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We start today like we started last Thursday night, with John Fund introducing us to Scott Brown. This time John has an interview with the new senator.

…Massachusetts’ senator-elect says he had always admired JFK as a president who “wanted to help everybody,” and when he and his staff pored over that president’s speeches his defense of tax cuts leaped out. “That’s what we need now. Across-the-board tax cuts,” he says. “A payroll tax cut would have been better than any government stimulus.” …

…Nonetheless, Mr. Brown is clearly sensitive—and a tad defensive—about his state’s own universal health-care system. It now covers about 95% of the population; but it has also led to the nation’s highest insurance premiums. It is driving hospitals towards bankruptcy and making it more difficult for people to see a doctor. Mr. Brown voted for the system in 2006 when it was proposed by then-GOP Gov. Mitt Romney. “Of course, it can be made better,” Mr. Brown says today. “But it was bipartisan and it fit our local needs. We were being eaten alive by health-care costs.” Universal coverage hasn’t changed that, however. …

…Mr. Brown says it frustrates him that too many politicians still believe that people will be fooled by what they’re proposing. “People aren’t stupid, and leaders should figure out they’re better informed now than ever.” Perhaps that explains how Scott Brown was able to pull off his improbable Cinderella story.

Back in September, picking up on the rising tide of public anger over health reform, excessive spending, and one-party arrogance, he fashioned a simple, compelling narrative to deal with it: no to a rushed, confusing health-care bill, yes to a freeze on federal spending and to introducing some sunlight into government. Mr. Brown repeated it over and over with the inner confidence that his message would eventually resonate. It did.

Mark Steyn discusses The One-Hit Wonder. Is more government Obama’s only answer to every question?

…when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? …

Peter Schiff comments that Obama’s policies worsen the state of the union.

…To lead us back to brighter days, he articulated a vision of a centrally planned recovery, where clean energy and a Soviet style five-year plan to double our exports would make our economy preeminent once more. He fails to understand that the only reason our economy rose to the top in the first place is that the government left it alone.

In the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Since our President cannot even learn from the mistakes of his immediate predecessor, to say nothing of those he made himself while in the Senate or during his first year as president, we are surely doomed to repeat them, perhaps more quickly than Santayana could have imagined.

Rather than tightening the reins on the reckless monetary policy that undermined our savings, diminished our industrial output, inflated asset bubbles, and led to reckless speculation on Wall Street and excess consumption on Main Street, we are loosing them further. Rather than repealing regulations that distort markets and create moral hazards, we are adding new ones that do more of the same. Rather than cutting government spending to reduce the burden it places on our economy, we are increasing both the amount of the spending and the size of the burden. Rather than making government smaller so that the private sector can grow, we are making government bigger and forcing the private sector to shrink. Rather than paying off our debts we are taking on even more. Rather than encouraging people to save we are enticing them to spend. Rather than creating jobs, we are merely creating unemployment benefits.

As a result, instead of seeding the soil for a real recovery we are setting the stage for a prolonged depression.

Randy Barnett makes a number of excellent points in his article in the WSJ. He says that Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address was wrong in judgment and in fact.

…Then there is the substance of the remark itself. It was factually wrong. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United concerned the right of labor unions and domestic corporations, including nonprofits, to express their views about candidates in media such as books, films and TV within 60 days of an election. In short, it concerned freedom of speech; in particular, an independent film critical of Hillary Clinton funded by a nonprofit corporation.

While the Court reversed a 1990 decision allowing such a ban, it left standing current restrictions on foreign nationals and “entities.” Also untouched was a 100-year-old ban on domestic corporate contributions to political campaigns to which the president was presumably referring erroneously.

That is a whole lot to get wrong in 72 sanctimonious words. Clearly, this statement had not been vetted by the president’s legal counsel. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, for example, would never have signed off on such a claim. Never. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks on the matter in the Corner.

The president attacked the Supreme Court at the State of the Union, which I believe is unprecedented. …

The court actually is at that event not for pleasure and not even as a duty — it’s not required — but as a sign of respect for the other branches, for the presidency and the Congress. And to subject it to a direct attack in a setting in which it can’t respond, I thought, was a breach of etiquette which shouldn’t have happened.

On the substance, when the president said that it [the Court] was breaking a 100-year precedent, it was wrong. As even Linda Greenhouse, the liberal Supreme Court reporter of the New York Times pointed out, the ruling 100 years ago was the prohibition of a direct sending of money from corporations into the treasuries of candidates. That remains illegal. It was not touched in this decision. So there was no overturning of that precedent. What it dealt with is a question of corporations funding speech attacking a candidate. …

In the New York Times, Samuel Pisar speaks about his experiences at the hands of the Nazis, and the importance of the Holocaust victims sharing their stories with the world.

…It took a long time for the news of the American-led invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous. The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before.

One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.

We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.

Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun. …

In Friday’s Pickings, Marty Peretz pointed out that Obama had neglected to mention Israel’s significant contribution to Haiti disaster rescue operations. Today, Peretz responds to criticism from Time’s Joe Klein’s.

I am glad Joe Klein tried to take me to task for criticizing the president about his not giving Israel the respect it deserved for its efforts in Haiti. … But, in fact, Obama passed over Israel entirely in his enumeration of especially worthy aid providers. Here’s what Bill Clinton said about Israel’s contribution: “I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital in Haiti.” Israel’s operational unit was, Clinton noted, the only facility capable of performing surgeries and advanced examinations. Meanwhile, that unit is staying on with a change of personnel and is relocating its field hospital to an orphanage. CBS, in a moment of exaggeration, called the Israeli facility the “Rolls-Royce” of the entire aid effort.

Despite his carping, Joe concedes that I was correct. That, in fact, the president should have mentioned Israel and should do much more with the Jewish state to balance his courting of the Arab world (which hasn’t done his presidency or his policies any good).

So what is Klein’s bitch with me? He writes in his “Swampland” blog–yes, that’s what it’s actually called, and I must concede that it’s aptly titled–that Obama’s omission had no meaning and was not the result of any decision at all. So what was it? It was “an oversight.” Oh, I see. This administration which crosses every ‘t’ and dots every ‘i’ just forgot to mention Israel. You know what I say to that?  …

Ben Webster at the Times, UK, reports that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri knew about the glacial inaccuracy for two months before he was pressured into addressing it. Hey, why stop the gravy train?

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. …

In the WaPo, Neely Tucker writes that the meteorite that recently landed in Northern Virginia is stirring up some drama.

…The doctors who were nearly bonked on the head by the thing when it came plummeting from the asteroid belt into Examining Room No. 2 in the Williamsburg Square Family Practice, gave it to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In return, Smithsonian officials planned to give them $5,000 in appreciation. The doctors, Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, planned to donate the money to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. The Smithsonian planned to put the meteorite on prominent display and study it as a 4.5 billion-year-old postcard from the formation of the solar system. …

…But in an extraterrestrial soap opera still unfolding, the landlords of the Virginia building that houses the doctors’ office now say they are the rightful owners of the meteorite. Museum officials said the landlords informed them, midday Thursday, that they were coming to take the stone out of the Smithsonian by sundown. …

…The remnants are valuable to scientists, particularly when discovered just after impact, because they have not been subject to the gravity, erosion and atmospheric pressures of Earth, and thus can offer insights about what the solar system looked like long ago. …

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The election of Scott Brown was the most important event of the last year, and it came out of the blue. Today’s Pickings starts out with a retrospective of our items on that Massachusetts race. The first mention was January 6th when John Fund had an piece in Political Diary, joined by John Steele Gordon with an item in Contentions. It was such a long shot, we almost failed to pass them on thinking there was no sense creating false hopes. It’s fun to look back at these posts and watch things develop. Today we went without the normal pull quotes. We just did our introductions and then the complete posts are after the summary.

Afterwards there are some current items and a great day of cartoons.

January 6th …

John Fund focuses our attention on the Senate race that could, if we are very lucky, be the undoing of Obamacare.

Comments on the same race from John Steele Gordon in Contentions.

January 10th …

We opened with a piece by Mark Steyn about America in decline. Then posted this;

Maybe the country will decline the decline. New poll shows the Mass. US senate race a toss up. We shall see if voters in Massachusetts are going to send a thunderbolt to the White House. Corner post by Daniel Foster with the details.

January 11th …

Scott Rasmussen analyzes the Massachusetts race.

January 12th …

Michael Barone looks at the polls in Massachusetts.

John Fund posts on that race.

Corner post too.

January 13th …

Scott Brown, running for the senate in MA is fast on his feet. The Corner has the story.

January 14th …

Politico gives us another view of the Mass. senate race by looking at the Dem candidate, Martha Coakley.

January 17th …

Jennifer Rubin blogs about Martha Coakley and Tuesday’s vote in Mass.

January 18th …

Power Line posts on dueling rallies in Mass.

Jake Tapper has another report on the Mass. race.

January 19th …

Mark Steyn posts on the Mass. race.

Back to the present day, there was a state of the union speech last night. Here’s a Corner reaction from Marc Thiessen who led two state of the union writing teams.

… It was quite possibly the most partisan, condescending State of the Union address ever. Tonight, Obama was unpresidential. The permanent campaign continues. In the long run it will backfire.

Marty Peretz notices a stunning Obama omission. Seems the One, while listing the Haiti helping countries overlooked the extraordinary Israeli 500 bed hospital contribution David Warren wrote about in January 26th Pickings.

I’ve just read the transcript of the president’s remarks about Haiti, the ones he made on January 15. He noted that, in addition to assistance from the United States, significant aid had also come from “Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others.” Am I missing another country that truly weighed in with truly consequential assistance? Ah, yes. There it is. Right there “among others.” Yes, the country to which I refer is “among others,” that one.

The fact is that, next to our country, Israel sent the largest contingent of trained rescue workers, doctors, and other medical personnel. The Israeli field hospital was the only one on the ground that could perform real surgery, which it did literally hundreds of times, while delivering–as of last week–at least 16 babies, including one premature infant and three caesarians. The first 250-odd Israelis were real professionals, and they were supplemented by others, also professionals. And to these can be added the many organized Jews from the Diaspora who, in solidarity with Israel, also went on a work pilgrimage, an aliyah, in solidarity with Haiti. …

According to Beltway Confidential in Washington Examiner Obama is now saying he had no part in any of the slimy deals for ObamaCare.

… But the Washington Post reported on December 20 that Obama’s top aides were involved in the negotiations with Nelson:

“Schumer, who spent more than 13 hours in Reid’s office Friday, said the Medicaid issue was settled around lunchtime, and the final eight hours of the talks focused on the abortion language. Boxer estimated she spent seven hours in Reid’s offices — without ever once sitting in the same room, even though they were all of 25 steps apart.

Reid and Schumer kept up the “shuttle negotiation” between the leader’s conference room and his top aide’s office, Boxer said. Keenly aware how tense the talks were, the White House dispatched two aides who together have decades of experience in the Senate — Jim Messina and Peter Rouse — to work with Nelson. They relayed their intelligence to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who monitored the talks from a dinner in Georgetown.” …

The Corner provides Krauthammer’s Take on the spending freeze.

It’s not a hatchet. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a Q-tip. It’s a fraud. This is a miniscule amount. It excludes Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs. It excludes all the entitlements, which are 60 percent of the budget. It excludes stimuli past and future — the two thirds of the near trillion-dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded.

The Anchoress has a post that explores some of the increasing strangeness of Obama.

Necessity being the mother of invention, it appears that Barack Obama has needed, and thus invented, the Portable President Kit, consisting of two teleprompters with accompanying equipment and a traveling Don’t-You-Know-Who-I-Am-I-Am-The-President-That’s-Who Podium With Presidential Seal, which Barack Obama takes with him, everywhere he goes.

That means he brings it to an elementary school, for use in addressing the press (something past-and-moronic presidents did not have to do), who are then weirdly dismissed and unable to witness his talk to the children. …

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Abe Greenwald, in Contentions, discusses the president’s pathological self-regard.

…For all this, Obama makes a tremendous show of his cool nerves. “I don’t rattle,” he said. In a way, that’s true. Blaming Republican failings for the Massachusetts Republican victory, for example, is not a sign of being rattled. It’s a sign of disconnected logic, a much more exotic subconscious defense. It requires a lot of psychological reapportioning not to get rattled while flailing on the world stage. Instead of losing your cool, you indulge in excessive denial or projection or sublimation. Something, after all, has got to give. It’s becoming clear that something is giving. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Sherman Frederick put it, “this kind of weird delusion is consistent with the unbounded hubris of Team Obama.”

During the campaign, we heard endlessly about Barack Obama’s “presidential temperament.” But a few observers thought of it more as a strange placidity. What, in fact, is presidential about terminal aloofness? He’s the chief executive of a country that’s fighting two wars, struggling to get out from under an unprecedented financial breakdown, staring a near-nuclear Iran in the face, and on the constant receiving end of terrorist threats. Yet the most fired up we’ve ever seen Obama was when he decided a Cambridge Massachusetts police officer was “stupid” for inconveniencing his friend with a request to show ID. His second most animated moment came when some nobodies crashed his dinner party. What’s worrisome in this pattern is the president’s attachment to the personal. If we acknowledge that Obama weighs everything first by the degree to which it redounds on him personally, his failings are not so mysterious. If Obama has not conveyed to Americans that he hears their concerns, it may be because he doesn’t hear them. He merely hears pointers for his perpetual image upkeep.

Which makes you wonder where it ends. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by external force. But for Obama, it’s all internal, personal. …

Peter Wehner blogs about an arrogant comment spoken by The One.

Rep. Marion Berry, yet another retiring Democrat, gave an interview to Jane Fullerton of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. According to Fullerton:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ …

…Whatever strengths Mr. Obama brought to the job as president — and they now appear to be quite limited — they are overwhelmed by, among other things, his massive ego and otherworldly arrogance. It is leading him and his staff into a state of self-delusion. Mr. Obama’s self-regard is not only utterly unwarranted, especially given his failed first year; it is downright dangerous. He is a man whose wings are made of wax; if he’s not careful, a long fall into the deep blue sea awaits him.

It appears that Obama has not understood anything the electorate has said. Jennifer Rubin comments.

It is only fitting that Obama’s first significant personnel change in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle is to hire back his campaign manager. No, really. …

…Not a new economic team. Not a new chief of staff. Not even a new national security staff to replace the gang that dropped the ball on the Christmas Day bomber. No, with the Obami, it is never about substance or getting the policy right. It’s not about governance. It is about the perpetual campaign. So the campaign manager gets the emergency call.

Plouffe, not coincidentally, authors an op-ed in Cillizza’s paper arguing that ObamaCare was a fine idea, just misunderstood. (”It’s a good plan that’s become a demonized caricature.”) He says Democrats better pass it, or the public won’t understand how wrong Sarah Palin was. (I’m not making that up: “Only if the plan becomes law will the American people see that all the scary things Sarah Palin and others have predicted — such as the so-called death panels — were baseless.”) …

…You see the problem. This is what passes for inspired advice, and this is the personnel slot that Obama fills first. It’s hard to believe that the candidate who ran against stale politics is now, a year into his presidency, a hackneyed pol happy to push this sort of pablum on an already disgusted public. Well, it sure does explain how Obama wound up in his current predicament.

We have a couple of shorts from Streetwise Professor.

Jennifer Rubin thinks that Congress should try to pass some real healthcare reforms.

It is not clear whether anyone has the stomach for more health-care negotiations.  For the Democrats, it would be like revisiting the site of a traumatic auto accident. It is where the pain started, and it will only remind voters where the Democrats got off course. Republicans might just as soon move on to other issues rather than throw Democrats a lifeline. But there are good reasons, both substantive and political, to move forward. …

…In a similar vein, James C. Capretta and Yuval Levin urge Republicans to move forward on three fronts:

First, they should seek to address the problem of insuring Americans with preexisting conditions through state-based high-risk pools, not cumbersome insurance regulations that try to outlaw basic economics.  … Second, they should propose to help doctors and patients limit some of the burden of rising costs with medical malpractice reform. … Third, they should argue that the states be given the lead role in developing more detailed reforms of how and where people get their insurance—to cover more people and slow the rise of costs. The overall goal should be to build well-functioning marketplaces in which insurers and providers compete to deliver the best value to cost-conscious consumers. The federal government should remove bureaucratic obstacles to state experimentation on this front, and offer support where possible, but not design one mammoth new program.

Well, it sounds like they and the Washington Post editors could hammer something out in an afternoon. But alas, the same crew who came up with ObamaCare would be negotiating with the Republicans, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Nevertheless, as a political matter, it makes sense, if not now then in a couple of months, for both Democrats and Republicans to give it a try. Democrats don’t want the last chapter of health-care reform to be the Cornhusker Kickback and the mandate to make everyone buy policies they don’t want from Big Insurance. And Republicans, who are auditioning for control of Congress, want to show what real reform looks like and how the “party of no” was another liberal fable cooked up while Democrats were trying to convince voters the choice was between ObamaCare and nothing at all. (The voters liked the “nothing at all” option better.) …

Jennifer also points out Obamacare was big business and big government railroading the American people.

Mara Liasson on Fox News Sunday makes a key point that the Obami aren’t likely to appreciate:

This is not a revolt of special interests killing the health care bill like with Hillary-care. You have big pharma, you have the insurance companies basically inside the tent, bought into this idea that they’re going to get a big new market in exchange for being highly regulated.

This is not only accurate but also highlights the phoniness of Obama’s newfound populism. The populists — yes, including those “angry” tea party protesters whom Obama pretended to ignore — are arrayed against Obama and his statist, big-government agenda. They aren’t protesting that special interests have blocked health care; they’re mad that an unholy alliance of big business, big labor, and big government has formed with little concern for the interests of seniors (whose Medicare would get slashed) or middle-class voters (who would be taxed on Cadillac plans, forced to buy insurance, etc.). Obama may be donning the lingo of those who elected Scott Brown, but he’s missing the point.

Obama’s own agenda is fundamentally anti-populist. What could be worse for the little guy than to be told to go buy a big, expensive health-care plan from a big insurance company? It’s the sort of thing Democrats would rightly mock Republicans for coming up with, had the GOP the nerve to come up with such a scheme in the first place. …

John Stossel blogs about Obama’s belief that he didn’t talk to the American public enough last year.

Obama said it was his hard work creating public policy that caused him to lose a direct connection to Americans.

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year it’s that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are…”

Excuse me? We know what our core values are. It is presumptuous for a politician to presume that he must lecture us about them. …

…Blogger Denny Hartford asks, Obama needs to talk to us even more?

Talk about revisionism. For this statement comes from a fellow who was constantly on our television screens, in the headlines, and on the magazine covers. Indeed, only 21 days in the whole doggone year did he not have a public appearance or splashy press event!…

Mark Steyn essentially asks if the government can do anything with common sense and efficiency.

A couple of days after the Christmas Day Pantybomber tried to light up his gusset on the approach to Detroit, I was at a small airport in Vermont shuffling through the line to what they call the “sterile” area. Anyway, I handed over my driver’s license and, as he had done with all the previous passengers, the Transportation Security Administration agent examined it. And examined it. And examined it some more. He had a loupe, one of those magnifying glasses jewelers use to examine diamonds for any surface blemishes or internal flaws. In this case, he was deploying it to examine how the ink lies on the paper. And when he’d finished doing that he got out his UV light to study the watermark on my license.

And, looking down at his bald patch as he went about his work with loving care, I was overcome by a sudden urge to point out that nobody had ever blown up a U.S. airliner with a fake driver’s license. Why bother going to all that trouble when a real one is so easy to get? On Sept. 11, 2001, four of the terrorists boarded the flight with genuine, valid picture ID issued by the state of Virginia and obtained through the illegal-immigrant day-workers’ network run out of the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church. Almost two years earlier, Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, had been arrested on the British Columbia-Washington state border travelling on a genuine Canadian passport. In that instance, the terrorist had been stopped because the guard thought he seemed nervous when she looked him in the eye. …

…Question: what do the 9/11 killers, the Shoebomber, the Heathrow plotters, the Pantybomber, the London Tube bombers, the doctors who drove a flaming SUV through the concourse of Glasgow Airport and the would-be killers of Danish cartoonists all have in common? Answer: they’re Muslim. Sometimes they’re Muslims with box cutters, sometimes they’re Muslims with flaming shoes, sometimes they’re Muslims with liquids and gels, sometimes they’re Muslims with fully loaded underwear. But the Muslim bit is a constant. What we used to call a fact. But America’s leaders cannot state that simple fact, and so the TSA is obliged to pretend that all seven billion inhabitants of this planet represent an equal threat. …

David Harsanyi examines Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s sudden change of conviction on Obamacare.

…For a case study on malleable values, take Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. In December, CNN host John King asked him if “every piece of evidence tells you, if you support that bill, you will lose your job, would you cast the vote and lose your job?”

Our hero answered, “Yes.” The senator even commemorated his own gutsiness via press release. He then voted for the Senate health care bill — a surprise to no one.

Well, this week, the political world, as it tends to, was upended. And only hours after the president capitulated to the will of voters and called for a slowdown, Bennet — by mere happenstance, no doubt — chimed in that, you know what, he too believed Congress should slow down. …

…Bennet, like many others, had a magnificent opportunity to demonstrate independence by voting “no” on government-run medicine. Bennet had a chance to overcome his ethical misgivings regarding transparency and fishy deals then. Now, however, he is about political survival — the real message taken from Massachusetts. …

Christopher Hitchens discusses the revelations about the Clintons in Game Change.

The inevitable grumbling and grunting about the use of unattributed quotations in Game Change, the engrossing new campaign book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has been accompanied by a more or less grudging general admission that nobody cited in these pages has so far complained of being misrepresented. To this suggestive point I would add, from comparatively limited experience, that where the authors discuss anything that I know about, they have it right. In fact, what they say is often less sensational than what they might have said.

Surely this is particularly true of the most notorious rapid-response operation in modern political history: the infamous Clinton team and its eager outriders and propagandists. I am astonished at how relatively little attention this has received. If the book is to be believed, then the following things occurred:

1) After his wife’s third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, Bill Clinton telephoned Sen. Edward Kennedy in pursuit of an endorsement and, according to Kennedy’s own account as given to a friend, said of then-Sen. Barack Obama: A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee. …

The Economist has figured out there is a problem with government growth.

…Rising government spending is not the only manifestation of growing state power. The spread of regulation is another. Conservatives tend to blame the growing thicket of rules on unwanted supranational bodies, such as the European Union, and on the ever growing industry of public-sector busybodies who supervise matters like diversity and health and safety. They have a point. But voters, including right-wing ones, often demand more state intrusion: witness the “wars” on terror and drugs, or the spread of CCTV cameras. Mr Bush added an average of 1,000 pages of federal regulations each year he was in office. America now has a quarter of a million people devising and implementing federal rules.

…In these circumstances, hard rules make little sense. But prejudices are still useful—and this newspaper’s prejudice is to look for ways to make the state smaller. That is partly for philosophical reasons: we prefer to give power to individuals, rather than to governments. But pragmatism also comes into it: there is so much pressure on the state to grow (bureaucrats building empires, politicians buying votes, public-sector workers voting for governments that promise bigger budgets for the public sector) that merely limiting the state to its current size means finding cuts.

And cuts can be found. In the corporate world, slimming a workforce by a tenth is standard fare. There’s no reason why governments should not do that too, when it’s needed. Sweden and Canada managed it, and remained pleasant countries with effective public services. Public-sector pay can be cut, given how secure jobs are: in both America and Britain public-sector workers are on average now paid more than private-sector ones. Public-sector pensions are far too generous, in comparison with shrunken private-sector ones. Entitlements can be cut back, most obviously by raising pensionable ages. And the world might well be a greener, more prosperous place if the West’s various agricultural departments disappeared. …

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David Warren takes a philosophical look at our judgments of events, and how they can change.

…The victory of Scott Brown, in the Massachusetts byelection, has brought the Left agenda — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in White House and Congress — to an abrupt halt. And it has done so before that much damage could be done.

In the bluest of all American blue states — the one which already had a taste of progressive “Obamacare” at state level — people realized they’d made a horrible mistake. A vote swing of more than 30 per cent changed the complexion of a Senate seat that had belonged to the Kennedy family since 1952.

Debt is not the answer to economic problems, there or here; more bureaucracy is not the answer; nor is the further empowerment of public sector unions to hold taxpayers to ransom.

And as to terrorism and foreign threats, Mr. Brown was able to play, before the most politically correct constituency in the U.S., variations on the theme: “American taxpayer dollars should go to buying weapons to kill terrorists, not pay for lawyers to defend them.” …

Thomas Sowell celebrates Scott Brown.

Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don’t have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.

Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment — both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media — were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can’t do anything else right, they can count votes.

It was the same story with the government’s health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.

Then Scott Brown got elected to the “Kennedy seat” in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless. …

Mary Katherine Ham blogs in the Weekly Standard about Medicare-related issues.

…But Barack Obama needed senior support on Obamacare, so back in October, he sent out a senior stimulus— $250 per Social Security recipient coming to a total of $13 billion. He didn’t get their support (as we now know), but the checks went out, supported by some Republicans and criticized by deficit hawks and many conservatives.

Today, when answering an Ohio woman’s question, Obama edged indelicately close to the political truth about programs for seniors: “We never forget seniors because they vote at very high levels,” he said to light laughter before realizing the response was a bit crass. He then hastened to add that we appreciate seniors because they “changed our diapers.” It was a cynical moment for the hope-and-change merchant.

The admission is a political truth we all know, and the reason Republicans have (unwisely, I think) painted themselves into a fiscal corner by bashing the idea of Medicare cuts in the fight against Obamacare. What’s telling is how clumsy the president has become in his rhetoric. As the constant pitch for flailing health-care becomes more and more tired, the Great Orator does himself less and less good with each outing.

It’s always interesting to see the MSM eat crow. Mort Zuckerman has another commentary on the deflation of Obama’s popularity. Since the health care monstrosity was such a near miss, we are right to wonder where Zuckerman was when we really needed him.

…Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and healthcare plans were voted on so quickly that the lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama’s chief of staff essentially asserting that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two Band-Aids and an aspirin.

Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country’s anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to “boil the ocean” and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons … and the beat goes on.

This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public’s distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn’t seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama’s lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits. …

The Economist reviews the undoing of The One, and suggests a course correction.

…One thing, though, is clear. The brief era in which the Democrats felt they could push through anything they wanted, courtesy of their thumping majorities in the House and the Senate and their occupancy of the White House, is over. Once Scott Brown is seated in the Senate, Mr Obama will lose his supermajority there, so a determined opposition (which this one certainly seems to be) will be able to block anything it wants to. Making deals with the Republicans once again becomes a necessity, not a luxury. That should not be a disaster; most presidents have to govern with far fewer than 60 Senate votes.

It is not obvious, though, that the Olympian Mr Obama knows how to do this, despite all his fine words along the campaign trail about “a new politics”. What he now has to understand is that he is in a weak position: he needs the Republicans more than they need him. To get what he wants, he will have to learn to give them much more of what they want. For instance, he could now offer the Republicans tort reform and genuine cost-control to bring them on board for a slimmed-down health bill: that might be an offer they could not refuse. Likewise, any hope of getting a climate-change bill through Congress will probably have to involve more nuclear power.

Bill Clinton grasped all this after the disaster of 1994, when the Republicans took back Congress; the result was a stream of good laws that outraged many leftish Democrats, from welfare reform to free-trade deals to deficit-reduction. Mr Clinton won an easy re-election and his presidency, despite his own best efforts to destroy it, was a pretty successful one. Mr Obama, who is now faced with the possibility of a similar electoral catastrophe, needs to copy the great triangulator.

Peter Schiff describes how government intervention has destroyed American Samoa’s economy and standard of living. People who abuse the power of the state never learn the law of unintended consequences.

…For generations, American Samoa offered strong advantages for tuna canners. The close proximity to vast Pacific tuna schools, the islands’ good port facilities, political association with the United States, and an abundance of relatively inexpensive labor (by American standards) enticed StarKist and Chicken of the Sea to locate their primary canning facilities in American Samoa. Although the workers were paid, in recent years, wages that were below the U.S. minimum, given the low taxes and living costs, these wages were enough to offer the average worker a standard of living that was superior to the denizens of other islands in that area of the Pacific.[ii]

But then, in 2007, Washington came to the “rescue.” As part of its efforts to provide a “living wage” for all Americans, Congress passed a law to step up the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour across all U.S. states and territories by 2009.[iii] Understanding that such a law would devastate American Samoa by raising canning costs past the point where the companies could maintain profitability, the non-voting Samoan member of the U.S. House of Representatives convinced Congress to allow an exemption for the islands. However, Republicans raised allegations that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in whose district both Chicken of the Sea and StarKist had corporate offices, had caved to pressure from big donors and was allowing the continued “exploitation” of Samoan workers. Facing a sticky political situation, the exemption was removed.

The Samoan representative desperately sought to fend off what he was sure would be an economic calamity. He asked the Department of Labor to issue a report examining the potential consequences of the law upon the islands’ economy. The report explained that “nearly 80 percent of workers covered by the FLSA earned under $7.25 per hour. By comparison, if the U.S. minimum wage were increased to the level of the 75th percentile of hourly-paid U.S. workers, it would be raised to $16.50 per hour.” Therefore, the study continued, “there is concern that [the tuna canneries] will be closed prior to the escalation of the minimum wage … and that production will be shifted to facilities outside the U.S.” Ultimately, the Department of Labor concluded that “closure of the tuna canneries will cause a total loss of 8,118 jobs – 45.6 percent of total employment.” (emphasis mine) [iv]…

Roger Simon blogs about the latest Climategate “science” scandal.

Sitting here in Barbara Jordan Terminal, waiting for my plane home and surfing the net, I came upon yet more Climategate/Glaciergate news from the the superb ongoing Telegraph coverage. Now they reveal the UN IPCC’s head climate honcho Rajendra Pachauri has hired the very scalawag who lied to us for years that the Himalayan glaciers were receding, the very “finding” from which Pachauri has suddenly been trying to distance himself. (Two weeks ago it was just the opposite. Don’t we all wish we had Pachauri’s bank account?)

So it goes. Anthropogenic Global Warming is rapidly morphing into the greatest scandal in the history of science since the belief in a flat earth – and people had a lot more excuses for that. Not that the Obama administration is even beginning to acknowledge it. Who knows what they say to each other behind the scenes? They have enough to worry about.

But speaking of climate scalawags, how about my Congressman Henry Waxman of Waxman-Markey fame? The reified liberalist lifer undoubtedly is incapable of understanding the science for himself – in fact he admitted as much in front of his committee, saying he “relied” on scientists for that – but it would be funny to watch if and finally they do make a public rollback on this nonsense. Fortunately for sclerotic Henry, this will probably be avoided, since virtually no one is making noises about the risible cap-and-trade legislation any more. And Al Gore appears to have conveniently vanished from the public eye, a John Edwards of climate. (Actually, I’m surprised Gore hasn’t turned up in Haiti to do “pro bono” work to resurrect his reputation.) …

Jeremy Page, in the Times, UK, reviews all the errors discovered in the IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers.

…The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

…The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

…leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalayan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources. …

Walter Russell Meade, in The American Interest, gives more reason to pull the plug on UN funding.

The London Times continues to follow the glaciergate story–and it keeps getting worse.

The latest disclosure: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s (formerly) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known as the IPCC), may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

According the the London Times, Pachauri’s institute got money from the European Union and the US-based Carnegie Corporation to investigate a prediction that never had any scientific backing whatever, and one which all serious glacier scientists instantly recognized as impossible. The bogus claim was frequently repeated in the fundraising efforts — and reiterated as recently as January 15 when the IPCC was already under intense pressure to admit it had blundered.

This is now more than an example of eye-popping incompetence and gross neglect of elementary scientific standards by a body on whose authority the world is expected to make multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting every business and every person on the planet.

It is now, potentially, a criminal issue.  If Pachauri knew the claim was bogus and allowed these grant applications to go forward, he could find himself facing criminal charges. …

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Peter Robinson says hats off to the Tea Partiers.

…In short, our forty-fourth chief executive sought to end America’s two-and-a-third centuries as a truly exceptional nation—more patriotic, more dynamic, more enterprising and freer than any other—to turn the republic into a kind of enervated satellite of Western Europe. Barack Obama’s America, a supersized Belgium.

And but for one vote in the Senate—one vote—Obama would have succeeded. …

…To whom, then, do we owe our gratitude? Broadly speaking: the unstylish, the unschooled and the uncool. In other words, the tea partyers.

If you had to choose one moment as the inception of the tea party movement, you’d select February 19, when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli suddenly and gloriously lost his temper on the air. On the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli, reporting an Obama housing measure, began ranting about the unfairness of penalizing ordinary Americans in order to bail out mortgage deadbeats. What the country needed, Santelli announced, was a “Chicago tea party.” Within hours, tea party Web sites had sprouted online. Meeting one another through Facebook and Twitter, tea partyers began organizing protests. On Tax Day, April 15, more than half a million tea partyers participated in protests at 800 locations around the nation. The soccer mom in Maine, the truck driver in Canton, the schoolteacher in Orlando, the farmer in Chico—all had found their voice. …

…Will Barack Obama follow the example of Bill Clinton, who, after the electorate rebuked him in 1994 by handing control of the House back to the GOP, moved to the center? Or will Obama instead remain on the left and fight, turning the remainder of 2010 into a raw struggle for power? Beats me. But I do know this—and by now Obama knows it, too: The most potent political force in America is still an ordinary citizen who has finally had enough.

David Bernstein blogs in Volokh Conspiracy about one disadvantage to Scott Brown’s victory.

Like others who oppose much of President Obama’s legislative agenda, I’m pleased that Scott Brown won, and even more pleased that he won relying on generally libertarian themes.  There is a downside, however.  From what I can tell, the swing vote for Brown, and more generally against Obama these days, is senior citizens who want to protect Medicare in its current, bloated form; Brown himself argued that he wanted to defend Medicare from Obama.

In a sense, this serves the Democrats right.  For decades, any time a Republican suggested any sensible Medicare reform, the Democrats responded with a barrage of (very effective) political propaganda accusing the Republicans of wanting to eviscerate Medicare.  As a result, Medicare became politically sacrosanct; the only major Republican-led reform of recent years was a massive Medicare expansion under President Bush. …

…The problem, of course, is that Medicare is utterly unsustainable in it present form.  One hopes that a bipartisan solution, that will be blamed on both (or neither) party can be achieved.  More likely, I’m afraid, politicians will have learned that even liberal Democrats dare not mess with Medicare, and the program will gradually  (further) bankrupt the country.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports that key national security departments were not consulted on the decision to give the pantybomber constitutional rights. It appears that Attorney General Eric Holder has a lot to answer for.

…So who decided to treat Abdulmutallab as a civilian, read him the Miranda warning, and provide him with a government-paid lawyer — giving him the right to remain silent and denying the United States potentially valuable intelligence that might have been gained by a military-style interrogation?

This week that simple question — Who? — became more complicated after several of the administration’s top anti-terrorism officials testified on Capitol Hill. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, said he wasn’t consulted before the decision was made. The director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, said he wasn’t consulted, either. The secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said she wasn’t consulted. And the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, said he wasn’t consulted. …

…So on Thursday all seven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Holder asking for a full explanation: Who made the decision and why, and whether the administration now has “a protocol or policy in place for handling al Qaeda terrorists captured in the United States.” …

The WaPo editors originally backed the Obami decision to give terrorist Abdulmutallab the constitutional rights of the US citizens that he was seeking to murder. Now that it has come to light that many departments and agencies were left out of the loop, the editors are questioning the decision. Some liberals believe that if there is a thorough discussion or summit of some kind, the decision must be a good one. Such logic gives further creedence to the conservative belief that liberals do not know how to keep Americans safe.

UMAR FAROUK Abdulmutallab was nabbed in Detroit on board Northwest Flight 253 after trying unsuccessfully to ignite explosives sewn into his underwear. The Obama administration had three options: It could charge him in federal court. It could detain him as an enemy belligerent. Or it could hold him for prolonged questioning and later indict him, ensuring that nothing Mr. Abdulmutallab said during questioning was used against him in court.

It is now clear that the administration did not give serious thought to anything but Door No. 1. This was myopic, irresponsible and potentially dangerous.

…In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, all said they were not asked to weigh in on how best to deal with Mr. Abdulmutallab. Some intelligence officials, including personnel from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were included in briefings by the Justice Department before Mr. Abdulmutallab was charged. These sessions did provide an opportunity for those attending to debate the merits of detention vs. prosecution. According to sources with knowledge of the discussions, no one questioned the approach or raised the possibility of taking more time to question the suspect. This makes the administration’s approach even more worrisome than it would have been had intelligence personnel been cut out of the process altogether. …

Stephen Spruiell takes exception to Paul Krugman’s assessment of the economy. There’s a Krugman quote here from 2002 when he was suggesting the Fed should create a housing bubble. So, how’d that work out?

…And who could forget this gem from 2002?

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

(Important note: I did not make that one up.)

Can we please stop taking recession-fighting advice from Paul Krugman? Really. Any day now.

Sabrina Eaton in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer writes about an Obama fan/activist using deception to get letters to the editor published.

Ellie Light sure gets around.

In recent weeks, Light has published virtually identical “Letters to the Editor” in support of President Barack Obama in more than a dozen newspapers. Every letter claimed a different residence for Light that happened to be in the newspaper’s circulation area.

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.

…Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro. Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses. …

Seems the pajamas news media-types are helping root out another liberal deception. Patterico is compiling the newspapers and websites that published the Ellie Light letter. Can we get some Russian hackers to track “Ellie Light” down?

…Like Ben Smith at Politico.

And the Washington Times.

And a blog at USA Today.

And the Sheboygan Press in Wisconsin. And the Stevens Point Journal in Wisconsin — listing an address of Algoma, Wisconsin.

…And in TheUnion.com, listing an address of Grass Valley, CA.

…On an unrelated note, recall that recently, Glenn Greenwald flagged the fact that Obama’s pal (and head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) Cass Sunstein recently wrote this paper suggesting something sounding a lot like Astroturfing:

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).

…P.S. If you find other examples, please leave them in comments with a link. Many more updates in the extended entry.

…And my current favorite so far, The Bangkok Post — the “World’s Window to Thailand.” No hometown provided.

Eric at Classical Values has a little fun with “Ellie Light”. You’ll have to see the photo to get the joke.

Chris Hafner at Car Lust Blog celebrates the internal combustion engine and the gasoline-powered car.

…Think of a one-gallon container of liquid–a typical milk container, for example. With only that much gasoline, depending on conditions and driving style, a brand new Honda Fit will drive 40 miles, possibly more, before it runs out of fuel. …

In absolute terms, 40 miles is a significant amount of distance. Think of the most common means of transportation before cars became common. Forty miles represents six hours of travel from a sailing ship traveling at a steady six knots. It represents five hours of travel from a horse trotting at a steady eight mph. It represents two days of travel from a cross-country wagon train. A late 19th-century train could cover 40 miles distance nearly as quickly as the Fit, but it would would need 1,000-4,000 pounds of coal to do so.

Let’s take a look at the other side of the equation. The Fit is capable of covering those 40 miles on one gallon of fuel, within 40 minutes or less, without drama, and in comfort. The driver would be swaddled in an environment that includes a comfortably upholstered chair, a high-quality sound system with decent acoustics, and with filtered and climate-controlled air. And while we consider the Fit a relatively small and efficient car, it is capable of remarkable utility–it is a 2,500-pound car with a modern safety cage, seating for a family of five, and room for gear. It only takes eight fill-ups and 80 gallons of gas, costing the driver roughly $240, to propel this 2,500-pound object from one side of this continent to the other. That’s an amazing accomplishment for a relatively small amount of fuel. …

Rob Long in the WSJ tells of the passing of a pioneer in the field of hypnotism.

…Dr. Herbert Spiegel—a Freudian analyst who became a trailblazing hypnotist—had died at 95.

Dr. Spiegel treated anxiety, smoking, posttraumatic stress syndrome—and a host of other disorders that I probably also have—with hypnosis. In the 19th century, doctors had experimented with the method—Franz Mesmer more or less invented hypnosis, and Sigmund Freud practiced it in his early days. …

…And there was something disturbing about Dr. Spiegel, too: his efficiency. He put you under, you had a therapeutic conversation, he snapped his fingers, and . . . done. Pay the lady on the way out.

Actors came to him for help with stage fright. People afraid to fly found themselves, after treatment, happily boarding planes. Smokers were cured. In other words, people got better.

And Dr. Spiegel got famous. Well, not famous famous, but known in Manhattan media and political circles as an interesting, effective and fast-acting healer. He even had a regular table at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side hangout with its heyday in the ’60s and ’70s. The names of his clients are confidential, yet when one recalls a few of the more notorious Elaine’s regulars—Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and George Steinbrenner among them—it’s clear he could have had a lot to work with. …

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In the Corner, John Miller lists all the reasons why liberals have had a tough week.

1. The Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, sending their health-care takeover efforts into a tailspin.

2. The Supreme Court wiped out the central feature of McCain-Feingold, in a victory for free speech.

3. Air America declared bankruptcy.

UPDATE: A reader notes the arrival of this anniversary:

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. …

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 22, 2009. …

Mark Steyn discusses trucks and other liberal issues.

…”The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry, and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.” …

…Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.

…As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell To Obama.” …

…The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. …

Mort Zuckerman is one of the disenchanted liberals.

…In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.

Five states got deals on health care—one of them was Harry Reid’s. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It’s a bizarre form of political corruption. It’s bribery. I suppose they could say, that’s the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it. …

…One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.” …

Der Spiegel reviews commentary from German newspapers on the political landscape that Obama faces.

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

“Of course the president rejects the interpretation that the Massachusetts election was a referendum on his first year in the White House. But he cannot ignore the fact that his health care reform package is not popular, the situation of the country’s finances is seen as threatening and many voters blame the high unemployment rate on the party in power — on the Democrats, led by Obama. The result is a second year in office full of very different challenges than the first. To save what there is to be saved, Obama will have to be prepared to fashion a bipartisan compromise on health care — a compromise with a Republican Party which has tasted blood and can now dream once again about a return to power.”

Charles Krauthammer shreds the liberal spin.

…After Coakley’s defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that … it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull’s-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don’t Mirandize terrorists. Don’t raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests. …

More bad news for Obama. Yuval Levin blogs about it in the Corner.

…You know an administration is in trouble when prominent officials let it be known to the press that they disagreed with one of the president’s major decisions. It happens to every president, and it’s always a very bad sign. Usually it comes after some policy goes terribly awry, and sends senior advisors running for cover. But sometimes, in the very worst cases, it happens as soon as a decision is made, before the policy in question has even had a chance to be tested—and it reveals more than dissent about one particular decision, but a broader sense that things are not well at the top.

That is why this Reuters story from yesterday was so striking. It describes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s opposition to the bank limits President Obama announced. It seems that on the very day of the announcement, Geithner decided he needed to dispatch people close to him to make it known (anonymously) that he did not agree with the decision, and indeed that he agreed with the two key arguments offered by its staunchest critics. …

Jonah Goldberg comments on Yuval Levin’s post.

Reading Yuval’s post about the Treasury Secretary’s unease with the president’s bank plan, it seems pretty obvious that the political shop is running policy at the White House. …

…. But it does remind me that a lot of folks thought it was just terrible for Karl Rove to have any role in policy formation in the White House. Whatever the merits of this bank plan, is there any doubt that David Axelrod is playing just such a role here?

However galling the cynicism, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of the White House’s turn may be, I’m hardly scandalized that politics is influencing policy. That’s what politics is all about. My bigger concern is that such populist scapegoating rarely makes for good policy over the long haul.

Roger Simon is concerned about Obama’s next moves.

I don’t think it’s accident that the Stock Market is tanking after a very short rally that coincided with the then coming victory of Scott Brown. The business world is scared – as is evidently our Secretary of the Treasury who has wandered about as far off the reservation as cabinet officers normally go, allowing the world to know his skepticism about Obama’s new reining in of the banks. (How long before Geithner goes under the bus now?)

The scary thing is that many of us believe the President hardly knows much of anything, certainly not economics, and is surrounded by an increasingly paranoid and defensive group of advisers. It’s shades of Nixon, but worse. Tricky Dick, at least, knew what he was doing and could accomplish things. Obama is the biggest windbag to ever ascend to the presidency. He has no idea what he is doing and now things are getting rough. Frankly, I’m worried for our country because this man doesn’t really understand what the public is telling him. He just thinks we’re “angry.” He’s wrong – we’re furious and we’re furious because he blames everyone but himself and seems psychologically incapable of taking responsibility. One can imagine a ninety-year old Obama stumbling around in some rest home shaking his walking stick at George Bush. But for the moment Bush is being replaced boy. Now evidently it’s the banks’ fault. The evil bankers are to blame. It’s capitalism, stupid.

Problem is, we’ve been there, done that, a thousand times. The alternative to capitalism is socialism and it has never worked. Not once, in all its myriad permutations. In fact, it most often hurts those it was intended to help, bankrupting the society and leaving the lower classes destitute. The Soviet Union collapsed. China was deeply impoverished until it turned essentially capitalistic . Everybody knows that now, and has for years, except maybe our president. He’s after the banks and is so clueless he thinks that will impress us. Of course, it won’t. Nobody believes anything he says anymore. But he is the President and he can take executive actions. And with those actions, like a wounded animal, he may pull all of us down with him. I am deeply afraid of that because Barack Obama has never had to deal with any personal adversity in his adult life. He has lived a completely privileged existence. This is a first for him. There’s no telling how he will behave. Watch out, buckle up and hold on to your seats.

Jennifer Rubin discusses some comments that will make you cringe.

In an interview this week Obama admits that he really didn’t have a clue on how the Middle East works:

I’ll be honest with you. A: This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get. …

Really hard?? The hubris is remarkable, isn’t it? One supposes that he imagined all the dolts who preceded him in the Oval Office to just not have been smart enough or him enough to get the job done. It seems as though he “overestimated” the impact of his mere presence on the parties. Really, who knew there were underlying political realities that would render the parties immune to his charms? But there is no sign he’s going to do much, if anything, differently (”we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution”). But now he knows it’s hard.

…He is, it seems, so fixed in his preconceptions of the word that basic geopolitical realities come as a surprise or disappointment. If only the world worked the way his university-professor pals and George Mitchell told him it would. …

In Commentary, Michael Totten says that the Middle East has been hard for a long time.

…The Middle East’s “Berlin Wall,” so to speak, may have cracked, but it didn’t fall. Iraq all but dismembered itself after its successful election. Hezbollah blew up the Levant and put Lebanon’s “March 14″ revolution on ice. Palestinians elected Hamas and transformed Gaza into a suppurating jihad state. It could be a while before I allow myself to feel upbeat and sunny again. The Middle East makes suckers of everyone who feels upbeat and sunny.

…The entire Middle East is difficult and dysfunctional. There is no peaceful political mainstream. Ethnic and religious violence is normal — not just between Arabs and Israelis, but also between Arabs and Persians, Arabs and Kurds, Kurds and Turks, Kurds and Persians, Muslims and Christians, and Sunnis and Shias. The idea that peace is likely to break out there any time soon was memorably ridiculed in the Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. “They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years,” said the main character’s mother. “It can’t be much longer.” …

…If the “peace process” is sure to fail right now — and it is — announcing it as a foreign-policy priority only sets Obama up as a weak leader who can’t deliver the goods. His credibility suffers, and so does America’s leverage. He ought to focus on conflict management and damage control, and try not to make anything worse.

David Harsanyi hits a home run.

…Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).

This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. …

…Now, I am under no grand illusions about democracy. The electorate can be mercurial and irrational — as nearly every election proves. Nor do I believe any ethical politician should abandon his or her core values simply because polls tell them it would be expedient.

I say, keep fighting, Mr. President. Those of us who believe in capitalism need you. …

David Warren offers his thoughts on Haiti and on giving.

…Yet if our intention is to help, both short term and longer, our emphasis should not be on doing things that make us feel good about ourselves, but instead on what works. …

…This problem is exacerbated by our “culture of narcissism,” which focuses on the happyface of good intentions. Good intentions are never enough, prudence is required to convert them into useful action, yet prudence is the last thing on the minds of people jostled by headlines into a need to “do something now.”

The impulse to “write a cheque” to assuage conscience becomes more and more deeply engrained in our psyches, as we abandon the moral and spiritual underpinnings of our civilization, and indulge the habit of quantifying each issue by the amount of money we throw at it. My advice to the people who have asked me what they can most usefully do to help is, start thinking ahead to the next disaster. For Port-au-Prince is already bottlenecked with supplies. …

Leading off the cartoons is a Corner Post from Jack Fowler.

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner contrasts Bush and Obama in foreign policy.

…Hence, the hallmarks of Obama’s foreign policy have been the naive engagement of an array of odious dictatorial regimes, grovelling apologies before foreign audiences, lamb-like timidity in the face of intimidation, the ending of the War on Terror, and the trashing of traditional alliances. But has this liberal foreign affairs revolution succeeded in advancing American interests and security across the globe? Hardly. Under Obama’s leadership the United States now appears significantly weaker and far more vulnerable, faced with an array of deadly threats that grow more menacing by the day.

When President Bush was in power he may not have been hugely popular abroad, but the United States was widely feared on the world stage, her enemies were hunted to the ends of the earth, and her real allies were treated with respect. As Barack Obama is discovering to his cost, the world stage is not an extension of the set of American Idol, and global leadership is not about winning popularity contests. The doctrine of “smart power” looks increasingly like an empty shell, a naive approach that has reaped no dividends and threatens to usher in an era of American decline, unless it is reversed.

I’ve outlined below ten areas where George W. Bush’s international leadership was considerably smarter than that of his successor. As I noted in an article at the end of the Bush presidency, ten or twenty years from now, historians will view Bush’s actions on the world stage in a more favourable light. President Bush, like Ronald Reagan, understood that American global leadership rests heavily upon the projection of hard power as well as diplomacy, and the United States can only lead effectively if it is willing to aggressively confront its enemies and defeat them. …

Spengler discusses what has been on the minds of voters, and lays out some of the strategies he feels will help the economic situation.

…When Reagan took office in 1981, the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s, America had a 10% savings rate, the current account was in surplus, and America was the world’s largest net creditor nation. Reagan was able to cut taxes and finance an enormous budget deficit because the world’s demand for US Treasury securities was correspondingly large. In 2010, the baby boomers are in their 50s and 60s, America has saved nothing for a decade, the current account remains in severe deficit and the world is choking on the existing supply of Treasury securities. Cutting taxes to stimulate the economy is not as simple this time round.

Professor Reuven Brenner and I argued in the December 2009 issue of First Things that fundamental changes in American economic policy are required to emerge from the Great Recession. We proposed that the United States fix the dollar to the Chinese yuan and other currencies in order to re-orient trade flows to the developing world. We added, “We have been borrowing in order to consume; we need now to save in order to invest. We need to shift the tax burden, moving it away from savings and investment and toward consumption. We should replace individual and corporate income taxes with consumption-based taxes.”

Americans need to be told that they will need to invest before they can consume, and that the cure will take years rather than months to take effect. It’s not a happy message, and no one in politics is willing to deliver it – if indeed anyone in politics understands it.

The WSJ editors have an interesting piece on where Americans are moving.

Every day thousands of Americans vote with their feet on the best places to live and work, and these migration patterns can tell a lot about state economies—and economic policies. United Van Lines has released its annual report for 2009, based on those the moving company has relocated across one state line to another…

…The next two biggest net losers were Illinois and New Jersey, while California and New York also continued to have far more departures than arrivals.

Ten states gained net arrivals: Oregon, Arkansas, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Texas and North Carolina. Of those, only Oregon sways decidedly to the political left and it has benefited from the economic refugees fleeing California.

…As for the biggest winner, well, our readers won’t be surprised to learn that it was Washington, D.C. by a large margin. United Van Lines moved nearly seven families to the federal city last year for every three it moved out. As always when the feds gear up the income redistribution machine, the imperial city and its denizens get a big cut of the action. …

Peter Wehner gives his thoughts on the political landscape after the Massachusetts special election.

4. I suspect we will see a damaging split emerge between the Democratic leadership — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid — and other Democratic lawmakers. The former will talk tough; they will say its time to redouble their efforts, that now is not the time to turn away from their agenda, that reconsidering it in the wake of the Massachusetts election would be a sign of weakness and a path to defeat in November. “This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official told Politico.com. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.”

Many Democratic lawmakers will think this counsel to be deeply unwise, bordering on insane. They will argue that the public has sent a message as emphatically as it possibly can: embracing ObamaCare and Obamaism is politically lethal. Give it up. And so the Democratic caucus will politely — and in some instances not-so-politely — decline to follow Obama, Reid, and Pelosi over a cliff.

6. There is a slew of bad data for Democrats to pour through in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s victory. But here is the most frightening data point of all: Mr. Brown won unaffiliated voters by a margin of 73 percent to 25 percent, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen. This 3-to-1 margin comes after independents broke for Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie by 2-to-1 margins in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively. This is a stunning, and for Democrats an ominous, development. More than anything else, it explains why they now face the prospect of losing both the House and the Senate in November.

8. The radiating effects of the Massachusetts election will be enormous, including its effects on GOP recruitment and Democrats who opt to stay on (or retire to) the sidelines.

If you are a Republican, you now understand that this may be your best opportunity ever to run and to win; outstanding candidates who might otherwise not throw their hat into the ring will now do so. Conversely, many well-qualified Democrats, seeing the Category Five storm that is now hitting shore, will decide to take a pass at a run. We are seeing a virtuous cycle and a vicious cycle play itself out simultaneously. …

John Steele Gordon points out the irony of the political maneuvering by the Massachusetts legislators.

Among the many lessons to be learned from yesterday’s election in Massachusetts is that politicians should not play games with established law for short-term political advantage.

Like most states, Massachusetts law called for the governor to appoint someone to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat until the next general election. But in 2004, Republican Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, and Democratic Senator John Kerry was running for president. To prevent Romney from appointing a Republican in the event of a Kerry victory, a bill was submitted to the General Court (as Massachusetts calls its legislature) to strip the governor of this power and require a special election to be held from 145 to 160 days after the seat became vacant. The bill stalled in the legislature, however, until Senator Ted Kennedy personally pushed for its passage. Governor Romney vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden by the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. …

…Had the Massachusetts Democrats and Senator Kennedy simply left the law alone in 2004, this election would not have taken place, and the Democrats’ 60-seat majority in the Senate would still be intact. Had the Massachusetts Democrats, Senator Kennedy, and President Obama left the law alone in 2009, the Senate would have been forced to bargain with Republicans to secure passage of the health-care bill. A bill might have emerged that would have had more public support, and the president and the Democrats might have escaped an epic political disaster.

Jennifer Rubin wonders whether any of the ersatz political advisors at the White House will get the boot.

Yuval Levin raises an interesting point about the Obami:

They have made it impossible for themselves to change course without a massive loss of face and of political capital. But however costly, that change will now need to come. You have to wonder if the people responsible for setting this course—and especially Rahm Emanuel and the House and Senate leadership—will still be standing when it’s all done with.

Obama isn’t big on firing people. It took a weekend of angst before Van Jones was shown the door. No one lost his job over the national security debacle that resulted in the Christmas Day near-catastrophe. So will he now clean house, after his domestic agenda has blown up in the Bluest State, his approval rating has plummeted, his party has formed a circular firing squad, and his congressional majorities are at risk? It seems that the Obama political brain trust — which thought its expertise extended to Afghanistan war strategy and the Middle East “peace process” — wasn’t very good at the jobs in which they were supposedly expert. Rahm Emanuel understood Congress. David Axelrod understood political salesmanship. But they, along with Obama of course, made a perfect mess in only a year.

It might be smart for Obama to toss some of them out. For starters, it might elevate the tone of the White House, which has been languishing in the partisan sewers for a year. And it might signal to panicked Democrats in the House and Senate that Obama doesn’t intend to plow them under. But most of all, it would be a message to the country that the president has learned a lesson and is setting a new direction. …

Rubin continues her thoughts on White House housecleaning.

Dana Milbank reminds me that there’s another White House aide who deserves to be shown the door: the ever-snide Robert Gibbs. Milbank explains:

Gibbs acts as though he’s playing himself in the movie version of his job. In this imaginary film, he is the smart-alecky press secretary, offering zippy comebacks and cracking jokes to make his questioners look ridiculous. It’s no great feat to make reporters look bad, but this act also sends a televised image of a cocksure White House to ordinary Americans watching at home.

This is the most visible manifestation of a larger problem the Obama White House has. Many Obama loyalists from the 2008 race still seem, after a year on the job, to be having trouble exiting campaign mode. They sometimes appear to be running a taxpayer-funded rapid-response operation.

Sometimes? We’ve been treated to attacks from Gibbs on Fox, Gallup, radio talk-show hosts, and CNBC reporters. As Milbank describes, he waves off reporters’ legitimate inquiries with the back of his hand — the perfect metaphor for the contempt with which this White House treats critics.

The WSJ has an editorial on what your taxes (and the taxes of your children and grandchildren) are paying for. Apparently just because his climate theory was debunked doesn’t mean that Michael Mann shouldn’t receive more taxpayer dollars to create more climate science baloney.

As for stimulus jobs—whether “saved” or “created”—we thought readers might be interested to know whose employment they are sustaining. More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.

Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public.

Mr. Mann came by his grants via the National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money. Last June, the foundation approved a $541,184 grant to fund work “Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing,” which will contribute “to the understanding of abrupt climate change.” Principal investigator? Michael Mann. …

So, what does a liberal think of the Mass. mess? John Judis, senior editor of the New Republic thinks Obama’s lucky to get the message about his disastrous policies so soon.

Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won–and by ten points or more.

There were no network exits polls, only a limited sample by Rasmussen , but some of the polls taken beforehand bear out Obama’s role in Coakley’s defeat. In the final January 17 poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning North Carolina outfit that picked up Brown’s surge early in the month, 20 percent of the respondents who voted for Obama in 2008 said they’d vote for Brown. Among those voters, only 22 percent approved of Obama’s presidency, and only 13 percent backed his health care plan. (Click here to read Thomas B. Edsall: ”Why Health Care is the Graveyard of Democratic Dreams.”)

In fact, the percent of 2008 Obama voters who were backing Brown almost perfectly matched the percentage who were dissatisfied with Obama’s health care plan, which Brown himself singled out for criticism in his campaign. According to the Rasmussen exit sample, 52 percent of Brown voters rated health care as their top issue–a clear indication that they were viewing the election in national and not merely state terms. …

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Abby Thernstrom blogs about the change in the political scene in Massachusetts.

…When we left the greater Cambridge fallout area two years ago and migrated to Virginia, we were well-known and heartily disliked by the Harvard chosen — although not by Steve’s adoring students. But our car in a Harvard parking lot regularly prompted questions about a little American flag decal; it was a clear sign of disloyalty to the “right” values. The Harvard version of unpatriotic. We had long ceased to be invited to Harvard dinner parties. Steve had remained unfailingly polite and respectful; not me.

But every election night we had a tiny crowd of Republican intellectuals over to watch returns. Roughly 25 friends would come. And everyone who walked in the door would mutter some variation on the theme: OMG, you must have every Republican intellectual in the whole state here.

Harvard is undoubtedly unchanged, but my old friends from that tiny crowd tell me the atmosphere in much of the state the last few days has been nothing short of electrifying. One pal recently drove through an intersection in suburban Wayland; on all four corners supporters held Scott Brown signs high, despite the freezing weather. Cars were honking in celebration. Others have been drawing the same picture. …

In the Corner, Shannen Coffin has a post on the Dems political maneuverings in the Massachusetts state legislature.

Massachusetts Democrats changed the rules of the game after Ted Kennedy’s death, granting to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint an interim Senator pending today’s special election — a power that it had expressly denied to Republican Governor Mit Romney in the 2004 election cycle.  The reason was to maintain the 60th vote on the President’s health care legislation and cement Ted Kennedy’s “legacy.”   The plan didn’t work on that front, since Democrats couldn’t come to an agreement on the specifics of the bill in the time allotted.  And the political maneuvering in the State legislature had enormous political ramifications, feeding a sense of foul play by the Democratic establishment.   As much as anything, this unfair play helped propel Scott Brown to a competitive position — and he and Martha Coakley have done the rest.  We’ll find out tonight whether Brown will succeed, but you have to wonder whether some state Democrats are second-guessing their decision to change the rules of the game after Kennedy’s death.

Rich Lowry posts an e-mail exchange with a reader, in the Corner.

E-mail:

Hey Rich. I haven’t seen anyone point out that if Scott Brown wins, he’s the logical choice for the nominee for President in 2012. A state senator, followed by 2 years of experience in the US Senate! Aren’t those the job requirements now?

…

I’m not so sure.  Was Brown ever a community organizer?

Also he needs to be careful not to actually *serve* in the US Senate, but rather to start running for President tomorrow morning and show up for his day job as little as humanly possible.  That will help him avoid any inconvenient legislative fingerprints for the haters to pick away at.  (Come to think of it, his actual service in the state legislature, where he worked instead of just killing time until he could reach for the next rung on the ladder, may disqualify him entirely.)

Jonah Goldberg comments on Rich Lowry’s post.

Rich — It’s funny, I had a very similar conversation with the missus last night.

About a year ago, I was up in New York to do a panel for Commentary magazine (I was sitting in for you, I believe). I was talking to John Podhoretz beforehand and he was saying how Bill Kristol was probably right: The lesson of Barack Obama may well be that none of us have even heard of the next Republican standard-bearer. After all, prior to his 2004 DNC keynote, Obama was a political “nobody,” too. A year ago, I thought how implausible it was that there really could be someone who was not a familiar name, at least to professional political junkies, could be the next GOP nominee. Then again, I also thought that the Democrats were going to be in strong shape for a very long time. But here we are.

Now, I do not actually think that Brown — if he wins — is obvious presidential material (Indeed, I think a senator should actually be a senator for a while, rather than use the title to run for president as Obama did).

But how well known was Bob McDonnell a year ago? The point is we are living in amazingly fluid times, politically. Who knows what’s coming next?

Mark Steyn likes Scott Brown’s speechwriters.

…By contrast, Scott Brown seems to deliver very nice lines on a regular basis:

“It’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s the people’s seat”: Brilliant. Popular democracy vs the House-of-Lords Democrats.

“Scott Brown believes in evolution, but in the case of Bob Kerrey he’s willing to make an exception”: Lovely. A genial throwaway response to a demented line of attack that makes the attacker look ridiculous.

“The leader of the free world is talking about my truck“: Bullseye. It underlines the David-vs-Goliath nature of the race, and also reminds you that, by having to intervene to prop up his flailing candidate, the President of the United States demeaned himself. …

From the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden has election thoughts.

… So if Scott Brown does beat Martha Coakley what will it mean? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Health care reform is dead. Even if there was (and it’s doubtful) some procedural way the Democrats could push it through, such a move would be political suicide.

2. Obama will have failed to achieve his signature reform despite Democrats having had a healthy majority in the House and a 60:40 advantage in the Senate. That is a huge blow and could render him not just a one-term President but a one-year President in terms of his political authority.

3. Obama’s will have failed to achieve his signature reform in such a way as to destroy any chances of fulfilling a signature pledge: to bring a new bipartisanship to Washington. By pushing through a bill on a party-line vote in the Senate, he left himself vulnerable to an electoral surprise or a death – it was a win-or-bust strategy. …

Also from the Telegraph, Gerald Warner.

It takes a real mental effort to come to terms with the notion of a man named Brown being an effective and worthwhile politician, but in Massachusetts that is the reality. Brown created an electoral insurgency. He articulated all the resentment of decent Americans against the liberal establishment. In doing so he has overturned the Democrats’ 60-seat presence in the Senate which until last night made them invulnerable to a Republican filibuster and made it possible for them to railroad Obama’s insane, statist, totalitarian health care “reforms” through Congress.

No more. If the Democrats even attempted to use procedural tricks to rush the healthcare dog’s breakfast through before Brown takes his seat, America would not stand for such a blatant evasion of the popular will on so controversial a measure. It simply isn’t going to happen. Nor is any of the rest of the Obama fantasy. The Republicans are now poised to take control of the House in November. Obama has had his year of power, but now he is a busted flush.

And what a year it was. Retreat, abasement and blunders in every area of foreign policy, from North Korea to sell-out to Russia on nuclear weapons. This blog always insisted Obama would be a one-term president. Even I, however, had not counted on his being a one-year wonder. Even Anne of the Thousand Days had a longer run than that. Americans have proved they can spot a phoney in 12 months. That shames Britain’s record: the deluded electorate here voted three times for the Great Charlatan Blair.

To see the pricking of the Obama balloon is delightful. Congratulations, America. Happy anniversary, Mr President.

The WSJ editors comment on the Left’s self-destruction.

…What explains this precipitous political fall? Democrats and their media allies attribute it to GOP obstructionism, though Republicans lack the votes to stop anything by themselves. Or they blame their own Blue Dogs, who haven’t stopped or even significantly modified any legislation of consequence.

Or they blame an economic agenda that wasn’t populist or liberal enough because it didn’t nationalize banks and spend even more on “stimulus.” It takes a special kind of delusion to believe, amid a popular revolt against too much government spending and debt, that another $1 trillion would have made all the difference. But that’s the latest left-wing theme. …

…The lesson of Mr. Obama’s lost first year is that an economic crisis is a terrible thing to exploit. As they have each time in the last 40 years that they have had total control of Washington, Democrats are proving again that America can’t be successfully governed from the left. If that is the lesson Mr. Obama learns from Massachusetts, he might still salvage his Presidency.

Mike Allen’s piece in Politico shows that liberals are going to try the same community-activist inspired political tactics.

…But the president’s advisers plan to spin it as a validation of the underdog arguments that fueled Obama’s insurgent candidacy.

“The painstaking campaign for change over two years in 2007 and 2008 has become a painstaking effort in the White House, too,” the official said. “The old habits of Washington aren’t going away easy.” …

…Already Obama’s rhetoric is reflecting what aides acknowledge is a strong undercurrent of populist anger. By these lights, impatience with the status quo — rather than any rightward turn in the mood of the electorate — is what would fuel a Brown victory.

Reflecting his new tone, Obama last week announced a new fee on big banks by vowing, “We want our money back, and we’re going to get it.”…

Jennifer Rubin comments on one of the divisive issues in Obamacare.

The Democrats have long insisted that ObamaCare can be sold to the public if only the poor, uninformed masses understood what was in it. But with every revelation about the specifics of ObamaCare, one is obliged to exclaim, “How could they vote for that?” A case in point is Medicare Advantage. Jeffrey Anderson explains:

According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, in its real first ten years (2014 to 2023), Obamacare would cut Medicare Advantage benefits by $214 billion. Medicare Advantage plans vary by company and region, so cuts would vary from person to person. But, on average, Obamacare would cut Medicare Advantage enrollee’s benefits by $21,000 — per person.

As Anderson notes, Medicare Advantage — which allows patients to choose their own private providers — won’t be fairly and equally administered if the Cash for Cloture backroom deals go into effect. “Thanks to the ‘Gator Aid’ deal that Sen. Harry Reid struck behind closed doors with Sen. Bill Nelson, seniors in South Florida would be exempt.” So seniors in California represented by Sen. Barbara Boxer and those in Pennsylvania who rely on Sen. Arlen Specter to look out for them will get a worse deal, and worse health-care coverage, than the Gator Aided seniors. Where’s the “reform” in that? …

Bret Stephens explains how aid given to a poor country destroys the local economy.

…For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

…But this still fails to get at the real problem of aid to Haiti, which has less to do with Haiti than it does with the effects of aid itself. “The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape,” James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, told Der Spiegel in 2005. “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

Take something as seemingly straightforward as food aid. “At some point,” Mr. Shikwati explains, “this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the U.N.’s World Food Program.” …

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Mark Steyn posts on the Mass. race.

… However things turn out, the Dems have got a fright. I would be surprised if many candidates in November are quite the same spectacular combination of gaffe-prone stupidity and arrogance as Martha Coakley. But, granted that, I was surprised at how incompetent the Democrat machine was. On Sunday, the President veered between dull and really, really lousy. He did what he did with his Olympics pitch in Copenhagen – he took the extraordinary step of flying in to save the day, and then when he got there thought he could wing it. He, or at any rate his minders, should know by now that his rhetoric is seriously underperforming – “incoherent without his teleprompter and a bore with it“. Yet his staff allow him to stagger around as the last believer in his own magic. What sort of functioning pol would be so careless as to say “Everybody can own a truck”? He should talk to any New England dealership about that. As it happens, I bought a new truck last month and I’ve never seen the place so empty. …

Jennifer Rubin reports that in national security issues, the Obami may be waking up to reality.

Michael Isikoff reports:

“Top administration officials are getting nervous that they may not be able to proceed with one of their most controversial national-security moves: trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 conspirators in federal court in New York City. Last November Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. portrayed the trial as a way to showcase the American justice system to the world — and to accelerate President Obama’s stalled plans to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. But because of shifting political winds in Congress, the trial is now “potentially in jeopardy,” a senior official, who did not want to be named talking about a sensitive situation, tells Newsweek. The chief concern: that Republicans will renew attempts to strip funding for the trial and, in the aftermath of the bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253, pick up enough support from moderate Democrats to prevail.”

It seems that Sen. Lindsay Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf will try to force votes in Congress to cut off funding for the trial. And one additional issue: the more than $200 million price tag for each year of the trial. The kicker: “If Holder’s plans are thwarted, though, one top administration official, who also didn’t want to be named talking about delicate issues, notes there is a Plan B — reviving the case against the alleged 9/11 conspirators before a military tribunal, just as the Bush administration tried to do.” …

…But alas, that proved to be politically untenable and logistically difficult. We had three domestic terror attacks. The president was hammered for his clueless reserve and the Keystone Kops response to the Christmas Day bombing. So now being “not Bush” doesn’t seem like such a good idea. It was born of arrogance and from a distorted view of the nature of our enemy. If Obama retreats on both this and Guantanamo, it will be a bitter pill for the Left and sweet vindication for those who kept us safe for seven and a half years after 9/11. But more important, it will be a step toward sanity in the administration’s national security policies. And should Obama and Holder feel the sting of humiliation if forced to abandon their plans to shutter Guantanamo and give KSM a propagandistic platform, the White House may find that a small price to pay to sync up its anti-terror policies with both reality and public opinion.

Peter Wehner on Obama’s fall from grace.

…But there is another, and I think quite important, explanation that was reinforced to me while reading John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book, Game Change, which is a fascinating (and very well-written) account of the 2008 presidential campaign.

One is reminded once again of how the core of Obama’s popularity was an appeal not to policy or to a governing agenda; instead it was an appeal to thematics and narrative.  …Obama’s appeal was romantic and aesthetic, built on the rhetoric of hope and change, on his “freshness and sense of promise.” A cult of personality built up around Obama — not because of what he had achieved but because of what he seemed to embody. (”Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention,” Michelle Obama dryly told a reporter.)…

…That was what we were promised. What we got instead is a president who increased the divisions in our nation, the most partisan and polarizing figure in the history of polling, one who is dogmatic and has been as generous to special interests as any we have seen. The efforts to buy votes in pursuit of the Obama agenda has added sewage to the cesspool.

This would hurt any president under any circumstances; for Barack Obama, whose allure was based almost entirely on his ability to convince the public that he embodied a “new politics,” it has been doubly damaging. It was Hillary Clinton of all people who understood Obama best when she said during the campaign, “We have to make people understand that he’s not real.” …

Jennifer Rubin brings up some excellent points about Obama campaigning in Massachusetts.

Charles Hurt, writing of Obama’s lackluster and belated appearance in Massachusetts on behalf of the listing campaign of Martha Coakley, observes:

“Obama told the crowd here yesterday that he needed Coakley in Washington because she is “independent.” Really? Does anybody actually think that the reason Obama wants her in the Senate is that she would even dream of casting the deciding vote to kill the Democratic health-care bill? Absolutely not. The only reason Obama came here is because he needs somebody bought and paid for. By him.”

This concisely sums up the problem that threatens to engulf Obama and whatever is left of the remnants of his campaign organization. He is a candidate deprived of a campaign. He is a community organizer with no one to organize against those who hold the levers of power. He holds the levers of power but without the executive acumen to bring the country along and to craft a successful, broad-based agenda. If not out of his depth, he is out of his milieu. …

Roger Simon posts more on the Copenhagen summit of thieves.

I thought I was done writing about my trip to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December, but just when you think you’re out, as Mario Puzo once put it, they pull you back in. And what did my pulling in in this instance was the CBS report on the amazingly lavish junket (well, not so amazingly really) of Nancy Pelosi & Co. to the Scandinavian capital. I learned therein that seventeen, count ‘em seventeen, Members (many with spouses and even children) went to the conference with their staffs, utilizing three military jets and booking 321 hotel nights at the posh Copenhagen Marriott. The carbon footprint of all that – assuming you believe in AGW, and most of them claim to – was immense. The amount of serious discussion that went on was practically nil.

And, yes, needless to say, there’s more, lots more, although LaPelosa has, also needless to say, resisted press inquiries about the details. She is now being bombarded, as she should be, by FOIA requests, so we will probably learn more anon. But the idea of all that absurd excess in the light of what is now going on in Haiti is particularly stomach-turning. …

…In a way, that’s what Copenhagen was about and why it was such a signal event. Everyone was playing a role. I doubt if a single person in the city changed their mind about anything, certainly not anything remotely to do with climate. It was just a game with no purposes other than spending money or trying to extort some – or posturing. …

There is housecleaning to be done at the Pentagon. Bill Bennett writes about the politically correct report from the Pentagon on the Fort Hood massacre.

…Here’s the report I’d write and I can do it on less than one page:  An Islamic terrorist was raised in the United States and given a pass throughout his professional career in the United States military.  His allegiance was not to his country but to his radical religion.  He told his colleagues of this again and again.  He didn’t set off signals, he set off sirens.  And nothing was done. The military leadership didn’t take his words seriously, even as we were at war with people saying the exact same things he was saying. And the culture of the Army that coddled him was too well-represented by the Army chief of staff who, after the rampage, said “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

It was this thinking that led to us keeping Major Hasan in the Army and that diminished force protection. It was this culture that allowed a terrorist into the Army. It was this political correctness that led to the deaths of 14 innocents. And if you want to prevent another tragedy like this, you must end this infection of the mindset. I call it a tragedy because it was preventable. That it was not prevented is a shame on our institutions and indicative of a preemptive cultural surrender that I never thought would affect the U.S. military but, sadly, dangerously, has.

But the solution to these problems remains elusive because the military will not even mention the problem. And that, as Winston Churchill once put it, is why we still have a “Gathering Storm” coming, and not a near-victory in this, the Global War Against Islamic Terrorism.

Tunku Varadarajan thinks that bankers should not receive huge bonuses this year.

…Banks are making money because they’re borrowing at ridiculously low rates from the public and central banks and then investing in higher-yielding government securities.

The banks receive deposits from savers (on which they pay negligible interest) and then leverage it several times by borrowing from other banks, or the central bank. LIBOR (the rate at which banks borrow from each other) as well as the Fed’s discount window are below 0.5 percent. This is the cost of money to banks. The loot is then invested in government bonds, which are yielding anywhere from 3.75 percent to 4.75 percent in the U.S. and Europe.

This interest margin may not sound like much, but when applied to the trillions of dollars that make up various banks’ balance sheets, it produces profits in tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. For a well-leveraged bank, this is a safe “carry” trade as long as the value of government securities does not collapse. In fact, a bank would have to be incredibly inept not to make money in these circumstances. Awarding bankers bonuses is tantamount to paying them for not being certified cretins. …

…Such action would also have shown up as specious the argument that “if we do not pay, the talent will go away.” If tax measures were implemented globally, where would the talent go? Some of it, perhaps, to hedge funds. That would be an appropriate, even elegant, solution, because the kinds of risks some of the bankers were taking are best suited for hedge funds. As for the rest of the bankers… they should just stay put and expect to get paid when they start adding value, not merely leeching from public policy.

Robert Samuelson gives an explanation for why investment bankers earn so well.

…The explanation for Wall Street’s high pay lies elsewhere. Most of us are paid based on what we produce or, more realistically, what our employers produce. By contrast, Wall Street compensation levels are tied to the nation’s overall wealth. Investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms and many other financial institutions trade stocks, bonds and other securities for their own profit. They also advise mutual funds, pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals on how to invest and trade.

There’s a big difference between annual production and national wealth. In 2007, the last year before the crisis, annual production (gross domestic product) equaled almost $14 trillion. In the same year, household wealth was $77 trillion (5.5 times production); that covered the value of homes, vehicles, stocks, bonds and the like. Eliminating nonfinancial assets (mainly homes) cut wealth to about $50 trillion (3.5 times). Deducting household debts from financial wealth pushed net worth to $35 trillion (2.5 times income).

People who are trying to protect or expand existing wealth are playing for much higher money stakes than even hard-working and highly skilled producers. That’s the main reason they’re paid more. Similar percentage changes in production and wealth translate into much larger gains or losses in wealth — up to five times as much based on the crude math above. Many lawyers enjoy the same envious position of being paid on the basis of wealth enhancement or protection. They’re involved in high-stakes mergers and acquisitions, estate planning, divorces and tax planning. On average, partners in the top 25 law firms earned from $1.3 million to $4 million in 2008, reports The American Lawyer magazine. …

If what you’ve heard about Obamacare makes you sick, get ready. WSJ editors tell us how Dems are buying off their union friends.

Democrats seem impervious to embarrassment as they buy votes for ObamaCare, but their latest move makes even Nebraska’s Ben Nelson look cheap: The 87% of Americans who don’t belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do.

The Senate bill was financed in part by a 40% excise tax on high-cost insurance coverage. The White House backs this “Cadillac tax” as one of the few remaining cost-control tokens. But Big Labor abhors the tax because union benefits tend to be far more generous than average, and labor leaders and House Democrats have been throwing a political tantrum for weeks.

So emerging from their backrooms, Democrats have agreed to extend a special exemption from the Cadillac tax to any health plan that is part of a collective-bargaining agreement, plus state and local workers, many of whom are unionized. Everyone else with a higher-end plan will start to be taxed in 2013, but union members will get a free pass until 2018.

Ponder that one for a moment. Two workers who are identical in every respect—wages, job, health plan—will be treated differently by the tax system, based solely on union membership. …

Ed Morrissey blogs about a headline that makes a farce of claims by Obamacare fans and green fascists.

Like my friend Bruce McQuain at QandO, I’m wondering whether Michael Moore will add this to a later edition of the Sicko DVD.  Twenty-six patients in a Cuban mental hospital died from hypothermia during an unusually cold winter in Havana…

…My goodness, it’s a good thing that Michael Moore decided to lecture Americans on the superiority of the Cuban health-care system in his feature-length diatribe, isn’t it?  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be demanding a government takeover of our own health-care system to achieve parity with Fidel’s paradise.

I live in Minnesota, where it gets considerably colder than Havana for about six months out of the year.  Our hospitals manage to keep patients warm, clean, and safe.  When was the last time anyone heard of patients dying in an American hospital of hypothermia caused by their stay in the facility?  According to my recollection, that would be, uh … never. Where were the staff at this Cuban paragon of medical care?  When it got cold, no one apparently thought to close windows, or give out more sheets and blankets, or bring in more heaters … for hours. …

…Addendum: It’s also worth pointing out that a mass of people dying of hypothermia in the tropics doesn’t exactly bolster the claims of global-warming activists. …

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Power Line posts on dueling rallies in Mass.

President Obama came to Massachusetts yesterday in a last-minute effort to preserve his party’s filibuster proof majority in the Senate. He did so at a rally at the campus of Northeastern University in Boston which featured the Massachusetts political establishment. Scott Brown countered with a rally in Worcester which featured Massachusetts sports legends Curt Schillling and Doug Flutie.

I didn’t watch the dueling rallies, but this report by Politico leaves the impression that Brown may well have won the duel, or at least that if Martha Coakley needed a big day, she probably came up short. …

Jake Tapper has another report on the Mass. race.

Political operatives say the Senate race in Massachusetts between Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley and Republican state senator Scott Brown is too close to call. But the fact that President Obama felt the need to fly to the Bay State to campaign for a Democrat in one of the most Democratic states in the nation speaks volumes about the ugly climate for Democratic candidates.

Coakley has run an imperfect campaign and has had a rough couple weeks. But, as one senior White House official acknowledged to me, “in Massachusetts, even after a rough couple weeks the Democrat should be ahead.” Polls have Coakley and Brown neck and neck.

At the rally in Boston for Coakley yesterday, President Obama said a few things worth paying attention to: …

David Brooks has interesting comments on Haiti and the methods for fighting poverty.

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not. …

David Warren offers his thoughts on Haiti.

…A knowledge of Haiti itself already provides intending rescuers with some idea of the difficulties they face in delivering food, water, medicine, and shelter. Looting, gang violence (with machetes, when guns are unavailable), and such spontaneous acts of public despair as piling corpses across a street to protest the lack of aid (thus creating a roadblock against its delivery), must all have been predictable, from past experience of delivering aid after hurricane disasters. The collapse even of surviving infrastructure, and of all government services, went without saying. …

…For such reasons as I’ve sketched above, they are already tripping over each other. According to reports, the airport at Port-au-Prince is blocked with the accumulation of planes that cannot be refueled; the city’s hospitals collapsed; inmates of the main prison escaped. Rescuers are not to be blamed when making their best efforts. …

…But the same informants who described to me the worst of Haiti, often also described the best: exhilarating encounters with warm, kindly, often very creative and thoughtful people, who were no less “typically Haitian” than members of machete gangs. An earthquake makes no distinctions between them. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews Mark Steyn on a number of current topics, including Game Change, the new book about the election.

HH: Yeah, what’s remarkable, the people who come off the worst, though, is the media, because you’ve got Hillary and Bill wandering around obsessing about President Obama’s past drug use and not being reported…

MS: Right.

HH: …Hillary muttering about Obama’s mother being a communist. I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff in this book.

MS: Right, right, right.

HH: None of it made it into the media.

…HH: Hillary at one point says, “Am I the only one who sees the arrogance? Does it not bother other people? Bill says he’s an, “off the rack Chicago politician.” Over and over again, they’re amazed he’s an empty suit, and they can’t touch him.

MS: Well, and the arrogance thing, and I think Hillary is right. I think there is, that you can certainly make the case, I mean, I’m not someone who cares about sexism and mean-spiritedness, and all the other obsessions of the Democratic Party. But I think if you do, then I think that you can certainly make the case that Hillary was the victim of that, that in fact, he’s in many ways a quite unpleasant man, this sort of curious habit he has of composing himself so that his hand on his face appears to be flipping the finger at you, which he has done a significant number of times, toward political opponents, that it doesn’t seem like an accidental gesture. And I think this is the question….somebody said to me before the election, Obama isn’t cool, he’s cold, he’s cold. And I think that’s what America saw in the performances after Fort Hood and the Pantybomber. …

In the National Journal, Charlie Cook discusses the disconnect between the political struggle over Obamacare, and the economic struggle facing so many Americans.

…Last week’s disappointing December unemployment report was the final blow in what was already a bad week for Democrats. One of the most sobering findings in the report was that if 661,000 Americans had not given up even looking for work that month, the unemployment rate would have moved up rather than holding steady at a horrific 10 percent.

Most economists had been expecting an increase of about 50,000 jobs in December; instead, the total declined by 85,000. Some 6.1 million Americans, the highest number in the post-World War II era, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The “U-6″ rate of unemployment, which adds in people who are working part-time while seeking full-time work and those who have stopped looking, stands at 17.3 percent, the highest level in the 15 years that the Labor Department has calculated it.

…Another piece of bad news was the distressing late-December report that the housing sector’s slow improvement had stalled, raising the specter of a second dip. As Wellesley College economist Karl Case, one of the developers of the definitive Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, told The New York Times recently, “I’m worried. Everyone’s worried.” He added, “If prices sink 15 percent from here, which is a possibility, and the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we’re back where we were before — in a nightmare.” Faster action in Congress to renew (or even increase) the tax credit for first-time homebuyers might have boosted housing prices, which in turn would have improved mortgage lenders’ balance sheets. …

Good news! Bret Schundler, once mayor of Jersey City, is back. In the NYTimes, David Halbfinger discusses New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie’s appointments.

…The nomination of Bret D. Schundler to the post underscored the governor’s determination to press ahead with his push for school vouchers, more charter schools and merit pay for teachers.

It was the first selection by Mr. Christie to suggest even the possibility of a confirmation battle with Democrats, who control both houses of the Legislature. Thus far, the governor-elect has chosen nominees heavy on managerial experience, if lacking in drama or outsized personalities, and drawn bipartisan praise for his selections. …

…“We agree on the type of significant reform that needs to happen in our educational system here in New Jersey,” Mr. Christie said in making the announcement at the State House. “I want a strong, reasonable, bold leader who’s going to help me implement those policies.” …

Richard McKenzie, in the WSJ, writes an interesting article about the successes of orphanages.

…I watched the Gingrich-Clinton debate with a personal interest, having grown up in an orphanage in North Carolina in the 1950s. I wrote a column for this newspaper defending my own orphanage and others like it: “Most critics would like the public to believe that those of us who went through orphanages were throttled by the experience. No doubt, some were. However, most have charged on.” The children at Barium Springs Home for Children worked a lot and didn’t get the hugs many children take for granted, but we did get advantages that many children today don’t get—a sense of security, permanence and home.

I was shocked by the number of orphanage alumni who called, faxed or emailed in agreement. What’s more, many added, “My orphanage was better than yours,” which made me wonder if the experts knew what they were talking about.

During the past decade I have surveyed more than 2,500 alumni from 15 American orphanages. In two journal articles, I reported the same general conclusion: The orphanage alumni have outpaced their counterparts in the general population often by wide margins in almost all social and economic measures, including educational attainment, income and positive attitude toward life. White orphanage alumni had a 39% higher rate of college graduation than white Americans of the same age in the general population, and less than 3% had hostile memories of their orphanage experiences. University of Alabama historian David Beito replicated the study with several hundred alumni from another orphanage, reaching much the same conclusions. …

Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings report in the Times, UK, that climate scientists are having more problems with facts.

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. …

…Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.