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In honor of April Fool’s Day, we have the top April 1st 10 hoaxes from Museum of Hoaxes.com. Plus there’s a link to the top 100. Here’s number 10;

1976: The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

Continuing with the theme, Kimberley Strassel tells us about the items GOP senators made the fool Dems vote for.

…reconciliation allowed Republicans to bring up unlimited amendments. Because Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could not allow the reconciliation bill to be changed in any way—which would send it back to the House—his party was obliged to vote down every one of those amendments. And every one had been designed to make even hardened pols whimper.

Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) offered language to bar the government from subsidizing erectile dysfunction drugs for convicted pedophiles and rapists. Democrats voted . . . No! Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) proposed exempting wounded soldiers from the new tax on medical devices. Democrats: No way! Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) wanted to exempt critical access rural hospitals from funding cuts. Senate Democrats: Forget it! This was Republicans’ opportunity to lay out every ugly provision and consequence of ObamaCare, and Democrats—because of the process they’d chosen—had to defend it all.

And so it went, into the wee Thursday hours. All Democrats in favor of taxing pacemakers? Aye! All Democrats in favor of keeping those seedy vote buyoffs? Aye! All Democrats in favor of raising taxes on middle-income families? Aye! All Democrats in favor of exempting themselves from elements of ObamaCare? Aye! All Democrats in favor of roasting small children in Aga ovens? (Okay, I made that one up, but you get the point.) Aye! …

John Hinderaker, of Power Line says that Paul Krugman always qualifies as a fool.

One thing about Paul Krugman, he always gets the memo. You can count on his column in the New York Times to echo the Democratic Party’s talking points of the moment, whatever they are. Thus, his current column accuses Republicans of threatening violence against those poor little Democrats. It’s a dumb claim, so it suits Krugman perfectly. His “evidence” is lame beyond belief. After referring to “the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers”–no mention of Eric Cantor’s office being shot at, death threats against Sarah Palin, etc. …

‘…The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.”‘

This is downright funny. Krugman, in his usual dishonest-but-ineffective way, forgets to mention the whole point of the RNC fund-raising appeal, i.e., “Fire Pelosi.” …

…Now, Paul, let’s take this slowly, and try to follow along: “Fire Nancy Pelosi” means to cause her to lose her job as Speaker of the House. That will happen if the Republicans take the majority of the House in November, see? So the flames aren’t an incitement to burn Ms. Pelosi alive, they are a pun on the word “fire.” Get it? And Steele’s reference to putting Pelosi on “the firing line,” while perhaps infelicitous, obviously referred to the theme of the campaign: Fire Pelosi, not to assassinating the Speaker of the House. …

Continuing with the NY Times, the Gloria Center publishes a piece on just one Times article on the Mid-East. Barry Rubin finds four major errors. If you depend on the Gray Lady, you’re a fool.

In my entire life I have rarely read an article which simultaneously showed the need to be well-informed before reading a newspaper and the shocking shortcomings of mass media coverage of the Middle East than this minor piece about the reopening of the Cairo synagogue. I’ve never said this before but will now: If you want to understand the Middle East’s reality and how it is distorted in the media, read the following analysis. …

…I am not focusing on an individual reporter here, especially because I don’t know how his original piece was edited. But what is important is the product. In this one article, the Times deserves an “F” for journalistic competence and it has failed to inform readers of some of the most important aspects of the contemporary Middle East.

In these respects, I cannot imagine a better example of what’s wrong with media coverage of the region-and much more.

To quote George Orwell on a similar situation in 1945 (when the correspondent of a left-wing newspaper was criticized by readers for revealing how badly Soviet troops behaved toward civilians), once you accept the idea that the media should support “good causes” rather than just report accurately: “It is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.”

Now we have a look at people who are hard to fool. In Air and Space Magazine, Stephen Joiner gives us a fascinating look at serious repo guys. That would be the men (and women) who repossess large jet airplanes; like 747′s, etc.

…Jennifer Barlow, the company’s project planner, masterminds a repossession’s complex logistics. There are conference calls with banks and insurers and opinions from lawyers. Then, Barlow says firmly, “We decide what needs to be done.” She does not mean putting a strongly worded reminder in the mail.

She begins compiling a three-ring binder called the Repo Book. It includes affidavits of default, power of attorney, and all the legalese required to satisfy international treaties governing the process: everything that will give the crew the rights of a lawful owner.

Sage-Popovich also makes a determination whether the repo will be “friendly” or “non-friendly.” (Barlow estimates that defaulting airlines cooperate in the repossession of their airplanes less than 20 percent of the time.) In a non-friendly repo, “they’re probably going to try to hide the aircraft from us,” she says. As the airline continues to use the aircraft to make money, it may juggle routes and schedules to frustrate recovery. Charter aircraft, which don’t fly set routes or on timetables, can be particularly elusive. One outfit (Popovich wouldn’t identify carriers presently operating) repeatedly gave the repo men the slip by exploiting Egypt’s loose enforcement of financial covenants. Sage-Popovich arranged for a go-between to charter the desired airplane under the guise of a lucrative U.K. tour-group contract. The eager operator flew the airliner out of its Egyptian haven and landed in repo-friendly Britain. “We just watched and waited until the crew checked into their hotel,” Popovich says, “then we grabbed their plane and flew away.” …

…During a repo in the mid-1980s, both sides got physical. A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, “I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane.”…

And we close with information on another hoax. That would be man-made global warming. In American.com, Stephen Hayward says that we owe this latest discovery to a meteorologist and the volunteers he recruited.

…The Marysville temperature station is located at the city’s fire department, next to an asphalt parking lot and a cell phone tower, and only a few feet away from two air conditioning compressors that spew out considerable heat. These sources of heat amplification mean that the temperature readings from the Marysville station are useless for determining accurate temperatures for the Marysville area.

Indeed, the Marysville station violates the quality control standards of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA admits that stations like Marysville, sited close to artificial heat sources such as parking lots, can produce errors as large as 5 degrees Celsius. …

…To the contrary, 89 percent of the 860 temperature stations surveyed fail to meet the National Weather Service’s site requirements that stations must be located at least 30 feet away from any artificial heat source. …

…Who performed this revealing audit of these important data-generating instruments? NASA? NOAA? The Government Accountability Office? The National Academy of Sciences? A congressional committee perhaps? No to all of the above. Meteorologist Anthony Watts used the Internet to recruit an army of 650 volunteers to photograph weather stations around the country and send him the results. Watts posted photos of dozens of the worst offenders on his website, surfacestations.org, and is adding more all the time.

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David Harsanyi writes about the Dems attempts to blame Republicans for the threats that Democratic politicians are receiving. Because the Dems certainly didn’t do anything to anger anyone; like force Obamacare down our throats.

…Democrats insist Republicans must condemn — over and over — this imaginary rise of widespread radicalism. In doing so, they are implicitly accusing Republicans of controlling the aforementioned radicals.

Other Democrats, like Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, went as far as to claim that Republicans were “aiding and abetting terrorism” against Democrats. …

…”I’ve received threats since I assumed elected office, not only because of my position, but also because I’m Jewish,” said Republican Whip Eric Cantor, who had a bullet shot through his office Monday. “I’ve never blamed anyone in this body for that. Period.” …

Jonah Goldberg posts on some incidents of vandalism.

Disturbing! Troubling! I demand the Democratic Party disavow their hate-filled rhetoric! This is America:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Police are investigating vandalism at the Albemarle County Republican headquarters.

The Daily Progress of Charlottesville reports that someone threw bricks through the headquarter’s windows, breaking three of them.  The vandalism was discovered Friday morning. …

…In November, someone glued the county GOP headquarters’ doors shut on Election Day.

In the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin looks at the various problems with Obamacare, and why it must be repealed.

…But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate last winter, the Democrats were forced to give up on that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result is not even a liberal approach to escalating costs but a ticking time bomb: a scheme that will build up pressure in our private insurance system while offering no escape. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is unsustainable, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it—requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to insurance companies while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs. …

…In other words, Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster—for our health care system, for our fiscal future, and for any notion of limited government. But it is a disaster that will not truly get underway for four years, and therefore a disaster we can avert.

This is the core of the case the program’s opponents must make to voters this year and beyond. If opponents succeed in gaining a firmer foothold in Congress in the fall, they should work to begin dismantling and delaying the program where they can: denying funding to key provisions and pushing back implementation at every opportunity. But a true repeal will almost certainly require yet another election cycle, and another president.

The American public is clearly open to the kind of case Obamacare’s opponents will need to make. But keeping voters focused on the problems with the program, and with the reckless growth of government beyond it, will require a concerted, informed, impassioned, and empirical case. This is the kind of case opponents of Obamacare have made over the past year, of course, and it persuaded much of the public—but the Democrats acted before the public could have its say at the polls. The case must therefore be sustained until that happens. The health care debate is far from over. …

David Warren has more thoughts on free speech in Canada.

…The Coulter crew were met in Calgary, Thursday night, by a sampling of exactly the same sort of thugs they encountered at Ottawa U. But there, the police did not hesitate. It wasn’t even necessary to make arrests: at the first provocation, the young thugs were simply confronted and told to leave.

Several black holes have developed in the enforcement of law in Canada — stare hard, for instance, at Caledonia, Ont. — and there have been numerous campus events involving physical intimidation about which nothing was done. Each capitulation makes the next more likely.

Free speech is very nice “in theory.” But to exist in practice, it must be enforced.

In the WSJ, David Propson reviews a number of books on Mark Twain, published this year, the centennial of his death.

Mark Twain died at age 74 on April 21, 1910. The ­centennial of that sad event is ­being observed with yearlong festivities in the cities he called home—Hannibal, Mo., and Hartford, Conn.—as well as with a raft of Twain-related books. …

…Twain won his readers’ ­affection, in that book, by ­traveling the world and ­bringing it back to his fellow countrymen—bringing it down to size, too, by exposing Old World ways to New World wit. In later books he revealed to Americans the less familiar parts of their own nation—its trackless Western frontier and its endless mother-river. Not for nothing did William Dean Howells call Twain “The ­Lincoln of Our Literature.”

By the end of his life, Mark Twain’s opinion on countless topics was sought and treasured. For readers around the world, he was America. …

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Abe Greenwald liked Obama’s speech in front of troops in Afghanistan.

… The line that earned the biggest spontaneous show of enthusiasm was about commitment: “The United States of America does not quit once is starts on something. You don’t quit, the American armed services does not quit. We keep at it and we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.” After the long, uncertain policy-decision period last fall, it’s important that he hammer that message home as frequently as possible.

Obama talked about “bringing hope and opportunity to a people who have known a lot of pain and a lot of suffering.” It would have been nice to hear him mention freedom or consensual governance, but it’s important to remember that this was not a policy speech. It was a morale booster for the men and women fighting abroad. …

Jonathan Tobin on what makes this president different.

As the dispute between the Israel and the United States enters its third week, President Obama’s anger at Israel and his determination to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give in on the question of building in the eastern sector of Israel’s capital is apparently unabated.

Yet this is hardly the first dispute between the two countries. Every administration since 1967 has proposed peace plans and negotiating strategies that Israel disliked or actively resisted. Genuine friends such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as less friendly presidents such as Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, all pushed hard at times for Israeli acceptance of unpalatable concessions. But in spite of these precedents, Barack Obama has managed to go where no American president has gone before. …

Elliott Abrams offers a wide range of insights into Middle East relations. We have pulled out only a few.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration. …

…George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers—all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them. …

…Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the “uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry” argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in “1967 issues” related to Israel’s size, but in “1948 issues” related to Israel’s existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel’s existence—not its settlement policy—comes into play. …

… we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow “proximity talks” Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel’s capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals. …

Instapundit has a theory about Obama’s rudeness to Israel.

… But it’s also possible — I’d say likely — that there’s something else going on. I think Obama expects Israel to strike Iran, and wants to put distance between the United States and Israel in advance of that happening. …

Some of our favorites think the criminal class in Washington has a VAT for our future. That would be a “value added tax.” Mark Steyn is first.

May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual?

Bear with me. There’s some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.

In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.

Fast forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Congressman Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol’ American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the OECD is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the doughnut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “In order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” – a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction. …

And Charles Krauthammer is next.

… Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.

Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.

It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.

Paul Greenberg catches the spirit.

Have you ever seen a more gleeful bunch of politicians than the Democratic leadership of the House as they prepared to ram the health-care bill or bills into law? Nancy Pelosi, Speaker and Precinct Captain of the House, led all the rest, swinging an outsized gavel as if it were an ax. A picture is worth a thousand words — no, make that 400,000 — words. Which is roughly the size of the health bill and encyclopedia just enacted into confusing law.

The smiling faces brought to mind a group of Roman solons marching triumphantly toward Vesuvius. Because this debate in Congress, which finally closed in the midnight hours Sunday, has just begun out in the country. Can you hear the rumbling underneath the political surface? And the electoral tsunami waiting to be unleashed? …

Robert Samuelson reports on the coming budget crisis.

When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health-care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.

Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape historians. For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.

Let’s be clear. A “budget crisis” is not some minor accounting exercise. It’s a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval. Large deficits and rising debt — the accumulation of past deficits — spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans. The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors. To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply. Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment. Not pretty. …

Pickings of March 3rd had a story from Chicago Business.com about inroads made in the minds of ministers in South Side neighborhoods by Wal-Mart. More on this today from WSJ.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has won the support of dozens of church ministers in its long-running battle to expand in Chicago, a sign of how the recession has softened skepticism of the retailer in a community desperate for jobs.

The ministers, most of them African-Americans together representing thousands of congregants, are pressuring the city council to grant approval for a Wal-Mart “supercenter”—a store with a full grocery that also sells general merchandise—on the city’s South Side.

Some of the same ministers as recently as last year opposed bringing the discount giant to the South Side, concerned that the company’s pay was inadequate and that the store would hurt nearby businesses. But the need for jobs and tax dollars in the recession—along with a big push by Wal-Mart—has changed their minds.

The shift sets up a showdown between the ministers and another community group, largely financed by unions, that opposes the proposal, which remains stalled in the city council. …

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Just when you think this administration had done it all. Nile Gardiner has the post.

I wrote recently about Barack Obama’s sneering contempt for both Israel and Great Britain. Further confirmation of this was provided today with new details emerging regarding the President’s appalling reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. As Adrian Blomfield reports for The Telegraph:

“Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem. …

WSJ editors say the health care returns are starting to arrive.

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

Jonathan Adler explains in Volokh Conspiracy why these write-down’s are happening so quickly.

… Why are the companies announcing these changes?  And why now if the tax change does not take effect until 2013?  Because failure to do so could get the companies in trouble with the SEC.  Under standard accounting rules, companies are supposed to take the charge in the quarter in which the tax law change is enacted, not when it takes effect.  Because the first quarter ends Wednesday, more writedown announcements may be forthcoming.

David Harsanyi discusses the implications of Obamacare.

…When House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was recently asked to identify where the Constitution granted Congress the authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance, he replied, “Under several clauses; the good and welfare clause and a couple others.” …

…Attorneys general from 14 states and other state legislatures disagree with Conyers, and have already mounted legal challenges to the constitutionality of individual mandates. Few people believe they will be successful in their admirable cause. …

Richard M. Esenberg, professor of law at Marquette, explained the consequences of Obamacare like this: “If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do any old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what — save some other constitutional restriction — it cannot require you to do or prohibit you from doing.”

Representative Paul Ryan from Wisconsin gave a brilliant speech about government and healthcare in January at the DC Kirby Center of Hillsdale College. His points are still relevant; the Obamacare passage does not mark the end of the process. This was published in February’s Imprimis.

…Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

Government’s constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice. …

In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger has some great thoughts on Obamacare and the Dems. Repeal!

…Spring renewal and baseball’s new season are upon us, so let’s quote the optimism of Yogi: It isn’t over until it’s over. I thought 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday night in Washington was the Republican Party’s finest hour in a long time. When the voting stopped, the screen said the number of Republicans voting for Mr. Obama’s bill was zero. Not one. Nobody.

Pristine opposition is being spun as a Republican liability. It looks to me like a Republican resurrection. The party hasn’t yet discovered what it should be, but this clearly was a party discovering what it cannot be. …

…The GOP is being counseled to abandon its morning-after impulse to “repeal the bill.” Why do that? This is the first honest emotion the party has had in years. Yes, technical repeal isn’t remotely possible until after 2012. But “Repeal!” is a terrific bumper sticker and campaign slogan for our times. Repeal! ObamaCare is just a start. Can’t repeal the bill yet? Drive people to November’s polls to repeal the Democratic Party and what it has turned into. …

Stuart Taylor discusses the John Adams project with the ACLU that showed photos of CIA agents to Gitmo terrorists. No surprise that Taylor thinks no one should be prosecuted. It is a pleasant surprise that the Attorney General appears to be taking this seriously.

…The August 21 Post article reported that FBI agents had questioned military defense lawyers about whether they had shown their clients photos of covert CIA officials that had been “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.” The Justice Department cleared the military lawyers of any wrongdoing months ago, according to the March 19 Newsweek report by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. (I am an occasional contributor to Newsweek.)

But the investigation of the John Adams Project lawyers “was given new urgency after the discovery last month of additional photographs of interrogators at Guantanamo,” Bill Gertz reported in The Washington Times on March 15. …

…This concern might seem far-fetched if — as the ACLU has suggested — the 9/11 defendants were shown the photos but were given no other information that could lead to exposure of the agents’ names or whereabouts. But Romero’s statement that the 9/11 conspirators were not told the agents’ names “to our knowledge” is not entirely reassuring. Nor is the fact that some of the photos were apparently left with — rather than just shown to — a detainee. …

Mark Steyn blogs about Ann Coulter’s reception in Canada.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she’d even set foot on Canadian soil.

M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred“. As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North:

This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university… Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada! …

In the Corner, John J. Miller has some good news about another politician, and a Dem, no less.

Rep. Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, is black. He also voted against the health-care bill, both last year and this year. The Washington Post seems to think that a black congressman shouldn’t commit the apostasy of “distancing himself from the biggest legislative achievement of the first black president.” Forget the merits of the issue: It’s a black thing and Davis should get with the program.

“I vigorously reject the insinuation that there is a uniquely ‘black’ way of understanding an issue, and I strongly suspect that most Alabamians will as well,” says Davis, who is running for governor.

Good for him. Shame on the Washington Post for thinking this is some kind of controversy.

NRO staff posted a few of Charles Krauthammer’s takes. Here’s one:

On Vice President Biden’s profane utterance at the signing ceremony for Obamacare ["This is a big f**n deal"]:

I think he is the man who, perhaps without intending, has given historical context to this presidency. After all, Obama sees himself as a successor to FDR and Truman, so now we have the historical procession: the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the “Big F**n Deal.” …

Daniel Foster has an interesting post in the Corner. The California part of this equation is not an astonishing fact to Pickings readers.

This is probably bad news for California, but it is certainly good news for Iraq:

Traditional Wall Street investors have taken note. Iraq is now considered a safer bet than Argentina, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Dubai — and is nearly on par with the State of California, according to Bloomberg statistics on credit default swaps, which are considered a raw indicator of default risk.

“Compared to California, I’d rather bet on Iraq,’’ Daher said. “Iraq is a country where there are still bombs going off and people getting murdered, but they are less indebted than the United States. California is likely to have more demands on its resources, and there is no miracle where California is going to have more revenue coming out of the sky. Iraq has prospects for tremendously higher revenues, if they can manage to get their act halfway together, which they seem to be doing.’’ …

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Victor Davis Hanson posts in The Corner on the “threats” to Dems.

… write a book in which you muse about killing George Bush, and its Knopf imprint proves it is merely sophisticated literary speculation; do a docudrama about killing George Bush, and it will win a Toronto film prize for its artistic value rather than shock from the liberal community about over-the-top discourse.

Socialism and totalitarianism are tough charges from the hard right, but they seem to me about as (or as not) over-the-top as Al Gore screaming “digital brown-shirts” or John Glenn comparing the opposition to Nazis. When 3,000 were murdered in Manhattan, and Michael Moore suggested Bin Laden had wrongly targeted a blue state, I don’t think that repulsive remark prevented liberal politicians from attending his anti-Bush film premiere. Yes, let us have a tough debate over the role of government and the individual, but spare us the melodrama, the bottled piety, and the wounded-fawn hurt. …

Abe Greenwald comments on the sad events of the past few days.

…Additionally, for the media at large and for certain self-consciously moderate political analysts, some things are most dangerous when speculated upon. Once they are actually achieved, they are merely “historic.”

The Democrats are doing a lot of talking about history these days. “It is with great humility and great pride that tonight we will make history for this country,” said Nancy Pelosi, before the House passed the Senate’s tax and entitlement bill. “Tonight we answered the call of history,” said Barack Obama, after the deed was done. Not only does this crew refuse to be constrained by the false choice between great humility and great pride; they also reject the false choice between embracing history and ignoring it. For amid the symbolic fanfare of giant gavels and the tactical gravitas of deployed Lincoln quotes, one important fact is being swept aside: the state’s co-opting of the private sector never ends well. Every learned lesson about free markets and central planning, incentives, the allocation of scarce resources under competing systems, government incompetence, overall quality of life and freedom in socialist vs. capitalist states — in short, the reality of the Cold War — has been unlearned. Sunday night brought us the most ahistoric bit of history-making we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. …

Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post finally understands Obama and Israel.

… U.S. pressure on Netanyahu will be needed if the peace process ever reaches the point where the genuinely contentious issues, like Palestinian refugees or the exact territorial tradeoffs, are on the table. But instead of waiting for that moment and pushing Netanyahu on a point where he might be vulnerable to domestic challenge, Obama picked a fight over something that virtually all Israelis agree on, and before serious discussions have even begun. …

… A new administration can be excused for making such a mistake in the treacherous and complex theater of Middle East diplomacy. That’s why Obama was given a pass by many when he made exactly the same mistake last year. The second time around, the president doesn’t look naive. He appears ideological — and vindictive.

In GQ, Robert Baer has an excellent article about how seven CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan by an Al Qaeda double agent. Baer says it was the tragic result of the destruction of standards at the CIA. This does help explain how the national intelligence community has gotten some major things wrong, like the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. Baer lays a lot of this on the doorstep of John Deutch. Pickerhead always knew he was a Deutch bag.

…It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when the operatives’ sun started to set, but many CIA insiders would point to John Deutch, the former MIT provost and Bill Clinton’s second CIA director. From the moment Deutch set foot in Langley, he made it plain that he hated the operatives, their swagger and arrogance. …

…Deutch’s first shot at the operatives was his appointment of Dave Cohen as deputy director of operations, the CIA’s most senior operative. Cohen was an analyst who had never served overseas or run a foreign informant. Deutch’s message couldn’t be any clearer: Anyone can do an operative’s work.

The first thing Cohen did was order a “scrub” of every informant with dirty hands. Drug dealers, dictators’ minions, arms dealers, terrorists—Cohen ordered the operatives to sever ties with all of them. The only problem was, these were the people who mix well with our enemies—rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Deutch and Cohen didn’t care; they had a mandate to clean up the CIA, and that’s what they were going to do.

Headquarters officers started taking more and more of the important jobs in the field. For the first time in the CIA’s history, analysts, reports officers, and logistics officers were given stations and bases to run. … Field experience no longer mattered, either for assignments or promotions.

As the CIA purged informants, it leaned on allies to do our dirty work in the field. Friendly Muslim intelligence services, not CIA operatives, were asked to comb jihadi circles. All this only got worse after September 11. …

Mark Steyn posts about the Obamacare power grab and the Constitution.

Richard Esenberg at PointofLaw.com ponders the constitutional challenge to Obamacare and its likely outcome:

Were I to wager on the question (which may turn out to be an exercise in reading the mind of Anthony Kennedy), I would expect the Court to uphold the individual mandate. But the day that it does will be a tragic one for the Republic. . . .

It will be tragic because the notion of a Congress limited by the scope of its enumerated powers will have finally suffered the coup de grace. The Bill of Rights (once famously – and now ironically – thought to be unnecessary given the structural limits on the power of the national government) will become the only limitation on the power of Congress. If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do any old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what – save some other constitutional restriction – it cannot require you to do – or prohibit you from doing.

Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab. That’s another reason why it’s necessary to repeal or otherwise kill Obamacare — because its underlying assumptions about the power of the central government will not be confined to insurance mandates.

Karl Rove has suggestions for what the GOP should do now.

… Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in “repeal, replace and reform.” Few voters will want to keep onerous mandates that hit individuals and taxes that hobble economic growth. Rather than spending a trillion dollars on subsidies for insurance companies and Medicaid expansion, as ObamaCare does, Republicans should push for giving individuals the same health-insurance tax break businesses get, which would cost less.

Republicans must also continue to press for curbing junk lawsuits, enabling people to buy insurance across state lines, increasing the amount of money they can sock away tax free for medical expenses, and permitting small businesses to pool risk.

Opponents of ObamaCare have decisively won the battle for public opinion. As voters start to feel the pain of this new program, Republicans will be in a stronger position if they stay in the fight, make a principled case, and lay out a competing vision.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York looks at one company that makes medical devices. Obamacare taxes are going to increase the cost of the devices, decrease jobs in the US, or stop innovation. Or all three. Most politicians refuse to acknowledge that increasing taxes hurts the economy and our standard of living.

…The company’s first option is to pass the increase on to customers like hospitals and ambulance companies. That might or might not work, given that they are coming under increasing pressure to cut their own costs.

The next option is to cut research and development — a short-term, money-saving move that will surely cost Zoll down the road. And a third option, says Packer, is to “look at trying to shift jobs to lower-cost places around the world.” That would be bad news for Massachusetts and the USA. …

…No matter what happens, the makers of the devices that save our lives are going to take a major hit.

Thomas Sowell points to this November as our last chance. If congress can take power without checks from other branches of the government, or from the American people, freedom will fall.

…The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.

When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.

The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

Even David Brooks, for all his Obama whorship, can see this will not end well.

… The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem. …

… This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.

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In the New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi gives us an insider’s view of what Obama’s Middle Eastern strategy has wrought.

…Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.

Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama’s demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations. …

…That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he’s ensured that the Palestinians won’t show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy. …

In Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong describes how appeasement is working for the Obami.

Hillary Clinton just visited Moscow.  While there, she was sandbagged by Vladimir Putin.  Putin scammed his way onto her schedule for what was supposed to be a grasp-and-greet photo op, then launched into a six minute diatribe against the United States, in front of the assembled press corps …

…But wait!  There’s more!  Putin/Russia added injury to insult.

The other most contentious moment of Clinton’s trip was also thanks to Putin after he announced yesterday that a nuclear power plant Russia is building in Iran will be completed in the next few months. …

Alan Dershowitz, the usual ally of people who wish to increase the size of the state, warns Obama saying Neville Chamberlain is remembered for appeasing Hitler, not his progressive social programs. Actually, weak thinking in both areas goes hand in hand. Dershowitz also hangs the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on W, when it was part of a long line of problems the intel community created for Bush’s efforts to confront Iran. Not withstanding all these caveats, the piece does explain the risks inherent with nuclear weapons in Iran.

…There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small “sacrifice” of the billion Muslims in the world.

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime. …

Spengler portrays a foreboding financial picture. Those who were elected to serve the American public have brought the nation to a fiscal precipice.

…Governments averted a financial apocalypse in 2009 by bailing out the bankrupt banking system. But who will bail out the governments? The answer for the time being is that they will bail themselves out at the expense of the private economy. In the post-apocalyptic financial world, private banks have turned into flesh-eating zombies that cannibalize the private economy in order to finance government borrowing requirements not seen since World War II. …

…The monetary base is growing at a 40% annual rate. Under normal circumstances, this would lead to double-digit inflation. As long as banks reduce lending to the private sector, and buy government securities that replace lost tax revenues, the result is a so-called liquidity trap. …
…Weaker governments like Greece and Spain, or even the United Kingdom, could snap the chain. A shift out of US dollars in response to monetary inflation could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. An attempt by investors to ease out of the carry trade could provoke a stampede for the exits. Japan has managed to keep its bubble going for 20 years. But Japan did so on the strength of its domestic banking system under the supervision of the Bank of Japan; the United States depends on the reserve status of the dollar, which makes less and less sense when the Treasury is flooding the world with US liabilities.

We have never seen anything quite like this before, and one hesitates to make forecasts about an arrangement so absurd and unstable that the list of potential break-points is endless. Now that the whole world is buying US government debt on borrowed money, it makes no sense to own it. It will end badly – but it is too early to specify just how and when.

In the Corner, John Derbyshire comments on the insatiable appetite of the government.

Dismal news from the mother country today:

State spending now accounts for more than half of Britain’s economy, for the first time since OECD records began. Money from Whitehall and town halls made up 52 per cent of Gross Domestic Product last year, and the proportion is certain to rise.

That’s a growth of 12 percent in just 13 years…

…The U.S. figure for 1997 was 33.77 percent.

What is it today? 44.48 percent and climbing. …

John Hinderaker relates the shocking history of Alcee Hastings.

…Hastings was once a federal judge, but he was impeached…because he solicited bribes from criminal defendants. … That’s a little extreme, even for a Democrat. Hastings’ efforts to make himself rich in this criminal fashion came to light and he was investigated. He responded to the investigation by committing perjury.

As a result of his multiple crimes, Hastings was removed as a federal judge by the United States Senate, one of the few times in history that has happened. Here is the really astonishing thing: instead of going to jail, Alcee Hastings went to Congress! Democratic voters were not in the least concerned that he is a criminal of the most verminous sort. On the contrary, they elected him to represent them in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District! That, really, tells you all you need to know about the depravity to which the Democratic Party has sunk. …

… We are being ruled by people who should be behind bars.

Tunku Varadarajan comments on the passage of Obamacare.

…What Americans saw next was the legislative souk at its most squalid: cajoling, bribing, threatening, wheedling, all designed to bring on board those Democratic congressmen and -women whose votes were needed to attain (or surpass) the number 216, and whose “principles” were getting in the way of a “yes” vote. Hewing to principle is difficult, because it makes party whips angry, spoils dinner parties, and ends careers and friendships. So Kucinich, Stupak & Co. succumbed. To borrow a phrase from Tony Judt, the historian, writing in the latest New York Review of Books: “We… have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications.” …

In American.com, Charles Murray voices concern about the direction of the country.

…Yes, the Democrats will suffer at the polls this fall. But there will be no repeal of health reform. Politicians never withdraw entitlements. The Democrats are right to think that what happened yesterday makes enactment of the rest of the European welfare state easier. But do Obama and Pelosi have any understanding of how profoundly they have violated the sense of the American project? Do they have any idea how hard it is to sustain democracies over long periods of time, and how fragile our democracy has become because of what they did?

I’m sure they don’t. I can see no evidence that we have a president or Democratic congressional leaders who think in terms of “the sense of the American project.” It’s just another political system to them, to be manipulated as all political systems can be manipulated.

This morning, unlike any other day in my life, I feel like I am living in an occupied country.

George Will has a description – Enronesque.

… Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system’s costliest defect — untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the wage system — remains. Obama could not challenge this without adopting measures — e.g., tax credits for individuals, enabling them to shop for their own insurance — that empower individuals and therefore conflict with his party’s agenda of spreading dependency.

On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America’s Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: “More.”

There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable — e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen — is Enronesque. …

In Politico, Robert Zelnick comments on aspects of Obamacare.

…About rising medical bills – often owing to exotic life support systems for the terminally ill, the new law does nothing. Ditto with the rising costs of specialists. The bill would take a mighty chunk out of payments to physicians a few years down the road. But not one in 50 familiar with physician compensation questions believes those sorts of cuts will ever come to pass.

The bill slaps s series of tax boosts on the earnings of those in the quarter million per year bracket and above together with taxes on investment, corporate earnings, other “unearned” (I.e., job-creating investment income) and estates, again nothing remotely linked to the subject of the legislation. …

The Economist reviews a new study on fairness in different societies.

…Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia and his colleagues wanted to test these conflicting hypotheses. They reasoned that if notions of fairness are, indeed, calibrated to the Palaeolithic, then any variation from place to place should be random. If such notions are cultural artefacts, though, they will vary systematically with some aspect of society. In a study just published in Science, Dr Henrich and his team looked at the relationship between notions of fairness and two social phenomena: the degree to which a society is economically integrated and how religious the individuals within it are. …

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Today we must watch these people do their victory laps. While doing so, remember these are the brilliant folks who put the Dems in the position, such that we would laugh at them if they failed, and rail at them if they succeeded. They have weakened our country and added to its divisions. We will find out in November what price they will pay.

The National Review editors say that Obamacare can still be repealed.

…It is quite possible that the majority of America that rejects this legislation will get its way in the next few years — if it is given the right leadership. And it is worth the effort to try. …

…For that matter, the lengthy legislation could turn out to have little time bombs, the nature of which cannot currently be guessed. Nothing about the process that produced the legislation, after all, suggests that it was put together with careful consideration. Conservatives will be able to capitalize on the discrediting of Obamacare, however it takes place, only if they campaign this fall on a pledge to replace this government-heavy system with true reform. Republicans running against Democrats who voted for this legislation will have the easiest task. But even Republicans running against Democrats who voted against it can advance the cause by challenging those Democrats either to advocate repeal and replacement themselves…
The Democrats have abused the system, ignoring both the Founders’ design and public opinion. The first step toward undoing that abuse is to make them pay a political price for it.

In Power Line, John Hinderaker lists his reasons to have hope. Here are two:

* The health care battle is just beginning. Next, the Senate will try to enact the House’s “fixes” to the original Senate bill. Some Senators say that won’t happen. If not, then President Obama has the option of signing the original Senate bill–now passed by the House–Cornhusker Kickback and all. I assume he would do that, but the resulting blowback from House Democrats, not to mention the American people, would be something to behold.

* The health care bill’s taxes will go into effect promptly, but its substantive provisions are, for the most part, deferred for four years. This means that we have plenty of time to repeal the legislation. Sure, it will take a new Congress and new President. But repealing this disaster of a bill will by a rallying cry for the American people for years to come. Moreover, even if the Republicans only take over the House in November, and not the Senate, won’t it be possible to throw roadblocks in the way of the bill’s implementation? Won’t budget appropriations be necessary to sustain the various federal tentacles the bill seeks to establish? What will happen if the House simply refuses to fund them?

Jennifer Rubin says that Obamacare has given the Republicans a big opportunity to win elections. We hope that Republicans reduce and rein in government this time.

…But this much is clear: Obama has handed his opponents a message and a target. The Republican party will put many internal arguments aside and focus on the objective of challenging and repealing ObamaCare. The Left — when not considering that Obama has now herded Americans into the arms of Big Insurance — may be delighted. But no party can win and govern for long without the vast center of the American electorate. Obama has now ceded that to his political opponents.

Investor’s Business Daily editors chronicle a list of lies that President Obama recently said about Obamacare.

• (“This is not a) government takeover of health care.” How is it that government can dictate to private insurance companies what they can offer, to whom, under what circumstances and at what prices, and yet still not own it? Every basic business decision a private company can make has effectively been expropriated.

Even as Obama denied his health care plan was a government takeover, his vice president, Joe Biden, laid out the real deal: “You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.” We’ll take him at his word.

• “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” That’s if your doctor chooses to remain in the profession. Unfortunately, our own IBD/TIPP Poll found that up to 45% would consider quitting if they’re going to be dictated to by unaccountable bureaucrats who couldn’t get into medical school. …

In the Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong discusses Steve Pincus’ book, 1688, about James II and the revolution he sparked. He notes how the beginning of the story could just as easily be Obama’s.

…James ascended the throne with the good wishes of most of the English nation.  His anodyne statements about protecting freedom of conscience convinced most in England that a new era of tolerance was in store.  England, by a large margin, had great and positive expectations for James’s reign.

But it soon became clear that James had a strong ideological agenda that was at odds with the deeply held beliefs of most Englishmen of all political persuasions. James’s rough actions belied his smooth words about tolerance.  He embarked on an aggressive campaign to remake England along continental lines, a campaign that attacked deeply held convictions in England about the relation between government and the governed.  Rather than being an empathetic man in touch with the sentiments of the country, as most had believed, he proved to be a haughty, headstrong, and stubborn one intent on bending the country to his will, and damn quickly. …

…There will be, I trust, no such resolution–or revolution–in the US.  But I do think that it is highly likely that there will be an intense popular reaction that will transform American politics for years to come.  The reaction is already manifest.  The question remains as to whether it will be sufficient to derail Obama’s headlong race to a statist future in 21st century America, as the Glorious Revolution derailed James’s race to an authoritarian, absolutist one in 17th century England. …

Peter Wehner gives us his thoughts.

…The Democratic party is now, more than ever, the party of big government, at a time when trust in government is near historic lows. Democrats engineered a federal takeover of the American health-care system at a moment when confidence in Washington is virtually nonexistent. And at a time when the deficit and debt are white-hot concerns with the public, the Democrats — with the stroke of Barack Obama’s pen — will claim ownership for the fiscal wreckage that awaits us.

5. Some of us have been arguing that passage of ObamaCare would do even more damage to the Democratic party than its failure. This view is predicated on the belief that when you take extremely unpopular legislation, pass it through means that are widely seen are corrupt, and make the health-care system worse rather than better, you will pay a high political price. Democrats already have, simply during the debate about health-care reform. But ObamaCare has now landed. It is what the Obama presidency and the Democratic party now stand for. And I suspect what they have experienced so far, in races in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, will seem like glory days compared to what will happen to them on the first Tuesday of November, and beyond.

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel describes the actions that Obama and Company took to pass Obamacare.

…President Obama flew to Pennsylvania (home to five wavering House Democrats), Missouri (three wavering), Ohio (eight), and Virginia (four) to hold rallies with small, supportive crowds. In four days, Mr. Obama held 64 meetings or calls with congressmen. The goal was to let undecideds know that the president had them in his crosshairs, that he still had pull with the base, and he’d use it against them. By Saturday the tactic had yielded yes votes from at least half the previously undecided members of those states. …

…Outside heavies were enlisted to warn potential no votes that unions and other Democrats would run them out of Congress. Al Lawson, a Tallahassee liberal challenging Blue Dog Florida Rep. Allen Boyd in a primary, made Mr. Boyd’s previous no vote the centerpiece of his criticism. The SEIU threatened to yank financial support for New York’s Michael McMahon. The liberal Working Families Party said it would deny him a ballot line. Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand vowed to challenge South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin if she voted no. New York’s Scott Murphy was targeted as a part of a $1.3 million union-financed ad campaign to pressure him to flip. Moveon.Org spent another $36,000 on ads in his district and promised a primary. Messrs. Boyd and Murphy caved on Friday. …

George Will exposes Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s hypocrisy.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, like many liberals, seems afflicted by Sixties Nostalgia Syndrome, a longing for the high drama and moral clarity of the civil rights era. …Duncan vowed to unleash on public schools legions of lawyers wielding Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They supposedly will rectify what he considers civil rights violations, such as too many white students in high school Advanced Placement classes. …

…While his lawyers seek evidence of displeasing enrollments in AP courses, he is complicit in strangling the scholarship program that enables 1,300 District of Columbia low-income minority students to escape from the District’s execrable schools. … Sensitive about supposed injustices in distant AP classes, Duncan is worse than merely indifferent to children within sight of his office at the foot of Capitol Hill.

No segregationist politician is blocking schoolhouse doors against D.C. children; congressional Democrats are. Until Duncan and the talkative president he serves speak against the congressional Democrats who are strangling the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, he should spare us the exhibitionism of explaining problems of social class in the ’60s vocabulary of civil rights violations.

Robert Samuelson comments on Alan Greenspan’s recently published defense of his record.

…Greenspan’s complicity in the financial crisis stemmed from succeeding too much, not doing too little. Recessions were infrequent and mild. The 1987 stock market crash, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and the burst “tech bubble” did not lead to deep slumps. The notion spread that the Fed could counteract almost any economic upset. Greenspan, once a critic of “fine-tuning” the business cycle, effectively became a convert. The world seemed less risky. The problem of “moral hazard” — meaning that if people think they’re insulated from risk, they’ll take more chances — applied not just to banks but to all of society: bankers, regulators, economists, ordinary borrowers and consumers.

“We had been lulled into a state of complacency,” Greenspan writes in passing, failing to draw the full implication. Which is: Too much economic success creates the seeds of its undoing. Extended prosperity bred overconfidence that led to self-defeating behavior. Neither Greenspan nor any other major economist has yet wrestled with this daunting contradiction.

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Streetwise Professor reacts to health care.

Whatever happens this afternoon (or this evening) in the healthcare vote, the entire spectacle brings to mind what Mark Twain once wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”  Or perhaps this one: “I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.”  (There are more: all, sadly, fit.)

And this, uttered by lawyer Gideon Tucker: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

As dysfunctional as the American healthcare system is, we will pine for the merely dysfunctional if Obamacare passes.  The procedural chicanery and will to override the clear sense of the American people will make things worse, not better.  If only Congress were subject to the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.  (But then what would they do with their time?) …

Matthew Continetti says when it comes to health care, the process is the substance.

One day historians of the health care debate will puzzle over a curious distinction. Why was so much ink spilled over the difference between “process” and “substance”? The terms seem suited to a discourse on phenomenology, not politics. Nevertheless, future historians will note that early 21st century liberals decried the process of legislating because they felt it blinded their subjects to the beneficial substance of social reform. Look beyond the turbulence, tumult, and messy compromises of democracy, their argument went, and the goodness of the liberal cause is self-evident.

But of course it is not self-evident. And to separate process from substance is to create, as somebody likes to say, a false choice. When you bake a cake, everything depends on the selection of ingredients and the manner of preparation. So, too, with the law. Health care reform’s inputs—the partisanship, the special deals, the procedural tricks, the budgetary gimmicks—will directly affect its outputs, i.e., its consequences. They are part and parcel of a $1 trillion-plus health bill that will raise taxes, cut Medicare, become ridiculously expensive sooner rather than later, and poison politics for a long time to come. Liberals miss the point. The process is the substance. …

The Economist writes about how some cultures are killing their baby girls. Be warned: there is a very disturbing story in the first three paragraphs of this article.

…Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole. …

…Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, “must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.” …

…Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3). There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors give us one more reason to reign in government. In the San Joachin Valley, the Department of the Interior turned off the water to save an endangered fish. This action dried up fertile farmland, reduced farming families to poverty, and caused the price of our food to increase. But once Obamacare votes must be bought, the water is turned back on.

…One could chalk it up to good fortune or just good constituent service. But in the middle of a contentious health care debate marked by Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases, we may be forgiven if we find an announcement by the Department of the Interior regarding California’s water supply a tad too coincidental.

On Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it was increasing water allocations for the Central Valley of California, a region that depends on these water allocations for local agriculture and jobs. The timing adds to our suspicions.

According to the Interior announcement, “Typically (the Bureau of) Reclamation would release the March allocation update around March 22nd, but moved up the announcement at the urging of Senators (Diane) Feinstein and (Barbara) Boxer, and Congressmen (Jim) Costa and (Dennis) Cardoza.” …

Michael Kinsley may think that Carter got a bad wrap, but it’s worth taking note when he points to an easy way the government could try to get out from under the national debt without having to make hard decisions.

…There is a way out. It’s called inflation. In 1979, for example, the government ran a deficit of more than $40 billion—about $118 billion in today’s money. The national debt stood at about $830 billion at year’s end. But because of 13.3 percent inflation, that $830 billion was worth what only $732 billion would have been worth at the beginning of the year. In effect, the government ran up $40 billion in new debts but inflated away almost $100 billion and ended up with a national debt smaller in real terms than what it started with. Ten percent inflation for five years (if that were possible) would erode the value of our projected debt nicely—but along with it, the value of non-indexed pensions, people’s savings, and so on. The Federal Reserve is independent, but Congress and the White House have ways to pressure the Fed. Actually, just spending all this money we don’t have is one good way.

Compared with raising taxes or cutting spending, just letting inflation do the dirty work sounds easy. It will be a terrible temptation, and Obama’s historic reputation (not to mention the welfare of the nation) will depend on whether he succumbs. Or so I fear. So who are you going to believe? Me? Or virtually every leading economist across the political spectrum? Even I know the sensible answer to that. …

In the Daily Beast, Charles Gasparino says that Moody’s is concerned about the national debt.

…At issue is a report issued by Moody’s Investors Service that says the triple-A rating on U.S. government debt might someday be a thing of the past. The triple-A rating is, of course, an opinion, but one that carries a lot of weight in the bond markets. …

…Meanwhile, the raters’ track record in predicting a crisis of this magnitude is pretty weak, as well. Many of those esoteric bonds that were held on the books of the banks and later destroyed the financial system in 2008 because they were worth pennies on the dollar were rated triple-A. The raters, for example, gave Orange County, California, high grades before its bankruptcy in 1994, failed to see the bond-market implosion in 1998, and had no idea that the housing market was cratering in 2007, until it cratered, and the bonds backed by risky mortgages were defaulting and spreading a virus that, save for a government bailout, would have destroyed what was left of the financial system.

That said, the current warning shouldn’t be taken lightly, precisely because ratings agencies like Moody’s have been so late in the past. Calling attention to the country’s debt level must mean we are really heading for trouble.

So what would it mean for a downgrade? First, higher borrowing costs. …

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Charles Krauthammer looks at the reason for the Obami anger directed at Israel.

…Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its gross domestic product is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”

What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.

Indeed, long before the Biden incident, Abbas refused even to resume direct negotiations with Israel. That’s why the Obama administration has to resort to “proximity talks” — a procedure that sets us back 35 years to before Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem. …

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews the recent ultimatum that the Obami have made on Israel, and what lies beneath.

…Obama’s new demands follow the months of American pressure that eventually coerced Netanyahu into announcing both his support for a Palestinian state and a 10-month ban on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria. No previous Israeli government had ever been asked to make the latter concession.

Netanyahu was led to believe that in return for these concessions Obama would begin behaving like the credible mediator his predecessors were. But instead of acting like his predecessors, Obama has behaved like the Palestinians. Rather than reward Netanyahu for taking a risk for peace, Obama has, in the model of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, pocketed Netanyahu’s concessions and escalated his demands. This is not the behavior of a mediator. This is the behavior of an adversary. …

Nile Gardiner criticizes Obama’s unbelievably poor judgment in foreign policy.

…Contrast President Obama’s softly, softly treatment of the Iranian theocracy led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – which has threatened to wipe Israel off the map – with that of his distinctly aggressive stance towards Israel. Every effort has been made to engage Tehran, and appease its leaders, from remaining silent over its brutal beating and murder of protestors to turning a blind eye to Tehran’s military and financial support for both the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorist groups in Iraq. At the same time, the Iranians continue to bankroll and arm Hamas and Hizbollah, whose sole aim is the destruction of Israel.

In the space of just over a year, Barack Obama has managed to significantly damage relations with America’s two closest friends, while currying favour with practically every monstrous dictatorship on the face of the earth. … There is nothing clever about this approach – it will ultimately weaken US global power and strengthen the hand of America’s enemies, who have become significantly emboldened and empowered by Barack Obama’s naïve approach since he took office. …

More on-target commentary from Mark Steyn.

…Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you – yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens – are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. …

…Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. …

…Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It’s appropriate that it should take banana republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it’s about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. …

Roger Simon comments on the latest in the efforts to pass Obamacare. It really is fortunate that liberals were greedy in their healthcare grab.

…When you think over the last year, it’s clear Obama has some of the most inept advisers in recent presidential history. Allowing him to risk his entire presidency on a global overhaul of health care – when an incremental overhaul could have been had simply for the asking – seems absurd politics, win or lose. It also isn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things – other than the obvious, increasing the amount of the economy under government control. The nostalgia for marxism inherent in it all this almost pathetic. Don’t these people live in the real world? …

Victor Davis Hanson agrees with the president on one point.

At an outdoor rally today, the president described the health-care debate as a referendum on the “character” of the country, and I do believe he was correct.

The president is pushing legislation that a clear majority of the people dislike, and whose details neither he nor his supporters can explain in simple language. Its ends-justify-the-means passage will require legislative gymnastics that border on the unconstitutional, and in Orwellian fashion are designed to reassure its sheepish supporters that they can appear not to be voting for the bill they vote for. And to achieve a House majority, Obama must offer an array of personal favors, political payoffs, federal stipends, and open threats, which, if done in the private sector, would be actionable acts of felonious bribery or racketeering.

So, yes, this is a reflection about character; and so far the president has throughout this entire shameful process been shown to be utterly wanting on that count…

Peggy Noonan has come to her senses. She writes an excellent article about Obama and the recent strategies to pass Obamacare, including the Fox interview.

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he’s having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he’s been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend. …

…Mr. Baier forced him off his well-worn grooves. He did it by stopping long answers with short questions, by cutting off and redirecting. In this he was like a low-speed bumper car. In the end the interview seemed to me a public service because everyone in America right now wants to see the president forced off his grooves and into candor on an issue that involves 17% of the economy. Again, the stakes are high. So Mr. Baier’s style seemed—this is admittedly subjective—not rude but within the bounds, and not driven by the antic spirit that sometimes overtakes reporters. He seemed to be trying to get new information. He seemed to be attempting to better inform the public.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. …The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing. …

In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez liked Peggy Noonan’s article.

I know not everyone was in the “Patriotic Grace” mood when her book came out, but Peggy Noonan makes excellent observations today. And maybe they’re especially powerful when you consider how she did, in fact, have hopes for this president:

…And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn’t worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass. …

Also in the Corner, Andy McCarthy has different thoughts.

Sorry, K-Lo, can’t go with you on this one. First, this bill is entirely worth it to the Obama Left. It is the social revolution they’ve always dreamed of, they get it without firing a shot, and it never gets rolled back without very drastic countermeasures — meaning the likelihood is that it doesn’t get rolled back (and since we live in a dynamic world, what doesn’t get rolled back, rolls on, and rolls over us).

Second, when some of us argued in 2008 that Obama is not a conventional politician, that enacting his radical, transformative agenda remains more important to him than winning elections, and that he would lead us straight to Demon Pass, Peggy Noonan scoffed — when she wasn’t swooning over our vibrant, promising, intellectual giant of a new president. And she still doesn’t get it: Obama hasn’t changed a whit; she was just wrong.

Jonah Goldberg posts comments from David Brooks on the legislative tricks the Dems are trying to pass Obamacare.

…Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane? …

David Harsanyi makes some important points about the corrupt deem-and-pass process.

…Actually, in the case of health care legislation, the ugly substance of the legislation creates the ugly process. The two issues are inseparable. The process is corrupted, as the advocates have no other path for passage.

This particular process, cobbled together in an effort to bypass the will of voters and protect cowardly legislators, then becomes vitally important. …

…Let’s concede that Democrats are correct in calling out duplicitous and hypocritical GOPers. Does dredging up instances of Republican chicanery now validate the use of your own scams to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act” (the president’s own characterization)? …

From The Corner, a schedule of today’s votes.

… 6:15 p.m.: If the reconciliation bill passes, the House will immediately vote on the Senate bill, without debate.

From The Hill, a list of the 20 Dems who will decide the fate of the bill. Here are a few;

* Glenn Nye (Va.) Nye is in a toss-up race. He voted no last time and his vote will go a long way in determining whether Democratic leaders get the votes.

* Zack Space (Ohio) Space is undecided. Other Ohio Democrats, such as Reps. Betty Sutton and Mary Jo Kilroy, have gone from undecided to yes. He supported the House bill in 2009.

* Ciro Rodriguez (Texas) Rodriguez is considered more likely than not to vote yes but he did vote for the Stupak language. Rodriguez voted yes last year.

From Kathryn Jean Lopez, at the Corner, we learn Glenn Nye announced last night he will vote no.

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Roger Simon wonders if American Jews are giving thought to the way Obama is treating Israel.

…The Obama administration has taken the admonition to “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” to a new level. They want to make love with their enemies while taking their friends to the woodshed and beating the living daylights out of them. And take them they did, time after time. First Biden, then Hillary, then some semi anonymous character at the State Department dressing down Ambassador Oren (talk about disrespecting your betters!), then on to the talk show circuit with the droning Gibbs and Obama’s “best Jew” David Axlerod. His other “best Jew” Rahm Emanuel was nowhere in evidence, as far as I know. (Interesting, that).

But back to my lede. Is the Jewish love affair with the Democratic Party about to end? I know many will be skeptical. And they should be. But I suspect something is brewing. This kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed. …

In Jewish World Review, Anne Bayefsky believes the recent vitriol directed at Israel is to intimidate the Israelis from protecting themselves against a nuclear Iran.

…Reading between the lines, the true explanation of the hyperbole of describing the announcement of housing plans as “insulting” – to use Clinton’s word – is something else entirely: Iran. Ironically, when Vice-President Biden went before the Israeli public on March 11 and told them “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period,” only politeness prevented Israelis from laughing out loud. Nobody believed him. Everyone knows that the UN is not going to deliver a Security Council resolution imposing serious sanctions on Iran in time to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. Every time Obama officials claim they are working on sanctions, it just reinforces the conclusion that they have absolutely no intention of doing what is necessary to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

That leaves Israel holding the bag. And Obama – along with European countries and Australia – do not want Israel to use force against Iran’s nuclear facilities regardless of the mortal threat that they pose to Israel’s population. The President’s only way to prevent Israel from acting – without using more overt intimidation that would reveal his having put Israel’s security way down on his list of priorities and risk a backlash in Congress – is to scare Israel fast with threatened isolation on a trumped-up affront like a bunch of new houses in the desert. …

…And we also know that for the Vice President of the United States to stand before Israelis, address the greatest immediate threat to their peace and security and misrepresent the President’s willingness to do what it takes to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb – is what is really insulting.

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin blogs that the Obami are getting in the way of their own peace process by criticizing Israel and stirring up Palestinian unrest.

What prompted this morning’s violence in Jerusalem’s Old City? Though the stone-throwing and disruptions resulted in only eight Israeli security personnel being wounded and a similar number of Palestinian casualties, the context of the American diplomatic offensive against the Jewish state must be seen as an incentive for the Palestinians to do their own part to ratchet up the pressure. While the Obama administration is using its hurt feelings about the announcement of building homes in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to put the screws to the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians have their own game to play here. And since Washington has decided to go all out to falsely portray the Israelis as the primary obstacle to peace, it should be expected that the supposed victims of the new housing — Palestinians who are in no way harmed by the building of new apartments — will seek to keep events churning. …

Also in Contentions, Noah Pollak blogs that the Obami are mastering the art of alienating friends.

Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with White House officials today and posted this report.

“So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset…

Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.”

So here we have on record the Obama administration saying 1) that it is trying to topple the government of a democratic ally (if only we could try this in Tehran!) 2) that it believes it has such mastery of Israeli politics that publicly bludgeoning Bibi will result in such a shakeup, and that 3) even if the hoped-for new government is formed, the White House thinks it’s a good idea to go on record stating that the Prime Minister they will have to deal with is stupid. …

In Power Line, Paul Mirengoff blogs about the Obami lack of diplomacy and WaPo commentary on the subject.

…But the Post’s perspective is an important one because it purports to reject what Obama is doing even on its own terms (the Post assumes that Obama is trying to advance the cause of peace, not simply letting off steam after a tough year by venting against a country he can’t stand; I’m not so sure). If Obama’s actions fail to garner support even from those who would like Israel to do at least some of what Obama is demanding — and from an institution like the Post that is more than willing to criticize Israel — then the administration has little hope of winning over mainstream Israelis and Americans for its crusade against the Netanyahu government. And without such support, that crusade is likely to be as unsuccessful this year as it was early last year when Obama and Hillary Clinton attempted to browbeat Israel into making concessions. …

David Harsanyi has some criticism for the disproportionate ways in which the Obami are addressing foreign policy issues. In reading about Dalal Mughrabi square, one wonders why the Israelis would consider entering into a peace process with the Palestinians, who celebrate a terrorist who murdered Israelis.

…These days, as Christian farmers are being slaughtered by Muslim machetes in Nigeria, outrage from the White House is difficult to find. But it made sure to instruct our Libyan ambassador to apologize to “Colonel” Moammar Khadafy after he offered some mildly critical comments about the dictator’s call for jihad against Switzerland.

Khadafy can be forgiven, but there are transgressions that can’t. One such sin was perpetrated by Israel after the nation’s decision to allow a new housing project to be built in Jerusalem.

…As the administration was manufacturing this anger, the Palestinian Authority was preparing the newly minted Dalal Mughrabi square. You know, just a place for folks to gather and commemorate the 32nd anniversary of 1978′s Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israelis — 13 of them children — were murdered in a bus hijacking. …

Claudia Rosett reviews Mosab Hassan Yousef’s book, Son of Hamas.

Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef, a genuine Palestinian freedom fighter. He was raised to become a leader of the terrorist group Hamas–strict Muslims dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the horrors he saw them inflicting on their own people led him to become an informant within Hamas for the Israeli security service Shin Bet. Risking death had he been found out, he worked for years to save innocent lives, as he puts it–both Israeli and Palestinian.

Now living in the U.S., Yousef is further risking his neck to tell his tale. He has just published a memoir, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices. In a phone interview, speaking fluent English, he says it “reads like a novel” but “this is a true story.”

Written with the help of journalist Ron Brackin, Yousef’s 265-page book reads with the page-turning ease of a great thriller. Its bombshell news about his work for the Israelis broke just last week, a few days prior to publication. That comes on top of his disclosure in 2008 that while working with Hamas he had quietly converted from Islam to Christianity. In his multi-faceted telling of what he calls his “unlikely journey,” Yousef challenges layers of conventional wisdom (and the entire weave of State Department and White House thinking), to offer his insider insights into Islam, terrorism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and hopes for peace in the Middle East. Whether you are inclined to agree with him or not, he deserves a wide hearing. …

Jonathan Laing, in Barron’s, takes an in-depth look at the looming fiscal crises to state and local governments due to bloated public pensions.

…Says Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University: “In many ways, some of our states are like General Motors before its bankruptcy, suffering from falling revenue, borrowing money to cover operating expenses and operating under crushing legacy health and pension liabilities. It’s entirely possible, given the gigantic size of the pension liabilities, that some states might do what was once the unthinkable at GM and default.”

Such assessments might be alarmist. A rebound in the U.S. economy and a continued rally in stocks would do a world of good for ailing public pension funds. And only one state — Arkansas in 1934 — has defaulted on its GO bonds in the past century with their holders suffering losses. Arkansas, however, was a special case. In addition to the Great Depression, it was ailing from large local debts it had assumed as a result of catastrophic floods in the 1920s.

But what if the stock-market rally falters, the economy doesn’t return to full health, jobs remain scarce and tax revenues remain depressed?

…some major bond investors are altering their strategies in light of the impending pension crisis. …

…Vallejo, Calif., had no choice but to file a Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2008 …

…the fallout has been brutal. Employee health-care benefits have been decimated. Holders of the city’s municipal bonds are unlikely to get all their money back. And violent crime rates have shot up dramatically as a result of reductions in its police force from 158 to 104 officers.

The only thing that will be left untouched? The very thing that tipped the California city into Chapter 9 — its $84 billion in future pension obligations.

The Economist has more on the new abundance of natural gas first posted here February 7th.

… These techniques have unlocked vast tracts of gas-bearing shale in America (see map). Geologists had always known of it, and Mitchell had been working on exploiting it since the early 1990s. But only as prices surged in recent years did such drilling become commercially viable. Since then, economies of scale and improvements in techniques have halved the production costs of shale gas, making it cheaper even than some conventional sources.

The Barnett Shale alone accounts for 7% of American gas supplies. Shale and other reservoirs once considered unexploitable (coal-bed methane and “tight gas”) now meet half the country’s demand. New shale prospects are sprinkled across North America, from Texas to British Columbia. One authority says supplies will last 100 years; many think that is conservative. In 2008 Russia was the world’s biggest gas producer (see chart 1); last year, with output of more than 600 billion cubic metres, America probably overhauled it. North American gas prices have slumped from more than $13 per million British thermal units in mid-2008 to less than $5. The “unconventional”—tricky and expensive, in the language of the oil industry—has become conventional. …