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The Economist reviews and critiques a new book by Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was sceptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity, Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.

Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness. …

…The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously. …

Mark Steyn discusses how our government and other western governments try to avoid addressing the pathological aspects of Islam. We leave the frightening examples for you to read in the article.

…At Fort Hood, Maj. Hasan jumped on a table and gunned down his comrades while screaming, “Allahu Akbar!”, which is Arabic for “Nothing to see here” and an early indicator of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Times Square Bomber, we are assured by The Washington Post, CNN and Newsweek, was upset by foreclosure proceedings on his house. Mortgage-related issues. Nothing to do with months of training at a Taliban camp in Waziristan. …

…You may not be interested in Islam but Islam is interested in you. Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union’s decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.

Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies – not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam. …

John Fund reviews the election news in Massachusetts.

…This week saw a special election for the state senate seat that Mr. Brown gave up when he became a U.S. Senator. The suburban Boston district has been competitive, with Mr. Brown first winning it in a 2003 special election with only 51%.

This time it wasn’t even close. GOP State Representative Richard Ross defeated Democrat Peter Smulowitz, an emergency-room physician, with 62% of the vote. Mr. Ross even won Needham, a liberal bastion in the district, by over 200 votes. “The Democratic machine is striking out in Massachusetts,” claimed Jennifer Nassour, the state’s GOP chairwoman.

Not quite. The highly competitive race for governor has seen Democratic Governor Deval Patrick rebound somewhat from his recent dismal poll numbers. He now leads Republican Charlie Baker, a protégé of former GOP Governor Bill Weld, and state Treasurer Tim Cahill, who left the Democratic Party to run as an independent last year. In a new Rasmussen poll, Mr. Patrick scores 45% support against 31% for his GOP opponent Mr. Baker. …

Michael Barone thinks Utah Senator Bob Bennett’s loss may be only the start of the election year upsets.

…While incumbents of both parties may be in trouble this year, it is significant that both Mr. Bennett and Mr. Mollohan lost to opponents on their political right. Utah Republican convention delegates were in no mood to accept even a thoughtful backer of bipartisan proposals. West Virginia Democratic primary voters were ready to oust an incumbent who backed Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And polling suggests that Republicans will run much better against Democrats in November than they did in 2006 or 2008. …

Peter Wehner looks at how quickly politics can change.

On ABC’s Good Morning America yesterday, the Democratic political strategist James Carville — in commenting on this devastating (for the Democrats) Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll — said that it is “absolutely possible” that the Democrats could lose control of Congress, and, if the election were held today, they almost certainly would. That is by now a commonplace belief.

Carville’s admission is quite a contrast to what he was saying just last year. “Today,” he proclaimed, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Carville even wrote a book on the topic: 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. …

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery responds to arguments that conservatives want big government because some want the government to help with the oil spill cleanup.

…Government is a big and blunt instrument, while markets are smaller and flexible tools. Government acts for the whole, and gives things one direction; markets react to and serve individuals, respond to a great many small discrete interests, and facilitate the pursuit of happiness by creating demands for a great many diverse and various skills. …

…Government does well when it opens doors and lets people go through them; less well when it tries to micromanage or fix destinations. It did well when it outlawed segregation, but affirmative action became a disaster; welfare was a boon at the start, but became counterproductive.

One can applaud the state when it wins wars, stops terrorists, and rushes aid to flood- or to drought-stricken areas, and still feel a national health care reform bill will be courting disaster if it tries to take over one-sixth of the economy and directs the employment decisions of millions of doctors and hospitals, the research decisions of hundreds of companies, and the personal health care decisions of 300 million-plus people. …

…In a misapplied quote, President Reagan once said that government itself was not the problem; it became the problem when it went beyond its legitimate sphere of endeavor. …

John Stossel explains how the US will match Greece’s financial crisis. He uses economist Paul Krugman’s stats to reach this conclusion.

…But it’s Krugman who is confused. All his graph shows is that Greece is worse off than the US now, and in the near future. That should be obvious to anyone following the news of riots in Greece.

His graph hides the fact that, while our annual deficits may shrink — some forecasters expect the economy to get better and stimulus funding to phase out — every year the government will still spend more than it takes in, so total U.S. debt will keep rising. And Krugman’s graph doesn’t get at the important question: are we on track to become what Greece is like now? This graph, which uses the same data set as Krugman’s chart, helps answer that…

…In short: In 10 years, under Obama’s budget plan, the USA will likely be in same debt position as Greece is now.

John Hinderaker has Edmund Conway in the UK Telegraph with an IMF report on how quickly the US debt will grow if liberals continue the current course.

Is the United States Greece? The short answer is: not yet, but it will be if the Democrats remain in control in Washington for two more election cycles.

In the Telegraph, Edmund Conway summarizes a lengthy report by the International Monetary Fund on sovereign debt that came out today:

[T]he really interesting stuff is the detail, and what leaps out again and again is how much of a hill the US has to climb. Exhibit a is the fact that under the Obama administration’s current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015 – a far steeper increase than almost any other country. …

…The Democrats in Washington are both too stupid and too ideologically committed to read the writing on the wall. They are leading the United States over a financial cliff, and they have no intention of turning back. On the contrary: if they can, they will hobble our economy further by enacting a carbon tax. There is only one way to stop them, and to save our children–from whom greedy, selfish Washington liberals are borrowing trillions of dollars–from a lifetime of debt. The Democrats must be voted out in 2010, and Barack Obama must be denied a second opportunity to deconstruct the country that he doesn’t much like.

The Streetwise Professor has some damning statistics for liberals who claim that low tax rates are the reason that the US debt is so high.

…There is no doubt that Greece is doomed.  We’re not doomed, but we are in very deep trouble.  From this I’m supposed to take comfort?

Of course, Krugman beckons his standard villain to explain the US’s budget troubles: conservatives who have starved the government of revenue:

“And bear in mind, also, that taxes have lagged behind spending partly thanks to a deliberate political strategy, that of “starve the beast”: conservatives have deliberately deprived the government of revenue in an attempt to force the spending cuts they now insist are necessary.”

As if.  Krugman is, how do you say it?  A liar.  That’s it.  In 1970, federal revenues as a fraction of GDP: 19 percent.  1980: 18.9 percent.  1990: 18 percent.  2000: 20.8 percent.  2010: 19.2 percent.   Some starvation. …

The Streetwise Professor also comments on Edmund Conway’s article on the IMF report.

This article from the Telegraph summarizes the dreary conclusions of an IMF report which says, contrary to Alfred E. Krugman, the United States faces one of the most daunting fiscal crunches in the years ahead. …

…However, the flip side of this is that because it has yet to feel the market strain, the US also has yet to face up properly to the public finance disaster that could befall it if it does not do anything about the problem. America is not Greece, but if it does not start making efforts to cut the deficit within a few years, it will head in that direction. The upshot wouldn’t be an IMF bail-out, but a collapse in the dollar and possible hyperinflation in the US, but it would be horrific all the same. America has time, but not forever.

In The Hill, A.B. Stoddard has an excellent article on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

…Christie is tackling the nation’s worst state deficit — $10.7 billion of a $29.3 billion budget. In doing so, Christie has become the politician so many Americans crave, one willing to lose his job. Indeed, Christie is doing something unheard of: governing as a Republican in a blue state, just as he campaigned, making good on promises, acting like his last election is behind him.

Upon taking office Christie declared a state of emergency, signing an executive order that froze spending, and then, in eight weeks, cutting $13 billion in spending. In March he presented to the Legislature his first budget, which cuts 9 percent of spending, including more than $800 million in education funding; seeks to privatize numerous government functions; projects 1,300 layoffs; and caps tax increases.

…Can Christie succeed? We will find out on June 30, when the Legislature must pass a budget . But no matter the political price, Christie is determined. “You just have to stand and grit your teeth and know your poll numbers are going to go down — and mine have — but you gotta grit through it because the alternative is unacceptable,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The alternative is unacceptable — words a growing majority of Americans desperately want to hear from their elected officials.

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David Harsanyi believes in separation of sports and state. Or, to paraphrase Laura Ingraham, “Shut up and play.”

…Take the recent immigration flap in Arizona. Leftist intellectual and El Sol all-star point guard Steve Nash — slumming it in Arizona at $13 million per year — is certainly free to lecture the proletariat. But like Jack Kemp, Jim Bunning, Heath Shuler or Bill Bradley, it would probably be better if he saved it for the post-game.

Those boycotting the Arizona Diamondbacks are equally grating. Obviously, I oppose any sort of discrimination by my childhood teams — unless the Yanks are exclusively signing Dominican stars; then they can call themselves Los Gringos for all I care. But I don’t take out my exasperations over New Yorkers consistently voting for Chuck Schumer on the New York Knicks.

Sports happens to be one of the most meritocratic institutions in this nation. It divides us into regional and traditional clusters. To inject corrosive political grandstanding into this thing that so many of us love can only undermine the camaraderie of fans, who are able to put aside their ideological differences, financial situations and often their worries to partake in a communal gratification that politicians and “activists” only pretend to understand and foster.

And, after all, is nothing sacred?

Charles Krauthammer discusses his proposed public safety exception to Miranda warnings.

…The fact that the Times Square bomber did talk after he was Mirandized is blind luck. Holder is undoubtedly aware of just how much information about the Pakistani Taliban, which he now tells us funded and directed Shahzad’s attack, would have been lost to us had Shahzad stopped talking — and therefore how important it is to make sure the next guy we nab trying to blow something up is not Mirandized until a full interrogation regarding that plot and others is completed. …

…Nonetheless, this administration seems intent upon using the civilian legal system rather than designating caught-in-the-act terrorists as enemy combatants. I think it’s a mistake, but they will be in power for almost three more years, possibly seven. In the interim, therefore, we have to think about how to adapt this administration’s preferred domestic-judicial model to the real world.

The way to do it, as Holder has come to understand, is by modifying Miranda. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne writes that European leaders have merely delayed solving the current fiscal problems.

As the health of much of the global economy weakens on a daily basis, political leadership increasingly ignores the source of the malady and instead focuses on short term “band-aid” remedies. These measures which may buy a few months, or years, of relative well being, will convince the public that problems have been solved and will thereby take pressure off governments to make the needed structural changes.

The recently announced $1 trillion EU bailout is a perfect example of this “band-aid” approach. The just concluded general election in the United Kingdom is another. The inconclusive UK result, which creates a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, will be an unhappy, unquestionably temporary arrangement. Similarly, the EU bailout will continue to infuriate Northern Europeans, who may ultimately push for a breakup of the Union. …

Tunku Varadarajan offers bullet points on the new British government. Here are two:

2. A governors’ coalition is a very un-British thing. The Brits have historically been much better at constructing coalitions of the governed: Witness colonial India, or Nigeria, or Ireland. India, for instance, was administered by parceling out privileges to different groups, never to one alone, and this division of spoils—or of access to power—rendered the subjects governable. But the British government, whether at home or abroad, was always deeply, satisfyingly monolithic. Not anymore, and we shall watch this new political experiment with a sense of wonderment.

10. The Labour Party should ready itself for introspective opposition. Brown has resigned as leader, so the party has rid itself of its greatest electoral liability. But if Cameron governs decently and flexibly (and why should he not, given his need to take into account the views of his coalition partners?), and if the return to a more paternalistic conservatism can be achieved without sacrificing overly on fiscal rigor, Labour could well find itself shut out of power for more than one full parliamentary term. Deputy Prime Minister Clegg, now committed to a historic coalition, will not be able to pull out of government for anything other than irrefutable reasons. And Cameron hardly seems like the sort of chap to furnish those at the risk of bringing down his own, hard-earned government.

George Will exposes some of the lies and hypocrisy surrounding the bailouts of GM and Greece. He starts out by giving the real story on the latest GM ad suggesting it as a metaphor for Greece.

To understand the pertinence to America of events in Greece, notice General Motors’ most recent misbehavior. A television commercial featuring CEO Ed Whitacre demonstrates the institutional murkiness and intellectual dishonesty that result when the line between public and private sectors disappears.

In the commercial, Whitacre says GM has “repaid our government loan in full.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) noted that GM used government funds to pay back the government: It “simply transferred $6.7 billion from one taxpayer-funded TARP account to another.” The government still owns 60.8 percent of GM’s common equity, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that the government will lose about $34 billion of the $82 billion of TARP funds disbursed to the automotive industry.

When Ryan and two colleagues asked the Treasury Department for clarification, they got this careful reply: “Treasury has never suggested that the loan repayment represented a full return of all government assistance.” A Treasury news release did say “GM Repays Treasury Loan in Full.” The loan is, however, a small part of taxpayer exposure. Under crony capitalism, when government and corporate America merge, both dissemble. …

Michael Barone looks at the Kagan nomination and sees government by faculty lounge.

… As dean at Harvard Law, Kagan signed a brief that sought to overturn the law denying federal funds to universities that barred military recruiters. Yet that brief, written by one of the ablest Supreme Court advocates, Walter Dellinger, was nonetheless rejected by the justices by a vote of 8-0.

In nominating Kagan, Obama said he wanted a justice who understood “the real world.” But it seems that he nominated someone who, on one important occasion, utterly misjudged the real world beyond the campus.

Of course one might say the same of Obama himself, who has pushed big government policies that seem like no-brainers to most professors but have aroused passionate and principled opposition from the public at large. We are seeing what government by the faculty lounge looks like.

Roger Simon was surprised to find out who supports same-sex marriage.

…So it is with some gratification that I found tonight that the person in public life I have admired tremendously for some time is also a supporter of same-sex marriage – Laura Bush. She proclaimed that support in her characteristic well-mannered, low-keyed fashion on the Larry King Show. (Okay, nobody’s perfect.) I even had the suspicion that her husband agreed with her, but for political considerations didn’t say so.

What does this mean?  Traditionally a woman like Bush would oppose gay marriage, but she has stepped outside that “tradition,” seen the situation objectively and come to a different conclusion.  I think it’s interesting that the supposedly liberal Barack Obama has not been able to reach this conclusion or to perform any action that would indicate that he had.  Meanwhile, the supposedly antediluvian Dick Cheney has expressed his support for same-sex marriage.

So what are we to think?  Who is the “progressive” and who is the “conservative”?  And what do these words mean?  Well, not much to me, as I have said. …

Tony Blankley thinks it was good thing the Utah GOP threw Bennett out of the primary.

…We need determined men and women who share the view of us shocked and appalled Americans that we are in crisis – and that we cannot wait until 2013 to stop the madness and start the rollback. Winning a majority of Republicans in November without electing a majority for radical, immediate rollback will be essentially as good as losing. As a Republican Party man for 46 years, I have, until now, always thought it was better to win a majority any way we can.

But not this year. This year it really doesn’t matter that good men such as Mr. Bennett get thrown out on their ear. I became radicalized on the matter of the national deficit and debt upon the administration’s release of its 10-year budget – the most irresponsible federal document ever released – which plans for unsustainable debt and does not even propose a path out. …

…In the face of financial ruin of the nation, it was unconscionable to pass a new health entitlement that almost all Americans know will add trillions to the debt. Next year, as Mr. Obama almost certainly will call for a new value-added tax to do the “responsible thing” to reduce the deficits he and Congress have created, it will be equally unconscionable to support such a tax. The only solution to the debt and deficit that will not kill economic growth is to cut spending, not raise taxes. We cannot afford to elect Republicans or Democrats who would be “responsible,” and raise taxes. …

The Economist reports on new technology in dirigibles.

…Although helium-filled weather balloons regularly launch instruments high into the stratosphere, at altitudes of 20km (65,000 feet) the air is 15 times less dense, causing the balloons to expand and ultimately burst.

This problem has long vexed the American military, which would like to use lighter-than-air dirigibles as atmospheric satellites, or stratellites. From 20km a blimp would be able to continuously survey an area the size of Texas for months at a time, but in greater detail and at much lower cost than geostationary satellites or those moving in low Earth orbit. …

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In Division of Labour, Frank Stephenson has a good quip.

“The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings Wednesday on the “Potty Parity Act,” a bill that seeks to address the unequal number of restroom facilities for women in federal buildings.”

This is a much better way for the honorables to spend their time rather than mucking around in health care or passing cap and tax.

In WSJ, Amy Jaffe writes about the new technology in natural gas that will have positive effects on many nations’ economies.

Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation’s natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.

We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.

I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy. …

…Russia made no secret about its desire to leverage its position and create a cartel of gas producers—a kind of latter-day OPEC. That seemed to set the stage for a repeat of the oil issues that have worried the world over the past 40 years.

As far as I’m concerned, you can now forget all that. Shale gas will breed competition among energy companies and exporting countries—which in turn will help economic stability in industrial countries, and thwart petro-suppliers that try to empower themselves at our expense. Market competition is the best kryptonite for cartel power. …

…The trade deficit has crippled our economy and shows no signs of abating as long as we remain tethered to imported energy. Why ship dollars abroad where they can destabilize global financial markets—and then hit us back in lost jobs and savings—when we can develop the resources we have here in our own country? Shall we pay Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to develop our natural gas—or the citizens of Pennsylvania and Louisiana?

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments on the Kagan nomination.

If you look at this on an ideological scale, it’s Obama going [from] left to center. He starts with Sotomayor at a time — in ’09 — when he’s strong, he’s riding high, he has control of the Senate. She’s pretty left, [as in] the “wise Latina” comment. He’s in a position where he can risk it [with Sotomayor].

Now he’s a lot weaker — 41 Republicans in the Senate. So he goes with a more mainline liberal. He knows that after next year, if he gets another pick, he’s going to get really weakened in this [election], especially in the Senate. He could even lose the Senate — unlikely, but possible. But he’ll certainly have a much smaller majority. He’s going to have to [then] go to a fairly centrist liberal like a Merrick Garland whom he overlooked now.

I think he’s planned it politically very well. You go more ideological when you’re strong — and you go to the center when you’re weaker. …

And we have more commentary from Jennifer Rubin on the Kagan nomination.

This report repeats the idea that Elena Kagan was nominated primarily to sway Justice Kennedy to the liberal side of those tricky 5-4 decisions. But if so, does this make any sense? That notion assumes that the Court operates like the Harvard Law School faculty, where nice words, dinner parties, back-slapping, and not revealing her own views served Kagan well. But that’s not how the Court operates:

Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court lawyer at Akin Gump and author of the widely read SCOTUS Blog, says she has exhibited an “extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful” avoidance of public positions on any matters she might face as a Justice. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” Goldstein wrote.

And even if she did have well-established positions, they’d be nothing compared to Kennedy’s. “Justice Kennedy has been on the bench for 40-some years now, including his time on the Ninth Circuit,” says the former clerk. “It’s particularly unlikely that he’s going to fall under the sway of a new judge who’s never been on the court.” …

Jennifer Rubin follows up from her last post.

…Well, she did some things on her own:

[Charles Fried] also credits her with arranging a faculty lounge so it offered free lunch and large tables, where faculty could sit and get to know one another. “It was an absolute stroke of genius,” Mr. Fried said.

Genius? I think most employers have figured out that free food usually is a winner with employees. But maybe Justice Kennedy can be swayed by sandwiches and soda. …

…This is all very commendable for a dean but utterly irrelevant to the job of being a Supreme Court justice. More revealing will be what she accomplished as solicitor general, and we should begin to focus on that — the number and quality of her arguments. Then we might learn whether she is really up for the job. …

Spengler discusses what he sees on the global economic landscape.

…Paul Samuelson’s most gifted doctoral student is the Canadian Robert Mundell, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in economics. Mundell’s theory is not as simple as Keynes, for it is a global model that casts a weather eye on the long run. The trouble, Mundell observed in a 1965 essay in the Journal of Political Economy, is that markets are not very good at seeing into the future.  …

…Reality has a way of impinging. The Greeks know very well that their situation cannot be fixed by a dose of austerity, and have staged a national tantrum that Aristophanes would have enjoyed staging. The Germans know that they need every penny of their own tax revenues to pay for their own elderly dependents, who will comprise 61% of all Germans in 2040 (again assuming constant fertility). The vehemence of the political response in both countries is a signal to the market that something is very, very wrong. So is the British inability to elect a government.

Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked – shocked – to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.

That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom’s aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn’t, everything will go pear-shaped.

And that becomes a self-referential question: if you believe in the bubble, it will continue, and if you don’t, it won’t. That, I surmise, explains a 10% price drop in US stock market indices in a matter of minutes last Thursday. A slight change in attitude can dry up the vast reserves of liquidity of the US stock market. …

Yesterday we had the dismal projection of $85 billion for an April deficit at treasury. Reuters has the actual number.

The United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.

It was more than twice the $40-billion deficit that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast and was striking since April marks the filing deadline for individual income taxes that are the main source of government revenue. …

In the Weekly Standard Blog, John McCormack posts on an Obamacare congressman who just lost the Democrat Party primary.

Of course, if he were a Republican, I would write that West Virginia congressman Alan Mollohan was “purged” instead of “defeated.” Per the Wall Street Journal: “With 82% of precincts reporting, Democratic state Sen. Mike Oliverio was already leading by 12 points, 56%-44%.”

Oliviero opposed Mollohan’s vote for Obamacare, and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes that this was a key factor in the race: “it’s important to remember two factors unique to this race: Mollohan had been damaged by ethics allegations over the last few years and Oliverio actually ran to the incumbent’s ideological right — castigating him for his vote in favor of President Obama’s health care bill.”

If a vote for Obamacare can help sink a “Blue Dog” in the Democratic primary, what does this portend for the general election? …

Walter Williams sets the record straight on free markets.

Listening to America’s liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth. First, let’s first say what free markets are. Free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, refer to an economic system where there is no government interference except to outlaw and prosecute fraud and coercion. It ought to be apparent that our economy cannot be described as free market because there is extensive government interference. We have what might be called a mixed economy, one with both free market and socialistic attributes. If one is poor or of modest means, where does he fare better: in the freer and more open sector of our economy or in the controlled and highly regulated sector? Let’s look at it.

Did Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller and Guggenheim start out rich? Andrew Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, six days a week, earning $1.20 a week. A young John D. Rockefeller worked as a clerk. Meyer Guggenheim started out as a peddler. Andrew Mellon did have a leg up; his father was a lawyer and banker. Sam Walton milked the family’s cows, bottled the milk and delivered it and newspapers to customers. Richard Sears was a railroad station agent. Alvah Roebuck began work as a watchmaker. Together, they founded Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1893. John Cash Penney (founder of JCPenny department stores) worked for a local dry goods merchant.

…The market is a friend in another unappreciated way. In poor black neighborhoods, one might see some nice clothing, some nice food, some nice cars but no nice schools. Why not at least some nice schools? Clothing, food and cars are distributed by the market mechanism while schools are distributed by the political mechanism.

The Economist has an interesting piece on the evolution of gender differences in navigation.

…Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labour, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.

The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants. ..

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Thomas Sowell looks at a disturbing idea.

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly. …

John Fund discusses an interesting point about Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court.

…But Mr. Obama’s choice comes at some short-term cost. Because Ms. Kagan is his solicitor general, she would have to recuse herself as Justice from any cases in which she had been involved as an administration official. Those would likely include lawsuits over ObamaCare and the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Ms. Kagan’s recusals would limit her role in at least her first year on the court. Thurgood Marshall, the last Supreme Court justice she clerked for, was Lyndon Johnson’s solicitor general when he was picked for the court in 1967. In his first year after confirmation, he had to recuse himself from 57% of the cases that were heard. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on various aspects of the nomination, including the recusal issue.

Elena Kagan, as expected, was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her remarks were unexceptional and humble, appropriate to the occasion. Obama was partisan and ludicrous, even by his own standard. Justice John Paul Stevens was many things. But an exemplar of judicial restraint he was not. And Obama’s waxing lyrical on this score struck one as bizarrely insincere. Moreover, his attack on Citizens United and praise for Kagan’s role in it was wholly unnecessary and, frankly, wrong. It’s the law of the land, and his continual invective against it betrays a lack of respect for the Court.

Moreover, come to think of it, is Kagan now recused from cases that evaluate and would seek to modify or reverse that case? It would seem so — particularly because she, according to Obama, made such a big deal of choosing this case as her first to argue before the Court as solicitor general. Now that’s a small bonus for conservatives, if true. And Republican senators should pin her down on that point.

John Steele Gordon comments on Elena Kagan’s stance on military recruitment, given her Supreme Court aspirations.

…As Bill Kristol points out, tracking Ed Whelan’s fifth point, Elena Kagan appears anti-military here, not just pro-gay. She has consistently blamed the military for implementing what was, in fact, an act of Congress (and a Democratic one at that) that had been signed into law by a Democratic president. Does she think the military has a moral obligation to mutiny in this case? …

Jennifer Rubin criticizes Obama’s remarks on Elena Kagan.

…Obama also pronounced, “Elena is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds.” This is preposterous. She’s written little, and what she has written is banal and unexceptional. Her speeches as dean are not analytical or historical discourse but pep talks and generic spiels on ethics and the wonders of Harvard Law School’s reputation.

So she brings neither an abundance of non-elite experience nor an intellectual record of achievement. That doesn’t mean she isn’t qualified or won’t make a capable justice, but it does serve to emphasize — once again — the president’s penchant for exaggeration if not fabrication. …

Jennifer Rubin has more to say on the recusal issue.

Yesterday, I raised the issue of Elena Kagan’s recusal in a case that might try to reverse or modify Citizens United. It seems the White House has already thought this through:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama took the issue into consideration when he looked at Kagan for the nomination. “The president had to make a decision similar to past presidents that have tapped solicitor generals to serve on the high court,” Gibbs said. “Next year, I think we anticipate recusals in about a dozen cases, and then maybe less than half of that in the year after that.”

Really — how did they count? What standard are they using? Kagan should be very clear about what sorts of cases and what issues she believes she will be recused from. This is critical not only in determining her ethical posture but also in figuring out whether Democrats will be “down a vote” for some period of time. Is she going to opine on the constitutionality of ObamaCare? On Guantanamo cases? On this, the Senate should insist on clear and definitive answers. After all, it goes directly to her ability to perform the job for which she has been nominated.

Abby Thernstrom gives some advice to the RNC.

Mr. Steele (and RNC staff), just as a little experiment, you might try thinking before you speak.

In a tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall shortly before his death, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan quoted our first black Justice as having said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.”

“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?” the RNC now asks. A litmus test for Kagan, it implies.

But of course the answer should be, yes. Might the Three-Fifths Clause have been a wee bit of a defect?

The NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s take on the nomination.

On Elena Kagan as a possible Supreme Court nominee:

Kagan is the safer choice. She has friends on the right as a result of how she conducted herself as the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was open to ideological diversity on the faculty — which is rather shocking on an Ivy League campus which is [as] open to ideological diversity as the Supreme Soviet was in the old days. . . .

The one advantage Kagan has is her youth. She’s 50. She could be on for three decades. Long after America goes bankrupt, she’ll still be on the court.

Ralph Reed first notes that Obama looked in the mirror and decided on a nominee. He goes on from there.

…For all the attempts by the liberal fog machine to obfuscate her extremist views, Kagan is a committed liberal. Her attempt to defy federal law — reversed by the Supreme Court — by banning military recruiters from Harvard’s law school during a time of war is only the most well-known example of her radical views. Her belief that political speech is selectively protected by the First Amendment based on the form of media used to express it is more frightening. (One of her few scholarly articles in a thin academic resume defends the right of the government to regulate “hate speech.”) Nor is her belief in strictly constraining constitutional liberty confined to the First Amendment. In response to questions during her confirmation as solicitor general, Kagan argued the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, like freedom of speech, enjoys “strong but not unlimited protection.” This is a dangerous view of the law when it leads to the creeping erosion of the Bill of Rights. …

In Contentions, Rick Richman comments on Trials of the Diaspora by Anthony Julius.

In the New York Times Book Review, Harold Bloom reviews Anthony Julius’s monumental new book, Trials of the Diaspora. It is a cover review — an indication of the book’s importance — and a uniformly favorable one: a “strong, somber book” reflecting “extraordinary moral strength.” But even those complimentary terms, from one of America’s leading literary critics, do not begin to convey the scope and magnitude of Julius’s achievement.

The book’s subtitle is A History of Anti-Semitism in England, which itself understates the significance of the book, since the book covers aspects of the psychology and sociology of anti-Semitism that extend far beyond a single country’s experience. …

…Julius is particularly eloquent on two matters: first, the sheer surreality and incoherence of anti-Semitism:

The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism. It should have rebutted once and for all the principal anti-Semitic fantasy of malign Jewish power; it should have satiated the appetite of the most murderous anti-Semites for Jewish death. And yet instead it precipitated new anti-Semitic versions or tropes …

In the NY Times, Harold Bloom reviews Trials of the Diaspora.

Anthony Julius has written a strong, somber book on an appalling subject: the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society. My first, personal, reflection is to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City.

With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counter­boycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism. …

Christopher Hitchens applauds French legislators standing up for Muslim women’s rights.

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a “ban.” To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another. …

…So it’s really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.

In the WSJ, Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Susan Yager’s new book, The Hundred Year Diet.

…Yet worries over overeating, as Susan Yager interestingly reminds us “The Hundred Year Diet,” preoccupied the public long before Americans en masse became so massive. These days we may track the content of trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup—the staples of processing that make much food so cheap and unhealthful—but in the 1970s we were already measuring out our lives with tablespoons, trying to follow the Atkins or Pritkin or Beverly Hills diets. Indeed, back in 1960 John F. Kennedy was worrying in the pages of Sports Illustrated that the nation’s youth had become flabby and dangerously “soft.” …

…Ms. Yager’s bite-sized chapters are easy and pleasant to digest as she takes us through America’s fat-fighting history, from its now comical-seeming beginnings through the wild pendulum swings of the late 20th century (when carbohydrates and fats alternated as public enemy No. 1) to the promise of the fat-substitute Olestra (with its regrettable intestinal consequences) and today’s gastric bypass surgery for the severely obese. …

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In NewsBusters, Tom Blumer reviews the bad economic news that the media isn’t reporting.

…The government almost always runs an April surplus because it’s the biggest month for tax collections. Individual filers have to settle up what’s left of their previous year’s liabilities with Uncle Sam on April 15, and the first installments of current-year individual and corporate estimated taxes are also due.

But as seen in the chart that follows, April receipts have cratered during the past two years by stunning amounts compared to April 2007 and 2008. The April 2010 plunge continues a nearly unbroken trend of year-over-year declines in monthly receipts going back almost two years…

In Real Clear Markets, John Tamny explains the reason why oil prices haven’t fallen.

…In each instance commentators mistake the symptom of expensive oil for its true cause. Von Mises frequently touched on money values in his brilliant expositions on markets, and it’s because the dollar has no true value or fixed definition that oil is presently expensive. In short, oil is dear because the dollar in which it’s priced is cheap. …

…The good news, however, is that this can be fixed. As evidenced by the dollar’s major decline versus gold this decade, the dollar is very cheap. The dollar’s debased nature explains expensive spot oil prices, high prices at the pump, and most important of all, it helps explain a difficult job outlook. With so much soggy money flowing into commodities least vulnerable to dollar weakness, the entrepreneurial economy where most jobs are created is losing out. …

Peter Wehner comments on a lecture he heard given by General Petraeus about the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.

…It is fashionable in some circles to emphasize the limits of policy when it comes to improving everyday life in a nation, particularly in one as shattered as Iraq was. That is of course sometimes the case. But in other instances, when the intellectual foundation is right and when the correct lessons from history and human experience are drawn, things can unfold much faster and much better than we anticipate.

A second lesson to draw from General Petraeus’s lecture is that we are witnessing one of the most remarkable, far-reaching reforms of an institution in our lifetime. (David Brooks devotes his column to this topic.) All large institutions are difficult to reform. Old habits are hard to uproot. People become settled in their ways, invested in policies they have advocated. Thinking becomes rutted. And there is of course a widespread human reluctance to engage in searching self-examination and to admit mistakes. All of which makes the transformation we are witnessing amazing. The intellectual orientation of the Army is significantly different from what it was less than a half-decade ago. How that occurred, and precisely how the (intellectual) tectonic plates shifted, is something that will be studied for decades to come. …

David Brooks also attended the lecture and writes about the change that occurred within the Army.

…Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas. …

…The process was led by these dual-consciousness people — those who could be practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next. They were neither blinkered by Army mind-set, like some of the back-slapping old guard, nor so removed from it that their ideas were never tested by reality, like pure academic theoreticians.

It’s a wonder that more institutions aren’t set up to encourage this sort of alternating life. Business schools do it, but most institutions are hindered by guild customs, by tenure rules and by the tyranny of people who can only think in one way.

Spengler is not a fan of General Petraeus.

…Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money. Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use them.

Petraeus’ “surge” of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the available Sunni fighters into an American-financed militia, the “Sons of Iraq,” or Sunni Awakening. With American money, weapons and training, the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime have turned into a fighting force far more effective than the defunct dictator’s state police. And now the American military is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and, under General Keith Dayton, in Palestine. America is pouring money – which is to say weapons – into disputed areas of Afghanistan, and building the core of a Palestinian army. The latter’s mission is to impose a pro-Western Palestinian government on a population of whom two-thirds oppose the two-state solution. It more likely will end up fighting Israel. …

…Petraeus made his reputation on the surge, and needs someone to blame for its prospective failure. His choice is Israel. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Petraeus’ March 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which the CENTCOM commander blamed the Israel-Palestine conflict for inflaming Muslim sentiment against the United States. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam discusses the oil spill and energy alternatives.

…We only have one non-terrible option for reducing our reliance on oil, and that’s sharply increasing our reliance on nuclear power. As Peter Huber observes in the latest issue of City Journal, the success of antinuclear activists in killing the 100 nuclear power plants that were in the pipeline as of 30 years ago has led to an increase in coal consumption in the neighborhood of 400 million tons a year. …

David Warren gives his thoughts on the British election.

…The pound took its beating in world currency markets at the prospect of a “hung parliament.” This is because the people holding the debt know that big bold changes are required — deep spending cuts, or vertiginous new taxes, or both — to restore solvency. They know a minority government can’t deliver such goods, and they are now looking hard at lethal violence in response to mere half-measures in Greece. The financiers may not have a very nuanced picture, but they do get the gist. …

Mark Steyn also weighs in.

…And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:

This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected. …

In the Corner, Peter Robinson follows up on a Steyn comment.

“I seem to recall,” Mark Steyn writes below, that when a couple of months ago David Cameron and his Tory Party still commanded an enormous lead over Gordon Brown and Labour, “more than a few Republican ‘reformers’ were recommending the Cameronization of the Republican Party.”  Now that Cameron has blown his lead to produce the first hung Parliament in more than three decades, Mark seems to suppose, no one will ever again hold up the present Tory Party as a model for the GOP.

Silly him.

Herewith David Brooks on the NewsHour, not 24 hours ago, speaking of the “impact” of the British election “on the Republican Party”…

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In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews recent political and strategic events involving the Middle East. Says to get ready for war.

…Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km. range. This week, Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

…From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four-front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country, aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores. …

In the WSJ, Gerard Baker discusses the UK’s election results, and what lies ahead. Remember Baker? He wrote for the London Times until a year ago when the Journal snagged him for some administrative post where, unfortunately he rarely writes. The piece is a good tour de farce.

… But others, like Terry Marsh, hope to make a more serious point.

Angry at the failures of Britain’s political system, Mr. Marsh, a former light-welterweight world boxing champion, wanted to cast a vote by which he could signal his disdain for all the major parties. But under electoral rules it was not possible to formally register a protest vote on a ballot and have it counted. So Mr. Marsh instead paid the 5,000 pounds needed to run as a candidate, changed his name officially to None Of The Above X—the X marking the character the British still use to cast their votes in ink on paper ballots—and registered as a candidate in his local district of Basildon, in Essex, just outside London.

In the event, Mr. X, as he is presumably now known, secured a mere 100 votes out of the 45,000 cast in the district.

But in a larger, much larger, sense, as the results of Thursday’s election trickled and flowed in through the early hours of Friday, it became clear that the cause represented by the Man Formerly Known as Marsh was the real victor in Britain’s most unpredictable election in a generation.

None of the Above won Britain’s election this week. …

…You don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that this historic election result marked something much more than the usual seductive appeal of the Time for a Change message. In fact it has been known for a while now that what is going on in the old country is not just some spasm of reaction to bad economic data, but the flowering of a deep-rooted popular disgust with the entire political class.

Last year’s toe-curling exposure of corruption in high and low places (and everywhere in between) in the political system damned almost all politicians in the eyes of the electorate. The spectacle of members of parliament enriching themselves by exploiting taxpayer-paid expense loopholes in a magnificently English, class-based farce—from the Labour MP’s 88 pence ($1.30) bath plug, to the Conservative who claimed for a moat for his country castle—enraged the recession-weary voters. …

…The U.K. has, according to data from the European Commission published last week, the largest fiscal deficit in the European Union, at 13% of national income, even larger than the U.S. deficit. The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s. …

David Harsanyi makes some important points about giving the government more power when the government isn’t using the current laws appropriately to protect us against terrorists.

…McCain must be aware that the FBI can invoke, as it did in Times Square, the “public safety exception,” which allows officials to postpone Miranda warnings to suspects while they investigate clear and present danger to the public at large. They have the tool. …

…We often misunderstand Miranda. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (who would likely disagree with this column) explained, “Miranda and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause are strictly about whether confession evidence gets admitted at trial . . . they just mean that you can’t use against the person any non-Mirandized statements he gives.” …

Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on the government’s response to the most recent terrorist.

…Let us hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call to those who have nothing better to do than predict violence from critics of ObamaCare. There are forces in this country that really do want to kill and intimidate dissenters – and they are not shy about their jihad. Witness a prominent death threat against Comedy Central because of its “South Park” cartoon portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. …

David Goldman (Spengler) comments on the Great Euro-Bail Out.

Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.

The banking system really was about to come down. The reason is that sovereign debt is a bigger problem than subprime mortgages ever were. ..

… Now the government are going to bail out the banks again, with money raised–from the banks. I’m holding my gold positions. This is truly ludicrous and may lead to a decline in confidence in all major currencies.

Why Greece matters by Robert Samuelson.

What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” Vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only to a point. …

Jennifer Rubin has Elena Kagan thoughts.

Although records from her years in the Clinton administration may raise other concerns, at this stage the most significant vulnerability for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is her position in opposing giving military recruiters access to Harvard Law School because of the armed services’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This is problematic in two respects.

First, as Bill Kristol observes, the level of invective directed at the military is noteworthy: …

More on Kagan from Daniel Foster in The Corner.

Roger Simon comments on the demise of Newsweek.

…The Washington Post would have to pay me to take Newsweek off its hands – and a substantial sum, in the neighborhood of sixty million.  You figure it out. In 2008, the magazine lost $16.1 million; in 2009, that went to $29.3 million.  Not a promising proposition.

And what is Newsweek anyway?  In recent years it’s been nothing more than a semi-leftwing propaganda rag for Upper West Side dentists – chock full of the kind of opinion you can get for nothing on the Huffington Post or even the Daily Kos. …

No one’s interested in paying to read liberal opinions, writes John Podhoretz.

…For years, Newsweek was a liberal journal of opinion masquerading as a news publication that attempted to sell itself to a mass readership with a lot of health-care, entertainment, and lifestyle fluff. As a vehicle for news analysis, it was entirely conventional; as a purveyor of sociological fluff, it was kind of fun, though often enragingly so; as a journal of opinion, it was to actual journals of opinion as tofutti is to gelato, flavorless and bland and mock. Last year, Meacham and Co. ditched much of the news analysis and sociological fluff in favor of more and more opinion.

It will not surprise you to know that much of the opinion dealt with the ways in which Barack Obama was right and noble and good and strong and tough and resourceful and a good symbol and an agent of change and so is his wife, by the way — and when it was not about that, it was primarily about how the right is at war with itself and torn and in conflict and dominated by anger and full of rage and presumptively racist and anti-gay and anti-women and anti-media. That was to be expected. But there was really almost nothing else in there, and what was there as a matter of ideological coloration wasn’t especially tough or good or interesting or novel. …

Scott Johnson has some good Newsweek quips in Powerline.

Linking to this story regarding the Washington Post’s efforts to unload Newsweek, NRO’s Jim Geraghty tweets: “Newsweek’s latest promo: With a 12-month subscription, they’ll throw in the entire organization for free.” More Geraghty tweets (and laughs) here.

UPDATE: This just in: A Dartmouth reader reports:

Just read your brief post this morning about the declining fortunes of Newsweek magazine. As it happens, this is pledge week at Vermont Public Radio (the Hanover area’s main NPR affiliate). VPR is now offering free Newsweek subscriptions as a giveaway for contributions made to VPR — something I do not recall ever occurring during our 22 years living in the Upper Valley and listening to public radio here.

Newsweek: The perfect companion to Democrat State Radio.

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Mark Steyn pokes fun at the government’s and the media’s assertions about American society and Islam.

…As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the past nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Barack Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” – rather than the rights of the ever-lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized and murdered for not wanting to be covered. …

…And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg, a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Maj. Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in –slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit? …

Pickings first took note of Obama’s nastiness on February 3, 2010 when a Corner post noted the proposed budget eliminated a one million dollar scholarship program named in memory of Bart Stupak’s son. This was when Stupak was one of the holdouts on Obamacare. We have the summary from that day. Following that a number of our favorites note Obama’s talk about ”civility” and then contrasts that to his actual behavior.

February 3, 2010;

Robert Costa blogs in the Corner about one of the few budget cuts that the White House has proposed. It is in education, no less. It is not much, only one million dollars. But, what it does show is what a nasty piece of work Barack Obama is. The program to be cut is a scholarship program named after the deceased son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich). Rep Stupak did not toe the ObamaCare line.

With tax hikes dominating today’s budget debate, you will not hear much about the smaller federal grants that President Obama is hoping to slash. One proposed cut sticks out: Obama’s budget eliminates a $1 million scholarship program for aspiring Olympic athletes at Northern Michigan University. Here’s why it matters: In 1998, the program was renamed to honor B. J. Stupak, the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who committed suicide in 2000. Is the cut related to Stupak’s playing hardball on health care last year?

Stupak won’t speculate on the politics of the decision, but he does tell National Review Online that he is “disappointed” to hear about the cut. He says he found out about it through the media, not the president or the Democratic leadership. He notes, however, “that in the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, never has a presidential staff called me to tell they are cutting something. Usually everyone around here scrambles after a budget is released.”

Stupak pledges to fight for the grant to be reinstated into the budget. “I’ll do my appropriations request and put in testimony. I want it to be funded on its own merit. President Bush did the same thing, and we always restored it. We need to do a better job explaining the program.” Stupak adds that with the Winter Olympics approaching, it is “time to remind Congress why it is important to provide educational assistance to aspiring young Olympic athletes. We’ll all be cheering our athletes next month, but we should remember that programs like this give a major boost to those training for the games. Shani Davis, the first black speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, credits the scholarship with keeping in him school. There are hundreds of stories like that. This program has become a small farm team for Olympic education.”

John Fund gives an example of incivility from the president.

…In his new book on President Obama’s first year in office, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter reports on the president’s frustration with united GOP opposition to many of his programs. Mr. Alter quotes Mr. Obama as saying the unanimous House Republican vote against his stimulus bill “helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

“Tea bagger,” the term used by Mr. Obama, is an extremely crude sexual term that has been used by many liberals as a derogatory description of Tea Party protestors. Anderson Cooper of CNN was compelled to apologize for using it on-air back in April 2009. “It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means.”

A decade or so ago, Democrats and many others were outraged when Indiana Rep. Dan Burton referred to President Clinton as a “scumbag” for his behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Perhaps President Obama would do well to more carefully follow his own calls for civility.

Karl Rove suggests that the president take his own advice.

…For example, last week Mr. Obama suggested that Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell was “cynical and deceptive” in arguing that the administration’s financial regulation bill would allow more bailouts “when he knows that it would do just the opposite.” Does implying the Senate GOP leader is a hypocrite and a liar make reaching compromise easier?

Mr. Obama even draws on the Bible for political attacks. In a teleconference with religious groups supporting health-care reform, he accused opponents of the legislation of “bearing false witness.” Or take last September when, in a health-care speech to Congress, the president—in a single paragraph—accused his critics of spreading “bogus claims” and “lies” and of being “cynical” and “irresponsible.” …

…If Mr. Obama wants his Ann Arbor words to be taken seriously, then he needs to rein in his party, his staff and himself. Presidential leadership matters as much as presidential words, perhaps more. Mr. Obama should back up his inspiring call to civility with action.

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery writes Obama an open letter.

…You say insufficient regulation of banks caused the crash, but you ought to say also it was bad government policy, if well-intended, and that when the president asked for more government oversight, you were one of those voting against. If you want to be civil, you might try telling the truth, and the whole truth, not what makes you look better. Only a thought.

You say “listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship,” and we agree. But we wonder what you had in mind last year when you tried to attack, marginalize and possibly silence a number of commentators, along with the network Fox News. …

…Wasn’t it just weeks ago that you sneered at the rallies on Tax Day, and dared the people who want health care repealed to “Go for it!” to a howling, partisan crowd? …

The Streetwise Professor thinks we are seeing the president’s true temperament.

…FDR was a SOB in private, but a charmer in public.  Obama is an SOB in public.  And people are noticing.

But Obama doesn’t.  Jennifer Rubin hits the nail square and true:

“Frankly, this gets back to a lack of self-awareness. This is a president who derides political opponents, fails to engage them on the merits, and has perfected the straw-man and ad hominem attacks. It was his White House that declared war on Fox News. So it is the height of hypocrisy for him to now tell the rest of us to up the tolerance and intellectual diversity quotient in our lives. It’s sort of like Tom Friedman telling us to consume less and reduce our carbon footprint.” [A Twofer!  Slamming Obama and Tom Tool Time Friedman in the same paragraph.  Way to go, Jennifer.] …

In Roll Call, Morton Kondracke thinks that Obama is merely a misguided ignorant liberal.

…But blasting business is not confined to insurance. Last weekend, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar twice said the administration intended to keep its “boot on the neck” of BP over the Gulf oil spill.

But then what do we make of Obama at the University of Michigan last week, saying that “vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise”?

My own hunch is that Obama, at heart, is not a socialist but a liberal without the slightest idea of how private enterprises create wealth — and deeply suspicious of their practitioners. …

Michael Barone continues his series on the DemocRats Leaving the Sinking Ship. This time it is David Obey.

The Associated Press is reporting that Congressman David Obey, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, will not run for reelection.

This is pretty shocking news.

Obey is one of the most senior members of the House; he was first elected in a special election in 1969 to replace Republican Mel Laird, who had been appointed Press (Defense) Secretary by Richard Nixon. Obey had served in the Wisconsin legislature before that. He is known for his angry temper, particularly at House colleagues or members of the public he considers ill-informed. I see him as something of a “happy warrior” in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, a true believer in expanding government to serve the little guy, rough hewn perhaps but also a hard worker and a master of detail.

In the WSJ, William McGurn looks at some interesting First Amendment issues.

…Because Mr. Chen reported on the new iPhone for his website, Gizmodo.com, the seizure of his computers has renewed a heated debate about whether bloggers are real journalists. Traditionally, many in the mainstream press have disparaged bloggers, though in this case at least some press organizations—including the parent company that runs Mr. Chen’s blog—argue that he is a full-time journalist whose home is his newsroom. The irony is how few connect Mr. Chen’s First Amendment freedoms to those for corporations that were recently upheld in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. …

…The classic view of the First Amendment holds all Americans are entitled to its rights by virtue of citizenship. These days, alas, too many journalists and politicians assume that a free press should mean special privileges for a designated class. The further we travel in this direction, the more the government will end up deciding which Americans qualify and which do not. …

Peter Schiff says that the problems facing Greece and the US are more similar than we would like.

…Of course, the negative effects on the economy of run-a-way inflation and skyrocketing interest rates are worse than what otherwise might result from an honest restructuring or even out right default. It is just amazing how few economists understand this simple fact.

Just because we can inflate does not mean we can escape the consequences of our actions. One way or another the piper must be paid. Either benefits will be cut or the real value of those benefits will be reduced. In fact, it is precisely because we can inflate our problems away that they now loom so large. With no one forcing us to make the hard choices, we constantly take the easy way out.

When creditors ultimately decide to curtail loans to America, U.S. interest rates will finally spike, and we will be confronted with even more difficult choices than those now facing Greece. Given the short maturity of our national debt, a jump in short-term rates would either result in default or massive austerity. If we choose neither, and opt to print money instead, the run-a-way inflation that will ensue will produce an even greater austerity than the one our leaders lacked the courage to impose. Those who believe rates will never rise as long as the Fed remains accommodative, or that inflation will not flare up as long as unemployment remains high, are just as foolish as those who assured us that the mortgage market was sound because national real estate prices could never fall.

Illinois legislators vote against the kids and for the unions. Then they tried to hide the record. But the ChiTrib found them out. The New Editor has the story.

The Illinois House Wednesday voted down a measure to allow as many as 30,000 kids in Chicago’s worst public schools get tuition vouchers. …

…From a Chicago Tribune editorial:

“Twenty-two Democrats and 26 Republicans in the Illinois House voted Wednesday to let up to 30,000 children escape Chicago’s worst schools. But 44 Democrats and 22 Republicans voted against tuition vouchers for those kids. One opponent, Rep. Monique Davis, D-Chicago, said she was standing with teachers unions and principals. Sponsor Kevin Joyce, D-Chicago, told The Capitol Fax Blog: “It’s job protection for the union leadership.” He’s right. …”

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Mark Steyn has troubling news from Great Britain. You’ll have to read the article to see what Big Brother is up to.

The British election campaign didn’t do much to catch the attention of Americans, but one little item feels pertinent — although it attracted remarkably little attention even across the pond. In Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, a lady called Phyllis Delik received a postcard from Gordon Brown’s Labour party. On one side, there was a photograph of a woman suffering from breast cancer saying “It’s the sort of thing you think will never happen to you.” On the reverse, there was a question: “Are the Tories a change you can afford?” — followed by a warning that the Conservatives would scrap a Labour guarantee that any woman diagnosed with breast cancer is entitled to see a specialist within two weeks.

(Yes, yes, I know that lingo still sounds a little strange to Americans: Government bureaucrats announce “targets” for the length of time between seeing your family doctor and seeing your specialist, or between getting your MRI and getting your operation. But don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it.) …

John Podhoretz wants public servants to tell us the truth.

…Instead of acknowledging this truth, government officials believe it is their role to provide reassurance even when they cannot do so. And they’re simply wrong about that. The American people are far more sophisticated about these things than those officials appear to believe, and they can be talked to like adults. That was the lesson, in part, of the immediate aftermath of September 11, when Rudy Giuliani simply said that the “number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.” He sugar-coated nothing. And that is the truth of crises and crisis management. When it is done well, there should be no sugar-coating. The impulse to sugar-coat is a mark of the conviction among politicians that they are in the same relation to the body politic as a parent is to a child. In our system, a politician is an employee, not a parent. For a rational employer, an employee who gives it to you straight will always be someone you take more seriously than an employee who pretends that everything is fine when everything isn’t.

Jonah Goldberg posts an email from a reader who did not like Mayor Bloomberg’s assumption about the latest would-be bomber.

…Bloomberg later told CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric that the suspect behind the bombing attempt could be a domestic terrorist angry at the government who acted alone. “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything,” he said.

A mentally deranged person or someone who did not like the healthcare bill?

Why is he so damned anxious to blame this on white conservative America?  …

Mark Steyn also discusses how public servants look for answers everywhere except in the most obvious direction.

Whenever something goofy happens — bomb in Times Square, mass shootings at a US military base, etc. — there seem to be two kinds of reactions:

a) Some people go, “Hmm. I wonder if this involves some guy with a name like Mohammed who has e-mails from Yemen.”

b) Other people go, “Don’t worry, there’s no connection to terrorism, and anyway, even if there is, it’s all very amateurish, and besides he’s most likely an isolated extremist or lone wolf.”

Unfortunately, everyone in category (b) seems to work for the government. …

David Harsanyi lends some sarcasm to the commentary.

…If I had to guess 25 cents, I’d bet the administration makes no mention of fundamentalist Islam even when it reluctantly admits we’re dealing with “terror.” …

…After all, the administration has never been scared to call out despots and extremists, such as insurance companies, Wall Street executives, Tea Party activists and the Israeli government. This is the Department of Homeland Security that issued a report alerting us to potential violence from “right- wing extremists” who are ginned up about “illegal immigration,” “federal power,” and the Second Amendment. (So at least half of you qualify.) …

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell reviews a fascinating new book about who really has the power in the United States. It may surprise you.

…What does it mean, the inability or unwillingness of either party to change or discipline the big banks in any way, even after all the havoc they have lately caused? In the year and a half since the implosion of Lehman Brothers, Simon Johnson, who was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, is the only person to have come up with a plausible explanation. He has done so by examining the United States as an IMF analyst would examine some bankrupt basket-case of a country in what used to be called the Third World. Johnson believes that the leaders of the American finance industry have turned into the sort of oligarchy more typical of the developing world, and that they have “captured” the government and its regulatory functions. Johnson laid out this bombshell thesis in the Atlantic a year ago.

There are many ways for countries to blunder their way into big economic trouble: Kleptocracy, capital flight, or a commodity-price crash can all spark a panic or collapse. Nevertheless, Johnson wrote, “to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work.” In a gripping new book, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, 304 pages, $26.95), written with his brother-in-law James Kwak, Johnson explains why those changes aren’t happening in the United States.

Most countries rescued by the IMF are marked by tight links between the business elite and the political elite. They are oligarchies. Johnson defines oligarchy as a system whereby economic power can be translated into political power (and vice versa). When you try to fix a country dominated by an oligarchy, you immediately hit a frustrating paradox: Rescue plans make the oligarchy more powerful. An IMF loan is a lifeline. Somebody has to decide which banks and industries get to use it, and which ones are set adrift. In this process, the cement company owned by the finance minister’s cousin does better than the cement company run by some schmuck in the hinterland. And it is not just that politically favored companies get the original infusion of IMF cash. Private investors can see what is going on and realize that it is “best to invest in the firms with the most political power (and hence the most assurance of being bailed out in a crisis).” So if the politically connected rich don’t pay, who does? “Most emerging-market governments,” according to Johnson, “look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.”

This is a terrifying truth, if you think about it. It means that you cannot take for granted that “once burned, twice shy” will describe the aftermath of an oligarchy-driven financial crisis. Serious reform is not inevitable. On the contrary: The “reforms” that follow a bubble-binge-bailout cycle tend to consolidate the privileges of the oligarchs who caused it. That is why the IMF tends to judge the good faith of a country seeking debt relief by whether it is willing to “squeeze at least some of its oligarchs,” in Johnson’s words. Back in the day when the United States was on its moral high horse, our bankers and government officials derided the fledgling market economies of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe as havens of “crony capitalism.” We demanded not just the squeezing of oligarchs but the squeezing of government. Freewheeling monetary policy and write-downs were anathema. Discipline was the order of the day. …

What Johnson thinks we should have done is take those banks over—“nationalize” them, if you like—and put the banks’ overvalued assets on the government’s books, where we could wait patiently to sell them, making depositors whole but letting shareholders take the loss. Then we should have broken them up, on grounds similar to the ones Theodore Roosevelt used for breaking up big industrial trusts, to ensure that none of them was too big to fail. “A central pillar of??…??reform must be breaking up the megabanks,” Johnson and Kwak write. They would limit assets to 2 percent of GDP (about $285 million) for investment banks and 4 percent for all banks (roughly what Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and NationsBank each had in the mid-1990s). Some people think that large banks provide economies of scale. Johnson and Kwak think the evidence is mixed. The evidence of the problems that big banks can cause, however, is now unambiguous. …

Peter Wehner shares his thoughts on an Obama speech about civility in public discourse.

…So President Obama lacerates his critics for engaging in the very activity he denounces. And he does so in the haughtiest way imaginable, always attempting to portray himself as hovering above us mere mortals, exasperated at the childish and petty quality of the political debate, weary of the name-calling. How hard it must be to be the embodiment of Socratic discourse, Solomonic wisdom, and Niebuhrian nuance in this fallen and broken world.

Here is the rather unpleasant reality, though: our president fancies himself a public intellectual of the highest order — think Walter Lippmann as chief executive — even as he and his team are accomplished practitioners of the Chicago Way. They relish targeting those on their enemies list. The president himself pretends to engage his critics’ arguments even as his words are used like a flamethrower in a field of straw men. It’s hard to tell if we’re watching a man engaged in an elaborate political shell game or a victim of an extraordinary, and nearly clinical, case of self-delusion. Perhaps there is some of both at play. Regardless, President Obama’s act became tiresome long ago. …

In WSJ Blogs, Dan Neil reports on the most expensive car ever sold.

Some time last week, the estate of Dr. Peter D. Williamson sold the late car collector’s prized 1936 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic to the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Ca., for between $30 million and $40 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Any figure in that range would make the Williamson Atlantic – a heartbreaking piece of European automotive sculpture, considered the epitome of French Deco styling – the most valuable car known to have changed hands. …

…The Atlantic’s price is, of course, staggering, even to automotive historians and experts. …

Scott Ott makes a good point.

Although Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had initially said she had no evidence to indicate the attempted Times Square bombing was anything other than a “one-off” event, an unnamed Homeland official today contradicted that assessment based on “one compelling piece of evidence.”

“We knew that we were dealing with a coordinated attack, involving perhaps dozens of co-conspirators and robust technological capabilities,” the anonymous source said, “And we knew he wasn’t a lone wolf based on a single fact: the driver of the bomb-filled SUV actually found a parking space in Times Square.”

While officials called the bomb itself “crude” and “amateurish”, they now privately acknowledge that the preparation, advanced espionage and meticulous orchestration of events required to insert a Sport Utility Vehicle into a curbside parking space anywhere in New York City reflects a high-level of intellectual and technical sophistication.” …

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Robert Samuelson discusses global market shifts as developing countries increase consumption.

…China, India, Brazil and many “emerging-market” countries escaped the worst consequences of the Great Recession. Their economies are generally growing much faster than ours (6.4 percent annually in 2010 and 2011, compared with a 2.9 percent rate for the United States, reckons the International Monetary Fund). This boosts their demand for the advanced equipment, instruments and basic industrial supplies (chemicals, coal) that constitute two-thirds of U.S. exports. Of Boeing’s 3,350-jet backlog, 77 percent will go to foreign customers.

Domestic spending is strengthening in emerging markets, as incomes and tastes — for cars, clothes, computers, cellphones — expand. In 2002, the consumption spending of these countries (including Brazil, China and India) was 23 percent of the world total and the U.S. share was 36 percent, estimate economists David Hensley and Joseph Lupton of J.P. Morgan Chase. By 2008, developing countries were 32 percent, the United States 28 percent. …

Radio Free New Jersey has a message for the Greek protestors.

Morons,

There is no money. There is no one else’s pocket left to pick. You can’t borrow anymore, you can’t print anymore, and you can’t steal anymore from anyone else. The people who will be paying the bill to keep you from reentering the 15th century are, unlike you, working very hard. They deserve better than you spoiled pampered children are giving them.

You object to the bond market, but the bond market is just the voice of reality calling. It’s telling you that 2 plus 2 is still 4, no matter what your union bosses would have you believe. Your bosses tell you that ‘the people’ didn’t spend the money, but it’s not true. That’s exactly who has wasted the money, and now the bill is coming due. Right now the Bond Market is actually your very best friend. It’s telling you what a horrible mistake you’ve made, and giving you a chance to undo it, before it’s too late. …

Christopher Hitchens surveys Britain’s political landscape.

…There’s a whole sector of the British professional class that probably knows Tuscany and Provence better than it knows large areas of post-industrial Britain. But this “Europeanized” layer is not large enough to swing an election, especially at a time when the stupendous size of Britain’s debt puts it at risk from the same continentwide factors that have ruined the Greek economy. This, in turn, is why some of those who rate bonds have been warning that a so-called hung Parliament, unable to arrive at swift or difficult decisions, would endanger the stability of sterling and cause a crisis of confidence in Britain’s decisive financial system. And a hung Parliament is precisely the contingency that Nick Clegg’s sudden emergence makes many times more likely. …

In Forbes, John Tamny explains why we won’t become Euro-Weenies.

…To understand why the U.S. will be fine over the long run, we have to remember that we’re a “nation of immigrants.” This is an important distinction, because as Johns Hopkins professor John D. Gartner says in his 2005 book, The Hypomanic Edge, “a ‘nation of immigrants’ represents a highly skewed and unusual ‘self selected’ population.”

We’re for the most part descended from the kind of individuals who possessed what historian John Steele Gordon referred to as the “get up and go” that drove them to leave the comforts of home in order to make their highly uncertain way in the new world that was the United States. We’re different because we’re descended from those who had the courage and drive to leave feudal, excessive taxing, warmongering governments. Simple as that.

…This American restlessness, the unrelenting drive for something better, reveals itself most notably in the entrepreneurial nature of the average American. Driven to work hard by our restless minds, Americans elevate starting a business far more than individuals in most countries do. According to a poll cited by Gartner, when asked “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?”, 91% of Americans polled said yes vs. 28% of British and 8% of Japanese respondents. …

In the Corner, Kevin Williamson wants to hear Mark Steyn’s response to John Tamny’s opinion.

…Americans love Big Government. But it’s not a blind love — it all depends on the direction the arrow is pointing on the cashflow chart. Ask George W. Bush, who got himself crucified for trying to reform Social Security. Ask anybody who has touched Medicare,  or even idly thought aloud about doing so. Ask a farmer or anybody marching in the Small Business Administration pork parade.

Steyn’s fear, which I share, is that Americans, like the British before us, will become used to  government-run health care, will consequently come to fear the uncertainties of a market-based system and — above all — will come to dread the need for be personally responsible for their own health care. Tamny’s take does not account for how a giant new entitlement can change the character of the American people. He is correct, I think, that today’s Americans are very different from today’s Europeans. But today’s Europeans are very different from their recent forebears. …

Thomas Sowell looks at resentment in the context of race and achievement.

Recent stories out of both Philadelphia and San Francisco tell of black students beating up Asian American students. This is especially painful for those who expected that the election of Barack Obama would mark the beginning of a post-racial America. …

…Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements are more deadly than envy of wealth. …

…These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype about differences that are translated into “disparities” and “inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under their more prettied-up name of “social justice.” …

… People who call differences “inequities” and achievements “privilege” leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady gives a current example of how top-down governing of markets doesn’t work. The buffoon Hugo Chávez provides the example.

The late Milton Friedman once quipped that “if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Friedman was using hyperbole to make a point about central planning. Or so I thought until Hugo Chávez put himself in charge of Venezuela’s coffee sector. Last year, for the first extended period of time in the country’s history, Venezuela did not produce enough of the little red berry to satisfy domestic demand. It has now become a coffee importer and is facing serious shortages. …

In the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti wonders why the Dems have become such thugs.

…There’s a word for this sort of overbearing, priggish intimidation: bullying. And like a lot of bullying, the Democrats’ behavior seems to stem from deep-seated insecurities. Maybe the Democrats are not as confident in government as they appear. Maybe they worry about the massive deficits and the hemorrhaging public debt. Maybe they read the same polls we do, the ones showing the public shifting right, Republicans leading the generic ballot, Republican-leaning independents returning to the GOP, congressional approval and support for incumbents at record lows, and the conservative base in a state of wild enthusiasm. Maybe the bully party, in other words, is simply acting out.

The Economist relates stories about jade auctions that will interest Antiques Roadshow types.

… Mr Axford is head of the Asia department in a small provincial English auction house called Woolley & Wallis, in the southern town of Salisbury. A year ago, he offered for auction a Qianlong-period green jade buffalo that belonged to Lady Diana Miller, daughter of the 5th Earl of Yarborough. The buffalo had lain in a bank vault since the Battle of Britain in 1940 and was still wrapped in wartime newspaper when Mr Axford saw it for the first time.

The internet has done much to change the auction business. No longer do small country auction houses have to languish in obscurity. Good photographs posted on the web now reach potential buyers all over the world.

On the day of the sale last May, Woolley’s auction room was full of bidders who had made the journey from London, and even from as far afield as Hong Kong and mainland China. Bidding for the buffalo opened at £150,000 ($230,000) and rose to £3.4m (£4.2m including commission and taxes). The buyer was Daniel Eskenazi, the son of London’s pre-eminent dealer in Chinese treasures, who was bidding on behalf of Bruno Eberli, a Swiss foreign-exchange specialist based in New York. The sale brought Mr Axford considerable publicity. The 88-year-old Lady Diana was delighted, and resolved to buy herself a racehorse. …

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John Fund warns about the coming VAT war.

Expect the coming debate over an American VAT to be especially nasty. Soaring spending and deficits have prompted Democrats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker to suggest creating a European-style Value Added Tax. President Obama himself recently declined in an interview to rule out a VAT despite his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $200,000.

The debate is already becoming bitter. …

Mort Zuckerman points out the role congress had in the financial crisis explains mortgage-backed securities.

Corn and hogs in the Midwest seem a long way from condos in Florida. There is, in fact, a direct link and it’s one worth contemplating in light of the pursuit of Goldman Sachs by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. //

Derivatives—the new bad word—used to be called “futures.” They’ve existed since the Civil War, invented basically to protect farmers, traders, and merchandisers from ruin when they could not sell a crop to cover their costs because a bumper harvest created a glut, or, conversely, to protect buyers when a bad harvest led to price inflation. Hence the creation of contracts with third parties who agreed to buy or sell at a certain price, whatever the future might bring. This stabilized the market and freed farmers from looking around for a buyer in what might be a frantic market. …

…But we also need to understand how the housing market got as hot as it did. Why did it keep rising, generating more and more derivatives geared to a rising market? It turns out that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration had financed a lot more subprime and Alt-A (alternative documentation) loans than anyone realized, mostly as a result of congressional mandates. Indeed, of their total outstanding mortgage portfolios of $10.6 trillion, roughly half turned out to be of low quality. Had this been known, it would have been clear that the American public’s capacity to assume this amount of housing debt was at great risk.

That is at the heart of the now-famous Goldman-Paulson saga. Hedge fund manager John Paulson judged that the housing market was a bubble, so he shorted the securities through Goldman Sachs and an insurer called ACA, which sold the package to a German bank. The buyers judged that it was safe to count on housing prices continuing to rise. They chose which mortgage securities would be bundled by Goldman. And they have paid a heavy price for their judgment.

The American public has hereby had a peek into the bewildering complexities of the world of finance. The natural instinct is for the public to blame the housing decline on those who shorted. But it is the other way around. They should be blaming those who let the market get pumped up, inviting a dramatic and painful correction that took most people by surprise. …

Jennifer Rubin looks for information on one possible Supreme Court nominee.

Elena Kagan is the prohibitive favorite for the Supreme Court. She has made it through one confirmation hearing for her current post as solicitor general and possesses academic credentials, a reputation for collegiality with conservatives, and a limited paper trail. Moreover, she is the closest we have to a stealth candidate among the front-runners. As Tom Goldstein notes, “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.”

Casual observers assume that a dean of Harvard Law School and a domestic-policy aide in the Clinton administration must have a sizable body of work reflecting her legal views. But not so. Paul Campos has read all there is to read — and it’s not much:

“Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn’t take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she’s published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. …”

There are lots of interesting Shorts from National Review. Here are three:

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 to work for the freedom of political prisoners. Over the years, it has expanded its activities to oppose capital punishment, torture, and detention without trial. Recently, however, AI has latched onto Moazzam Begg, a hard-core Taliban jihadist who peddles cockamamie tales of being tortured at Guantanamo. That decision was too much for one AI officer, who protested the incongruity of embracing as a human-rights defender a man who committed violent acts of terror in support of an ideology that subjugates millions of women. In return, she was suspended. AI’s secretary general, Claudio Cordone, explained that “jihad in self defence” is not “antithetical to human rights,” and that in any case, Begg is innocent until proven guilty (a principle Cordone does not apply to the U.S. military). While AI’s condemnations have often been questionable, it was always scrupulous about playing no favorites among the regimes it called oppressive. Now the organization seems to feel that some human-rights violators are more equal than others.

Andy Stern is leaving his $306,388-a-year position fighting against the nation’s fat cats on behalf of the working stiffs at the Service Employees International Union, an organization that shook enough change out of its sofa cushions to throw down $60 million to put Barack Obama in the White House. Among the candidates vying to replace Stern are Change to Win president Anna Burger ($252,724/year) and SEIU executive Mary Kay Henry ($231,348 per annum). SEIU executive and Democratic Socialists of America leader Eliseo Medina ($242,286) is strangely absent from the running. Maybe he is weary of the endless self-sacrifice that being a modern labor leader entails.

Jaime Escalante was the ultimate hero teacher. At Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, he taught calculus to poor Mexican Americans and achieved astonishing results: Scores of his students, written off by other educators, passed Advanced Placement exams. They were so successful that test administrators wrongly accused them of cheating. The Bolivian-born Escalante became the subject of Stand and Deliver, an inspirational film starring Edward James Olmos. Hollywood did not make a sequel, which is unfortunate — because what happened next is instructive. Escalante clashed with education-blob bureaucrats who resented his success. The teachers’ union cracked its whip because Escalante had violated a contract rule that restricted classes to 35 students — a rule that Escalante did not want to break, except when it meant putting his students in classrooms with teachers he considered inadequate. The frustration eventually overwhelmed him. Escalante left Garfield, and the program he had spent years to build, and moved to Sacramento, where he tried to replicate his earlier success with mixed results. He generated further controversy for his outspoken opposition to bilingual education. Dead at 79. R.I.P.

In the WSJ, Timothy Aeppel reports on the inroads being made by plastic corks.

…Cork was first adapted to close bottles of sparkling wine by a French Benedictine monk named Dom Perignon in the late 1600s. For the next four centuries, cork was considered the ultimate wine stopper: Its cellular structure makes it easy to compress into the neck of a bottle, where it expands to form a tight seal. Wine also benefits from “breathing,” which is facilitated by cork’s cell structure. An air-tight seal on a wine bottle can cause another set of problems and is one factor that limited the use of plastics and screw caps in the past. …

…Although it was long known that cork could sometimes ruin the taste of wine, the problem wasn’t well understood until the early 1980s. Then, chemists finally pinpointed the main cause of cork taint: The powerful chemical 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole or TCA. It can get into wine through contaminated cork, tainted barrels or pallets and render bottles undrinkable.

By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. “No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase—and that’s what happened to us,” says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim. …