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In the WaPo, Gerard Alexander discusses liberal condescension.

…Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals. …

Jennifer Rubin extends a glorious ray of hope that Eric Holder may soon be dumped.

…But Holder seems to be on thin ice and the White House might now view him as a liability. The New Yorker quotes a source close to the White House:

“The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.”

Even more ominous for Holder: Rahm Emanuel is making it clear to all those concerned that he disagreed with a string of highly controversial and politically disastrous decisions by Holder. We learn: “Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions.” And then there is the KSM trial:

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them. “…the informed source said. . . .  “Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” the informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with [Sen. Lindsay] Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

Interesting that Emanuel and his spinners are now distancing the White House from their attorney general. One wonders where Obama stands in this drama. Isn’t he, after all, the commander in chief? Either the president was content to go along with Holder’s decisions until they went south or he subcontracted, with no oversight, some of the most critical decisions of his presidency to a lawyer who is prone to making the kind of mistakes a “first-year lawyer would get fired for. …

In the Corner, Bill Burck and Dana Perino blog about the Obami leaking that Abdulmutallab is talking again. So once again national security is compromised to try to make the White House look better.

Yesterday, we talked about the White House’s outrageous decision to leak that the underwear bomber was now cooperating with the FBI. We said that these coordinated leaks would damage national security by, among other things, telling the underwear bomber’s fellow terrorists that he had flipped on them and it was time to go to ground.

The White House dismissed this criticism, saying that revealing the underwear bomber’s cooperation would not harm national security. Well, apparently FBI director Robert Mueller didn’t get the memo. According to this letter from Senator Bond on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director Mueller on Monday “personally stressed [to Senator Bond] that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”

Less than 24 hours later, the White House was deliberately leaking this very information to the press. What changed in those 24 hours? Nothing except the White House decided the political benefits of leaking outweighed the national security costs.

Also in the Corner, Daniel Foster blogs about the moving of the Obama statue in Indonesia.

Further evidence that the thrill is gone for President Obama, from my friend Aaron Connelly’s Indonesia-based blog:

Earlier today, Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo authorized the removal of a recently erected statue of Barack Obama as a child, from its current spot in a park in the city’s classy old Menteng neighborhood to the nearby school that he attended. The order followed the creation of a Facebook group campaigning for the statue to be torn down. Newspapers and television stations here reported on the group extensively, and newswires picked it up and sent it global. After all that attention, the group’s membership soared to over 50,000 members.

The story has been played back home– and will no doubt be played again today– as an amusing piece of news that sums up succinctly the narrative which the media has settled on for President Obama’s current predicament: fading enthusiasm for the president, even in his old strongholds like Menteng and Massachusetts! The Facebook group creators have been quoted arguing that Obama has not yet accomplished enough for a statue to have been erected in his honor, which of course sounds like an echo to anyone who has turned on FoxNews since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in September.

The permutations of clever leads are endless. The blog Ironic Surrealism remarked when the news of the group broke: “Obama is not only falling off of his pedestal here in the US. In Indonesia where he spent a few years as a child, he may soon be literally knocked off of his pedestal.”

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives us an idea of how a liberal deals with facts when they have to admit to errors. Not entirely forthcoming, soft-pedaling the number and the seriousness of the mistakes made, and “empathizing” with those involved.

“I have some experience with interrogation, and 50 minutes does not get you what you need,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He also understands a distinction that appears to escape Holder: Although torture is a moral horror, aggressive interrogation is a moral imperative when lives could be at stake.

…After all, Mirandizing is the law-enforcement routine in this country, a routine that the Bush administration followed in similar cases. It took me a while to realize that Mirandizing was a big mistake in this case. So I empathize with those who made the mistake. I also defended Holder’s plan to hold the 9/11 trial in Manhattan, which seems a very bad idea now that the initial enthusiasm of many New York politicians has morphed into nightmare visions.

And I would still defend his decision to maximize the trial’s legitimacy by prosecuting Mohammed under civilian rather than military law. Too bad that Holder almost immediately made the trial sound like a charade by declaring that “failure is not an option.” Then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs went him one better by asserting that Mohammed is “likely to be executed.” …

…But if Obama wants to fend off the soft-on-terrorism label, he will have to think less like a law professor and more like a war leader.

In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson tells us what the politicians aren’t saying and the MSM haven’t analyzed. It’s about our deficit.

…First, from 2011 to 2020, the administration projects total federal spending of $45.8 trillion against taxes and receipts of $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is almost a fifth of spending. In 2020, the gap is $1 trillion, again approaching a fifth: Spending is $5.7 trillion, taxes $4.7 trillion. All amounts assume a full economic recovery; all projections may be optimistic. The message: There’s a huge mismatch between Americans’ desire for low taxes and high government services.

Second, almost $20 trillion of the $45.8 trillion of spending involves three programs — Social Security, Medicare (health insurance for those 65 and over) and Medicaid (health insurance for the poor — two-thirds goes to the elderly and disabled). The message: The budget is mainly a vehicle for transferring income to retirees from workers, who pay most taxes. As more baby boomers retire in the 2020s, deficits would grow.

Third, there is no way to close the massive deficits without big cuts in existing government programs or stupendous tax increases. Suppose we decided to cover all future deficits by raising taxes. Taxes would rise in the 2020s by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden. …

In Forbes, John Tamny says that government actions are increasing healthcare costs. Decreasing government intervention would reduce costs.

…Specifically, the federal government should stop protecting the pharmaceutical firms that sell their wares more cheaply in foreign markets, only to block the entrance of those drugs into the U.S. This isn’t to suggest for one second that Big Pharma shouldn’t achieve the highest profits possible on its innovations, but it is to say that Americans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize the consumption of foreigners. Allowing drug re-importation would quickly force drugmakers to sell their products at market rates overseas, which would allow them
to charge us a non-subsidizing rate in the states. Re-importation would quickly become a non-issue if this “tariff” were removed.

Also, the tax-deductible nature of company health insurance is a subsidy like any other. The better solution would be to get rid of all health care tax subsidies so that companies have a greater incentive to offer their employees health savings accounts, as opposed to insurance that creates the illusion of “free” care. As individuals we’re always most careful with our own money, and if our employers require us to pay out of pocket for routine, non-catastrophic care, we’ll necessarily use the funds provided more wisely.

Back to GDP: Health care certainly constitutes 16% of our economy, but this is not a good thing. It’s the result of unconstitutional government efforts to subsidize with transfer payments and tax breaks a lot of wasteful spending. In that sense, the only proper reform would involve the federal government exiting health care altogether so that spending on what is a good as opposed to a “right” is rationalized to our economic betterment.

And don’t miss the cartoons!