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The new president pays tribute to George W. Bush; according to Charles Krauthammer anyway.

… If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama’s declaration that “we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel.” Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court. …

In his second effort upon return, David Warren writes about his fears for the new administration.

… I think Barack Obama came quite well out of his first 100 days. The personal qualities that got him elected do transfer to elected office, in his case. He is eloquent and unflappable; he is unreadable yet outwardly consistently charming; he looks close up when at a distance, and at a distance when close up; he is smooth and ruthless in the pursuit of his political goals. He has, as we already knew, the gift of charisma with crowds, the seemingly magical ability to embody sweet reason even when making statements entirely hollow of substance. There is something very presidential in that.

I was especially impressed with the way he remained “above the fray” when one cabinet appointment after another proved to be a dog. Somehow it wasn’t Obama’s mistake; somehow it became the fault of the person he had appointed. The new president had the gift of making himself invisible at will; though it should be said that he depends on supine mass media to accomplish this trick. …

Noemie Emery reminds us of the bleak GOP year of 1977 and how Reagan built the opposition to Jimmy Carter, the first incarnation of Obama.

In 1977, as in 2009, the future seemed dark for the country’s conservatives, shut out of all of the conduits to power, with nary a bright spot in sight. “The result of the 1976 election was Democrats in power as far as the eye could see,” wrote Michael Barone in Our Country (1992). “It was almost universally expected that the Democrats would hold on to the executive branch for eight years; it was considered unthinkable that they could lose either house of Congress.” “Once again, the death knell of the Republican Party was being sounded,” added Steven F. Hayward, in his two volume study of Reagan. Notes historian John J. Pitney Jr., “The hot bet of the moment was not whether the Republican Party could reshape politics, but whether it could survive at all.”

At the time, the New York Times said the party was “closer to extinction than ever before in its 122 year history.” House minority leader John Rhodes thought it could go the way of the Whigs and vanish completely. Robert Novak said the election showed the “long descent of the Republican Party into irrelevance, defeat, and perhaps eventual disappearance.”

Gerald Ford had just lost to Jimmy Carter. Republicans held 38 seats in the Senate, and just 143 seats in the House. According to a Gallup poll, more than twice as many Americans identified with the Democrats as with the Republicans. In Fortune magazine, election scholar Everett Carll Ladd pronounced that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the United States since the Civil War.” Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, was widely regarded as the cure-all for what ailed the Democrats, a social conservative who had been a career Navy officer before coming home to take over the family business (a peanut farm in Plains, Georgia), and who planned to restore simple and homespun American virtue to a scandal-wracked land.

If the GOP seemed washed up, so did Ronald Reagan, who had led a conservative revolt inside the party and then lost to Gerald Ford, who would lose in November. ..

Mark Steyn Corner posts on Government Motors.

… Under traditional bankruptcy restructuring, the various GM/Chrysler brands — Chevy, Dodge, etc — would have wound up in the hands of new owners, domestic and foreign, willing to make a go of them. Instead, Obama and his car czars have delivered these marques into the formal control of the unions (the ones who got the companies into this mess) and of the government — which cannot run a car company. Why? Because it will make decisions for political rather than business reasons. And unions will make decisions for the “workforce” rather than the market. At the moment the GM/Chrysler unions cannot make a car at a price anyone is willing to pay for it. Why give them the companies?

Those of us who’ve lived with government car companies know how this story ends: see Iain Murray’s column today — and, for a precis of life under a union/government alliance, ask Iain to explain the British expression “Beer and sandwiches at Number Ten.”

I love American cars. I have a Chevy truck, Chevy SUV, the whole Steyn fleet. But I will never buy another Chevy until it is restored to private ownership. When GM sneezes, America catches a cold. When GM is put on government life-support, it’s America — and the American idea — that’s dying.

Ross Mackenzie of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has interesting health care proposal.

Our fabulous president said the other day, “I will not rest until the dream of health-care reform is achieved in the United States of America.” What do you think about that?

As we all know, he’s a dreamer, and on this one he’s dreaming big time – or smoking something. His is a protracted exercise in wishful thinking.

You don’t believe in reform? You don’t believe our health-care system needs reforming?

Reform means change, presumably for the better. But not all change is prudent or good. Going to hell is a form of change too, yet hell is not somewhere many want to be.

Does the quality of care the nation’s health system provides need improving?

Not much. Americans receive the highest quality health care in the world – bar none. What does need major improving is the nearly dysfunctional system that finances this outstanding care. …

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It is the day before we honor our war dead, citizens who died in wars that were the failures of our politicians. Today much of our content is comments on the remarkable dueling Cheney/Obama speeches at the end of last week. First though let’s have Mark Steyn’s weekly Orange County Register column which is a peek into the language of govspeech.

I was in Vermont the other day and made the mistake of picking up the local paper. Impressively, it contained a quarter-page ad, a rare sight these days. The rest of the page was made up by in-house promotions for the advertising department’s special offer on yard-sale announcements, etc. But the one real advertisement was from something called SEVCA. SEVCA is a “nonprofit agency,” just like The New York Times, General Motors and the state of California. And it stands for “South-Eastern Vermont Community Action.”

Why, they’re “community organizers,” just like the president! The designated “anti-poverty agency” is taking out quarter-page ads in every local paper because they’re “seeking applicants for several positions funded in full or part by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” – that’s the “stimulus” to you and me. Isn’t it great to see those bazillions of stimulus dollars already out there stimulating the economy? Creating lots of new jobs at SEVCA, in order to fulfill the president’s promise to “create or keep” 2.5 million jobs. At SEVCA, he’s not just keeping all the existing ones, but creating new ones, too. Of the eight new positions advertised, the first is:

“ARRA Projects Coordinator.”

Gotcha. So the first new job created by the stimulus is a job “coordinating” other programs funded by the stimulus. What’s next?

“Grantwriter.”

That’s how they spell it. Like in “Star Wars” – Luke Grantwriter waving his hope saber as instructed by his mentor Obi-Bam Baracki (“May the Funds be with you!”). The Grantwriter will be responsible for writing grant applications “to augment ARRA funds.” So the second new job created by stimulus funding funds someone to petition for additional funding for projects funded by the stimulus. …

David Harsanyi is the first to comment on the speeches. He columns on Obama’s assertion that Bush policies were rooted in “fear.”

… Obama, after all, has been as masterful as anyone in using dread to ram through ideology-driven legislation and silencing political opposition.

During the “debate” over the government’s “stimulus” plan, the president claimed that the consequences of not passing his plan would mean the “recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

To contend that a country that survived the Great Depression, world wars, a Civil War and the social upheavals of the past century could not reverse a recession without an immense government bailout is farcical. (Moreover, almost nothing the president’s economists predicted has come to fruition; the opposite has. We are still approaching double-digit unemployment and sinking deeper into crisis, despite the passage of the “stimulus” plan.)

How many times did proponents of the “recovery” package or other recent spending plans dispatch the bromide “something needs to be done,” or claim that choosing “inaction” was tantamount to national suicide? Those aren’t exactly arguments drenched in reason. Panic, maybe.

But the most common brand of public policy that relies on scary talk is environmental. We need not catalog the endless end-of-days scenarios that environmentalists have been laying on us for more than three decades to understand how intrinsically they rely on fear. …

Now some of our Corner favorites. Ramesh Ponnuru.

… President Obama and former Vice President Cheney weren’t so much a study in contrast today as a portrait of harmony. Both men agree that the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist policies were largely correct. Cheney signaled his acceptance of this view by vigorously defending those policies. Obama signaled it by largely adopting those same policies and emitting a fog of words to cover up the fact. …

Andrew McCarthy.

… President Obama’s speech is the September 10th mindset trying to come to grips with September 11th reality. It is excruciating to watch as the brute facts of life under a jihadist threat, which the president is now accountable for confronting, compel him forever to climb out of holes dug by his high-minded campaign rhetoric — the reversals on military detention, commission trials, prisoner-abuse photos, and the like.

The need to castigate his predecessor, even as he substantially adopts the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy, is especially unbecoming in a president who purports to transcend our ideological divisions. …

Pete Hegseth.

… The president’s juggling-act stands in stark contrast to former Vice President Cheney’s grown-up speech at AEI. After hearing President Obama literally call the Bush approach “a misguided experiment” and “a mess,” Cheney calmly dispelled the caricature of the big bad Bush administration.

His defense of doing what it takes — within the law and under the Constitution — struck me as the kind of gutsy, straightforward, and yet sophisticated approach our country needs from the White House. Cheney underscored the continued threat we face, and the need to support our war-fighters — and intelligence operatives — as they do the dirty work of defending the Constitution. He also emphasized that a) they must have all the tools they need (within the law); b) we can’t afford to start releasing terrorists, thereby putting our troops in more danger; and c) who cares what Europe thinks, American security is at stake here. …

Jay Nordlinger.

There are, of course, 10,000 things to say about President Obama’s national-security speech today, and I said just a few below. Once you start, it’s kind of hard to stop — sort of like eating potato chips. But let me offer just one more point — a somewhat offbeat one.

Obama said, “The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican presidents.”

I don’t remember a president’s talking this way: about the party affiliations of presidents who appointed Supreme Court justices. I don’t recall a president’s describing a Court that way. Been following politics for a while. And I’ve never heard an important presidential national-security speech that sounded so much like a campaign speech — even in the midst of an actual campaign. …

McCarthy again.

… When businesses fail, we have a framework, an institution, and a set of values that are triggered:  The framework is called bankruptcy, the institution is the United States Bankruptcy Court, and the applicable values are found in the corpus known as federal bankruptcy law, which prescribe bedrock principles like: secured creditors take priority over unsecured creditors.  Rather than trusting in those things and using settled law as a compass, Obama has adopted an ad hoc approach which has proved grossly ineffective and — given the moral hazard it infuses in the entire financial system — unsustainable.

Why isn’t the GM debacle a violation of the “rule of law” that Pres. Obama and Attorney General Holder are so fond of lecturing us about?

Now, to favorites from Contentions. John Podhoretz.

There is much to say about President Obama’s speech today, but one thing especially jumped out at me—his accusation that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 response was the result of an excess of fear: “Our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” he said.

Speaking dismissively of “fear,” conceiving of it as a bad thing, is an old trope, dating back to FDR’s notion that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It has within it, this idea, the adult’s condescending and loving laugh when a child is afraid of the vacuum cleaner or of an ant. Fear, from this perspective, is unreasoning and based on ignorance, a misunderstanding of what is and what is not a true threat.

But fear was an entirely responsible response to September 11. …

Jennifer Rubin.

… One final thought: Obama has placed his presidency in the hands of America’s enemies. Should they succeed in any significant operation, his words disparaging his predecessors’ efforts will come crashing down on him and his party. In politics, as in life, you never want to give over control of your destiny to others. But in a shocking way the President of the United States did just that today.

Jonathan Tobin.

One is hard pressed to think of a more unlikely and more lopsided competition for public approval than a debate between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney. The president’s charisma and virtues as a public speaker are no secret. And whether it is entirely deserved or not, Cheney’s reputation as Washington’s prince of darkness is established in the public imagination of the republic. Obama’s easy popularity is matched only by Cheney’s lack of appeal.

And yet if the speeches the two gave this morning on national security and the record of the Bush administration are heard or read alongside each-other, there is no escaping the conclusion that the former vice president got the better of the current resident of the White House. Cheney’s speech was straightforward. He addressed the accusations that have been leveled at the record of the government he served and he calmly and methodically debunked them. …

… Obama’s address was full of good sound bytes. But in terms of substance, it was nothing but moral preening, condescension and self-congratulation. …

Closing the section is an impressive Peter Wehner blog post that puts all of this in historical perspective.

… if Mr. Obama wants to tear into past presidents for violations of the Constitution and basic human rights during war time, perhaps he should start with those whom he must surely consider the worst violators of our Constitution and our values: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith — who worked in the Bush Justice Department and who opposed waterboarding — has written that

in response to the secession crisis that began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln raised armies and borrowed money on the credit of the United States, both powers that the Constitution gave to Congress; he suspended the writ of habeas corpus in many places even though most constitutional scholars, then and now, believed that only Congress could do this; he imposed a blockade on the South without specific congressional approval; he imprisoned thousands of southern sympathizers and war agitators without any charge or due process; and he ignored a judicial order from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to release a prisoner detained illegally.

“No president before or since Lincoln,” Goldsmith has written, “has acted in such disregard of constitutional traditions.” Perhaps President Obama can therefore devote an entire speech to what he must consider to be the awful and unforgivable assault on the Constitution by Lincoln, his purported hero.

After that, President Obama might want to devote an entire speech — or perhaps several speeches — to FDR. After all, President Roosevelt gave order for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans and people of Japanese descent during World War II, a violation of rights President Bush has never approached. All told, around 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were forcibly relocated and interned in “War Relocation Camps.” …

For the next few decades, there will be many who say our present economic unpleasantness was caused by capitalism. Steve Malanga puts the lie to some of that in an essay about lying as antithetical to the function of markets.

The further we get from the housing bubble that helped to prompt our current financial meltdown, the less we seem bothered by the decline in trustworthiness and the rise in cheating that fueled the irrational exuberance of the home mortgage market. And then along comes New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews to remind us of that era via his own personal story of attempted mortgage deception and borrowing irresponsibility. If you want to understand how individual wrongs by seemingly upstanding members of society piled up and helped fuel our national ruin, read Andrews’ piece, My Personal Credit Crisis, in last Sunday’s Times.

As an economics reporter for the Times, Andrews analyzed and described the frothy housing market before he made his own unwise plunge. In a story he published in June of 2004 he explained the growing risk that home borrowers were taking on, including those who used “innovations” in the market, like no-documentation mortgages that were nicknamed “liar’s loans,” which didn’t require income verification. In the story, Andrews noted that their growing use alarmed housing experts. …

… Is there a larger consequence to such shifts in attitudes? Adam Smith would certainly have thought so. A moral philosopher, Smith laid the groundwork for his ideas on trade and commerce in his first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he traced the evolution of mankind’s ethics from our nature as social beings who feel bad if we do something that we believe an imagined impartial observe would consider improper. Out of this basic mechanism for making judgments, what Smith called sympathy and modern psychology calls empathy, we create civilizing institutions, like courts of law, to help us govern our economy as it becomes more complex. Over time a society relies on these institutions to reinforce our individual values. …

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Michael Barone takes up India policy.

Last November 131, million Americans voted, and the whole world took notice. Over the last month, about 700 million Indians voted, and most Americans, like most of the world, didn’t much notice. To be sure, American elections are more important to people all over the world than those in any other country. But the election in India is more important to Americans than most of us realize. Including, perhaps, our president. …

… Obama has continued military operations in Iraq and stepped them up in Afghanistan, but otherwise he is banking heavily on the proposition that he can convince those who have been our sworn enemies that they should be our friends. Maybe that will work. But in the meantime, it would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.

Karl Rove does a victory lap over Obama flip-flops on national security policies. Domestically though, we are watching Bush on steroids.

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called “the projection of appealing images.” All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image “becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself.” Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.

Mr. Obama’s appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America’s security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Gitmo two step.

Let’s see if we can figure this out. Before he knew much of anything about Guantanamo or had a plan for how to treat the detainees, Obama announced Guantanamo’s closing, hoping to impress his friends on the Left and overseas. But it’s hugely unpopular — so unpopular you have 90 senators (more than you usually get for tributes to National Girl Scout Day and the like) scrambling to get out of the way of the voters who would descend on their offices en masse if this ever resulted in terrorists coming to the U.S. The administration wants to strong-arm and pressure lawmakers into staying on board and, left to their own devices, liberal lawmakers would happily oblige. But they can’t — because, after all, the majority of voters in this country think this is nuts. But they still haven’t a clue what to do with these people. So you have a meandering, equivocating performance today as Democrats try to balance their loyalty to the president and their sense of self-preservation. In that fight, it’s easy to predict the winner.

David Warren returns from a holiday with a paean to the printed word.

The last five weeks I’ve been on holiday, getting as far away from it all as I could, mentally when not corporally. The reader may guess I am a news junkie; it would be a safe guess for anyone who works in newspapers. Being removed from the necessity of consulting the daily news does not cure one of the habit, however. And since a holiday isn’t Lent, I wasn’t planning to starve my curiosity about current events. But my wrists told me I needed a holiday from my laptop, and my eyes added that they were sick of being glared by backlit screens.

I, anyway, don’t watch television; succumbing to temptation not even on those rare occasions when I am myself being interviewed. For some reason I have never liked television — actually, “reasons” in the plural, and I could list them in a book. But the dislike extends to the irrational, and were I dictator of the universe the first three things I’d disinvent would be cars, and TV. (I know, that’s only two things, but as we learned from fairy tales, it is wise to reserve one’s third wish.)

Therefore I resolved to read only such news as I could find in print. …

David Harsanyi expects the U. S. will be invaded by Le Car imitations.

Finally, Americans can start moving forward — albeit in small, unsafe, state-mandated, subsidized pieces of junk.

We all remember a time when we drove around in nearly any variety of car or truck desired. Well, thank goodness we’re getting past that kind of anarchy.

Rejoice, my fellow citizens, in the forthcoming automobile emission and efficiency standards, even if they happen to add more than $1,000 to the cost of an average car.

Just consider it charity, or an “investment.” Because, needless to say, you might as well pony up the dough since your tax dollars already are keeping the auto industry afloat.

Then again, despite my profound appreciation for all the decency being showered upon me, it is difficult not to marvel at the demagoguery and corruption that’s employed to get it done.

Take the supposed coming together of California, the United Auto Workers, Washington and the auto industry, in support of stringent new standards that would cut an entire 0.05 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. …

John Stossel thinks old folks are becoming “greedy geezers.”

Isn’t it high time America did less for the elderly? A politically incorrect question for sure. But Medicare has an astounding $34-trillion unfunded liability. And because of rising unemployment, its hospital-stay program will go broke two years earlier than previously predicted.

I spoke with residents of La Posada, a development in Florida that made Forbes’s list of top 10 “ritzy” retirement communities. These folks are well off. And they get a bonus: You pay for most of their health care under Medicare.

The retirees love it. Everyone likes getting free stuff. And Medicare often makes going to the doctor just about free.

Why is this a good thing?

“What about those young people [who pick up the tab]? What kind of legacy are we leaving for them?” asks Harvard Business School Professor Regina Herzlinger. “We’re really stealing from them.”

NY Times Art Review introduces us to the Storm King Wavefield in the Hudson River Valley. Perhaps because of spending so much time on the water, Pickerhead loves this work by Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC.

MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y. — When the painter Winslow Homer left New York City for this Hudson Valley hamlet in the summer of 1878, he was reported to be “a little under the weather.” He was probably suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the cause was a failed romance or despair at seeing the Gilded Age shatter around him, we don’t know. But he felt unmoored and clung to the natural world. The dozens of watercolors he did that summer were landscape-filled, with sloping pastures and wall-like mountains dwarfing human figures, idylls so perfect that they look unreal.

The New York State Thruway buzzes through that landscape now. Most of the pastures are gone, but the mountains are still here: Schunnemunk, behind a series of ridges; Storm King, running high and long before dropping into the Hudson. And recently, some new additions, baby mountains, have appeared: seven undulating, grass-covered ranges of them.

These mini-Catskills were conceived and built — molded is really the word — by the artist Maya Lin as a permanent installation at the Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre sculpture park that for almost half a century has been devoted to the display of outdoor works either designed for the location or too large or strange to fit comfortably elsewhere. …

Adam Smith gives us a picture of Zimbabwe’s One Hundred Trillion Dollar note.

In this case money tells us a little about Robert Mugabe and a lot about centrally planned economies. The hundred trillion dollar note is literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, and the city authorities in Harare had to put up notices in the loos forbidding people to use banknotes in the toilets.

Bjørn Lomborg warns about the climate-industrial complex.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the “military-industrial complex,” cautioning that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He worried that “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a “climate-industrial complex” is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain. …

Scrappleface reports Pelosi first learned of 9/11 in late 2003.

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When he decided to compare the new administration to plastic surgeons, perhaps Spengler was watching the president yesterday pretend his new CAFE standards will solve problems of global warming, oil shortages, and the high costs of the family’s cars. A couple of more 100 day sets and the kid president can step down since he will have solved all the difficult issues facing the country and the world. We are all fortunate to have lived in the TOO*.

You can define a mythical creature with precision, observed St Thomas Aquinas, but that doesn’t make a phoenix exist. To be there, things actually have to have the property of existence. St Thomas would be a party-pooper in today’s politics, where “yes, we can” means that we can do whatever we want, even if it violates custom, the constitution or the laws of nature.

The television cartoon South Park offers a useful allegory for the administration’s flight from realism. In one episode the children’s teacher, Mr Garrison, gets a sex change, little Kyle gets negroplasty (to turn him into a tall black basketball star), while Kyle’s father undergoes dolphinplasty, that is, surgery to make him look like a dolphin.

Looking like a dolphin, of course, doesn’t make you one. Sadly, the Barack Obama administration hasn’t figured this out. Out of the confusion of its first 100 days, we can glimpse a unifying principle, and that principle looks remarkably like the sort of plastic surgery practiced in South Park.

Like dolphinplasty and negroplasty, it has given us cosmetic solutions that we might call civitaplasty, turning a terrorist gang into a state; fiducioplasty, making a bunch of bankrupt institutions look like functioning banks; creditoplasty, making government seizure of private property look like a corporate reorganization; matrimonioplasty, making same-sex cohabitation look like a marriage; and interfecioplasty, making murder look like a surgical procedure.

There is a consistent theme to the administration’s major policy initiatives: Obama and his advisors start from the way they think things ought to be and work backwards to the uncooperative real world. If reality bars the way, it had better watch out. In the South Park episode, the plastic surgery underwent catastrophic failures too disgusting to recount here. Obama’s attempt to carve reality into the way things ought to be will also undergo catastrophic failure, perhaps in even more disgusting ways. …

*Time Of Obama

Holman Jenkins comments on auto policy.

… Mr. Obama was supposed to be smart. His administration was supposed to be a smart administration. But the policy coming out has not been smart. It has been a brute shifting of power to the president’s political allies, justified by the shibboleths of copybook liberalism (though Mr. Obama is clever enough to know that nothing he’s done will have a meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon or climate change or the country’s need for oil imports).

With no overarching philosophy in evidence, the art of the possible has come to define the Obama administration. One thing that has proved possible is an untrammeled power grab over the auto industry. Yet it all seems mainly to testify to the limitations of Saul Alinsky as a political philosopher. The doyen of community organizing, his views profoundly influenced Mr. Obama. The late Alinsky was unsentimental about power, and about accumulating it in order to extract from “the system” benefits for his constituents.

But a president also has to represent the system. He has to care about whether the setup is sustainable and ultimately meets a nation’s needs and reflects its values. In delivering unlimited sway over the domestic auto makers to the greens and labor, Mr. Obama is creating a catastrophically unbalanced “system” with no effective pushback on behalf of profits (aka “viability”) — that is, except from consumers, who ultimately will doom his attempt. How so? By declining to pay enough for the forthcoming Obamamobiles to cover the cost of designing and building them.

Victor Davis Hanson asks now that the Dems own Gitmo, what was it all about?

… We are now in the age of a sober and judicious President Obama who circumspectly, if reluctantly and in anguish at the high cost, does what is necessary to keep us safe.

And we won’t see a brave young liberal senator, Obama-like, barnstorming the Iowa precincts blasting a presidency for trampling our values with the shame of Guantánamo, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, military tribunals, Predators, Iraq, etc. That motif just dissolved — or rather, it never really existed.

It short, all the fury, the vicious slander, the self-righteous outbursts, the impassioned speeches from the floor, the “I accuse” op-eds by the usual moralistic pundits — all that turned out to be solely about politics, nothing more.

Krauthammer’s take from The Corner.

Tunku Varadarajan thinks we must stop ignoring India.

While it’s possible to be critical–scathing, even–of Barack Obama’s handling of the financial crisis, his stewardship of America’s foreign and security policy has been surprisingly deft. He’s played a cautious, humble hand on Iraq, taken bold steps on Afghanistan, striven manfully to help Pakistan put out the flames that are threatening to burn that place down, and, most recently, made a seemingly inspired choice in his ambassador to China. In all these theaters, he’s shown an ability to see the big picture while keeping a close eye on those pesky little pixels.

But the one part of America’s foreign policy that Obama can be argued to have flubbed so far is its relations with India. Since taking office in January, he has paid India scant attention. India–which for the first time in its history is in a position to regard the U.S. as its closest big-power ally, thanks to the evangelical efforts of George W. Bush–has noted Obama’s froideur. It noted, too, that the one time the American president made an India-related public pronouncement, it was a critical (and fatuous) reference to India’s role in the outsourcing of employment. (On May 4, he criticized the U.S. tax code for–in his view–saying that “you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, N.Y.”)

There are two ways to read Barack Obama’s neglect of India. …

These last two paragraphs are reason enough to pass along Financial Times thoughts from a former deputy prime minister of Poland.

… Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Nozick and others have noted that under democratic capitalism there are always influential intellectuals who condemn capitalism and call for the state to restrain the markets. Such an activity bears no risk and may be very rewarding. (This contrasts strongly with the consequences of criticising socialism while living under socialism.)

Entrepreneurial capitalism has nowadays no serious external enemies; it can only be weakened from within. This should be regarded as a call to action – for those who believe that individuals’ prosperity and dignity are best ensured under limited government.

Hilarious London Times review of Honda’s new Insight.

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more. …

… Honda has produced a graph that seems to suggest that making the Insight is only marginally more energy-hungry than making a normal car. And that the slight difference is more than negated by the resultant fuel savings.

Hmmm. I would not accuse Honda of telling porkies. That would be foolish. But I cannot see how making a car with two motors costs the same in terms of resources as making a car with one.

The nickel for the battery has to come from somewhere. Canada, usually. It has to be shipped to Japan, not on a sailing boat, I presume. And then it must be converted, not in a tree house, into a battery, and then that battery must be transported, not on an ox cart, to the Insight production plant in Suzuka. And then the finished car has to be shipped, not by Thor Heyerdahl, to Britain, where it can be transported, not by wind, to the home of a man with a beard who thinks he’s doing the world a favour.

Why doesn’t he just buy a Range Rover, which is made from local components, just down the road? No, really — weird-beards buy locally produced meat and vegetables for eco-reasons. So why not apply the same logic to cars? …

… But let me be clear that hybrid cars are designed solely to milk the guilt genes of the smug and the foolish.

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WaPo writers think we should be wary of this administration’s finances. First Robert Samuelson.

… At worst, the burgeoning debt could trigger a future financial crisis. The danger is that “we won’t be able to sell [Treasury debt] at reasonable interest rates,” says economist Rudy Penner, head of the CBO from 1983 to 1987. In today’s anxious climate, this hasn’t happened. American and foreign investors have favored “safe” U.S. Treasuries. But a glut of bonds, fears of inflation — or something else — might one day shatter confidence. Bond prices might fall sharply; interest rates would rise. The consequences could be worldwide because foreigners own half of U.S. Treasury debt.

The Obama budgets flirt with deferred distress, though we can’t know what form it might take or when it might occur. Present gain comes with the risk of future pain. As the present economic crisis shows, imprudent policies ultimately backfire, even if the reversal’s timing and nature are unpredictable.

The wonder is that these issues have been so ignored. Imagine hypothetically that a President McCain had submitted a budget plan identical to Obama’s. There would almost certainly have been a loud outcry: “McCain’s Mortgaging Our Future.” Obama should be held to no less exacting a standard.

David Ignatius is next.

… The Obama administration has struggled to revive the market for asset-backed securities. The problem isn’t with securitization, they argue, but with restoring investor confidence. So they have launched a variety of schemes aimed at detoxifying the credit system that developed during the 1990s. Not coincidentally, the U.S. Treasury team during that financial boom included Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who are now Obama’s top financial advisers.

To restart the securitization machine, Treasury and the Federal Reserve have proposed a series of programs with tongue-twister names. They include the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (known as “TALF”) and the Public-Private Investment Program (known as “P-PIP”). But these programs have had limited success, so far.

The Treasury argues that securitized lending is slowly coming back, thanks to TALF. That program made available up to $200 billion in public loans to support new issuance of asset-backed securities. A Treasury fact sheet boasts that $13.6 billion of these new securities have been issued this month, more than double the combined total for March and April, with $9.6 billion financed though TALF.

That’s all fine, but the new issues are a small fraction of the securitized lending that was taking place two years ago — for the simple reason that investors remain wary of buying and selling the bundles of debt. In the fourth quarter of 2006, the total issuance of asset-backed securities (excluding mortgage-backed securities) was $250 billion; in the fourth quarter of last year, that total was just $5 billion. The market has come back a little from that low point, but not much.

Private lenders are extremely wary of having the federal government as a partner. …

David Harsanyi prefers hookers over censors.

The first case of prostitution probably dates back to the Paleolithic era, and the last instance of quid pro sexus will most likely take place whenever it is that human civilization finally expires.

The mere existence of crime is not ample justification to ignore it, of course, but most of us would concede that banning ads from the “erotic services” section of Craigslist will bring only a negligible change in the bottom line of harlotry.

So the crusade by 40 state attorneys general and other opportunistic politicians to control language on Craigslist and social networking sites such as MySpace.com will have only long-term implications for free speech on the Internet. …

Art Laffer and Stephen Moore say the high tax states are going to chase away taxpayers.

… Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, “Rich States, Poor States,” published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts. …

Talking about runaway state budgets leads to Tom Elia’s New Editor post on the poster boy for public-sector pensions.

I haven’t followed the saga of retired Chicago-area detective Drew Peterson too closely, but I know he was recently arrested for murdering his third wife, and is under suspicion for the disappearance for his fourth wife.

Aside from the obvious points that he seems to be a real schmuck and perhaps even a cold-blooded murderer, there is another fact to consider about Drew Peterson: he retired in 2007 from his job as a Bolingbrook, IL police detective at the age of 53 with a pension of just over $6,000 per month. …

We have a couple of blog posts on the lack of value in college degrees. The Corner is first. MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles is next.

Hernan Castillo is treading water, trying to survive under the weight of $5,200 in credit card debt and $30,000 in student loans. He’s making payments on time, but the Orange County, Calif., resident sees little hope for getting out of the warehouse job he holds and landing a job as an accountant, the field in which he earned his degree. And forget about saving money for a home or retirement. He now firmly believes the money he spent earning a college degree was a waste.

“Every day I wish I had never gone to college,” Castillo said. “It has been the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes I wish I had gone to prison instead of college. At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent once I got out.”

Castillo is one of thousands of student debtors who’ve found their way to the StudentLoanJustice.org Web site, propelled by last year’s credit squeeze and the abrupt economic downturn, according to Alan Collinge, who runs the site.

A recent study by Sallie Mae shows college student credit card debt is skyrocketing. Graduates leave school with 41 percent more credit card debt than four years ago, with one in five owing at least $7,000 on plastic by the time they get their diploma. Worse yet, the study showed that more students – 22 percent — make the minimum payment each month than the 17 percent who pay their bills in full. A full 82 percent said they carried balances each month, and were forced to pay finance charges, far more than the national average of about 50 percent. …

Scott Ott in the Washington Examiner says General Mills will offer prescription strength Cheerios.

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Stuart Taylor speculates on what “empathy” might mean on the court.

… Obama is also right if he is saying that empathy for all of the people affected by a case, in the sense of coming to a sympathetic understanding of their positions, is essential to good judging.

But that’s not always what he seems to be saying. Rather than equal empathy for all, some of the Obama statements quoted above stress special empathy for “the powerless,” for single mothers, for employees as against employers, for criminal defendants, and the like. How does that square with the oath to do equal justice to the poor and to the rich?

In addition, law-making is supposed to be mainly a democratic exercise driven by voters, not a judicial exercise driven by empathy for selected groups. Indeed, our laws as written already reflect the balance of interests — of empathy, if you will — that the democratic process has struck between the powerless, the powerful and other groups.

A leading example is a case often cited by Obama and other “empathy” advocates as showing that the Supreme Court’s conservatives lack empathy for the powerless. That was the 5-4 decision in 2007 against Lilly Ledbetter’s claim that she had been a victim of pay discrimination based on sex, because she did not file her lawsuit until after the expiration of the 180-day time limit for suing that was specified in one of the two laws that she invoked, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In my view, the court’s decision was probably a correct application of Title VII’s unusually short time limit. It reflected the balance that Congress had struck to encourage settlement of employment disputes by negotiation rather than litigation. The time limit was also designed to guard against employees waiting for years to bring a complaint, until after relevant evidence had been discarded and witnesses who would support the employer had died — which happens to be exactly what Ledbetter did.

All this was lost in an explosion of liberal outrage fanned by rampant distortions of the facts by the media, congressional Democrats and President Obama. They claimed, among other things, that Ledbetter had learned that she was paid less than most male colleagues long after all time limits for suing had expired, and that the evidence left no doubt that she had been a victim of gender discrimination. The first claim was flat-out false and the second was highly debatable, as I have detailed in two columns.

The near-deification of Lilly Ledbetter helped push a bill overruling the court’s decision through Congress in January. Whether the result will be to bring better justice for victims of job discrimination or to make employers more reluctant to hire women and minorities who might end up suing them remains to be seen. …

Charles Krauthammer tells us why Pelosi’s hypocrisy matters.

… The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda’s plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama’s own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed “high-value information” — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right. …

More from Krauthammer’s take.

And Bill Kristol tells us why Dick Cheney is a most valuable Republican.

… When President Obama released the Justice Department interrogation memos a month ago, Cheney denounced him for doing so. He explained why it was inappropriate and unwise to release such documents. But he did more. He didn’t just defend himself and the administration in which he served. He fought back, and encouraged others to do so.

He challenged the president to release CIA memos evaluating the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques. He raised the question of whether congressional Democrats–Nancy Pelosi, for one–had known of, and at least tacitly approved of, the allegedly horrifying abuses of the allegedly lawless Bush administration.

Now, a month later, Pelosi is attacking career CIA officials for lying to Congress, and other Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from her. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has pulled back on threats to prosecute Bush-era lawyers, reversed itself on releasing photos of alleged military abuse of prisoners, and embraced the use of military commissions to try captured terrorists. The administration now looks irresponsible when it lives up to candidate Obama’s rhetoric, and hypocritical when it vindicates Bush policies the candidate attacked. …

Jay Nordlinger reminds us of one of the noble campaigns of George Bush.

On Friday, Ramesh recalled that President Bush (43) tried to reform Social Security, and spent political capital in the effort. This awakened several memories in me.

In 2000, Bush campaigned on Social Security reform, which was thought either gutsy or foolhardy — maybe both. Many Bush advisers warned against it. But he would say, “I’m runnin’ for a reason” — publicly, I mean. I must have heard him say that 100 times. And when he said it, he usually meant Social Security. He did not want to be elected president merely to mark time. He wanted to accomplish something, or try to.

Social Security was known as “the third rail of American politics”: Touch it, and you would fry. Joe Andrew, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was quite explicit about this. He promised that Democrats would indeed fry Governor Bush on this rail.

And they almost did. …

Jay also suggests a more proper relationship between the president and the people he serves.

I had a thought on the Notre Dame thing I wanted to share — sort of an offbeat one. A lot of people say, or imply, that other people have a lot of nerve, opposing an invitation to the President of the United States. Why, he’s the President of the United States. What more is there to say?

Well, a fair amount more. I had a memory — had not thought of this episode for a long time. Occurred twelve years ago, in April 1997. Tiger Woods won the Masters, for the first time. And President Clinton immediately invited him to Shea Stadium, to participate in a Jackie Robinson ceremony. Tiger said no-thanks — he had plans to go to Mexico, with friends.

A couple of things went into this, I think. …

Charles Murray gives us a heads up on the rise of illegitimacy rates. This is a blog post that needed an editor.

The New York Times has gotten around to reporting something that has been known for a couple of months, that in 2007 the U.S. illegitimacy ratio (the proportion of live births that occur to unmarried women) reached the truly remarkable, once unthinkable, figure of 40 percent. …

Speaking of illegitimate, Glenn Reynolds comments on the kid’s tax joke.

Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.

At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”

Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. …

And speaking of jokes, Wanda Sykes gets the Hitchens treatment.

As a gnarled and grizzled veteran of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner (it must be almost three decades since I first tuxed up and attended one), I see no reason to miss the chance to comment on the Wanda Sykes phenomenon. This is because I think it may actually tell us something about the American and international press and its over-ripe relationship to the new president of the United States.

As he showed at the Al Smith dinner last year—the one minor round in the entire campaign that went decisively to John McCain—Barack Obama may be graceful and charming on the podium, but he is not a natural wit. And on May 9 Obama made the same point in a different way: by pausing for a smile-break to mark his every punchline. It may be a fetching-enough smile, but we old stand-up artists learned long ago that if you have to signal a joke, then it is a weak one. Any audience that is being cued or prompted to applaud is also likely to say to itself, “Actually, we’ll be the judge of that.”…

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Just before Netanyahu’s visit, Anne Bayefsky details how the administration has stabbed Israel in the back.

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn’t fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.

It began this past Monday with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously — meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: “The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009.”

This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January — which said only that “The Security Council welcomes the Quartet’s consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009.” Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League — most of whom don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist — and one Jewish state. A great idea — if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection. …

WSJ editors on memoirs out of China.

As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, that history remains as relevant to China’s future as ever. The soon-to-be-released memoirs of the late Zhao Ziyang, who was secretary general of the Communist Party during the student protests, show why.

Zhao was a champion of economic liberalization and famous among China’s farmers for his agricultural reforms. In the spring of 1989, he agreed with student demands for transparency, less corruption and a freer press. As Bao Pu explains on the previous page, Zhao’s political opponents ultimately outmaneuvered him, resulting in Zhao’s ouster from the Party, the tragic events of June 4, 1989 and his 16-year house arrest. He died in 2005.

Zhao’s memoirs provide a rare insider’s view of debates among Chinese leaders, and they indict the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the statist economic model. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks Bush must be enjoying the kid’s flips.

George W. Bush must be smiling. He’s not talking in public about the Obama administration, but he can’t be displeased: his harshest critic is adopting most of his national security policies, albeit grudgingly and with a whole lot of spin. But not even the White House spinners can conceal what has happened. …

… The Left is apoplectic about all this. And conservatives are conflicted. (Does Obama get “credit”? Is this a change of heart or political convenience?) But it doesn’t really matter what Obama’s motives are. The reality is that on one national security decision after another he has come to conclusions strikingly similar to his predecessor. That likely makes George Bush happy. But more importantly, it makes us all safer.

Jennifer also comments on what Cheney’s been doing.

… The administration and the media jointly overlooked the power of Cheney’s message which was based on a set of facts over which he has complete mastery (and which they were either indifferent to or ignorant of). So they now sit slack-jawed while Cheney has largely pinned the Obama team to the mat.

Perhaps the media would do well to start brushing up on some basic facts. What are the relevant statutes regarding “torture” that were in place at the relevant time, what’s the basis for prosecution of Bush officials, what statutes might prevent release of Guantanamo detainees, what is the record of the released Guantanamo detainees, what did the Bush military tribunals entail, etc. In other words, rather than reporting as if this were a popularity contest (Obama wins because his Q rating is triple Cheney’s!) they might examine the underlying facts bedeviling the administration. And the administration? Rather than play “pin the tail on the least popular Republican,” they might give up the Bush-Cheney vendetta and start governing like grown-ups, considering what is best for the nation’s security first and not as a last resort. If they did that, they might not miss the next pothole in their national security planning.

Mark Steyn opens a section on Pelosi.

Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re: waterboarding has raised, according to The Washington Post, “troubling new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word: “troubling.”

I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi Speakership to a sudden end – and needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of Congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured “torture” debate:

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding? …

Krauthammer’s take from FOX. On Pelosi;

… what she said is utterly implausible. And the charge that the CIA lied to her is an extremely serious one. She is now at war with the CIA, and it has the means, by leaking selectively, of destroying her, and I suspect it will do that.

Andrew McCarthy, who has been in these pages often, and who led the prosecution team against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, thinks Nancy Pelosi (another terrorist type) has convicted herself with her own press conference testimony.

… In today’s news accounts, Pelosi ups the ante big-time by alleging that, in 2002, she was “told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” and, therefore, that the agency is lying when it claims to have told her it was. But — though I acknowledge she is confusing and at times incoherent — Pelosi does not appear to disclaim knowledge that waterboarding was at least in the CIA’s gameplan. And, indeed, she now says she learned waterboarding was being used from other lawmakers who attended other briefings in the ensuing months.

Now, back to the torture statute. I won’t rehash the now familiar provisions that explain what torture is. But I do want to focus our attention on a prong of the torture statute, Section 2340A(c), that hasn’t gotten much notice to this point:

Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

So I ask myself, “Self, what difference does it make whether Speaker Pelosi knew the CIA was waterboarding suspects or merely knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding?” Answer: None.

Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. …

WaPo’s Dana Milbank writes on Pelosi’s presser.

Nancy Pelosi is a woman of many talents. Yesterday, she performed the delicate art of backtracking while walking sideways.

The speaker of the House had just read a statement accusing the CIA of lying and was trying to beat a hasty retreat from her news conference before reporters could point out contradictions between her current position and her previous statements.

“Thank you!” an aide called out to signal an end to the session. Pelosi walked, sideways, away from the lectern and, still sidling in a sort of crab walk, was halfway to the door when a yell from CNN’s Dana Bash, rising above the rest of the shouting, froze her in the aisle.

“Madam Speaker!” the correspondent called out. “I think there’s one other question that I would like to ask, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, okay,” Pelosi said, in a way that indicated it was not okay. Pelosi had no choice but to sidle back to the lectern.

Over the next few minutes of shouted questions — “They lied to you? Were you justified? When were you first told? Did you protest? Why didn’t you tell us?” — the speaker attempted the crab-walk retreat again, returned to the lectern again and then finally skittered out of the room. …

The Sun, UK with stunning photo of the space shuttle silhouetted against the sun.

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You can walk for liberty in Williamsburg, VA on June 1st.

Todd Zywicki, George Mason law prof, on Chrysler and the rule of law.

The rule of law, not of men — an ideal tracing back to the ancient Greeks and well-known to our Founding Fathers — is the animating principle of the American experiment. While the rest of the world in 1787 was governed by the whims of kings and dukes, the U.S. Constitution was established to circumscribe arbitrary government power. It would do so by establishing clear rules, equally applied to the powerful and the weak.

Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right?

Until Chrysler. …

Richard Epstein writes on Chrysler too.

The proposed bankruptcy reorganization of the now defunct Chrysler Corp. is the culmination of serious policy missteps by the Bush and Obama administrations. To be sure, the long overdue Chrysler bankruptcy is a welcomed turn of events. But the heavy-handed meddling of the Obama administration that forced secured creditors to the brink is not.

A sound bankruptcy proceeding should do two things: productively redeploy the assets of the bankrupt firm and correctly prioritize various claims against the bankrupt entity. The Chrysler bankruptcy fails on both counts. …

And George Will.

… The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which has not yet been used for its supposed purpose (to purchase such assets from banks), has been the instrument of the administration’s adventure in the automobile industry. TARP’s $700 billion, like much of the supposed “stimulus” money, is a slush fund the executive branch can use as it pleases. This is as lawless as it would be for Congress to say to the IRS: We need $3.5 trillion to run the government next year, so raise it however you wish — from whomever, at whatever rates you think suitable. Don’t bother us with details.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort — burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. — but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

Steve Malanga writes on the power of unions in our governments.

Across the private sector, workers are swallowing hard as their employers freeze salaries, cancel bonuses, and institute longer work days. America’s employees can see for themselves how steeply business has fallen off, which is why many are accepting cost-saving measures with equanimity — especially compared to workers in France, where riots and plant takeovers have become regular news.

But then there is the U.S. public sector, where the mood seems very European these days. In New Jersey, which faces a $3.3 billion budget deficit, angry state workers have demonstrated in Trenton and taken Gov. Jon Corzine to court over his plan to require unpaid furloughs for public employees. In New York, public-sector unions have hit the airwaves with caustic ads denouncing Gov. David Paterson’s promise to lay off state workers if they continue refusing to forgo wage hikes as part of an effort to close a $17.7 billion deficit. In Los Angeles County, where the schools face a budget deficit of nearly $600 million, school employees have balked at a salary freeze and vowed to oppose any layoffs that the board of education says it will have to pursue if workers don’t agree to concessions.

Call it a tale of two economies. Private-sector workers — unionized and nonunion alike — can largely see that without compromises they may be forced to join unemployment lines. Not so in the public sector. …

David Harsanyi has comments on the soda tax.

“And he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the Pepsi drinker!”

There has to be a statement about soft drinks tucked somewhere in Leviticus. I have assurances, after all, that such beverages are wicked.

Sin taxes are normally levied on so-called vices like drinking, smoking and gambling. Now Congress is “studying” a proposal to legislate morality by taxing sugary beverages — which is to say it is “studying” whether such a tax would be politically feasible. …

Michael Barone says Obama offers security at the expense of liberty.

Republicans and conservatives are trying to grapple with the Obama administration’s $3,600,000,000,000 federal budget — let’s include the zeroes rather than use the trivializing abbreviation $3.6 trillion — and the larger-than-previously-projected $1,841,000,000,000 budget deficit. Political arguments are usually won not by numbers but by moral principles. And conservatives, banished by voters from high office, are having a hard time agreeing on a moral case.

The always thoughtful David Brooks complains in his New York Times column that Republicans learned the wrong lessons from John Ford’s classic Western movies. They should not be “the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice,” but rather “once again the party of community and civic order.” They should not celebrate the lonely hero that saves the town, but the everyday people who build the voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the chief strength of America back in the 1830s.

But Brooks errs when he suggests that in opposing administration policies Republicans are betraying community and civic order. For the policies of the Obama administration are not designed to shelter and nourish what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons.” They are designed to subject them to what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” which he identified as the natural tendency and potentially fatal weakness of American democracy. …

John Stossel says we can save tigers by eating them.

In India, China and Russia, there were once 100,000 wild tigers. Today, only a few thousand survive.

They’ve disappeared because poachers kill them to sell crushed tiger bone, which is made into a paste that is supposed to kill pain.

The usual solution is to ban the sale of these products. Actor Harrison Ford says in a public-service announcement, “When the buying stops, the killing can, too. Case closed!”

But the case isn’t closed. The ban is 33 years old, yet the tigers still disappear. …

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John Fund says Nancy Pelosi is having a hard time getting away from the torture tar baby.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be stuck in an endless loop, claiming she didn’t know the CIA was using waterboarding on terrorism suspects while more and more evidence emerges that she was indeed briefed on the practice — and stayed silent. Now it appears there may be a full investigation of the dispute.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer added to Ms. Pelosi’s discomfort yesterday when he suggested: “What was said and when it was said, who said it, I think that is probably what ought to be on the record as well.” In other words, Ms. Pelosi’s deputy now believes the conflict needs to be resolved. …

Melanie Phillips is apoplectic over our new Israel policy.

Leaving aside for the moment the malice towards Israel that is involved, the attitude of the Obama administration towards the Middle East is well-nigh incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity. It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the US will not help protect its security by defanging Iran (and how, precisely would it do that?). But in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardising the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony.  This paper by Efraim Inbar spells out the multiple idiocies of an administration that believes that making nice with genocidal fanatics will turn them into apostles of peaceful co-existence : …

The kid president says he’s gonna raise much money closing all the corporate foreign operation loopholes. Robert Samuelson says not so much.

… Listen to President Obama, and the status quo seems a cesspool. Pervasive “loopholes” engineered by “well-connected lobbyists” allow U.S. multinationals to skirt American taxes and outsource jobs to low-tax countries. So the president proposes plugging loopholes. Some jobs will return to the United States, he said, and U.S. tax coffers will grow by $210 billion over the next decade.

Sounds great — and that’s how the story played. “Obama Targets Overseas Tax Dodge,” headlined The Post. But the reality is murkier; the president’s accusatory rhetoric perpetuates many myths. …

We’re truly in a silly season in our country. Yesterday we saved $2 Trillion in health care costs. Thank God we elected Obama. Otherwise we wouldn’t have thought of this. Bu, why can’t the miracle workers in the administration save that much everyday? Former Bush economic adviser Keith Hennessy blogs on the subject.

… The President is attempting to claim credit for savings that (a) do not yet exist, (b) are not backed up by any specific changes in industry practices or government policies, and (c) are related to him only in that the groups announced they were adopting his quantitative goal.  For all three of these reasons, the President’s claim that these savings will materialize is wildly unrealistic, and it is absurd to attach a per-family savings number to it.  This is like the Mayor claiming credit for the 40 additional wins now, and telling fans that he will be responsible for the team winning the pennant.  No one should take these claims seriously.

This artfully constructed sentence misleads:

What they’re doing is complementary to and is going to be compatible with a strong, aggressive effort to move health care reform in Washington with an ultimate result of saving health care costs for families, businesses, and the government.

If the groups had specific plans to change industry practices to hit their new quantitative goal, then those changes in private-sector behavior would save money for families, businesses, and government. …

Speaking of health care, it’s mostly the subject of Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Mark Steyn.

… MS: Well, Canadian health care is basically, that’s one of the few countries in the world where private health care is actually illegal. There is a private health care system in Canada. It’s called America.

HH: (laughing)

MS: If you get sick and you want urgent treatment, head south. If you head south from Montreal on what turns into I-87, just south of the border they’ve got a big, new hospital on the New York side pointing north toward Montreal, with a sign on it saying Canadian checks accepted. That’s for patients who can’t get treated under their own health system. For the amount of money they pay in taxes, you should be entitled to three or four terminal illnesses a year. But in fact, when you actually do have a serious illness, you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait, and eventually, the province of Quebec ships you down to Fletcher Allen in Vermont, or Dartmouth Hitchcock in New Hampshire to be treated in a foreign hospital. I think that is, that’s the old joke about the Barack Obama reforms. Where are Canadians going to have to drive to once America gets government health care? …

… HH:  … I’m spending the month of May on American medicine, asking doctors, posting their e-mails at Hughhewitt.com, why do the Democrats want to do this? We have no evidence that it works anywhere. They call it a government option, but it’s really single payer, and it really means rationing. Everywhere you try it, you just mentioned Bulgaria, Great Britain and Canada, it is a disaster. Why do they want to do it?

MS: Well, what is does is, if you’re a Democrat, what it does is it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. It alters the equation. If you provide government health care, then suddenly all the elections, they’re not fought about war and foreign policy, or even big economic questions. They’re suddenly fought about government services, and the level of government services, and that’s all they’re about, because once you get government health care, the citizens’ dependency on government as provider is so fundamentally changed that in effect, every election is fought on left wing terms. And for the Democratic Party, that is a huge, transformative advantage. …

Camille Paglia’s monthly column is here. This month she beats up on some of the right’s talk radio. She seems to suggest things are so bad in the country that someone will make another movie like ”Seven Days in May.”

… Troubled by the increasing rancor of political debate in the U.S., I watched a rented copy of “Seven Days in May” last week. Its paranoid mood, partly created by Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie, minimalist score, captured exactly what I have been sensing lately. There is something dangerous afoot — an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives:

Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America’s identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm. Two days after watching “Seven Days in May,” I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that “any U.S. soldier,” given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?  …

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Some of our favorites thought highly of the Afghan command change. Story from Ramesh Ponnuru in The Corner.

Steve Malanga in City Journal writes, at length, on a serious epidemic OHD – Obsessive Housing Disorder. We devote a lot of space for this today because affirmative action in mortgages was the main reason for last year’s economic collapse. It is instructive to see how long our country has been favoring home ownership.

In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis—and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans—using “the mighty muscle of the federal government,” as the president himself put it—Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford, the Times said.

Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results. The Times’s analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington’s repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they’ve caused. The ideal of homeownership has become so sacrosanct, it seems, that we never learn from these disasters. Instead, we clean them up and then—as if under some strange compulsion—set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing once again. As Washington grapples with the current mortgage crisis, advocates from both parties are already warning the feds not to relax their commitment to expanding homeownership—even if that means reviving the very kinds of programs and institutions that got us into trouble. Not even the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression can cure us of our obsessive housing disorder. …

… We’ve largely forgotten that Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce, initiated the first major Washington campaign to boost homeownership. His motivation was the 1920 census, which had revealed a small dip in ownership rates since 1910—from 45.9 percent to 45.6 percent of all households. …

Clifford May wonders why the left is so enamored with Islamist fascists.

Ask those on the Left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning Left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the Left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. The author Paul Berman, unambiguously and unashamedly a man of the Left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications such as The New Republic have not been apologists for radical jihadists.

But The Nation has been soft on Islamism for decades. Back in 1979, editorial-board member Richard Falk welcomed the Iranian revolution, saying it “may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.” Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, longtime Nation contributor Robert Fisk complained that “terrorism” is a “racist” term.

It is no exaggeration to call groups such as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with both Islamists and the Stalinist regime in North Korea — which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian-socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran’s ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy. …

The humor section starts with a piece on dachshund racing.

… A wiener dog at full throttle, flying down the lane with his ears inside out and tongue flapping, is a sight worth seeing. And the races return some civic benefits. The Buda event, in which no fewer than 468 dachshunds were taking part, is sponsored by the local Lions Club and has proved to be their best fund-raiser. Proceeds go to scholarships, summer camps and eye care. …

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