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Bill Kristol starts us off with a transcript of Congresswoman Eleanor Norton soliciting contributions from a lobbyist. He takes an excellent macro view of the incident.

…If you set up a casino of welfare statism, crony capitalism, and big government liberalism, this is what you’re going to get.

…The point is that this is what happens when you have crony capitalism and a big government welfare state. Tea Party activists already understand this. The Norton phone call is just more evidence for their broader point about how the current system works and why it has to be reformed.

So our advice to GOP candidates is this: Go ahead and play aloud the Eleanor Holmes Norton tape. But don’t then waste time excoriating the D.C. delegate. Instead, ask your constituents whether this is the kind of government they want. Point out to them that low tax rates do not invite this kind of extortion, while earmarks and stimulus spending packages do. Turn the ethical issues of this Congress (and this administration) into fodder for a broad reform agenda of re-limiting government…

Thomas Sowell comments on the sad outcome of D.C.’s mayoral election.

Few things have captured in microcosm what has gone so painfully wrong, where racial issues are concerned, like the recent election for mayor of Washington, D.C.

Mayor Adrian Fenty, under whom the murder rate has gone down and the school children’s test scores have gone up, was resoundingly defeated for re-election.

…Either one of these achievements would made mayors local heroes in most other cities. Why then was he clobbered in the election?
One key fact tells much of the story: Mayor Fenty received more than 70 percent of the white vote in Washington. His opponent received more than 80 percent of the black vote.

Both men are black. But the head of the school system that he appointed is Asian and the chief of police is a white woman. More than that, most of the teachers who were fired were black. There were also bitter complaints that black contractors did not get as many of the contracts for doing business with the city as they expected.

In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to. …

Toby Harnden describes the Tea Party movement in the wake of a number of Republican primary wins for Tea Party candidates.

…Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members.

…A desire for small government, lower taxes and fidelity to the United States Constitution binds members together. There is a prevailing mood of anger towards Washington and a sense of having been conned. …

But beyond that, the Tea Party is a vast, teeming muddle of opinion and impulses. Many of its strong supporters don’t attend public meetings. “The Tea Party is more an attitude than anything organised,” one Southern conservative told me.

…The Republican primary system is such that ordinary people can reject the choice of the party hierarchy. This has now happened with Senate races in Florida, Alaska, Utah, Kentucky, Colorado and Nevada as well as Delaware.

For all the talk of how the Tea Party will help the Democrats by splitting the Republican vote, the first five of those states are highly likely to result in Republican/Tea Party wins, Nevada is in the balance and only Delaware looks like an uphill struggle. Increased conservative turnout and the energy generated by the Tea Party is likely to punish Democrats disproportionately. …

David Warren writes his first column on what needs to be done to get government under control.

…A correspondent in Virginia, responding to last week’s column, put this point so well, that I will quote and not paraphrase: “Patients are no longer responsible for their own good health; doctors and the ‘health care system’ are. Students are no longer responsible for their own learning: teachers and the schools are. And citizens, by extension, are no longer responsible for their own civic well being; someone else is.”

The most urgent political task, now and into the indefinite future, is to articulate such home truths, in direct defiance of the “progressive” Zeitgeist.

That, more than anything else, is what Reagan and Thatcher accomplished in their day: setting their faces against the statist breeze. Lord knows, they accomplished little at the practical level. But for a glimmering moment, they helped us remember that a nation is her people and not her government.

They knew that bureaucracy is an evil; but accepted it as a necessary evil, susceptible to reform and occasional “downsizing.” We need to take one step farther, and grasp that it is an unnecessary evil — that any human activity which requires a cumbersome bureaucracy is itself morally dubious; that anything which reduces the human being to a “unit” for bureaucratic purposes is in its nature inhuman.  …

Jennifer Rubin turns an Obama phrase on its head.

…Obama declares that the choice is between “hope and fear.” Actually, he’s right, but not in the way he intends. For many voters the hope is that electing conservatives to Congress will slow and reverse the spend-a-thon and focus the peripatetic White House on the issue they care most about — jobs. As for the fear, one suspects the public has grown weary of the host of villains the White House conjures up to deflect attention from its own dismal record.

It’s been two years since Obama articulated his own hopeful vision. Now it’s all about recriminations and finger-pointing. You wonder what his reaction will be when the Bible- and gun-huggers, the stooges of the insurance industry, and the Islamophobes stream to the polls, throw out many Democratic incumbents, and declare Obamanomics kaput. At this point, he’s certainly not acting like a president prepared to take the voters’ message to heart and revise his agenda accordingly. …

And we have more witty commentary from Jennifer Rubin, this time at Jimmy Carter’s expense. She wonders if Obama is up to being a worse ex-president than president because Carter has set a new precedent.

Jimmy Carter has been an annoyance to every one of his successors. He’s played footsie with dictators, made common cause with Israel’s enemies, made Osama bin Laden’s book list, and demonstrated the peevishness that was not yet fully in evidence during his presidency. He then pronounces that he is ”superior” to all his successors. Sensing that is a bit much for Saint Jimmy, he backpedals, explaining, “What I meant was, for 27 years the Carter Center has provided me with superior opportunities to do good.” Not much better is it? Frankly, on this one even Bill Clinton has the right to be offended.

Carter, as one of the wittiest commentators points out, now insists in his diary (on Osama bin Laden’s nightstand no doubt!) that he would have won in 1980 had it not been for those darn hostages and the pesky Ted Kennedy. …

…Carter has managed, arguably, to be a worse ex-president than president. For Obama, that will be a challenge.

Thomas Sowell looks at the concept of nuclear disarmament.

…Had there been no nuclear weapons created during World War II, that would have given an overwhelming military advantage in the postwar world to countries with large and well equipped armies. Especially after the U.S. Army withdrew from Europe, following the end of World War II, there was nothing to stop Stalin’s army from marching right across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

…Western Europe has had one of its longest periods of peace under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella. Japan, one of the biggest and most cruel conquerors of the 20th century, has become a peaceful nation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the real world, the question of whether nuclear disarmament is desirable or undesirable is utterly irrelevant because it is simply not possible, except in words— and we would truly be fools to accept such words at the risk of our lives. …

The WSJ editors comment on an economic clunker.

…economists Atif Mian of the University of California Berkeley and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago have examined “cash for clunkers,” the $2.85 billion program that subsidized consumers to buy new cars and destroy older ones. Their conclusion: The program “had no long run effect on auto purchases.” It did juice sales during its two-month run last summer, by about 360,000 cars, but then it quickly hurt sales by about the same amount, in effect stealing purchases from the future. The program was a wash in a mere seven months.

…It’s impossible to test what would have happened without cash for clunkers because there’s no control group. But Messrs. Mian and Sufi do the next best thing by looking at how clunkers were distributed around the country. Comparing high-clunker areas to low-clunker areas—and thus the areas that were more “stimulated”—allowed them to measure relative economic outcomes.

Lo, Messrs. Mian and Sufi found in their paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research that there was “no noticeable difference” in economic outcomes among the 957 metropolitan areas they studied. …

George Will shares his thoughts on Castro’s late awakening to economic reality.

Fidel Castro, 84, may have failing eyesight but he has noticed something: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” So, the secret is out. …

…By saying what he recently did about the “Cuban model” (he said it to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic), Castro seems to have become the last person outside the North Korean regime to understand how statism suffocates society. Hence the Cuban government’s plan to shed 500,000 public employees.

This follows a few other measures, such as the denationalization of beauty parlors and barber shops — if they have no more than three chairs. With four or more, they remain government enterprises. Such is “reform” under socialism in a nation that in 1959 was, in a variety of social and economic indices, one of Latin America’s five most advanced nations, but now has an average monthly wage of about $20. Many hospital patients must bring their own sheets. …

…Today, the U.S. policy of isolating Cuba by means of economic embargoes and travel restrictions serves two Castro goals: It provides an alibi for Cuba’s social conditions, and it insulates Cuba from some of the political and cultural forces that brought down communism in Eastern Europe. The 11th president, Barack Obama, who was born more than two years after Castro seized power, might want to rethink this policy, now that even Castro is having second thoughts about fundamentals.