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Jake Tapper noticed one of the “accomplishments” of the recent nuclear summit was a retread. This reminds Pickerhead of his first trip to Moscow. It was a trade mission that allowed my visit to pose as a business expense. After one general meeting that accomplished little beyond creating hot air, I remarked to my interpreter, “This is nothing but a circle jerk.” Soon as I said that, I knew I had tasked his English skills too much. But, that’s what we had in Washington this week.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced today that Russia would shut down its final plutonium reactor, the ADE-2 reactor that has producing weapons-grade plutonium for nearly 52 years in Zheleznogorsk, a once-secret city in Siberia.

According to 2008 report from the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the ADE-2 reactor was originally supposed to shut down last year, after construction of a replacement plant in Zheleznogorsk was completed. …

Corner post from Seth Leibsohm is a good summit summary.

… And if you want to know how badly our foreign muscle has weakened, this story in the Brazilian press this morning informs you: “Brazil has joined forces with Turkey in opposition to sanctions against Iran.”

So, in sum: We had a summit that accomplished nothing except a) angering the American and international press corps, b) closing down Washington for two days, and c) misleading everyone for 24 hours that China and others were on board with something to help stop Iran when that just wasn’t true. This just isn’t serious foreign or defense policy. In fact, it’s a dangerous, even Neronian policy — except it won’t be Rome that will burn.

More summit summations from Nile Gardner in Telegraph Blogs, UK. He contrasts the summit to Netanyahu’s speech at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

… Netanyahu’s warning about the dangers of appeasement is exactly the message the world needs to hear. In contrast, the Nuclear Security Summit has largely been a feel-good exercise by a president who consistently projects weakness over strength, and for world leaders who enjoyed an extravagant, two-day foreign junket at US taxpayers’ expense in the capital of the free world. …

… large political summits don’t necessarily make the world safer, but strong American leadership in the face of tyrannical regimes definitely does, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated. Unfortunately that kind of backbone is in short supply at the White House today, with a president more concerned with PR spin than confronting and defeating evil on the world stage.

Marty Peretz has finally seen the light and understands what a foreign policy disaster this administration has become. The occasion for this revelation was knowledge Syria has armed Hezbollah with Scud missiles. They have a range of 430 miles and can strike Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israel’s nuclear installations at Dimona.

I don’t know whether I should have ended the headline above with a question mark or an exclamation point. The first of my options would suggest that the president might actually learn from his palpable mistakes. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, to tell you the truth, I felt that would be playing with my readers. My alternative would hint—more than hint, I suppose—at my utter exasperation with Obama’s foreign policy. I don’t really want to go there. Still, are you not really exasperated with him and with it? Or are you one of those who care only about domestic affairs? …

… And, thinking about the utter collapse of American policy in so many areas of the world, I wonder why there is so little oversight and even so little questioning of the diplomatic apparatus by the Senate.

Peretz also says that Obama’s opinion on Iranian sanctions is just “blather.”

Sometimes a journalist grasps an intricate situation and explains it in just one simple sentence. Here is what the distinguished Timesman John Vinocur has to say in today’s International Herald Tribune about Obama’s policy of sanctions:

“The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which, although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to give the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep.” …

When it comes to Obama and the Mid-East, no scales were coming off Roger Simon’s eyes.

Barack Obama has an Israel problem. I won’t say a Jewish problem, because that wouldn’t be “politically correct.” As we all know, anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism (or is it?).

Anyway, the President’s Israel problem couldn’t be more obvious and it seems to have increased, or should I say metastasized, in parallel with his popular decline, almost in the way that classic Jew hatred increased during times of economic downturn (Weimar Republic, etc.) Not that anyone who spent two decades in Reverend Wright’s church with its hero worship of Louis Farrakhan and generally racist tinge was likely to be philo-Semitic. But things have gotten worse. Indeed, his very close friends at the New York Times are now reporting that the President, in the wake of the supposedly surprise announcement of new Jewish housing units in Jerusalem, “has seized control of Middle East policy himself.” They go on to note : “Mr. Obama, incensed by that snub, has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a list of demands, and relations between the United States and Israel have fallen into a chilly standoff.”

Incensed by the snub? List of demands. Chilly standoff? In other words, as we say in Hollywood, this time it’s personal. …

… his behavior has certainly not won the hearts and minds of the Israeli public. A gigantic 91% oppose Obama’s possible attempt to impose a deal on Israel, an unheard of number in opposition to an American president – and that from a populace that tends to the liberal, a country where one of the few, if only, socialist successes ever flourished, the kibbutz.

Of course, Obama’s actions are making every Israeli into a dreaded Likudnik. Why wouldn’t they? When a man acts on inchoate impulses tinged with rage, there’s no telling what he will do. If this goes on much longer, he may even change the voting patterns of the American Jewish public. Stranger things have happened. Just wait.

Jonah Goldberg says Sarkozy is not giving up France’s nukes. A reader writes him;

… Sarkozy’s announcement on nukes demonstrates that we’ve crossed some sort of line, and not a good one. This is one of those ‘you know you’re in trouble when…’ moments. You know we’re in trouble when the president of France makes more sense on national security than the president of the United States.

A couple of our favorites look at the Supremes. David Harsanyi is wondering if the American people think like Justice Stevens.

… Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that government should continue to use racial quotas and preferences rather than allow citizens the freedom to succeed or fail on their own merits — or even their own luck — rather than color of their skin?

Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that local government should be permitted to throw American citizens off their own property and out of their homes? Do they concur that government should then be able to hand that property over to other private citizens simply because they can pay more taxes? Because, in Kelo vs. City of New London, Stevens, writing for the majority, radically expanded the idea of property as “public use.”

It’s no mystery why Leahy would want to turn the tables on conservatives and make the confirmation hearing about corporations rather than the Constitution or the reckless manner in which justices like Stevens treat it. I would do the same if my agenda’s success was intricately tied to the pliability of the document.

In a very interesting piece, Stuart Taylor thinks he knows why many GOP appointments turn out to be duds like Stevens, or Souter, or Warren, or O’Conner, or Kennedy, or …….

… Blackmun and O’Connor as well as Stevens, on the other hand, clearly “evolved,” as liberal journalists and academics have said approvingly. Their ideological drift has to some extent mirrored the direction of general public opinion, such as diminishing bias against gay people. But the public has never moved sharply to the left — as has Stevens and as did O’Connor and Blackmun — on abortion rights, racial preferences or church-state issues such as school prayer.

While many liberals see this trend as a case of acquiring wisdom on the job, conservative critics including Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have claimed that their more liberal Republican-appointed colleagues have been moved neither by wisdom, nor by legal principle, nor by general public opinion, but by the leftward march of the intellectual elite, especially in the media and academia.

While I would not dismiss the liberal view, the conservative critique seems more plausible. Indeed, it would be only human, as I wrote in a 2003 column, for justices who arrive without settled ideological convictions to evolve in a liberal direction.

The justices’ reputations are determined in large part by mostly liberal news reporters, commentators and law professors and by liberal feminist, civil rights and professional interest groups such as the American Bar Association. Newly appointed justices who vote conservative are often portrayed as uncompassionate right-wing ideologues. Those who move leftward win praise for enlightenment. (“I ain’t evolving,” the aggressively conservative Thomas has reportedly told clerks.) And the bright young law clerks — the justices’ closest professional collaborators — tend to come from elite law schools where conservative professors are rare birds and general public opinion is widely seen as benighted. …

J. Rubin posts on a Marco Rubio. He might be a modest politician. Is there such a thing?

… Rubio has a bright future that will only get brighter if he proves to be a thoughtful and knowledgable force in the Senate. That he sees himself as not remotely ready for the White House is further evidence of his good character and common sense, qualities in short supply among many pols.

Joel Kotkin says families are not dying out and in fact, are becoming more important.

For over a generation pundits, policymakers and futurists have predicted the decline of the American family. Yet in reality, the family, although changing rapidly, is becoming not less but more important.

This can be traced to demographic shifts, including immigration and extended life spans, as well as to changes of attitudes among our increasingly diverse population. Furthermore, severe economic pressures are transforming the family–as they have throughout much of history–into the ultimate “safety net” for millions of people.

Those who argue the family is less important note that barely one in five households–although more than one-third of the total population–consists of a married couple with children living at home. Yet family relations are more complex than that; people remain tied to one another well after they first move away. My mother, at 87, is still my mother, after all, as well as the grandmother to my daughters. Those ties still dominate her actions and attitudes.

Critically, marriage, the basis of the family, is also far from a dying institution. …

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics speculates about how good it might be in the November elections. We will see if there are enough people who want to do the work.

Though Election Day is still months away, pundits have already begun to speculate on possible outcomes for this year’s midterms. There’s a general consensus that Democrats will lose seats in November, but beyond that opinions vary widely on how big those losses might be. Some argue that because of the advance notice, passage of health care, and an improving economy (or some combination of all three), Democrats will be able to limit their losses significantly. Others are predicting a repeat of 1994, when Democrats lost 50+ seats and control of the House.

So how bad could 2010 get for the Democrats? Let me say upfront that I tend to agree with analysts who argue that if we move into a “V”-shaped recovery and President Obama’s job approval improves, Democratic losses could be limited to twenty or twenty-five seats.

That said, I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility …

The Economist says people can listen to your keyboard clicks and find out what you’re typing. Yipes!

CLATTERING keyboards may seem the white noise of the modern age, but they betray more information than unwary typists realise. Simply by analysing audio recordings of keyboard clatter, computer scientists can now reconstruct an accurate transcript of what was typed—including passwords. And in contrast to many types of computer espionage, the process is simple, requiring only a cheap microphone and a desktop computer. …

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In Commentary, Michael Totten discusses Iran with a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name “Wally” inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he’s issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.

…A military attack against Iran should be rolled out only if every conceivable peaceful solution fails first. Striking Iran would, in all likelihood, ignite several Middle Eastern wars all at once. Hamas and Hezbollah would bombard Israel with missile attacks. Lebanon and Gaza would both come under massive counterbattery fire. The war could easily spill over into Iraq and put American soldiers at risk.

The above scenario may sound like the worst, short of nuclear war, but it isn’t. The worst-case scenario is a regional war that fails to stop Iran’s nuclear program while keeping the regime in place. If the Israelis decide to use force, the nuclear facilities should not be the target. The government should be the target. And the U.S. should back Israel’s play and even assist it, no matter how enraged American officials might be. The last thing any of us needs is a bloodied Iranian government with delusions of invincibility that later acquires the weapons of genocide and then sets out for revenge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “If you shoot at a king you must kill him.” …

Jennifer Rubin has more on foreign policy, this time on South Korea.

It really doesn’t pay to be an ally of the U.S. these days. That status confers on a nation’s leaders the opportunity to be publicly berated and to see prior agreements evaporate (e.g., the Bush-Sharon settlement deal, the missile-defense arrangement with Eastern Europe). And when it comes to our allies’ security and economic needs, Obama nearly always has some higher priority. A case in point (another one) is South Korea. Fred Hiatt writes:

In a world of dangerously failed states and willful challengers to American leadership, South Korea is an astoundingly successful democracy that wants to be friends. But will America say yes? That seemed to be the question perplexing President Lee Myung-bak when I interviewed him here last Wednesday, though he described relations at the moment as excellent. …  The two nations have signed a free-trade agreement that Lee believes would — in addition to bringing obvious economic benefit to both sides — seal a crucial alliance and promote stability throughout Northeast Asia. But President Obama has yet to submit the agreement to Congress for ratification or say when he might do so…

The Economist has a short on the complexity of the tax code.

…The federal tax code, which was 400 pages long in 1913, has swollen to about 70,000. Americans now spend 7.6 billion hours a year grappling with an incomprehensible tangle of deductions, loopholes and arcane reporting requirements. That is the equivalent of 3.8m skilled workers toiling full-time, year-round, just to handle the paperwork. By this measure, the tax-compliance industry is six times larger than car-making.

Every year, the national taxpayer advocate issues a report begging Congress to simplify the system. In her most recent one, published on December 31st, Ms Olson frets that she is repeating herself. She refers Congress to what she said the previous year. An incredible 82% of taxpayers are so flummoxed that they pay for help. Some 60% hire an accountant or tax preparer, while another 22% use tax software. She might have added that even the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, gets someone else to do his taxes. …

We applaud Thomas Sowell’s view of things.

…If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.

But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Michael Barone says that Obamacare will be a central issue for the upcoming SCOTUS nominee.

…One is the constitutionality of the health care bill’s mandate to purchase private health insurance. The federal government has never before commanded citizens to buy a commercial product. Could the government command you to buy breakfast cereal?

Some 14 state attorneys general are trying to raise the issue in court, and pending state laws outlawing mandates could raise the question as well. Those state laws are obviously invalid under the supremacy clause unless the federal law is unconstitutional. Is it?

…Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.

Jennifer Rubin comments on polling numbers for repealing Obamacare.

Three weeks after Congress passed its new national health care plan, support for repeal of the measure has risen four points to 58%. That includes 50% of U.S. voters who strongly favor repeal.The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters nationwide finds 38% still oppose repeal, including 32% who strongly oppose it.

It’s startling that fifty percent strongly favor its repeal. It is not simply that Obama hasn’t sold his signature health-care legislation; attitudes are hardening even before the tax hikes, premiums increases, and Medicare cuts go into effect. …

…It has, however, reinvigorated and revived the conservative movement. That’s no small accomplishment.

David Goldman says that small business indicators are not optimistic.

Meanwhile the NFIB’s business optimism index fell to 86.8 in March from 88 in February. Bloomberg quoted an NFIB economist as follows:

The measure of earnings expectations showed the biggest decline in March, falling 4 points to minus 43 percent. Thirty- four percent of respondents cited “poor sales” as the top business concern, the same as in February, and the net percent of owners projecting higher sales, adjusting for inflation, fell to minus 3 percent.

How do we square this with what appears to be a big improvement in employment according to the Household Survey for March? For March, the household survey has a seasonally-adjusted total employment number of 138,905 and an unadjusted unemployment number of 137, 983. Unemployed s.a. are 15.008 million vs. 15,678 million before seasonal adjustment. There is something squirrelly in seasonally-adjusting data in the midst of tectonic shifts in the structure of the economy.

In the WSJ, Burton Folsom, Jr. and Anita Folsom explain how the Great Depression ended.

…Instead, Congress reduced taxes. Income tax rates were cut across the board. FDR’s top marginal rate, 94% on all income over $200,000, was cut to 86.45%. The lowest rate was cut to 19% from 23%, and with a change in the amount of income exempt from taxation an estimated 12 million Americans were eliminated from the tax rolls entirely.

Corporate tax rates were trimmed and FDR’s “excess profits” tax was repealed, which meant that top marginal corporate tax rates effectively went to 38% from 90% after 1945. …

…By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the U.S. had received during the war years, when tax rates were higher. Price controls from the war were also eliminated by the end of 1946. The U.S. began running budget surpluses. …

Ralph Kinney Bennett, in the American.com, writes an ode to the Jeep.

…Born of war and now in its 70th year, its brilliant design has propelled it into a new century with an undiminished reputation. It is an engineering landmark, the epitome of functional simplicity, and yet nobody is entirely sure who designed it or gave it its name.

What eventually became the Jeep was originally conceived in the 1930s as a light, rugged “reconnaissance car” to provide speedy movement of key personnel and equipment in the rear and on the battlefield. The U.S. Army vaguely envisioned something bigger than a motorcycle, smaller than a truck, and undaunted by the most difficult terrain. …

…The appeal of the basic Jeep is visceral, profound, beyond explanation. Not even a Volkswagen Beetle is as instantly recognizable. Older Jeeps continue to be recycled through new bodies, new engines, giant wheels and tires, hard tops, soft tops, no tops. They become dune buggies, beach buggies, ball buggies on golf driving ranges, and windshield-down stump jumping go-to-hell cars. They do everything but die. As to the military originals of the Second World War, I have often seen veterans simply break into tears in the presence of a restored one. …

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Tony Blankley continues to advocate exiting Afghanistan.

I concluded in November 2009:

“If the Taliban and al Qaeda retake Afghanistan, the world (and America) will have hell to pay for the consequences. But this president and this White House do not have it in them to lead our troops to victory in Afghanistan. So they shouldn’t try. The price will be high for whatever foreign policy failures we will endure in the next three years. Let’s not add to that price the pointless murder of our finest young troops in a war their leader does not believe in. Bring them home. We’ll need them later.”

…if we need a credible “local partner,” our local partner needs a reliable, supportive “large brother” (to wit: the United States). But by first hesitating to support Mr. Karzai, then saying we will support him – but only for 18 months, then publicly admonishing him to end the endemic corruption, then leaking the fact that his own brother is a major drug smuggler, we have undermined and infuriated him, without whom we cannot succeed in Afghanistan.

Great nations often find themselves in alliance with undesirable local chieftains. Usually in such circumstances, the great nation either tries quietly to strengthen and improve the local boss or it gets rid of him and finds a better puppet. If neither method works – then the great nation eventually gets out. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson writes that Obama’s views on nuclear policy have not changed.

…The Times article reported on Obama’s March 1983 article “Breaking the war mentality.” The Times noted that in the article Obama railed against discussions of “first-versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

…The Times chose to portray Obama’s 1983 article as the early expression of his continuing pursuit of “a nuclear free world.” That’s one way to put it. While others may hope that Obama has outgrown his youthful radicalism, the Times suggested that he is fulfilling it. The Times unfortunately appears to have gotten that right.

George Will summarizes and comments on the current news in state pension reforms.

…A recent debate on “Fox News Sunday” illustrated the differences between the few politicians who are, and the many who are not, willing to face facts. Marco Rubio, the former speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives who is challenging Gov. Charles Crist for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, made news by stating the obvious.

Asked how the nation might address the projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said that we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits: Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system’s unfunded liabilities.

…By the time the baby boomers have retired in 2030, the median age of the American population will be close to that of today’s population of Florida, the retirees’ haven that is Heaven’s antechamber. The 38-year-old Rubio’s responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity — a brave approach to the welfare state’s inevitable politics of gerontocracy.

The New Editor links to a Chicago Tribune editorial on the decline of Illinois.

… Illinois needs a new paradigm.

Illinois needs leaders who unwind the terrible indebtedness that lawmakers past and present have bequeathed to taxpayers and their grandchildren.

Illinois needs an end to the mutual admiration society of public officials and public employees coddling one another.

Illinois needs fewer governments and, in Springfield, one government scared straight by so much lost employment.

Most of all, Illinois needs leaders who see that, across this nation, concerns about the public sector’s size, cost and reach is the domestic issue that most rivets Americans. …

Robert Samuelson feels we should be more optimistic about the economy.

When things were going well, it was said that the United States enjoyed a Goldilocks Economy. Growth was fast enough to produce jobs and higher incomes but not so fast as to generate inflation. In the same vein, it might be said that today we have an Oscar-the-Grouch Economy. Good news is discounted. Pessimism is trendy. Growth is considered too feeble to help real people. But there is some genuine good news — and it deserves attention.

It’s most obvious in the labor market. The increase of 162,000 payroll jobs in March was the largest in three years. Layoffs have subsided to pre-recession levels. Job openings have ended their precipitous decline. Surveys suggest more gains. A poll of the corporate chief executives in the Business Roundtable found that 29 percent expect to increase jobs over the next six months, and only 21 percent expect to cut; not since the fall of 2008 have more CEOs expected to hire than fire. In March, the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group for small firms, found no net job cuts — the first time that’s happened since April 2008. …

Abby Thernstrom shares some of her insights on the census, race, and political culture.

The president has officially declared himself to be black—having checked the “black” box on his census form. Barack Obama rejected the option of identifying himself as biracial, which of course he is. His declaration is hardly a surprise. His search for a black identity was the focus of his autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” and surely that search partly explains his long membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, which described itself as “Afrocentric”—an “instrument of Black self-determination.” …

…At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then-Sen. Obama spoke of “one American family.” He said: “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America.” And yet in filling out the census form as he did, the president unequivocally declared himself part of “black America.” In effect, he disowned his white mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents who acted as surrogate parents for much of his boyhood. Mr. Obama had hardly ever laid eyes on his father, but that absent parent shaped his own sense of identity. …

Christopher Hitchens comments on liberal political satire.

…If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or any straight-faced, eyebrow-raising (and studio-audience-thigh-slap-triggering) mention of, say, The New York Times’s routine practice of captioning Al Sharpton as “the civil rights activist.” Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with. …

…See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence. How might I give an illustration of the laws of unintended consequences? Let us imagine that Senator Franken composed a chapter about government lying and cover-up, which involved the use of the irresistibly hilarious instance of Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s former national security adviser, being caught red-handed as he stuffed his pants with classified papers from the National Archives. In a capital city that witnesses quite frequent alternations of power between the two main parties, what will be the chances that fiasco and corruption occur at the expense of only one of them? Yet meticulous care is taken by the senator to make sure that no such “fair and balanced” laughter is ever evoked, which is quite a sacrifice for a comedian. Consistency of this kind allows no spontaneity, let alone irony. It might even go some way to explaining the howling success of the “Air America” network, the collapsing-scenery rival to the right-wing dictatorship exerted over the rest of the ether. …

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Charles Krauthammer opines on the revision of US nuclear policy.

…This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections. …

…It gets worse. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review declares U.S. determination to “continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks.” The ultimate aim is to get to a blanket doctrine of no first use.

This is deeply worrying to many small nations that for half a century relied on the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella to keep them from being attacked or overrun by far more powerful neighbors. When smaller allies see the United States determined to move inexorably away from that posture — and for them it’s not posture, but existential protection — what are they to think? …

Jonah Goldberg has a good point. If we become Europe, from what country will Europeans get their free ride?

… Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.

The most obvious and most cited illustration of this fact is national defense. Europe’s defense budgets have been miniscule because Europeans can count on Uncle Sam to protect them. Britain, which has the most credible military in NATO after ours, has funded its butter account with its gun account. As Mark Steyn recently noted in National Review, from 1951 to 1997 the share of British government expenditure devoted to defense fell from 24 percent to 7 percent, while the share spent on health and welfare increased from 22 percent to 53 percent. And that was before New Labour started rolling back Thatcherism. If America Europeanizes, who’s going to protect Europe? Who’s going to keep the sea lanes open? Who’s going to contain Iran — China? Okay, maybe. But then who’s going to contain China?

But that’s not the only way in which Europeans are free-riders. America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? …

Peter Wehner reminds us of the importance of civility in political discourse and commentary. He comments on an article from Michael Gerson on the topic.

My former White House colleague Michael Gerson has a very good column in the Washington Post today on civility and public discourse. It makes a very important (and too often overlooked) point:

…The opposite — questioning the legitimacy of a democratic outcome; abusing, demeaning and attempting to silence one’s opponents — is a sign of democratic decline. From the late Roman republic to Weimar Germany, these attitudes have been the prelude to thuggery. Thugs can come with clubs, with bullhorns, with Internet access.

Spirited, passionate debate is fine, and even good at times, for the country. The opposition party should offer sharp, even piercing, criticisms when appropriate. After all, politics ain’t beanbags, as Mr. Dooley said. And it’s not the place for those with delicate sensibilities. But nor should it be an arena for invective or hate. And conservatives should not repeat the tactics used by some Democrats and liberals during the Bush years. …

And here is Michael Gerson’s article from the WaPo.

…We have entered a national debate on the role and size of government, intensified by the passage of health-care-reform legislation. It is not quite Antietam, but many Americans feel that their deepest beliefs about liberty and self-government are being undermined. Passions run high. Activists slip easily into reckless talk of tyranny and revolution. …

…The most basic test of democracy is not what people do when they win; it is what people do when they lose. Citizens bring their deepest passions to a public debate — convictions they regard as morally self-evident. Yet a war goes on. Abortion remains legal. A feared health-reform law passes. Democracy means the possibility of failure. While no democratic judgment is final — and citizens should continue to work to advance their ideals — respecting the temporary outcome of a democratic process is the definition of political maturity. …

Tunku Varadarajan will miss Justice Stevens.

…Our present America is one in which all aspects of life—culture, politics, business, education—are shaped more decisively by the judiciary than by any other branch of government, and one always had the impression that Justice Stevens would have preferred things to be otherwise. He craved a lower-key role for himself and for his court, and this was plain for all to see in his dissent in Bush v. Gore—a case which, for him, was a clear example of the Court stepping onto turf where it didn’t belong—of the Court, in fact, overstepping its bounds.

It is this sense of “bounds” that marks him apart from many of his fellow judges, as does his politics, which are better described as “cultured” or “humane” than “liberal” (which is the label most frequently applied to him): His views, and his inclinations, were marked by an absence of dogma; his rulings usually reflected a private and passionate morality, which led him, more often than not, to rule as he would like the law to be. Law, for him, was a tool by which he sought to effect constant “improvement” of society. Not surprisingly, this put him squarely at odds with Justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia, whose constitutional jurisprudence is less instinctual and arguably less “humane”—while at the same time more faithful to the Framers’ intentions than Stevens’.

American civilization, broadly defined, will benefit from the fact that Stevens will depart under a liberal president. We are a “5-4” society—by which I mean that we are almost evenly divided, ideologically—and the Supreme Court, as presently constituted, reflects faithfully our social clefts and divisions, as well as our swings of mood and indecision. As with our electoral politics, it is better that there be no runaway majority on the Supreme Court (a perpetual 6-3, say) on the central questions of our civitas. It is better that each victory be fought for. That keeps everyone honest. …

Peter Schiff refutes Paul Krugman’s belief that inflation will help us.

…In simple terms, Krugman believes that inflation is the best cure for burdensome debt problems. To prove his arguments, he points to the course followed by the Unites States in the decade after the Second World War. In 1946, due to unprecedented military spending during the war, U.S. public debt as a percentage of GDP came in at a staggering 122 percent – which is even higher than the 113 percent currently weighing on Greece.

Krugman endorses U.S. policy at the time which, he claims, concentrated on fostering growth instead of taking measures to drastically cut the post-war debt. He notes that by the end of 1956, the federal debt had not diminished in nominal terms, but had become much easier to bear because of the decade of GDP growth that inflationary policies had created.

He neglects to mention that during the five years from 1945 to 1949, federal spending dropped by 58% and taxes fell by 12%. Meanwhile, the budget deficit fell by 66% in 1946 and was in surplus from 1947 to 1949. [i] In other words, although we did not pay down our nominal debt in the decade after the war, we did succeed in massively shrinking government and the burden that it places on society. Could it be that this had something to do with the post-war boom, or should we give all the credit to the monetary policy? …

WSJ’s Weekend Interview was with George Will who talks of baseball. Will says its a sport for democracies. Pickerhead thinks it is a sport that employs the important human skills of handling a club and throwing, with which we employed our opposable thumbs, so we can kill from a distance.

…Craft—defined by Mr. Will as the art of excellence—has fascinated the columnist for decades. Twenty springs ago, the Pulitzer Prize winner published “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball,” and it raced up the bestseller lists. HarperCollins will re-release the book with a new introduction on Tuesday. …

…But baseball, he says, has always been the passion of his life. With “Men at Work,” “I wanted to know what was going on out there,” Mr. Will says, clasping his hands like a professor. “My theory— and being a political philosopher I had to have theory—was that more than any other sport, a fan’s enjoyment of baseball is a function of how much he understands the nuances.” Nuance—how a batter moves his hips or where a shortstop stands—makes baseball more than a contest of runs. “You don’t need to understand a thing about football to marvel at the astonishing violence or speed of that game, or in the NBA, the athleticism and grace of giants. The spectacle is its own reward,” Mr. Will tells me. “Baseball is different.” …

More about baseball today we look back at Pickings on November 5, 2008 when we said;  “Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open-minded tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the  American people had already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?”

Streetwise Professor posts on opening day in DC with A Poser Who “Throws Like a Girl”*

… those who want to identify themselves as more urban, more hip, will sometimes choose to become Sox fans–or affect being Sox fans.  For such people, wearing Sox gear is an affectation, an advertisement, a statement (“I’m an edgy urbanite, not a gauche suburbanite”). (The Sox have consciously played to this, e.g., the black caps/uniforms.)

Obama is quite clearly such a person, and he all but admits it in what I quoted above.  The whole Obama White Sox thing is just another piece of a persona, deliberately chosen to convey an image, a perception.  It is, in other words, quintessential Obama.

As is his rationalization for his performance:

‘The president suggested his accuracy would have improved with a longer outing.“If I had a whole inning, I’m telling you, I would have cleaned up,” he quipped.’

Would it kill him to admit “Well, I just suck at baseball”?  Is he so invested in his own ego that he has to be great at everything? I know that politicians are narcissists, but this guy is off the charts.

More on baseball from John Kass .

…Dibble: “Who was one of your favorite White Sox players growing up?”

Obama: “You know … uh … I thought that … you know … the truth is, that a lot of the Cubs I liked too.”

Ouch. The silence between the stammers was excruciating. America’s No. 1 Sox fan couldn’t name one Sox player. …

…Don’t worry, Mr. President. This will blow over. Just look how quickly the media stopped twisting the knife into Sarah Palin. …

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The WSJ editors show how the arrogant treatment of President Karzai has come back to haunt us.

… This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK’s orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.

By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals. …

Abe Greenwald, in Contentions, also comments on the disrespect of Karzai.

…The point here is not that Karzai is a paragon of trustworthiness and good governance. He is a very flawed and, in some ways, compromised figure. The issue is how best to keep him from actively obstructing our mission and how to lay the foundation for a genuine tilt toward a stable and accountable representative government in Afghanistan. That’s achieved first by backing up a rock-solid commitment to defeat the Taliban and staying on for institution building. At the same time, Karzai should be intelligently coerced in private, not undermined in public.

For a president who has invested so much in style over substance, and dwelled so incessantly on the virtues of listening over dictating, Obama has achieved a strikingly ill conceived tone on Karzai. What’s more his penchant for the perfect compromise has not served him well on Afghanistan. We cannot at once be committed to fighting and winding down the same war. Nor can we treat a partner as both an ally and an antagonist. For all Obama’s talk of Bush’s failures in Afghanistan, the president could learn a few things from his predecessor.

Fouad Ajami places Karzai and Afghanistan in the context of our feckless policies in the region.

…Forgive Mr. Karzai as he tilts with the wind and courts the Iranian theocrats next door. We can’t chastise him for seeking an accommodation with Iranian power when Washington itself gives every indication that it would like nothing more than a grand bargain with Iran’s rulers. …

…All this plays out under the gaze of an Islamic world that is coming to a consensus that a discernible American retreat in the region is in the works. America’s enemies are increasingly brazen, its friends unnerved. Witness the hapless Lebanese, once wards of U.S. power, now making pilgrimages, one leader at a time, to Damascus. They, too, can read the wind: If Washington is out to “engage” that terrible lot in Syria, they better scurry there to secure reasonable terms of surrender.

The shadow of American power is receding; the rogues are emboldened. The world has a way of calling the bluff of leaders and nations summoned to difficult endeavors. Would that our biggest source of worry in that arc of trouble was the intemperate outburst of our ally in Kabul.

Turning to our upcoming rendezvous with April 15th, David Harsanyi has some interesting statistics, the upshot of which is a message to the GOP on how to win the next elections.

…So taxes it is. If I were running a minority party, I would make tax reform a major plank of my campaign.

Cut capital gains and corporate taxes. Simplify and flatten income taxes. Finally — and this is sure to go over well in suburban and lower income households around the nation — spread the income tax burden more equitably, so that all of us can enjoy “investing” in Washington. …

Mark Steyn is on the subject of taxes also.

… for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes – state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. …

In Forbes, Richard Epstein tells us to watch Maine and Massachusetts to see where Obamacare will take us. The pressure is building.

…As a matter of first principle, however, this two-state meltdown shows the colossal flaw in the modern theory of health insurance rate regulation. Originally, rate regulation operated as a counterweight to the monopoly power of key providers in network industries–railroads, electricity, power transmission, telecommunications and the like. Those price controls forced these monopoly providers to accept a risk-adjusted competitive return for their services. Knowing, however, that these industries had to invest in infrastructure, courts rejected as confiscatory steep rate cuts that would not allow regulated firms to stay in business.

Here is the catch. Health care insurance is a competitive industry, with no monopoly profits for wise regulators to eliminate. Rate regulation thus makes no sense if its only consequence is to drive up administrative costs while denying competitive firms a competitive rate of return on investment. A sensible constitutional regime would knock out these rate reductions automatically without demanding any detailed case-by-case accounting to reveal the obvious: Open entry eliminates persistent excessive returns. This brass knuckles treatment of state regulators is a pipe dream under today’s permissive constitutional environment that sees rate regulation as an economic panacea. So current regulators first starve the insurance carriers and then invite them do battle with the health care providers. …

…There is no mystery here. Maine and Massachusetts have introduced programs that require them to live beyond their means. They give us an early warning system, like canaries exposed to carbon monoxide in the mine. These new entitlement programs can’t breathe without new oxygen. But there is no air in their fiscal oxygen tank. Runaway costs will lead to price controls that will lead to queuing for standard health care services. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives a liberal’s view of the upcoming SCOTUS nomination. Justice Stevens has expanded the government’s power, and federal power over the states. Stevens also authored the Kelo v. New London decision that allows government to steal land from its citizens. Justice Stevens is fond of saying he didn’t change, the court did. Yet, he was first party to a decision to bring back the death penalty and then later ruled against it.

…Stevens, who will still have one of the best minds on the Court when he turns 90 on April 20, has long insisted that he remains the old-fashioned judicial conservative and moderate Republican he was when President Ford appointed him in 1975. But the leftward drift of his opinions over the years has made him the senior member of the four-justice liberal bloc.

The four shortlisters are Solicitor General Elena Kagan; federal Appeals Court Judges Diane Wood of Chicago and Merrick Garland of the District of Columbia; and (though some count her out) Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. President Obama interviewed Kagan, Wood, and Napolitano last spring before choosing Sonia Sotomayor, an Appeals Court judge, to succeed Justice David Souter.

…But Obama knows that a big confirmation battle could deplete his political capital and make it much harder to get his proposed legislation on climate change and other matters through Congress. …

In Future Pundit, Randall Parker tells us about a study that will please some people. Specifically, those who think that mint chocolate chip ice cream is all the green they need in their diet.

“An analysis of dietary data from more than 400,000 men and women found only a weak association between high fruit and vegetable intake and reduced overall cancer risk, according to a study published online April 6, 2010 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”

Other studies have found the same results. But you can still eat fruits and vegetables for your heart and arteries.

Coincidentally, another recent report finds Vitamin K as K1 found in green leafy vegetables does not cut cancer risk but Vitamin K as K2 found in cheese does cut cancer risk.

The Economist reports on the same study.

FOR snivelling children and recalcitrant carnivores, requests that they should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But those who did comply with official advice from charities, governments and even the mighty World Health Organisation (WHO), could remind themselves, rather smugly, that the extra greens they forced down at lunchtime would greatly reduce their chances of getting cancer. Until now, that is. Because a group of researchers led by Paolo Boffetta, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, have conducted a new study into the link between cancer and the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and found it to be far weaker than anyone had thought. …

…Even those who eat virtually no fruit and vegetables, the paper suggests, are only 9% more likely to develop cancer than those who stick to the WHO recommendations.

…More importantly, there is still good evidence that fruit and vegetables protect against heart disease and strokes by reducing blood pressure. A separate investigation of the people involved in Dr Boffetta’s study suggests that those who eat five servings a day of fruit and vegetables have a 30% lower incidence of heart disease and strokes than those who eat less than one and a half servings. It is also possible that some specific foods, such as tomatoes, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, do offer protective effects against particular kinds of cancer. …

Pickerhead’s favorite TV series, ever, was Frank’s Place. The WSJ reviews a new HBO series Treme that gives hope something like it may appear again. Starts tonite on HBO.

The new HBO series “Treme” (Sunday 10-11 p.m. ET) opens in New Orleans just three months after Katrina. Its a gumbo of so many ingredients that it will take a nice, long time to suck the juice out of them. Best of all, the series producers, David Simon and Eric Overmyer, create a world outside the standard Big Easy-Cajun-honky-tonk-voodoo clichés. From the opening credits to the end of each episode, it delivers jolts of what feels like the real thing, or at least an original thing.

“Treme” begins in the old African-American neighborhood of that name with a rousing second-line parade—so called because musicians form the first line, and second come people who join the procession as it spreads good vibes along the way. …

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In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on the choices in facing the Iranian nuclear threat.

Iran is pressing forward with its nuclear program. The Obama administration is dithering. Bent upon getting a Security Council resolution rather than assembling a coalition of the willing, the White House and American policy is being held hostage by Russia and most of all by China. Here’s an informed prediction: if Beijing does come around and support a new round of sanctions, it will be hailed by the White House as a major breakthrough: peace in our time. But the actual sanctions will be weak to worthless. China has too much at stake in Iran as a source of energy. It also sees an opportunity to poke us in the eye. …

In Newsweek, Sumit Ganguly thinks India should be treated with more respect.

…India won’t wait indefinitely for the White House to put the relationship back on track. Instead, it is cutting deals with nations that respect its significance. Russia, which had let old Soviet ties to India wither, is now dramatically renewing the connection. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently visited India and went home with multiple agreements, including deals on civilian nuclear energy and more than $1.5 billion worth of advanced naval aircraft. Obama’s inattention is what makes Russia’s advance possible.

It’s hard to understand why Washington would continue to neglect such a valuable ally. India is a vast and growing market, a significant military player in South Asia, a growing force in global talks on climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. So instead of ignoring or publicly upbraiding India, Washington needs to find a way to avoid the acutely sensitive issue of Kashmir, while enhancing counterterrorism cooperation and actively seeking India’s input into the larger discussion on Afghanistan. Doing so will help secure Washington’s relationship with a nation that is too important to keep on the sidelines.

Roger Simon gives another reason why he calls Obama - President Weirdo.

…The President of the United States — whose most important duty is to protect the citizens of this country — is publicly abjuring the use of nuclear weapons if we are attacked by chemical or biological weapons — both of which are known to all of us as Weapons of Mass Destruction, the dreaded WMDs.

…Now I detest nuclear weapons as much as the next person, but this approach seems — I hate to repeat myself, but I will — deranged. It also has very little to do with actually reducing nuclear weapons in the world. Again, it seems like the act of an extreme narcissist, someone who wants to parade himself as anti-nuke while ignoring the checks and balances that have, in fact, kept nuclear weapons in their silos for decades. …

Tunku Varadarajan discusses the president’s stubborn anti-Bush stance as misguided and unprincipled foreign policy.

…There is also an unseemly side to the pragmatism that is Obama’s international leitmotif. Paradoxically for a man who incarnates the progress of civil liberties in his own country, the president has literally banished human rights (that quintessentially liberal and Democratic concern) from U.S. foreign policy—just because Bush took up the cause. Of rights in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, the Obama administration has spoken only with an excessive, and dispiriting, circumspection.

So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…

…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.

John Hinderaker comments on the president’s anti-nuclear policy. Amateur, thy name is Obama.

…On its face, that is unbelievably stupid. A country attacks us with biological weapons, and we stay our hand because they are “in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty”? That is too dumb even for Barack Obama. The administration hedged its commitment with qualifications suggesting that if there actually were a successful biological or chemical attack, it would rethink its position. The Times puts its finger on what is wrong with the administration’s announcement:

“It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war.”

That’s exactly right. The cardinal rule, when it comes to nuclear weapons, is keep ‘em guessing. We want our enemies to believe that we may well be crazy enough to vaporize them, given sufficient provocation; one just can’t tell. There is a reason why that ambiguity has been the American government’s policy for more than 50 years. Obama cheerfully tosses overboard the strategic consensus of two generations.

Peter Wehner says that history will not judge Obama kindly.

…Why Mr. Obama made this fateful decision is hard to tell. He is a person of unusual ideological rigidity. The president is undeniably committed to expanding the size, scope, and reach of government. …

….This is what this moment demanded of this president and this Congress. Instead, we got the opposite. Rather than tapping the fiscal brakes and eventually nudging us into reverse, they have hit the accelerator and are leading us over a cliff. …

…The majority of the Obama presidency is still before us. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to say that on this vital front, Barack Obama has been, and will eventually be judged to be, a significant failure. He not only missed history’s calling, he mocked it. He placed his own statist ambitions above the needs of the nation he was elected to serve. Soon enough, and perhaps on a scale he cannot now imagine, Obama and his party will be held accountable for having done so.

The Streetwise Professor comments on the most recent attack on free markets from the Left, brought to you by Senator Christopher Dodd.

…And just what are the apparatchiks in the SEC going to do in that 120 days?  Just what knowledge and expertise can they bring to bear in evaluating the funding plans?  The question answers itself; this adds costs and delay, for no perceivable benefit.  And what reason is there to restrict the free flow of capital from consenting adults with over $1mm to startups?

The American system of financing entrepreneurial startups is one of the world’s wonders.  It has played a central role in stimulating amazing technological innovation that has brought us amazing new products and contributed to substantial productivity growth in the ’90s and ’00s.  It is in no way implicated in the financial crisis. …

Nile Gardiner has more on the Obami’s destruction of the US economy.

The relentless drive by the Obama administration to undercut economic freedom in the United States continued yesterday with Paul Volcker’s call for the possible introduction of European-style value-added taxes as well as energy or carbon taxes. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chief, is currently the most powerful economic adviser to the president after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and sits as the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

This is not empty, throw away rhetoric, but a call to arms by an aggressively interventionist and uncompromisingly left-wing US administration that is actively seeking to refashion the United States in the image of the European Union, both in terms of foreign and economic policies. …

Jennifer Rubin’s commentary is on the money.

James Klein of the American Benefits Council writes in opposition to the attacks by the administration and Rep. Henry Waxman that corporations’ write-downs of losses due to ObamaCare are some sort of political scare tactics …

…As Klein notes, it is the frenzied ObamaCare defenders who are playing politics with the tax code, and worse — berating corporations to defraud shareholders. (”As for the government’s assertion that companies are failing to adequately account for all the savings they will enjoy from health-care reform, isn’t that exactly the kind of “creative” accounting that got Enron in trouble?”)

This is the administration that promised to take the politics out of science and the ideology out of foreign policy. But in fact everything — including the tax code — is merely part of the Chicago machine, which threatens to mow down any rule, any entity, and any critic standing in its way. Lacking internal restraint and humility, this administration and the country would surely benefit from some robust legislative scrutiny and oversight. The voters in November will have an opportunity to check the voracious power of an administration of bullies.

Charles Krauthammer helps the president answer Doris the factory worker in much less than 17 minutes.

On President Obama’s 17-minute answer to a question at the town-hall meeting in Charlotte about Obamacare raising taxes:

I don’t know why you’re so surprised. It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln was answering an easier question: the higher purpose of the Union and [of the death of] soldiers who fell in battle.

The president had an easy answer. He could have said: I wanted to make history with health care and to do it, I have to raise your taxes. Sure, it’s not a good time economically in the middle of a recession, but politically, I had to, because I have a majority in Congress and I’m going to lose it in November. End of answer.

Debra Saunders gives us her take on the president and Doris.

In June, comedian Bill Maher complained of President Obama, “You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day – you’re the president, not a rerun of ‘Law & Order.’ ”

I get paid to listen to politicians tell the same old jokes, repeat the same canned sound bites and – as often occurs – not answer questions. But I do not think it too much to ask that, now that Obama has signed legislation to overhaul the health-care system, he ditch the health-care spiel.

To watch Obama nine months after Maher’s quip is to live in rerun hell. …

David Harsanyi says the food fascists are coming. Actually, now that Obamacare has passed, you’re not allowed to be fat. To help citizens lose weight, the government will impose a VAT tax that will make food much more expensive, so people won’t be able to afford to eat as much.

…And if Washington can’t dictate calorie counts in school vending machines, or tax soda pops, or force elementary schools in Topeka to stock their cupboards with USDA-approved nutritional fare, then, really, why do we have a federal government in the first place?

As we speak, legislation is wiggling through Congress that would ban candy and sugary beverages in local schools — bake sales, a la carte lunches, Halloween goodies, birthday cupcakes — and stipulate that suitable chow be offered. It’s legislation that can’t be stopped. It’s for the children. …

John Stossel explains how libertarianism is compassionate.

…Besides, says Wendy McElroy, the founder of ifeminists.com, “government aid doesn’t enrich the poor. Government makes them dependent. And the biggest hindrance to the poor … right now is the government. Government should get out of the way. It should allow people to open cottage industries without making them jump through hoops and licenses and taxing them to death. It should open up public lands and do a 20th-century equivalent of 40 acres and a mule. It should get out of the way of people and let them achieve and rise.” …

The Economist has a piece on the ethical problems with drone warfare.

…Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself—or, rather, the software that is used to operate it—in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience.

The software conscience that Dr Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called the Ethical Architecture. Its judgment may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And—like a human but unlike most machines—it can learn.

The drone would initially be programmed to understand the effects of the blast of the weapon it is armed with. It would also be linked to both the Global Positioning System (which tells it where on the Earth’s surface the target is) and the Pentagon’s Global Information Grid, a vast database that contains, among many other things, the locations of buildings in military theatres and what is known about their current use. …

And we have a link to the world’s most beautiful waterfountains.

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Mark Steyn writes about the ominous restraint of free speech in two countries.

You’ve probably heard of Geert Wilders, the “far right” Dutch politician currently on trial in Amsterdam for offending Islam. But have you heard of Guy Earle? He’s a Canadian stand-up comedian currently on trial in Vancouver for offending lesbians. Two lesbians in particular. They came to a late-night comedy show he was hosting and got a table near the stage. They were drunk, and began disrupting the act, and so he did the old Don Rickles thing and put down the hecklers. So, naturally, the aggrieved party went to the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, and Mr. Earle has now been hauled into the dock for the “homophobic” nature of his putdowns.

Between them, these two trials symbolize where most of the Western world is headed, and very fast. Geert Wilders is an elected member of parliament and the leader of what is, since last month’s local elections, the second-biggest political party in The Hague and, according to recent national polls, tied for first place as the most popular party in the country. So, although he’s invariably labeled “far right” in European and U.S. news reports, how far he is depends on where you’re standing: When the “extreme right” “fringe” is more popular than the “mainstream,” maybe the mainstream isn’t that mainstream, and the center isn’t exactly where the European establishment would like it to be. …

Christopher Hitchens comments on the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Turks against Armenians, and the continuing denials and repercussions.

…The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of the city’s remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the language of the country’s enormous Kurdish population and to create an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus, a democratic member of the European Union.

So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey’s unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament that should be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.

Bill McGurn of the WSJ defends the Pope and the Church against the attacks by the NY Times. Readers are reminded it was seven years ago the Times ran a campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club. It became such a NY Times obsession, the editor, since fired, spiked columns by Times’ sports writers that criticized their own paper.  McGurn reveals the same unbalanced coverage in the case of the Church.

…It’s accurate to say Murphy was never convicted by a church tribunal. It’s also reasonable to argue (as I would) that Murphy should have been disciplined more. It is untrue, however, to suggest he was “never” disciplined. When asked if she knew of these letters, Ms. Goodstein did not directly answer, saying her focus was on what was “new,” i.e., “the attempts by those same bishops to have Father Murphy laicized.” …

…A few years later, when the CDF assumed authority over all abuse cases, Cardinal Ratzinger implemented changes that allowed for direct administrative action instead of trials that often took years. Roughly 60% of priests accused of sexual abuse were handled this way. The man who is now pope reopened cases that had been closed; did more than anyone to process cases and hold abusers accountable; and became the first pope to meet with victims. Isn’t the more reasonable interpretation of all these events that Cardinal Ratzinger’s experience with cases like Murphy’s helped lead him to promote reforms that gave the church more effective tools for handling priestly abuse?

That’s not to say that the press should be shy, even about Pope Benedict XVI’s decisions as archbishop and cardinal. The Murphy case raises hard questions: why it took the archbishops of Milwaukee nearly two decades to suspend Murphy from his ministry; why innocent people whose lives had been shattered by men they are supposed to view as icons of Christ found so little justice; how bishops should deal with an accused clergyman when criminal investigations are inconclusive… Oh, yes, maybe some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiffs attorney making millions off these cases. …

It is always a pleasure to read the products of writers who can turn outrage into well-reasoned and well-worded commentary. We have two such writers commenting on the fake hate-crimes scandal. First up is Peter Kirsanow, in the Corner.

As Mark Steyn noted this past weekend, the smearing of tea-party members by elected representatives and their media acolytes demonstrates the desperation and bankruptcy of many of today’s arguments in support of the liberal agenda — in this case, health-care reform. The claim that black Democratic congressmen courageously defied being spat upon and being called the n-word reflects a pathetic attempt to equate their support for the cynical, corrupt process by which the health-care bill was passed with the heroic efforts of the civil-rights movement.

Unable to marshal coherent arguments in favor of the bill’s merits, Obamacare supporters resort to a most reliable standby: accusing their opponents of racism. But time has passed these liberals by. The ubiquity of new media exposes the calumny as a fraud. Despite the presence of dozens of reporters, recorders, and cameras, no evidence has been produced in support of the accusations. …

And next is Abby Thernstrom. Read her full post to get her thoughts on the Tea Party.

Like Mark Steyn, I regard Rep. John Lewis as a true American hero. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, to face Alabama state and local troopers willing to use electric cattle prods, nightsticks, and tear gas to suppress a peaceful voting-rights march. Not for the first time, Lewis ended up bloodied, with scars that have never entirely faded.

Undoubtedly, the psychological scars have not faded either; those were the formative years for Lewis, and he has clearly not been able to move past them entirely.

And thus I partially forgive him — but only him — when he is quick to see racism in an angry white crowd. Not a single one of his Congressional Black Caucus colleagues has the same excuse, and it was disgraceful (needless to say) for Nancy Pelosi to equate that brutal struggle to make good on basic constitutional rights with the sordid effort to pass a mess of a health-care law whose moral force did not even remotely resemble that of the great mid-1960s civil rights acts. …

Ward Connerly also comments on various aspects of the scandal.

…If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives. In the courtrooms, on college campuses, and, most especially, in our politics, race is a central theme. Where it does not naturally rise to the surface, there are those who will manufacture and amplify it. …

…In a video that has been played repeatedly showing CBC members as they walked past the tea partiers, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is seen using his telephone to tape the event. If he had any evidence to corroborate the racial claims, why hasn’t he come forward with his phone by now to settle this matter? I believe we all know the answer. …

More on the subject in The Corner. This from Hans A von Spakovsky.

For another good example of how civil rights “icons” like John Lewis use racial scare-tactics for political purposes, listen to this audio recording sent to me by a friend in Atlanta in reaction to Mark Steyn’s note in The Corner. This political ad was run in a county commission race in Fulton County, Georgia in 2006 the day before the election.

Thomas Sowell criticizes race-baiting politicians and reminds us where this can end.

… The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don’t need to repeat in the United States of America.

Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country– now called Sri Lanka– that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.

The world has been shocked by the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda but, half a century ago, there had been no such systematic slaughters there. Political demagoguery whipped up ethnic polarization, among people who had co-existed, who spoke the same language and had even intermarried.

We know– or should know– what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A “race card” is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.

In the LA Times, David Crane discusses the Government Employees’ Republic of California, and their pension debt disaster.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported. …

…What can we do about this? For the promises already made, nothing. They are contractual, and because that $500 billion of debt must be paid, retirement costs will rise dramatically no matter what we do. But we can reduce the sizes of promises made to new employees and require full and truthful disclosure so that pension debt can never again be hidden.

Last summer Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed exactly that. Since then? Silence. State legislators are afraid even to utter the words “pension reform” for fear of alienating what has become — since passage of the Dills Act in 1978, which endowed state public employees with collective bargaining rights on top of their civil service protections — the single most politically influential constituency in our state: government employees.

Because legislators are unwilling to raise issues that might offend that constituency, they have effectively turned the peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on its head: Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses some kerfuffle regarding California’s last-place credit rating.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the sale was the nation’s largest ever long-term general-obligation deal, and the third-largest tax-exempt offering in U.S. history. The Journal cited the office of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer for that proposition, while noting that California’s credit rating is the lowest among 50 states. I’m pretty sure the latter observation did not derive from Lockyer. …

…The Financial Times asks where Borat is when you really need him: “Maybe Bill Lockyer ‘not make benefit glorious state California’? Taking a page out of Greece’s playbook, the peeved treasurer of America’s largest state fired off letters this week to the chiefs of Goldman Sachs and other banks questioning their marketing of credit default swaps on California’s debt.”

Addressing the gist of Lockyer’s complaint, the FT rises to the defense of Kazakhstan’s financial standing compared to that of California: “The real Kazakhstan, although not problem-free, looks fairly solid compared to California and many other states – a fact that should spook investors in America’s $2,800bn municipal bond market.” A letter from Lockyer to the FT is undoubtedly in the mail. …

In the WSJ, John Pancake reports on an interesting piece of architecture in Ukraine. Pickerhead added photos so you can see for yourself.

Eastern Europe is not awash in whimsical extravagance.

Which is why Vladislav Gorodetsky’s House of Chimeras in Kiev is so wonderful. Its skin bulges with frogs, elephants, catfish, stags, lizards, rhinos. A snake hangs down one corner like a scaly drain pipe. Mermaids straddle thrashing fish on the roof. It couldn’t be more over the top. …

…When I look at the House of Chimeras, I think about the idea of inequality and about Gorodetsky. Here was a man committed to the idea that some people were going to live a lot better than other people, or so it seems to me. It’s such a clear statement that I sometimes wonder how his building survived. …

The Economist has an article about the benefits of straw houses.

…It is, for one thing, a great insulator. That keeps down the heating bills in houses made from it. It is also a waste product that would otherwise be burned, and is therefore cheap. And—very much to the point in a place like California—it is earthquake-resistant. A year ago, a test conducted at the University of Nevada’s large-scale structures laboratory showed that straw-bale constructions could withstand twice the amount of ground motion recorded in the Northridge earthquake that hit Los Angeles in 1994. Mr Brush’s ranch is a mere 18km (11 miles) from the San Andreas Fault. …

… But straw buildings of this sort might do well in seismically active places that are less wealthy. Spurred by the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, Darcey Donovan, a structural engineer from Truckee, California, set up a not-for-profit straw-bale-construction operation that has since built 17 houses there. …

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Interesting day here because Pickings is totally composed of blog posts.

Mark Steyn blogs about having confidence in America.

Ever since this health care “debate” got going, I’ve worried that American conservatives underestimate the ability of Big Government to transform the character of a people. After all, the Euro-weenies weren’t always Euro-weenies – else how would they have conquered the entire planet? Readers who think I’m just a mopey downer loser (as not a few do) might prefer this alternative take from Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe. While “agreeing with almost every word” of mine, he has an entirely different conclusion:

We are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. …

…In my view, [Barack Obama] and today’s Democratic Party represent the last gasp of the Progressive impulse. The tyrannical ambition hidden at the heart of Progressivism’s quest… has made manifest …the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century … What is required in what he calls “this defining moment” is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a new birth of freedom.” The period we just entered could be our finest hour.

The Streetwise Professor explains that Obamacare steals the standard of living from the upcoming generation.

Here, the government uses its coercive powers to force the young to consume a service at an above market rate (in order to subsidize consumption by others).  We again hear the high-sounding rhetoric to cover this outright theft from one cohort of the population. … The indirect effects will also affect the young disproportionately; the inevitable tax burden will slow economic growth, dramatically reducing the lifetime incomes of those just entering the labor force. …

In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld delivers a devastating and well-deserved critique of the national intelligence community. We quote his review of the 2007 NIE and its consequences. The full post includes the latest comment that calls the word “intelligence” into question.

Back in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released a declassified summary of an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring with “high confidence” that four years earlier “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Buried in a footnote was the fact that the summary was only referring to one—and far from the most important—component of Iran’s nuclear project.  The other portions of the Iranian bomb effort—most significantly, uranium enrichment—were continuing apace.

The damage caused by the misleading document was immense, and traveled in two directions. On one side, it had the political effect of removing any possibility of public support for a Bush administration military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. It also undermined the case for economic sanctions. What would be the point, after all, of targeting a weapons project that our intelligence agencies were declaring had already been halted?

On the other side, there was a boomerang effect on the Intelligence Community itself. By issuing an NIE that, at least in its publicly released form, was transparently flawed and also blatantly political in its construction, the NIC inflicted severe damage to its own reputation for integrity. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts excerpts of a speech given by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.

Earlier this week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) traveled to the Sooner State to address the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Much of his speech focused on progressivism…

…Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage. But Progressivism turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson would have scorned the self-proclaimed “Progressives” of our day for handing out bailout checks to giant corporations, corrupting the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care, and funneling billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for make-work patronage. That’s not “Progressivism,” that’s what real Progressives fought against!

Since America began, the timid have feared the Founding Fathers’ ideas of individual freedom, so they yearn for Old World class models. Our Progressivists are the latest iteration of that same fear of the people. In unprecedented numbers, Americans are speaking out against the intolerable Health Care bill and irresponsible debt-ridden spending.

Does anyone recall Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom of Speech” painting of an average working Joe standing and speaking his mind at a town hall meeting? Today’s Progressivists ridicule average Americans speaking out at tea parties across the nation and denounce their criticisms as “un-American.” Millions of average Americans reject their big government solutions, and that scares them. …

John Fund relates a recent exchange between President Obama and Doris the factory worker. We don’t know whether the president ever looked Doris in the eye.

President Obama prefers to interact with questioners on his own terms. That means almost no prime-time news conferences — he hasn’t given one for more than nine months. Instead, he obviously favors any forum that allows him to give long, discursive answers without being subjected to follow-up questions.

A prime example came last Friday during his appearance at a North Carolina battery manufacturer. A woman named Doris asked the president during a Q&A session whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package. “We are overtaxed as it is,” she concluded.

That set President Obama off on a 17-minute and 12-second riff that must have put the crowd into a stupor. …

…As was apparent to all who listened, his filibuster had only served to avoid addressing her concern. He never explained why his health care bill ended up raising taxes on those making under $200,000 a year — a violation of his explicit 2008 campaign pledge. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the same exchange.

The mainstream media is slowly waking up to the fact that Obama is a bore. No, really. He’s long since stopped saying anything new or interesting, and he talks constantly, at great length. So when he went into a mind-numbing filibuster to a perfectly reasonable question from a woman at a Q&A session in Charlotte as to whether it was smart to throw a load of new taxes into health-care “reform,” not even the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut could conceal her — and the audience’s — disdain for the Condescender in Chief…

…And, of course, he never answered the lady’s question. Why is it we are raising taxes for those making less than $200,000? Why are we raising $52.3 billion in new taxes over 10 years? Obama has no response, or no effective one, to these queries; so he vamps and bloviates, as he did in the health-care summit when confronted with troublesome facts to which he had no adequate response (e.g., Rep.Paul Ryan’s list of fiscal tricks). Just as he failed to keep the attention of the Charlotte crowd, he’s long since lost the American people who now tune him out. Eloquent? Hardly. Persuasive? Not in the least, as evidenced by multiple polls showing that a large majority of Americans aren’t buying his health-care arguments. (And he’s eroding his party’s credibility on issues over which they previously held a commanding advantage. Rasmussen reports, for example: “Following the passage of the health care bill, 53% now say they trust Republicans on the issue of health care. Thirty-seven percent (37%) place their trust in Democrats.”) …

In Contentions, Max Boot highlights good news in Iraq.

Terrible violence continues to upset Iraq — at least 35 dead from suicide bombings in Baghdad, 25 Sunni family members slain south of Baghdad. But this Rod Nordland article buried deep in the New York Times presents a glowing account of the last election — and appropriately so. He notes that voters made discerning decisions. The outcome reveals some notable trends …

…A lot of bad things can — and probably will — still happen in Iraq but the election outcome, at least so far, hardly validates overblown fears that Iraq is “falling apart.” If anything it shows that, in one place at least, Arabs are taking to the democratic process with heartening enthusiasm.

Jennifer Rubin discusses the consequences of the Obami not having principles guiding their foreign policy.

The Obami are promising another round of sanctions aimed at Iran. This will be the fourth round, and we should not, judging from press reports, expect them to be “crippling.” As Bill Kristol noted on Fox News Sunday:

The only things that can stop the Iranian nuclear program are — would be the success of the green movement in Iran, which the Obama administration has done nothing to help and remains incredibly indifferent to and standoffish to on the one hand, or military action on the other, which the Obama administration seems uninterested in doing and I’m afraid is setting up a situation where Israel will feel it has to act.

The abject lack of seriousness from the Obama administration — its disinclination to even suggest the use of force or to aid the Green Movement in any meaningful way — has not gone unnoticed either here or in Israel. …

In Reason’s blog, Nick Gillespie relates some of the analysis of stimulus distribution by Veronique De Rugy.

…But more to the point, I think it’s worth focusing on something else that de Rugy has written about for Reason: Stimulus spending has been done without any consideration of unemployment or other economic factors. If the government seriously believes it can create jobs via public spending, she wrote last fall, then

We should expect the government to invest relatively more money in the states that have the highest unemployment rates and less money in the states with lower unemployment rates….

Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states. …

… if you’re spending money that’s supposed to get the economy going again without any thought for what spots need it most, you’re thoroughly incompetent on top of misguided. …

Some people only know how to play the victims. Mark Steyn explains the fake hate crimes. The upside of the story is the demonstration of integrity by the Tea Partiers.

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He’s either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he’s a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. …

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points …

But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to – faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. …

In WSJ, James Taranto laughs at a liberal blog trying to play gotcha. Maybe they should stick to playing the victims.

It’s been a grimly serious few weeks, so we thought we’d open today’s column with a bit of levity, courtesy of the folks at the liberal Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com. They think they have caught a Republican politician in an embarrassing goof:

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R) sent a letter to her supporters [Monday] in honor of the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which she described as a time where [sic] “we break bread and spend time with our families and friends.” …

…Have any of the editors at TPM, or Smith and Frum for that matter, ever actually had matzoh? It is a flat bread that is rigid and brittle like a cracker. It is usually produced in sheets several inches square, considerably bigger than bite size. So whereas one obtains an individual serving of, say, challah by cutting or ripping a piece from the loaf, it is pretty much impossible to eat matzoh without breaking it first. A Passover Seder is one of the few occasions on which people literally, not just figuratively, break bread.

Claudia Rosett will miss Jack Bauer.

After eight seasons, the Fox series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, America’s one-man do-or-die counterterrorism force–is due to go off the air when the current season wraps up on May 24.

I’ll miss Jack. It’s only television, but I think he’s summed up something important about the American spirit: a will to defend his country, against all attackers, no matter what the odds. That fighting spirit is still evident among American troops on the battlefield. But in Washington’s political quagmires, over the nine years since Sept. 11, it’s been substantially snuffed out. Instead, policy revolves endlessly around denial of real threats and the impulse to Mirandize enemies on foreign fields of war and bestow upon them the rights of U.S. citizens at home–even if that means releasing them to kill Americans again. …

…He is the only man who can stop the next attack. Except after May he will be gone. It seems there are plans for a Jack Bauer movie to follow, also starring Sutherland. But that won’t be the same as that weekly hour of escape that since Sept. 11 has allowed us to forget the endless absurdities of real-world politics and watch a guy whose mission in life is to protect us, no matter what obstacles the bureaucrats and politicians–not to mention the terrorists–throw in his way. That might just be the definition of a modern hero.

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The global climate conspiracists can’t catch a break. Roger Simon comments.

…And speaking of repeating farces, the anthropogenic global warming movement is reaching maybe its hundredth sold-out, standing room only comedic spectacular with the latest news that the purportedly disappearing arctic sea ice is back to “normal” levels after less than a decade. Next the over-breeding polar bears will be invading our cities. …

…If there’s one thing that the AGW debate has shown us it is that our politicians are about as qualified to rule on matters scientific as I am to compete in the pole vault in the 2012 Olympics. …

…But this too is of little importance because the cap-and-trade legislation isn’t about science; it’s about money and control. Anyone the slightest bit interested in science would laugh the whole thing off in twelve seconds. Indeed, the entire environmental movement is verging on becoming an enemy of science itself. But before I go further, let me make clear WE ARE ALL ENVIRONMENTALISTS. And, yes, I’ve broken the unwritten Internet rule and put that in caps because, ironically, it’s very obviousness tells me it has to be emphasized. We all like clean air and water, okay? …

Jonathan Tobin has some amusing commentary on another aspect of the global warming conspiracy.

The supposedly rock-solid consensus among all thinking human beings about the impending catastrophe of global warming has taken another hit from an unlikely villain: your friendly local TV weather forecaster. According to a front-page feature in Monday’s New York Times, some of the biggest global-warming skeptics are precisely those people whom many Americans look to for insight about the weather. The Times reports that a study released this week by George Mason University and the University of Texas reveals that “only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was caused mostly by human activities.” This is very bad news for environmental extremists, since the public seems to trust the weather guys more than Al Gore. …

…For the Times, the problem is primarily one of academic achievement. The climatologists who are promoting fear of global warming—and profiting handsomely from it—are generally affiliated with universities and tend to have advanced degrees whereas many meteorologists do not. For Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who works to promote global-warming hysteria at something called Climate Central, the problem is that the weathermen are just not smart enough to understand her field. Indeed, she says the claim that it will be hotter 50 years from now is as open and shut a case as asserting that August will be warmer than January. But if you think about it, it makes sense that those who work on a day-to-day basis with weather forecasts would have their doubts about computer models about the weather we will get 50 years from now. They know all too well how variable the climate can be and that efforts to project forecasts with certainty, especially those promising apocalyptic disasters, should be taken with a shovel-full of salt. …

In Contentions, Jillian Melchior discusses how the government is responsible for the housing crisis.

Earlier this week, Peter Wallison presented a contrarian speech at the Hudson Institute, New York, detailing how the financial crisis was caused by government policy — not Wall Street greed, or the interconnectedness of financial institutions, or insufficient regulation, or any of the other political scapegoats blamed promiscuously throughout the collapse. (You can find a more detailed, albeit older, version of Wallison’s argument here.) …

…If Wallison is right, the Community Reinvestment Act is a smoking gun, and the hand holding it belongs to Uncle Sam. …

…especially after ObamaCare, angry citizens want specific talking points. And overreaching politicians are as provocative and sinister as any Wall Street demon. Wallison also noted that if the government really wanted to subsidize housing, it should have done so honestly — by putting the funds to do so on the budget. Instead, it chose to coerce financial institutions to do its dirty work. Conservatives need to point to the regulatory causes — the Community Reinvestment Act being one of many examples — and make their case. …

…Wallison’s argument is timely because, as part of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked with exploring the origins of the crisis, he’ll be fighting to present his explanation to Congress on Dec. 15, 2010. He’s outnumbered by Democrats on the commission, who might dominate the written report, in which case his ideas will be presented in dissent. …

Surprise! Peter Schiff has a dim view of things. He says the Fed is creating a government bubble.

… Of course, there will be winners in the government bubble, at least for a while. As was the case with the stock and real estate bubbles, plenty of money will be made by the well-connected and parasitic classes. Government employees will continue to enjoy pay raises at our expense, as will anyone benefiting from the new wave of subsidies, such as Wall Street investment bankers, financial speculators, and those working in health care or education.

These gains will come at the expense of the taxpayers who foot the bill and the consumers who face higher prices. As government grows, it deprives the private sector of the resources it needs to survive and grow. The result is a lower overall standard of living. Not only are government jobs less productive than private sector jobs, but bureaucratic interference actually makes the remaining private sector jobs less efficient as well. …

Mark Steyn writes more about the Obami’s treatment of friends.

…One of the oddest features of the scene is attributed to the president’s “cool,” which seems to be the euphemism of choice for what, in less-stellar executives, would be regarded as an unappealing combination of coldness and self-absorption. I forget which long-ago foreign minister responded to an invitation to lunch with an adversary by saying “I’m not hungry,” but Obama seems to reserve the line for his “friends.” Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk’n'talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone anytime anywhere. Instead, he recoils from all but the most minimal contact with the world.

…One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed “multiculturalist” who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.

Peter Wehner has thoughts on foreign policy after Hillary’s latest.

…Secretary Clinton’s comments were made in the context of the Canadian government’s G8 maternal and child health initiative. According to Clinton: “You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”

So here’s a question: can you imagine Henry Kissinger or Dean Acheson ever saying such a thing? Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State; she’s not the president of Planned Parenthood. And for an administration that insists it shouldn’t meddle in the internal affairs of other nations — unless it means making life considerably more difficult for our allies like Honduras and Israel — this is quite remarkable. …

David Harsanyi opines on Congressman Henry Waxman’s intimidating tactics towards corporations who have reported to the SEC that Obamacare will increase their expenses.

…Some may wonder if Waxman has any lawful grounds to bully anyone into accepting his view of Obamacare. Even if corporations, typically snuggling up to Washington for crony capitalistic favors, had joined in a twisted political conspiracy to make Barack Obama’s legislative masterpiece look as terrible as it is . . . so what? Since when is making a law look bad a criminal act?

The ironic part of Waxman’s abuse of power is that he also demands that CEOs show up with “any documents including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform.”

Would it not be helpful for Congress to first provide taxpayers with any documents — including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by elected officials — regarding this historic health care reform bill? …

In Contentions, Kejda Gjermani is outraged by the next bill that will hurt the economy. Politicians simply have no concept of the damage that they are doing to the economy and the standard of living for normal Americans.

Congress has passed or contemplated so many blunders of late that I, for one, am finding it harder and harder to muster fresh outrage toward every new one. But this latest being cooked up by Chris Dodd deserves a special shout out:

First, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.

All the prerogatives over private businesses; all the power over health care, now near absolute; all the dabbling in the inner workings of financial institutions; in short, all the regulation in the world, cannot seem to satisfy this government. Are the Democrat legislators ever going to have enough? …

Jonah Goldberg thinks there are a couple of political reasons for the flip-flop on drilling.

…Obama justified his decision to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the southern Atlantic and some coastal regions of northern Alaska on the grounds that it would create jobs and serve as a “bridge” to the carbon-free Brigadoon we’ve long been promised. The reality is that his decision was entirely political. Aiming to win vital Republican support in the Senate for some kind of bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation, he lifted the ban where the polling was in favor of doing so. Sound science, energy policy and economics were the last things on his mind. On that, there’s widespread consensus.

Back when oil cost $140 per barrel, President George W. Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling. Once elected, Obama quietly reinstated it. Since then, Obama’s Interior Department has been doing just about everything it can to slow, hamper and prevent oil and gas exploration in the U.S. and offshore. There’s no reason to believe the administration won’t keep doing that. Besides, Obama’s announcement actually bans more promising oil and gas reserves from exploration than it opens up: nothing in the Pacific, nothing in the western Gulf of Mexico, nothing in southern Alaska. …

…And that’s the irony. Obama and his Democratic successors will keep trying to squeeze the rich to pay for their schemes. But that won’t raise anything close to the revenue they need. They’ll try for a value-added tax, which will raise lots of money but also stifle growth. Eventually, if they want to avoid bankruptcy and keep the welfare state afloat, never mind pay for all of these environmental white elephants, they’ll need more revenue, and that’s where oil comes in. …

The Economist explores the coming of wireless power.

…The idea of transmitting power wirelessly has been around since the 1830s when Michael Faraday introduced his celebrated law of induction. Loosely stated, this says that an electrical current in one conductor will induce a current in a second, wholly separate, conductor that shares the same magnetic field. The concept of transmitting power across an air gap between one coil of wire and another led to electrical transformers, generators and motors—and ushered in the era of electrical engineering.

By the 1890s, Nikola Tesla had demonstrated that not just magnetic fields but also electromagnetic waves themselves could transmit power—and over far greater distances. In one experiment, Tesla powered lights in his laboratory grounds remotely from a transmitter coil many metres away. More recently, a government laboratory in Canada built an unmanned aircraft to act as a communications relay station circling 21km up in the sky for months on end. Power was supplied by a microwave transmitter on the ground. A large disc-shaped rectifying antenna attached to the fuselage harvested the microwave energy, turning it into direct current to power an electric motor attached to the plane’s propeller. …

…More down to Earth, several companies have started offering mats and work-surfaces capable of simultaneously recharging a number of portable devices. One of the simplest comes from a firm called WildCharge, based in Colorado. An adaptor is attached to each gadget (often as a specially designed replacement for its back cover) with three lugs on its back for making contact with the charging mat’s conductive surface. Because of the way the mat is configured, at least one lug always makes contact with a positive region of the conductive surface and one with a negative part. Power is transferred to each device by direct contact rather than via a magnetic field and induction. …

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According to Abe Greenwald the freed Lockerbie bomber was twice lucky.

… Megrahi may have been freed twice: first from prison, then from U.K. healthcare. It’s entirely likely that Libyan medical treatment given to a close friend of Muammar Qaddafi could have raised Megrahi out of the 51% survivability ghetto of the United Kingdom. My question is, who’s springing us when America adopts prison-like healthcare?

David Warren discusses the polarization of politics.

…That is why it is interesting to me that Noonan has been writing lately about the egotistical madness of politicians; about their blindness to what is at stake in their actions. She is one of several commentators beginning to discern apocalyptic developments in U.S. politics: the division of America not into supporters of two established political parties, with a common patriotism, but rather into two violently angry and mutually antagonistic camps, with little middle ground, and what there is disappearing.

The writer named David P. Goldman, who often signs himself “Spengler,” is another such “prophetic pundit,” and incidentally another New Yorker. He is superficially as different from Noonan as another person can be, yet he writes of parallel things in parallel ways. Where Noonan looks almost exclusively at American politics and society, “Spengler” is a globalist; with an uncanny understanding of both high finance and high diplomatic strategy. (Read him in Asia Times and First Things websites.) …

…Both see catastrophe coming in the present overreaching of the Obama presidency and the attendant triumphalism that this is spreading through the forces of the Left, internationally. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Obami’s poor judgment in foreign policy in the Middle East.

By seizing upon and escalating an issue on which no Israeli government could relent, the Obami have made clear that the “game” here is not compromise or resolution but rather high-pressure tactics directed against the Israeli government. The Obami holler while the PA throws stones. The aim of  both is to squeeze the Netanyahu government to the breaking point and shift the focus away from the Palestinians’ inability to enter into any meaningful peace deal … The Palestinians now are certain that they can have both violence and a “peace process” in which the administration can be counted on to browbeat the Israelis into providing more concessions:

Shaath, a former PA foreign minister, said that peaceful protests were now a popular demand to confront Israel’s policies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

“We need to strengthen and back this option in the face of the Israeli occupation’s policies,” he said. “We can’t return to the negotiations unless Israel halts all settlement construction in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem.”

The results of the Obami’s handiwork once again suggest that “realism” is not the animating rationale behind their Middle East policy. In their animosity toward Israel and obsession with aligning themselves with the Palestinian bargaining position, the Obami have reinforced the Palestinians’ worst tendencies and convinced Israel (not to mention other nervous allies) that this administration is not to be trusted. …

Charles Krauthammer reviews Obama’s sorry record with America’s friends.

… But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most disoriented. “We British not only speak the same language. We tend to think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide tea, sympathy and troops,” writes Bruce Anderson in London’s Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis of the U.S.-British special relationship.

Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the United States, to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: “[Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there.”

I’m not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning’s guess is as good as anyone’s. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.

More on this in The American Interest as Walter Russell Mead reviews the Obami foreign policy missteps. Although some of his analysis is questionable and his perspective is center-left, Mead agrees that the Obami have left much to be desired.

…None of this has worked particularly well.  The EU powers are not exactly leaping to Washington’s support on Afghanistan.  A British parliamentary committee has just pronounced the US-UK special relationship over.  Brazil’s President Lula da Silva publicly rejected Secretary Clinton’s public request for support for a sanctions resolution at the UN.  Turkey is flirting with Iran and hanging out with Russia.  For now, at least, the Israelis are resisting Washington’s pressure for a freeze on new construction in Jerusalem.

The policy of slapping friends seems not to be working very well; the policy of kissing up to the bad guys has been even less of a success.  North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have blown off the administration’s efforts to put bilateral relationships on a friendlier basis.  Not only is President Obama back to Bush’s old policy of trying to get the UN to adopt tougher sanctions on Iran, he’s denouncing human rights crackdowns in Cuba.  The biggest success to date, getting a new missile treaty with Russia, is at lot less impressive than it looks.  Russia needs to reduce the costs of its nuclear arsenal and wants the prestige that comes from arms talks with the US just like the Soviet Union used to have.  I support the treaty and hope it gets ratified, but on the whole it’s more a favor from us to Russia than the other way round. …

…Part of the problem may be that the administration’s dislike of Bush administration policies may extend to countries that cooperated with the last administration.  That’s a mistake.  Many of the countries who supported the United States in Iraq (especially the ones in Central and Eastern Europe) didn’t do it because they loved war, loved neoconservatism or loved Bush.  They did it because they believe that good relations with a strong United States are the foundation of their own security.  These countries are potentially President Obama’s good friends as well.  Many of them don’t care who the president is or what he wants; they will work with Washington and give it what help they can no matter whether we have a Blue State or Red State leader.  It’s more important than one might think to treat these countries with consideration and to bring them along when our policy changes.  Countries around the world should know that if you stand by the United States we will stand by you, and our new president won’t blame you for working with our last one. …

John Fund notes some changes at GE and with Michael Steele at the GOP national office.

Michael Steele, the embattled chairman of the Republican National Committee, was plagued with negative media stories long before this week’s revelation that the head of his young donors program had reimbursed a GOP consultant for a nearly $2,000 bill at a Los Angeles lesbian bondage club.

Back in January, Mr. Steele lashed out at his Republican critics on ABC News: “I’m telling them and I’m looking them in the eye and say I’ve had enough of it. If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.” The next month, Mr. Steele followed up that salvo by complaining to Washingtonian magazine: “I don’t see stories about the internal operations of the DNC that I see about this operation. Why? Is it because Michael Steele is the chairman, or is it because a black man is chairman?” …

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin says that people are moving to Texas. The most recent article in Pickings featuring Texas was on March 9th. Michael Barone discussed Texas’ low taxes, conservative fiscal policies, and minimalist approach to governing. Makes sense that Texas is one of the states that is weathering the recession better than most.

…According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009–the most of any region in the country–a healthy 2.3% increase. …

…According to Moody’s Economy.com, Texas’ big cities are entering economic recovery mode well ahead of almost all the major centers along the East or West Coasts. This represents a continuation of longer-term trends, both before and after the economic crisis. Between 2000 and 2009 New York gained 95,000 jobs while Chicago lost 257,000, Los Angeles over 167,000 and San Francisco some 216,000. Meanwhile, Dallas added nearly 150,000 positions and Houston a hefty 250,000. …

WaPo’s Anne Kornblut slams Obama’s bulls**t. Only she calls it loquacious.

Even by President Obama’s loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.

“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, …

The Economist reports on a surprising turn of events in gene patenting.

…On March 29th a federal district court in New York made a ruling that, taken at face value, turns America’s approach to the patent protection of genes on its head. A coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the very basis of Myriad’s patents. The nub of the case was this question: “Are isolated human genes and the comparison of their sequences patentable things?”

Until now, the answer had been “Yes”. But Robert Sweet, the presiding judge, disagreed, at least as far as the BRCA genes are concerned. After weighing up Myriad’s arguments, he ruled: “It is concluded that DNA’s existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issues directed to ‘isolated DNA’ containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.” Mr Sweet reasoned that DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, and that such biological information is a natural phenomenon. …