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Thomas Sowell writes on politics’ magic words.

… It is too bad that Lincoln is not still around today. He might emancipate us all from our enslavement to words.

When you call something a “stimulus” package, that does not mean that it actually stimulates. The way individuals, banks and businesses in general are hanging onto their money suggests that “sedative” package might be more accurate.

This is not a new phenomenon, peculiar to this administration. President Bush’s “stimulus” package did not stimulate either. The same was true back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “pump-priming” by spending government money to get private money flowing.

The circulation of money slowed down back then the way it has slowed down today.

Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence of realities. “Rent control” laws do not control rent and “gun control” laws do not control guns.

The big cities with the tightest rent control laws in the nation are New York and San Francisco. The nation’s highest rents are in New York and the second-highest are in San Francisco. …

Michael Barone says when it comes to health care and climate, beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That’s the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The “quants” who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.

Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning.

The lesson seems clear. Don’t allow a whole system to become hostage to the workings of some geek’s formula. Keep in mind the possibility that the real world might not behave as the formula indicates.

But, astonishingly, our society seems about to forget that lesson, just as it should have been learned. Congress is poised, at least if the Obama administration gets its way, to pass major new laws on carbon emissions and on health care whose success depends on geeks bearing formulas. …

Ron Brownstein took exception to the items about the kid president’s divisiveness. Peter Wehner answers him in Contentions.

… Several of the points Brownstein makes are legitimate. For example, Obama still maintains significant support among independents — though according to Gallup, Bush’s support among independents was by the end of April 2001 slightly higher than Obama’s is right now.

Still, in several respects, Brownstein’s analysis is either incomplete or simply wrong. For example, what Brownstein doesn’t say, but what is highly relevant, is that according to the Gallup Poll, Obama has lost 16 points of support among Republicans since his Inauguration. President Bush actually gained 5 points in approval among Democrats (from 32 percent to 37 percent) between his Inauguration and early April. In fact, it wasn’t until Gallup’s September 19-21, 2003 poll — more than two-and-a-half years after he took office — that Bush’s support among Democrats fell the equivalent of a 16-point drop in support from his Inauguration.

The truth is that Obama started his presidency with fairly strong support among Republicans (above 40 percent according to Gallup). This complicates Brownstein’s claim that the GOP has “contracted” in a way that made support for Obama extremely unlikely because it is a party “dominated by conservatives.” In fact, a dozen weeks ago, in a party “dominated by conservatives,” Obama had substantial support from Republicans. That has been squandered. …

Jennifer Rubin says McCain was right when he said BO would raise taxes.

Although not for lack of trying, John McCain was never able to convince voters of — or get the media to focus on — the fallacy of then-candidate Barack Obama’s claim that he would provide a tax break for 95% of voters. Well, with the enormous spending increases it is becoming clearer that a whopping tax increase is in store for many voters. The Hill reports: …

Karl Rove wonders if the GOP can take advantage of the tea parties.

Yesterday was Tax Day, and it was marked by large numbers of Americans turning out for an estimated 2,000 tea parties across the country. This movement is significant.

In 1978, California voters enacted Prop. 13 in reaction to steep property taxes. That marked the start of a tax-cutting movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan slashing high national income taxes in the 1980s. Now Americans are reacting to runaway government spending that they were not told about before last year’s election, and which Americans are growing to resent.

Derided by elitists as phony, the tea-party movement is spontaneous, decentralized, frequently amateurish and sometimes shrill. If it has a father it is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who called for holding a tea party in Chicago on July 4. Yesterday’s gatherings were made up of people who may never meet again (there’s no central collection point for email addresses). But the concerns driving people to tea parties are real, growing and powerful. Politicians ignore them at their peril. …

The second half of the Vanity Fair Pinch Sulzberger profile is here.

… Arthur is still often referred to as “Young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or by the despised nickname that puns on his father’s, “Pinch.” Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—‘When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”

But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that the wealth part is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The Times’s reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he feels in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells.

“This is ridiculous,” says a former business-side executive at the Times. “It flies in the face of logic and reason, this belief that if your news product is so good and so comprehensive the normal rules of business are suspended. Think about it. Think about the inanity of saying that you survived by putting in more news and cutting ads.”

Arthur repeated this belief proudly in his interview with Rose, describing how Adolph Ochs responded to the lean years after he purchased the paper by expanding its news hole—“We’re going to give our readers more! That’s gutsy!”—and how his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger did something similar during World War II, when newsprint was being rationed: “Major decision, major gutsy decision from him there. Perhaps the critical decision of his time … whether to continue to print ads—revenue, money, profit—or to say, No, we’re going to add more news. He went to news, the Herald Tribune went to ads, and the rest was just a matter of time. By the time the war ended the Times had taken such a huge leadership that it was just a matter of time before the Herald Tribune was to fold.”

This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers, including Arthur, and published more than a year before he spoke those words to Rose. The authors, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, thoroughly debunked the legend.

“One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news. In fact, he devoted the majority of the newspaper’s space to ads, and earned more revenue than he had since 1931. Ad revenue “had actually increased during the period, from $13 million to $15 million, while the amount of money spent on news had slumped slightly from $3.9 million to $3.7 million,” Tifft and Jones wrote. …

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Glenn Reynolds, who we know as Instapundit, writes for the WSJ on today’s tea parties.

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies — dubbed “tea parties” — to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

So who’s behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing “flash crowds” — groups of people, coordinated by text or cellphone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month. This is part of a general phenomenon dubbed “Smart Mobs” by Howard Rheingold, author of a book by the same title, in which modern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don’t know each other.

In the old days, organizing large groups of people required, well, an organization: a political party, a labor union, a church or some other sort of structure. Now people can coordinate themselves. …

Good time to bring back the awesome graph from Instapundit displaying the out of control federal government.

Robert Samuelson writes in WaPo on the misplaced priorities of this administration.

President Obama has made no secret of his vision for America’s 21st-century economy. We will lead the world in “green” technologies to stop global warming. Advancing medical breakthroughs will improve our well-being, control health spending and enable us to expand insurance coverage. These investments in energy and health care, as well as education, will revive the economy and create millions of well-paying new jobs for middle-class Americans.

It’s a dazzling rhetorical vista that excites the young and fits the country’s mood, which blames “capitalist greed” for the economic crisis. Obama promises communal goals and a more widely shared prosperity. The trouble is that it may not work as well in practice as it does in Obama’s speeches. Still, congressional Democrats press ahead to curb global warming and achieve near-universal health insurance. We should not be stampeded into far-reaching changes that have little to do with today’s crisis.

What Obama proposes is a “post-material economy.” He would de-emphasize the production of ever-more private goods and services, harnessing the economy to achieve broad social goals. In the process, he sets aside the standard logic of economic progress. …

Pickerhead has made no secret of his disdain for the NY Times and its far left agenda. Pinch Sulzberger, the man who is leading the Times down the road to oblivion was treated to a lengthy profile in Vanity Fair. We have it in two parts concluding tomorrow. Can you spell schadenfreude?

I was in a taxi on a wet winter day in Manhattan three years ago when my phone rang, displaying “111-111-1111,” the peculiar signature of an incoming call from The New York Times.

“Mark? It’s Arthur Sulzberger.”

For weeks I had been trying to talk with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of the New York Times Company. We had met once before, on friendly terms, and sometime after that I had informed him that I was hoping to write a story about him. I figured he was calling now to set something up. Instead he asked, “Have you seen the New Yorker piece?”

The article in question, just published, was bruising. It had surely been painful for him to read. Among other indignities, it featured a remark by the celebrated former Times man Gay Talese, the author of one of the most popular histories of the newspaper, The Kingdom and the Power. Speaking of Arthur, the fifth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty to preside over the paper, Talese had said, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”

I told Arthur that I had not yet fully read the story. “Well, I’m getting out of the business,” he said. Startled, I gazed through the window at the cars and people shouldering through the cold rain, the headline already forming in my mind: publishing scion resigns! “Wait, Arthur,” I said. “Is this a major scoop? Or are you just saying that you aren’t talking to writers anymore?” He laughed his high-pitched, zany laugh. “The latter,” he said.

Now, I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence. But ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—approximately 400 of them—into the field every day asking questions. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.

He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, The New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, Times Company stock is officially classified as junk. Arthur made a catastrophic decision in the 1990s to start aggressively buying back shares ($1.8 billion worth from 2000 to 2004 alone). This was considered a good investment at the time, and had the effect of increasing the stock’s value. Shares were going for more than $50. Now they are slipping below $4—less than the price of the Sunday Times. …

This is an appropriate time for a Power Line post on the Times’ worst columnist.

It’s a tough competition, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that any columnist in America could be more inept than Paul Krugman. I used to enjoy beating up on Krugman, but haven’t read him for a long time–life is short. But today I happened to notice this column, which attacks the Republican Party and the tea party movement.

I’d rebut Krugman’s arguments, only he doesn’t make any. Does he ever? Krugman doesn’t argue, he just vents. This is what we used to call “mailing it in.” If Krugman spent more than 20 minutes writing this column, I’d be shocked.  …

American.com treats us to the latest government idea for curtailing our freedoms. California is thinking of limiting the size of televisions. All for the environment of course.

… The most recent example comes from (where else?) California, which is considering a proposal to ban big-screen TVs. The unelected bureaucrats who comprise the state’s energy commission are working up new efficiency regulations aimed at big-screen televisions, which are condemned as energy hogs.

Big-screen televisions require more energy than smaller ones, and really big plasma TVs can suck more power than your refrigerator. That’s hardly surprising, but it upsets regulators all the same. The California proposal—which could be adopted this summer—would forbid retailers from selling TVs that require what state officials think is too much power. Proponents claim they are mandating energy efficiency, and who could object to that? The practical effect, however, would be to remove TVs with screens 40 inches or bigger from the market.

Regulators cite global warming and note that big-screen TVs are extremely popular among Californians. Soaring sales mean a greater demand for electricity, and more electricity use means increased greenhouse gas emissions. In a state devoted to fighting global warming (though one that has outlawed construction of new nuclear power plants that emit no greenhouse gases), that is unacceptable.

Another problem is that California is notoriously averse to adding electricity capacity, which explains the rolling blackouts earlier this decade. Forecasts of increased energy demand put state officials on the spot. Rather than take steps to build more power plants to meet consumers’ needs, California regulators would force residents to settle for products they do not want.

Last year, the California Energy Commission floated a proposal giving it authority to remotely regulate or even shut down homes’ thermostats via radio-controlled devices at the government’s discretion. It did not get far, but did reveal a bureaucratic desire to dictate appropriate levels of consumption rather than leave consumers to decide what they want and will pay for. The move to ban big-screen TVs is just another version of this bureaucratic power grab to control how other people power their lives. …

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Freedom Works.org has the top ten reasons to scrap the tax code. Here’s number nine.

9. The Code Drives Political Donations

The Congressman on the House Ways and Means Committee Received  </$55,157,458  in the 2008 Election Cycle.

The Ways and Means Committee deals with taxes.  It’s responsible for “raising the revenue required to finance the Federal Government. This includes individual and corporate income taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, and other miscellaneous taxes.”  It’s the busiest committee and it’s membership during the 2008 election cycle received $55,157,458 in campaign contributions.

If we scrapped the code, the committee members would lose their power to manipulate the code in order to pay off their campaign contributors.  Our tax system leads to corruption and corporate capture of legislation .

Couple of good Corner posts on the pirates.

Last week, for the first time in two hundred years, pirates attempted to capture a vessel sailing under the flag of the United States of America, the Alabama. As we all know, their attempt was foiled.

Amazingly, the U.S. destroyer dispatched to the area to confront the pirates bears the name of Commodore Bainbridge, who was instrumental in shaping U.S. policy towards pirates in the late 1700s and early 1800s. At the time, North African pirates were waging war on commerce in the Mediterranean Sea. By declaring independence, the United States had just lost the protection of the British Empire, and with it the world’s most powerful navy. U.S. merchant ships, therefore, increasingly became victims of piracy in what was then a waterway of high importance.

Thomas Jefferson, then an American diplomat, reached out to France, Spain, and several other countries in an attempt to form a coalition of navies that would patrol the area, but the Europeans preferred paying ransom to the pirates rather than confronting them militarily. So the United States, too, resorted to bribery. The pirates’ demands, however, grew ever larger, and acts of piracy increased, as piracy became more lucrative. By 1786, the pirates had become so bold, and their respect for U.S. power had so diminished, that the leader of one pirateering nation told Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that the United States had to pay him $1 million per year if it wanted the pirates to stop attacking U.S. vessels. Bainbridge found these degradations appalling and advocated a more muscular approach. …

It is ironic that Hernando de Soto is lecturing us about doing the economic paperwork.

… With information about derivatives not standardized and thousands of idiosyncratic bonds sold, resold and scattered helter-skelter all over the market, it will be difficult for any individual vulture to calculate their worth until someone locates and categorizes them. In fact, some derivative paper is so sloppily structured that banks have been unable to figure out the contents of their own portfolios, and U.S. courts continue to reject many foreclosures that are based on this kind of paper. So before we could really hand over the solution to the vultures, someone still would have to do the math.

And even while the vultures are, minimally, at work, the contamination will continue as this huge shadow economy of derivative paper infects everything it touches. Consider that a mere 7% default on subprime paper — equivalent to maybe $1 trillion or $2 trillion — quickly contaminated other paper, creating a $50-trillion hole in the U.S. economy from losses in stocks, home values and revenues in less than one year. By not counting and identifying derivatives one by one and drawing a legal boundary around each by means of the rules of property law (things such as registration, traceability and standardized identification), we are unable to protect every asset and every particular interest on that asset from contamination. The longer we wait to do the math, the worse it will get. And the more likely the anarchy of this shadow economy will spread.

In the world where I come from, it is the typical state of affairs. In fact, apart from the elite Westernized minority, most people’s assets are covered by paper that is endemically toxic: not recorded, not standardized, difficult to identify, hard to locate, its real value so opaque that ordinary people cannot build trust in each other or be trusted in global markets. In short, for shadow economies outside the U.S. and Europe, “credit crunch” and “meltdown” are chronic conditions. …

Karl Rove and Michael Gerson write on BO’s extremism. Rove;

The Pew Research Center reported last week that President Barack Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. This “approval gap” is 10 points bigger than George W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency, despite Mr. Bush winning a bitterly contested election.

Part of Mr. Obama’s polarized standing can be attributed to a long-term trend. University of Missouri political scientist John Petrocik points out that since 1980, each successive first term president has had more polarized support than his predecessor with the exception of 1989, when George H.W. Bush enjoyed a modest improvement over Ronald Reagan’s 1981 standing.

But rather than end or ameliorate that trend, Mr. Obama’s actions and rhetoric have accelerated it. His campaign promised post-partisanship, but since taking office Mr. Obama has frozen Republicans out of the deliberative process, and his response to their suggestions has been a brusque dismissal that “I won.”

Compare this with Mr. Bush’s actions in the aftermath of his election. Among his first appointments were Democratic judicial nominees who had been blocked by Republicans under President Bill Clinton. The Bush White House joined with Democratic and Republican leaders to draft education reform legislation. And Mr. Bush worked with Republican Chuck Grassley to cut a deal with Democrat Max Baucus to win bipartisan passage of a big tax cut in a Senate split 50-50 after the 2000 election. …

Peter Robinson is in Forbes with a contrarian’s view of the housing crisis.

Jennifer Rubin has more on ethanol in One of the Worst Ideas Ever.

Global warming history lesson from Pajamas Media.

Ah, spring, when the earth slowly wakes from its winter slumber, a warming welcomed by nearly every living thing.

Hard to believe some silly people are deathly afraid of warming weather — worried sick because the earth has warmed a degree or two over the last 150 years.

Make no mistake — the earth has warmed.  Unfortunately for the climate-change catastrophists, warming periods have occurred throughout recorded history, long before the Industrial Revolution and SUVs began spitting man-made carbon into the atmosphere. And as might be expected, these warm periods have invariably proven a blessing for humanity.  Consider:

Around the 3rd century B.C., the planet emerged from a long cold spell. The warm period which followed lasted about 700 years, and since it coincided with the rise of Pax Romana, it is known as the Roman Warming.

In the 5th century A.D., the earth’s climate became cooler.  Cold and drought pushed the tribes of northern Europe south against the Roman frontier. Rome was sacked, and the Dark Ages commenced.  And it was a dark age, both metaphorically and literally — the sun’s light dimmed and gave little warmth; harvest seasons grew shorter and yielded less. Life expectancy and literacy plummeted. The plague appeared and decimated whole populations. …

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Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post on surviving in a post-American world.

Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world’s policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama’s presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history – both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US’s nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America’s missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, “Don’t worry, be happy,” as he leaves them to Moscow’s tender mercies; humiliating Iraq’s leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world’s aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama’s supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn’t be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN’s former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, “America’s… superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy.”  …

GWU law prof Jonathan Turley writes on the diminishment of free speech.

For years, the Western world has listened aghast to stories out of Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations of citizens being imprisoned or executed for questioning or offending Islam. Even the most seemingly minor infractions elicit draconian punishments. Late last year, two Afghan journalists were sentenced to prison for blasphemy because they translated the Koran into a Farsi dialect that Afghans can read. In Jordan, a poet was arrested for incorporating Koranic verses into his work. And last week, an Egyptian court banned a magazine for running a similar poem.

But now an equally troubling trend is developing in the West. Ever since 2006, when Muslims worldwide rioted over newspaper cartoons picturing the prophet Muhammad, Western countries, too, have been prosecuting more individuals for criticizing religion. The “Free World,” it appears, may be losing faith in free speech.

Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of “inciting religious hatred” for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics. …

And an Easter message from David Warren.

It is Easter. The custom among Christians has ever been to observe this as the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Not quite all Christians: for I know several strict Calvinists of the Westminster Confession, who reject both Christmas and Easter as pagan celebrations. God bless them, they are fine people, and my brethren, even if separated from me by more schisms than I can count.

For that matter, as my ancient Roman Church teaches, all men are my brothers, and that includes all women and children, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, animists, atheists, etc. Even Richard Dawkins.

We must (as my Pope also mentions from time to time) categorically respect every sincere and peaceable manifestation of religious belief, no matter how seriously we may believe it is in error.

As he said at the University of Regensburg in 2006, in a lecture that was maliciously misconstrued, we must further insist that our differences be discussed without violence and intimidation, and by the light of a reason that should be accepted as the common property of all mankind. In the conditions of the modern world, there is no alternative that does not lead to cataclysm. …

WaPo editors rough up Arne Duncan SecEd for the demise of DC vouchers. Jennifer Rubin says, “Wait a minute, Duncan has a boss.”

… So if one re-reads the op-ed with  “the president” in lieu of “Arne Duncan” one gets a better picture of what is going on here. The president has betrayed the kids in his hometown for the sake of mollifying the teachers’ union. It is about as far from “hope” and “change” as one can get. And it is, along with his egregious fiscal irresponsibility, perhaps the greatest disappointment of his new presidency — at least for those who were hoping he’d be a new kind of Democrat. Perhaps it is time for his hometown paper to focus on whom is ultimately and entirely responsible for this abomination.

Here’s that WaPo editorial.

Deroy Murdock writes on DC vouchers for Real Clear Politics.

Despite being “a skeptic of vouchers,” candidate Barack Obama promised this would not prevent him from “making sure that our kids can learn.” As he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “You do what works for the kids.”

Last January 21, his first full day in office, President Obama declared, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

Just 10 weeks later, Obama has broken both these promises. And poor-but-promising minority kids suffer the consequences.

These 1,714 children — 90 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic — enjoy the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. They each receive up to $7,500 for private or parochial schools outside Washington, D.C.’s dismal government-education system. Since its 2004 launch, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, or more than four children per voucher.

This program’s popularity notwithstanding, Obama stayed silent as Congress scheduled this initiative’s demise after the 2009 — 2010 academic year. Both a Democratic Congress and DC authorities must reauthorize the program — not likely. …

London Times reports on new blood test for cancer. Buried in the story is indication of cancer fighting capabilities of statins, the new miracle drug.

A drop of blood or speck of tissue no bigger than a full stop could soon be all that is required to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment, research suggests.

New technology that allows cancer proteins to be analysed in tiny samples could spell the end of surgical biopsies, which involve removing lumps of tissue, often under general anaesthetic.

Researchers at Stanford University, California, have developed a machine that separates cancer-associated proteins by means of their electric charge, which varies according to modifications on the protein’s surface. …

Borowitz reports salary caps are driving away Wall Street’s jerks.

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Understanding economics requires the ability to see an action’s unintended consequences. WSJ Editors write on one consequence that ignorant and corrupt dems should have anticipated.

… A tariff imposed to please a powerful domestic constituency leads to retaliation that whacks innocent bystanders who lack the ear of the White House or Speaker of the House. In this case, a payoff to the Teamsters stuffed in a spending bill has now become a hardship for the farm growers and workers of Oregon. We elect Presidents to stop this kind of economic damage, not to promote it.

Instapundit has a graphic illustration of just how bad Obama’s budgets are. Bush was awful. The kid is off the charts.

Peter Wehner posts on BO’s willingness to trash our country.

At convenient points on his overseas trip President Obama purposefully disfigured reality in a way that reflected poorly on America. That is to say, an American president played up cartoon images of the United States in order to get foreign audiences to applaud him. It is rare for the leader of a nation to revise history in order to make his nation look worse. But for Obama, the upside — making himself look good — is an easy trade-off. One senses that when it comes to Obama, it is all, and always, about him.

In thinking about Obama’s trip, I was reminded of the words of another Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who said this:

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

It is almost inconceivable to think of former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, going overseas and criticizing America in the manner Obama did, especially for baseless reasons. …

Jennifer Rubin on the subject.

… You (Peter) raise the possibility that there is a certain potent egotism at work here — the desire to be adored by not just the American public but by a world audience, which of course doesn’t always think very highly of America. But that should be no problem for Obama who finds his country’s behavior to be arrogant and self-centered and insufficiently concerned with others. How nice that he can bond with international audiences in their mutual disdain for America’s behavior. …

Charles Krauthammer picks up the theme in “Your County Too, Mr. President.”

… With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his bridge partner behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. …

… It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.

Mark Steyn writes on all the distractions coming at the kid president. Perhaps we should be thankful for them. Otherwise he could do real damage.

The Reuters headline put it this way: “Pirates Pose Annoying Distraction For Obama.”

So many distractions, aren’t there? Only a week ago, the North Korean missile test was an “annoying distraction” from Barack Obama’s call for a world without nuclear weapons and his pledge that America would lead the way in disarming. And only a couple of days earlier the president insisted Iraq was a “distraction” – from what, I forget: The cooing press coverage of Michelle’s wardrobe? No doubt when the Iranians nuke Israel, that, too, will be an unwelcome distraction from the administration’s plans for federally subsidized day care, just as Pearl Harbor was an annoying distraction from the New Deal, and the First World War was an annoying distraction from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s dinner plans

If the incompetent management driving The New York Times from junk status to oblivion wished to decelerate their terminal decline, they might usefully amend their motto to “All The News That’s Fit To Distract.” Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the past 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran – now Somali pirates.” …

… When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all. Most wealthy nations lack the means to defend themselves. Those few that do, lack the will. Meanwhile, basket-case jurisdictions send out ever bolder freelance marauders to prey on the civilized world with impunity. Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future.

David Warren continues his columns on the the kid’s excellent adventures with “Innocents Abroad.”

… Barack Obama, is back in Washington after an apology tour to Europe, Turkey, and Iraq. He received no European commitments whatever for his proposed surge-like strategy in Afghanistan. (The word “surge” is now banned in White House parlance, along with the phrase “war on terror” and several related terms. With the help of supinely obliging media, the very ability to describe a conflict may soon be, as it were, “withdrawn.”)

So far as I am able to discover, President Obama’s most significant accomplishment abroad was getting President Sarkozy of France to accept exactly one of the 245 Guantanamo inmates currently on offer to anyone who wants them.

The strategy behind the new Obama foreign policy, so far as any can be discerned, is to disavow everything the Bush administration did in eight years, and then harvest the resulting good will. And while the product of this strategy is zero, it has been charitably observed that his term in office has hardly begun.

Just so we can remember all the foolish things George W. Bush did as president, we are now learning biofuels (ethanol) might be a hazard. The Economist has the story.

… just as governments have committed themselves to the greater use of biofuels (see table), questions are being raised about how green this form of energy really is. The latest come from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.

The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of biofuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as maize and rape probably negates by itself any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.

Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around longer. The upshot is that, over the course of a century, its ability to warm the planet is almost 300 times that of an equivalent mass of CO2. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who was involved in writing the ICSU report, said that although the methods used by Dr Crutzen could be criticised, his fundamental conclusions were correct. …

WSJ has the story of how Ronald Reagan rescued a director from Hollywood’s blacklist.

In Kirk Douglas’s new one-man stage play, “Before I Forget,” he entertains audiences with the story of how he “broke” the blacklist. In 1960, he used his influence as the executive producer and star of the movie “Spartacus” to give known communist writer Dalton Trumbo on-screen credit for the script. It is regarded as a watershed moment in the movie business — the first time that an artist who was blacklisted by Hollywood for his communist associations was rescued from the shadows.

But as noteworthy as Mr. Douglas’s action was, the first time a blacklistee was openly brought back into the Hollywood fold actually came almost a decade earlier with the rehabilitation of 42-year-old director and former communist Edward Dmytryk. A young Ronald Reagan, of all people, was substantially responsible. …

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David Warren picks up on a column by Thomas Sowell.

One of my living heroes, the American journalist and economist Thomas Sowell, wrote a column a couple of days ago consisting of “random thoughts” — aphoristic remarks about things as they now are. His points ran from the generality of:

“Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences.”

To the specificity of:

“Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent.”

Sowell is superb when apothegmatic. The value in such assertions as these — made free of the encumbering apparatus of careful qualification on which he usually depends — is that they light a dark landscape with lightning. They are the pure electric charge of insight.

I love Sowell, because he can “do” desolation without wandering into despair. Reciprocally, he can do hope — the real thing, not the rhetorical posture. A black man, from a fatherless home, raised by an aunt whom he thought was his mother, in rural then urban conditions that would excuse any man for failure, he saw through his circumstances. He dragged himself up, through a machine shop, through the Marines, eventually to great eminence in the academic world, at a time before he could trade on his race. And he continued rising, with the help of honest friends, and by ignoring vilifications. …

Camille Paglia has her column that answers letters.

… At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him — a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday’s news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama’s staffing problems are blatant — from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another — from the president’s tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady’s over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama’s sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol. …

Mark Steyn wishes to be a demographic bore.

As National Review’s in-house demography bore — oh, hang on, the self-deprecating “demography bore” shtick is getting even more boring than just boring on about demography . . . Well, okay, usually I bore on about it, as my detractors have it, in the head-for-the-hills-the-Muzzies-are-coming sense. So, just for a change, here’s the Subprime Bailout Variations of my same old demographic song.

Take a “toxic asset.” What would improve its current pitiful value? That’s easy: More demand. Less supply. An asset is only an asset as long as there’s a buyer willing to buy it. If you’ve got 50 houses and 100 would-be homeowners, that’s good for property prices. If you’ve got 100 houses and 50 would-be homeowners, that’s not so good.

Which is the situation much of the developed world is facing. A bank is a kind of demographic shorthand, by which old people with capital lend to young people with ambition and ideas. Unfortunately, the Western world is running out of young people. Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. …

BO’s education secretary, Arne Duncan is caught by David Harsanyi lying about the DC voucher program killed by the dems.

… But the most “fundamentally dishonest” aspect of the affair was Duncan’s feeble argument against the program. First, he strongly intimated that since only 1 percent of children were able to “escape” (and, boy, that’s some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving.

So, you may ask, why not allow the 1 percent to turn into 2 percent or 10 percent, instead of scrapping the program? After all, only moments earlier, Duncan claimed that there was no magic reform bullet and it would take a multitude of innovations to fix education.

Then, Duncan, after thrashing the scholarship program and study, emphasized that he was opposed to “pulling kids out of a program” in which they were “learning.” Geez. If they’re learning in this program, why kill it? And if the program was insignificant, as Duncan claimed, why keep these kids in it? Are these students worse off? Or are they just inconveniencing the rich kids?

Duncan can’t be honest, of course. Not when it’s about politics and paybacks to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus. …

Speaking of education, John Stossel examines the universal pre-K scam.

Did you go to preschool? When I was growing up, few kids did. But now there is a new movement that says every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten — at taxpayer expense.

It’s part of President Obama’s massive spending plans. His “stimulus” bill includes an Early Learning Challenge Grant to encourage states to “Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs”. It’s a popular idea. Sixty-seven percent of Americans favor universal pre-K funded by the government. But I doubt that most Americans have thought it through.

Mia Levi has. She told me, “This whole thing is a scam.”

Levi runs six preschools. I thought she’d favor the program, since she’d collect easy money from the government.

“I don’t want to have to answer to the government,” she said. “Our programs are so far superior.” …

Jennifer Rubin on the ‘Bama Bow.

Abe Greenwald on the failures of the BO tour.

And now Barack Obama’s aid plan for Pakistan falls flat:

U.S. envoys met with Pakistani leaders on Tuesday to ensure that the $7.5 billion that President Obama plans to send their way over the next five years will be used to achieve common goals in the fight against extremism.

But according to a Pakistani newspaper, regional envoy Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen came up empty-handed and received a “rude shock” when a proposal for joint operations against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the volatile tribal regions was rejected.

It’s a clean sweep. Obama’s proposals have been turned down by every foreign government and international body he’s approached — from Pyongyang to Brussels, and assorted points in between. …

As you’re watching the Masters, The WSJ says try to remember how golf helps you remember.

Millions of golf enthusiasts who will watch the Masters Tournament this weekend have waxed endlessly about the game’s mystical power and its hold on the human mind. A handful of people with Alzheimer’s disease, no longer able to dress or nourish themselves without assistance, are proving them right.

A little after 9 a.m. last week, Wardell Johnston declared he wanted to be left alone. Confused and annoyed by the activities and tasks confronting him, the 87-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer shut his door at the Silverado Senior Living home in Belmont, Calif.

Just hours later, Mr. Johnston was measuring the uphill, right-to-left break on a 12-foot putt and knocking his ball into the hole. Then the former civil engineer, who played the game regularly as a younger man, ambled over to the driving range. He grabbed a six iron and practiced chipping with the sort of easy, stress-free swing duffers half his age could learn something from.

“I quit,” he said with a cocky grin after each successful shot. Then he deftly cradled another ball with his club, moving it into position for the next stroke. “I haven’t played a lot lately,” he added. “I should, though. I’ve still got all the strokes.”

Anyone who has dealt with people suffering from mid- to late-stage Alzheimer’s knows how difficult it can be to transport someone from fear and confusion to contentment and lucidity. But at Silverado, caregivers have stumbled onto a technique that works nearly every time — a golf outing. …

Scrappleface says people are copying Obama’s bow to King Abdullah.

News Biscuit reports on Isle of Wight man who dies trying to answer his daily 3,000 pieces of spam.

… Police investigating the incident found that the last 438 messages in Mr Spriggs’s sent folder read: ‘Dear Sir, I refer to your esteemed correspondence of the 18th inst. I beg to inform you that the length and girth of my penis is adequate for the requirements of my dear wife. I therefore must regretfully decline your kind invitation. I remain, sir, your humble servant, Arthur Spriggs.’

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Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn post on BO’s thoughts about the most “dangerous legacy of the cold war.” Steyn;

… It’s not just embarrassing to hear the so-called “leader of the free world” talking like a 14-year old who’s been up in his room listening to “Imagine” for too long. I fear this presidency has the makings of global tragedy.

Jonah Goldberg says the kid president is good with words.

President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that’s worth.

And for Obama, that’s worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. “Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Obama proclaimed. ” ‘I have a dream’ — just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? Just speeches?”

Give the man points for consistency. He has put rhetorical innovation on an equal footing with policy innovation. Exhibit A: “Overseas contingency operations.” That’s the Obama administration’s term of choice to replace “the long war” or “the global war on terror.” No doubt they were inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy novel, Overseas Contingency Operations and Cessation of Overseas Contingency Operations, later dumbed-down by the publisher to War and Peace.

Janet Napolitano, head of Obama’s Department of Homeland Security — primarily created to deal with terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11 — has decided “terrorist attack” is too hard-edged. It’s “man-caused disasters” now. “That is perhaps only a nuance,” Napolitano explained to a German newsmagazine, “but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” …

Speaking of words, Bret Stephens writes on the unreality tour and the kid’s reaction to those who don’t worship words.

… “Rules must be binding,” the president told his audience in Prague on Sunday. “Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.” But how are words supposed to mean anything if all the administration proposes to do is offer up yet another resolution — which is to say, more words?

To nobody’s surprise (except, perhaps, Mr. Obama’s) the Security Council has so far failed to agree on a resolution. But that’s the U.N. for you, as opposed to a serious organization like NATO, at whose 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg . . . nothing much was accomplished, either.

Well, not nothing. A new NATO secretary-general was named. And France returned to NATO as a member of the military command, just a few decades too late for it to matter one way or the other. …

Anne Applebaum says the prez has a weird obsession with nuclear disarmament.

… the centerpiece of the visit, Obama’s keynote foreign-policy speech in Prague—leaked in advance, billed as a major statement—was, to put it bluntly, peculiar. He used it to call for “a world without nuclear weapons” and a new series of arms-control negotiations with Russia. This was not wrong, necessarily, and not evil. But it was strange.

Clearly, the “no nukes” policy is one close to the president’s heart. The Prague speech even carried echoes of that most famous of all Obama speeches, the one he made after losing the New Hampshire primary. “There are those who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it is worth setting a goal that seems impossible,” he told his Czech audience. (Remember “We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics”?) “When nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens,” he continued. (“We are not as divided as our politics suggests.”) He didn’t say “Yes, we can” at the end, but he did say “human destiny will be what we make of it,” which amounts to the same thing. …

Victor Davis Hanson has some ideas for the apologizer in chief.

…A modest suggestion: from now on, every president who wishes to go abroad and review all his lesser citizens’ collective past and present sins, with accompanying apologies — to applause from foreigners — must first, in the spirit of New Testament atonement, review his own regrettable transgressions. It would go something like this: …

Writing in Pajamas Media, Jennifer Rubin says BO has, in fact, lost the budget battle.

President Obama may have gotten his budget (once the House and Senate iron out their differences), but along the way he may have sacrificed his chances for slaying the Republican Party and establishing that permanent governing majority which both political parties crave.

An over-reaching budget, which drowns us in red ink and devotes more of the GDP to the government than at any time since WWII, may turn out to be a setback for the administration. As Obama forfeits his claims of fiscal responsibility, he has emboldened the opposition and made moderates in his own party, rightfully so, very nervous.

Liberals are generally pleased, but liberal giddiness is not a barometer of long-term success. As [1] Michael Goodwin observed, “That pattern is tired already. Starting with the stimulus, Obama’s initiatives have depended almost entirely on liberal Democrats.” His budget received not a single Republican vote. Mainstream [2] op-eds and former Clinton officials have panned it as a jump into the fiscal abyss. …

The Masters starts tomorrow. Right in time for that Forbes has an article on Boo Weekley, the man they claim can save the PGA Tour. (Didn’t know it needed saving) However, it is a good profile of a man who represents something new on the tour.

It’s impossible to tell the story of professional golfer Thomas Brent (Boo) Weekley without bringing up the orangutan. When Weekley was 15 he and some friends went to a county fair near Milton, Weekley’s hometown on the Florida Panhandle. A man at the fair had an orangutan in a cage and was offering $50 to anyone who could lay a hand on the ape. Weekley jumped in the cage. “The next thing I remember I was in the back of my buddy’s pickup truck, bleeding,” he says.

This type of thing never happened during the childhood of Tiger Woods, who was groomed from birth to become the greatest golfer in the world. Weekley wasn’t supposed to be a PGA Tour golfer (even though his Milton high school has miraculously produced three of them). He’ll tell anyone within earshot that he’d rather be bass fishing than taking a stroll down the fairways of Augusta National. He likes beer in cans and eats at Hooters. He flunked out of college after one year. He cleaned chemical tanks during 12-hour shifts at a Monsanto factory until he got laid off. When he finally gained entrance to the PGA Tour in 2002 he flunked out of that, too, and nearly gave up on the game. “I took golf for granted for a long time,” he says.

Weekley is not the best player on the tour (he’s ranked number 57), nor does he make the most endorsement money (about $2 million annually); both of those honors still belong to Woods (number one in the world, with an estimated $90 million in annual endorsements). At 35, Weekley is not a fresh-faced prodigy like the confident 23-year-old American Anthony Kim or the floppy-haired 19-year-old Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland. He does not create the escape-artist drama of Phil Mickelson.

Yet Weekley is exactly the type of golfer the tour needs to endure the recession. He has the colorful history. Two years into his second chance on the PGA Tour, he has become one of its most popular players, serenaded with “Boooo” by fans at every tournament. Few, if any, golfers work harder for sponsors. And he can play: Golf purists consider him the best pure ball-striker in the game, and he was a hero of the United States’ Ryder Cup win in 2008. “He’s a little different,” says PGA Tour Commissioner Timothy Finchem. “But he’s been terrific for us.” …

The Corner says we’re beginning to pay the costs for BO’s sellout to the Teamsters.

News Biscuit says a teenager in England completed a sentence.

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Virginia Postrel on the problems of government healthcare.

If I lived in New Zealand, I’d be dead.

That’s the lead my editor wanted me to write, and I have to admit it’s great. Alas (for this column, at least), it’s not exactly true. But neither is it false. And the ways in which it’s partly true matter greatly, not just to me or to New Zealanders but to anyone who might get cancer or care about someone who does.

The American health-care system may be a crazy mess, but it is the prime mover in the global ecology of medical treatment, creating the world’s biggest market for new drugs and devices. Even as we argue about whether or how our health-care system should change, most Americans take for granted our access to the best available cancer treatments—including the one that arguably saved my life. …

Melanie Phillips says we are showing weakness to North Korea. And she posts on the coming destruction of Israel.

As was entirely predictable, Obama has gone to his good friends the Saudis to help him throw Israel under the bus. Having bowed deeply to the Saudi King Abdullah when they were in London last week (an image which tells you everything you need to know — and so has been conspicuous by its absence from the msm; the Queen, by contrast, merited only a protocol-busting hand on the back) Obama, according to his Middle East envoy George Mitchell, is adopting the Saudi Israel destruction ‘peace’ plan as his solution to the Middle East impasse. Ha’aretz reports:

“The Arab peace initiative will be part of the Obama administration’s policy toward the Middle East, the United States special envoy to the region said. The 2002 initiative offers to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories including East Jerusalem, the establishment of a Palestinian State and a ‘just settlement’ for Palestinian refugees.”

That ‘just settlement’ in the Saudi destruction plan means the unlimited immigration into Israel of the Arabs of the territories, which would mean the end of Israel. …

Cook County politico accidentally explains how it’s done.

Seems some of the Brit press has discovered what Pickings readers already knew. BO is tiresome.

For Cubs fans last year the name CC Sabathia was an ominous sound. Picked up mid-year by the Milwaukee Brewers, there were times when it looked like Sabathia would single-handedly pitch them into first place in the Central Division. The Cubs did win the division, but Sabathia’s willingness to pitch with only three days rest inspired the Milwaukee club. His agent, with visions of the $161 million contract he would sign with the Yankees, pleaded with him to spare his arm. Sabathia took the ball anyway, and the Brewers won the wild-card with CC’s 11 – 2 Milwaukee record. Sports Illustrated tells us about CC in this week’s cover story.

… The pitcher doesn’t stop. A man stares down at him, opens his mouth, waits, squirms, as if unsure how to address the mystery below.

Sabathia, born in California, famously allowed that he’d love to pitch there. Everyone knew he would have taken less money to get closer to home. But then came his dominating stint with the Brewers down the stretch last year: Traded to Milwaukee in midseason, Sabathia ignored the pleas of his agent and risked his looming financial bonanza as a free agent by starting three games on three days’ rest, throwing seven complete games, going 11–2 with a 1.65 ERA and carrying Milwaukee into the playoffs for the first time in 26 years.

“The most unselfish performance by any player,” says Brewers G.M. Doug Melvin. “To pitch like he did for the betterment of the ball club? To put that ahead of free agency? You just don’t see that much anymore.”

It was, indeed, such a display of baseball cojones that the Yankees felt they had no choice. Sabathia was 28 and had won 117 games, the most for any current pitcher his age: Cashman had to have him. He offered seven years at $161 million—two years and about $60 million more than the Brewers and the Angels. It was the sport’s new standard for an offer you can’t refuse.

Still, the Yankees faithful are a romantic bunch. They like to think it takes unique toughness to win in New York, and that being a true Yankee has nothing to do with money. This is odd for the richest team in sports, but the paradox abides: Yankees fans live by the wallet yet despise mercenaries. Free-agent pitching busts such as Ed Whitson, Kenny Rogers, Hideki Irabu and Carl Pavano serve as foils in Yankees lore—derided examples of how not to be. With that puffy body and an opt-out clause after three years, Sabathia is more suspect than most new arrivals. Did he come only for the contract? Will Santa be too laid-back for the Bronx?

The man in the stands has it at last. He leans over the railing and yells, “Who wants to be on the WEST Coast?”  …

… THINGS IN the Crest have steadily gotten worse since Mare Island went dark in 1996. There’s hardly money for rent—never mind sports fees—and baseball is king no more. In March thieves broke into the North Vallejo Little League office, stole 150 uniforms and the concession food and candy, trashed the computers and trophies and tore down photos of alums like Sabathia. “It’s not the same city,” says Sabathia. “A lot of closed businesses, a lot of my friends out of work. I feel like there’s something I should do … but I don’t know what.”

He is, of course, in a unique position. Last May, in the face of a $16 million deficit, Vallejo became the largest municipality in California to declare bankruptcy. If Sabathia isn’t worth more than the city he grew up in, he’s at least running a surplus. Still, there seems to be little resentment of his good fortune in Vallejo, because Sabathia hasn’t committed the cardinal sin of the pro athlete: He doesn’t big-time his hometown. Each winter he’s seen ducking into Vallejo High basketball games or working out with the school’s baseball team. He walks in the annual Martin Luther King Day parade with his entourage: Amber, their three kids (CC, now 5; Jaeden, 3; and Cyia, six months) and Margie. Sabathia bought a batting cage for Vallejo High one year, paid to resurface the North Vallejo Little League fields another.

Once he signed his Yankees contract in December, Sabathia stepped it up. In February he asked to meet with Vallejo High athletic director Tami Madson and football coach Mike Wilson and his wife, school board member Hazel Wilson, and told them he wanted to supply the football, basketball and baseball teams with new uniforms—a gift Madson estimates at $100,000, more if footwear is included. Then Sabathia turned to Hazel and asked her to set up two college scholarships, Charlie Hustle awards in memory of his cousin Nathan.

With Margie serving as his local point person, Sabathia also pledged more than 400 backpacks, each filled with supplies, to the kids at his elementary school, Loma Vista, and is putting the finishing touches on a plan to overhaul his old Little League complex for next spring, complete with new scoreboards, dugouts and concession stands. Long-term? “I want to do a baseball academy, a Boys & Girls Club–type thing in north Vallejo, indoor fields: Have a bus pick up kids from each elementary school, have them come do homework for 90 minutes, then the rest is baseball,” he says.

Last September, during a Brewers series with the Cubs, Sabathia flew Hobbs, his high school coach, into Chicago. He still considers Hobbs a second father, the man who, he says, “saved all of us” by teaching boys in the Crest not just to play baseball, which is the easy part, but also to love the work the game demands. Weekends, Hobbs would have CC and his buddies hustling from early morning until well past dark, and it didn’t end there. He’d turn his car lights on the batting cage, burning out one or two batteries a season so the boys could keep hitting.

Hobbs’s oldest son, Luke, grew up around CC and is severely autistic. In Chicago, Abe and CC talked baseball and reminisced about a trip they’d made to Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park when CC was 14. Sabathia casually asked him about a treatment machine called a “hug box” that has proved to be effective in calming autistic patients—and, at $5,000, costs more than Hobbs could afford.

“I got back from Chicago, and the machine was at my house,” Hobbs says. “CC didn’t mention it.” …

The Onion says the Cubs will continue the grand tradition of playing baseball.

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The Corner gives us Krauthammer’s take on BO’s most excellent european adventure.

Mark Steyn has a summit summary.

… Well, we all hate “the rich,” don’t we? Last week, David Paterson, the governor of New York, said that if he’d known his latest tax increase would persuade Rush Limbaugh to sell his Manhattan apartment and leave the city, he’d have raised taxes earlier. Ha-ha. Very funny. In New York City, as Mayor Bloomberg has pointed out, the wealthiest 1 percent contribute 50 percent of municipal revenue. How tiny a number of people does Gov. Paterson have to drive out before it causes significant shortfalls in the public coffers?

On the other hand, the rich can only be driven out if they’ve got somewhere to be driven to. At the ludicrous G-20 summit in London last week, the official communiqué crowed over a “clampdown” on tax havens – those British colonies in the Caribbean and a few other offshore pinpricks in the map. “The era of banking secrecy is over,” the G-20 proclaimed.

Does anyone seriously think a Swiss bank account or a post office box in the Turks and Caicos are responsible for the global meltdown?

No, but the world’s governments have decided to focus on irrelevant scapegoats. In the current crisis, Japan, Germany and Italy (plus Russia) are in net population decline that’s only going to accelerate in the years ahead. So, unlike the U.S., they can’t run up the national debt and stick it to their kids and grandkids, because they don’t have any kids and grandkids to stick it to. If New York is running out of rich people, Germany is running out of people, period. The Chinese and other buyers of Western debt know that. If you’re an investor, and you’re not tracking GDP versus median age in the world’s major economies, you’re going to lose a lot of money. …

… If government has a role in this crisis, it ought to be to reverse the combination of unaffordable social programs and deathbed demographics that make a restoration of real GDP growth all but impossible in many European nations. But that would involve telling the citizenry unpleasant truths, and Continental politicians who wish to remain electorally viable aren’t willing to do that. President Sarkozy, The Times of London reported, “said that the summit provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” What he means by “a conscience” is a global regulatory regime that ensures there’s nowhere to move to. If you’re France, which has a sluggish, uncompetitive, protectionist, high-unemployment business environment whose best and brightest abandon the country in ever-greater droves, it obviously makes sense to force the entire planet to submit to the same growth-killing measures that have done wonders for your own economy. But it’s not good news for the rest of the world. The building blocks for a global regulatory regime and even a global central bank with an embryo global currency (the IMF and the enhanced role of “Special Drawing Rights”) are an ominous development. …

Mark claimed the summit was involved in exporting their mistakes throughout the world. The start of the baseball season is a good time to look at another bogus world export. Jonathan Tobin reports in Contentions.

… the Times piece is a reminder of just how alien pro soccer is to Americans.  Soccer fans here are forced to root for American teams that have names ending with the initials FC (Football Club). Other team names are distinct echoes of other foreign sports traditions, and feature the word “United.” Fans also wear scarves with their team colors, just like the Euros. In other words, the whole deal is a phony European import that will never succeed as an American game despite all the puffery it gets from the mainstream media.

As the season begins on Sunday, let the cry of “play ball” resound throughout this fair land, and by that I mean baseball and not a game in which fans have to pretend to be Europeans in order to properly enjoy themselves.

David Warren contemplates the American/European divide.

… What I instead wished to bring, to my reader’s attention this morning, is Bruce Hutchison’s observations on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism, circa 1954.

From his first page he refers to “the dry rot, something intangible developing within the minds of nameless millions, that is steadily undermining the friendship of the old world and the new, on which the fate of both must hang.”

Plus ça change. What Hutchison goes on to describe — the European perception of Americans as crass, childish, stupid, dangerous; and the reciprocal American perception of Europeans as profoundly ungrateful hypocrites and snobs — is still with us.

Moreover, the “root cause” seems still to be what Hutchison believed. For immediately below the surface he found a remarkable inability to understand each other, masked by the illusion of sharing the same broad culture. Europe draws a wicked caricature of America; America’s cartoon Europe is a preposterous fairy tale. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Labor can’t figure out they’re beat this year on card-check.

Roll Call reports, “Labor leaders are giving President Barack Obama a pass — for now — on his failure to put ‘card check’ legislation at the top of his to-do list, but they are preparing to demand immediate action if Democrat Al Franken is seated as Minnesota’s Senator.” And we hear that Big Labor is preparing some sort of “blitz” on the issue during Congress’s two-week recess.

But to what end is all this fuss? Even the Los Angeles Times conceded that Senate defections have put the bill in “deep trouble.” Arlen Specter has said “no way.” Democrats from Diane Feinstein to Ben Nelson to Mary Landrieu and Balnche Lincoln have given card check supporters the brush off. Even if all of those Democrats were to cave and Al Franken were to gain entry to the Senate, Big Labor would have only 59 votes.

Perpetuating the issue must make those Red state Democrats quite uncomfortable. Would Blanche Lincoln like to run for re-election with card check as a “live” issue or a dead one? Certainly the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia is milking this issue for all it’s worth against three Democratic contenders who would rather change the topic. …

Jennifer also reports on the congressional election in NY 20.

Speaking of card check, The Corner has stunning piece of NY Times hypocrisy.

David Harsanyi is tired of advice.

… Now, the government has set up a site to help us get through the coming depression (although, really, it’s done enough). At www.samhsa.gov/. economy, you will learn more about the possible health risks associated with an economic downturn.

Do you feel “depression”? “Anxiety”? (And, considering your 401(k), if you’re not, perhaps you’re a sociopath.) Are you engaging in compulsive behavior? How about “Substance abuse”? (Fingers crossed; I’m only one fiscal quarter away!) Or, is there “persistent” crying going on?

Hey, why not? In the eyes of Washington, we are children, after all.

If we’re not, how about doing us a public service and leaving us alone?

Shorts from National Review. Don’t miss the item on the Japanese man who survived both WWII nukes.

… Mr. Yamaguchi, now 93 years old, has been formally certified as one of the very few to have survived both nuclear blasts; and, of that few, to have been closest to both — about two miles in each case.

Tonight’s NCAA final reminds of one 30 years ago starring Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

I put in a DVD the other day and watched that 1979 NCAA championship game — Michigan State vs. Indiana State, Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird, still one of the most-watched games ever, college or pro.

I knew how it would turn out. Michigan State, stronger and deeper than the Sycamores, would go ahead early, then hold off a second-half challenge to win by 11. But at the opening jump I could still feel the charge so many people felt that day. There they were, those two sublime athletes, long-haired boys again on the screen, slender in the old short trunks, yet commanding. They were why so many watched.

They were still beautiful. But as a Midwesterner, I turned off the set feeling a little sad. Somehow the meeting of those two boys struck me as the high point of a certain stretch of time that we took for granted until we realized — just now, really — that it was over. …

Dilbert’s here.

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David Warren with a summit update.

Perhaps I was too optimistic in my Wednesday column, which gave reasons to hope the London G20 Summit would null out entirely — and thus, no additional damage would be done to the world economy.

I tend to underestimate the power of fantasia. When 20-plus of the planet’s most excruciating egos are gathered in one place, under a general expectation they will accomplish something, an upbeat communiqué is likely to emerge.

In the event, our great leaders were able to conjure another trillion or so (in dollars: Euros would be more expensive) to shovel into the black holes. And they found a common cause, at least in badmouthing the world’s few remaining tax havens. …

The left-wing Manchester Guardian has some fun with BO, the great orator.

John Fund details a significant loss for cap and trade fans.

Last week Claudia Rosett wrote on the U. S. application for membership in the UN human rights group. Today, it’s Ann Bayefsky’s turn.

Pres. Barack Obama has announced that the United States will seek a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council for the first time. The formal election of new members is in May, but the result is a foregone conclusion. The human-rights abusers who dominate the Council and use it to protect themselves, to eliminate universal standards, and to demonize their democratic foes are already celebrating.

This is a surrender of American values unlike any other. The spectacle of this particular president legitimizing a lethal weapon for the defeat of human rights will haunt him until the end of his term.

The Council was created in March 2006 after the U.N. Human Rights Commission became too much of an embarrassment even for the U.N. The General Assembly rejected a U.S. proposal requiring that states actually protect human rights as a condition of Council membership. As a result, the United States voted against the Assembly resolution that gave it birth.

The Bush administration also refused to use taxpayer dollars to pay for the Council. Obama’s move will reverse this policy. It is, therefore, important to appreciate exactly what American tax dollars will now be purchasing. Here is a sample of what the Council has “accomplished” over its short history. …

You’ll love reading how counties in the NY-20 congressional district made it difficult for the military to vote. Story from the Corner.

Charles Krauthammer on the president’s agenda.

… Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes — even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government — Obama stuck to the tax hike “for purposes of fairness.”) The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda. …

Matthew Continetti doesn’t think much of BO’s budget or the GOP alternative.

You can learn a lot from a budget. President Obama’s $3.6 trillion behemoth isn’t just a bunch of numbers and tables. It’s a vision of where America ought to be in the future. Obama would ramp up government spending in health care, energy, and education. Taxpayers would foot the bill for a larger, more intrusive government that would claim to improve the quality of life and reduce inequality.

Annual deficits and a growing public debt burden would be secondary to improving society. Obama is betting that, by throwing money at schools and hospitals and environmentally friendly industries, he’ll lay the foundation for the next economic boom. The president says he’s neither a socialist nor a big-government liberal. He sees himself as the venture-capitalist-in-chief.

The problem with all this is that Obama has an oversized confidence in what government can achieve. The economy and society aren’t toys that the president and his whiz-kid policymakers can manipulate to achieve their desired ends. The economy and society are complex organisms that constantly mutate. They repel, adapt to, or coopt outside pressures. They frustrate attempts at rational control. …

… When Obama says his budget heralds “a new era of responsibility,” he’s not talking about individual responsibility, or the responsibility of families to raise the next generation. Nor does he mean government’s responsibility to provide for a decent measure of social and national security, and a legal and regulatory framework that allows civil society and the free market to flourish. No, Obama is talking about the responsibilities government is going to impose on us in the form of higher taxes. The upshot is more government, and still more debt. Not to mention a dependent citizenry.

We wish we could say that Republicans had stepped up to the plate with a compelling, competing vision of America’s future. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet. As visions go, the alternative budget that the House GOP offered last week is pretty dim. …

Kimberley Strassel outlines how BO’s machine attacks the ones it fears the most.

The thing about fear is that you can see it. For an insight as to what the left today fears most, witness its attempted political assassination of Eric Cantor.

The 45-year-old Virginia congressman came to Washington in 2001, and by last year had been unanimously elected Republican Whip, under Minority Leader John Boehner. In recent months, Mr. Cantor has helped unify the GOP against much of President Barack Obama’s agenda, in particular his blowout $787 billion stimulus, and yesterday, his blowout $3.6 trillion budget.

He’s also one of the GOP’s up-and-coming talents. Along with Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, or California’s Kevin McCarthy, he represents a new guard, one that’s sworn off earmarks and brought the conversation back to fiscal responsibility and economic opportunity. They’ve focused on party outreach, and are popular with younger voters and independents. They are big fund-raisers, part of a drive to recruit and elect more reformers. And they are on the rise.

All of which threatens the left. Democrats know their current dominance in Washington is in no small part due to public disillusionment with the GOP. They are also aware that their current tax-and-spend governance is creating plenty of opportunities for that opposition to remake itself. Thus the furious campaign — waged by every blog, pundit, union, 527, and even the White House — to kneecap Republicans who might help lead a makeover. Mr. Cantor is the top target. …

Couple of Corner posts on the mark to market accounting rule changes that did so much to improve the markets.

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