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Just before Netanyahu’s visit, Anne Bayefsky details how the administration has stabbed Israel in the back.

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn’t fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.

It began this past Monday with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously — meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: “The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009.”

This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January — which said only that “The Security Council welcomes the Quartet’s consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009.” Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League — most of whom don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist — and one Jewish state. A great idea — if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection. …

WSJ editors on memoirs out of China.

As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, that history remains as relevant to China’s future as ever. The soon-to-be-released memoirs of the late Zhao Ziyang, who was secretary general of the Communist Party during the student protests, show why.

Zhao was a champion of economic liberalization and famous among China’s farmers for his agricultural reforms. In the spring of 1989, he agreed with student demands for transparency, less corruption and a freer press. As Bao Pu explains on the previous page, Zhao’s political opponents ultimately outmaneuvered him, resulting in Zhao’s ouster from the Party, the tragic events of June 4, 1989 and his 16-year house arrest. He died in 2005.

Zhao’s memoirs provide a rare insider’s view of debates among Chinese leaders, and they indict the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the statist economic model. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks Bush must be enjoying the kid’s flips.

George W. Bush must be smiling. He’s not talking in public about the Obama administration, but he can’t be displeased: his harshest critic is adopting most of his national security policies, albeit grudgingly and with a whole lot of spin. But not even the White House spinners can conceal what has happened. …

… The Left is apoplectic about all this. And conservatives are conflicted. (Does Obama get “credit”? Is this a change of heart or political convenience?) But it doesn’t really matter what Obama’s motives are. The reality is that on one national security decision after another he has come to conclusions strikingly similar to his predecessor. That likely makes George Bush happy. But more importantly, it makes us all safer.

Jennifer also comments on what Cheney’s been doing.

… The administration and the media jointly overlooked the power of Cheney’s message which was based on a set of facts over which he has complete mastery (and which they were either indifferent to or ignorant of). So they now sit slack-jawed while Cheney has largely pinned the Obama team to the mat.

Perhaps the media would do well to start brushing up on some basic facts. What are the relevant statutes regarding “torture” that were in place at the relevant time, what’s the basis for prosecution of Bush officials, what statutes might prevent release of Guantanamo detainees, what is the record of the released Guantanamo detainees, what did the Bush military tribunals entail, etc. In other words, rather than reporting as if this were a popularity contest (Obama wins because his Q rating is triple Cheney’s!) they might examine the underlying facts bedeviling the administration. And the administration? Rather than play “pin the tail on the least popular Republican,” they might give up the Bush-Cheney vendetta and start governing like grown-ups, considering what is best for the nation’s security first and not as a last resort. If they did that, they might not miss the next pothole in their national security planning.

Mark Steyn opens a section on Pelosi.

Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re: waterboarding has raised, according to The Washington Post, “troubling new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word: “troubling.”

I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi Speakership to a sudden end – and needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of Congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured “torture” debate:

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding? …

Krauthammer’s take from FOX. On Pelosi;

… what she said is utterly implausible. And the charge that the CIA lied to her is an extremely serious one. She is now at war with the CIA, and it has the means, by leaking selectively, of destroying her, and I suspect it will do that.

Andrew McCarthy, who has been in these pages often, and who led the prosecution team against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, thinks Nancy Pelosi (another terrorist type) has convicted herself with her own press conference testimony.

… In today’s news accounts, Pelosi ups the ante big-time by alleging that, in 2002, she was “told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” and, therefore, that the agency is lying when it claims to have told her it was. But — though I acknowledge she is confusing and at times incoherent — Pelosi does not appear to disclaim knowledge that waterboarding was at least in the CIA’s gameplan. And, indeed, she now says she learned waterboarding was being used from other lawmakers who attended other briefings in the ensuing months.

Now, back to the torture statute. I won’t rehash the now familiar provisions that explain what torture is. But I do want to focus our attention on a prong of the torture statute, Section 2340A(c), that hasn’t gotten much notice to this point:

Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

So I ask myself, “Self, what difference does it make whether Speaker Pelosi knew the CIA was waterboarding suspects or merely knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding?” Answer: None.

Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. …

WaPo’s Dana Milbank writes on Pelosi’s presser.

Nancy Pelosi is a woman of many talents. Yesterday, she performed the delicate art of backtracking while walking sideways.

The speaker of the House had just read a statement accusing the CIA of lying and was trying to beat a hasty retreat from her news conference before reporters could point out contradictions between her current position and her previous statements.

“Thank you!” an aide called out to signal an end to the session. Pelosi walked, sideways, away from the lectern and, still sidling in a sort of crab walk, was halfway to the door when a yell from CNN’s Dana Bash, rising above the rest of the shouting, froze her in the aisle.

“Madam Speaker!” the correspondent called out. “I think there’s one other question that I would like to ask, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, okay,” Pelosi said, in a way that indicated it was not okay. Pelosi had no choice but to sidle back to the lectern.

Over the next few minutes of shouted questions — “They lied to you? Were you justified? When were you first told? Did you protest? Why didn’t you tell us?” — the speaker attempted the crab-walk retreat again, returned to the lectern again and then finally skittered out of the room. …

The Sun, UK with stunning photo of the space shuttle silhouetted against the sun.

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You can walk for liberty in Williamsburg, VA on June 1st.

Todd Zywicki, George Mason law prof, on Chrysler and the rule of law.

The rule of law, not of men — an ideal tracing back to the ancient Greeks and well-known to our Founding Fathers — is the animating principle of the American experiment. While the rest of the world in 1787 was governed by the whims of kings and dukes, the U.S. Constitution was established to circumscribe arbitrary government power. It would do so by establishing clear rules, equally applied to the powerful and the weak.

Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right?

Until Chrysler. …

Richard Epstein writes on Chrysler too.

The proposed bankruptcy reorganization of the now defunct Chrysler Corp. is the culmination of serious policy missteps by the Bush and Obama administrations. To be sure, the long overdue Chrysler bankruptcy is a welcomed turn of events. But the heavy-handed meddling of the Obama administration that forced secured creditors to the brink is not.

A sound bankruptcy proceeding should do two things: productively redeploy the assets of the bankrupt firm and correctly prioritize various claims against the bankrupt entity. The Chrysler bankruptcy fails on both counts. …

And George Will.

… The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which has not yet been used for its supposed purpose (to purchase such assets from banks), has been the instrument of the administration’s adventure in the automobile industry. TARP’s $700 billion, like much of the supposed “stimulus” money, is a slush fund the executive branch can use as it pleases. This is as lawless as it would be for Congress to say to the IRS: We need $3.5 trillion to run the government next year, so raise it however you wish — from whomever, at whatever rates you think suitable. Don’t bother us with details.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort — burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. — but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

Steve Malanga writes on the power of unions in our governments.

Across the private sector, workers are swallowing hard as their employers freeze salaries, cancel bonuses, and institute longer work days. America’s employees can see for themselves how steeply business has fallen off, which is why many are accepting cost-saving measures with equanimity — especially compared to workers in France, where riots and plant takeovers have become regular news.

But then there is the U.S. public sector, where the mood seems very European these days. In New Jersey, which faces a $3.3 billion budget deficit, angry state workers have demonstrated in Trenton and taken Gov. Jon Corzine to court over his plan to require unpaid furloughs for public employees. In New York, public-sector unions have hit the airwaves with caustic ads denouncing Gov. David Paterson’s promise to lay off state workers if they continue refusing to forgo wage hikes as part of an effort to close a $17.7 billion deficit. In Los Angeles County, where the schools face a budget deficit of nearly $600 million, school employees have balked at a salary freeze and vowed to oppose any layoffs that the board of education says it will have to pursue if workers don’t agree to concessions.

Call it a tale of two economies. Private-sector workers — unionized and nonunion alike — can largely see that without compromises they may be forced to join unemployment lines. Not so in the public sector. …

David Harsanyi has comments on the soda tax.

“And he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the Pepsi drinker!”

There has to be a statement about soft drinks tucked somewhere in Leviticus. I have assurances, after all, that such beverages are wicked.

Sin taxes are normally levied on so-called vices like drinking, smoking and gambling. Now Congress is “studying” a proposal to legislate morality by taxing sugary beverages — which is to say it is “studying” whether such a tax would be politically feasible. …

Michael Barone says Obama offers security at the expense of liberty.

Republicans and conservatives are trying to grapple with the Obama administration’s $3,600,000,000,000 federal budget — let’s include the zeroes rather than use the trivializing abbreviation $3.6 trillion — and the larger-than-previously-projected $1,841,000,000,000 budget deficit. Political arguments are usually won not by numbers but by moral principles. And conservatives, banished by voters from high office, are having a hard time agreeing on a moral case.

The always thoughtful David Brooks complains in his New York Times column that Republicans learned the wrong lessons from John Ford’s classic Western movies. They should not be “the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice,” but rather “once again the party of community and civic order.” They should not celebrate the lonely hero that saves the town, but the everyday people who build the voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the chief strength of America back in the 1830s.

But Brooks errs when he suggests that in opposing administration policies Republicans are betraying community and civic order. For the policies of the Obama administration are not designed to shelter and nourish what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons.” They are designed to subject them to what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” which he identified as the natural tendency and potentially fatal weakness of American democracy. …

John Stossel says we can save tigers by eating them.

In India, China and Russia, there were once 100,000 wild tigers. Today, only a few thousand survive.

They’ve disappeared because poachers kill them to sell crushed tiger bone, which is made into a paste that is supposed to kill pain.

The usual solution is to ban the sale of these products. Actor Harrison Ford says in a public-service announcement, “When the buying stops, the killing can, too. Case closed!”

But the case isn’t closed. The ban is 33 years old, yet the tigers still disappear. …

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John Fund says Nancy Pelosi is having a hard time getting away from the torture tar baby.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be stuck in an endless loop, claiming she didn’t know the CIA was using waterboarding on terrorism suspects while more and more evidence emerges that she was indeed briefed on the practice — and stayed silent. Now it appears there may be a full investigation of the dispute.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer added to Ms. Pelosi’s discomfort yesterday when he suggested: “What was said and when it was said, who said it, I think that is probably what ought to be on the record as well.” In other words, Ms. Pelosi’s deputy now believes the conflict needs to be resolved. …

Melanie Phillips is apoplectic over our new Israel policy.

Leaving aside for the moment the malice towards Israel that is involved, the attitude of the Obama administration towards the Middle East is well-nigh incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity. It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the US will not help protect its security by defanging Iran (and how, precisely would it do that?). But in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardising the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony.  This paper by Efraim Inbar spells out the multiple idiocies of an administration that believes that making nice with genocidal fanatics will turn them into apostles of peaceful co-existence : …

The kid president says he’s gonna raise much money closing all the corporate foreign operation loopholes. Robert Samuelson says not so much.

… Listen to President Obama, and the status quo seems a cesspool. Pervasive “loopholes” engineered by “well-connected lobbyists” allow U.S. multinationals to skirt American taxes and outsource jobs to low-tax countries. So the president proposes plugging loopholes. Some jobs will return to the United States, he said, and U.S. tax coffers will grow by $210 billion over the next decade.

Sounds great — and that’s how the story played. “Obama Targets Overseas Tax Dodge,” headlined The Post. But the reality is murkier; the president’s accusatory rhetoric perpetuates many myths. …

We’re truly in a silly season in our country. Yesterday we saved $2 Trillion in health care costs. Thank God we elected Obama. Otherwise we wouldn’t have thought of this. Bu, why can’t the miracle workers in the administration save that much everyday? Former Bush economic adviser Keith Hennessy blogs on the subject.

… The President is attempting to claim credit for savings that (a) do not yet exist, (b) are not backed up by any specific changes in industry practices or government policies, and (c) are related to him only in that the groups announced they were adopting his quantitative goal.  For all three of these reasons, the President’s claim that these savings will materialize is wildly unrealistic, and it is absurd to attach a per-family savings number to it.  This is like the Mayor claiming credit for the 40 additional wins now, and telling fans that he will be responsible for the team winning the pennant.  No one should take these claims seriously.

This artfully constructed sentence misleads:

What they’re doing is complementary to and is going to be compatible with a strong, aggressive effort to move health care reform in Washington with an ultimate result of saving health care costs for families, businesses, and the government.

If the groups had specific plans to change industry practices to hit their new quantitative goal, then those changes in private-sector behavior would save money for families, businesses, and government. …

Speaking of health care, it’s mostly the subject of Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Mark Steyn.

… MS: Well, Canadian health care is basically, that’s one of the few countries in the world where private health care is actually illegal. There is a private health care system in Canada. It’s called America.

HH: (laughing)

MS: If you get sick and you want urgent treatment, head south. If you head south from Montreal on what turns into I-87, just south of the border they’ve got a big, new hospital on the New York side pointing north toward Montreal, with a sign on it saying Canadian checks accepted. That’s for patients who can’t get treated under their own health system. For the amount of money they pay in taxes, you should be entitled to three or four terminal illnesses a year. But in fact, when you actually do have a serious illness, you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait, and eventually, the province of Quebec ships you down to Fletcher Allen in Vermont, or Dartmouth Hitchcock in New Hampshire to be treated in a foreign hospital. I think that is, that’s the old joke about the Barack Obama reforms. Where are Canadians going to have to drive to once America gets government health care? …

… HH:  … I’m spending the month of May on American medicine, asking doctors, posting their e-mails at Hughhewitt.com, why do the Democrats want to do this? We have no evidence that it works anywhere. They call it a government option, but it’s really single payer, and it really means rationing. Everywhere you try it, you just mentioned Bulgaria, Great Britain and Canada, it is a disaster. Why do they want to do it?

MS: Well, what is does is, if you’re a Democrat, what it does is it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. It alters the equation. If you provide government health care, then suddenly all the elections, they’re not fought about war and foreign policy, or even big economic questions. They’re suddenly fought about government services, and the level of government services, and that’s all they’re about, because once you get government health care, the citizens’ dependency on government as provider is so fundamentally changed that in effect, every election is fought on left wing terms. And for the Democratic Party, that is a huge, transformative advantage. …

Camille Paglia’s monthly column is here. This month she beats up on some of the right’s talk radio. She seems to suggest things are so bad in the country that someone will make another movie like ”Seven Days in May.”

… Troubled by the increasing rancor of political debate in the U.S., I watched a rented copy of “Seven Days in May” last week. Its paranoid mood, partly created by Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie, minimalist score, captured exactly what I have been sensing lately. There is something dangerous afoot — an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives:

Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America’s identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm. Two days after watching “Seven Days in May,” I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that “any U.S. soldier,” given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?  …

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Some of our favorites thought highly of the Afghan command change. Story from Ramesh Ponnuru in The Corner.

Steve Malanga in City Journal writes, at length, on a serious epidemic OHD – Obsessive Housing Disorder. We devote a lot of space for this today because affirmative action in mortgages was the main reason for last year’s economic collapse. It is instructive to see how long our country has been favoring home ownership.

In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis—and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans—using “the mighty muscle of the federal government,” as the president himself put it—Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford, the Times said.

Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results. The Times’s analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington’s repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they’ve caused. The ideal of homeownership has become so sacrosanct, it seems, that we never learn from these disasters. Instead, we clean them up and then—as if under some strange compulsion—set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing once again. As Washington grapples with the current mortgage crisis, advocates from both parties are already warning the feds not to relax their commitment to expanding homeownership—even if that means reviving the very kinds of programs and institutions that got us into trouble. Not even the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression can cure us of our obsessive housing disorder. …

… We’ve largely forgotten that Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce, initiated the first major Washington campaign to boost homeownership. His motivation was the 1920 census, which had revealed a small dip in ownership rates since 1910—from 45.9 percent to 45.6 percent of all households. …

Clifford May wonders why the left is so enamored with Islamist fascists.

Ask those on the Left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning Left-Islamist alliance?

I know: There are principled individuals on the Left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. The author Paul Berman, unambiguously and unashamedly a man of the Left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications such as The New Republic have not been apologists for radical jihadists.

But The Nation has been soft on Islamism for decades. Back in 1979, editorial-board member Richard Falk welcomed the Iranian revolution, saying it “may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.” Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, longtime Nation contributor Robert Fisk complained that “terrorism” is a “racist” term.

It is no exaggeration to call groups such as MoveOn.org pro-appeasement. Further left on the political spectrum, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sympathizes with both Islamists and the Stalinist regime in North Korea — which is in league with Islamist Iran and its client state, Syria. Meanwhile, Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian-socialist Venezuelan strongman, is developing a strategic alliance with Iran’s ruling mullahs and with Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy. …

The humor section starts with a piece on dachshund racing.

… A wiener dog at full throttle, flying down the lane with his ears inside out and tongue flapping, is a sight worth seeing. And the races return some civic benefits. The Buda event, in which no fewer than 468 dachshunds were taking part, is sponsored by the local Lions Club and has proved to be their best fund-raiser. Proceeds go to scholarships, summer camps and eye care. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Morrissey takes up the subject.

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

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

Jennifer Rubin too.

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

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

Power Line closes the section.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mark Steyn says it is the GOP that is diverse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stimulus”: Too big for cyberspace. …

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

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

Krauthammer’s take.

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

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

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

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

More on Thatcher from the Weekly Standard.

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

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

Manny Lopez of the Detroit News has bailout thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pardon me while I puke. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Barone starts a section on Chrysler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Will has a look at the auto business too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Megan McArdle who blogs at The Atlantic Monthly.

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

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

Part three of Thomas Sowell’s columns on empathy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economist reports we’re doing science on YouTube.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things were indeed complicated. They are always complicated.

That’s the point. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Richard Epstein warns against “empathy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corner posts on Specter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few quick facts. George W. Bush has:

• increased federal spending on education by 60.8 percent;

• increased federal spending on labor by 56 percent;

• increased federal spending on the interior by 23.4 percent;

• increased federal spending on defense by 27.6 percent.

And of course he has:

• created a massive department of homeland security;

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

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

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

Walter Williams takes up grade inflation.

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

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

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Kevin Hassett comments on the Chrysler deal.

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Sowell on the Supreme pick.

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

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

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

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

Stuart Taylor has Supreme thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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David Harsanyi has interesting points of view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White House said the story was false.

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

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

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

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

Reuters has the story too.

Power Line closes out the section.

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

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

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

Roger Simon on the comic relief that is Joe Biden.

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