Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Caroline Glick tells us how well our MidEast policy is working.

… The shift in the regional power balance following Mubarak’s fall has caused Fatah leaders to view their ties to the US as a strategic liability. If they wish to survive, they must cut a deal with Hamas. And to convince Hamas to cut a deal, they need to abandon the US.

And so they have. Fatah’s first significant move to part company with Washington came with its relentless bid to force a vote on a resolution condemning Israeli construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria at the UN Security Council. In an attempt to avert a vote on the resolution that the US public expected him to veto, Obama spent fifty minutes on the phone with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas begging him to set the resolution aside. Obama promised to take unprecedented steps against Israel in return for Abbas’s agreement to stand down. But Abbas rejected his appeal.

Not only did Abbas defy the wishes of the most pro-Palestinian president ever to occupy the White House, Abbas told the whole world about how he defied Obama.

Abbas’s humiliation of Obama was only the first volley in the Fatah leader’s campaign against the US. Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and their PA ministers have sent paid demonstrators into the street to protest against America. They announced a boycott of American diplomats and journalists. They have called for a boycott of American products. They have scheduled a “Day of Rage,” against America for Friday after mosque prayers. …

Jennifer Rubin reacts to Chris Christie’s appearance on Face the Nation.

… Far from overbearing, he seems like the tough football coach — he’s not going to take any guff, but he’s devoted to his guys (in this case, the ordinary citizen).

And those who think he doesn’t show restraint should think again. Is Sarah Palin ready for president? “She’s got to make that judgment herself.” Should Michelle Obama be dinged for her anti-obesity campaign? “Well, I think it’s unnecessary. I think it’s a really good goal to encourage kids to eat better. You know, I’ve — I’ve struggled with my weight for 30 years and it’s a struggle. And if a kid can avoid that in his adult years or her adult years, more power to them.” The man knows when not to throw a punch.

He, of course, insists he isn’t running for president. But here’s the deal (a Christie-ism): if he racks up another big win in the budget fights, the GOP field continues to shrink and disappoint and the economy is still in the doldrums, don’t you think Christie might just decide to take the ball and run with it? And with his reputation and name identification, he could make that decision in November. By then, the Republican electorate should be desperate for a candidate who can not only beat Obama but take Washington by storm.

NY Times Sunday Magazine has a “fair and balanced” portrait of Chris Christie. Maybe Robert Murdoch bought the Times.

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Acid monologues like this have made Christie, only a little more than a year into his governorship, one of the most intriguing political figures in America. Hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers linger on scenes from Christie’s town-hall meetings, like the one in which he takes apart a teacher for her histrionics. (“If what you want to do is put on a show and giggle every time I talk, then I have no interest in answering your question.”) Newly elected governors — not just Republicans, Christie says, but also Democrats — call to seek his counsel on how to confront their own staggering budget deficits and intractable unions. At a recent gathering of Republican governors, Christie attracted a throng of supporters and journalists as he strode through the halls of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel like Bono at Davos.

While Christie has flatly ruled out a presidential run in 2012, there is enough conjecture about the possibility that I felt moved to ask him a few weeks ago if he found it exhausting to have to constantly answer the same question. “Listen, if you’re going to say you’re exhausted by that, you’re really taking yourself too seriously,” Christie told me, then broke into his imitation of a politician who is taking himself too seriously. “ ‘Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I’m exhausted by the question!’ I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that’s really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting.”

There is, in fact, something astonishing about the ascent of Chris Christie, who is about as slick as sandpaper and who now admits that even he didn’t think he would beat Jon Corzine, the Democrat he unseated in 2009. Some critics have posited that Christie’s success in office represents merely the triumph of self-certainty over complexity, the yearning among voters for leaders who talk bluntly and with conviction. Yet it’s hard to see Christie getting so much traction if he were out there castigating, say, immigrants or Wall Street bankers. What makes Christie compelling to so many people isn’t simply plain talk or swagger, but also the fact that he has found the ideal adversary for this moment of economic vertigo. Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens,” Rudy Giuliani had his criminals and “squeegee men,” and now Chris Christie has his sprawling and powerful public-sector unions — teachers, cops and firefighters who Christie says are driving up local taxes beyond what the citizenry can afford, while also demanding the kind of lifetime security that most private-sector workers have already lost.

It may just be that Christie has stumbled onto the public-policy issue of our time, which is how to bring the exploding costs of the public workforce in line with reality. (According to a report issued last year by the Pew Center on the States, as of 2008 there was a $1 trillion gap, conservatively speaking, between what the states have promised in pensions and benefits for their retirees and what they have on hand to pay for them.) Then again, he may simply be the latest in a long line of politicians to give an uneasy public the scapegoat it demands. Depending on your vantage point, Chris Christie is a truth-teller or a demagogue, or maybe even a little of both. …

… The crux of Christie’s argument is that public-sector contracts have to reflect what has happened in the private sector, where guaranteed pensions and free health care are becoming relics. It’s not surprising that this stand has ingratiated Christie to conservatives in Washington; advocacy groups and activists on the right have carried out a long campaign to discredit the ever-shrinking labor movement in the private sector, and what Christie has done, essentially, is to blast his way into the final frontier, taking on the public-sector unions that have come to wield enormous political power. More surprising is how the governor’s proposals are finding sympathy from less-partisan budget experts, if only because they don’t see obvious alternatives. “I’ve tried to look at this objectively, and I just don’t know of any other option,” says Richard Keevey, who served as budget director for a Democratic governor, Jim Florio, and a Republican governor, Tom Kean. “You couldn’t tax your way out of this.”

Union leaders, on the other hand, are howling. The heads of the police and firefighters’ unions say that Christie’s cuts to local aid have already cost the state several hundred firemen and police officers, and they warn that his 2 percent cap on property taxes will have dire effects on public safety, as more towns and cities try to shave their payrolls to conform with the cap. “I don’t think they’re going to get it until the body bags pile up,” Anthony Wieners, president of the police union, warns darkly.

Leaders of the teachers’ union, meanwhile, are apoplectic about Christie’s proposed changes to their pension plan, which they say will penalize educators for the irresponsibility of politicians. After all, they point out, it wasn’t the unions who chose not to fund the pension year in and year out, and yet it’s their members who will have to recalibrate their retirements if the benefits are cut.

When I made this same point to Christie, he simply shook his head. What’s done is done, he told me, and it’s time for someone to tell these workers the truth, which is that the state is simply never going to have the money to make good on its commitments. “Listen, if they want to travel in the Michael J. Fox time machine and change time, I guess we could try that,” he said. “We could get the DeLorean out and try to go back there. But I think realistically that that was just a movie and make-believe. So we’ve got to live with what we’ve got.” …

… Christie, it turns out, has a preternatural gift for making the complex seem deceptively simple. Last month I saw him hold forth at a town-hall meeting in Chesilhurst, a South Jersey borough of about 1,600. Chesilhurst is about half African-American, and I sensed more curiosity than enthusiasm among the racially mixed crowd as it flowed into the little community-center gymnasium. An unusually large number of folding chairs were empty. About 20 minutes after the program was supposed to start, there came over the loudspeakers the kind of melodramatic instrumental that might introduce a local newscast, or maybe an Atlantic City magic show, and in came Christie, taking his position in the center of the crowd. The theme of the week was pension-and-benefits reform, and in his introductory remarks, Christie explained the inefficiency in the state’s health care costs not by wielding a stack of damning statistics, as some politicians might, but by relating a story.

When he was a federal prosecutor, Christie told the audience, he got to choose from about 100 health-insurance plans, ranging from cheap to quite expensive. But as soon as he became governor, the “benefits lady” told him he had only three state plans from which to choose, Goldilocks-style; one was great, one was modestly generous and one was rather miserly. And any of the three would cost him exactly 1.5 percent of his salary.

“ ‘You’re telling me,’ ” Christie said he told the woman, feigning befuddlement, “ ‘that no matter which one I pick, the good one or the O.K. one or the bad one, I’m going to pay 1½ percent of my salary?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’

“And I said, ‘Then everyone picks the really good one, right?’ And she said, ‘Ninety-six percent of state employees pick the really good one.’

“Which led me to have two reactions,” Christie told the crowd. “First, bring those other 4 percent to me! Because when I have to start laying people off, they’re the first ones!” His audience burst into near hysterics. “And the second reaction was, of course I would choose the best plan,” Christie said, “and so would you.

“Now listen, I don’t think this is groundbreaking stuff,” Christie added. “I don’t think this means that instead of being governor, you know, I should be at NASA, working on the space shuttle. I’m no genius. Just seems to me that if you give people an option to get something for nothing, they’ll take it.” Scanning the nodding faces around me, it seemed there wasn’t a person in the gymnasium, at that point, who wouldn’t have voted to make state workers and teachers pay more for the better plan. …

… There’s one more piece of political narrative that Christie seems to grasp, which is that every story has both a protagonist and an antagonist, someone who stands for change and someone who plays the foil. Christie never had to look far to cast his ideal antagonists. They sit just across the street and one block down from the State House, in the building occupied by New Jersey’s major teachers’ union.

WITH 200,000 MEMBERS and more than $100 million in dues, the New Jersey Education Association is easily the most powerful union in New Jersey and one of the more powerful local unions in the country. In Trenton, the union’s organizing might — and its willingness to use that might to intimidate candidates and lawmakers — has sunk a small shipyard of promising careers. So it’s not hard to see why the twilight struggle between Chris Christie and “the bully of State Street,” as he likes to refer to the teachers’ union, has transfixed New Jersey’s political observers for the last year. It’s as mesmerizing as an episode of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” only harder to watch, mostly because Christie can be so unrelentingly brutal. …

… What the union’s leadership seems not to have considered is that public sentiment around budgets and public employees has shifted in a fundamental way. For decades, as Keshishian and Giordano were rising up through the union, it probably made sense to adopt a strategy of “no surrender,” to dig in and outlast the occasional politician who might dare to threaten the union’s hard-earned gains. But over the last 10 years or so, most American workers have come to expect less by way of benefits and security from their employers. And with political consensus building toward some kind of public-school reform, teachers’ unions in particular have lost credibility with the public. Forty-­six percent of voters in a poll conducted by Stanford and the Associated Press last September said teachers’ unions deserved either “a great deal” or “a lot” of blame for the problems of public schools.

And so, when the union draws a hard line against changes to its pay and benefit structure, you can see why it might strike some sizable segment of voters as being a little anachronistic, like mimeographing homework assignments or sharpening a pencil by hand. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 47 percent of respondents said their states should cut pension plans for government employees, which made it the most popular option on the table. …

News Biscuit tells us about a new airline offering.

In a bold move to reduce the amount of time that passengers spend waiting for flights that never take off, Easyjet are to introduce the pre-cancelled flight. Hours of frustrating and pointless waiting will be eliminated and delays could be made a thing of the past.

‘Flights will be booked as normal with the added choice of pre-cancellation for a small fee,’ said an Easyjet spokesperson for a small fee. ‘Customers will no longer need to wait around in the airport living off overpriced takeaway food and choking on their own sense of injustice. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer likes the developments in Wisconsin.

The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity.

At the federal level, President Obama’s budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, “Hell, no.”

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades. …

David Harsanyi comments on an over the top analogy from the far-left.

According to Nobel laureate and raconteur Paul Krugman, Gov. Scott Walker and “his backers” are attempting to “make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a Third World-style oligarchy.”

Now, it’s common knowledge that throwing around loaded words like “socialism” is both uncivil and obtuse, so it’s comforting to know we can still refer to people as “Third World-style oligarchs.” And boy, that kind of Banana Republic doesn’t seem very appealing.

Democracy, naturally, can only be saved by public sector unions, which attain their political power and taxpayer-funded benefits by “negotiating” with politicians elected with the help of unions who use, well, taxpayer dollars. And you know, that doesn’t sound like an oligarchy at all.

While Walker, who won office using obnoxious Third World oligarchic tactics like “getting more votes than the other candidate,” is a cancer in the heart of democracy, union- funded Democrats evading their constitutional obligation to cast votes are only protecting the integrity of representative government by completely avoiding democracy.

John Fund profiles Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s newest progressive.

… It is deeply symbolic that this epic battle over the direction of government is taking place in the Badger State. Wisconsin was the birthplace of the modern progressive state in the early 20th century under Gov. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, who championed progressive taxation and the nation’s first worker’s-compensation system. In 1959, Gov. Gaylord Nelson made Wisconsin the first state to grant public employees collective-bargaining rights.

But in more recent years Wisconsin has also been an incubator of the conservative counterargument to the welfare state. In the 1990s, Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson helped push through welfare reform and school-choice programs that have been emulated across the country. By modernizing the relationship between state employees and the government, Mr. Walker, like Mr. Thompson before him, hopes to contain the excesses of the past—to enable the modern welfare state to live within its means.

Mr. Walker says that the employee rights that people care about are protected by civil-service rules, not collective bargaining. “We have the strongest protections in the country on grievance procedures, merit hiring, and just cause for disciplining and terminating employees,” he says. “None of that changes under my plan.” Mr. Walker notes that the single largest group affected by his proposal are the 30,000 workers at the University of Wisconsin who were only granted collective-bargaining rights in 2009. “If they only got them two years ago, how can you say they’re set in stone?” …

Victor Davis Hanson liked Krauthammer’s comparison of the president and France’s Louis XV.

President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission — and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion in red ink gave rise to the Tea Party movement and led to the largest midterm defeat of the Democratic party in the House of Representatives since 1938.

No matter. The president has proposed a new budget with an even larger $1.6 trillion deficit. That record federal borrowing prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to describe it as a Louis XV indulgence, an allusion to the wild royal spending that brought about the French Revolution. Even Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas, who once gushed that Obama stood “above the world” as some “sort of God,” called the president’s new budget a “profile in cowardice.” …

Deroy Murdock wonders when we can start drilling for oil again.

… Petroleum futures Thursday reached $103.41 per barrel before falling back below $100, their highest price since September 2008. Unleaded gasoline averages $3.24 per gallon – up 55 cents, year-on-year. Summer road trips may push prices higher.

Amid all of this, the Obama administration treats America’s domestic petroleum supply like the Smithsonian’s Hope Diamond: Something to be observed and admired, but not touched.

Like it or not, America relies heavily on oil today, for jobs, commerce, and our very existence. Alas, oil comes mainly from an area that is as stable as a prison riot. “Precarious” barely describes America’s predicament. And yet, a huge part of the solution – domestic oil and gas – lies just beneath our feet, if only President Barack Obama would let us open the basement door and light this dormant furnace.

May we drill now, please?

John Stossel tells us how to bet on the Oscars.  

Sunday night is Oscar night! Think you know who’s going to win? Want to make a bet?

The Hollywood Stock Exchange allows people to bet on which movies, actors, directors, etc. will take home Academy Awards. You can also bet on how much money a movie might make. It’s called a prediction market … except unlike other prediction markets, bettors can’t use real money.

What fun is that? It’s not only less fun, it’s also makes the prediction market less accurate. People are more careful when they have real money on the line, and the chance of losing money weeds out the frivolous guessers. Prediction markets are valuable for predicting all kinds of things because the prospect of making money attracts people with knowledge, judgment and a good sense of the future. More information is better than less. The people most confident in their information bet the most. That’s why speculation is a sound market institution.

The promoters of the Hollywood Stock Exchange would have preferred the use of real money but — surprise! — government forbids it. The Frank-Dodd financial regulation law killed the real market at the behest of some in the movie industry. …

WSJ editors tell us the foolishness of ethanol subsidies are so obvious Bill Clinton sees the light. 

America’s political addiction to ethanol has consequences, from raising the price of food to lining the pockets of companies like Archer Daniels Midland. So we’re delighted to see another prominent booster—Bill Clinton—see the fright.

“We have to become energy independent” but “we don’t want to do it at the expense of food riots,” the former President told an agriculture conference Thursday. He urged farmers to consider the needs of developing countries—the implication being that the diversion of corn to ethanol production limits food supplies and artificially raises prices. …

Scientists in North Carolina have demonstrated turtles navigate by differences in the earth’s magnetic field.

For centuries, determining longitude was an extremely difficult task for sailors, so difficult that it’s been thought improbable — if not impossible — for animals to do it.

But migratory sea turtles have now proved capable of sensing longitude, using almost imperceptible gradients in Earth’s magnetic field.

“We have known for about six years now that the magnetic map of turtles, at a minimum, allows turtles to … detect latitude magnetically,” said biologist Ken Lohmann of the University of North Carolina, who describes the turtle’s power Feb. 24 in Current Biology. “Up until now, that was where the story ended.”

Lohmann specializes in animal navigation, and work from his laboratory and others have exhaustively demonstrated how sea turtles — along with many birds, fish and crustaceans — use gradients in Earth’s magnetic field to steer. …

Politico catches Nancy Pelosi with more delusions of grandeur.

The Democratic National Committee wanted to honor Nancy Pelosi Thursday — but its praise wasn’t good enough for the House minority leader.

When the DNC’s Resolutions Committee brought up a resolution commemorating Pelosi’s years as speaker of the House, Pelosi’s daughter sought to alter the proposal at her mother’s behest, adding some of the accomplishments that the elder Pelosi felt the committee had overlooked.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Karl Rove tells us why the president is involved in Wisconsin.

… Why is the president trying to bully the Wisconsin governor? After all, Arizona, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia are among the states to explicitly prohibit collective bargaining for public employees, which is far beyond what Mr. Walker is seeking. The answer is found in four digits: 2012.

Unlike those states, Wisconsin is a 2012 battleground. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told a reporter from this newspaper last week that a union defeat in Wisconsin “can put [Mr. Obama] in some danger” of losing the next election. Labor spent $400 million to elect Mr. Obama in 2008: Mr. McEntee was sending a not-so-subtle message that unions would be unable to spend so generously on his behalf in 2012 if they continue hemorrhaging members and dues money. ..

Roger Simon says liberals have become reactionaries.

Jonah Goldberg has famously linked liberals with fascism, but in these times I think they are more like reactionaries, desperately clinging to past views when they are no longer functional or even relevant, if they ever were.

I admit I have been using the term “reactionary” for a while when referring to contemporary liberals. This has been quite intentional, something of a deliberate hoisting by their own petard. In my old days on the left, we would brand everyone we didn’t like as a reactionary, mired in the then supposedly-evil capitalist system. And I would like to use the events in Wisconsin to explain why I do it to them now. (Yes, it is partly to get their goat, but it is also to make a point.)

Let’s review what happened: In November, Wisconsin voters delivered a serious and obvious message. Their state (and our country) was going broke. It could no longer afford the massive entitlement programs that had been enacted and in place for some time. Demographics had made them untenable. Something had to be done to avoid bankruptcy and a calamitous economic situation, both for the state and the country. And it had to be done soon. (This was indeed a worldwide phenomenon, as most of us know.) ….

Noemie Emery says there is a war between chief executives of the states and the country.

Picture a hand on the wheel of the great ship of state, pushing it hard in a certain direction, say, to the left. It belongs to the president. Picture 29 smaller ones on the other side of the wheel, trying as hard as they can to wrench it back in the other direction. They belong to Govs. Chris Christie, R-N.J., Mitch Daniels, R-Ind., Scott Walker, R-Wis., and 26 other Republican governors, 12 of them elected in the 2009 and 2010 cycles.

Two years and four months ago, President Obama was elected to enact his agenda; and four months ago, the Republicans were put in to dismantle it.

In the interim, the public had a big change of mind, which created the impasse. Each side has a mandate, and is hell-bent upon it, creating a situation unique in our history.

For the first time since the Civil War ended, the federal government and a large number of the states and their governors are at open and few-holds-barred war. …

Josh Kraushaar in The National Journal says the president is playing a prevent defense.

President Obama has chosen to play the political equivalent of the prevent defense as his reelection campaign approaches by deferring tough decisions on entitlements. 

His budget made no attempt to change the Medicare and Social Security programs, and barely made a dent in spending cuts.

His agreement to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts in last year’s lame-duck session has been followed by an embrace of the protesters in Wisconsin, both of which are off key in an economic situation that demands sacrifice from all.

Obama said in his State of the Union address that he wants to “win the future,” but his policies remain stuck in a 20th-century mindset defending a strained government entitlement system and public-sector unions.

His own message was clear: Wait for Republicans to take the initiative, at their own political peril. And that they did. The contrast between the White House and GOP messages couldn’t have been more at odds with each other last week—one that is poised to set the tone for the 2012 presidential election.  

A trio of Republican governors has set the stage.

John Podhoretz thinks the 2012 GOP candidate will come from the action in the states. 

For months now, Republicans have turned to each other and said, “Who’s the candidate?”

President Obama is vulnerable in 2012, clearly, but you can’t beat something with nothing, and right now, the GOP field looks pretty much like . . . nothing.

Who’ll have the stature to compete? Thanks to those Democratic lawmakers fleeing Wisconsin and Indiana to frustrate the democratic process they swore an oath to uphold, we may have an answer.

They, and the demonstrators screaming about the governors seeking cuts in the absurdly generous benefits granted to public-sector workers, have created a national stage on which a new and dynamic candidate can emerge.

The governors (and perhaps the House members) who are taking on these battles are fighting the fight of the GOP future, and one of them now seems certain to take the mantle of 2012. …

Steve Malanga exposes many of the lobbying efforts of government unions. 

Government workers have taken to the streets in Madison, Wis., to battle a series of reforms proposed by Gov. Scott Walker that include allowing workers to opt out of paying dues to unions. Everywhere that this “opt out” idea has been proposed, unions have battled it vigorously because the money they collect from dues is at the heart of their power.

Unions use that money not only to run their daily operations but to wage political campaigns in state capitals and city halls. Indeed, public-sector unions especially have become the nation’s most aggressive advocates for higher taxes and spending. They sponsor tax-raising ballot initiatives and pay for advertising and lobbying campaigns to pressure politicians into voting for them. And they mount multimillion dollar campaigns to defeat efforts by governors and taxpayer groups to roll back taxes. …

Richard Cohen thinks enough is enough with government pensions.

In New York City, the No. 2 guy in the fire department retired on a pension worth $242,000 a year. In New York State, a single official holding two jobs and one pension took in $641,000. A lieutenant with the Port Authority police retired with an annual pension of $196,767, and 738 of the city’s teachers, principals and such have pensions worth more than $100,000 a year. Their former employer, it goes almost without saying, is steamed. Their former employer is me.

These examples of pension obesity were culled from the local newspapers, which never fail to shock with revelations of how good life is for those who once worked for the city, the state or any one of several public agencies. In some cases, retirement came a mere 20 or so years after first reporting to HR and, if you were lucky enough to fake a disability – oh, my aching back! – the sky is virtually the limit. Fully one-third of all New York City cops who retired during a recent 17-month period did so on disability. They have dangerous jobs, we all know – but not nearly as dangerous as Long Island Rail Road workers. Almost all of them retired on disability. All aboard!

I pause now to assert my bona fides. I got my first union card while still in college and remained a member of the Newspaper Guild throughout my career, paying dues even when I no longer had to. I can whistle union ditties, and I swell with pride at the ancient picture of my grandfather, posed with his good friend, the union organizer. I know, too, what happens when unions are weak or nonexistent. Capitalism is cruel. Do not look for charity.

But, really, enough is enough. …

Streetwise Professor says Krugman’s defense of public sector unions proves their danger.

… Krugman sets out a Galbraithian vision in which the influence of countervailing powers, organized labor and organized capital, are offsetting, and an activist government wisely directs the polity and the economy.  As if.  In practice, what occurs instead is corporatism of a sort described by Mancur Olson, in which concentrated and organized interests exploit the power of the state to extract rents from diffuse consumers, investors, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.

Thus, Krugman’s unwitting endorsement of the public choice perspective torpedoes his own defense of public sector unions.  Because they are just organized groups that exploit the power of the state for their own benefit and impose costs on those lacking such privileged influence.  Once it is admitted that that’s the way the game is played–and Krugman jumps into that puddle with both feet–the immediate conclusion is that it is imperative to constrain the power of such bodies, and the power of the state that they exploit for their gain and to our detriment.

Nile Gardiner agrees, saying that liberals are stuck in a twilight zone. 

Remember those episodes of the brilliant but now dated 1960s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone where the lead character invariably gets stuck in a parallel universe, but is blissfully unaware until the final denouement? Well 2011 America looks much the same as far as the country’s liberal elites are concerned, trapped in a make-believe world where the towering national debt doesn’t really matter, where militant trade unions holding an entire state hostage is somehow normal and “democratic”, and where the real problem is not the spectre of Big Government but those cost-cutting conservatives committed to bringing it down to size.

Two op-eds published in the bastions of the liberal establishment this President’s Day weekend encapsulate the Twilight Zone mentality which dominates America’s left in the second decade of the 21st Century. The first is by Paul Krugman, who holds forth in The New York Times with what can only be described as a ludicrous rant against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who, heaven forbid, is actually trying to reduce spending by cutting the entitlements of the bloated public sector. According to Krugman, Walker is hell-bent on turning America into a “third world oligarchy” under the pretense of fiscal retrenchment: …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes on the Muslim Brotherhood.

‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What’s extraordinary about this maxim is the succinct way that it captures the political dimension of Islam. Even more extraordinary is the capacity of these five pillars of faith to attract true believers. But the most remarkable thing of all is the way the Brotherhood’s motto seduces Western liberals. …

Jeff Jacoby says the assault on Lara Logan was not a one-off.

PERHAPS THE most shocking thing about the despicable sexual attack on CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo’s Tahrir Square is that to those who know Egypt, it wasn’t shocking at all.

“Why is sexual harassment in Egypt so rampant?’’ asked the headline of a story written by CNN’s Mary Rogers in November. A veteran producer and camerawoman who has lived in the country since 1994, Rogers reported that the experience of being publicly molested unites women across Egypt’s social spectrum.

“Young, old, foreign, Egyptian, poor, middle class, or wealthy, it doesn’t matter,’’ she wrote. “Dressed in hijab, niqab, or Western wear, it doesn’t matter. If you are a woman living in Cairo, chances are you have been sexually harassed. It happens on the streets, on crowded buses, in the workplace, in schools, and even in a doctor’s office.’’ Rogers discovered the ugly reality soon after her arrival in the country, when, as she was walking home from work, a stranger “reached out, and casually grabbed my breast.’’ After repeatedly enduring such obnoxious harassment, Rogers stopped walking to and from her office.

In a swath of the globe notorious for mistreating women, Egypt is particularly infamous. According to a survey conducted in 2008 by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, 83 percent of native Egyptian women and 98 percent of women visiting from abroad have experienced some form of public sexual harassment. More than half the Egyptian women reported being molested every day. And contrary to popular belief, most of the victims were wearing modest Islamic dress. …

Robert Samuelson wants to know when the AARP will stop running the government.

The great question haunting Washington’s budget debate is whether our elected politicians will take back government from AARP, the 40 million-member organization that represents retirees and near-retirees. For all the partisan bluster surrounding last week’s release of President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget, it reflects a long-standing bipartisan consensus not to threaten seniors. Programs for the elderly, mainly Social Security and Medicare, are left untouched. With an aging population, putting so much spending off-limits inevitably means raising taxes, shrinking defense and squeezing other domestic spending – everything from the FBI to college aid.

Power is the ability to get what you want. It suggests that you control events. By these standards, AARP runs government budgetary policy, not presidents or congressional leaders. Obama says we must “win the future,” but his budget (and, so far, the Republicans’, too) would win the past and lose the future. The massive federal debt would continue to grow because, without restraining retiree spending, there’s no path to a balanced budget. The aging infrastructure (roads, airports) wouldn’t get needed repairs. The already-stressed social safety net for the poor would be further strained. We would cut defense while China’s military expands. All this is insane. It’s not the agenda of a country interested in its future. …

Thomas Sowell beats up high speed rail.

Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of “high-speed rail.” The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think.

High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher than in the United States. But, without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the high cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system. …

Michael Barone likes Daniels and Christie.

… Christie was less elegant and even more blunt than his Hoosier colleague. Drawing on his struggles with New Jersey’s public employee unions over pensions and benefits, he turned to national issues.

“My children’s future and your children’s future are more important than political strategy,” he began.” You’re going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security. Whoa, I just said it, and I’m still standing here. I did not vaporize.

“We have to reform Medicare because it costs too much and it is going to bankrupt us. Once again lightning did not come through the windows and strike me dead. And we have to fix Medicaid because it’s not only bankrupting the federal government, it’s bankrupting every state government.”

Obama, he said, was offering “the candy of American politics” — high-speed rail, plug-in cars — and congressional Republicans so far haven’t offered much more. If those he campaigned for don’t, he said, “the next time they’ll see me in their district is with my arm around their primary opponent.” …

George Will says Wisconsin’s Scott Walker gives a lesson in leadership to the kid president.

Hitherto, when this university town and seat of state government applauded itself as “the Athens of the Midwest,” the sobriquet suggested kinship with the cultural glories of ancient Greece. Now, however, Madison resembles contemporary Athens.

This capital has been convulsed by government employees sowing disorder in order to repeal an election. A minority of the minority of Wisconsin residents who work for government (300,000 of them) are resisting changes to benefits that most of Wisconsin’s 5.6 million residents resent financing.

Serene at the center of this storm sits Republican Scott Walker, 43, in the governor’s mansion library, beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Walker has seen this movie before. …

Tony Blankley thinks polls will show the Dems are on the wrong side of history with their Wisconsin posturing.

… While we do not have reliable polling on the Wisconsin controversy, it was a telltale sign over the weekend when the head of the teachers union urged the teachers to go back to work. Public unions are in a justifiably low standing with the public.

And after three years of private-sector firings, plus 9 percent unemployment, salary cuts, home-mortgage crises and 401(k) shrinkage – the 91 percent of the American work force employed in that private sector (53 percent in small businesses with even lower benefits) is entitled to feel little sympathy for Wisconsin schoolteachers receiving an average of $89,000 in salary and benefits and contributing zero to their pension plan and only 5 percent to their medical insurance while the average private-sector employee contributes 29 percent.

The president’s strong support for the public-worker union lines up – at least for the time being – both a state and federal policy debate that may well yield needed deficit-education legislation and dangerous political waters for the Democratic Party. The Democrats seem to be prepared to defend the idea of not dealing with the deficit crisis. Have the party strategists, including those in the White House, really thought through the electoral implications of that decision?

Of course, huge, good news for America on an unrelated topic may break out somewhere – although probably not in the Middle East, Mexico, Europe or Asia – and I hope it does. But if deficits and debt continue to be the defining issues of American politics for the next 18 months – and if the Democrats from the White House to the statehouses stay in their current head-in-the-sand posture – they may be approaching a nasty electoral meltdown of their party in November 2012.

Jennifer Rubin wonders why the left misbehaves.

Charles Lane observed over the weekend that in Madison, Wis., “anger and vilification are once again the order of the day — and the incivility emanates from the progressive end of the spectrum, including, no doubt, many of the same people who blamed right-wing vitriol for creating a climate of violence in Arizona.” The tactics of those on the left — threatening officials in their homes, forcing a shutdown of the state legislature and providing phony doctor’s notes to defraud the state (allowing protesting teachers to collect sick pay) — confirm the inherent anti-democratic nature of the protest, and indeed, of public-employee unions. …

Liberal Wisconsin cartoonist sides with the governor. Of course we have samples of his work. Disrupt the Narrative.com has the story.

Cartoonist Phil Hands of the Wisconsin State Journal newspaper has this to say…

“This debate over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill has been difficult for me. I have progressive values. I believe in gay marriage, I believe in mass transit, I believe in global climate change, I believe in abortion rights, I believe in urban planning and I believe in a single payer health care system. But on the issue of public employee compensation and the role that their unions play in our government, I find myself siding with conservatives.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

You are not going to believe what an ABC reporter said about Obama and Wisconsin. The president has really hurt himself.

… In a powerhouse roundtable with George F. Will, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, ABC Senior Political Correspondent Jon Karl and freshman Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour asked about the implications of the president injecting himself into a state dispute.

“The president was quicker and more forceful of his denouncement of Gov. Scott Walker than he was of denouncing Hosni Mubarak,” Karl said. “Madison, Wisconsin — the state of Wisconsin — this is arguably ground zero for the 2012 presidential campaign. Look, this is a state if President Obama loses, he’s almost certainly going to not win re-election.”

Karl pointed out that the state had swung significantly Republican in 2010.

“Democrats see the momentum and see real danger signs for next year,” he said. …

Clive Crook of Financial Times takes the prez to task.

… Nothing obliged Obama to take this position. He could have recused himself, as he has on, say, budget policy. And it is one thing to offer comment in support of the unions, quite another to get his staff working in “close co-ordination” with the protesters. A shame he cannot be as forthright about long-term fiscal discipline as he is about the rights of public-sector unions.

Toby Harnden says the president doesn’t get it.

Something momentous is happening in the United States right now and Barack Obama doesn’t get it. In Madison, Wisconsin last week, up to 40,000 public employees, organised by their unions, the Democratic party and the grassroots Organizing for America group that elected the president in 2008, gathered at the state capitol. Teachers left their classrooms, forcing schools to close.

Their objective? To rail against an attempt to balance the budget and curtail union power by newly-elected Governor Scott Walker, a Republican. The Democratic party’s response? Its state senators have fled Wisconsin to Illinois, dodging state troopers as they went, in order to prevent the budget being voted on. Obama branded Walker’s actions as an “assault on unions”.

It was Obama who crowed just after he entered the White House that “elections have consequences”. In Wisconsin last November, the consequences included the governorship, a Senate seat and the state senate and assembly all being lost by the Democrats. …

Jonathan Tobin catches the Times with its normal bias.

In 2009 and 2010 the New York Times covered protests against the Obama administration’s stimulus spending bill and health care plan as the barely legal revolt of an unwashed and uncivil band of reactionaries determined not only to halt what the paper considered progress but also to thwart democracy. But anyone looking at the Times’ front page article on Saturday describing protests against the effort by Wisconsin’s newly elected governor and legislature to balance the state’s books got a very different view of a protest movement.

According to the Times, the activities of the Wisconsin public sector unions — whose expensive benefits have put their state on the brink of bankruptcy — are nothing less than the moral equivalent of the demonstrations in Tunisia that brought down an authoritarian dictatorship. As the headline “Wisconsin Leads the Way as Workers Fight Cuts” indicates, the whole focus of the piece is an effort to portray the unions and their Democratic allies as revolutionaries who are on the cutting edge of a movement that will, in effect, reverse the verdict of last year’s election.

There are two points to be made about this coverage. …

Michael Barone has kudos for Gov. Scott of Florida for cancelling a high speed rail project.

Good news from Tallahassee: Florida Governor Rick Scott has rejected the proposed high-speed rail line from Orlando to Tampa and the $2.4 billion that goes with it. “The truth is that this project would be far too costly to taxpayers and I believe the risks far outweigh the benefits,” Scott said. As Scott seems to understand, projections of cost and riderships on high-speed rail lines have turned out to be grossly optimistic. If Florida opted to go ahead, it faced two dangers: that it would decide to cancel, and have to repay the federal government for funds paid out, or that it would choose to operate the rail line at a loss, subsidizing the rail line year after year. Scott decided to call a halt, even if it means losing the federal funds currently committed—the same decision Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio made. …

Columbia law prof Phillip Hamburger has more to say about the problems with health-care waivers.

Although health-care waivers are unconstitutional, can they nonetheless be justified? The Department of Health and Human Services has granted almost a thousand waivers from part of the health-care law, and (as explained last week in these pages) the waivers are an unconstitutional exercise of the dispensing power. But what if the waivers are used for good purposes? What if Congress delegated the power to issue the waivers? And what if the waiver process were transparent? Might not these considerations lend legitimacy to the waivers?

Undoubtedly, waivers or dispensations can be used for good purposes — primarily, for relief from bad laws. Yet the need for relief from a burdensome law does not mean that all forms of relief are desirable. The question therefore is not merely whether a waived law is regrettable, but whether waivers are an appropriate remedy. For hundreds of years, it has been clear that waivers or dispensations were dangerous, and this has not changed.

An initial concern is favoritism. One may assume that when the executive waives compliance with a law, it will grant waivers only to the most deserving applicants. Inevitably, however, it will find deserving applicants among those who have close contact with the administration, including many who are politically aligned with it. …

AOL News asks what is government good for.

Pop quiz. What’s the biggest single job the federal government undertakes?

National defense? Nope.

Homeland security? Wrong.

Transportation? Not even close.

Law enforcement? No way.

Education? Getting colder.

Foreign aid? Are you kidding?

Nope, the biggest single thing the federal government does these days is … cut checks. …

Clive Crook notes who is trying to deal with the fiscal crisis of our governments.

… Republican governors such as Chris Christie in New Jersey, Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Scott Walker in Wisconsin face the same immediate fiscal challenge as Democratic governors such as Jerry Brown in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York – and their responses are perforce much the same. They are squeezing services severely and confronting the public sector unions that have forced pay, benefits and other terms of service out of line with private sector equivalents.

These efforts are meeting resistance, to put it mildly. Public sector workers in Wisconsin began huge protests at the end of last week, drawing national attention. What is interesting, though, is that the governors have come to a cross-party consensus about the measures that are necessary, and up to a point see each other as allies. That helps them do their job. Also, the ones who have been most forthright in explaining the fiscal facts of life to their constituents – especially the splendidly in-your-face Mr Christie – are winning respect for it beyond their states.

A troubling thought for Mr Obama, maybe, but for the moment the farce in Washington serves his purposes. Let the House GOP get on with it, the president’s advisers are telling him: keep the spotlight on them, and watch swing voters flock back. If we are really lucky, thinks the White House, the new continuing resolution will fail (remember it must pass House and Senate, still controlled by Democrats, in the same form). The government will have to shut down, as it did in 1995, financial markets will go crazy and it will be the Republicans’ fault.

Avoiding a fiscal meltdown would be good for 2012 purposes. Having one that could be blamed on Republicans would be perfect. What a way to run a country.

Daily Beast does a puff piece on Jim Webb, one of the two Obama stooges in the senate from Virginia. Says here he warned the president the healthcare bill was too much. So where was his acclaimed independent streak when he voted for the bill? The Virginia voters have been denied the chance to throw the bum out. We will save that for Mark Warner in 2014.

The end of Jim Webb’s senatorial career, with his announcement that he would not seek re-election in 2012, was far less surprising than the fact that Webb even had a senatorial career to end. He’d arrived in the Senate seeming ready to leave, having declared, in a 2006 debate with his Republican foe, George Allen, “When I go to my grave, whether I was a United States Senator or not is not gonna be high on my agenda.”

And that was when he was trying to convince Virginia voters to put him into the Senate. That 2006 Webb campaign had the feel of a forced march, a mood that very much reflected the candidate himself. His public appearances had all the spontaneous joy of a line inspection at Camp Lejeune. Webb spoke with a flat, matter-of-fact voice, always in earnest tones. He possessed none of the innate muscle memory of a natural pol—the ready banter, the easy saunter, the reflexive hand-to-shoulder intimacy. His campaign smile usually seemed the product of considerable exertion. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor sees the bright side of Wisconsin.

… I am actually quite encouraged by the protests in Wisconsin.  The protesters are so clueless.  They fail to understand how their antics are just going to turn even more people against them, and intensify the opposition of those who are already unfavorably disposed.  The more they whine about the benefits they are losing, and the “rights” that they are giving up, the more the hoi polloi who are footing the bill will recognize how generous those benefits and rights are.  The suckers who pay will say: “I don’t get that good a deal.  I am looking at a more straitened future.  Why should these people get a better deal than I do?  Especially since the performance doesn’t match the pay?  I was a sucker before, but no more.”

In short, temper tantrums and hissy fits by the privileged only stoke anger against them.  So go for it, boys and girls!

Obama, of course, couldn’t resist butting in.  His operatives and union allies are coordinating and funding protests.  He has come out and criticized Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for attacking unions.

This is all understandable, I guess.  Buffeted by one failure after another, Obama sees an opportunity to rabble rouse–sorry, I meant to write “community organize”–and says: “Hey, THIS is something I can do!”

But again, this is good news.  For being associated with the Insane Clown Posse will only damage Obama further. …

David Harsanyi thinks Wisconsin events are important.

… Certainly, how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fares in this battle will be an important signal to the rest of the nation. Places like Colorado only recently allowed state workers to organize. Other states are facing pension nightmares. Who knows? States might begin privatizing and allowing competitive outsourcing of jobs. States must, because nationally, we’re headed in the other direction.

“Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where they’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,” explained President Barack Obama, who, unlike governors, can (and does) borrow trillions. The numbers, though, tell us that public-sector unions are the ones assaulting taxpayers and brittle state economies. And the more we grow the state monopoly, the worse it will get.

David Warren explains the value of what he calls “formalized adversarial order.”

… It is just possible, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, to confront problems that would overwhelm a country, because organized oppositions exist.

Republicans are waiting when Democrats fail, and vice versa. It is because of the long history, not so much of “democracy” per se, but of a formalized adversarial order, that such a chance exists.

There are at most two countries in the Middle East of which this could be said: Israel, and maybe Turkey. In societies ruled by autocrats since time out of mind, no organized opposition waits to pick up the pieces. In each case, the autocrat who falls can only be replaced by another autocrat -unless by something like the Taliban.

Nasty as things will get in states like Wisconsin, the majority can rule. And if that majority can be persuaded to see sense, solutions are possible.

A similar thought and a note of optimism from Yuval Levin in The Corner at National Review.

… Too often, there is not much of a difference between the parties, and people inclined to care about policy are driven to call a pox on both their houses. But as this remarkable week has shown, this is not one of those times. The Democrats are shaming themselves on the premise that American voters can’t handle the truth and that there is political advantage in appealing to the country’s worst instincts. Republicans, whether by choice or by default, are taking up the challenge of telling voters the truth about our problems and persuading them that effective, responsible, and gradual solutions are possible — without taking benefits from current seniors and without abandoning our obligation to fellow citizens in need. There have not been many opportunities for conservatives to be proud of being Republicans in recent years, but this week has certainly been one.

Republicans and Democrats are both at fault for the mess we are in, and for ignoring and denying it for far too long. But so far only one party seems interested in changing that. Voters will notice. And then we will find out who is right about American voters: the party that thinks they are selfish children or the party that thinks they are responsible adults. I have a feeling Republicans will not regret their judgment that the time has come to get serious.

The foolish president’s budget is still here. Charles Krauthammer compares and contrasts Louis XV and Obama. 

… Yet for all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade’s end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.

A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans – for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault – and sets Obama up perfectly for reelection in 2012.

Obama fancies his happy talk, debt-denial optimism to be Reaganesque. It’s more Louis XV. Reagan begat a quarter-century of prosperity; Louis, the deluge.

Moreover, unlike Obama, Louis had the decency to admit he was forfeiting the future. He never pretended to be winning it.

Want to know how well the juxtaposition of Dem waste and GOP frugality is looking? Here’s Eleanor Clift, a liberal’s liberal, writing on our hero Chris Christie in The Daily Beast.

… Christie sees a new zeitgeist of frugality. Soon after taking office in January 2010, he was told the state could not meet its payroll if he didn’t act immediately to close a deficit. He impounded money without the permission of the legislature. And when the Democratic legislature threatened a government shutdown, he vowed he would not do as his predecessor, Jon Corzine, had done, and sleep on a cot in his office until the crisis was resolved. “Look at me,” he exclaimed, drawing attention to his considerable girth, “I’m not sleeping on a cot.” He told the lawmakers that if they engaged in such mischief, he’d get a beer, order a pizza, and watch the Mets.

He likes to tell stories about himself taking on the teachers’ unions and the firefighters and the police officers. When he talked to a firefighters’ meeting in Wildwood one weekend, they booed him “lustily,” he said, and when he got to the podium, he said, “C’mon, you can do better than that—and they did.”

Christie’s tough-guy approach is working, making him a national figure after just 13 months in office. “He commands the bully pulpit more effectively than any other governor we have seen in modern history,” says Dworkin, who predicts Christie will deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention in 2012.

The action is in the state capitols says Peggy Noonan.

There were two big speeches this week, and I mean big as in “Modern political history will remember this.” Together they signal something significant and promising. Oh, that’s a stuffy way to put it. I mean: The governors are rising and are starting to lead. What a relief. It’s like seeing the posse come over the hill.

The first speech was from Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor who is the answer to the question, “What if Calvin Coolidge talked?” President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she’d made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, “You lose.” But he was principled, effective and, in time, broadly popular.

The other speech was from a governor newer to the scene but more celebrated, in small part because he comes from a particular media market and in large part because he has spent the past year, his first in office, taking on his state’s most entrenched political establishments, and winning. His style—big, rumpled, garrulous, Jersey-blunt—has captured the imagination of the political class, and also normal people. They look at him and think, “I know that guy. I like that guy.”

Both Mr. Daniels, who spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, were critical of both parties and put forward the same message: Wake up. We are in crisis. We must save our country, and we can. But if we don’t move now, we will lose it. This isn’t rhetoric, it’s real.

Here’s why response at both venues was near-rapturous: Everyone knew they meant it. Everyone knew they’d been living it. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Harsanyi thinks we’re overdoing the obeisance to democracy.

… Don’t get me wrong, democracy is clearly a vast improvement over an autocracy. (Though, now that you bring it up, how many of you would choose to reside in one of those despotic Persian Gulf states with stipends, film festivals and casinos rather than a democratic Haiti?)

But democracy without a moral foundation, economic freedom, and a respect for individual and human rights has the potential not to be any kind of freedom at all. It takes more than democracy to be free.

We wish the Muslim world the best in shedding its dictatorships and theocracies and finding true liberty. But let’s not confuse two distinct ideas.

At the very least, not on television, a place where Americans can typically rely on pinpoint accuracy and untainted reporting. Not there.

David Warren notes the power and weakness of the net.

… We have read much about those twittering “social media,” which the younger generation of Islamists have mastered, along with everyone else. The demonstrations were certainly organized through them. They became possible because social media gave people the sense of strength in numbers — well before they actually had the numbers on the street. And al Jazeera leaped in quickly to spread the word and excitement from there. The Internet, in combination with partisan and sensationalized mass media, have rewritten many of the rules.

The mob is now electronically summoned and enhanced, but, to return to where I started, this does not make it any easier to argue with, nor contribute to the possibilities for mature and intelligent deliberation over the path ahead. It instead creates a new and much broader field for anarchy. From anarchy to totalitarianism is one Persian step. …

The next “David” up today is Goldman (AKA – Spengler). He continues the internet thought and proposes a solution too.

Once America had allies. Now it has Facebook friends.

Google News turns up more than 5,000 news reports including the search terms “Facebook“, “Egypt” and “revolution”. The same soap-bubble of global youth culture that gave us the Internet stock bubble in the 1990s has returned, this time as the solution to the problems of the Arab world. With the last bubble, people got poor. This time people will get killed.

As a reality check: the search terms “Egypt”, “revolution” and “genital mutilation” turn up just seven stories in Google News (including a previous essay by this writer). Many Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation, while fewer than 10% of Egyptians use Facebook. Before long we will see whether the “tech-savvy” revolutionaries (172 stories with the qualifier on Google news) are just benzine bubbles floating atop the viscous Nile mud.

Egypt churns out 700,000 university graduates a year qualified to stamp each other’s papers and not much else, and employs perhaps 200,000 of them, mostly in government bureaucracy.

As Egypt’s new Finance Minister Samir Radwan said of the young people who put him in power (to the Financial Times on February 13), “I’m generalizing, but a large number of the Egyptian labor force is unemployable. The products of the education system are unemployable.”  …

… The Facebook friends of Tahrir Square will do nothing more than furrow the mud of Egypt’s traditional society. But they must be good for something. Here’s one idea: have the army draft them all, and send them to the villages to reach reading. The late Shah of Iran created a “Literacy Corps” that allowed any draftee with a high school diploma to perform military service in rural villages as teachers. In one generation, Iran raised its literacy rate to nearly 90%. If the university graduates are unemployable, at least they can do the same. That would really make a difference.

Today’s Pickings started out to be a reasonable length. But, the unions, and then our foolish president kept raising the stakes in Wisconsin. So we have a section devoted to events there. John Fund kicks it off in the WSJ. 

This week President Obama was roundly criticized, even by many of his allies, for submitting a federal budget that actually increases our already crushing deficit. But that didn’t stop him Thursday from jumping into Wisconsin’s titanic budget battle. He accused the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, of launching an “assault” on unions with his emergency legislation aimed at cutting the state budget.

The real assault this week was led by Organizing for America, the successor to President’s Obama’s 2008 campaign organization. It helped fill buses of protesters who flooded the state capital of Madison and ran 15 phone banks urging people to call state legislators.

Mr. Walker’s proposals are hardly revolutionary. Facing a $137 million budget deficit, he has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. That’s roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules—something that 24 states already limit or ban. …

Peter Wehner is the first of three from Contentions.

Here are a couple of predictions related to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s relatively modest requests of government unions (asking many of the state’s public employees to start contributing to their own pension and health-care benefits and limiting their collective bargaining rights to negotiations over pay rather than benefits) and the massive, angry protests they have elicited.

First, Governor Walker — if he holds shape and doesn’t back down (and I rather doubt he will back down) — will eventually benefit from this collision. Government unions, on the other hand, will suffer badly. The hysterical reaction to Walker’s reforms — comparing the governor of Wisconsin to (take your pick) Mubarak, Mussolini, or Hitler — is going to go down very poorly with the citizens of Wisconsin. Many of the public-employee protesters come across as pampered, childish, selfish, and overwrought. …

Alana Goodman and Jonathan Tobin note the lack of “civility” coming from the left.

As Alana has noted, one of the interesting sidelights of the confrontation in Wisconsin is the way that, once again, liberal hypocrisy on hate speech has been exposed. The dispute between Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislative majority intent on passing legislation that would limit collective bargaining by state-employee unions and force their members to pay for some of their health-care and pension costs and the Democrats and unions who oppose these measures illustrates the double standard by which our chattering classes view politics in this country.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, during the heated debate about President Obama’s health-care legislation, Americans were repeatedly told by the leaders of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and even supposedly nonpartisan groups like the Anti-Defamation League that there was something profoundly and uniquely troubling about the angry language and behavior of those who opposed ObamaCare and the stimulus spending bill. Conservative Tea Party activists were continuously slammed as a threat to democracy because of the way they spoke about Obama or characterized the Democratic majority in Congress. The fact that the political left had spent the previous eight years demonizing President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the Republicans was ignored. The hue and cry over the need for more civility in politics was treated as an indication that there was something peculiarly unwholesome or even racist in the revulsion felt by a great many Americans toward the president’s policies. In November 2010, the idea that such sentiments were the preserve of a crackpot minority was exposed as a myth when the voters handed Obama a record midterm election defeat and sent scores of Tea Partiers to Washington. …

Jennifer Rubin closes this section.

E.J. Dionne decries Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s “overreach,” declaring the governor is “drumming up a crisis to change the very nature of the relationship between public workers and the government.”

Let’s talk about overreach. Here’s how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board put it:

“Democrats in the state Senate threw a temper tantrum Thursday – essentially they took their ball and went home.

Actually, they didn’t go home. They apparently went to Illinois, just out of reach of their obligations.

By boycotting an expected vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, they were able to prevent action on the measure. Twenty senators are required for a quorum; the Republicans have only 19. . . .

One leading Democrat – Obama was his name, as we recall – put it well after winning the White House in 2008: “Elections have consequences,” he told Republicans at the time. Indeed they do. The Democrats’ childish prank mocks the democratic process.”

Overreach would be choosing extra-legislative means (flight) to prevent the voters’ elected representatives from working their will. Overreach would be threatening Republican officials in their homes. Overreach would be a flurry of Hitlerian imagery (good for the National Jewish Democratic Council in denouncing the widespread signage, but where is the George Soros-backed Jewish Funds for Justice and the anti-Glenn Beck crowd when you need them?) Overreach would be a massive sick-out, in essence a dishonest strike. …

Before we get to the budget, W. W. in the Democracy in America Blog has a neat post demonstrating the dull formulaic groupthink of the American liberal.

… Mr Herbert wanted to say that American democracy is broken because it’s been hijacked by the rich. This is one of approximately five columns liberal pundits phone in when they are uninspired or feeling lazy. …

Turning to the budget, Tony Blankley says rather than saying “draconian cuts” how about saying “draconian deficits.”

… The thing to be condemned should be draconian deficits, not draconian deficit cuts.

From the early reports of the White House‘s proposed 2012 budget, they will be more subject to the former than the latter charge.

According to The Washington Post, quoting the administration (don’t take my word for it): “The White House proposal, outlined Friday by a senior administration official, would barely put a dent in deficits that congressional budget analysts say could approach $12 trillion through 2021. But the policies would stabilize borrowing, the administration official said, while reversing the trend of ramping up spending.”

When a ship is sinking, one might consider actually pumping out more water than is rushing in. But the White House is content to “stabilize” these draconian deficits it contributed to during the past two years. How nice the alliterative phrase “draconian deficits” sounds. …

Debra Saunders knows one place to start cutting. 

The liberal group Moveon.org has been sending out e-mails to warn that Republicans are back in control of the House and to ask recipients to sign a petition that states, “Congress must protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.”

Of course, the best way to guarantee no political meddling would be to eliminate some $500 million in federal funds allocated annually to these media’s parent organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Also of course, the fact that Moveon.org wants to keep federal tax dollars pouring into the public broadcasting bucket should end any question as to whether NPR and PBS news programs lean left. They do.

Yet for all his deficit-reduction talk in the face of America’s $14 trillion federal debt, President Obama wants to increase CPB’s funding by $6 million in 2014. …

WSJ reprints a City Journal article on the return of whooping cough in California where thoughtless people will surf most any silly trend.

Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year, are one of the most successful public-health interventions in the history of modern medicine. Among the diseases that they prevent is the whooping cough. Why, then, is that sickness making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all. This public-health calamity, moreover, comes at a time when the Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit against whooping-cough vaccine manufacturer Wyeth; if successful, the suit would make epidemics much more likely and undermine public confidence in vaccines even further. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn has a short on Egypt.

… Amidst all this flowering of democracy, you’ll notice that it’s only the pro-American dictatorships on the ropes: In Libya and Syria, Gaddafy and Assad sleep soundly in their beds. On the other hand, if you were either of the two King Abdullahs, in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and you looked at the Obama Administration’s very public abandonment of their Cairo strongman, what would you conclude about the value of being an American ally? For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Mark Thiessen, in WaPo, writes on how the Egyptian people were lost to us.

The extraordinary scenes in Cairo this past weekend brought back memories of similar scenes on the streets of Warsaw, Prague and Berlin two decades ago. Yet there is one crucial difference between then and now. Unlike the crowds that brought down Marxist regimes in Central Europe, the crowds that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt do not believe America stood with them in their struggle for freedom – and many believe we stood against them.

When the protests first erupted, ordinary Egyptians appeared to hope – almost to expect – that once they rose up to demand their freedom, America could not help but stand with them. Instead, they heard President Obama’s handpicked envoy, Frank Wisner, declare that Hosni Mubarak “must stay in office” to oversee the changes he had ordered. They heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare the United States backed “the transition process announced by the Egyptian government” (which then consisted of Mubarak staying in power until September). And they waited in vain for Obama himself to speak out clearly and align America with the democratic revolution they had set in motion. Soon their hopes gave way to disappointment and eventually anger. Demonstrators began carrying signs that declared “Shame on you Obama!” and showed Mubarak depicted as Obama in his iconic “hope” image – with a caption that read “No You Can’t.” …

IBD editors have no illusions about Egypt.

Romantics in Western media expect “democracy” to flower from the anti-Mubarak rioting in Cairo. But polling shows Egyptians actually seek strict Islamic rule.

According to a major survey conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, adults in Egypt don’t crave Western-style democracy, as pundits have blithely trumpeted throughout coverage of the unrest.

Far from it, the vast majority of them want a larger role for Islam in government. This includes making barbaric punishments, such as stoning adulterers and executing apostates, the law of their country. With the ouster of their secular, pro-American leader, they may get their wish. …

Many are the comments on the new budget. Andrew Sullivan is falling out of love.

… In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road. …

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor has budget thoughts.

… This is not a remotely serious proposal.   I don’t know what color the sky is on the planet where this was formulated, but it ain’t the same as what I see out my window.  There is no recognition whatsoever of the existential fiscal situation the country now faces.  ”What, me worry?” doesn’t even come close to describing this.  No spending restraint whatsoever.  Projections of large tax increases and large revenue increases that will never–never–be realized.

The budget is chock-full of silliness, like a vast increase in funding for the Department of Education.  (Motto: “There’s No Problem We Can’t Make Worse With More Money!”)  Or especially the high speed rail boondoggle.  ”High” is right. The only thing that is missing in the administration salesmanship of this turkey is Robert Preston returning from the dead to perform a reprise of his role as the Music Man.  This is a con of the first order.

Apparently, the administration is attempting to reincarnate the budget showdown of 1995, in which Clinton regained his political balance by forcing a budget battle with the Gingrich-led Republicans. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions;

Barack Obama, the post-everything visionary who vowed to deliver us from a suffocating political past, is in fact a dinosaur. The fossilized evidence has revealed itself over the past two years. So deep in the layers of political history is the 44th president lodged that even Palestinian leaders have moved on from the grievances he cites. So overtaken by the times is he that European heads of state dismiss his economics as yesterday’s errors. Indeed, Obama is so plainly out of step with the challenges of today that he has bowed out of the present altogether and redirected our attention to an impossible and therapeutic “future.”

We have exited politics and entered prophecy. The president’s budget reflects this. It is a spending plan for an alternate universe. …

Jennifer Rubin is next.

… It (The budget) also reveals, as many of us suspected, that Obama’s posturing during the lame duck session and the hiring of some new staff in the White House did not represent a fundamental shift in the White House’s agenda or philosophy. The Obama team is composed of people who think government spending creates prosperity, who have no fear that tax hikes will choke off economic growth, and who believe the electorate won’t notice or care that Obama has rejected the 2010 midterm message.

Obama in presenting his budget and revealing the philosophy to which he stubbornly clings has conceded the huge middle of the political spectrum to the Republicans. The Republicans now have the opportunity to cement their gains with independent voters and to rekindle the same excitement in the base that helped the party take 63 seats in the House and 6 Senate seats. If the Republicans play this smartly — a big if — they have the chance to lead and to make substantial gains in 2012.

Jennifer also comments on Tuesday’s presser.

… His most egregious departure from reality came not on the budget, but on Egypt. He proclaimed: “History will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history.” This is preposterous to anyone but the most determined Obama sycophant. He did virtually nothing to push Hosni Mubarak toward reform for two years, and once the protests began the White House became a muddle of multiple voices, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggesting at points that Mubarak wasn’t and shouldn’t go anywhere. The administration never publicly called for Mubarak’s departure. In short, the Obama team followed and did not lead; its support for regime change was in doubt throughout the process. Unfortunately, Obama wasn’t asked if he had been on the right side of history in June 2009 when he largely ignored the Green Movement’s uprising.

Obama and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that most problems are a matter of “messaging” or “communication.” But when Obama communicates a flawed message or misrepresents facts, he compounds his own difficulties, making it that much more difficult for his allies to defend him and all the more easy for opponents to demonstrate that he’s not leading on the crucial issues of the day.

Robert Samuelson can not believe anybody could seriously advocate for high speed rail.

Vice President Biden, an avowed friend of good government, is giving it a bad name. With great fanfare, he went to Philadelphia last week to announce that the Obama administration proposes spending $53 billion over six years to construct a “national high-speed rail system.” Translation: The administration would pay states $53 billion to build rail networks that would then lose money – lots – thereby aggravating the budget squeezes of the states or federal government, depending on which covered the deficits.

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits. The president’s 2012 budget is due Monday. How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big spending programs?

High-speed rail would definitely be big. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has estimated the administration’s ultimate goal – bringing high-speed rail to 80 percent of the population – could cost $500 billion over 25 years. For this stupendous sum, there would be scant public benefits. Precisely the opposite. Rail subsidies would threaten funding for more pressing public needs: schools, police, defense. …

Thomas Sowell thinks the GOP can learn a lot from Rocky Marciano.

Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career– and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding.

One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them.

In a sense, Republicans today are in a similar position in the political arena. With most of the media heavily tilted toward the Democrats, Republicans are going to get hit far more often than they are going to get in their own punches.

The difference is that Rocky Marciano understood from the beginning that he was going to get hit more often, and prepared himself for that kind of fight. His strategy was to concentrate on developing punches powerful enough to nullify his opponents’ greater number of punches.

Republicans take the opposite approach from that of Rocky Marciano– and often with opposite results. That may be why they managed to lose both houses of Congress and the White House in recent years, in a country where there are millions more people who call themselves conservatives than there are who call themselves liberals. …

Toby Harnden looks at the large GOP field for 2012 and likes the chaos.

… The Grand Old Party has a tradition of selecting the next guy in line, the runner up from the previous contest. That hasn’t exactly worked out well in recent years. President George Bush Snr was a one-term president who raised taxes. Bob Dole was trounced by Bill Clinton in 1996 and John McCain, another flawed candidate, was overwhelmed by Obama in 2008.

The open contest this time, and the relatively level playing field – no anointed sons or incumbent vice-presidents – will ensure that the 2012 Republican choice will be more meritocratic than usual.

Amongst conservatives, there is a palpable sense that America is facing a fiscal crisis and that Obama must be stopped at all costs if the US is not to succumb to European-style big government.

That may be an exaggerated fear but few would disagree that there will be a lot at stake in 2012. At the moment, Obama looks strong but he is eminently beatable because of high unemployment and the fact that most of the country opposes his policies, if not him.

In these circumstances, a long, deliberative process to select Obama’s challenger can only benefit Republicans and the country. Competition is good in baseball and business – and politics too.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Today’s Pickings turns to another review of Bloodlands the story of the lands where Hitler and Stalin clashed. Before that we have some lighter fare. First is David Warren’s look at Vladimir Nabokov and his scientific pursuits. Yup, the author of Lolita was an accomplished naturalist who studied butterflies and in the process expounded theories that have just been proven with DNA testing.

… You make money however you can, and Nabokov also obtained a research fellowship at Harvard, proving so proficient that he was ultimately left in charge of the university’s butterfly collections. There he found the materials to speculate on the evolutionary descent of the whole range of New World “blues,” and to concoct the “imaginative” hypothesis that they were derived from Eurasian species, which had been “able to see Alaska from Russia,” and began crossing the Bering Strait during a warm spell in the Earth’s climate history, 11 million years ago.

In five major waves, corresponding to falling temperatures, successive butterflies crossed, then spread, finally advancing all the way to Chile. The proof that speciations within South America had not been the result (as previously assumed) of the separation of groups by the rise of the Andes, was a demonstration that butterflies on either side of that young mountain chain were more closely related to proposed ancestors in Southeast Asia, than to each other.

Enter the Harvard biology professor, Naomi Pierce, who has had the honour of telling the world this last fortnight, that Nabokov’s fanciful hypothesis is true, down to the most provocative assertions. Using the most advanced current molecular technology, she has tracked the whole history through DNA, confirming Nabokov dead right through fine details on five out of five. …

Pickerhead visited a blog named TreeHugger and learned of 500 year old “living” bridges in India.

Some of the smartest, most sustainable engineering feats were discovered hundreds of years ago, and many have gone unacknowledged. For evidence, take the bridge growers of northeastern India. Planning 10-15 years in advance, they build what may be the most sustainable foot bridges in the world — by literally growing them out of living tree roots. These bridges are extremely sturdy, reach up to 100 feet long, and many are at least 500 years old. …

… In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction–say, over a river–the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems. The thin, tender roots of the rubber tree, prevented from fanning out by the betel nut trunks, grow straight out. When they reach the other side of the river, they’re allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.

Sure, “enough time” isn’t exactly expedient by today’s standards — each root bridge takes between 10-15 years to grow strong enough to be put into use. But strong they are — evidently up to 50 people can cross the heftier bridges at once, and many bridges are over 100 feet long. And they only become stronger with time, as the roots continue to grow. …

The NY Times has an interesting shipwreck story.

In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s.

Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.”

Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.)

Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket.

And then, that ship sank, too.

On Friday, in a discovery that might bring a measure of peace to Captain Pollard, who survived his second wreck (though his career did not), researchers announced that they have found the remains of the Two Brothers. The whaler went down exactly 188 years ago after hitting a reef at the French Frigate Shoals, a treacherous atoll about 600 miles northwest of here. The trove includes dozens of artifacts: harpoon tips, whaling lances and three intact anchors. …

The Economist tells us how electrical transmission lines can be less ugly.

… The pylons in question have been designed by engineers at TenneT, the firm that runs the Netherlands’ national electricity grid, in collaboration with KEMA, a Dutch research company. Instead of a single lattice tower, the cables are supported by two elegant steel poles up to 65 metres high. There are no arms. The six cables that pass from one pylon to another are each borne by two insulators attached to the poles. The resulting arrangement, though hardly invisible, is reasonably elegant. As much to the point, though, it has technological advantages. Though no harm has been proven from them, conventional pylon cables, which transmit a three-phase alternating current, generate a strong electric field and a continuous buzz of low-frequency radio waves which some people who live near them fear might be detrimental to their health.

TenneT’s pylons should help allay that fear. Carrying all the cables in a “stack” between the poles, rather than hanging them separately on outward-facing arms, allows them to be arranged in a way that causes the individual fields generated by each cable to cancel each other, weakening the overall field around the pylons. The result is far less low-frequency radiation. The combination of being less of an eyesore and producing less electrical smog should, TenneT hopes, soften objections to the construction of new overhead power lines. …

Slate’s review of Bloodlands provides this;

… There is no algorithm for evil, but the case of Stalin’s has for a long time weighed more heavily the ideological murders and gulag deaths that began in 1937 and played down the millions who—Snyder argues—were just as deliberately, cold-bloodedly murdered by enforced famine in 1932 and 1933.

Here is where the shock of Snyder’s relatively few pages on cannibalism brought the question of degrees of evil alive once again to me. According to Snyder’s carefully documented account, it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children.

The bare statement alone is horrifying even to write.

The back story: While Lenin was content, for a time anyway, to allow the new Soviet Union to develop a “mixed economy” with state-run industry and peasant-owned private farms, Stalin decided to “collectivize” the grain-producing breadbasket that was the Ukraine. His agents seized all land from the peasants, expelling landowners and placing loyal ideologues with little agricultural experience in charge of the newly collectivized farms, which began to fail miserably. And to fulfill Five-Year Plan goals, he seized all the grain and food that was grown in 1932 and 1933 to feed the rest of Russia and raise foreign capital, and in doing so left the entire Ukrainian people with nothing to eat—except, sometimes, themselves.

I’ve read things as horrifying, but never more horrifying than the four pages in Snyder’s book devoted to cannibalism. In a way I’d like to warn you not to read it; it is, unfortunately, unforgettable. On the other hand, not to read it is a refusal to be fully aware of what kind of world we live in, what human nature is capable of. The Holocaust taught us much on these questions, but alas, there is more to learn. Maybe it’s better to live in denial. Better to think of human history Pollyanna-like, as an evolution upward, although sometimes I feel Darwin spoke more truly than he knew when he titled his book The Descent of Man. Certainly one’s understanding of both Stalinism and human nature will be woefully incomplete until one does read Snyder’s pages.

Here is an excerpt: …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Rick Richman looks at our foreign policy.

The Bastille has fallen in Egypt, but it will be more difficult to create a constitutional democracy than it was in France in 1789 — and France did not do such a great job itself, as I recall. I knew Louis XVI; Louis XVI was a friend of mine; and Hosni Mubarak was no Louis XVI — he was a U.S. ally, welcomed at the White House a few months ago, praised by President Obama at that time as one of our “key partners.” A few months later, he was on par with Saddam Hussein.

With mass demonstrations against a tyrannical Iranian regime that stole a presidential election, Obama kept silent. When the military removed the president in Honduras pursuant to a judicial order and legislative ratification, Obama called it a coup. When the military removed the Egyptian president months before a scheduled election in which the president had pledged not to run again, Obama supported the removal as essential for freedom. There must be a coherent foreign policy in there somewhere. …

Here’s a brilliant point from Philip Hamburger, in National Review. Hamburger discusses how it is unconstitutional for HHS to grant waivers to some favored organizations, and force the rest of us to follow new healthcare regulations. We look forward to its litigation.

…The Department of Health and Human Services has granted 733 waivers from one of the statute’s key requirements. The recipients of the waivers include insurers such as Oxford Health Insurance, labor organizations such as the Service Employees International Union, and employers such as PepsiCo. This is disturbing for many reasons. At the very least, it suggests the impracticability of the health-care law; HHS gave the waivers because it fears the law will cost many Americans their jobs and insurance.

More seriously, it raises questions about whether we live under a government of laws. Congress can pass statutes that apply to some businesses and not others, but once a law has passed — and therefore is binding — how can the executive branch relieve some Americans of their obligation to obey it?

…Waivers are mostly, if not entirely, for politically significant businesses and unions that get the special attention of HHS or the White House. The rest of us must obey the laws.

As it happens, waivers have a history. In the Middle Ages, the pope granted waivers, known as dispensations, and English kings soon followed suit. …

…The underlying justification was that the king had absolute power — a power above the law …

…Waivers can be used for good purposes. But since the time of Matthew Paris, they have been recognized as a power above the law — a power used by government to co-opt powerful constituencies by freeing them from the law. Like old English kings, the current administration is claiming such a power to decide that some people do not have to follow the law. This is dangerous, above the law, and unauthorized by the Constitution.

Mitch Daniels made a good speech at CPAC. Des Moines Register reviews.  

Washington, D.C. — Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels Friday summoned frustrated Americans to join together in a broad coalition to set the nation on a healthier fiscal and economic course.

But Daniels, a Republican quietly weighing a presidential candidacy, did so in a cerebral call-to-arms by also asking a select audience of conservatives to welcome non-ideologues into the tent.

“We must be the vanguard of recovery, but we cannot do it alone,” Daniels told about 500 attending a banquet at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

“We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities,” the second-term governor and former Bush administration budget director said. “We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean. Who surf past C-SPAN to get to SportsCenter. Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise ship accessory.” …

John Fund compliments Daniels’ speech.

… the wonky former budget director for George W. Bush surprised many by delivering what some said was the most intellectually substantive and eloquent speech of the conference. He won cheers when he compared the federal government to a “morbidly obese patient” that will need “bariatric surgery.” But he also won respectful silence and some applause — remarkable for a highly ideological audience — when he argued the possible merits of political compromise. …

Rich Lowry liked the speech too. 

Mitch Daniels gave an extraordinary speech at CPAC last night. As anyone who has ever done any public speaking at all knows, the hardest thing to do is to tell people things they don’t necessarily want to hear. For Daniels not to strike one pandering note, and even to challenge the audience at times, speaks to just how grounded he is. He even put in a good word for the occasional necessary compromise. Few potential presidential candidates would dare say such a thing in a CPAC speech. …

So, here’s a transcript of Mitch Daniels’ speech and a link to a video courtesy of The Corner.

… I bring greetings from a place called Indiana.  The coastal types present may think of it as a “flyover” state, or one of those “I” states.  Perhaps a quick anthropological summary would help.

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions.  Some might say we “cling” to them, though not out of fear or ignorance.  We believe in paying our bills.  We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.  When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all. 

Before our General Assembly now is my proposal for an automatic refund of tax dollars beyond a specified level of state reserves.  We say that anytime budgets are balanced and an ample savings account has been set aside, government should just stop collecting taxes.  Better to leave that money in the pockets of those who earned it, than to let it burn a hole, as it always does, in the pockets of government.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.  We see government’s mission as fostering and enabling the important realms – our businesses, service clubs, Little Leagues, churches – to flourish. Our first thought is always for those on life’s first rung, and how we might increase their chances of climbing.  

Every day, we work to lower the costs and barriers to free men and women creating wealth for each other.  We build roads, and bridges, and new sources of homegrown energy at record rates, in order to have the strongest possible backbone to which people of enterprise can attach their investments and build their dreams.  When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply:  “Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of ‘corporate citizenship.’ If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.”

We place our trust in average people.  We are confident in their ability to decide wisely for themselves, on the important matters of their lives.  So when we cut property taxes, to the lowest level in America, we left flexibility for localities to raise them, but only by securing the permission of their taxpayers, voting in referendum.  We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.  

We have broadened the right of parents to select the best place for their children’s education …

… The national elections of 2010 carried an instruction.  In our nation, in our time, the friends of freedom have an assignment, as great as those of the 1860s, or the 1940s, or the long twilight of the Cold War.   As in those days, the American project is menaced by a survival-level threat.  We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before.  We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose.  We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White. 

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence.  It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.  No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be. …

… The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans.  Today’s EPA should be renamed the “Employment Prevention Agency.”  After a two-year orgy of new regulation, President Obama’s recent executive order was a wonderment, as though the number one producer of rap music had suddenly expressed alarm about obscenity. …

… I’ve always loved John Adams’ diary entry, written en route to Philadelphia, there to put his life, liberty, and sacred honor all at risk. He wrote that it was all well worth it because, he said, “Great things are wanted to be done.”

When he and his colleagues arrived, and over the years ahead, they practiced the art of the possible.  They made compacts and concessions and, yes, compromises.  They made deep sectional and other differences secondary in pursuit of the grand prize of freedom. They each argued passionately for the best answers as they saw them, but they never permitted the perfect to be the enemy of the historic good they did for us, and all mankind.  They gave us a Republic, citizen Franklin said, if we can keep it.

Keeping the Republic is the great thing that is wanted to be done, now, in our time, by us.  In this room are convened freedom’s best friends but, to keep our Republic, freedom needs every friend it can get.  Let’s go find them, and befriend them, and welcome them to the great thing that is wanted to be done in our day. 

God bless this meeting and the liberty which makes it possible.