to the misogyny, xenophobia, Jew hatred, and general intolerance that characterizes its societies. In so doing he made clear that his idea of pressing the restart button with the Islamic world involves erasing the moral distinctions between the Islamic world and the free world.

In contrast, Obama’s perverse characterization of Israel — of the sources of its legitimacy and of its behavior — made clear that he shares the Arab world’s view that there is something basically illegitimate about the Jewish state. …

Charles Hurt in the NY Post.

… The problem with talking so much is that you eventually just start babbling and saying a bunch of stuff that makes no sense.

At one point, Obama fretted over the rise of new power that, to the horror of civilized people, exudes an obsessed and twisted view of “sexuality” and “mindless violence.”

Islamo-fascism?

No, the Internet.

They guy is confronting one of the most evil and relentless mindsets in the history of man and he finds room in his big address to whine about the Internet — by far a greater tool for freedom than anything else. …

You never again have to watch the kid president before his teleprompter, because a Daily Beast blogger has broken his speech code.

President Obama has faced his share of tough issues and audiences over the years, but at every turn he’s managed to defuse tension with a well-timed speech. Already he’s receiving rave reviews for this morning’s address in Cairo, Egypt, on America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But how does he do it? We analyzed Obama’s most famous speeches to bring you this handy instruction manual.

Step 1. Thanks for having me.

Step 2. Express shock that someone with your life story could ever stand before such a crowd…

Step 3. …But that’s just America for you. …

We have a couple of items on the auto bankrupts. First from the Corner.

… gotta love Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (PDF): “‘Hoosier retirees and taxpayers are being deprived of millions of dollars in their funds while a foreign corporation [Fiat] receives a windfall at no cost, this is not equitable,’ stated [Indiana state] Treasurer Mourdock.” He also called the administration’s actions “unprecedented and illegal.”

Hoosier retirees and taxpayers . . . doesn’t exactly square with Obama administration’s depiction of its opponents as a bunch of Wall Street vultures.

Michael Levine from the Financial Times.

… the Obama administration overtly played favourites to get the United Auto Workers protection it would not have received under Section 1113, probably elevating costs in a way that will damage prospects for a successful reorganisation. It made and imposed business judgments on GM about what cars to make and what plants to close (and perhaps about suppliers and distribution) that no one in the government or on the task force had the experience to make and for which no one would be financially accountable. Worst of all, despite Sunday’s desperate attempt to distance itself from GM’s future decisions, it left its fingerprints all over the new plan. Inevitably the White House will take political and hence financial responsibility for its success, relieving pressure on management and labour to succeed. Ultimately it elected to adopt an industrial policy toward the industry that failed utterly in the UK, and has worked out badly and expensively in France and Italy.

Finally, in the process, it disturbed the security of expectation that has made lenders willing to provide capital as secured credit, thus handicapping all US industry and undermining what has been, for all its flaws, one of the best financial reorganisation processes in the world, now emulated elsewhere.

The administration took a tragic situation and turned it into an expensive mess to pay a political debt. It wasted billions of dollars over many months delaying GM’s filing and then implicitly put itself on the hook for many billions more. The financial, political and social echoes of that decision will be with us for a long time. In short, they blew it.

We close with Mark Steyn who has found a need for another czar.

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If you want a clue for one of the reasons the left is still so nasty, even after their big win, it is in Jennifer Rubin’s post about a Quinnipiac poll showing the center-right nature of the country. The left knows they won’t be in power long because the media can’t forever hide all the mistakes.

… We will have the confirmation hearing for Sotomayor this summer. In each of these the public will hear arguments about quotas, preferences, historical discrimination, preferential treatment, and multiculturalism. Conservatives who extol the concept of individual, as opposed to group, rights and who eschew the practice of divvying up by race, are on firm constitutional footing. This poll confirms that they also are speaking for the overwhelming number of Americans who think it is time to get beyond identity politics and racial preferences.

Jonathan Tobin posts on the obsequious Friedman interview with the president.

… Friedman was able to get Obama to stop talking about himself long enough to tell him an old joke about a guy who prays to win the lottery but never buys a ticket. The point of this knee-slapper is that nobody in the Middle East has given peace a chance. It made the president laugh and gave the columnist the opportunity once again to pose as an adviser (rather than a mere Boswell) to the powerful.

Obama, as Max pointed out, then said:

We have a joke around the White House. We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.

Oh, the perils of honesty! That’s the word Obama used earlier this week in another pre-Cairo interview with NPR to describe his hostile attitude toward Israel. If this was a contest to see which of the two was the most self-infatuated, I guess you’ve got to give the decision to Obama.

But the point here is that the big fibbers are Friedman and Obama, not the Israelis who, they imply, have never lifted a finger for peace and have no interest in hearing the truth.

The fact is Israel has been anteing up for peace since 1993,  when it signed the Oslo Accords, brought the PLO and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat back to the country, and handed most of the West Bank and Gaza over to him. …

Mark Steyn posts on Mali Muslim massacre.

David Warren on Tiananmen, D-Day and what we fight for.

We have two important anniversaries this week: tomorrow is the 20th of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Saturday will be the 65th of D-Day. Both events retain “educational value,” and today I shall try to remember why.

I was not around for D-Day. Recently I buried a father who was, and at an age to make me realize that the Second World War will soon exist only as book knowledge. Include, in that book, what was incised in stone over the battlefields of France, where Western leaders will gather on the weekend for verbal tributes, and where a few surviving veterans will recall the comrades of their vanished youth.

Much is forgotten, but nothing is lost. The whole history of the world is inscribed in God’s living memory. We will, according to this religious view, again glimpse that record on a Day of Judgement. I do not believe for one moment that what is forgotten therefore disappears. For that is the ostrich view of space and time, suitable only for those who are in hiding. …

David Harsanyi takes up the subject of General Motors.

For those of you who have carefully avoided piddling away your hard-earned dollars on a General Motors vehicle, resistance is futile. You’re a majority “investor” now. Rejoice.

Taxpayers, our president has decreed, are impelled to preserve a prehistoric, poorly run, unprofitable private corporation. Now, the only question becomes: What does all this sacrifice mean?

Will GM be run as profitably and efficiently as Amtrak? Will GM be paid not to produce like the agricultural sector? Will it feed into an economic bubble like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Will it boast the negligible oversight and waste of the so-called stimulus package? Will it feature the fiscal irresponsibility of Social Security? Or will we see the runaway costs of Medicaid?

So many options. …

National Review editors on the peril for Milwaukee’s school choice program.

Milwaukee is home to America’s most vibrant school-choice program: More than 20,000 students participate, almost all of them minorities. They have made academic gains and boast higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools. They even save money for taxpayers. Inevitably, Democrats in the state capital are trying to eviscerate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

They’ve wanted to gut school choice for years, at the behest of teacher-union patrons who believe education should be a government monopoly. Until recently, Republicans have stood in the way. That changed following last year’s elections. Now, for the first time since the advent of school choice in Milwaukee two decades ago, Madison is a one-party capital. The governor, Jim Doyle, is a Democrat. Members of his party control both the state assembly and the state senate. School choice is in their crosshairs. …

Karl Rove gets to say, “It’s gonna be the economy, stupid.”

… It is becoming clear that the economy is now the top issue. Mr. Obama’s presidency may well rise or fall on it. The economy will be his responsibility long before next year’s elections. Americans may give him a chance to turn things around, but voters can turn unforgiving very quickly if promised jobs don’t materialize.

That’s what happened in Louisiana, where voters accepted Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s missteps before Hurricane Katrina but brutally rejected her afterward because she failed to turn the state around.

Until now, the new president has benefited from public willingness to give him a honeymoon. He decided to use that grace period to push for the largest expansion of government in U.S. history and to reward political allies (see the sweetheart deals Big Labor received in the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies).

The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead — higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.

Tony Blankley expands on the subject.

The Roman historian Livy famously described the terminal plight of the late Roman Republic: “Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus” (“We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them”). As I reread this phrase in Christian Meier’s biography of Julius Caesar this past weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of America’s current fiscal profligacy — which has been growing for years at an ever-accelerating rate.

Of course, since last fall’s financial/economic crisis, the rate of profligacy has become supercharged. Like the Roman Republic’s lament, we think we can’t survive without deficit spending — but we soon won’t be able to survive with deficit spending, either.

In 2012, federal debt will be more than $15 trillion. Annual interest probably will be between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion — depending on whether long bonds remain at about 3.5 percent or go to recent historic rates (6 to 7 percent). Deficits will average about $1 trillion a year — $22 trillion by 2019. Yearly interest payments then will be more than $2 trillion. That’s the good news. …

A Contentions post too.

… Bernanke is engaged in an effort to stimulate an economic recovery by using monetary tools to reduce the level of medium and long-term interest rates (”quantitative easing”). The Treasury is trying to add to the effort by using fiscal tools (Keynesian stimulus). What everyone hopes will happen is that the economy will pick up and start generating its own momentum, so that by the time interest rates start ticking up by themselves, we’ll be able to lay off both the quantitative easing and the stimulus spending.

The danger, however, is that expectations for economic recovery will cause investor dollars to flow away from Treasury debt and dollar-denominated investments altogether, before the job has been done. As medium and long-term interest rates rise, Bernanke finds himself under considerable pressure to expand the quantitative easing program, which he’s very reluctant to do because of the danger of runaway inflation.

That leaves the Treasury needing to keep borrowing gargantuan amounts of money for a long time to come, probably years. And that keeps steady upward pressure on interest rates in the economically-sensitive medium and long range segments of the yield curve. …

We close this section with a piece from the Financial Times.

Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade its outlook for British sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative” should be a wake-up call for the US Congress and administration. Let us hope they wake up.

Under President Barack Obama’s budget plan, the federal debt is exploding. To be precise, it is rising – and will continue to rise – much faster than gross domestic product, a measure of America’s ability to service it. The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.

“A government debt burden of that [100 per cent] level, if sustained, would in Standard & Poor’s view be incompatible with a triple A rating,” as the risk rating agency stated last week.

I believe the risk posed by this debt is systemic and could do more damage to the economy than the recent financial crisis. …

Borowitz reports the president gave a Chevy Malibu to the Saudi king.

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Spengler notes the foolishness of an address to the “Muslim world.”

… To speak to the “Muslim world”, is to speak not to a fact, but rather to an aspiration, and that is the aspiration that Islam shall be a global state religion as its founders intended. To address this aspiration is to breathe life into it. For an American president to validate such an aspiration is madness. America is not at war with Islam, unless, that is, Islam were to take a political form that threatens America’s global interests. These interests include friendly relationships with nation-states that have a Muslim majority, such as Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. To address “the Muslim world” is to conjure up a prospective enemy, for global political Islam only can exist as the enemy of the nation-states with which America has allied.

Obama, the White House press office told reporters last week, will address among other issues the Arab-Israeli issue. What does it imply to raise this issue in a speech to the “Muslim world”? Nearly 700 million of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, countries which share no linguistic or cultural affinities with the Arabs, and have only religion in common.

They have no strategic interest whatever in the outcome of war or peace in the Levant. Their only possible interest is religious. Does the United States really believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is religious in origin? …

… Thus far, Obama’s efforts to propitiate the “Muslim world” have made the administration’s future work all the harder. Iran is convinced that the administration needs it to help out in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has all the less incentive to abandon its central goal of developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan is in the midst of a bloody civil war forced upon it by the United States. After Obama leaned on the Israelis to halt settlement construction, the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas left Washington convinced that Obama will force out the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the next two years.

For his trouble, Obama will get more bloodshed in Pakistan, more megalomania from Iran, more triumphalism from the Palestinians, and less control over Iraq and Afghanistan. Of all the available bad choices, Obama has taken the worst. It is hard to imagine any consequence except a steep diminution of American influence.

Corner posts on the visit to Egypt.

“One of the largest Muslim countries.” Jeesh.

More on the large Muslim country.

Richard Epstein has more on Sotomayor.

Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for a Supreme Court seat has put both her defenders and attackers into high gear. In my previous Forbes column, I indicated some of my deep reservations about the Sotomayor candidacy based on her perfunctory performance in Didden v. Town of Port Chester, where the panel brushed aside the “public use” language in the constitution’s takings clause.

Likewise, the cryptic panel decision of her panel in the New Haven firefighters’ case, Ricci v. DeStefano, also evidenced a tin ear to the explosive statutory and constitutional issues that arose when New Haven chose to disregard its own promotion test on the sole ground that it identified few (indeed, no) African-American candidates as eligible for promotion to captain and lieutenant.

On this occasion, I won’t ask why Judge Sotomayor took an intellectual pass on a hard case, which is now before the Supreme Court. Instead I will examine the other side of the coin, which is the serious intellectual weakness in the conservative case against her confirmation. Note that I consciously use the term “conservative” in opposition to the decidedly different “libertarian” orientation. …

Mark Steyn Corner post on empathy on the Court.

Thomas Sowell on the nomination.

… Laws are made for the benefit of the citizens, not for the self-indulgences of judges. Making excuses for such self-indulgences and calling them “inevitable” is part of the cleverness that has eroded the rule of law and undermined respect for the law.

Something else is said to be “inevitable” by the clever people. That is the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But it was only a year and a half ago that Hillary Clinton’s winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president was considered “inevitable.”

The Republicans certainly do not have the votes to stop Judge Sotomayor from being confirmed — if all the Democrats vote for her. But that depends on what the people say. It looked like a done deal a couple of years ago when an amnesty bill for illegal aliens was sailing through the Senate with bipartisan support. But public outrage brought that political steamroller to a screeching halt.

Nothing is inevitable in a democracy unless the public lets the political spinmasters and media talking heads lead them around by the nose. …

Mona Charen says it is cruel to casually call someone racist.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has already achieved a boon for our political culture: It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.”

Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar — that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman — he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair. If Democrats are learning this now, that’s excellent news. One hopes they will remember this discovery when the wheel turns and a Republican nominee is before the Senate. Certainly they didn’t seem to get it as recently as 2002, when President Bush nominated Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. …

Treasury Sec. Geithner was laughed at in China.

… Mr Geithner told politicians and academics in Beijing that he still supports a strong US dollar, and insisted that the trillions of dollars of Chinese investments would not be unduly damaged by the economic crisis. Speaking at Peking University, Mr Geithner said: “Chinese assets are very safe.”

The comment provoked loud laughter from the audience of students. There are growing fears over the size and sustainability of the US budget deficit, which is set to rise to almost 13pc of GDP this year as the world’s biggest economy fights off recession. …

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Just as the Dems stood in the school house door fighting
integration, they now stand in the way of education reform. Here’s the story of
one South Carolina Democrat who is fighting for
school choice.

Getting arrested doesn’t normally bolster a politician’s
credibility. But when South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford told me recently
that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. As a
youth, Mr. Ford cut his political teeth in tumultuous 1960s civil-rights
protests. 

Today this black Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle
is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a
decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the president’s
help. “We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school
he wants.”

Mr. Ford was once like many Democrats on education — a
reliable vote against reforms that would upend the system. But over the past
three and a half years he’s studied how school choice works and he’s now
advocating tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or
private schools.

He’s not alone. …

When he was president of Washington College,
Robert E. Lee admonished the staff for planting neat rows of trees on the
grounds saying nature did not organize planting that way.  David
Warren votes for chaos too.  

Call me an anarchist, but I don’t like books to be all the
same size. They aren’t, of course, but there are people who would like them to
be. I don’t want them to be all the same colour, or smell. I can handle a
fairly long set, here or there, but not the prospect of interminable rows. I am
inflamed by the sight of matching spines on the shelves in the offices of
lawyers.

I don’t like envelopes to be in standard sizes, or
notepaper, either; or magazines. …

… And as readers who have followed me over the years may
recall, I do not like the metric system, which, among its other notorious
evils, is the mother and father of innumerable standardization schemes. It is a
quirkless system, and must therefore be condemned.

All these things are a source of irritation, though I must
boast that Nature is on my side, and that she may be relied upon to put an end
to all projects of regimentation, in due course; and in the meantime, to be a
constant source of sabotage. …

Mark
Steyn Corner post on Britain in the ’70′s.

Bill
Kristol says the Sotomayor confirmation process will get very interesting
when the Court rules on the New Haven firefighters’ case.

… we will have an unusual moment in the Sotomayor
confirmation process–one that will stand out from the customary small-bore
senatorial back-and-forth during judicial confirmations. We’ll have a
high-profile Supreme Court ruling highlighting a very questionable judicial
decision by the president’s nominee. Most Court observers expect the judgment
in which Sotomayor joined to be reversed. But even if it isn’t, there will be a
closely observed decision by a probably closely divided Supreme Court that will
bring home the importance of the Sotomayor nomination for jurisprudence in this
area. The public will have occasion to see how a nominee, herself picked for
identity-politics reasons, was unempathetic, one might say, and unjust to the
victims of identity politics, the firefighters of New Haven who were denied
promotions.

Sotomayor will probably be confirmed. But nothing is
certain. And a Ricci-focused debate over her confirmation will serve to remind
Americans of the unseemliness and injustice of the Constitution-corrupting,
identity-politics-driven agenda so dear to the hearts of the modern Democratic
party, the Obama administration, and Sonia Sotomayor.

Jennifer
Rubin has thoughts on the subject.

… That is what this will boil down to: does Sotomayor (and
by implication, the president) believe in trying to get it right, trying to set
an impartial standard of justice for all Americans? Conservatives suspect by
word and deed (her perfunctory dismissal of Ricci (New Haven), for
example) on the bench she does not. Whether she does or not, she’ll need
to convince the Senate that she does — or face a very rocky road to
confirmation. Average Americans, unlike law professors and liberal pundits,
like to think “equal justice under the law”  means something and judges
aren’t merely surrogates for special interest groups.

Michael
Barone thinks the GOP should run against the center.

… So I think Republicans today should be less interested
in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center.
Here I mean a different “center” — not a midpoint on an opinion
spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and
strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions
fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets.

This center includes the Treasury, with its $700 billion of
TARP funds voted last fall to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions
and used instead to quasi-nationalize banks and preserve union benefits for
employees and retirees of bankrupt auto companies. It includes the Federal
Reserve, which has been vastly increasing the money supply. It includes a
federal government whose $787 billion economic stimulus has so far failed to
lower the unemployment rate from where the government projected it would be
without the stimulus package. …

Bill McGurn
tells us how Hillsdale College beats Harvard.

David
Brooks looks at GM and sees six reasons for the quagmire ahead.

… First, the Obama plan will reduce the influence of
commercial outsiders. The best place for fresh thinking could come from outside
private investors. But the Obama plan rides roughshod over the current private
investors and so discourages future investors. G.M. is now a pariah on Wall
Street. Say farewell to a potentially powerful source of external commercial
pressure.

Second, the Obama plan entrenches the ancien régime. The old
C.E.O. is gone, but he’s been replaced by a veteran insider and similar
executive coterie. Meanwhile, the U.A.W. has been given a bigger leadership
role. This is the union that fought for job banks, where employees get paid for
doing nothing. This is the organization that championed retirement with full
benefits at around age 50. This is not an organization that represents
fundamental cultural change. …

Interesting piece of food
Americana from the Economist. Seems a depression era WPA project on
American food was never published until now.

… The attack on Pearl Harbour, and America’s subsequent
entry into the second world war, meant that “America Eats” was never completed.
Now, however, Mr Kurlansky has dusted off the files from the FWP archive and
chosen the best morsels from a huge amount of raw material. They range from an
essay on maple-syrup production in Vermont to squirrel recipes from Arkansas, a
poem about Nebraskans’ enthusiasm for frankfurter sausages and a description of
how Sioux Indians prepared buffalo meat. As well as providing an introduction,
Mr Kurlansky adds his own commentary and sprinkles in the occasional modern
reference point: alongside the 1940 Christmas dinner menu from the Brown Hotel
in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, the 2007 menu from the same hotel is
provided for comparison. (The modern menu includes antipasti and sushi; the
1940 menu mentions neither.) …

Brown University has become a caricature of the politically
correct. The type of place ABC’s new Show The Goode Family makes fun of on
Wednesday night at 9:00. National
Review Corner posts have more.

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David Warren trashes Canada’s version of the auto bailout.

… Very few Canadians make as much as GM and Chrysler workers, or have pension plans as generous. Many of us don’t have pension plans at all, beyond the chump change offered by our Nanny State. The autoworkers’ plan is around $2 billion in the hole. It goes without saying that at least $2 billion of the bailout will go, directly or indirectly, to rescuing it.

That the government must deny this use of our money also goes without saying. But the plan will be rescued; and the person who thinks it will happen by a spontaneous miracle is naïve.

One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.)

Alas, until some conservatives take over the Conservative party, Canadians will be in no position to prove me wrong.

Stephen Moore laments the missing man – Milton Friedman.

… The myth that the stock-market collapse was due to a failure of Friedman’s principles could hardly be more easily refuted. No one was more critical of the Bush spending and debt binge than Friedman. The massive run up in money and easy credit that facilitated the housing and credit bubbles was precisely the foolishness that Friedman spent a lifetime warning against.

A few scholars are now properly celebrating the Friedman legacy. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economics professor, has just published a tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature. He describes the period 1980-2005 as “The Age of Milton Friedman,” an era that “witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined.”

So the Bernie Sanders crowd has things exactly backward: Milton’s ideas on capitalism and freedom did more to liberate humankind from poverty than the New Deal, Great Society and Obama economic stimulus plans stacked on top of each other.

At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

But in the energy industry today we are trading in shovels for spoons. The Obama administration wants to power our society by spending three or four times more money to generate electricity using solar and wind power than it would cost to use coal or natural gas. The president says that this initiative will create “green jobs.” …

George Will writes on “shock and awe statism.”

… State governments, too, are expected to accept Washington’s whims, but plucky Indiana is being obdurate. Gov. Mitch Daniels, alarmed by what he calls the Obama administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,” is supporting state Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s objection to the administration’s treatment of Chrysler’s creditors, which include the pension funds for Indiana’s retired teachers and state police officers and a state construction fund. Together they own $42.5 million of Chrysler’s $6.9 billion (supposedly) secured debt.

Compliant, because dependent, banks bowed to the administration’s demand that they accept less than settled bankruptcy law would have given them as secured creditors. Next, the president denounced as “speculators” remaining secured creditors, who then folded and accepted less on the dollar than an unsecured creditor — the United Auto Workers union — is getting. This raw taking of property from secured investors penalized those “speculators” — retired Indiana teachers and state police officers who, Mourdock says, are being “ripped off by the federal government.”

He is asking a court to declare that the Obama administration’s actions have violated “more than 100 years of established law by redefining ‘secured creditors’ to mean something less” and that the actions violate the Fifth Amendment protection against the seizure of private property. Furthermore, he says, the government is guilty of “misuse” of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which gives the Treasury authority only to aid financial institutions, not industrial companies. …

Robert Samuelson normally writes on economics, but today this subject is the media’s Obama infatuation.

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don’t provide effective opposition. And the press — on domestic, if not foreign, policy — has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”  …

How long will we allow ourselves to be governed by children? NY Times has the story.

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.

But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born. A bit laconic and looking every bit the just-out-of-graduate-school student adjusting to life in the West Wing — “he’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force — Mr. Deese was thrown into the auto industry’s maelstrom as soon the election-night parties ended. …

With just another routine lie, the kid president tried to pass off the auto bailout as something the Bush folks dreamed up. Sweetness and Light has the story.

Spend $100,000,000 to save $1,000,000 a year? Cafe Hayek posts on how our government touts failure.

The Economist reports it really was pigs that started that flu.

… This new study does not answer the big questions of how, exactly, the virus crossed over to humans and why it kills some people and not others—in particular, why it hits the young (and thus, presumably, healthy) harder than the elderly. A different study by the CDC has found that nearly two-thirds of swine-flu infections in America have been in people aged between five and 24, whereas only 1% of cases affected those over 65. This is the reverse of the pattern seen in seasonal flu, which kills thousands of old people every winter. One possible explanation, according to Anne Schuchat of the CDC, is that “older adults might have been in contact a long time ago with a virus similar to the one we see now.” That, she surmises, might give them an immunity to this new menace that young people lack.

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Mark Steyn thinks our reaction to North Korea’s test was underdone.

… If you’re American, it’s natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of …” Drumroll, please! “…grave concern,” declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will – wait for it – “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’”

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime – via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. – to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket case. This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but is demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. …

David Harsanyi says don’t give Sotomayor a free ride.

You know what would be a nice change of pace? A nominee for public office whose compelling life story didn’t remind me of my pitiably self-indulgent life.

Fortunately, while overachievers can induce some self-loathing, when it comes to public service, spectacular life stories are irrelevant.

Adversity does not grant anyone superhuman intellect or a Solomon-like temperament. And gripping tales of perseverance should not make one impenetrable to criticism.

Much has been made of political repercussions for Republicans if they dare target Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina who grew up in a deprived neighborhood in the South Bronx. New York’s hyper-yammering senator, Chuck Schumer, claims that the Republican Party would do so at its “own peril” — in part alluding, no doubt, to blowback from the Hispanic community.

If Republicans take this kind of bigoted advice, they will have done the country a great disservice. …

Jay Nordlinger with interesting background on the Soto story by reminding us of the Dems filibustering of Miguel Estrada.

In recent days, we’ve been hearing a lot about a “wonderful American story” — Sonia Sotomayor’s. Can’t oppose that, can you — that wonderful American story? Oh yes you can, if you’re the Democratic party. They certainly did it in the case of Miguel Estrada.

He came from Honduras, and was no Spanish aristocrat, to put it mildly. Arrived in America at 17 speaking barely any English. Graduated with honors from Columbia and Harvard: Law Review, Supreme Court clerkship, blah, blah, blah. Distinguished record in government service — an American success story, a Movie of the Week, a slam dunk. …

Also from the Corner, Andrew McCarthy tells us how it was Soto was appointed by Bush 41. No, it was not another stupid Souterlike move.

It’s at the top of the Left’s talking-points that Judge Sotomayor was first put on the bench by a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, in 1991. That’s pretty funny when you think about it — the Bush seal of approval is not usually thought an imprimatur by the Left, and it wouldn’t likely be much comfort to conservatives given that Sotomayor’s district court nomination came around the same time GHWB put Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. But there is even less to it than meets the eye. …

Perhaps Sotamayor’s biggest weakness is her record on the second amendment right to bear arms. David Kopel explains in Volokh.

… the Sotomayor per curiam opinion treats any Second Amendment claim as not involving “a fundamental right.”

The Maloney opinion is, on this issue, entirely consistent with Judge Sotomayor’s opinion in a 2004 case: “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.” United States v. Sanchez-Villar, 99 Fed.Appx. 256, 2004 WL 962938 (2d. Cir. 2004)(Summary Order of Judges Sack, Sotomayor & Kaplan), judgement vacated, Sanchez-Villar v. United States, 544 U.S. 1029 (2005)(for further consideration in light of the 2005 Booker decision on sentencing).

Judge Sotomayor’s record suggests hostility, rather than empathy, for the tens of millions of Americans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

Charles Krauthammer comments.

… So it’s extremely odd that she would reach all the way back to 1886 and say that a gun case is excluded because it is under state jurisdiction. It would imply to me that she was reaching as a way to undermine gun rights. And it would also imply that she might be inclined to overturn Heller or restrict it in the future.

Corner post on the fiscal problems in England and here.

Last week, Standard and Poor’s warned the British government that it could lose its triple-A rating for sovereign debt if large budget deficits persist in coming years, as currently projected. S&P noted that the U.K. net government debt burden is expected to reach 100 percent of the country’s annual economic output soon — and stay there indefinitely.

Yesterday, John Taylor of Stanford and the Hoover Institution noted in a piece in the Financial Times that there’s every reason to expect the U.S. will soon find itself in the same boat as the British. …

In response, Larry Kudlow says the VAT is out of the bag.

Everyone should closely read today’s Washington Post story on the value-added tax, or VAT. The cat is now out of the bag. For months I have argued that Team Obama and the Democratic Congress were going to be forced to consider a VAT in order to pay for their extravagant spending. Now borrowing almost 50 cents on every new dollar spent, the Democrats will at some point begin to deal with the politics of deficit reduction as a way of countering Republican criticisms about deficit expansion. …

There has been web noise that the administration is targeting GOP car dealers. Jonah Goldberg dismisses the idea.

… Of the 789 Chrysler dealers who were notified that their contracts will not be renewed, 38 are minority owned…

At the end of April, there were 154 minority dealers in Chrysler’s 3,181 total U.S. dealer body network….

You’ll see that 4.8% of the auto dealerships closed were minority owned.

Total percentage of all Chrysler dealerships that are minority owned? 4.8%

Speaking of autos, P.J. O’Rourke mourns the loss ……

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War. Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass. …

Claudia Rosett has a good take on the Cheerios flap.

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David Warren says it’s nice the Dems are in power, they have to act like grownups.

One of the advantages of having Barack Obama as president of the hyperpower, is that it puts his great mass of fans, in America and abroad, in the position of having to think about real problems. It turns out the solution to each of them was more complicated than “get rid of Bush.” The world does not spontaneously change when the president changes.

North Korea, Iran, and a seriously unstable Pakistan continue to present plausible and pressing nuclear threats. Islamist terrorists continue to seek soft targets right around the world; and the fanatic Islamist ideology continues to win adherents, even in New York prison cells. For that matter, problems of disease, poverty, petty tyranny and oppression, with or without war, continue to afflict our species, regardless of who comes and goes from an office in Washington. America’s allies become no more likely to pull their weight, and no less apt to strike self-serving rhetorical postures.

The banking problems, the environmental and other notional issues, must be seen in a new light. It is no use just inventing bogeymen, and accusing them of imaginary crimes. Suddenly the facts matter, and the advantages of pretending disappear. …

A WSJ editorial that could have been in the revenue shortfall section from two days ago.

… Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000 …

Michael Barone grew up in Detroit so his comments on the auto bailouts can have special poignancy.

… “The volumes need to be big for Chrysler to survive,” [market analyst Tracy Handler] said. “Will they be? I have doubts about that.”

See also this BBC article (“it’s madness”). Pathetically, Chrysler hopes that even if they don’t save the company the new small cars will “[b]urnish the environmental image of Chrysler brands,” says Automotive News.

My question: How many cars does burnishing a firm’s environmental image actually sell?

Barone noted our “gangster government” favoring unions will make it hard for unionized companies to sell bonds. David Indiviglio of The Atlantic has come to the same conclusion saying investors “can’t afford to lend to unionized companies.” Actually, they will, but the rates will be higher.

… Bond investors literally can’t afford to lend to unionized companies because it’s clear that current power in Washington will take the unions’ side, despite past bankruptcy law precedents that favor senior creditors. That means Washington’s actions in pushing for these bankruptcy verdicts to come out in favor of the unions will probably hurt unionized companies in the long run. As a result, it might be wise for Washington to reconsider the precedents it’s setting for unionized companies undergoing bankruptcy.

Mark Steyn on Britain’s expense scandal.

… For their constituents, the scandal is a rare glimpse of a central truth about politics in an advanced Western democracy: A lifetime in “public service” is a lifetime of getting serviced at public expense. The salaries are small but the perks are unlimited. A few weeks back, while the home secretary was away, her poor husband whiled away an evening by purchasing two pay-per-view pornographic movies — By Special Request and Raw Meat 3 — which, upon her return, his missus promptly billed to the government. Most of us, whether we land a job at the local feed store, the dental practice, or National Review, expect to have to pay for our own moats, toilet seats, chocolate Santas, and screenings of Raw Meat 3. But being in “public service” means never having to say, “Hey, this one’s on me.”

There are local variations, of course. In the U.S., I don’t believe you can claim for repairs to the toilet seat at your second home, but then again your second home might have come your way, like Chris Dodd’s Irish “cottage,” at an exceptionally favorable price. A senator gets between $2.3 million and $3.7 million for the costs of running his office. Tom Daschle’s plea in mitigation for his tax irregularities can stand for an entire political culture: It never occurred to him, suddenly returned to private life and working his Rolodex for a little light consulting and speechifying, that things like chauffeurs and limousines were taxable benefits members of the non-legislating class are supposed to declare to the Treasury. After all, in Congress, that stuff is just the way it is: Declaring your driver would be as silly as declaring the air or the grass.

Do you remember the anthrax scare just after 9/11? I remember how shocked I was when I heard on the radio that 34 of Senator Daschle’s staffers had come down with anthrax poisoning. Not shocked that they’d been poisoned, but shocked that Senator Daschle had 34 staffers. Why? …

Tony Blankley goes back to Frederic Bastiat to show the folly of “five million green jobs.”

In 1845, the French economist Frederic Bastiat published a satirical petition from the “Manufacturers of Candles” to the French Chamber of Deputies that ridiculed the arguments made on behalf of inefficient industries to protect them from more efficient producers.

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us….

“We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds – in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country. . . .”

This famous put-down highlights the problem of claiming that protecting inefficient producers creates good jobs. Obviously, the money the French would waste on unneeded candles could be spent on needed products and services – to the increased prosperity of the French economy. …

Not to mention Bush’s folly ethanol. A piece from American.com. It gets a little technical here, but it’s worth wading through.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently released its analysis of the renewable fuel standard enacted by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The standard requires 11.1 billion gallons of renewable fuel to displace petroleum fuel in 2009, ratcheting up each year until reaching 36.0 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. There are separate volume requirements for advanced biofuels, cellulosic, and biodiesel.

Forcing the market to produce large amounts of renewable fuel will harm consumers in two ways: it will increase prices at the pump, because biofuels are more costly than gasoline, and it will drive up the price of food, because it diverts crops into fuel. The impact of food price inflation will weigh most heavily in developing countries where food purchases comprise larger shares of consumption. Food expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of household consumption among lower income groups in the developing world.

What can justify a policy that deliberately increases the price of food and fuel? Calling passage of the bill the “shot heard ‘round the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it would improve the “health of our children.” But this is questionable at best. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis suggests that the switch toward renewables will decrease ammonia, carbon monoxide, and benzene, it also predicts “significant increases in ethanol and acetaldehyde emissions” and “more modest increases in nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, particulate matter, hydrocarbons, acrolein, and sulfur dioxide.” Citing time constraints, the EPA did not do a full analysis of the net health effects of these emission profiles, but a reasonable assumption is that the detrimental health impacts from increased particulate matter will at least offset the health improvements from the predicted reductions in the other pollutants. …

Karl Rove thinks the GOP should go ahead and oppose Sotomayor on principle.

… The Sotomayor nomination also provides Republicans with some advantages. They can stress their support for judges who strictly interpret the Constitution and apply the law as written. A majority of the public is with the GOP on opposing liberal activist judges. There is something in our political DNA that wants impartial umpires who apply the rules, regardless of who thereby wins or loses.

Mr. Obama understands the danger of heralding Judge Sotomayor as the liberal activist she is, so his spinners are intent on selling her as a moderate. The problem is that she described herself as liberal before becoming a judge, and fair-minded observers find her on the left of the federal bench.

Republicans also get a nominee who likes showing off and whose YouTube moments and Google insights cause people to wince. There are likely to be more revelations like Stuart Taylor’s find last Saturday of this Sotomayor gem in a speech at Berkeley: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Invert the placement of “Latina woman” and “white male” and have a conservative say it: A career would be finished. …

A securities law blog, Lots Stocks and Gavel posts on another foolish Sotomayor decision.

… When the case came to her, Judge Sotomayor took the opinion that the law did not bar standing for all lawsuits in connection with the sale or purchase of securities, even though the act specifically said it did bar standing.  Citing a 30 year-old case, written long before the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards act,  she opined that the law still allowed for class action law suits to be filled by those who suffered direct loss due to the purchase or sale of securities.  Blue Chip Stamps v Manor Drug Stores, 421 US 723 (1975).

In other words, she took an activist position in favor of an interpretation that would have allowed the suit to go forward, in spite of specific language in the law that would have barred it.

Her ruling was overturned unanimously with the Supreme Courts opinion being authored by one of the most liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank is back on the Sotomayor case.

In her years on the bench, Sonia Sotomayor has produced millions of words. Opponents of her Supreme Court nomination are particularly interested in 32 of them:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2001 speech. …

David Harsanyi ponders our changing abortion attitudes.

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Richard Epstein cites an eminent domain case more egregious than Kelo that found Sotomayor in agreement.

… Here is one straw in the wind that does not bode well for a Sotomayor appointment. Justice Stevens of the current court came in for a fair share of criticism (all justified in my view) for his expansive reading in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) of the “public use language.” Of course, the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is as complex as it is short: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” But he was surely done one better in the Summary Order in Didden v. Village of Port Chester issued by the Second Circuit in 2006. Judge Sotomayor was on the panel that issued the unsigned opinion–one that makes Justice Stevens look like a paradigmatic defender of strong property rights.

I have written about Didden in Forbes. The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined. Bart Didden came up with an idea to build a pharmacy on land he owned in a redevelopment district in Port Chester over which the town of Port Chester had given Greg Wasser control. Wasser told Didden that he would approve the project only if Didden paid him $800,000 or gave him a partnership interest. The “or else” was that the land would be promptly condemned by the village, and Wasser would put up a pharmacy himself. Just that came to pass. But the Second Circuit panel on which Sotomayor sat did not raise an eyebrow. Its entire analysis reads as follows: “We agree with the district court that [Wasser's] voluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands was neither an unconstitutional exaction in the form of extortion nor an equal protection violation.”

Maybe I am missing something, but American business should shudder in its boots if Judge Sotomayor takes this attitude to the Supreme Court. Justice Stevens wrote that the public deliberations over a comprehensive land use plan is what saved the condemnation of Ms. Kelo’s home from constitutional attack. Just that element was missing in the Village of Port Chester fiasco. Indeed, the threats that Wasser made look all too much like the “or else” diplomacy of the Obama administration in business matters. …

Mark Steyn has Sotomayorian experience.

Krauthammer’s Sotomayor take.

Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic wrote a series on possible nominees. Here’s his on Sotomayor. Rather than grounded in fact, a lot of this looks to be unattributed courthouse gossip.

… The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.” (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, “Will you please stop talking and let them talk?”) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: “She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.”

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues. …

More on the Cheney debate from a few sources. William McGurn is first.

… Ironically, it was left to Chris Matthews — one of the vice president’s most unrelenting critics — to offer the best take on last week’s dueling speeches. On his Sunday show, he put it this way: “I saw something from Barack Obama I never even saw in the campaign, a sense he was listening for footsteps, that he could hear Cheney coming at him and he was defensive.”

Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.

Of course, the effect was just the opposite. The White House reaction ended up elevating Mr. Cheney to Mr. Obama’s level, and ensuring that his words would be measured directly against the president’s. Like him or loathe him, Mr. Cheney forced the president to engage him.

For much of the Beltway, the Cheney surge is baffling. After all, when Mr. Cheney left office, his reputation seemed divided between those who thought him a punch line on late-night TV and those who thought him a war criminal. As so often happens, however, the conventional wisdom seems to have blinded Mr. Cheney’s ideological opponents to the many advantages he brings to the table. …

Toby Harnden in his Daily Telegraph blog.

The spectacle of two dueling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama’s address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished.

So who won the fight? (it’s hard to use anything other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides.

But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule his speech (Cheney’s was announced first) at exactly the same time as the former veep was a sign of some weakness.

Dana Milbank in his WaPo column.

… The president seemed slightly off his game. He introduced Defense Secretary Robert Gates as “William Gates,” confusing his Cabinet member with the Microsoft founder. And he was thrown off by an apparent teleprompter malfunction at the end of his speech. Mostly, though, Obama struck a defensive tone. “The problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility,” he reminded his audience many times. Without naming Cheney, he objected to his critics’ trying “to scare people rather than educate them.”

At just that moment, some of those very words were being distributed to the audience at AEI: an advance text, still warm from the printer, of Cheney’s rebuttal. The crowd at the conservative think tank offered no applause during or after the Obama speech but gave a warm ovation when Cheney entered the room and flashed a crooked grin. His remarks went quickly to Ground Zero and “the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape being burned alive.”

In an echo of the with-us-or-against-us theme, Cheney told Obama: “In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground.”

Cheney, battling respiratory congestion, listed the many things that have made him dyspeptic. The “so-called truth commission.” The “feigned outrage based on a false narrative” of the opposition. The administration soliciting “applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo.” The “euphemisms” he thinks Democrats are using to sanitize terrorism.

“Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer,” he growled. “Just remember: It is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.”

A swift uppercut to Obama’s chin! Nine more 9/11 jabs and Cheney was ready for his rubdown.

Shorts from National Review.

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Stuart Taylor, law correspondent extraordinaire for the National Journal, is not pleased with the supreme pick. It is passing strange to pick a judge whose latest controversial opinion is about to  be reversed by the Supreme Court.

… I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.

I also hope that Obama will use this Supreme Court appointment to re-enforce the message of his 2004 Democratic convention speech: “There’s not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

But in this regard, the president’s emphasis on selective “empathy” for preferred racial and other groups as “the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges” is not encouraging, as I explained in a May 15 post on National Journal’s The Ninth Justice blog.

As for Sotomayor’s speech, fragmentary quotations admittedly cannot capture every qualification and nuance. She also stressed that although “men lawyers… need to work on” their “attitudes,” many have already reached “great moments of enlightenment.” She noted that she tries to be impartial. And she did not overtly suggest that judges should play identity politics.

I place the earlier quotations in more-detailed context here so that readers can assess Sotomayor’s meaning for themselves. …

… In one of her few explosive cases, Sotomayor voted (without writing an opinion) to join two colleagues in upholding what I see as raw racial discrimination by New Haven, Conn. The city denied promotions to the firefighters who did best on a test of job-related skills because none was black. (See my column, “New Haven’s Injustice Shouldn’t Disappear.”) …

Jennifer Rubin notes the NY Times distress about the fall of the dollar. “What did you expect?” She says.

… It is no mystery how this happened. As the Times notes, the Fed “is printing money from thin air, and the government is issuing trillions of dollars in new debt as it tries to spend its way out of the recession with a huge stimulus package, new lending programs, health care overhauls and automotive rescues.” The immediate impact is already seen in higher oil and other commodity prices and higher interest rates. In the longer term economists now worry about the loss of the U.S. AAA bond rating. All this is occurring as unemployment is climbing into double digits. …

In a normal day, like most business folk, Pickerhead will ask the CFO, “What were collections today?” The same question has been asked about the federal government. A blog post from Safe Haven.com has the distressing answers.

… In 2007 and 2008, government tax revenues averaged about $633.15 billion per quarter. For the first quarter of 2009, however, the numbers just in tell us that tax receipts totaled only about $442.39 billion — a decline of 30%.Looking to confirm the trend, we compared the data for April – the big kahuna of tax collection months – to the 2007-2008 average, and found that individual income taxes this year were down more than 40%.

The situation is even worse for corporate income taxes, which were down a stunning 67%

When you add in all revenue from all sources (including Social Security revenue, government fees, etc.), the fiscal year-to-date – October through April – revenue shortfall comes to 19%, vs. the 14.6% projected in Obama’s budget. If, however, the accelerating shortfall apparent year-to-date, and in April in particular, continues, the spread between projected and actual tax receipts will widen considerably.

Tellingly, for the first time since 1983, the U.S. government posted a deficit in April. That’s a big swing in the wrong direction, as the bump in personal tax collections in April historically results in a big surplus — on average about $68 billion. …

Jennifer Rubin reports even BO has noticed the revenue shortage. Guess who he’s blaming?

… That darn Bush left a mess on national security. And what’s a guy to do with such a deficit left on his doorstep? But the facts tell a different story, as this chart illustrates. To a greater degree than any predecessor, Obama has run up the deficit — with little to show for it.

Blaming the previous administration is a time-honored political trick. But voters tend to hold the party in power responsible for the state of the country’s finances. That’s how the Republicans lost the White House and I suspect the public will be no less forgiving in 2010 or 2012 if things don’t turn around. …

National Review notes Japan’s opposition party is turning the screws on their government for its purchase of dollar denominated assets.

And Sebastian Mallaby explains China’s dollar dilemma.

… China has accumulated at least $1.5 trillion in dollar assets, according to my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Brad Setser, so a (highly plausible) 30 percent move in the yuan-dollar rate would cost the country around $450 billion — about a tenth of its economy. And, to make the dilemma even more painful, China’s determination to control the appreciation of its currency forces it to buy billions more in dollar assets every month. Like an addict at a slot machine, China is adding to its hopeless bet, ensuring that its eventual losses will be even heavier.

It is easy to appreciate China’s sudden appetite for bold new ideas about international finance. But Beijing’s leaders look less like the architects of a new Bretton Woods than like aspiring Houdinis.

Bret Stephens notes the disconnect between deciding something is a worthy goal and actually figuring out how to get there.

… The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . . …

Simon Heffer of London’s Daily Telegraph thinks sometime Obama will have to take a stand.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

… In other words, rather than explaining the bleak choices before us and explaining why his preferences have the best chance of succeeding, Obama has so far reduced his presidency to two themes: “Bush did it” and “I’m not your normal white male President.” If he keeps this monotony up, at some point even the comedians are going to notice the predictability.

Borowitz reports U.S. prepared to respond to North Korea with “strongest possible adjectives.”

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