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David Warren on summit nonsense.

There are two very big, very foolish ideas on the table at the G20 Summit. One of them is “Anglo-Saxon,” or at least Anglo-American. The other is European, or more precisely, French.

The first foolish idea is that, given the black holes opened by the financial crisis, we should throw money into them. This is called, I believe, “the new Keynesianism.” To be fair to the late Lord Keynes, who made at least one successful prediction (“in the long run we are all dead”), every Keynesianism has been a new Keynesianism, including the first. This is because politicians have invariably selected the easy part of his common-sensory proposals (“the government should spend when the economy falters”), while ignoring the hard part (“the government should save at all other times”).

There is never a new “new Keynesianism.” It is always the old “new Keynesianism,” in which governments tread water while the good times last, and then drown us in debt. This works, if not for us then for the politicians, since in the long run every government is out of office, and another is left holding the bag. …

Proving once again he is easy to roll, the kid president has applied for U. S. membership in the UN human rights council. Claudia Rosett has the story.

As part of President Obama’s “new era of engagement,” the U.S. State Department has just announced plans to seek one of the 47 seats on the United Nations Human Rights Council. This overturns the Bush policy since 2006 of shunning the Council, on grounds that, like its predecessor the U.N. Human Rights Commission, it is irredeemably tipped toward serving the interests of human rights violators.

In a teleconference press briefing on Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said that, while the Council’s trajectory has been “disturbing,” the U.S. aim is to “stand up and lead.” The aim now is to work “aggressively” from “within” to make the Council “a more effective body” and “a key forum for advancing human rights.”

Given the Council’s rotten record and structural flaws, that’s an agenda akin to headquartering Alcoholics Anonymous on a bar stool in a busy saloon. Like most U.N. bodies, the Human Rights Council allocates membership seats not on the basis of merit (such as democratic credentials) but on the basis of regional blocs. Western states currently get seven of the 47 seats, while African and Asian states between them get a controlling majority of 26. …

Obama will be in Turkey next week. A couple of weeks ago Spengler wrote on the forthcoming visit.

For the United States to borrow the US$2 trillion a year that it wants, a poor country like Turkey cannot borrow the $30 billion a year that it needs – unless, that is, the United States borrows it first and re-lends it to Turkey.

When President Barack Obama respectfully suggests that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan might like to jump, Erdogan will ask, “How long should I remain in the air?” Turkey requires a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at which the US has the biggest vote. News that an IMF loan might be delayed sent Turkey’s lira crashing to a new low against the dollar last week. Just then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned up in Ankara to announce that Obama would visit Turkey in April.

Most analysts expected Obama to adjust American foreign policy to the modesty of his circumstances, constrained by rising foreign debt and enervating entanglements. Instead, Obama has entered the foreign policy area with a magic lamp in hand, namely America’s bottomless capacity to borrow, and the whole of the world seems to him a Cave of Wonders – at least for the moment. Does America want logical support for its withdrawal from Iraq, or mediation with Iran, or a back channel to Hamas, or anything else? Obama’s wish is Erdogan’s command, as long as Erdogan can hold onto power.

Obama will run foreign policy precisely as he ran his presidential campaign, by dismissing consistency as the hobgoblin of small minds as he promised diametrically opposed things to irreconcilable factions. And the rest of the world will smile and nod and take American checks, at least for the moment, while there still are functioning governments to take American checks. …

Ed Morrissey reports Dianne Feinstein has bailed on card check.

Yesterday, The Hill reported that another Senate Democrat has expressed reluctance to support Card Check, and this one will sting.  Dianne Feinstein’s opinions carry significant weight within her caucus, and her apparent rejection of Big Labor’s prime directive will create more political cover for dissidents in her own caucus — as well as give moderate Republicans room to appease conservatives: …

Karl Rove wonders if the president will regret acting like the godfather.

“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” That’s what President Barack Obama said to Rep. Peter DeFazio in a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus last week, according to the Associated Press.

A few weeks ago, Mr. DeFazio voted against the administration’s stimulus bill. The comment from Mr. Obama was a presidential rebuke and part of a new, hard-nosed push by the White House to pressure Congress to adopt the president’s budget. He has mobilized outside groups and enlisted forces still in place from the Obama campaign.

Senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett and her chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis, are in regular contact with MoveOn.Org, Americans United for Change and other liberal interest groups. Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina has collaborated with Americans United for Change on strategy and even ad copy. Ms. Jarrett invited leaders of the liberal interest groups to a White House social event with the president and first lady to kick off the lobbying campaign.

Its targets were initially Republicans, as team Obama ran ads depicting the GOP as the “party of no.” But now the fire is being trained on Democrats worried about runaway spending. …

The Corner staff has Krauthammer’s take from last night’s Special Report. On the NY 20th election;

… You can spin this every which way. And…it will be over-spun because it’s all we have. So we’re going to have to go with it.

But I look at it a little more simply. I’m no Richard Feynman, but I can do elementary arithmetic. Five months ago the Democrats won this seat with 62 percent. Last night it was a split 50-50. That’s a 12 percent drop in less than half a year.

And I think it’s explained by the fact, among other things, that the magical mystery tour of Obama is over, and that charismatic era is done. …

David Harsanyi weighs in on the Texas school’s evolution debate.

Some time ago, a highly charged argument was set in motion. It pitted evolution against creationism. One side of this debate relies on scientific inquiry and the other relies on ancient mythological texts.

That’s my view. That’s what I intend to teach my children.

Yet, I have no interest in foisting this curriculum on your kids. Nor am I particularly distressed that a creationist theory may one day collide with the tiny eardrums of my precocious offspring.

Which brings me to the Texas Board of Education’s recent landmark compromise between evolutionary science and related religious concerns in public school textbooks.

The board cautiously crafted an arrangement that requires teachers to allow students to scrutinize “all sides” of the issue. This decision is widely seen as a win for pro-creationists — or are they called “anti-evolutionists”? …

One unalloyed good of the government’s increasing interference in our lives is the growing number of examples of government idiocy. George Will thinks the compact fluorescents work well that way. Remember, this is a law George W. Bush signed.

… A San Francisco — naturally — couple emerged from Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” incandescent with desire to think globally and act locally, in their home. So they replaced their incandescent bulbs with the compact fluorescents that Congress says must soon be ubiquitous. “Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however,” the Times reported, “they wound up coping with a mess.”

Although supposed to last 10,000 hours and save, the Times says, “as much as” $5.40 a year in electricity costs, some bulbs died within a few hours. Some experts, reports the Times, “blame the government for the quality problems,” saying its push to cut the bulbs’ prices prompted manufacturers to use inferior components.

Furthermore, some experts have written a guide saying the new bulbs require “a little insight and planning.” The Times says that “may be an understatement.”

The bulbs, says the Times, “do not do well in hot places with little airflow, like recessed ceiling fixtures,” and some do not work “with dimmers or three-way sockets.” And: “Be aware that compact fluorescents can take one to three minutes to reach full brightness. This is not a defect.” Well, if you say so. Because all fluorescents contain mercury, a toxic metal, they must never be put in the trash, so Home Depot and other chains offer bins for disposing of dangerous bulbs. …

Interesting follow-up to the Forbes article in on Harvard’s endowment from Talking Points Memo. The piece appeared in Pickings on March 25th.

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Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic says Bibi Netanyahu will do the heavy lifting in the Middle East if Obama won’t.

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, he suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”

But Netanyahu also said that Iran threatens many other countries apart from Israel, and so his mission over the next several months is to convince the world of the broad danger posed by Iran. One of his chief security advisers, Moshe Ya’alon, told me that a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. “This is an existential threat for Israel, but it will be a blow for American interests, especially on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region—Washington or Tehran?” …

… If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Netanyahu asserted, Washington’s Arab allies would drift into Iran’s orbit. “The only way I can explain what will happen to such regimes is to give you an example from the past of what happened to one staunch ally of the United States, and a great champion of peace, when another aggressive power loomed large. I’m referring to the late King Hussein [of Jordan] … who was an unequalled champion of peace. The same King Hussein in many ways subordinated his country to Saddam Hussein when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Saddam seemed all-powerful, unchallenged by the United States, and until the U.S. extracted Kuwait from Saddam’s gullet, King Hussein was very much in Iraq’s orbit. The minute that changed, the minute Saddam was defeated, King Hussein came back to the Western camp.”  …

… The Israeli threat to strike Iran militarily if the West fails to stop the nuclear program may, of course, be a tremendous bluff. After all, such threats may just be aimed at motivating President Obama and others to grapple urgently with the problem. But Netanyahu and his advisers seem to believe sincerely that Israel would have difficulty surviving in a Middle East dominated by a nuclear Iran. And they are men predisposed to action; many, like Netanyahu, are former commandos.

As I waited in the Knesset cafeteria to see Netanyahu, I opened a book he edited of his late brother’s letters. Yoni Netanyahu, a commando leader, was killed in 1976 during the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and his family organized his letters in a book they titled Self-Portrait of a Hero. In one letter, Yoni wrote to his teenage brother, then living in America, who had apparently been in a fight after someone directed an anti-Semitic remark at him. “I see … that you had to release the surplus energy you stored up during the summer,” Yoni wrote. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s too bad you sprained a finger in the process. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a good fist fight; on the contrary, if you’re young and you’re not seriously hurt, it won’t do you real harm. Remember what I told you? He who delivers the first blow, wins.

John Fund shorts on Ted Stevens,  stealth socialized medicine, and yesterday’s NY congressional election.

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona will take to the Senate floor today on behalf of America’s patients. He believes a series of health care proposals about to be passed by the Democratic Congress in reality represent a creeping attempt to control all aspects of America’s health care. “The liberals have decided they can’t pass nationalized health care in one swoop, so they will pass a series of smaller laws that make it inevitable,” he told me.

A centerpiece of the liberal effort is something called Comparative Effectiveness Research. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services named a 15-member panel to guide a $1.1 billion research program to determine which drugs, devices, and procedures are most effective and carry the lowest risk. While it’s true the panel won’t recommend guidelines for payment, coverage or treatment, everyone concerned understands that the information would be useful for any future government scheme to ration care as a way of controlling health care costs. …

Corner post on the election.

David Brooks has comments on government in the car business.

… the president certainly acted tough on Monday. In a show of force, he released plans from his Office of People Who Are Much Smarter Than You Are. These plans insert the government into the car business in all sorts of ways. They pick winners (new C.E.O. Fritz Henderson) and losers (Rick Wagoner). They basically send Chrysler off into the sunset. Joe Biden will be doing car commercials within weeks.

The Obama team also raised the bankruptcy specter more explicitly than ever before. Even more tellingly, the administration moved to “stand behind” the companies’ service warranties. That lays the groundwork for a bankruptcy procedure and should be a sharp shock to Detroit.

And yet by enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are now completely implicated in the coming G.M. wreck. Over the next few months, the White House will be subject to a gigantic lobbying barrage. The Midwestern delegations, swing states all, will pull out all the stops to prevent plant foreclosures. Unions will be furious if the Obama-run company rips up the union contract. Is the White House ready for the headline “Obama to Middle America: Drop Dead”? It would take a party with a political death wish to see this through. …

Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn have Corner posts on the auto industry. Steyn;

Incidentally, the government “overhaul” of GM is a useful shorthand for where we’re heading:

The first quid pro quo for the government giving you money (or “investing”, as President Obama and David Brooks say) is that it gets to regulate your behavior. Not just who sits on your board or (see Sarkozy last week) where your factory has to be. When the government “pays” for your health care, it reserves the right to deny (as in parts of Britain) heart disease treatment for smokers or hip replacement for the obese. Why be surprised? When the state’s “paying” for your health, your lifestyle directly impacts its “investment.”

The next stage is that, having gotten you used to having your behavior regulated, the state advances to approving not just what you do but what you’re allowed to read, see, hear, think: See the “Canadian Content” regulations up north, and the enforcers of the “human rights” commissions. Or Britain’s recent criminalization of “homophobic jokes.”

You’d be surprised how painlessly and smoothly once-free peoples slip from government “investing” to government control.

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