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Mark Steyn thinks our reaction to North Korea’s test was underdone.

… If you’re American, it’s natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of …” Drumroll, please! “…grave concern,” declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will – wait for it – “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’”

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime – via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. – to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket case. This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but is demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. …

David Harsanyi says don’t give Sotomayor a free ride.

You know what would be a nice change of pace? A nominee for public office whose compelling life story didn’t remind me of my pitiably self-indulgent life.

Fortunately, while overachievers can induce some self-loathing, when it comes to public service, spectacular life stories are irrelevant.

Adversity does not grant anyone superhuman intellect or a Solomon-like temperament. And gripping tales of perseverance should not make one impenetrable to criticism.

Much has been made of political repercussions for Republicans if they dare target Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina who grew up in a deprived neighborhood in the South Bronx. New York’s hyper-yammering senator, Chuck Schumer, claims that the Republican Party would do so at its “own peril” — in part alluding, no doubt, to blowback from the Hispanic community.

If Republicans take this kind of bigoted advice, they will have done the country a great disservice. …

Jay Nordlinger with interesting background on the Soto story by reminding us of the Dems filibustering of Miguel Estrada.

In recent days, we’ve been hearing a lot about a “wonderful American story” — Sonia Sotomayor’s. Can’t oppose that, can you — that wonderful American story? Oh yes you can, if you’re the Democratic party. They certainly did it in the case of Miguel Estrada.

He came from Honduras, and was no Spanish aristocrat, to put it mildly. Arrived in America at 17 speaking barely any English. Graduated with honors from Columbia and Harvard: Law Review, Supreme Court clerkship, blah, blah, blah. Distinguished record in government service — an American success story, a Movie of the Week, a slam dunk. …

Also from the Corner, Andrew McCarthy tells us how it was Soto was appointed by Bush 41. No, it was not another stupid Souterlike move.

It’s at the top of the Left’s talking-points that Judge Sotomayor was first put on the bench by a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, in 1991. That’s pretty funny when you think about it — the Bush seal of approval is not usually thought an imprimatur by the Left, and it wouldn’t likely be much comfort to conservatives given that Sotomayor’s district court nomination came around the same time GHWB put Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. But there is even less to it than meets the eye. …

Perhaps Sotamayor’s biggest weakness is her record on the second amendment right to bear arms. David Kopel explains in Volokh.

… the Sotomayor per curiam opinion treats any Second Amendment claim as not involving “a fundamental right.”

The Maloney opinion is, on this issue, entirely consistent with Judge Sotomayor’s opinion in a 2004 case: “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.” United States v. Sanchez-Villar, 99 Fed.Appx. 256, 2004 WL 962938 (2d. Cir. 2004)(Summary Order of Judges Sack, Sotomayor & Kaplan), judgement vacated, Sanchez-Villar v. United States, 544 U.S. 1029 (2005)(for further consideration in light of the 2005 Booker decision on sentencing).

Judge Sotomayor’s record suggests hostility, rather than empathy, for the tens of millions of Americans who exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

Charles Krauthammer comments.

… So it’s extremely odd that she would reach all the way back to 1886 and say that a gun case is excluded because it is under state jurisdiction. It would imply to me that she was reaching as a way to undermine gun rights. And it would also imply that she might be inclined to overturn Heller or restrict it in the future.

Corner post on the fiscal problems in England and here.

Last week, Standard and Poor’s warned the British government that it could lose its triple-A rating for sovereign debt if large budget deficits persist in coming years, as currently projected. S&P noted that the U.K. net government debt burden is expected to reach 100 percent of the country’s annual economic output soon — and stay there indefinitely.

Yesterday, John Taylor of Stanford and the Hoover Institution noted in a piece in the Financial Times that there’s every reason to expect the U.S. will soon find itself in the same boat as the British. …

In response, Larry Kudlow says the VAT is out of the bag.

Everyone should closely read today’s Washington Post story on the value-added tax, or VAT. The cat is now out of the bag. For months I have argued that Team Obama and the Democratic Congress were going to be forced to consider a VAT in order to pay for their extravagant spending. Now borrowing almost 50 cents on every new dollar spent, the Democrats will at some point begin to deal with the politics of deficit reduction as a way of countering Republican criticisms about deficit expansion. …

There has been web noise that the administration is targeting GOP car dealers. Jonah Goldberg dismisses the idea.

… Of the 789 Chrysler dealers who were notified that their contracts will not be renewed, 38 are minority owned…

At the end of April, there were 154 minority dealers in Chrysler’s 3,181 total U.S. dealer body network….

You’ll see that 4.8% of the auto dealerships closed were minority owned.

Total percentage of all Chrysler dealerships that are minority owned? 4.8%

Speaking of autos, P.J. O’Rourke mourns the loss ……

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War. Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass. …

Claudia Rosett has a good take on the Cheerios flap.

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David Warren says it’s nice the Dems are in power, they have to act like grownups.

One of the advantages of having Barack Obama as president of the hyperpower, is that it puts his great mass of fans, in America and abroad, in the position of having to think about real problems. It turns out the solution to each of them was more complicated than “get rid of Bush.” The world does not spontaneously change when the president changes.

North Korea, Iran, and a seriously unstable Pakistan continue to present plausible and pressing nuclear threats. Islamist terrorists continue to seek soft targets right around the world; and the fanatic Islamist ideology continues to win adherents, even in New York prison cells. For that matter, problems of disease, poverty, petty tyranny and oppression, with or without war, continue to afflict our species, regardless of who comes and goes from an office in Washington. America’s allies become no more likely to pull their weight, and no less apt to strike self-serving rhetorical postures.

The banking problems, the environmental and other notional issues, must be seen in a new light. It is no use just inventing bogeymen, and accusing them of imaginary crimes. Suddenly the facts matter, and the advantages of pretending disappear. …

A WSJ editorial that could have been in the revenue shortfall section from two days ago.

… Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000 …

Michael Barone grew up in Detroit so his comments on the auto bailouts can have special poignancy.

… “The volumes need to be big for Chrysler to survive,” [market analyst Tracy Handler] said. “Will they be? I have doubts about that.”

See also this BBC article (“it’s madness”). Pathetically, Chrysler hopes that even if they don’t save the company the new small cars will “[b]urnish the environmental image of Chrysler brands,” says Automotive News.

My question: How many cars does burnishing a firm’s environmental image actually sell?

Barone noted our “gangster government” favoring unions will make it hard for unionized companies to sell bonds. David Indiviglio of The Atlantic has come to the same conclusion saying investors “can’t afford to lend to unionized companies.” Actually, they will, but the rates will be higher.

… Bond investors literally can’t afford to lend to unionized companies because it’s clear that current power in Washington will take the unions’ side, despite past bankruptcy law precedents that favor senior creditors. That means Washington’s actions in pushing for these bankruptcy verdicts to come out in favor of the unions will probably hurt unionized companies in the long run. As a result, it might be wise for Washington to reconsider the precedents it’s setting for unionized companies undergoing bankruptcy.

Mark Steyn on Britain’s expense scandal.

… For their constituents, the scandal is a rare glimpse of a central truth about politics in an advanced Western democracy: A lifetime in “public service” is a lifetime of getting serviced at public expense. The salaries are small but the perks are unlimited. A few weeks back, while the home secretary was away, her poor husband whiled away an evening by purchasing two pay-per-view pornographic movies — By Special Request and Raw Meat 3 — which, upon her return, his missus promptly billed to the government. Most of us, whether we land a job at the local feed store, the dental practice, or National Review, expect to have to pay for our own moats, toilet seats, chocolate Santas, and screenings of Raw Meat 3. But being in “public service” means never having to say, “Hey, this one’s on me.”

There are local variations, of course. In the U.S., I don’t believe you can claim for repairs to the toilet seat at your second home, but then again your second home might have come your way, like Chris Dodd’s Irish “cottage,” at an exceptionally favorable price. A senator gets between $2.3 million and $3.7 million for the costs of running his office. Tom Daschle’s plea in mitigation for his tax irregularities can stand for an entire political culture: It never occurred to him, suddenly returned to private life and working his Rolodex for a little light consulting and speechifying, that things like chauffeurs and limousines were taxable benefits members of the non-legislating class are supposed to declare to the Treasury. After all, in Congress, that stuff is just the way it is: Declaring your driver would be as silly as declaring the air or the grass.

Do you remember the anthrax scare just after 9/11? I remember how shocked I was when I heard on the radio that 34 of Senator Daschle’s staffers had come down with anthrax poisoning. Not shocked that they’d been poisoned, but shocked that Senator Daschle had 34 staffers. Why? …

Tony Blankley goes back to Frederic Bastiat to show the folly of “five million green jobs.”

In 1845, the French economist Frederic Bastiat published a satirical petition from the “Manufacturers of Candles” to the French Chamber of Deputies that ridiculed the arguments made on behalf of inefficient industries to protect them from more efficient producers.

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us….

“We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds – in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country. . . .”

This famous put-down highlights the problem of claiming that protecting inefficient producers creates good jobs. Obviously, the money the French would waste on unneeded candles could be spent on needed products and services – to the increased prosperity of the French economy. …

Not to mention Bush’s folly ethanol. A piece from American.com. It gets a little technical here, but it’s worth wading through.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently released its analysis of the renewable fuel standard enacted by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The standard requires 11.1 billion gallons of renewable fuel to displace petroleum fuel in 2009, ratcheting up each year until reaching 36.0 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. There are separate volume requirements for advanced biofuels, cellulosic, and biodiesel.

Forcing the market to produce large amounts of renewable fuel will harm consumers in two ways: it will increase prices at the pump, because biofuels are more costly than gasoline, and it will drive up the price of food, because it diverts crops into fuel. The impact of food price inflation will weigh most heavily in developing countries where food purchases comprise larger shares of consumption. Food expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of household consumption among lower income groups in the developing world.

What can justify a policy that deliberately increases the price of food and fuel? Calling passage of the bill the “shot heard ‘round the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it would improve the “health of our children.” But this is questionable at best. While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis suggests that the switch toward renewables will decrease ammonia, carbon monoxide, and benzene, it also predicts “significant increases in ethanol and acetaldehyde emissions” and “more modest increases in nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, particulate matter, hydrocarbons, acrolein, and sulfur dioxide.” Citing time constraints, the EPA did not do a full analysis of the net health effects of these emission profiles, but a reasonable assumption is that the detrimental health impacts from increased particulate matter will at least offset the health improvements from the predicted reductions in the other pollutants. …

Karl Rove thinks the GOP should go ahead and oppose Sotomayor on principle.

… The Sotomayor nomination also provides Republicans with some advantages. They can stress their support for judges who strictly interpret the Constitution and apply the law as written. A majority of the public is with the GOP on opposing liberal activist judges. There is something in our political DNA that wants impartial umpires who apply the rules, regardless of who thereby wins or loses.

Mr. Obama understands the danger of heralding Judge Sotomayor as the liberal activist she is, so his spinners are intent on selling her as a moderate. The problem is that she described herself as liberal before becoming a judge, and fair-minded observers find her on the left of the federal bench.

Republicans also get a nominee who likes showing off and whose YouTube moments and Google insights cause people to wince. There are likely to be more revelations like Stuart Taylor’s find last Saturday of this Sotomayor gem in a speech at Berkeley: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Invert the placement of “Latina woman” and “white male” and have a conservative say it: A career would be finished. …

A securities law blog, Lots Stocks and Gavel posts on another foolish Sotomayor decision.

… When the case came to her, Judge Sotomayor took the opinion that the law did not bar standing for all lawsuits in connection with the sale or purchase of securities, even though the act specifically said it did bar standing.  Citing a 30 year-old case, written long before the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards act,  she opined that the law still allowed for class action law suits to be filled by those who suffered direct loss due to the purchase or sale of securities.  Blue Chip Stamps v Manor Drug Stores, 421 US 723 (1975).

In other words, she took an activist position in favor of an interpretation that would have allowed the suit to go forward, in spite of specific language in the law that would have barred it.

Her ruling was overturned unanimously with the Supreme Courts opinion being authored by one of the most liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank is back on the Sotomayor case.

In her years on the bench, Sonia Sotomayor has produced millions of words. Opponents of her Supreme Court nomination are particularly interested in 32 of them:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in a 2001 speech. …

David Harsanyi ponders our changing abortion attitudes.

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Richard Epstein cites an eminent domain case more egregious than Kelo that found Sotomayor in agreement.

… Here is one straw in the wind that does not bode well for a Sotomayor appointment. Justice Stevens of the current court came in for a fair share of criticism (all justified in my view) for his expansive reading in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) of the “public use language.” Of course, the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is as complex as it is short: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” But he was surely done one better in the Summary Order in Didden v. Village of Port Chester issued by the Second Circuit in 2006. Judge Sotomayor was on the panel that issued the unsigned opinion–one that makes Justice Stevens look like a paradigmatic defender of strong property rights.

I have written about Didden in Forbes. The case involved about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined. Bart Didden came up with an idea to build a pharmacy on land he owned in a redevelopment district in Port Chester over which the town of Port Chester had given Greg Wasser control. Wasser told Didden that he would approve the project only if Didden paid him $800,000 or gave him a partnership interest. The “or else” was that the land would be promptly condemned by the village, and Wasser would put up a pharmacy himself. Just that came to pass. But the Second Circuit panel on which Sotomayor sat did not raise an eyebrow. Its entire analysis reads as follows: “We agree with the district court that [Wasser's] voluntary attempt to resolve appellants’ demands was neither an unconstitutional exaction in the form of extortion nor an equal protection violation.”

Maybe I am missing something, but American business should shudder in its boots if Judge Sotomayor takes this attitude to the Supreme Court. Justice Stevens wrote that the public deliberations over a comprehensive land use plan is what saved the condemnation of Ms. Kelo’s home from constitutional attack. Just that element was missing in the Village of Port Chester fiasco. Indeed, the threats that Wasser made look all too much like the “or else” diplomacy of the Obama administration in business matters. …

Mark Steyn has Sotomayorian experience.

Krauthammer’s Sotomayor take.

Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic wrote a series on possible nominees. Here’s his on Sotomayor. Rather than grounded in fact, a lot of this looks to be unattributed courthouse gossip.

… The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.” (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, “Will you please stop talking and let them talk?”) Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: “She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media.”

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues. …

More on the Cheney debate from a few sources. William McGurn is first.

… Ironically, it was left to Chris Matthews — one of the vice president’s most unrelenting critics — to offer the best take on last week’s dueling speeches. On his Sunday show, he put it this way: “I saw something from Barack Obama I never even saw in the campaign, a sense he was listening for footsteps, that he could hear Cheney coming at him and he was defensive.”

Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that’s exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.

Of course, the effect was just the opposite. The White House reaction ended up elevating Mr. Cheney to Mr. Obama’s level, and ensuring that his words would be measured directly against the president’s. Like him or loathe him, Mr. Cheney forced the president to engage him.

For much of the Beltway, the Cheney surge is baffling. After all, when Mr. Cheney left office, his reputation seemed divided between those who thought him a punch line on late-night TV and those who thought him a war criminal. As so often happens, however, the conventional wisdom seems to have blinded Mr. Cheney’s ideological opponents to the many advantages he brings to the table. …

Toby Harnden in his Daily Telegraph blog.

The spectacle of two dueling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary. I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama’s address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely two minutes after his adversary had finished.

So who won the fight? (it’s hard to use anything other than a martial or pugilistic metaphor). Well, most people are on either one side or the other of this issue and I doubt today will have prompted many to switch sides.

But the very fact that Obama chose to schedule his speech (Cheney’s was announced first) at exactly the same time as the former veep was a sign of some weakness.

Dana Milbank in his WaPo column.

… The president seemed slightly off his game. He introduced Defense Secretary Robert Gates as “William Gates,” confusing his Cabinet member with the Microsoft founder. And he was thrown off by an apparent teleprompter malfunction at the end of his speech. Mostly, though, Obama struck a defensive tone. “The problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility,” he reminded his audience many times. Without naming Cheney, he objected to his critics’ trying “to scare people rather than educate them.”

At just that moment, some of those very words were being distributed to the audience at AEI: an advance text, still warm from the printer, of Cheney’s rebuttal. The crowd at the conservative think tank offered no applause during or after the Obama speech but gave a warm ovation when Cheney entered the room and flashed a crooked grin. His remarks went quickly to Ground Zero and “the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape being burned alive.”

In an echo of the with-us-or-against-us theme, Cheney told Obama: “In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground.”

Cheney, battling respiratory congestion, listed the many things that have made him dyspeptic. The “so-called truth commission.” The “feigned outrage based on a false narrative” of the opposition. The administration soliciting “applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo.” The “euphemisms” he thinks Democrats are using to sanitize terrorism.

“Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer,” he growled. “Just remember: It is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.”

A swift uppercut to Obama’s chin! Nine more 9/11 jabs and Cheney was ready for his rubdown.

Shorts from National Review.

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Stuart Taylor, law correspondent extraordinaire for the National Journal, is not pleased with the supreme pick. It is passing strange to pick a judge whose latest controversial opinion is about to  be reversed by the Supreme Court.

… I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.

I also hope that Obama will use this Supreme Court appointment to re-enforce the message of his 2004 Democratic convention speech: “There’s not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

But in this regard, the president’s emphasis on selective “empathy” for preferred racial and other groups as “the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges” is not encouraging, as I explained in a May 15 post on National Journal’s The Ninth Justice blog.

As for Sotomayor’s speech, fragmentary quotations admittedly cannot capture every qualification and nuance. She also stressed that although “men lawyers… need to work on” their “attitudes,” many have already reached “great moments of enlightenment.” She noted that she tries to be impartial. And she did not overtly suggest that judges should play identity politics.

I place the earlier quotations in more-detailed context here so that readers can assess Sotomayor’s meaning for themselves. …

… In one of her few explosive cases, Sotomayor voted (without writing an opinion) to join two colleagues in upholding what I see as raw racial discrimination by New Haven, Conn. The city denied promotions to the firefighters who did best on a test of job-related skills because none was black. (See my column, “New Haven’s Injustice Shouldn’t Disappear.”) …

Jennifer Rubin notes the NY Times distress about the fall of the dollar. “What did you expect?” She says.

… It is no mystery how this happened. As the Times notes, the Fed “is printing money from thin air, and the government is issuing trillions of dollars in new debt as it tries to spend its way out of the recession with a huge stimulus package, new lending programs, health care overhauls and automotive rescues.” The immediate impact is already seen in higher oil and other commodity prices and higher interest rates. In the longer term economists now worry about the loss of the U.S. AAA bond rating. All this is occurring as unemployment is climbing into double digits. …

In a normal day, like most business folk, Pickerhead will ask the CFO, “What were collections today?” The same question has been asked about the federal government. A blog post from Safe Haven.com has the distressing answers.

… In 2007 and 2008, government tax revenues averaged about $633.15 billion per quarter. For the first quarter of 2009, however, the numbers just in tell us that tax receipts totaled only about $442.39 billion — a decline of 30%.Looking to confirm the trend, we compared the data for April – the big kahuna of tax collection months – to the 2007-2008 average, and found that individual income taxes this year were down more than 40%.

The situation is even worse for corporate income taxes, which were down a stunning 67%

When you add in all revenue from all sources (including Social Security revenue, government fees, etc.), the fiscal year-to-date – October through April – revenue shortfall comes to 19%, vs. the 14.6% projected in Obama’s budget. If, however, the accelerating shortfall apparent year-to-date, and in April in particular, continues, the spread between projected and actual tax receipts will widen considerably.

Tellingly, for the first time since 1983, the U.S. government posted a deficit in April. That’s a big swing in the wrong direction, as the bump in personal tax collections in April historically results in a big surplus — on average about $68 billion. …

Jennifer Rubin reports even BO has noticed the revenue shortage. Guess who he’s blaming?

… That darn Bush left a mess on national security. And what’s a guy to do with such a deficit left on his doorstep? But the facts tell a different story, as this chart illustrates. To a greater degree than any predecessor, Obama has run up the deficit — with little to show for it.

Blaming the previous administration is a time-honored political trick. But voters tend to hold the party in power responsible for the state of the country’s finances. That’s how the Republicans lost the White House and I suspect the public will be no less forgiving in 2010 or 2012 if things don’t turn around. …

National Review notes Japan’s opposition party is turning the screws on their government for its purchase of dollar denominated assets.

And Sebastian Mallaby explains China’s dollar dilemma.

… China has accumulated at least $1.5 trillion in dollar assets, according to my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Brad Setser, so a (highly plausible) 30 percent move in the yuan-dollar rate would cost the country around $450 billion — about a tenth of its economy. And, to make the dilemma even more painful, China’s determination to control the appreciation of its currency forces it to buy billions more in dollar assets every month. Like an addict at a slot machine, China is adding to its hopeless bet, ensuring that its eventual losses will be even heavier.

It is easy to appreciate China’s sudden appetite for bold new ideas about international finance. But Beijing’s leaders look less like the architects of a new Bretton Woods than like aspiring Houdinis.

Bret Stephens notes the disconnect between deciding something is a worthy goal and actually figuring out how to get there.

… The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . . …

Simon Heffer of London’s Daily Telegraph thinks sometime Obama will have to take a stand.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

… In other words, rather than explaining the bleak choices before us and explaining why his preferences have the best chance of succeeding, Obama has so far reduced his presidency to two themes: “Bush did it” and “I’m not your normal white male President.” If he keeps this monotony up, at some point even the comedians are going to notice the predictability.

Borowitz reports U.S. prepared to respond to North Korea with “strongest possible adjectives.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn Corner posts on Government Motors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ARRA Projects Coordinator.”

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

“Grantwriter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now some of our Corner favorites. Ramesh Ponnuru.

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

Andrew McCarthy.

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

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

Pete Hegseth.

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

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

Jay Nordlinger.

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

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

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

McCarthy again.

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

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

Now, to favorites from Contentions. John Podhoretz.

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

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

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

Jennifer Rubin.

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

Jonathan Tobin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Michael Barone takes up India policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Gitmo two step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is this a good thing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjørn Lomborg warns about the climate-industrial complex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Time Of Obama

Holman Jenkins comments on auto policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krauthammer’s take from The Corner.

Tunku Varadarajan thinks we must stop ignoring India.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hilarious London Times review of Honda’s new Insight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Ignatius is next.

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

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

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

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

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

David Harsanyi prefers hookers over censors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Krauthammer tells us why Pelosi’s hypocrisy matters.

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

And they were right. …

More from Krauthammer’s take.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they almost did. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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