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David Brooks introduces us to Harlem’s Children’s Zone schools. Mr. Brooks has lost favor here since he drank the Obama Kool-Aid. Anything though that might close the achievement gap in schools merits our inspection. While the program is new and we know little, the Children’s Zone looks to be remarkably similar to the Walter Segaloff’s Achievable Dream Academy in Newport News, VA.

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as President Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.

The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?

Thomas Sowell’s part four to his “empathy” tour.

While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of the power of the federal government and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.

This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.

Judicial expansion of federal power is not really new, even if the audacity with which that goal is being pursued may be unique. For more than a century, believers in bigger government have also been believers in having judges “interpret” the restraints of the Constitution out of existence.

They called this “a living Constitution.” But it has in fact been a dying Constitution, as its restraining provisions have been interpreted to mean less and less, so that the federal government can do more and more. …

Stuart Taylor notes the dichotomy between Obama’s left-liberalism and his duty to protect the country.

… Filling moderately left-of-center Justice David Souter’s seat with anyone seen as more centrist would be a stunning abandonment of Obama’s campaign stance that would infuriate his liberal base.

But nominating a crusading liberal activist could seriously jeopardize the president’s own best interests, in terms of policy as well as politics. And although some of Obama’s past statements are seen by critics as a formula for judicial activism, he has also shown awareness of its perils.

As a matter of policy, consider Obama’s most important responsibility: protecting our national security from jihadist terrorism and other threats.

As I have noted briefly, the intersection of law and national security will provide the most consequential cluster of issues that the Supreme Court will consider over the next decade or more. Obama surely understands that the Court’s response to his national security policies will be more important by far to the success of his presidency than any decisions on abortion, race, religion, gay rights, crime, or free speech.

Obama’s national security policies are already under relentless attack from leading advocates of liberal judicial activism, such as the ACLU. Indeed, most (or at least many) lawyers and scholars who favor a liberal activist approach on social issues also tend to support relatively broad judicial power to overrule the president on national security.

The justifiable rejection of President Bush’s wildly excessive claims of near-dictatorial war powers by the five more-liberal justices — including Souter and swing-voting centrist Anthony Kennedy — has a downside for Obama. The justices, followed by the lower courts, have now asserted far more power than ever before to oversee and second-guess presidential decisions about national security. …

Jason Riley says while it’s good for the administration to correct crack cocaine sentencing disparities, where’s the concern about the education disparities?

… The reality is that the Obama administration chose to make the disparate treatment of black and white drug dealers a priority. Attorney General Eric Holder has set up a task force that will recommend shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack. And Democrats have not ruled out reducing crack sentences retroactively. But even if the administration achieves its objective, what has been accomplished? As Bill Cosby once quipped: “OK, we even it up. Let’s have a big cheer for the white man doing as much time as the black man. Hooray!”

Mr. Cosby’s point was that the real travesty is not the treatment of black criminals; it’s their prevalence. According to the Justice Department, “At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to … 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.” Blacks are 13% of the population but 38% of prison or jail inmates. And a black male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of being incarcerated at some point in his life.

One of the more effective ways to address this problem is by providing black children with decent schooling. Repeated studies have shown an inverse relationship between educational attainment and the likelihood of incarceration. Our prisons aren’t teeming with high-school and college graduates, and it’s no coincidence that cities with high crime rates also tend to have low-performing public schools.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems more interested in the sentencing gap than the learning gap. The president pays lip-service to the need to open pathways to educational achievement, but he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been actively working to shut down Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides low-income children with $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school. …

Roger Simon starts a section on Pelosi and her tortuous lies.

… Pelosi, from all her public statements, is clearly a blithering idiot and as close to unqualified for major office as anyone I can think of in my lifetime (and that’s saying a lot). Politics is obviously not a high IQ profession, but this woman makes Dan Quayle seem like DaVinci.

Therefore, her presence at a meeting at which enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) were discussed is not an indication that she understood what was going on or even was paying any serious attention. …

Ed Morrissey takes up the subject.

Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to evade responsibility for her role in approving the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques took another hit today in the Washington Post — and this time the fire comes from her side of the aisle.  Pete Hoekstra upped the ante as well, demanding the release of precise minutes of Congressional briefings, and Leon Panetta has promised to make them available, at least to Capitol Hill:

A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda operative, according to documents the CIA released to Congress on Thursday. …

Jennifer Rubin too.

It is not just Nancy Pelosi who is facing increased scrutiny for her feigned ignorance of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. The Wall Street Journal reports on Jay Rockefeller’s denial of knowledge:

Amusingly, or almost, Senator Rockefeller’s denial is flatly contradicted by his own report on the subject released last month, which notes that “On May 19, 2008, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency provided the Committee with access to all opinions and a number of other documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel . . . concerning the legality of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Five of these documents provided addressed the use of waterboarding.” …

Power Line closes the section.

… The Democrats’ attack on the Bush administration, with respect to “torture,” has fizzled out. There will be no criminal investigation or prosecution; Nancy Pelosi is on the defensive due to a CIA leak of what everyone already knew, that she approved of waterboarding when she was on the House Intelligence Committee; polls show that most Americans approve of waterboarding, etc., and the Democrats are trying to forget the whole thing.

The public is left with two conclusions: 1) the Democrats’ main indictment of the Bush administration is that it was mean to terrorists, and 2) if terrorists pull off an attack between now and 2012, the kinder and gentler Obama administration will be to blame.

This is a terrible position for the Democrats to be in, and the wound is entirely self-inflicted. We’ve been waiting for a while for the Democrats to pay a price for their orgy of hatred, and it looks like they finally have.

The Economist reports on efforts to make electric cars safer by generating noise.

… Dr Rosenblum and his colleagues recently repeated the experiment outside in a car park. This time blindfolded subjects stood three metres away from the point where the vehicles passed. The researchers found that the hybrid vehicles had to be around 65% closer to someone than a car with a petrol engine before the person could judge the direction correctly.

What sort of noise should electric-powered cars make? They could, perhaps, beep as some pedestrian crossings do, or buzz like a power tool. Having worked with blind subjects, Dr Rosenblum is convinced of a different answer: “People want cars to sound like cars.” The sound need not be very loud; just slightly enhancing the noise of an oncoming electric vehicle would be enough to engage the auditory mechanisms that the brain uses to locate approaching sounds, he adds. …

Power Line provides a preview of a new book about Truman and the founding of Israel.

… The book has won prepublication plaudits from scholars and writers including Michael Oren and Princeton’s Professor Sean Wilentz. Oren is of course Israel’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States and a distinguished historian in his own right. Oren writes: “Exhaustively researched, compellingly narrated and conceived, A Safe Haven is an outstanding achievement. The Radoshes succeed in debunking the many myths surrounding President Truman’s policies toward Palestine and Zionism, and answer the lingering questions concerning his decision-making on the crucial issue of Jewish statehood.”

Professor Wilentz adds: “Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh have written a thorough, powerful, and often surprising account of a fascinating political history, covering everything from diplomacy at the highest levels to the backroom machinations of left-wing Manhattan. It is one of the great stories in modern history, with a seemingly unlikely but steadfast hero in Truman — a book which will absorb anyone who cares about how the world we know came to be.”

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Mark Steyn says it is the GOP that is diverse.

In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless half-hearted semicolonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: in the Democrat parade, whatever your bugbear government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet… Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

OK, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it is.

Since we’ve elected these people for four years we need a lexicon to decode the speeches. David Harsanyi has just the thing.

Washington has always been a thermonuclear cliché generator. But the Obama administration, with all its super smarts, has taken the exploitation of the euphemism to spectacular new heights.

This week, we learned a bit more about what words like “sacrifice” (do what we want, you filthy, unpatriotic swine), “era of responsibility” (double the “sacrifice,” half the prosperity), and “investments” (we squander money so you don’t have to) really mean.

“Transparency” is when Barack Obama promises that the enterprising citizen will be able to track “every dime” of the $787 billion forever-government stimulus bill via a nifty website called Recovery.gov (sic).

Reality is when that much-heralded site won’t be complete until next spring, when half the stimulus money will have been wasted and, well, it probably won’t be especially helpful.

Earl Devaney, the chairman of the “Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board” — who, to absolutely no one’s surprise, admitted this week that fraud is a distinct possibility — claims the site won’t be ready for five months because there isn’t enough data storage capacity to hold it all.

“Stimulus”: Too big for cyberspace. …

… When it comes to “investments,” the general idea is this: Every unproductive and superfluous job or project that an army of pencil-pushers and special interest groups have conjured up needs someone to fund it. And since you won’t do it voluntarily, the administration will do it for you in the name of “community.”

After all, what other than a top-down economic model could sustain a place called the John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport in Pennsylvania, which services an average of 20 passengers a day? …

Krauthammer’s take.

… Again, you know, if he is going to spend billions everywhere on everything, why would he shut down the assembly line for an F-22, which is already ongoing. Talk about shovel ready, it is ready and going.

So his priority is cut defense and spend everything on anything everywhere else. And that, I think, tells us a lot about what he wants to accomplish.

John Fund notes the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister.

… It’s important to remember just how much Mrs. Thatcher’s election changed the tone of the debate both in Britain and later in the U.S. As British writer Arthur Seldon noted, “Back then, government was of the busy, by the bossy and for the bully.” …

More on Thatcher from the Weekly Standard.

Thirty years ago this week, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in the UK, promising a new future of growth and prosperity. She ushered in an era in which policymakers took for granted their role not as managers not of the economy, but as custodians of the conditions in which economic prosperity could occur. Shortly after her ascendancy to the top spot in British government, she was joined by Ronald Reagan in the United States, and the rest is history.

In almost no time at all, however, the Anglosphere has changed dramatically. Two months ago, President Obama and current UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown met in Washington to showcase a united commitment to combat the global economic crisis. Brown spoke of a “global New Deal,” and Obama said the “special relationship” was strong. Since then, the UK has marched in step with Obama’s cadence-call to spend its way out of the crisis. While other European leaders have expressed reservations about increased public spending, Brown has joined Obama in an all-out attempt to redefine how the world views the two historic (and possibly erstwhile) defenders of economic liberalization. …

Manny Lopez of the Detroit News has bailout thoughts.

President Barack Obama insists he doesn’t want to run the domestic auto industry — and we should all be thankful for that.

But his actions speak differently — and we should all be worried.

“… I rejected the original restructuring plan” that Chrysler LLC submitted for government loans, he said April 30 in announcing his decision to force Chrysler into bankruptcy. “… And the standard I set was high — I challenged them to design a plan …”

That’s a lot of self promotion and involvement from a guy who doesn’t want to control the companies. …

… The president found a scapegoat in the hedge funds that balked at the government’s “offer” to take pennies on the dollar for their secured investment

“… It was unacceptable to let a small group of speculators endanger Chrysler’s future by refusing to sacrifice like everyone else,” he said.

Pardon me while I puke. …

You can learn a lot by digging around. BBC News reports a tsunami visited New York 2,300 years ago.

Sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate that some sort of violent force swept the Northeast coastal region in 300BC.

It may have been a large storm, but evidence is increasingly pointing to a rare Atlantic Ocean tsunami.

Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, said large gravel, marine fossils and other unusual deposits found in sediment cores across the area date to 2,300 years ago.

The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, he said, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. …

Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, is the subject of a new book. Talk about a crossroads of history!

THE choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania—Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius—shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.

Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. “Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea,” said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city’s population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90% of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis’s subtle and evocative book about their city’s history. …

John Fund starts the humor section with the Specter’s seniority stripping story.

… Not so fast. Resentful Democrats went on the warpath against Mr. Reid’s offer to treat Mr. Specter as if he had been a Democrat since 1980 — an arrangement that could make Mr. Specter a committee chairman if he wins re-election next year. Senate Democrats effectively agreed by voice vote last night to strip Mr. Specter of his seniority — avoiding a roll-call vote that would have revealed exactly who his adversaries inside the Democratic caucus are. Mr. Specter will now be listed as the most junior member on the Judiciary Committee, meaning he’ll be last in line for questioning whomever President Obama appoints to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. That’s a big comedown from his role as chairman during the confirmation battles surrounding John Roberts and Sam Alito in 2005. …

A Contentions post with more on Specter’s seniority disappointment and the problems for Reid.

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Victor Davis Hanson warns about the generation that thinks it can have it both ways.

Today’s Americans inherited the wealthiest nation in history – but only because earlier generations learned how to feed, fuel, finance and defend themselves in ways unrivaled elsewhere.

Lately we have forgotten that and instead seem to expect others to do for us what we used to do ourselves.

Take our plentiful, cheap and safe food supply. Long ago, Americans struggled to create farmland out of swamp, forests and deserts, and built dams and canals for irrigation to make possible the world’s most diverse and inexpensive agriculture.

Now in California – the nation’s richest farm state – the population is skyrocketing toward 40 million. Yet hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland this year are going out of production, and with them thousands of jobs.

Why? In times of chronic water shortages, environmentalists have sued to stop irrigation deliveries in order to save threatened two-inch-long delta fish that need infusions of fresh water diverted from agricultural use. And for both environmental and financial reasons, we long ago stopped building canals and dams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to find sources of replacement irrigation water. …

Michael Barone starts a section on Chrysler.

… Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

The Chrysler negotiations will not be the last occasion for this administration to engage in bailout favoritism and crony capitalism. There’s a May 31 deadline to come up with a settlement for General Motors. And there will be others. In the meantime, who is going to buy bonds from unionized companies if the government is going to take their money away and give it to the union? We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government. It is likely to be part of a continuing series.

Holman Jenkins has the skinny on just how bad Obama’s Fiat deal was.

… A year ago, Fiat Chief Sergio Marchionne’s big play in the U.S. was to begin reintroducing the Alfa Romeo brand. He fretted about where to get the $100 million to fund the marketing effort. Now, with a global auto depression descending, he gets $6 billion of American and Canadian taxpayer money to lean on.

Don’t underestimate the appeal of that cushion for Fiat.

As for Chrysler — well, you could call this merger made in Washington George Bush’s baby as much as Barack Obama’s.

Chrysler would be in deep yogurt in any case amid the market collapse, but its other problem is a decent franchise in Jeeps, muscle cars, minivans and pickups — and nothing to meet Congress’s stiff new “corporate average” fuel economy rules, and nobody to supply the billions to develop such vehicles and (inevitably) bribe customers to drive them off the lots.

Daimler, its previous parent, certainly had no desire to fund such profitless extravagance. The Germans took a lot of guff but they’re the ones laughing now. They sold their majority stake in Chrysler just months after Democrats took over Congress, and just weeks after President Bush began blathering about “oil addiction” and echoing Democratic demands for stringent new fuel-mileage rules (after opposing them for years). …

George Will has a look at the auto business too.

… Many months and many billions of dollars are being wasted by the administration’s determination to spare the car companies, and especially the UAW, the rigors of a straightforward bankruptcy. The president’s “surgical” bankruptcy plan for Chrysler requires some of the company’s lenders, mostly non-banks, to receive less than they would as secured creditors under bankruptcy law.

The law may still make itself heard over the political thunder. Meanwhile, the president faults these “speculators” for not being as cooperative as are most of the banks that have lent to Chrysler. But the banks are compliant because they are mendicants: Having taken the government’s money, they are the government’s minions.

When the president was recently asked what had “humbled” him in office, he mentioned that “there are a lot of different power centers” in America, so, for example, “I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want.” Perhaps not a button, and not exactly what he wants, but in dealing with Detroit he pressed and they were accommodating.

It is Demagoguery 101 to identify an unpopular minority to blame for problems. The president has chosen to blame “speculators” — a.k.a. investors; anyone who buys a share of a company’s stock is speculating about the company’s future — for Chrysler’s bankruptcy and the dubious legality of his proposal. Yet he simultaneously says he hopes that private investors will begin supplanting government as a source of capital for the companies. Breathes there an investor/speculator with such a stunted sense of risk that he or she would go into business with this capricious government? …

Even the Economist, long in the tank for BO, recognizes the Detroit folly.

NO ONE who lent money to General Motors (GM) or Chrysler can have been unaware of their dire finances. Nor can workers have failed to notice their employers’ precarious futures. These were firms that barely stayed afloat in the boom and both creditors and employees were taking a punt on their promise to pay debts and generous health-care benefits.

The bet has failed. The recession has tipped both firms into the abyss—together they lost $48 billion last year. Chrysler has entered bankruptcy, from which it may emerge under Fiat’s control (see article). GM could soon follow if efforts to hammer out a voluntary restructuring fail. America’s government, keen to protect workers, is providing taxpayers’ cash to keep the lights on at both firms. But in its haste it has vilified creditors and ridden roughshod over their legitimate claims over the carmakers’ assets. At a time when many businesses must raise new borrowing to survive, that is a big mistake.

And Megan McArdle who blogs at The Atlantic Monthly.

… We are hardly Zimbabwe, or even Venezuela.  But if we keep using TARP to create a sort of “Most Favored Borrower” status, we’ll erode the safeguards that keep election to office in America from being the kind of giant spoils system that’s common in much of the world.  What the bankruptcy judge did was entirely right and proper–it’s his job to allocate losses among creditors.  And it’s always true that some of the creditors won’t like the deal they get.  On the other hand, what the administration did really wasn’t.  It got its pet majority stakeholders to screw both their own shareholders, and the other creditors, in order to give a powerful union a sweetheart deal.

When the government gives money to favored constituencies–well, I don’t like it, but as PJ O’Rourke says, that’s basically what our government does.  “It ought to be right there in the constitution:  ‘We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and give money to jerks . . . ‘ “  But when it starts stepping in and trying to bypass the bankruptcy rules in order to make someone else give money to jerks, that’s different in magnitude, and in kind. …

Part three of Thomas Sowell’s columns on empathy.

There is a reason why the statue of Justice wears a blindfold. There are things that courts are not supposed to see or recognize when making their decisions— the race you belong to, whether you are rich or poor, and other personal things that could bias decisions by judges and juries.

It is an ideal that a society strives for, even if particular judges or juries fall short of that ideal. Now, however, President Barack Obama has repudiated that ideal itself by saying that he wants to appoint judges with “empathy” for particular groups.

This was not an isolated slip of the tongue. Barack Obama said the same thing during last year’s election campaign. Moreover, it is completely consistent with his behavior and associations over a period of years— and inconsistent with fundamental principles of American government and society.

Nor is this President Obama’s only attempt to remake American society. Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience. The Constitution of the United States gives no president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate. …

George McGovern continues to appose the “employee free choice” act.

The recent news that Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter has become a member of the Democratic caucus has given new life to legislation that many thought had been put to rest for this Congress — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Last year, I wrote on these pages that I was opposed to this bill because it would eliminate secret ballots in union organizing elections. However, the bill has an additional feature that isn’t often mentioned but that is just as troublesome — compulsory arbitration.

This feature would give the government the power to step into labor disputes where employers and labor leaders cannot reach an agreement and compel both sides to accept a contract. Compulsory arbitration is bound to trigger the law of unintended consequences. …

David Ignatius says boomers have done a poor job saving for retirement.

… How bad are baby boomers at financial planning? Extremely bad, according to Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell of the National Bureau of Economic Research. They found that more than one-quarter of boomer households thought “hardly at all” about retirement and that financial literacy among boomers was “alarmingly low.” Half could not do a simple math calculation (divide $2 million by five) and fewer than 20 percent could calculate compound interest. The NBER researchers also found that, as of 2004, the typical boomer household was holding nearly half its wealth in the form of housing equity. Uh-oh.

For a closer look at the retirement squeeze, consider a study released last month by the Congressional Research Service. Patrick Purcell analyzed the most recent data on consumer finances gathered by the Federal Reserve. He found that for the 53 percent of households that hold at least one retirement account, the median combined balance was a mere $45,000.

Hold on, you say, that figure includes some younger workers who haven’t started saving in earnest yet. Okay, for households headed by persons between the ages of 55 and 64, the median value of all retirement accounts was just $100,000. Purcell noted that for a 65-year-old man retiring last month, that $100,000 would buy an annuity that would pay a paltry $700 a month for life, based on current interest rates. …

The Economist reports we’re doing science on YouTube.

Borowitz reports CNN thinks the swine flu threat will run through sweeps week.

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Bill McGurn alerts us to today’s DC school choice rally.

Some hypocrisies are apparently more equal than others. If, for example, you are a politician who preaches “traditional values” and you get caught in a hotel with a woman who is not your wife, the press is going to have a field day with your tartuffery.

If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer — and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven — the press corps mostly winks.

Today at 1 o’clock in Washington, we’ll learn if anything has changed. Two groups — D.C. Children First and D.C. Parents for School Choice — are holding a rally at Freedom Plaza, just across from the offices of the city government. As their flier explains, “D.C. families deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have.”

The precipitate cause of this rally is the Democrats’ passage of an amendment tucked into the omnibus spending bill. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), the amendment effectively ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a lifeline now used by more than 1,700 schoolchildren to escape one of America’s most miserable public school systems. Rally organizers say that the silence from local leaders was a big reason the Democratic Congress felt free to kill off the program. …

David Harsanyi tells us about Jon Stewart’s history lesson.

It’s fun to be idealistic in a world of moral absolutes. I know, I’m a columnist. But when we start discussing history, things always seem to get complicated.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show”learned this recently when debating the Foundation for Defense of Democracies president Cliff May about the harsh interrogation techniques administered during the Bush administration.

When May asked Stewart if he also considered Harry Truman a war criminal for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the host said yes. A few days later, however, Stewart apologized for his blasphemy, saying Truman’s decision was, in fact, “complicated.”

Things were indeed complicated. They are always complicated.

That’s the point. …

Thomas Sowell has a second part to his column on the Supreme pick. He writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes who never would qualify according to the empathy doctrine.

After a lunch with Judge Learned Hand, as Holmes was departing in a carriage to return to work, Judge Hand said to him: “Do justice, sir. Do justice.”

Holmes had the carriage stopped. “That is not my job,” he said. “My job is to apply the law.”

Holmes wrote that he did not “think it desirable that the judges should undertake to renovate the law.” If the law needed changing, that was what the democratic process was for. Indeed, that was what the separation of powers in legislative, executive and judicial branches by the Constitution of the United States was for.

“The criterion of constitutionality,” he said, “is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good.” That was for other people to decide. For judges, he said: “When we know what the source of the law has said it shall be, our authority is at an end.”

One of Holmes’ judicial opinions ended: “I am not at liberty to consider the justice of the Act.”

Some have tried to depict Justice Holmes as someone who saw no need for morality in the law. On the contrary, he said: “The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” But a society’s need to put moral content into its laws did not mean that it was the judge’s job to second-guess the moral choices made by others who were authorized to make such choices.

Justice Holmes understood the difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers and judges.

And Richard Epstein warns against “empathy.”

… It might be smart politics for Obama to play to his natural constituencies, but intellectually there is, I think, no worse way to go about the selection process. Empathy matters in running business, charities and churches. But judges perform different functions. They interpret laws and resolve disputes. Rather than targeting his favorite groups, Obama should follow the most time-honored image of justice: the blind goddess, Iustitia, carrying the scales of justice.

Iustitia is not blind to the general principles of human nature. Rather her conception of blindness follows Aristotle’s articulation of corrective justice in his Nicomachean ethics. In looking at a dispute between an injurer and an injured party, or between a creditor and debtor, the judge ignores personal features of the litigant that bear no relationship to the merits of the case.

So in a tort action, determining the fault of a driver doesn’t turn on whether he or she is rich or poor, citizen or alien. It’s simply turns on who was in compliance with the rules of the road. And in a collection case the first order of business is whether the debtor has paid his debt, not his or her wealth or citizenship. …

Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald columnist says Joe Biden is just the tip of the stupidity iceberg.

You know what they say about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare. My question is, if you sat an infinite number of Joe Bidens at an infinite number of microphones, would any of them ever say anything that wasn’t infinitely stupid? From his reminiscences about Franklin Roosevelt’s famous White House television address on the day of the 1929 stock market crash (that is, three years before Roosevelt was president and 20 years before Americans bought TVs) to his campaign-rally exhortation to Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham to ”Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see ya!” (Graham’s in a wheelchair), Biden’s serial stupidities have become a national mortification.

Listening to Biden’s gaffeprompter running full speed ahead on the subject of swine flu last week — he warned Americans that airplanes, subways and classrooms are microbiologic deathtraps, then promptly took a train to Delaware — my first thought was, who in the world made this guy vice president? My second was, oh, right. And my third was, no wonder people are always calling Barack Obama the smartest guy in the room. At most White House meetings, it’s probably literally — if dishearteningly — true.

Consider Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA boss, explaining market economics during an NPR interview. “The president has said, and I couldn’t agree more, that what this country needs is one single national roadmap that tells automakers, who are trying to become solvent again, what kind of car it is that they need to be designing and building for the American people.”

”Is that the role of the government?” asked the reporter. “That doesn’t sound like free enterprise.”

”Well, it is free enterprise, in a way,” declared Jackson. Yes, in the same way that Madonna is a chastity goddess. …

Corner posts on Specter.

Jay Nordlinger says it’s a myth that the GOP has moved to the right.

… I hope you’ll accept that National Review is a pretty good barometer of conservative opinion. A lot of people consider NR the flagship journal of American conservatism. So, as an exercise, consider NR’s positions on George W. Bush and the Republicans. You will see that we steadily criticized them and opposed them—from the right.

Bush and the Republicans spent massively, especially in Bush’s first term. We opposed that, mightily. The president’s most cherished initiative, probably, was the Faith-Based Initiative. We opposed that. Then there was his education policy: No Child Left Behind. We opposed that (mainly on grounds that it wrongly expanded the federal role). He had his new federal entitlement: a prescription-drug benefit. We of course opposed that. He imposed steel tariffs—for a season—which we opposed. He signed the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance—which we opposed. He established a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. We opposed that. He defended race preferences in the University of Michigan Law School case; we were staunchly on the other side. He of course proposed a sweeping new immigration law, which included what amounted to amnesty. We were four-square against that.

I am talking about some things that were very dear to Bush’s heart, and central to his efforts—and self-image, as a leader. NR, the conservative arbiter, opposed those things. The Republican party, by and large, supported them—with one glaring exception: the immigration push.

What on Bush’s domestic agenda did NR support? His tax-cutting, though we had some different ideas about what to do. His Social Security reform, which didn’t get very far. Etc. All thoroughly mainstream conservative stuff. …

Jonah Goldberg agrees. And he gives us the guts of a speech he gave in 2004 laying out the spendthrift ways of G. W. Bush.

A few quick facts. George W. Bush has:

• increased federal spending on education by 60.8 percent;

• increased federal spending on labor by 56 percent;

• increased federal spending on the interior by 23.4 percent;

• increased federal spending on defense by 27.6 percent.

And of course he has:

• created a massive department of homeland security;

• signed a campaign-finance bill he pretty much said he thought was unconstitutional (thereby violating his oath to uphold, protect, and defend the constitution);

• signed the farm bill, which was a non-kosher piñata filled with enough pork to bend space and time;

• pushed through a Medicare plan which starts with a price tag of $400 billion but will — according to every expert who studies the issue — go up a gazillion-bajillion dollars over the next decade;

Walter Williams takes up grade inflation.

… Academic fraud is rife at many of the nation’s most prestigious and costliest universities. At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A’s. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard’s grading practices “the laughing stock of the Ivy League.” Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A’s and B’s. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean’s list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C.

Some college administrators will tell us that the higher grades merely reflect higher-quality students. Balderdash! SAT scores have been in decline for four decades and at least a third of entering freshmen must enroll in a remedial course either in math, writing or reading, which indicates academic fraud at the high school level. A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students revealed that nearly half spent more hours drinking than study. Another survey found that a third of students expected B’s just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading. …

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Kevin Hassett comments on the Chrysler deal.

I feel like I have seen this bad gangster movie before.

In the opening scene, a naive investor buys some bonds, explaining to his staff that they are a sound investment secured by hard assets. Even if the company goes under, the investor explains, bond investors stand to get about 80 percent of their money back.

The next day, a government official calls and offers to buy up the bonds at 33 cents on the dollar, while giving controlling interest in the company to the labor unions. The investor refuses. That night, a man shows up at his home.

“We’re not saying anything bad is going to happen to you,” the tough says, “but the big boss is going to be very disappointed in you if you don’t take the deal. By the way, how’s your little girl? Is she still going to school down on Federal Street?” The investor caves.

The evolution of the Chrysler LLC bankruptcy seemed almost as bad. The Obama administration brokered a deal that gave labor unions a 55 percent equity stake in Chrysler, putting their interests ahead of the secured interests of bondholders. …

Thomas Sowell on the Supreme pick.

Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are missing the point.

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made “empathy” with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much further the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z? Nothing could be further from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States. …

Stuart Taylor has Supreme thoughts.

… With such a big Democratic majority in the Senate, Obama could get just about anyone confirmed easily. But the Republicans could bleed him some politically if he made an exceptionally controversial pick such as Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals court judge based in New York.

Obama would probably prefer to make a truly outstanding choice, and if possible a consensus choice. He will not see this as some exercise in political gamesmanship. He may also want to break the boring pattern of staffing the Supreme Court with cloistered appellate judges. He said during the campaign that he liked the Earl Warren model — a big-time politician who can lead the court by force of personality and convictions.

Obama has said he wants a Supreme Court justice to have empathy for the powerless; he voted against Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, accusing them of siding with the powerful. Obama is, of course, pro-choice on abortion and pro-civil liberties. But he applauded a conservative Second Amendment decision last June and assailed a liberal decision striking down the death penalty for raping a child. Both stances were widely seen as more politics than principle, but he may want to keep sounding the same political notes on the judicial front.

Presidential war powers seems an especially interesting issue area to watch. Now that he’s president — and taking some of the same positions that George W. Bush took about his power to detain suspected terrorists without criminal charges — Obama might like to reverse the 5-4 majority (which included Souter) that kept ruling against Bush in the Guantanamo cases. …

Robert Samuelson says the administration’s bias against oil and gas is a grave error.

… Contrary to popular wisdom, the United States still has huge oil and natural-gas resources. The outer continental shelf (OCS), including parts that have been off limits to drilling since the early 1980s, may contain much natural gas and 86 billion barrels of oil, about four times today’s “proven” U.S. reserves. The U.S. Geological Survey recently estimated that the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana may hold 3.65 billion barrels, about 22 times a 1995 estimate. And then there’s upwards of 2 trillion barrels of oil shale, concentrated in Colorado. If 800 billion barrels were recoverable, that’s triple Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves.

None of these sources, of course, will quickly provide much oil or natural gas. Projects take 5, 10, 15 years. The OCS estimates are just that. The oil and gas must still be located—a costly, chancy and time-consuming process. Extracting oil from shale (in effect, a rock) requires heating the shale and poses major environmental problems. Its economic viability remains uncertain. But added oil from any of these sources could ultimately diminish dependence on imports, now almost 60 percent of U.S. consumption, while the exploration and development process would immediately boost high-wage jobs (geologists, petroleum engineers, roustabouts, steelworkers).

Though straightforward, this logic mostly eludes the Obama administration, which is fixated on “green jobs,” and wind and solar energy. Championing clean fuels has become a political set piece. On Earth Day (April 22), the president visited an Iowa factory that builds towers for wind turbines. “It’s time for us to [begin] a new era of energy exploration in America,” he said. “We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.”

The president is lauded as a great educator; in this case, he provided much miseducation. He implied that there’s a choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil. Actually, the two are mostly disconnected. …

What do the NBA and the NFL owe to colleges and universities? According to Allen Barra, a lot.

… There are many reasons for the rise of the NFL and NBA over the past half-century, but one of the most important is seldom discussed: They don’t pay for the development of their players. Though MLB does draw some talent from the nation’s top collegiate programs, the major percentage of their players are brought up through an extensive minor-league system.

Who pays for NFL recruits? Many writers who have analyzed the economics of college football believe that between 70% and 75% of athletic departments lose money. Murray Sperber, author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” believes the number is higher than that. “Almost all athletic departments lose money if they do their books honestly. The NCAA’s latest accounting report, doing the books more honestly than ever before, supports my belief.” This means that much of the bill for maintaining football and basketball programs comes from alumni and even taxpayers. …

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David Harsanyi has interesting points of view.

… Today, a comparable, spontaneous grassroots effort has materialized. This one celebrates free-market principles rather than statism. Not surprisingly, there is also a sudden shift in perception. The once-glorified citizen activist is now nothing more than a radical, slack- jawed, proletariat yokel. …

… Specter, rather than admit that the only way he can win an election is as a Democrat, has perpetuated the following mythical narrative:

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent,” the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat explained, “the Republican Party has moved far to the right.” (All of a sudden Ronald Reagan provided a big tent? Who knew?) …

… There was no greater friend to expansion of government than President George W. Bush. I know this because anytime I mention the massive debt and regulation that Obama has already saddled us with, a helpful Democrat will appropriately point out that Bush started it. Which, apparently, makes it all tolerable. …

Howard Kurtz, who hosts CNN’s Reliable Sources, which is the best of the Sunday morning offerings, writes a great column; part on the different media reactions to GOP or Dem defections, and part stream of consciousness musings on the cable news cycles.

I was surfing the cable news channels, where the swine flu outbreak was being treated as possibly the next bubonic plague, displacing the news of President Obama’s 99th day in office, when word broke that Arlen Specter was switching parties.

The political bombshell reverberated across the screen for hours, until the networks ditched the Pennsylvania senator for a low-speed police chase of a stolen rig with a man clinging to the back. I was waiting in front of a camera at that moment to talk about the feverish flu coverage on Headline News, and never did make it on the air.

News seems more ephemeral than ever in this age of TiVo and tossed-off tweets. But it’s worth hitting the pause button to examine how media organizations chronicled the Specter saga.

The political elements, naturally, were front and center — Specter’s fear of losing a GOP primary next year, and his moving the Democrats within one Al Franken victory dance of a filibuster-proof majority. But in the straight-news reports, little attention was devoted to this question: Was this a betrayal of the voters who elected Specter? …

Last week the kid president was frustrated with some creditors who refused to go along with the haircut touted by the car czar. At the same time he offers 20% of the company to Fiat for nothing. Fiat not investing one lira. The country was presented with a Fiat accompli. We start with a number of Corner posts.

… Obama’s Auto Task Force has already used the run-up to Chapter 11 as an occasion to demonize Chrysler’s creditors. In what amounts to a pre-packaged bankruptcy, the task force and Chrysler in the last week buttoned-up an alliance with Fiat as well as concessions from the UAW. Union leaders trumpeted the “sacrifice” of a freeze in pay for its hourly workers (salaried workers have been under a freeze for years) as well as giving up such health-care benefits as Viagra. With those deals in hand, the president then turned both barrels on Chrysler’s creditors at his news conference, calling them “speculators” who sought to imperil Chrysler’s future for their own benefit. “I do not stand with them,” Obama thundered. …

… Yesterday, Obama said, “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities,” and not “those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.” Does that mean he doesn’t stand with the thousands of Americans who have retirement plans with Oppenheimer Funds?

… At all times in the negotiations, OppenheimerFunds sought fair treatment for the shareholders of our funds and we were willing to make very significant sacrifices to reach an agreement. Along with more than 20 other secured creditors, OppenheimerFunds rejected the Government’s offers because they unfairly asked our fund shareholders to make financial sacrifices greater than those being made by unsecured creditors [a.k.a. the UAW — SS]. Our holdings in secured Chrysler debt are entitled to priority in long-established US bankruptcy law and we are obligated to our fund shareholders to support agreements that respect these laws. …

Not everyone showed this kind of backbone. I don’t know about you, but knowing that Oppenheimer’s managers were willing to stand up to immense political pressure on behalf of their investors kind of makes me want to open an account there. …

ABC News’ Jake Tapper reports on BO’s threats against bondholders.

A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

The White House said the story was false.

“The charge is completely untrue,” said White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, “and there’s obviously no evidence to suggest that this happened in any way.”

Thomas Lauria, Global Practice Head of the Financial Restructuring and Insolvency Group at White & Case, told ABC News that Rattner suggested to an official of the boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners that officials of the Obama White House would embarrass the firm for opposing the Obama administration plan, which President Obama announced Thursday, and which requires creditors to accept roughly 29 cents on the dollar for an estimated $6.8 billion owed by Chrysler. …

Conor Clarke in Atlantic Monthly’s Business Blog follows on this story. Even the Atlantic sees the problems when BO becomes a thug.

… And to the substance: It isn’t that hard to see how getting tough on hedge funds could go wrong. A day before the administration released some details of the Chrysler plan, it released an update on applications to its public-private investor program to repurchase toxic assets. This program, whether you like it or not, relies crucially on the partipation and confidence of private investors. The administration extended the application deadline, and it reportedly had some trouble rustling up qualified applicants. (On just about every conference call with potential investors, a couple will express wariness about partnering with the government.) Even in purely horserace terms, it’s not obvious going after the holdout creditors is a good idea. ..

Reuters has the story too.

Power Line closes out the section.

The Chrysler reorganization is shaping up as another milestone in the decline of the rule of law under Barack Obama. We’ve said for quite a while that bankruptcy is the only viable option for Chrysler and General Motors, not–as Obama claims–because they don’t know how to make the right kinds of vehicles, but because their unsustainable union contracts make it impossible for them to be profitable. That reality has now been turned on its head, as the administration has tried to bully Chrysler’s secured creditors into going away, while the United Auto Workers Union, solely on the basis of political clout, would be paid at an implied rate of 50 percent and would emerge owning 55 percent of the company, with the government also holding a stake.

This is banana republic capitalism at its worst. Political influence, rather than the law, dictates the rights of the parties. When some of the secured creditors refused to be intimidated, Obama libeled them in the press, saying, outrageously, “I don’t stand with those who held out when everyone else is making sacrifices.” Actually, under Obama’s plan the politically favored parties, principally the UAW, will benefit–will steal money, to put it crudely–from the parties who held out. Those parties call themselves the “non-TARP lenders.” …

Richard Epstein calls for faster release of drugs to cancer patients.

Roger Simon on the comic relief that is Joe Biden.

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Andrew McCarthy’s letter to the Attorney General declining an invitation has been around the internet and heavily discussed by Rush Limbaugh.

This letter is respectfully submitted to inform you that I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases.  An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading.

The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.”  I admire the lawyers of the Counterterrorism Division, and I do not question their good faith.  Nevertheless, it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States).  Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues.  I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president’s first obligation to protect the American people.  Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop. …

For an illustration of the foolishness of BO’s terrorism policies read about the possible revival of the military tribunals. Ed Morrissey has the story.

Barack Obama promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and end the military tribunal process that he opposed as a Senator for its detainees if elected President.  After taking the oath of office, Obama fulfilled that promise by ordering the shutdown of Gitmo and halting the tribunals.  Now, three months later, the Obama administration can’t find nations willing to accept murderous, lunatic terrorists as guests, and suddenly those military tribunals look pretty good: …

Mark Steyn on BO.

… He has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical, which is a lethal skill. The thoughtful look suckered many of my more impressionable conservative comrades last fall, when David Brooks and Christopher Buckley were cranking out gushing paeans to Obama’s “first-class temperament” – temperament being to the Obamacons what Nick Jonas’ hair is to a Tiger Beat reporter. But the drab reality is that the man they hail – Brooks & Buckley, I mean; not the Tiger Beat crowd – is a fantasy projection. There is no Obama The Sober Centrist, …

… underneath the thoughtful look is a transformative domestic agenda that represents a huge annexation of American life by an ever more intrusive federal government. One cannot but admire the singleminded ruthlessness with which Obama is getting on with it, even as he hones his contemplative unhurried moderate routine on prime time news conferences. On foreign affairs, the shtick is less effective, but mainly because he’s not so engaged by the issues: He’s got big plans for health care, and federalized education, and an eco-friendly government-run automobile industry – and Iran’s nuclear program just gets in the way. He’d rather not think about it, and his multicontinental apology tours are his way of kicking the can down the road until that blessed day when America is just another sclerotic Euro-style social democracy …

Corner post by Jay Nordlinger introduces us to Krauthammer’s torture column.

Back in the early 1990s, I said this about Charles Krauthammer as columnist: “The thing is, you can hold up a Krauthammer column and say, ‘Here it is. This is it. This is what I believe, in a nutshell. This is the case I would make, had I the ability.’” A Krauthammer column gave you something to wave. A document to nail to a door, so to speak. A friend or acquaintance would say to you, “What do you believe about this issue, and why?” And you could hand him a Krauthammer column, saying, “Here.”

In fact, that is the highest value of any columnist, don’t you think? He crystallizes your own thought. (Then again, he could make you reexamine.)

All of this came to mind when I read Krauthammer’s column published today, on torture: …

Here’s the Krauthammer column.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, “You do what you have to do.” And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don’t entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen. …

Krauthammer’s take on Fox.

… And in the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the guy who they knew was the mastermind behind 9/11, the man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife, he was asked politely about the plans that he knew about, and his answer was “Soon you will know,” meaning you will be looking in the morgues, counting the American dead, looking in hospitals at those who were destroyed, bodies destroyed in a future attack of which he will tell you nothing right now.

That’s why they used enhanced interrogation, which worked. …

As the president pushes the country to spend like there is no tomorrow, California shows the disaster waiting for us. George Will has the story.

… Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California’s business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state’s. In the past decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico’s poverty. The latter is not California’s fault; the former is.

If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger’s less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent. …

Michael Fumento in Forbes says we can cool it with the flu.

There’s panic in the streets over a flu outbreak. “Projections are that this virus will kill 1 million Americans,” the nation’s top health official has warned.

The virus is swine flu. But the date is 1976. And the projection, it turns out, is off by 999,999 deaths. Direct ones, that is. The hastily developed vaccine killed or crippled hundreds. Sadly, the current hysteria outbreak threatens devastation on a worldwide scale.

A calm perspective of the current outbreak of the virus now known as influenza A (H1N1) would compare it to seasonal flu. According to the CDC, the seasonal flu infects between 15 to 60 million Americans each year (5% to 20%), hospitalizes about 200,000 and kills about 36,000. That comes out to over 800 hospitalizations and over 250 deaths each day during flu season. …

Pete Seeger turns 90. Corner post by Andrew Stuttaford.

… As just one example of the some of the more questionable ”choices” that this “teacher to the nation” has made over the years, here’s Reason’s Nick Gillespie with Seeger’s reaction to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 treaty that divided up much of Eastern Europe between the Third Reich and the USSR and, in effect, gave Hitler the green light to start World War II:

As part of the Stalinist singing group, the Almanac Singers, Seeger recorded an album lobbying against U.S. involvement in the war while the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had a peace treaty. Once Hitler invaded Russia, the band pulled their album from the market and issued a pro-war one.

So that was okay then.

Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

There’s more than a hint of self-confidence in an ostentatiously lifeless title like “Parks and Recreation,” the name of NBC’s new comedy series (Thursdays, 8:30-9 p.m. EDT). There was in fact reason for optimism about this enterprise built around “Saturday Night Live” star Amy Poehler. It was modeled on “The Office,” created by its executive producers and given the lead-in time slot to that adored series. Four weeks into its run — the show had its premiere April 9 — this comedy about Leslie Knope (Ms. Poehler), a minor official of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Ind., looks as though it may justify that confidence.

Ms. Poehler’s Leslie, oozing with deluded ambitions, is a version of Michael Scott, paper king of Dunder Mifflin and a creature of enchanting depths. Not that there’s much of a resemblance between these two. Leslie, the Parks and Recreation employee with dreams of bettering society and, along the way, winning a place for herself in government — possibly the nation’s highest office, who knows? — is, essentially, a one-note flake. …

Borowitz reports BO has ordered quarantine of Joe Biden.

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Walter Williams writes a great essay about what it means for a culture to be civilized.

During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn’t lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the ’60s and ’70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and ’50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today’s pathology on poverty and discrimination.

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

So what kind of people are the Palestinians? One of their courts just sentenced a citizen to death for the crime of selling land to a Jew. Jonathan Tobin has the story in Contentions.

… All of this ought to highlight a key truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict: though Israel is routinely depicted as a “racist” or “apartheid” state, it is actually the Palestinian nationalist movement that is predicated on hatred and exclusion — not Israel, which protects the political and property rights of its Arab minority.

It will be interesting to see whether the State Department or the White House, both eager to portray the P.A. as a worthy peace-partner and deserving of statehood, will call upon Abbas to pardon or commute the sentence of Brigith. We’ll also be waiting to see whether this outrage is taken up by the United Nations and its various agencies that are usually busy condemning Israel for having the temerity to defend its citizens against terrorism.

Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb posts on the 100 days of BO.

… One thing that is certain: Obama’s answers weren’t nearly as weak as the questions that prompted them. Jeff Zeleny embarrassed himself and his paper when he asked Obama what was the most “enchanted” moment of his first 100 days. I was unable to see whether the question was read out of a My Little Unicorn notepad. Readers of the New York Times may wonder why the Obama administration approved a dramatic reenactment of the 9/11 attacks using real fighter planes and a lifesize 747. They won’t find the answer in tomorrow’s paper, though they’ll be delighted to learn that “the ship of state is an ocean liner; it’s not a speed boat.”

In other words, Obama wants credit for closing Gitmo even though there’s only one less prisoner there than when he was inaugurated and his administration has no good answer for what to do with the rest. Obama wants credit for his handling of the economy even though the economy contracted at a worse than expected 6.1% in the first quarter of this year. Obama wants credit for rejecting the false choice between our security and our ideals even though you only get credit for that if your policies keep the American people safe.

Karl Rove comments on 100 days of outsourcing the presidency.

… What happens in a president’s first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.

Still, a president would rather start well than poorly — and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan’s 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.

Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.

However, there are cautionary signs. …

… Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

David Goldman, the writer we have known as Spengler, writes for First Things on our evolving society and how its changes might alter the way we approach economics.

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.

In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.

So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system, and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.

Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless ­iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.

To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.

Now, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children—which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children. …

… Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of ­America and now are missed.  …

… The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them—which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States. …

… The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of the world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).

The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.

After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth. …

Debra Saunders wants to know what Pelosi knew and when did she know it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a “truth commission” to investigate the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding – until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, “but she still realizes the political reality” – as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 – and did not protest. …

Anyone who’ll write a book titled Free Range Kids deserves a lot of space in Pickings. First a Contentions post on the author, Lenore Skenazy.

I’d like to nominate Lenore Skenazy as “Heroine of the Day” for her sane approach to child rearing. She is the so-called “worst Mom in America” who agreed to let her 9-year-old son get home on public transportation alone. He successfully rode the subway solo, she wrote a column about it, tons of angry mail and lots of media attention followed and poof a movement was born: Raising kids to be safe but without all the worry. Her book, Free-Range Kids is out today and she’s been hitting the airwaves, including a great interview with Brian Lehrer. One thing she said that is especially significant: “We’ve forgotten how competent our kids are.” …

Then a book WSJ review of her book and one other – both on raising children.

… One effect of parents’ over-involvement in their children’s’ lives has been the demise of those arenas of childhood that were once inviolably the province of children themselves: unsupervised play, neighborhood baseball games and other settings where children first exercised their moral imaginations and were forced to cope independently with their own shortcomings. Parents who lament this turn of events may welcome Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids,” which, like Mr. Weissbourd’s book, argues that adults should not always try to protect children from failure.

Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.” …

News Biscuit reports Somali pirates are going to wear more traditional clothing.

… International shipping insurers have welcomed the shift to more traditional pirate methods. The response came after Lloyds of London announced it had paid the latest ten million dollar ransom demand for the release of a U.S. registered oil tanker; ‘But the treasure be buried on a desert island in the Spanish Main; ten paces north from dead man’s tree. Yo ho ho!’

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Roger Simon figures out Specter

James Kirchick, New Republic editor, is also tired of BO running down his country. Nov. 5th Pickings expressed the hope electing a black as president would get some of the media and the left to agree the U. S. isn’t such a bad place after all. Instead, the new president has taken over the job of trashing our country.

… When not establishing false premises about the previous administration (the easier to glorify his own) or apologizing for his country, Obama has shown unusual deference to autocrats. At the Summit of the Americas, he calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez. There’s nothing wrong with the president participating in a multilateral summit where criticism, even egregiously unfair criticism, of the U.S. is expressed. But if he can sit and take verbal abuse from Latin American demagogues, then surely speaking a little truth in response to their lies is appropriate.

It was plenty controversial when, years into his ex-presidency, Jimmy Carter publicized his critique of U.S. policy by meeting with hostile governments to conduct freelance diplomacy. In 1994, Carter traveled to North Korea, called its then-dictator, Kim Il Sung, a “vigorous and intelligent” man, and took the Clinton administration by surprise, negotiating a deal empowering Kim to continue his nascent nuclear program. But Carter at least waited until he left the White House before denigrating his country.

The ill effects of Obama’s obsequious behavior will not be immediate. His friendly handshake with Chavez will not suddenly lead to the closing of more opposition radio stations in Venezuela, nor will his bemoaning American arrogance in Europe lead to more Russian aggression tomorrow.

But Obama’s fecklessness emboldens our adversaries and discourages advocates of liberty around the world. …

Thomas Sowell has similar thoughts.

… In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.

Repercussions extend far beyond issues of the day. It is bad enough that we have a glib and sophomoric narcissist in the White House. What is worse is that whole nations that rely on the United States for their security see how easily our president welshes on his commitments. So do other nations, including those with murderous intentions toward us, our children and grandchildren.

Jennifer Rubin posts on inadvertent admissions in a Tom Friedman column today.

… So to recap: the Bush team kept us safe from an implacable foe by using interrogation methods which the American public approved of and by fighting (often against the admonitions of Friedman and his colleagues) and largely prevailing in Iraq. The latter effort may deal a death blow to Al Qaeda which one supposes made it a very worthwhile endeavor. Well, yes, Friedman awards Obama the prize for “doing [his] best” in a war largely waged by his reviled predecessor – who is rarely praised for doing his best, but we get the point.

It must be some other George W. Bush who was the worst foreign policy president in history – because the 43rd president, by Friedman’s accounting, got some very big things right, despite ferocious odds. (One of President Bush’s librarians might want to clip this one out for the “Bush Legacy Inadvertently Revived By Obama” file.)

Stratfor on the pandemic possibility.

… We are not trying to be alarmist. As stated, we do not really know what these swine flu infections and deaths mean, and as with many other scares, this situation might dissipate in a matter of days. There have been plenty of scares about avian strains of the flu virus breaking through the human-to-human transmission barrier, and so far they have been unfounded. Even the widely hyped outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which spread rapidly from China to a number of other countries in 2002 and 2003, ultimately was contained. Fewer than 800 fatalities from SARS occurred worldwide, with only eight confirmed cases (and zero deaths) in the United States, despite widespread concern that the disease could severely impact the American populace. …

Debra Saunders won’t drink the torture Kool-Aid.

The mantra from the left during the Bush years went something like this: The world is not black and white. Sophisticated minds should seek out different, nuanced opinions.

Now that Barack Obama is president, you can say a farewell to nuance.

The left chants, “torture doesn’t work” – defining waterboarding and sleep deprivation as torture. Obama has a longhand version of that mantra in his rejection of the “false choice between our security and our ideals.”

In Obamaland, somehow there never are difficult choices.

From the presidency that was supposed to promote intellectualism comes the argument that waterboarding is immoral – which is a fair argument to make, until its adds: and it doesn’t work.

But common sense tells you that techniques like sleep deprivation, waterboarding and a forced bland diet work, at least some times. …

Ross Douthat’s inaugural column at NY Times is here. Ross has taken over the position of in-house conservative last occupied by Bill Kristol. Douthat kind of wastes this one arguing Dick Cheney might have been a better candidate for the GOP last fall.

WSJ reports on the combination of beer giants InBev and Anheuser-Busch.

ST. LOUIS — Construction crews arrived at One Busch Place a few months ago and demolished the ornate executive suites at Anheuser-Busch Cos. In their place the workers built a sea of desks, where executives and others now work a few feet apart.

It is just one piece of a sweeping makeover of the iconic American brewer by InBev, the Belgian company that bought Anheuser-Busch last fall. In about six months, InBev has turned a family-led company that spared little expense into one that is focused intently on cost-cutting and profit margins, while rethinking the way it sells beer.

The new owner has cut jobs, revamped the compensation system and dropped perks that had made Anheuser-Busch workers the envy of others in St. Louis. Managers accustomed to flying first class or on company planes now fly coach. Freebies like tickets to St. Louis Cardinals games are suddenly scarce.

Suppliers haven’t been spared the knife. The combined company, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, has told barley merchants, ad agencies and other vendors that it wants to take up to 120 days to pay bills. The brewer of Budweiser, a company with a rich history of memorable ads, has tossed out some sports deals that were central to marketing at the old Anheuser-Busch.

The changes have been tough for workers to swallow. …

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The Corner

RE: Arlen Specter   [Mark Hemingway]

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat.

Mark Steyn poses an important question; who regulates the regulators?

… This isn’t an abstract philosophical point, but a very practical one. Fans of big government take it for granted that Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Barney Frank, and a couple of other guys can “run” the financial sector better than 8,000 U.S. banks all jostling for elbow room like bacteria in a petri dish. Same with the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and “the global environment.” The skill-set required to run a billion-dollar company is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multi-trillion-dollar government is unknown to human history.

John Fund comments on the dem health care strategy.

House and Senate negotiators agreed on a five-year budget plan last night that gives Democrats authority to push through a controversial transformation of the nation’s health care system on a simple majority vote in both houses after a total of only 35 hours of debate. Normally, Senate rules require 60 votes and potentially unlimited debate to push ahead on controversial issues.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota said he personally opposed the move, but insisted Democrats need an “insurance policy” to cut off debate and ensure passage of their health care plan. Republican Paul Ryan, a House member from Wisconsin, accused Democrats of conducting “negotiations with a gun in one hand” as they rammed through the rule. …

Charles Krauthammer has figured out the kid’s agenda.

… Obama’s own budget projections show staggering budget deficits going out to 2019. If he knows his social agenda is going to drown us in debt, what’s he up to?

He has an idea. But he dare not speak of it yet. He has only hinted. When asked in his March 24 news conference about the huge debt he’s incurring, Obama spoke vaguely of “additional adjustments” that will be unfolding in future budgets.

Rarely have two more anodyne words carried such import. “Additional adjustments” equals major cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Social Security is relatively easy. A bipartisan commission (like the 1983 Alan Greenspan commission) recommends some combination of means testing for richer people, increasing the retirement age and a technical change in the inflation measure (indexing benefits to prices instead of wages). The proposal is brought to Congress for a no-amendment up-or-down vote. Done.

The hard part is Medicare and Medicaid. In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical “comparative effectiveness research”? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is “best practice” for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you’ve laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one’s lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain’s National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective — and if you’re old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements. …

Jennifer Rubin pivots off another in a long line of adoring Obama columns from EJ Dionne.

In his column today, E. J. Dionne pens a fawning love letter to the president — praising every aspect of his being. It is however light on evidence to support his amorous assessment. And indeed it is a guide in some respect to the fallacies which hobble the president’s outlook for success.

Dionne contends that the president “loves to engage conservatives.” But he has not done so in any meaningful way. None of their ideas for the stimulus plan were embraced; the president is bent on ramming  home healthcare through the reconciliation process; and he regularly slams conservative policy ideas, no matter how innovative, as “stale” or non-existent. It is an odd form of engagement that governs strictly on party lines. …

Robert Samuelson has complaints about the selling of green policies.

… The selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe. Environmentalists not only maximize the dangers of global warming — from rising sea levels to advancing tropical diseases — they also minimize the costs of dealing with it. Actually, no one involved in this debate really knows what the consequences or costs might be. All are inferred from models of uncertain reliability. Great schemes of economic and social engineering are proposed on shaky foundations of knowledge. Candor and common sense are in scarce supply.

Even a lib like Albert Hunt thinks BO’s plans will fail because of foolish spending.

George Will adopts a longer perspective to examine the 100 days.

A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages “a thousand years without a bath.” That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama’s opening sprint as 100 days without silence.

Ordinary politicians cannot comprehend that it is possible for the public to see and hear too much of them. In this sense, Obama is very ordinary. A few leaders of democracies have understood the importance of being economical with their demands for the public’s attention. Charles de Gaulle believed that remoteness nurtures a mystique that is an essential ingredient of leadership. Ronald Reagan, an actor, knew that the theatrical dimension of politics requires periodic absences of the star from center stage. He spent almost an eighth—a year—of his presidency at his ranch. But when he spoke, people listened. If Obama, constantly flitting here and there, continues to bombard the nation with his presence, he will learn how skillfully Americans wield the basic tool of modern happiness, the TV remote control with its mute button.

Calvin Coolidge, the last president with a proper sense of his office’s constitutional proportions, was known, not coincidentally, as Silent Cal. His reticence expressed an institutional modesty: “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” …

The president is a sophist according to the Real Clear Politics Blog.

… I have heard “there are those who say…” from this President quite a bit in the last three months. I think it’s time he start naming names. Who are these people who hold such backward-looking, unacceptable positions? If they are elected members of the government, shouldn’t the President tell us who they are so we can vote them out? If they are unelected, how is it they have such power?

Or maybe there are no such people, at least not of such relevance they deserve specific mention by the President. Maybe this is just a rhetorical trick designed to make Mr. Obama’s position seem like the only one allowed by common sense. …

Ryan Sager wonders what it takes to fire a teacher.

WHAT does it take to lose your job as a public- school teacher in America?

That’s a question worth asking as state education leaders bat around the idea of appointing a commission to study how school systems award tenure to New York teachers.

One way is to threaten to blow up your school, as a teacher in the Bronx did Friday, reportedly because he was upset about having been disciplined by his principal for assaulting a student.

Another is to be nominated for your state’s Teacher of the Year award — but have less seniority than some other teacher.

Yes, that’s what happened in Hampton, NH, earlier this month. …

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