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In his WSJ column, Karl Rove tells us things we don’t know about John McCain.

It came to me while I was having dinner with Doris Day. No, not that Doris Day. The Doris Day who is married to Col. Bud Day, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, fighter pilot, Vietnam POW and roommate of John McCain at the Hanoi Hilton.

As we ate near the Days’ home in Florida recently, I heard things about Sen. McCain that were deeply moving and politically troubling. Moving because they told me things about him the American people need to know. And troubling because it is clear that Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history.

When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.

Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, “I told you I would make you a cripple.”

The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day’s will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at “a goofy angle,” as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.

But it didn’t heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day’s splint in place. …

George Will thinks it’s good we’re getting to know Jeremiah Wright.

Because John McCain and other legislators worry that they are easily corrupted, there are legal limits to the monetary contributions that anyone can make to political candidates. There are, however, no limits to the rhetorical contributions that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright can make to McCain’s campaign.

Because Wright is a gift determined to keep on giving, this question arises: Can persons opposed to Barack Obama‘s candidacy justly make use of Wright’s invariably interesting interventions in the campaign? The answer is: Certainly, because Wright’s paranoias tell us something — exactly what remains to be explored — about his 20-year parishioner. …

Robert Tracinski thinks Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Over the weekend, the Obama campaign suffered a further disaster: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright finally seized his 15 minutes of fame.

Lured by the irresistible glow of the spotlight, the reverend launched a media blitz that took him from a softball interview with Bill Moyers on Friday, to a speech to a Detroit meeting of the NAACP on Sunday, to a press conference at the National Press Club on Monday morning.

Barack Obama is now declaring himself shocked and disappointed at Wright’s unrepentantly racist and anti-American views–but Obama can no longer plausibly claim innocence in this matter, because he is the one who has encouraged Wright by trying to excuse and explain his views. …

Thomas Sowell with a three part series on the economics of college.

A front-page headline in the New York Times captures much of the economic confusion of our time: “Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College.”

The whole article is about the increased costs of college, the difficulties parents have in paying those costs, and the difficulties that both students and parents have in trying to borrow the money needed when their current incomes will not cover college costs.

All that is fine for a purely “human interest” story. But making economic policies on the basis of human interest stories — which is what politicians increasingly do, especially in election years — has a big down side for those people who do not happen to be in the categories chosen to write human interest stories about.

The general thrust of human interest stories about people with economic problems, whether they are college students or people faced with mortgage foreclosures, is that the government ought to come to their rescue, presumably because the government has so much money and these individuals have so little.

Like most “deep pockets,” however, the government’s deep pockets come from vast numbers of people with much shallower pockets. In many cases, the average taxpayer has lower income than the people on whom the government lavishes its financial favors …

Why does college cost so much?

There are two basic reasons. The first is that people will pay what the colleges charge. The second is that there is little incentive for colleges to reduce the tuition they charge.

Those who want the government to provide subsidies to help meet the high cost of college seem not to consider whether government subsidies might have contributed to the high cost of college in the first place.

In any kind of economic transaction, it seldom makes sense to charge prices so high that very few people can afford to pay them. But, with the government ready to step in and help whenever tuition is “unaffordable,” why not charge more than the traffic will bear and bring in Uncle Sam to make up the difference?

The president of a small college once told me that, if he charged tuition that was affordable, even an institution the size of his would lose millions of dollars of government money every year.

In a normal market situation, each competing enterprise has an incentive to lower prices if that would attract business away from competitors and increase its profits.

Unfortunately, the academic world is not a normal market situation. …

John Stossel columns on the conceit of the regulators. His subject is the recent airliner safety scare. No surprise government fools were behind those problems.

… The latest “crisis” was launched when the FAA fined Southwest Airlines, which has an excellent safety record, $10.2 million for missing inspection deadlines. When Rep. Oberstar criticized the FAA for being too close to the airlines, the agency sprung into overreaction. “An industry-wide ‘audit’ commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something — anything — to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter,” said The Wall Street Journal (http://tinyurl.com/6yfm4x).

One result was the cancellation of 3,300 American Airlines flights and the stranding of 250,000 passengers over several days while 300 MD-80s were grounded so their wiring could be inspected.

American Airlines then did something rare and even heroic. It criticized the agency that regulates it for suddenly changing inspection procedures in ways that have little to do with safety. “We don’t know what the rules are,” said an American technical crew chief for avionics. Some rules contradict each other, the airline said.

The FAA disputes American’s claims, but The New York Times reports that “John Goglia, a maintenance expert and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that the rules had, in fact, changed. … The differences in American’s work, he said, were so small that ‘those airplanes could have flown for the rest of their careers and those wires would not have been a problem.’”  …

Walter Williams likes some smugglers.

While it’s politically popular to impose confiscatory taxes on America’s 40 million tobacco smokers, there are a number of consequences one might consider, but let’s start out with a quiz. If a carton of cigarettes sells for $160 in New York City, and $35 in North Carolina, what do you predict will happen? If you answered tons of cigarettes will be going up I-95 from North Carolina to New York City, go to the head of the class.

Smuggling cigarettes is illegal; so the next quiz question is: Who is most likely to engage in cigarette smuggling? It’s a mixed answer, but for the most part, organized smugglers will be people with a high disregard for the law. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has found that Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Middle Eastern (mainly Pakistani, Lebanese, and Syrian) organized crime groups are highly involved in the trafficking of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. What’s worse is the ATF found that some of these groups use the money to provide material financial assistance to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Some smugglers are good people who differ little from the founders of our nation such as John Hancock, whose flamboyant signature graces our Declaration of Independence. The British had levied confiscatory taxes on molasses, and John Hancock smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons a year. His smuggling practices financed much of the resistance to British authority — so much so that the joke of the time was that “Sam Adams writes the letters (to newspapers) and John Hancock pays the postage.” Like Hancock, some of today’s cigarette smugglers are providing a service to their fellow man caught in the grip of confiscatory taxation. …

Robert Samuelson says, want more oil, “start drilling.”

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Editors at the WSJ call attention to the abuse potential in the Clinton Foundation.

Transparency is a popular word in this presidential election, with all three candidates finally having released their tax returns. Yet the public still hasn’t seen the records of an institution with some of the biggest potential for special-interest mischief: The William J. Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton established that body in 1997 while still President. It has since raised half-a-billion dollars, which has been spent on Mr. Clinton’s presidential library in Arkansas and global philanthropic initiatives. The mystery remains its donors, and whether these contributors might one day seek to call in their chits with a President Hillary Clinton.

That’s no small matter given the former first couple’s history. Yet Mr. Clinton says he won’t violate the “privacy” of donors by disclosing their names, even if his wife wins the Oval Office. What is already in the public record should make that secrecy untenable, however:

Chicago bankruptcy lawyer William Brandt Jr. pledged $1 million for the Clinton library in May 1999, at the same time the Justice Department was investigating whether he’d lied about a Clinton fundraising event. The Clinton DOJ cleared him a few months later.

Loral Space and Communications then-CEO, Bernard Schwartz, committed to $1 million in 2000, at the same time the firm was being investigated for improperly sending technology to China. Loral agreed to a $14 million fine during the Bush Administration.

A major investor in cellular firm NextWave – Bay Harbour Management – pledged $1 million in 1999, when NextWave was waiting to see if the Clinton FCC would allow it to keep its cellular licenses. NextWave didn’t immediately get its licenses, and Bay Harbour never made good on its pledge. …

Marty Peretz thinks Bill Clinton is showing his real colors.

So now Bill Clinton wants us to think that, when he compared Barack Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary this year to to Jesse Jackson’s win in the same race two decades ago, he was actually complimenting his wife’s opponent rather than deriding him. What’s more, said our Pinocchio president, Jackson himself took the likening as tribute.  Well, why wouldn’t he?

Jackson has been washed up for years.  He has not had real work, perhaps for decades, and does no real work now, sort of like Clinton himself.  You can imagine JJ going from city to city, always with an entourage of more than anyone in his position needs, searching for racist incidents that he can ambulance-chase into an outrage.  But he does have a steady income largely through PUSH (whatever tangible has PUSH ever accomplished?), financed by big corporations and financial institutions, some guilty of racial misbehavior, some not, that would rather pay Jackson off than risk nasty picket lines or even boycotts against them.  When hip-hop came along Jackson seemed like the people’s poet.  Now, almost everyone grasps that he’s simply a wise-ass charlatan. …

Jim Taranto had the best analysis of the Jackson comparison. This from Jan. 31 Pickings.

… Jesse Jackson is not a racial healer but an ambulance chaser. He has made his career exploiting black insecurity and white guilt, seizing on racial disputes and misunderstandings to profit financially and enhance his own status. If racial disharmony disappeared tomorrow, Jackson would be out of a job.

In this sense–the sense that is most important to Jackson’s political identity–Obama is Jackson’s opposite. He has emerged as a national political figure, and a plausible prospective president, by calling for unity, not by seeking to take advantage of division.

When Mr. Clinton likens Obama to Jackson, the clear message to white voters is that a black candidate cannot be better than Jackson, cannot be relied upon to put the interests of the country above those of his race or himself. This is a truly bigoted notion–and it is one that Jackson cannot protest, for to protest it would be to acknowledge the truth about himself.

When speaking of Bill Clinton, Rep Jim Clyburn is ready to call a spade, a spade.

… In an interview with The New York Times late Thursday, Mr. Clyburn said Mr. Clinton’s conduct in this campaign had caused what might be an irreparable breach between Mr. Clinton and an African-American constituency that once revered him. “When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,” Mr. Clyburn said. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.”

Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost “unanimous” view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were “committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.” …

Sarah Baxter explains the Dem race to the readers of the London Times.

Given Hillary’s new math, John Fund thinks she might try to sue her way to the nomination. Perhaps she’s been studying at the feet of Al Gore.

Speaking of suing your way to high office, Ann Althouse has a link to tonight’s 60 Minutes interview with Scalia.

“It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, ‘I want this to be decided by the courts.’”

“What are we supposed to say — ‘Not important enough?’

Here’s a CBS link to that interview.

… “I say nonsense,” Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. “Get over it. It’s so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn’t even close. The vote was seven to two,” he says, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision that the Supreme Court of Florida’s method for recounting ballots was unconstitutional. …

Speaking of tonight’s TV, a Pickings reader alerts us to a surprising series starting on PBS.

Starting on PBS this Sunday, April 27th, from 9pm to 11pm, is the documentary on the USS Nimitz.

It’s airing for 5 days in a row, through May 1st, for two hours each day, for a total of 10 hours.

Making the film CARRIER required 17 filmmakers to take a six-month journey aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during its deployment to the Gulf in support of the Iraq War. They disembarked from Coronado, California on May 7, 2005 and returned there November 8, 2005 with stops at Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Guam, Kuala Lumpur, Bahrain and Perth, Australia.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/carrier/

Even though it airs on PBS, the documentary was made during the time when a conservative, Ken Tomlinson (forced out since then), was at the helm (pun intended). So, there is a chance that the documentary is more fair and balanced.

Enjoy,    Victor

Mark Steyn says “Feed your Prius, Starve a Peasant.”

… Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.

So what happened?

Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that, to date, the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:

“The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world’s environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

“At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies … . This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol.” …

Jonah Goldberg writes on Time’s cover too.

Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate” Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a tree.

No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.” …

… The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China’s ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China’s technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.

This is the atmosphere Time is helping to poison, with pollutants far worse than mere greenhouse gasses.

So, how did we get into the ethanol mess? NewsBusters reports on Al Gore’s contribution.

As the international disaster of ethanol begins taking its toll on the planet — and, maybe more important, as press outlet after press outlet finally begins recognizing it — will media remember that Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate requiring this oxygenate be added to gasoline? …

Corner posts on ethanol.

BreitBart reports on interesting discoveries about our prehistoric beginnings.

Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers have said.

“Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction,” said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York.

The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with “mitochondrial Eve,” a female hominid who lived some 200,000 years ago, to the point of near extinction 70,000 years ago, when the human population dwindled to as little as 2,000.

After this dismal period, the human race expanded quickly all over the African continent and emigrated beyond its shores until it populated all the corners of the Earth. …

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Karl Rove asks if Obama is ready for primetime.

After being pummeled 55% to 45% in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was at a loss for explanations. The best he could do was to compliment his supporters in an email saying, “you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible.” Then he asked for money.

With $42 million in the bank, money is the least of Sen. Obama’s problems. He needs a credible message that convinces Democrats he should be president. In recent days, he’s spent too much time proclaiming his inevitable nomination. But they already know he’s won more states, votes and delegates.

His words wear especially thin when he was dealt a defeat like Tuesday’s. Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.

Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better – and he worse – than expected in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn. They cover Hill’s win and we learn more about Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

HH: We begin as we do on any broadcast when we’re lucky with Columnist to the World, Mark Steyn, www.steynonline.com. Mark, what do you make of Hillary’s win?

MS: Well, I would have been surprised if she hadn’t won. I gather Chris Matthews came on the air at 8:00 and predicted an Obama win, which would have ended the race. It would have showed that he was resilient to the worst kind of scandals, which is to say when you yourself put your foot in it, which he did with his guns and God remarks. And it would also have showed that mainstream Democrats in a critical state were prepared to discount those kind of stories. So what would have changed the race would have been an Obama victory. Once it’s as predicted a Hillary Clinton victory, then I think the only question is how big the final figure is. If it isn’t double digits, then it’s a poor night for Hillary and it’s a good night for Obama, because it shows that his numbers can hold up under quite a sustained assault. But I think that both candidates are really getting weaker as this thing goes on.

HH: Terry McAuliffe, campaign director for Hillary Clinton, was out today saying I don’t need to raise twenty, though I could raise $20 million. These media markets ahead in Oregon and Kentucky and West Virginia and Indiana and North Carolina aren’t that expensive, sounding every bit like a campaign guy who’s going all the distance. I just can’t see Hillary Clinton quitting if she won.

MS: No. Hillary Clinton isn’t going to quit, because I think she realizes that Obama is a weak candidate. He’s weak in the sense that he’s unknown. And an unknown candidate always has vulnerabilities. Some of those have been raised on your show, not just long distant past associations, but a lot of current associations. So she’s got to figure that at some point, if he doesn’t get stronger, then her argument to the superdelegates is look, this guy can’t win. He’s not the glamour puss the media make him out to be. The big glamorous Obama guy that they love, and when they do these messianic cover stories on him, it’s simply not reflected in the numbers.

HH: Now Salem producer Guy Benson discovered some audio from a reunion of SDS’ers in 2007. I want to play you four clips, two from Bernardine Dohrn, and two from William Ayers. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz explores the media’s Obama adoration.

… The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.

The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he’d been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.

Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America’s just deserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America’s crimes – Mr. Gergen said, “Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we’ve fallen short.”

It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equaled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few “snippets” taken from years of sermons. …

George Will examines our education establishment.

… After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic” — Moynihan’s description — that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.

But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA’s behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us “open” classrooms, teachers as “facilitators of learning” rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of “multiculturalism,” and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century. …

Hitchens on Hill’s PA win

Walter Williams follows up a Sowell column.

Dr. Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “Republicans and Blacks,” (April 10, 2008) pointed out the foolhardiness of Republican strategy to secure more black votes. He pointed out that it is a losing strategy to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and black politicians. It’s like a quarterback trying to throw a pass to a receiver surrounded by a bunch of defenders. The second losing strategy is to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer — token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state handouts.

Sowell suggests that Republican strategy should be to highlight the liberal Democratic agenda that has done great harm to the poorest of the black community. Among those he mentions is the environmental agenda where “tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists’ severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.” Since 1970, San Francisco’s black population has been cut in half.

Then there are the liberal judges and parole boards who have turned criminals loose to prey on black communities. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, while 13 percent of the population, blacks committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides and were 46 percent of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer. …

John Stossel thinks there are a lot of Chicken Littles around.

“Mortgage Crisis,” shouts the New York Times. The Times has used the term “subprime crisis” at least 11 times. Not in opinion columns — in news stories.

The columns are worse. Paul Krugman writes: “A lot of the financial system looks like it’s going to shrivel up and have to be rebuilt.”

The “financial crisis,” says Fortune’s senior editor, “is threatening to bring down the entire system, with dire consequences.”

When the current troubles aren’t a “crisis,” they’re a “disaster”. That’s what John McCain called them, while Hillary Clinton prefers “crisis,” saying, “This market is clearly broken, and, if we don’t fix it, it could threaten our entire housing market.”

Wait a second.

Where is this “credit crisis”? Did the supermarket reject your Visa card? I still see Ditech commercials offering fixed-rate mortgages at around 5.5 percent.

Sure, some lenders are skittish while things play out. Some investment banks and brokerage houses are sitting on shaky mortgage-backed securities. But why call that a “crisis”?

Do we have 25 percent unemployment, as we did during the Depression? Do we even have 7.5 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates, as we did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency?

There’s a been a loss of jobs in the past two months, but that comes after years of strong job creation — 25 million net jobs in the last 15 years . At 5.1 percent, unemployment is low by historical standards. …

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P. J. O’Rourke took a ride on an aircraft carrier.

Landing on an aircraft carrier is…To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft–a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog. C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls the C-2 is the “COD.” This is an acronym for “Curling the hair Of Dumb reporters,” although they tell you it stands for “Carrier Onboard Delivery.”

There is only one window in the freight/passenger compartment, and you’re nowhere near it. Your seat faces aft. Cabin lighting and noise insulation are absent. The heater is from the parts bin at the Plymouth factory in 1950. You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what euphemistically is called a “landing.” The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn’t land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backwards off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot’s judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you’re still alive.

Landing on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I’d ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt–the “Big Stick”–were an equally unalloyed pleasure. I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn’t get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that’s longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world–86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.

Don’t you wish that Jimmy Carter would try his hand at getting Robert Mugabe to fold his tent in Zimbabwe. Better that, than hanging around the Middle East showing his anti-Semitism.

Oh wait!

Jimmy did have a hand in Zimbabwe. As a matter of fact, without Carter, Mugabe probably wouldn’t have come to power. James Kirchick has the story in the Weekly Standard. This is long, but an important part of the Jimmy Carter record.

In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa’s victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, “I do not believe in black majority rule–not in a thousand years.” Fortunately for the country’s blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.

Less than a year after Muzorewa’s victory, however, in February 1980, another election was held in Zimbabwe. This time, Robert Mugabe, the Marxist who had fought a seven-year guerrilla war against Rhodesia’s white-led government, won 64 percent of the vote, after a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe’s threat to continue the civil war if he lost. Mugabe became prime minister and was toasted by the international community and media as a new sort of African leader. “I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible,” Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, had gushed to the Times of London in 1978. The rest, as they say, is history.

That second election is widely known and cited: 1980 is the famous year Zimbabwe won its independence from Great Britain and power was transferred from an obstinate white ruler to a liberation hero. But the circumstances of the first election, and the story of the man who won it, have been lost to the past. As the Mugabe regime–responsible for the torture and murder of thousands, starvation, genocide, the world’s highest inflation and lowest life expectancy–teeters on the brink of disaster after 27 years of authoritarian rule, it is instructive to go back and examine what happened in those crucial intervening months. …

… Carter is unrepentant about his administration’s support for Mugabe. At a Carter Center event in Boston on June 8, he said that he, Young, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had “spent more time on Rhodesia than on the Middle East.” Carter admitted that “we supported two revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.” He adopts the “good leader gone bad” hindsight of Mugabe’s early backers, stating that “at first [Mugabe] was a very enlightened president.” While conceding that Mugabe is now “oppressive,” Carter stressed that this murderer of tens of thousands “needs to be treated with respect and assured that if he does deal with those issues [democratization and human rights], he won’t be punished or prosecuted for his crimes.” Though it has supervised elections in over 60 countries, the 25-year-old Carter Center has no projects in Zimbabwe, nor has Carter (who demonstrates no compunction about lecturing others) attempted to atone for the ruin that his policies as president wreaked.

History will not look kindly on those in the West who insisted on bringing the avowed Marxist Mugabe into the government. In particular, the Jimmy Carter foreign policy–feckless in the Iranian hostage crisis, irresolute in the face of mounting Soviet ambitions, and noted in the post-White House years for dalliances with dictators the world over–bears some responsibility for the fate of a small African country with scant connection to American national interests. In response to Carter’s comment last month that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was the “worst in history,” critics immediately cited those well-publicized failures. But the betrayal of Bishop Muzorewa and of all Zimbabweans, black and white, who warned what sort of leader Robert Mugabe would be deserves just as prominent a place among the outrages of the Carter years.

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Even though a year old, a column on Carter by Christopher Hitchens makes some good points for today.

… In the Carter years, the United States was an international laughingstock. This was not just because of the prevalence of his ghastly kin: the beer-sodden brother Billy, doing deals with Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, and the grisly matriarch, Miz Lillian. It was not just because of the president’s dire lectures on morality and salvation and his weird encounters with lethal rabbits and UFOs. It was not just because of the risible White House “Bible study” sessions run by Bert Lance and his other open-palmed Elmer Gantry pals from Georgia. It was because, whether in Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq—still the source of so many of our woes—the Carter administration could not tell a friend from an enemy. His combination of naivete and cynicism—from open-mouthed shock at Leonid Brezhnev’s occupation of Afghanistan to underhanded support for Saddam in his unsleeping campaign of megalomania—had terrible consequences that are with us still. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that every administration since has had to deal with the chaotic legacy of Carter’s mind-boggling cowardice and incompetence. …

Bob Tyrrell in American Spectator with Carter opinions.

In the 1980 presidential election the American people did the best they could with President Jimmy Carter, given the limitations imposed on them by our Constitution. They retired him from office (44 states participated in the ceremony). Looking back, however, on how the scamp has abused his retirement, I, for one, wish we could have done better. Perhaps he could have been put in a jar. He has, in the succeeding twenty-eight years since his exit from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, remained almost as ruinous a nuisance out of office as he was in office. This cannot be said of any other president.

When Jimmy was given the heave-ho, the Misery Index, an index combining rates of inflation and unemployment, was at an all time high of 21.98% — up from 13.5% when he was elected in 1976. After his last full year as president, inflation was at 13.5% and unemployment at 7.2%. Today the Misery Index is at 8.83%, though the Democrats have not a nice thing to say about Jimmy’s Republican successors. In Jimmy’s day the prime rate moved from 7% to 20%, and the home mortgage rate was almost 18%. Think about those figures this autumn when you are asked to choose between Senator John McCain and either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Clinton, two Democrats with even less experience than Governor Jimmy Carter in matters economic. …

The old Captain, Ed Morrissey too.

Jimmy Carter may have aged considerably since his years at the helm of foreign policy, but that doesn’t excuse his latest debacle; he was just as clueless 30 years ago as he proved himself to be this week. Carter had everything but Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella as he returned with a supposed agreement by Hamas to recognize Israel and accede to a peace deal negotiated by Mahmoud Abbas and approved by referendum. However, Hamas immediately pulled the rug out from under Carter, exposing his idiocy: …

Jeff Jacoby reviews the situation in Zimbabwe.

In retrospect , it was an exercise in naiveté to have imagined that Zimbabwe’s brutal strongman, Robert Mugabe, would relinquish power just because he had lost an election. It has been more than three weeks since the March 29 vote in which Mugabe’s party, known as ZANU-PF, lost control of the lower house of parliament. Yet official results in the presidential contest between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have yet to be released.

There isn’t much doubt who won. Public tallies posted at each polling station showed Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, garnering more than 50 percent of the vote. Were the electoral commission to certify those tallies, it would mean Mugabe’s 28 years at the top had come to an end. But the electoral commission, like everything else in Zimbabwe’s government, is controlled by ZANU-PF. So there will be no official results until the books have been cooked to Mugabe’s satisfaction. …

In the occasion of Earth Day, Patrick Moore tells why he left Greenpeace.

In 1971 an environmental and antiwar ethic was taking root in Canada, and I chose to participate. As I completed a Ph.D. in ecology, I combined my science background with the strong media skills of my colleagues. In keeping with our pacifist views, we started Greenpeace.

But I later learned that the environmental movement is not always guided by science. As we celebrate Earth Day today, this is a good lesson to keep in mind.

At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986. …

American.Com with the case for ending ethanol subsidies.

Just in time for today’s Earth Day festivities, President Bush has announced a new initiative to combat global warming. He set a goal of stopping the growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 and reducing emissions thereafter. But rather than plan for 2025—which is another two or three presidencies away—Bush should immediately fix his ethanol policy, which is increasing GHG emissions and raising food prices not only in the United States but all over the world.

American companies are still trying to digest the ethanol mandates passed by Congress last December. Congress mandated the production of 9 billion gallons of ethanol or other renewable fuels this year; that number will gradually increase until it reaches 36 billion gallons in 2022. In addition, ethanol producers receive a tax break of 51 cents a gallon, and corn growers receive huge subsidies that may increase in the next farm bill.

Using ethanol for energy was supposed to be a win-win situation: the United States has so much corn, we were told, that it could use some to make gasoline, thereby reducing its GHG emissions and also reducing its dependence on foreign oil. But in the real world, unintended consequences are all too frequent. …

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In his blog, Michael Barone, gives a short review of Douglas Feith’s book which he claims is an honest account of the move to war in W’s administration.

I haven’t finished reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, but I feel secure in saying that it is an extraordinarily frank and persuasive book. Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, has been criticized harshly and, I think, unfairly for somehow lying us into Iraq. In War and Decision he presents his view, fortified by generous quotes from government documents, reports, and memorandums. He should be saluted for getting many materials declassified so that we can have a clearer idea of what was actually going on at the top levels of government. I have long been struck by the contrast between what we can read today about the acts of leaders in World War II and what I gather was available to readers at the time. This book provides our first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration’s national security top leadership from one who was there. …

David Brooks on Obama’s fall to earth. (More like Brooks falling out of love. And since he’s stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, maybe he’ll be in Pickings more often.)

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment. …

… When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now. …

Speaking of drinking the Kool-Aid, the media gets manhandled by John Fund as he reviews their castigation of ABC for Gibson’s and Stephanopoulos’s effrontery towards Obama in the last debate.

George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson of ABC News weren’t just criticized for their tough questioning of Barack Obama during last week’s Democratic debate. They were flayed.

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker called their approach “something akin to a federal crime.” Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, said the ABC duo turned in “shoddy and despicable performances.” Walter Shapiro of Salon magazine said the debate had “all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-head marathon.”

Most of the media mauling consisted of anger that the ABC moderators brought up a series of issues that had surrounded Mr. Obama since the last Democratic debate, a long seven weeks ago. They included his remarks that “bitter” Pennsylvania voters “cling” to religion, guns and “antipathy toward people who aren’t them” and his relationships with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres, an unrepentant former member of the bomb-planting Weather Underground group. Mrs. Clinton also came under some fire over her made-up story of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

According to liberal journalists, all these topics are irrelevant. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo said they were “frivolous items . . . that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items.” Mr. Obama agreed, dismissing the items brought up by ABC as “manufactured issues.” …

Camille Paglia wrote on Hillary for the Telegraph, UK.

… Though she would specialise in women’s and children’s issues, Hillary’s public statements have often betrayed an ambivalence about women who chose a non-feminist path. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” she sneered during Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign. Then, defending her husband against the claims of a 12-year affair by Gennifer Flowers, Hillary snapped: “I’m not sittin’ here like some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” – a sally that boomeranged when Hillary had to make an abject apology. The irony is that Hillary had offended the very group of stoical, put-upon, working-class women who are now proving to be her staunchest supporters.

Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary’s public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband’s success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark.

In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband’s influence – from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public “concern” for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform.

Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic. Hillary’s disastrous botching of national healthcare reform in 1993 (a project to which her husband rashly appointed her) will live in infamy. Obama may also have limited executive experience, but he has no comparable stain on his record.

The argument, therefore, that Hillary’s candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates’ constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a US Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women’s rights. …

WaPo editors on the “intellectual poverty” of the Dem opposition to the Colombia free trade pact.

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the Bush administration’s free-trade agreement with Colombia may not be dead, even though she has postponed a vote on it indefinitely. If the White House doesn’t “jam it down the throat of Congress,” she said, she might negotiate. Ms. Pelosi wants an “economic agenda that gives some sense of security to American workers and businesses . . . that somebody is looking out for them” — though she was vague as to what that entails. Nor did she specify how anyone could “jam” through a measure on which the administration has already briefed Congress many, many times. …

Matthew Continetti in the Weekly Standard provides background for Pelosi’s nixing of the Colombia agreement.

…Why did Pelosi move to let the Colombia deal die? Politics. It’s an election year. The Democrats need union money, and the unions oppose free trade. Democratic presidential candidates go from coast to coast telling audiences that free trade has devastated our economy. This is nonsense. But it wouldn’t look too good if the Democratic Congress belied this irresponsible, hostile-to-foreigners, belligerent–one might say, unilateralist–rhetoric.

There’s another reason, too: President Bush. Congress has now rejected the White House’s two legislative priorities in 2008: a reform in the eavesdropping law that includes immunity for telecommunications firms and the CFTA. Congress’s top priority is to make sure voters perceive the Bush presidency as a failure. They may think they are well on their way to achieving this goal. That in both of these matters the Democrats’ hatred of Bush will redound to the benefit of enemies of the United States seems not to concern them in the least.

Kevin Hassett in Bloomberg News on deadly ethanol effects.

… Food riots have, by my count, now occurred in nine countries around the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a recent report that Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal have also seen food-related violence in recent weeks.

To what extent is ethanol to blame for the high prices? A new study by economist Thomas E. Elam of the consulting firm FarmEcon LLC explored the question.

The study, to be sure, was commissioned by livestock farming interest groups, yet it appears to rely on widely accepted economic models. Elam used his model to simulate what the price of corn today would be if the U.S. hadn’t been subsidizing biofuels. He found that prices are about 50 percent higher than they would have been in a world without subsidies. …

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Mark Steyn likes God and guns.

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.

A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. That’s what a lot of Reade’s laundry list – “gun-totin’,” “military-lovin’” – boils down to. As for “gay-loathin’,” it’s Oscar van den Boogaard’s famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: The editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Something fun this way comes. Baracky.

Samizdata post on acceptance of libertarianism.

As suggested by a Samizdata reader called Hugo, I am going to kick off a Friday discussion which takes the following line: “A barrier to people accepting libertarianism is the notion that we’d let people starve in the streets.”

I think the contention would be grossly unfair, to put it mildly. Libertarians oppose the welfare state, we do not oppose welfare. …

… The one place where starvation of the poor is a likely occurrence, of course, is under collectivism. Just look at the great socialist disasters of the 20th Century.

Great piece on the media’s reaction to the last debate from John Harris and Jim VandeHei from Politico.

… Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.

(Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and The Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.)

(VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama’s speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he’s on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.)

All this is hardly the end of the world. Clinton is not behind principally because of media bias; Obama is not ahead principally because of media favoritism. McCain won the GOP nomination mainly through good luck and the infirmities of his opposition. But the fact that lots of reporters personally like the guy — and a few seem to have an open crush — did not hurt.

But the protectiveness toward Obama revealed in the embarrassing rush of many journalists to his side this week does touch on at least four deeper trends in the news business. …

Patrick Michaels in the WSJ tells what is wrong with out climate numbers. First of all, they are a product of government effort. That right there should tell you they are bogus. This could have been better written, but we pulled out a few gems.

… it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don’t last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none. …

… The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don’t do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation, which is precisely what University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and I did. Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that “non-climatic” effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.’s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth’s surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend. …

… Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn’t Greenland shed its ice?

This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there’s little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you’re liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn’t such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland’s ice – we should be talking about reality.

Speaking of government failure, WSJ has more on the current air travel mess.

… Indeed, the fundamental problem with most regulation is that the regulatory agency does not have sufficient information, flexibility and immunity from political pressure to regulate firms’ behavior effectively. Fortunately, the market, and in some cases the liability system, provide sufficient incentives for firms to behave in a socially beneficial manner.

Consider why economic regulation of the U.S. airline industry failed. The Civil Aeronautics Board used to be responsible for regulating fares and the number of carriers serving each route. …

… In a nutshell, the CAB did not have sufficient understanding of industry operations and strategy, the flexibility to facilitate and account for possible changes in industry competition, and immunity from political pressure to set efficient fares. When fares and entry were deregulated, market competition accomplished in large measure what the CAB could not.

Airline safety presents similar problems for the regulator. The FAA knows much less about aircraft technology and airline operations than do the airlines and aircraft manufacturers. In principle, the agency can be educated about such matters, and through consultation with the airlines, aircraft manufactures and expert advisers can develop certain rules and procedures that the airlines agree to follow.

But the airlines will always be far more informed than the FAA is about the condition of their planes. …

…Unfortunately, the FAA’s inadequacies are shared by other federal agencies that attempt to regulate safety. In our research on the subject, examining available empirical evidence, we could not find any discernible improvement in safety that was associated with regulations promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Mine Safety and Health Administration, among others.

At first blush, the FAA appears to differ from these agencies because its drawbacks do not include stimulating consumers and workers to engage in “offsetting behavior” that compromises efforts to improve safety. Maybe so. But in response to the FAA’s overly aggressive actions that caused American Airlines to cancel thousands of flights, many travelers shifted from air travel to highway travel. In the process, they greatly increased their probability of dying in an accident on their journey

Speaking of government failure, (we love doing that) The Economist this week centers on the food crisis. Their lead article starts calling for the usual government efforts and then in the final four graphs comes to grip with the real culprit.

… In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.

Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.

More on food shortages and how they can be overcome from the Telegraph,UK.

It is remarkable how rapidly the world has moved from worrying about deflation to worrying about inflation; from cheer to despondency about the reduction of poverty; and from concern about food surpluses to panic about shortages.

The hand of rising food prices is suddenly seen everywhere: in the riots in Tibet against Chinese rule; in drastic measures in the Philippines, Egypt, India and many African countries to restrict food exports; in calls for more aid; and even in the Bank of England’s reluctance to cut interest rates as fast as its American counterpart.

For agricultural commodity prices (what we call “food”) to have more than doubled in the past three years is an astonishing and worrying turn of events. But in responding to it, we need to understand the true nature of the problem.

And we must recognise that a big part of this problem is our own fault – because of our ill thought-out enthusiasm for using food to fuel cars as well as stomachs; and because of our longer-established but also ill considered opposition to the use of genetic engineering to help us grow more food. …

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One last Carter item. This from Haaretz.

Senior Israeli officials were not the first to try to get out of meeting Jimmy Carter. A number of members of Bill Clinton’s administration have already tried, including the former president and his wife the candidate; most members of Bush senior’s administration, including George H. W. himself; and it goes without saying the same applies to his son and his administration.

Carter has a strange characteristic: He finds it easier to make friends with dictators. If a person’s companions testify to his personality and character, then here is a partial list of people with whom Carter has gotten along well: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Kim Il Jong. …

Tony Blankley takes the Bush administration to task for yesterday’s global warming speech.

The last months of a presidential administration are often dangerous. Presidents — looking to their legacies — go to desperate lengths to try to enhance their reputations for posterity. A pungent example of such practices by the Bush administration was reported above the fold on the front page of The Washington Times Monday: “Bush prepares global warming initiative.”

Oh, dear. Just as an increasing number of scientists are finding their courage to speak out against the global warming alarmists and just as a building body of evidence and theories challenge the key elements of the human-centric carbon-based global warming theories, George W. Bush takes this moment to say, in effect: “We are all global alarmists now.”

It reminds me of the moment back in 1971 when Richard Nixon proclaimed, “We are all Keynesians now” — eight years after Milton Friedman had published his book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960″ and about an hour and a half before a consensus built that Friedman’s work consigned Keynes to the dustbin of economic history. …

Manchester Guardian columnist sees thru the green rhetoric.

… While antagonism to science merely impedes progress, antagonism to economics is regressive. American subsidies to ethanol fuel are not just causing “tortilla riots” but costing American taxpayers a staggering $5.5bn a year. Biofuel tankers are circling the globe, burning gasoline and chasing subsidies. They have joined carbon emissions certificates among the world’s greatest trading scams.

If I have changed my mind, I am not sure the same applies to many greens. I have rarely encountered so much fanaticism and blind faith. Did those demanding fuel subsidies not realise that palm oil would wipe out rainforests and that ethanol from corn would use as much carbon as it saved? Did those pleading for wind farms really think they could ever substitute for nuclear power; or those wanting eco-towns not realise they would just add to car emissions? Did they not understand that, once the tap of public money is turned on, lobbyists will ensure it is never turned off – however harmful?

If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation.

Just now, for reasons not all of which are “green”, commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

The Dem debate last night has received a lot of comment mostly centered around the toughness of the questions. David Brooks has some thoughts.

Three quick points on the Democratic debate tonight:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues. …

John Fund next.

And Peter Canello from the Boston Globe.

Barack Obama last night staked his presidential campaign on the idea that the American people will look beyond the inevitable gaffes and errors and character attacks of a 24-hour campaign cycle to meet the challenges of a “defining moment” in American history.

Hillary Clinton staked her campaign on the idea that Americans won’t – and that her tougher, more strategic approach to countering Republican attacks is a better way for Democrats to reclaim the White House.

The first half of last night’s debate in the august National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was a tawdry affair, as ABC news questioners called on Obama and Clinton to address a year’s worth of dirty laundry, and each combatant eagerly grabbed at the chance to besmirch their rival a little more.

But while some in the audience groaned, the litany of nasty questions – about such matters as Obama’s comments on the working class and Clinton’s exaggerations about dangers she faced in Bosnia – helped to flesh out a long-simmering subtext to the Clinton-Obama battle: The Clinton campaign’s insinuation that Obama is more vulnerable to GOP-style attacks on his patriotism.

For Obama, the harsh questioning by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News probably felt as though the media were trying to make up for a year’s worth of allegedly ginger treatment all in one night. But it clarified the sharply different postures of the two campaigns. …

Michael Goodwin from NY Daily News.

It seems like ancient history now, but not long ago Hillary Clinton argued that Barack Obama was getting a free pass from the media.

Those days are over, with moderators, a private citizen and Clinton herself peppering Obama on Wednesday night with a barrage of the kind of tough questions he escaped for more than a year.

He answered some better than others, and some not at all. But the mere fact that at least five damaging issues were thrown at him within 30 minutes was testament to how much the race has changed in the six weeks since anti-American remarks by Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeramiah Wright, became public.

That was the high-water mark of Obama’s campaign, and now the cracks are showing. My bet is that his ineffective answers on Wednesday night will mean more doubts among voters and more concern among Democratic superdelegates about whether Obama is electable in November.

The result is that Clinton, despite her own electability issues and an imperfect evening, scored a debate victory just a week before the Pennsylvania primary. A loss would knock her out. …

Ann Coulter has comments on Obama’s most excellent adventure in San Francisco where he explained the country to folks on billionaire’s row.

… Obama informed the San Francisco plutocrats that these crazy working-class people are so bitter, they actually believe in God! And not just the 12-step meeting, higher power, “as you conceive him or her to be” kind of G-d. The regular, old-fashioned, almighty sort of “God.”

As Obama put it: “(T)hey get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The rich liberals must have nearly fainted at the revelation that the denizens of small towns in Pennsylvania have absolutely no concern for the rich’s ability to acquire servants from Mexico at a reasonable price.

We don’t know much about Obama’s audience, other than that four fundraisers were held on April 6 at the homes of San Francisco’s rich and mighty, such as Alex Mehran, an Iranian who went into daddy’s business and married an IBM heiress, and Gordon Getty, heir to the Getty Oil fortune.

It is not known whether any of Getty’s three illegitimate children attended the Obama fundraiser — which turned out to be more of a McCain fundraiser — but photos from the event indicate that there were a fair number of armed (and presumably bitter) policemen providing security for the billionaire’s soiree.

In 1967, Gordon sued his own father to get his hands on money from the family trust — and lost. So Gordon Getty knows from bitter. It’s a wonder he hasn’t turned to guns, or even to immigrant-bashing. God knows (whoever he is) there are enough of them working on his home.

These are the sort of well-adjusted individuals to whom Obama is offering psychological profiles of normal Americans, including their bizarre theories about how jobs being sent to foreign countries and illegal-alien labor undercutting American workers might have something to do with their own economic misfortunes. …

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Hadn’t planned anything for the anniversary, but daughter Liza, a reporter for the Tech paper sent me her latest. The most common thing you hear from students is how tired they are of the media. They’ve even come up with their own rump commemoration, knowledge of which, Liza tells me, has yet to be discovered by the press.

The University and the town of Blacksburg will be holding many events in commemoration of those lost on April 16, 2007. While some students are excited for all the things the campus has to offer, many are interested in making no plans at all.

“I think it’s great that there’s going to be so much to do,” said Sia Mallios, a junior finance major. “But I just don’t want to battle the crowds and the media. The last thing I want to do is be questioned more.”

Mallios said she remembers being pestered by news media last year, which tried to get her to answer questions at a time she wanted to least. She said she’s not sure what she’ll do tomorrow, but that she knows she won’t come to campus until the candlelight vigil planned for 8:15 p.m. on the Drillfield.

“It was sad enough that day,” Mallios said. “I don’t want to relive that.” …

Ed Koch must be feeling old since he wrote a short review of his political life. It’s a fun read. And some of it touch on one of today’s topics.

… I came to know Carter well.

When he ran for reelection, he asked me to campaign for him in 1980 – I was by then Mayor of New York City — and I said that I would vote for him, but not campaign for him because he was then engaging in hostile acts towards Israel. I was popular with the Jewish community and when I would not campaign for him unless he changed his position, he called me to his hotel in New York when attending a fundraiser and said, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.” I felt proud then, and even more today, since we now know what a miserable president he was then and the miserable human being he is now as he prepares to meet with Hamas.

Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. On one of his visits to New York City, I drove with him from the helicopter pad to Reagan’s hotel. The streets were lined with tens of thousands of people and, as he looked out the car window while were crossing 42nd Street, he suddenly yelled, “Look at that guy – he gave me the finger!”

Sure enough, there was a guy with his middle finger extended upright. I said, “Mr. President, don’t be so upset. Thousands of people are cheering you and one guy is giving you the finger. So what?” He replied, “that’s what Nancy always says. She says I only see the guy with the finger.” I never voted for him, but I loved him. …

Frank Gaffney on Jimmy Carter, the man who never met a tyrant he didn’t like.

Jimmy Carter’s pathetic need for political rehabilitation following a presidency widely regarded as one of the worst in American history is once again making news. He reportedly will meet this week with Khaled Mashaal, the Syrian-based leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian arm, Hamas – an internationally recognized terrorist organization.

Mr. Carter maintains this is no big deal since he has met with Hamas officials before. Indeed, in keeping with his Carter Center’s self-appointed status as global election monitor, the former president did officiate in January 2006 when the Brotherhood’s terrorists defeated those of Fatah led by Yasser Arafat’s longtime crony, Mahmoud Abbas.

In point of fact, it seems there is scarcely a serious bad actor on the planet with whom Jimmy Carter has not met. He is a serial tyrant-enabler, the very personification of Rodney King’s risible appeal, “Can’t we all get along?” Mr. Carter has come to epitomize the notion that “dialogue” is always in order, no matter how odious or dangerous the interlocutor – or the extent to which they or their agendas will benefit from such interactions.

As Barak Obama (whom Carter has all but endorsed) is as wedded as the former President to the idea of condition-free dialogue with tyrants, it is worth reflecting on just a few of the many example’s of how this Carteresque practice has produced disastrous results: …

James Kirchick brings up the Logan Act for Carter.

… The station of ex-president carries a diplomatic heft, and no one has used it with more inelegance and opportunism than Jimmy Carter, whose sabotage of American foreign policy has not been limited to Republican presidents (see Bill Clinton and North Korea). By calling on the United States to include Hamas in peace talks, and by meeting with the leader of said terrorist group in the capital of a country with which the United States does not even maintain diplomatic relations, Carter undermines a crucial plank in America’s Middle East policy. …

Townhall’s Ben Shapiro with harsh works for Jimmy.

Jimmy Carter is an evil man. It is painful to label a past president of the United States as a force for darkness. But it is dangerous to let a man like Jimmy Carter stalk around the globe cloaked in the garb of American royalty, planting the seeds of Western civilization’s destruction.

On Tuesday, former President Carter met with leaders of the terrorist group Hamas. He embraced Nasser al-Shaer, the man who has run the Palestinian education system, brainwashing children into believing Jews are the descendants of pigs and dogs. He laid a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat, the most notorious terrorist thug of the 20th century. Then, he had the audacity to offer to act as a conduit between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli and U.S. governments. This is somewhat like Lord Haw-Haw offering to broker peace between the German and British governments during World War II.

Carter is a notorious anti-Semite and an even more notorious terrorism- enabler. In particular, he is a huge supporter of Palestinian violence. …

John Stossel answers a critic from the legal community.

“Stossel, who often touts his belief in ‘market magic,’ attacks lawyers who represent consumers and others harmed by corporations, and wants instead to let corporate America police itself. This is the same corporate America that today is making the dreams of millions of Americans ‘disappear’ in the form of home foreclosures and job losses. … “

That’s what a class-action lawyer (who boasts he recovered “more than $2 billion in cash for average everyday American consumers”) wrote to the Wall Street Journal in response to my op-ed about the parasite circus of class-action lawyers who practice legal extortion.

As I expect from litigators, his letter was aggressive, well written and convincing. And he was right about my belief in “market magic.” That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned in 35 years of consumer reporting: The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, “experts” in government can’t even count the vote accurately.

That’s why I talk about market magic.

But I digress. The class-action lawyer, like so many who go to law school, gets the big stuff wrong. …

Dartblog came up with the Eulogy for WFB delivered by his son Christopher.

… He was — inarguably — a great man. This is, from a son’s perspective, a mixed blessing, because it means having to share him with the wide world. It was often a very mixed blessing when you were out sailing with him. Great men always have too much canvas up. And great men set out from port in conditions that keep lesser men — such as myself — safe and snug on shore. …

Speaking of Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus did a send-off of him and Norman Mailer in last Sunday’s NY Times.

Every now and again, the jostling frenzy of intellectual life in New York City, with its relentless fixation on the newest, the hottest, the coolest, the ins and the outs, pauses for a moment and the speed slows to a stately, reflective pace.

A striking example of this occurred when, in the space of a week, two of the city’s cultural giants received tribute, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues. On April 4, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for William F. Buckley Jr., who died in February at age 82. Five days later, last Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, homage was paid to Norman Mailer, who died in November at age 84.

One could easily imagine the two men, friendly combatants for nearly five decades, robustly arguing about who received the better send-off. Was it Mr. Buckley, whose A-list mourners included Henry Kissinger, George McGovern and Tom Wolfe? Or Mr. Mailer, who reeled in John Didion, Don DeLillo and Gay Talese? Best to call it a tie — not least since Charlie Rose and Tina Brown were on view at both events. …

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Notable Corner post. Michael Ledeen on the Berlusconi victory in Italy.

… And there’s an even more annoying feature to these elections, as seen by the chattering classes: Berlusconi is an outspoken, even passionate admirer of George W. Bush and the United States of America. Reminds one of the elections that brought Sarkozy to the Elysee, doesn’t it? Best to keep that quiet, or somebody might notice that hatred of America doesn’t seem to affect the voters in Italy, France or Germany. … That moron Bush sure is lucky.

John Fund on the Obama whistleblower.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama got caught on tape accusing Pennsylvania primary voters of being people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” What isn’t well known is that his campaign tried to prevent Mayhill Fowler, the HuffingtonPost.com blogger who broke the story, from getting into the San Francisco mansion where the candidate made the remarks. …

John Fund writes about Obama’s many flaws.

Barack Obama’s San Francisco-Democrat comment last week – about how alienated working-class voters “cling to guns or religion” – is already famous. But the fact that his aides tell reporters he is privately bewildered that anybody took offense is even more remarkable.

Democrats have been worrying about defending Mr. Obama’s highly liberal voting record in a general election. Now they need to fret that he makes too many mistakes, from ignoring the Rev. Wright time bomb until the videotapes blew up in front of him, to his careless condescension towards salt-of-the-earth Democrats. Mr. Obama has a tendency to make such cultural miscues. Speaking to small-town voters in Iowa last year, he asked, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”

Mr. Obama is the closest thing to a rookie candidate on the national stage since Dwight Eisenhower, who was a beloved war leader. Candidates as green as Mr. Obama make first-timer mistakes under the searing scrutiny of a national campaign. Even seasoned pols don’t understand how unforgiving that scrutiny can be. Ask John Kerry, who had won five statewide elections before running for president. …

… While Republicans tend to nominate their best-known candidate from previous nomination battles (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and now John McCain), Democrats often fall in love during a first date. They are then surprised when all the relatives don’t think he’s splendid. ..

Peter Wehner has a good take on Obama and his troubles.

… On a deeper level, what we saw in Obama’s comments is a glimpse into a particular worldview, one that animates his political philosophy (contemporary liberalism). Senator Obama seems to view ordinary Americans as bitter, often broken, small-minded objects of pity rather than anger, ostensibly in need of instruction from — you guessed it — Barack Obama. The words of Michelle Obama are worth recalling in this context. She has spoken about her husband pushing us out of our “comfort zones,” saying “Barack knows at some level there is a hole in our souls” and “Barack is the only person in this race who understands that before we can work on the problems as a nation, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

This is the Politics of Meaning on steroids. If one views Americans as fundamentally needy children rather than competent citizens, one embraces the precepts of the nanny state — the state that (in Margaret Thatcher’s memorable phrase) takes too much from you in order to do too much for you. This provides an enormous opening for Senator McCain, who can frame this election as pitting a candidate who believes in self-government, against a candidate who believes in the nanny state. …

Thomas Sowell on Obama.

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years.

Senator Obama’s election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.

There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — nor any other significant legislation, for that matter.

Senator Obama is all talk — glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk.

Some of his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama’s public image and his reality. …

Noemie Emery has a good Obama take.

… Whether this will do for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania and in Indiana what Hart’s remarks did for him in New Jersey remains unknown, but condescension towards the people by the party that loves them has a lineage that goes well beyond Hart.

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told “thinking people” were for him, said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority,” and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. “Stevenson,” Barone says, “was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture–the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting,” and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: “Halp us, Jon Carry–We R Stuck HEAR N Irak.” …

What’s it like when Obama goes to a mutual grope fest at an Associated Press gathering? Power Line has the transcript.

Monday, Barack Obama addressed the Associated Press’s Annual Meeting. That’s sort of like the Virgin Mary talking to a Knights of Columbus convention. The only way to read the transcript is for laughs. For example:

OBAMA: I don’t blame them for this. That’s the nature of our political culture. If I had to carry the banner for eight years of George Bush’s failures, I’d be looking for something else to talk about, too.

(LAUGHTER)

Talk about a receptive audience! Pretty much like the Democratic National Convention. Obama addresses “bittergate,” sort of: …

Jennifer Rubin’s comments in Contentions. On Bill first.

… With a rich selection of targets that might benefit Hillary, Bill chooses none of the above. Instead he latches onto the slur-in-passing on his reputation. There is no message control with him; it is just all about Bill 24/7, no matter what the circumstances. It’s enough to make you sympathize with her and her hapless campaign. …

Then on Hill’s skills as she grasps Barack by the throat and kicks him in the crotch.

… she makes the connection between Obama, a “good man,” and other recent “good men” (meaning Kerry and Dukakis) who bombed at the ballot box because they were perceived as elitists. And she comes across  as almost sincere:  she really does believe Obama is electoral poison for the Democrats.

She really has learned a couple things in her years in the White House: how Democrats lose elections and how to go in for the kill.

An Oxford University Press blog posts on Bill Clinton’s perks.

… The Clintons’ tax returns raise one further issue which also requires public discussion: The federal subsidy the Clintons have received over the last seven years while earning in excess of $100 million. Mr. Clinton’s aggressive pursuit of post-presidential income is incompatible with the extensive public support he has received from federal taxpayers since leaving office. That public support was designed to preclude the nation’s chief executives from facing financial hardship after their terms of office. It was not intended to subsidize the aggressive pursuit of a post-presidential fortune.

The federal taxpayer’s subsidy of Mr. Clinton has several components. First, as a former president, Mr. Clinton is entitled to receive, for the remainder of his life, the salary of a cabinet secretary. That salary is today $191,000 per annum. In addition, as a former president, Mr. Clinton also receives, at taxpayer expense, “suitable office space appropriately furnished and equipped.” Mr. Clinton’s office in New York City costs federal taxpayers over $700,000 per year to lease and operate. Federal taxpayers also defray the salary and benefits for office staff and some of Mr. Clinton’s travel outlays. The General Services Administration currently budgets for all of these costs a yearly total of $1,162,000 for Mr. Clinton. The equivalent annual figures for former President Bush and former President Carter are $786,000 and $518,000 respectively.

In addition, Mr. Clinton is also entitled, at taxpayer expense, to Secret Service protection for the remainder of his lifetime – even though, as president, Mr. Clinton signed legislation limiting Secret Service protection for his successors to the first ten years after they leave office. …

Ed Feulner on the dim bulbs that are elected to congress.

… Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves which products they’d prefer to use. It’s only inferior or unnecessary products (think of ethanol) that require congressional intervention to survive. Useful or innovative products (iPods, cell phones) thrive on their own.

The light bulb ban isn’t the first time Congress has attempted to protect Americans from wastefulness. Some years ago, lawmakers outlawed toilets that use more than 1.6 gallons per flush. The low-flow toilets don’t work as well, of course. Ironically they often require several flushes to, shall we say, get the job done.

Reflecting on the failure of a well-intentioned federal law, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said it made him “wonder what ever became of our capacity to govern ourselves.” Simply put, that ability goes away when Washington tries to regulate everything.

Here’s a brighter idea: Let’s allow Americans to choose our own light bulbs. And let the best bulb burn on.