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David Warren attempts to calm us down when contemplating Japan’s nuclear problems.

… Perversely, we have now had an international media sensation equivalent to a Japanese Chernobyl, from a “meltdown watch” on a nuclear power plant wherein there has been no meltdown, and the chances of one are not high. Moreover, the effects of such a meltdown would be relatively modest. This, at least, if one is reading writers with some expertise in nuclear engineering, as opposed to, say, axe-grinding environmentalists.

We have seepages of steam, radioactive on the dental X-ray scale, made dramatic by the very rigour of Japanese safety precautions. We have accumulations of a hydrogen gas from a chemical reaction between the melting zirconium alloy in fuel rod casings and this water steam, which -unsuccessfully vented -blew the roofs off several buildings. This provided exciting video footage. But the fuel rods themselves remain well-contained; and casualties are likely to remain negligible.

We have son-et-lumière (sound and light), but on the scale of other damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami, this is minor collateral. Whole towns were swept over, people by the thousands swept inland and then out to sea. And the biggest “fallout” from the loss of these reactors is likely to come from the power shortages that will hamper recovery efforts for years to come.

Chernobyl failed thanks to a couple of major design flaws, paired in turn with the Soviet way of doing things. And even Chernobyl was not so bad, on the scale of manmade disasters (in Russia, especially). From a strictly “green” point of view, one might even call it a success. For beyond its propaganda value in helping people to confuse apples with oranges, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary in which a number of endangered species are apparently flourishing.

The one flaw exposed in the design of the second-generation nuclear facility at Okuma (“Fukushima One”) was the dependence on electrical pumps for the water cooling system. They were what the Richter 9 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, knocked out. In third-generation reactors, the water is circulated by natural convection. Problem solved. …

Tony Blankley says the GOP will have to make some tough decisions.

… Back in the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan made three major promises: 1) Increase our military strength, 2) cut income taxes, and 3) reduce the budget deficit. Fortunately for President Reagan, he had the foresight during the campaign to prioritize those three promises, in the order in which I have listed them. He was able to keep Nos. 1 and 2, but could not keep the budget-cutting promise.

Today, there are three objectives or promises that many Republican congressmen have made: 1) Get the deficit and national debt under control, 2) don’t raise taxes, and 3) protect full benefits of Social Security and most of Medicare for those over 55.

The GOP will have to decide which of those laudable objectives have priority over the others. I would be amazed – but delighted – if they can keep any two of them, let alone all three.

For me the overwhelming historical obligation of our government – and the reason the Republicans were given the majority in the House – is to get the deficit and debt under control.

The GOP will risk losing its majority either if they propose coming in with a half-trillion deficit in the 10th year – or if they propose getting the deficit down by lowering costs of Social Security and Medicare and letting Bush tax cuts expire.

They should listen to the command of history, and take their chances with the electorate by proposing to solve the fiscal crisis – even at the price of not honoring their subordinate promises.

Mort Zuckerman suggests reasons for the anemic recovery.

… Three elements offer clues: consumer spending, housing and unemployment.

Importantly, the bubble of exuberant consumerism that powered the U.S. economy for the last 10 years of the 20th century and for most of the first years of the 21st century has burst. In reaction to economic hard times, American consumers are planning for the worst rather than hoping for the best, and they continue to pay down household debt instead of spending cash.

Who could blame people for holding back when we see roughly 50 million Americans on one or more taxpayer-supported programs, be it food stamps or unemployment benefits? This downturn may not have the 1930s feel of despair, but in large part that is because, as the economist David Rosenberg of the wealth-management firm Gluskin Sheff put it, “The modern day soup line is a check in the mail.”

An unprecedented number of Americans are borrowing against their 401(k)s, canceling their life insurance policies, and forgoing physicals. And that isn’t all. The American consumer today is fearful of the impact of higher food prices, higher gasoline prices, higher insurance costs, higher everything. The inflation of food and fuel alone has absorbed the December tax cuts agreed to by Congress and the administration.

So where has the recent modest growth in the economy come from? It is primarily due to massive amounts of federal government stimulus and a huge inventory swing, both of which will peter out this year. Only the wealthiest 10% of the population, whose stock portfolios have come roaring back, are doing well, but their spending is not enough to spur the economy or create much additional hiring.

Why are all the vital signs discouraging? Quite simply, it is because households are still carrying far too much debt on their balance sheets. …

Craig Pirrong thinks inactivity on the part of the administration is not necessarily a bad thing.

… If I am right in my analysis of Obama, at the most trying time in world history since the 1930s, a time fraught with political and economic peril, the United States is drifting along, neither led nor leading.  It’s worse than that, actually.  The administration has largely abdicated authority over the things that are properly in the executive sphere, while at the same time it has engaged in unprecedented expansion of government and executive power in areas–notably in economics–where the potential for mischief vastly exceeds the potential to make things better.  Doing too much of some things and too little of others doesn’t mean that on average you’re doing just the right amount: quite the opposite.

When stymied domestically, as Obama has been by the victories of the Republicans in 2010, presidents have historically turned their attention overseas, where they can exercise authority and discretion more independently and with less constraint.  Obama has not done that.  To the contrary, the opportunities to do so have been immense, but the more these opportunities have grown, the more he has shrunk from seizing them.

One initial reaction is to regret this passivity.  But given Obama’s background, ideology, and history, a more considered reaction is to conclude that it isn’t such a bad thing: things could be worse, and would likely be so were he to act according to his (leftist) lights.

Yes, things could be worse, but they are bad enough now.  The United States and the world are suffering greatly due to the leadership vacuum on both economic matters (most notably the budget and entitlements) and international affairs. Yes, as Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation.  And yes, as I wrote in the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, we are testing just how much ruin there is in this one.

Rick Richman’s Libyan lessons.

8. You may eventually be subject to sanctions, so check to see if they’ve worked yet with Cuba, North Korea, or Iran.

9. Consider restarting your nuclear program, since the conditions that caused you to suspend it are gone. At most, the president will form a committee of several nations to talk to you; he will consider more sanctions if the world speaks as one. You need not worry about his “deadlines.”

10. There is basically only one thing you do need to worry about: do not, under any circumstances, approve any future Jewish housing in Jerusalem. The president will go ballistic if you do.

W. W. at the Democracy in America Blog takes the “broken window” debate to another level.

JAPAN is in tragic disarray after last week’s massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Nature may be cruelly unpredictable, but people are just cruel. Every time there is a catastrophe abroad, American opinionators use the prospect of reconstruction as an opportunity to conduct a proxy debate over fiscal stimulus and economic fundamentals. So, like clockwork, some benighted folks started talking up the potential economic gains from Japan’s disaster, causing a rubber ball to fall down a tube into a pail, which overflowed, splling water down a chute, which turned a little water-wheel, which rang a little bell, startling libertarian economics professors into lecturing us about “ the broken windows fallacy“.

Now, I believe the fallacy is indeed a fallacy, and I find the idea that Japan might somehow gain from this bout of terrifying havoc and mass death both ridiculous and disgustingly Panglossian. But, really, this isn’t about us, and I’ve grown weary of playing a part in the rote broken-windows Punch and Judy show. Much more pertinent and interesting is the fascinating, lively, empirically-informed academic literature on the economic effects of disasters, which I was reading up on last night. Alas, the New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum beat me to the punch, providing a short overview of some recent research that finds that disasters have no long-term affect on GDP. This excellent 2008 Boston Globe article by Drake Bennett offers a more comprehensive summary. …

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The president thinks our future is tied to our ability to produce college graduates. Future of Capitalism Blog disagrees.

… Nothing against college graduates — I am one myself — but it seems to have escaped the president’s notice that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern America, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Jack Taylor, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Dell computer’s Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson — are not college graduates.

It seems to me that president is wrong, and that the best economic policy is not one that “produces more college graduates,” but one that produces more entrepreneurs. If producing a high proportion of college graduates were the secret to economic success, Belgium would be the world’s economic powerhouse. …

Contemplating the president’s college education fetish, a blog named The View From Alexandria picks up on something Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

A post in Volokh Conspiracy wonders about priorities in the White House.

… I’ve previously defended President Obama’s enthusiasm for golf, but the picture of the American President going on television to announce his predictions in a college basketball tournament, while America’s interests and long-term security are in imminent peril, is disconcerting. Whatever Barack Obama’s virtues, Hillary Clinton was right: he was not ready for the 3 a.m. phone call; and it appears that he never will be.

More on that from White House Dossier.

The Middle East is afire with rebellion, Japan is imploding from an earthquake, and the battle of the budget is on in the United States, but none of this seems to be deterring President Obama from a heavy schedule of childish distractions.

The newly installed tandem of White House Chief of Staff William Daley and Senior Adviser David Plouffe were supposed to impart a new sense of discipline and purpose to the White House. Instead, they are permitting him to showcase himself as a poorly focused leader who has his priorities backward.

This morning, as Japan’s nuclear crisis enters a potentially catastrophic phase, we are told that Obama is videotaping his NCAA tournament picks and that we’ll be able to tune into ESPN Wednesday to find out who he likes.

Saturday, he made his 61st outing to the golf course as president, and got back to the White House with just enough time for a quick shower before heading out to party with Washington’s elite journalists at the annual Gridiron Dinner. …

Thomas Sowell writes on ways the GOP might appeal to black voters.

… With all the Republican politicians’ laments about how overwhelmingly blacks vote for Democrats, I have yet to hear a Republican politician publicly point out the harm to blacks from such policies of the Democrats as severe housing restrictions, resulting from catering to environmental extremists.

If the Republicans did point out such things as building restrictions that make it hard for most blacks to afford housing, even in places where they once lived, they would have the Democrats at a complete disadvantage.

It would be impossible for the Democrats to deny the facts, not only in coastal California but in similar affluent strongholds of liberal Democrats around the country. Moreover, environmental zealots are such an important part of the Democrats’ constituencies that Democratic politicians could not change their policies.

Although Republicans would have a strong case, none of that matters when they don’t make the case in the first place. The same is true of the effects of minimum wage laws on the high rate of unemployment among black youths. Again, the facts are undeniable, and the Democrats cannot change their policy, because they are beholden to labor unions that advocate higher minimum wages.

Yet another area in which Democrats are boxed in politically is their making job protection for members of teachers’ unions more important than improving education for students in the public schools. No one loses more from this policy than blacks, for many of whom education is their only chance for economic advancement.

But none of this matters so long as Republicans who want the black vote think they have to devise earmarked benefits for blacks, instead of explaining how Republicans’ general principles, applied to all Americans, can do more for blacks than the Democrats’ welfare state approach.

W. W. in The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog tells us why the GOP probably won’t follow Sowell’s ideas.

… Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard and author of the much-discussed “The Triumph of the City”, deserves much of the credit for growing awareness of the way in which restrictions on housing supply have enriched wealthy, urban property-owners while squeezing out middle-class and poor residents. Today at the New York Times’ Economix blog, Mr Glaeser urges the tea-party movement to stand up for downtown:

“Big cities are not typically Tea Party territory, but if the new Republican members of Congress apply their libertarian principles assiduously to a few key federal policies, they could do much for urban America.”

Mr Glaeser’s point is not so much that Republicans could pick up votes from traditional Democratic constituencies, but that libertarian-leaning voters ought, as a matter of principle, to oppose the regulations and subsidies that have pushed populations out of the cities and into the suburbs. He argues that

“Residents of dense downtowns should urge Tea Partiers to take up the fight against socially engineered suburbia through federal homeownership subsidies and sprawl-inducing federal highway spending….

Good libertarians might ask why the federal government has any business promoting particular lifestyle choices, like homeownership.”

Preach it, brother!

If we join Mr Glaeser’s argument to Mr Sowell’s, Republicans would appear to have at their disposal a powerful argument for pro-minority urbanism. If Republicans raised and fought under this banner, it really might precipitate substantial partisan realignment. But I don’t think it’s going to happen, and the reason is simple. The Republican Party, as it is presently constituted, is to a great extent the party of rural and suburban white people. …

Byron York looks at the Wisconsin recall debate.

… Both sides have several more weeks to gather signatures. After that, there is a period for legal challenges of the petitions and then another period before the actual recall election, which could come in mid-to-late summer. Will the intensity of union activists last until then? And just as important, will the intensity of ordinary citizens, the people who are volunteering for Hunt’s group and others like it, stay alive as well?

Unions are very good at things like gathering signatures and chartering buses to take people to the polls. But don’t rule out the team that’s fighting on principle.

And Bill McGurn has modern day rules for radicals.

… In that spirit, here’s an updated list of 10 rules for Wisconsin protesters:

1) No more Jesse Jackson . This man is a national symbol of agitation for agitation’s sake, and he suggests to people who have not yet made up their minds that the protesters may be more radical than they claim.

2) Ditto for Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon and Tony Shaloub. Outsiders like these may excite the crowds, but they’ll alienate people you need.

3) Lose the peace signs. It suggests a hankering for the anti-middle class 1960s, rather than a 21st-century struggle for a middle-class standard of living. …

Michael Barone checks polls on what Wisconsin voters think about unions.

… as Rasmussen has explained, how you ask the question can make a huge difference in responses, particularly on an issue which is unfamiliar to most voters. Now Rasmussen has gotten more specific, finding that likely Wisconsin voters oppose weakening collective bargaining in general but strongly favor specific changes.

“Weakening bargaining rights”?  39% for, 55% against.  

Require that a local school district buy health insurance from a union company? 19% for, 57% against.

Should the union disclose all financial relationships between the union and the union-created insurance company WEA Trust? 76% yes, 12% no.

Debra Saunders says money for NPR is the Grey Poupon of federal subsidies.

… NPR now has to live with O’Keefe’s tapes. While trying to land a $5 million donation from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center Trust, now-former NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation to the broadcaster’s president) said NPR would be “better off in the long run without federal funding.”

He also said, “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.” I am sure he meant that, too.

Lamborn tells me that the O’Keefe videos increase the likelihood that Washington will cut the CPB cord because the videos show “the disarray at NPR.”

That may be a polite way of saying that the tapes make NPR execs look like complete frauds – the same way they looked when they very publicly fired Juan Williams. Vivian Schiller said the move had nothing to do with Williams’ regular appearances on the right-leaning Fox News. Apparently she believes the American public is stupid. Could that be because, until very recently, the American public very generously subsidized her perch?

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It is a good time to have a look at nuclear power. James Delingpole posts in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

… We seemed to have just reached the point where civil nuclear power was acceptable in polite society again, as decades on the fears that accompanied Three Mile Island and Chernobyl abated, CO2 emissions fears placed environmental advocacy groups in a cleft stick of nuclear versus global warming, and increasing demand for energy, and energy security concerns drive government policy.  The UK has plans to replace its ageing fleet of reactors, the US likewise, and China is already building new nuclear power stations, even green Germany has extended the life of its nuclear generating capacity.

Now we have an earthquake in Japan, possibly causing meltdown at a number of nuclear reactors, whose safety systems seem not to be working too well, and we may be back to square one.

So, how dangerous is it, either when there is massive operator error, like Chernobyl, or an exogenous event, like the earthquake in Japan?  We don’t know yet about Japan, although most expert commentary seems reasonably relaxed about the radiation risks in the event of core melt-down.  What do we know about Chernobyl?

Well, aren’t we lucky?  We have an almost perfect test case of the hazards of civil nuclear power, Chernobyl 1986.  25 years on we have an excellent view of the lives lost, environment despoiled, cancer rates, societal impacts, ecosystems, and so on, caused by the worst civil nuclear disaster ever. …

Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor reacts to the sanctions against Libya.

… As usual, the gap between words and deeds is vast.  Yammering about sanctions gives the impression of doing something, while actually doing absolutely nothing; that’s actually worse than saying nothing at all, because it would actually take some courage to say that he doesn’t believe that what could be gained by an intervention that could actually achieve something is worth the cost and risk to the US.  That would be cold, but it would have the virtue of honesty.

I’m not saying the choices are easy; it will take military force to stop Khadafy, and the amount of force and the consequences of its use are very difficult to predict.  What and who follows Khadafy are unlikely to be any prizes.  So the case for military involvement is hardly clear-cut.

But I can say with near metaphysical certainty that sanctions will have no effect whatsoever, and that even to suggest that they would have the slightest possibility of forcing Khadafy’s ouster, or preventing a bloodbath is either a lie or a delusion, and a mockery of the people who will be on the receiving end of Khadafy’s wrath.  This is just more moral preening intended to disguise a complete abdication of leadership.  It would be leadership to send in the Marines.  It would be leadership to say, frankly, it’s not in America’s interest.  It’s the inversion of leadership to pretend you’re taking strong action when you are in fact doing nothing that will have the slightest impact.

I’ll bet Khadafy and his thuggish sons are having a great big laugh right now.  ”Sanctions!  Stop it Barry, you’re killing me!  No, actually, we’re doing the killing here–but still, you’re a riot, kid!  Keep it up!”

Outside of the Khadafy compound, though, it’s not funny.  It’s sad and pathetic.

Bill Clinton lays a blast against the administration’s drilling delays. Ed Morrissey has the story.

… Both former Presidents (W too) agreed that one of the main issues in clearing offshore permits was getting workers back on the job.  And yet, as Jazz Shaw noted yesterday after Obama’s press conference, the number of operating rigs has dwindled sharply since the Deepwater Horizon failure almost a year ago.  We’ve dropped from 55 working rotary rigs in April 2010 to just 25 today.  The permitorium imposed by the Obama administration is the chief reason for the drop, and yet despite a court order, the White House continues to block efforts to get oil workers back on the job of producing American oil for American consumers.

I’ve been missing George Bush for more than two years.  Who knew I’d be missing Bill Clinton by this time?  Let’s hope we don’t get to the point where we’re missing …. Jimmy Carter.

Anybody say Jimmy Carter? Well yes, Chris Matthews showed his Freudian slip this weekend calling Obama President Carter. NewsBusters has a link.

… CHRIS MATTHEWS: If the Republicans get a real opportunity next year because President Carter, President – there’s a mistake – President uh, uh, Obama doesn’t seem to have a grip on it, he doesn’t seem to be able to pull the economy back. He’s not, it’s not working. Who would be the best to exploit that situation? Because that’s the person who would win. …

Anybody around here want oil to be more expensive? Debra Saunders remembers why the energy secretary was picked.

… There always has been a corner of Obamaland that doesn’t appreciate the job-creating properties of cheap fuel. Now Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Chu said that in September 2008 – and still Obama picked him for the slot.

Then again, if you think there are a lot of Americans cruising Main Street in gas-guzzling monstrosities, you probably wouldn’t even notice the high price of gasoline – until your approval ratings started to approach, well, Jimmy Carter levels.

Anybody say oil? Joel Kotkin writes for WSJ on the boom in North Dakota. 

Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state’s Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming.

Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy “sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits,” says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed’s newspaper, fedgazette. The state’s population, slightly more than 672,000, is up nearly 5% since 2000.

The biggest impetus for the good times lies with energy development. Around 650 wells were drilled last year in North Dakota, and the state Department of Mineral Resources envisions another 5,500 new wells over the next two decades. Between 2005 and 2009, oil industry revenues have tripled to $12.7 billion from $4.2 billion, creating more than 13,000 jobs.

Already fourth in oil production behind Texas, Alaska and California, the state is positioned to advance on its competitors. Drilling in both Alaska and the Gulf, for example, is currently being restrained by Washington-imposed regulations. And progressives in California—which sits on its own prodigious oil supplies—abhor drilling, promising green jobs while suffering double-digit unemployment, higher utility rates and the prospect of mind-numbing new regulations that are designed to combat global warming and are all but certain to depress future growth. In North Dakota, by contrast, even the state’s Democrats—such as Sen. Kent Conrad and former Sen. Byron Dorgan—tend to be pro-oil. The industry services the old-fashioned liberal goal of making middle-class constituents wealthier. …

Toby Harnden has NPR thoughts.

If proof were needed that some people at the top of National Public Radio despise the public then it was provided last week. In a delicious sting carried out by the young conservative troublemaker James O’Keefe, Americans were offered a glimpse of the different planet a certain class of liberal inhabits.

For the uninitiated, NPR (officially, they’ve actually dropped the radio bit as they pursue digital expansion) is viewed a little bit like the BBC is in Britain, only much more so: Left-leaning, worthy and a more than a little self-satisfied. Stereotypically, it’s preferred by those who munch granola, sip lattes and seldom shave – especially the men.

Until recently, NPR seemed to be moving away from the stereotype. Then, it fired Juan Williams, a black commentator who professed to be a liberal but regularly expressed fairly conservative views on Fox News. When he said that he got “nervous” when he saw people wearing “Muslim garb” on an aeroplane, NPR pronounced that this “undermined his credibility as a news analyst” and canned him.

But Williams had the last laugh, immediately securing a multi-million dollar new contract with Fox, where he has happily denounced his former employer ever since. … 

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Ignorant commentators, have suggested the devastation in Japan has a positive side as now much of the country most be rebuilt thus providing jobs. In 1850 Frederic Bastiat dealt with this in the Broken Window Fallacy. In this example a shopkeeper has a window broken and Bastiat answers the comment that at least the glazier found work so something good came from the destruction. He does this by pointing out the thing that is not seen.

… Now let us consider James B. himself. In the former supposition, that of the window being broken, he spends six francs, and has neither more nor less than he had before, the enjoyment of a window.

In the second, where we suppose the window not to have been broken, he would have spent six francs on shoes, and would have had at the same time the enjoyment of a pair of shoes and of a window.

Now, as James B. forms a part of society, we must come to the conclusion, that, taking it altogether, and making an estimate of its enjoyments and its labours, it has lost the value of the broken window.

When we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end – To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.” …

David Bernstein comments in Volokh.

… Sure. And instead of sending American aid, let’s follow up the earthquake with a few bombing runs over Tokyo. That will really “lift the economy.” Jeez.

Wisconsin Governor Walker’s website featured examples of the union pigs.

The $150,000 Bus Driver

In 2009, the City of Madison’s highest paid employee was a bus driver who earned $159,258, including $109,892 in overtime, guaranteed by a collective bargaining agreement.  In total, seven City of Madison bus drivers made more than $100,000 per year in 2009.

“That’s the (drivers’) contract,” said Transit and Parking Commission Chairman Gary Poulson.

Source: Wisconsin State Journal, 2/7/10

$150,000 Correctional Officers

Correctional Officer collective bargaining agreements allow officers a practice known as “sick leave stacking.”  Officers can call in sick for a shift, receiving 8 hours of sick pay, and then are allowed to work the very next shift, earning time-and-a-half for overtime.  This results in the officer receiving 2.5 times his or her rate of pay, while still only working 8 hours.

In part because of these practices, 13 correctional officers made more than $100,000 in 2009, despite earning base wages of less than $60,000 per year.  The officers received an average of $66,000 in overtime pay for an average annual salary of more than $123,000 with the highest paid receiving $151,181.

Source: Department of Corrections

John Podhoretz comments on last Friday’s presser.

The White House is worried: The Libyan crisis and the general instability in the Middle East have led to spiraling gas prices. The president wanted to show the American people he knows it’s a problem.

So he staged a press conference yesterday, and he basically said he’s going to do . . . nothing.

He’s not going to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He’s not going to authorize more drilling to reduce American dependency on foreign oil because, first of all, we’re already doing more drilling — and, second of all, we can’t drill our way out of the problem. …

… This was not a good press conference for the president. It was pointless. His responses in the Q&A were endless — in transcript, one answer was 1,385 words; another, 1,114.

In their proxility and lack of clarity, his minifilibusters revealed something deeply troubling: an incapacity to formulate and execute policy in response to unforeseeable circumstances.

That glaring failure of leadership should be worrying even to those who believe he’s been a good president thus far.

Similar comments from Peter Wehner.

… The president, you see, is concerned about what’s happening in Libya. Really, he is. He’s just not willing to do anything that will alter the course of events. Not now, anyway. But don’t despair; the president is giving the appearance of doing something. Because that’s very important. Even if we don’t do anything substantial, after all, it’s important to look like you are. Because optics are everything, don’t you know? …

The president let slip his inner Tom Friedman by suggesting it would be easier to be the president of China. Ed Morrissey does the honors.

… Well, Hu Jintao is technically “President” of China at the moment, but he has a lot of other titles that make the nature of that government more clear.  Among them: “Paramount Leader,” “General Secretary of the Communist Party,” and “Chairman of the Central Military Commission.”  Being “president” in China isn’t the same as being President of the United States; it’s a dictatorship, or at the very mildest, the strongest position in an autocratic and thoroughly entrenched and unaccountable political system.

As such, yes, it’s easier to wield power, which was exactly Friedman’s point and why he was an idiot for making the case for enlightened despotism over representative democracy. Making power easier for government to yield was the exact outcome that our founders feared, which is why they wrote the Constitution and ratified it 222 years ago.  Enlightened despotism is still despotism, and the “enlightened” part depends entirely on whether the analysts fall in or out of favor with the despot. …

… Finally, Obama might think it would be easier to be President of China, but he’d have found it impossible to become President of China.  Unlike Americans, who can vote for whomever they choose, the entrenched power structure in Beijing would never have allowed an untested backbencher with no experience in executive management to have come close to the top job.  Obama should be thanking his lucky stars rather than lamenting his fate.

And Michael Goodwin adds some thoughts in the NY Post.

… As shocking as the China lament is, it’s not surprising. The desire to sidestep messy reality is the thread that runs through his presidency, starting with the campaign.

As the economy melted down in the fall of 2008 and in the days after he took office, he never changed goals. He promised a health-care takeover, “investments” in education, and a commitment to weaning America off oil and coal.

Come recession and war, he has done his utmost to deliver all three. He has broken the bank and damaged the jobs machine to get them.

Under different circumstances, that dogged persistence might be a virtue. But the problems are getting worse, not better, and yet he won’t adapt. His stubborn refusal to face squarely the nation’s concerns has created a vacuum at home similar to the one abroad.

And now he confides the Oval Office’s crown of responsibility does not fit him. Much of the world shares the sentiment.

Slate article says working longer holds off the grim reaper.

… Retirement is usually seen as the severing of oneself from the work of a lifetime. Friedman, who is 60, dislikes this notion, and from his research he’s come to believe such an attitude is bad both for society and individuals. Of course, for those in miserable work situations, a departure can mean liberation. But most of the Terman males (given the attitudes of the times, far fewer of the women Termites worked) had solid, sometimes even exceptional careers. Interviews done with successful Termites in their 70s, several of them lawyers, showed a striking number continued to work part time.

For those who contemplate retirement as decades filled with leisure and relaxation, The Longevity Project serves as a warning. As Friedman says, “fun can be overrated” and stress can be unfairly maligned. Many study participants who lived vigorously into old age had highly stressful jobs. Physicist Norris Bradbury, who died at age 88, succeeded J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, overseeing the transition of the U.S. atomic weapons research lab from World War II into the Cold War. …

… One of the most striking findings of The Longevity Project is that conscientiousness is a predictor of long life. People who blow their deadlines and forget their appointments tend to find themselves making an early appointment with the grim reaper. Sorting through eight decades of data shows that the reliable, more-mature-than-their years little boys and girls identified in the 1920s became the dependable adults who were most likely to have made it into a new century. “[T]he best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness—the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person …—somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.”

The benefits of a conscientious personality are obvious: These people are less likely to smoke and drink, or drive dangerously. Throughout life, conscientious people are less impulsive, and less depressed. The researchers found that the prudent died less from all causes, not just those related to dangerous habits. It appears the conscientious have higher levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin (a brain chemical boosted by antidepressants), which is linked to, the authors write, “many health-relevant processes throughout the body, including how much you eat and how well you sleep.” …

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Charles Krauthammer examines the administration’s social security position.

Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Social Security is the most solvable.

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.

The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.

This claim is a breathtaking fraud. …

… On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It’s worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew’s preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection.

Jonah Goldberg clues us in on Washington math.

By earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you’re only getting a raise of 8 percent, you’re still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.

So when the GOP cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.

Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.

But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget.

Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then “slash” 28 bucks. That’s what it’s like to be a frugal Democrat. …

John Steele Gordon notes liberal lock-step commentary.

… The nice thing about liberal political commentary these days, apparently, is that you only have to read one to know what all the others say as well.

David Harsanyi wants to know why we can’t discuss radical Islam.

… Now, admittedly, I don’t believe criticism of religious ideology is equivalent to prejudice. Why does any belief deserve dispensation for its stunningly illiberal outlook of, say, the role of women in society? In Egypt’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the anticipated democratic nation, a mob of God-fearing men aggressively descended on the women there on International Women’s Day, intimidating and abusing them.

Sometimes it seems some of us are more concerned with admonishing political incorrectness than overt intolerance.

And though I am skeptical that King’s hearings will accomplish anything constructive, the obfuscation of his goals is, in the end, more harmful than the hearings themselves. Because it’s the critics who have falsely transformed a ham-handed congressman’s hearing on radicalism into an imagined referendum on all American Muslims. Which turns something useless into something incendiary.

Since Jacques Barzun graduated from Columbia as valedictorian of the class of 1927, he might be expected to know something about the history of the college.

… In 1969, spurred by antiwar student riots, the university cancelled its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, which had its roots in the Columbia Midshipmen’s School that trained over 23,000 naval officers in World War II. By the 1990s, after the fervor around the Vietnam War had subsided, university officials justified keeping ROTC off campus because of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

With Congress having repealed that edict last year, Columbia faculty have raised new arguments against ROTC. Some faculty members have recently circulated a petition that the military should remain banned because it continues to be a “discriminatory institution” on the basis of “many reasons from physical disability to age.” The basketball team discriminates too. …

We don’t often celebrate the conquests of Arianna Huffington, but her evisceration of the pompous editor of the NY Times is something to behold. Jennifer Rubin has the story. Here’s Arianna;

“I wonder what site he’s been looking at. Not ours, as even a casual look at HuffPost will show. Even before we merged with AOL, HuffPost had 148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism. . . .

… And did he not notice that he lost one of his top business reporters, Peter Goodman, to The Huffington Post — despite his best efforts to keep him? Indeed, on the very day that Keller’s column began circulating, we published a piece Goodman edited, a 4,000-word investigation of a for-profit college by Goodman’s first hire, Chris Kirkham, a former Washington Post intern. Did he think he came over to aggregate adorable kitten videos? And was he too busy scanning all those lists of “most powerful people” he’s on to notice that he also lost one of his top editors, Tim O’Brien, to us? . . . . But then Keller went much further, accusing me of “aggregating” his very thoughts!”

Fascinating post from Reason on how trade made us human. The writing is a bit dense, but the Reason summary will tell you if you want to read more.

… To summarize: trade and the division of labor are hallmarks of human cooperation. These findings bolster the arguments made in my friend Matt Ridley’s superb new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Ridley argues that groups that took advantage of the division of labor and traded peaceably with strangers outcompeted less cooperative groups. And more cooperation leads to more invention and more prosperity over time.

Nothing dense about Reuters story about people who walk on the mudflats of the Thames. They’re called mudlarks.

It’s seven in the morning and we kneel in black mud on the freezing banks of London’s River Thames in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, where a church has dominated the ancient city since the 7th century.

As the tide ebbs exposing the shore, Steve Brooker casually tosses a 17th century trader’s token he has found in the dirt into his bucket.

“Remember it’s all about getting your eye in,” says Brooker, who, armed with little more than a trowel, gloves, obligatory boots and an infectious enthusiasm has been combing the foreshore for antiquities for the past 20 years.

Traders’ tokens were issued by local merchants during and after the English Civil War (1642-1651) as a form of small change at a time when lower denominations of the realm were out of circulation. Preserved by the oxygen-free mud, the tiny copper-alloy farthing bears the name Thomas Lowe of Three Nuns Alley.

The other side of the coin is stamped with the figures of three nuns and is later traced to a merchant’s house in a long-lost narrow lane that now lies buried deep somewhere beneath Threadneedle Street, home to the Bank of England.

“You can smell the history down here — it’s everywhere,” he says as we disappear from view for a guided tour under the cavernous quay supports of Old Billingsgate Fish Market, an ancient place associated with the trade of all manner of goods, including seafood, since medieval times.

Brooker, 49, a larger than life character — he is 6 feet 6 inches tall — is no ordinary beachcomber however.

He is one of only 45 members of the Society of Thames Mudlarks who are licensed by the Port of London Authority to search the northern shore between Westminster, the seat of government, in the west of the old city and the Tower of London in the east. …

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Alana Goodman in Contentions writes on the continuation of Gitmo trials.

This was predictable, considering the comments from Robert Gates and Eric Holder recently, but it still has to be a bit of an embarrassing moment for President Obama. Two years after Obama signed (with much fanfare) an order to shutter Guantanamo Bay detention center, he’s now approved an order to resume military tribunals at the prison: …

More on Guantanamo from Pejman Yousefzadeh.

One of the points made by Donald Rumsfeld in his book, and in the book talk that I attended, is that for all of the controversy surrounding the detention of terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay, no one, when pressed, has found a better, more workable option than to house detainees there. To be sure, no one feels warm and fuzzy about the fact that the United States is keeping these suspects in detention, and in his book, Rumsfeld points out that it was never his desire to have the Department of Defense involved in detention policy, and that he sought, whenever he could, to reduce the prison population in Guantanamo Bay by relocating the prisoners. From the outset, the Defense Department was uncomfortable with the prospect of having the United States serve as the jailer of hundreds of terrorism suspects.

But as imperfect as Guantanamo Bay was–and is–as a detention locale, it remains better than all of the alternative locations considered during Rumsfeld’s time, and those considered after George W. Bush left office. For these reasons, in his book, Rumsfeld calls Guantanamo Bay “the least worst place” to house detainees.

Barack Obama campaigned, and came to office on the promise that he would close Guantanamo Bay. But the third year of his Presidency has commenced, and we are no closer to closing the detention facility there. Quite the contrary; the Obama Administration has actually reaffirmed, and increased its reliance on Guantanamo Bay as a detention locale:

David Harsanyi picks up on the public broadcasting flap.

… Sen. Barbara Boxer recently claimed that House Republicans were intent on stripping funding for government-supported entertainment because they have a “vendetta against Elmo.” (They might. After two years of living with a Tickle Me Elmo doll, I certainly do.) Does anyone believe that the marketplace wouldn’t or couldn’t provide sufficiently irritating muppet programming for the millions of kids without the government’s help? As anyone who purchases basic cable television knows, the demand for newscasts, kids’ shows, documentaries, nature programs, etc., is amply met.

The function and purpose of government has been rather expansive over the past few decades. Do we really believe that providing tax subsidizes for entertainment and journalism is one of the charges of government? The argument may have held up in the past, but in today’s world it simply doesn’t.

Roger Simon posts on the protocols of the elders of NPR.

… Lost in a delusional world of political correctness, the elders of NPR have forfeited the ability to think critically. They simply can’t see the facts anymore — or don’t care to. It’s too threatening to their limited weltanschauung. Hence, you get idiotic projections such as Schiller’s statement of how dumb Republicans are and how what America needs is more educated elites.

That they all sat there through the worst kind of anti-Semitic bilge that would make even George Soros and Pat Buchanan blush is as predictable as it is sickening.

What is needed now is not just the defunding of NPR, but also its marginalization. And one of the best ways to marginalize is through well-deserved ridicule. The authors of this video at Project Veritas are thus greatly to be praised. Yes, what they have done is a form of entrapment, but the fools who were trapped deserve it as much as any knave in a Moliere play. NPR and its clones are the true reactionaries of our time. They are no more liberal than Boss Tweed. Taking off their masks is a public service.

Pickerhead worked in Michigan factories to pay for college and was a member, and a shop steward, of a UAW local so he knows the truth of what Thomas Sowell says about unions.

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians. …

… To unions, workers are just the raw material used to create union power, just as iron ore is the raw material used by U.S. Steel and bauxite is the raw material used by the Aluminum Company of America.

The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers. … 

Hugh Hewitt speculates on the 2012 senate race in Ohio.

Josh Mandel is a 33-year-old veteran of the Iraq War, where he served two tours while a U.S. Marine. Mandel is a graduate of the Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve Law School. He served two terms in the Ohio legislature.

Mandel is also the treasurer of the state of Ohio, having garnered more than 2 million votes last November. He is married to a beautiful wife whom he wed in Jerusalem in 2008. He is Jewish. He is a Republican.

Mandel has almost inexhaustible energy, a voracious appetite for news and history, and is a compelling stump speaker. His Web site is JoshMandel.com. Josh Mandel is Sen. Sherrod Brown’s worst nightmare.

Brown is a Democratic senator from Ohio who spent the past three days climbing out of the hole he dug on the Senate floor …

Shorts from National Review.

Bill Clinton violated every standard of civil discourse — red-faced with rage, finger wagging, viciously smearing his opponents, lying and suborning lies — and so naturally has been selected to co-chair a new national institute on civil discourse, along with George H. W. Bush. Bill Clinton famously tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh, so it makes a sort of perverted sense that he would jump on a project rooted in Democrats’ cynical attempt to pin the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by an addled psychopath on tea-party protesters and their colorful signs. Meanwhile Democrats, who obviously have not yet availed themselves of the benefits to be had from this new bipartisan national treasure, are parading around Wisconsin waving Hitler signs and calling openly for the murder of Gov. Scott Walker, without a peep of criticism from Clinton — or from President Obama, whose only comment on the situation so far has been to cheer them merrily on. Bill Clinton was a lucky president in mostly happy years, and has been a rash on the body politic ever since.

Here’s another profile in civility: Tom Luna, the Republican superintendent of Idaho public schools, recently introduced an education-reform bill to the state legislature. The legislation gradually eliminates tenure, erodes seniority privileges, and increases the number of charter schools — all of which teachers’ unions dread. In response, they’ve gone Wisconsin on Luna. One thousand people protested the bill outside the state capitol. Hundreds of students walked out of class. A teacher showed up at Luna’s mother’s home to register his dissatisfaction. And one particularly thuggish opponent vandalized Luna’s car, slashing its tires and painting graffiti on its side. “I think Luna’s probably getting the clue that . . . we’re all against it,” one student told the Idaho station KTVB. He is certainly getting an education about the nature of the unions.

Robert Samuelson wishes to make a point about Social Security.

… We don’t call Social Security “welfare” because it’s a pejorative term and politicians don’t want to offend. So they classify Social Security as something else, when it isn’t. Here’s how I define a welfare program: first, it taxes one group to support another group, meaning it’s pay-as-you-go and not a contributory scheme where people’s own savings pay their later benefits; and second, Congress can constantly alter benefits, reflecting changing needs, economic conditions, and politics. Social Security qualifies on both counts. …

Joel Kotkin mines more from the census. 

The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America’s cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city’s surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.

To date the Census shows that  growth in America’s large core cities has slowed, and in some cases even reversed. This has happened both in great urban centers such as Chicago and in the long-distressed inner cities of St. Louis, Baltimore, Wilmington, Del., and Birmingham, Ala.

This would surely come as a surprise to many reporters infatuated with growth in downtown districts, notably in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and elsewhere. For them, good restaurants, bars and clubs trump everything. A recent Newsweek article, for example, recently acknowledged Chicago’s demographic and fiscal decline but then lavishly praised the city, and its inner city for becoming “finally hip.”

Sure, being cool is nice, but the obsession with hipness often means missing a bigger story: the gradual diminution of the urban core as engines for job creation. …

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Paul Johnson, British historian is interviewed by WSJ. He says our country will be OK

… “Of course I worry about America,” he says. “The whole world depends on America ultimately, particularly Britain. And also, I love America—a marvelous country. But in a sense I don’t worry about America because I think America has such huge strengths—particularly its freedom of thought and expression—that it’s going to survive as a top nation for the foreseeable future. And therefore take care of the world.”

Pessimists, he points out, have been predicting America’s decline “since the 18th century.” But whenever things are looking bad, America “suddenly produces these wonderful things—like the tea party movement. That’s cheered me up no end. Because it’s done more for women in politics than anything else—all the feminists? Nuts! It’s brought a lot of very clever and quite young women into mainstream politics and got them elected. A very good little movement, that. I like it.” …

… His concern with the human dimension of history is reflected as well in his attitude toward humor, the subject of another recent book, “Humorists.” “The older I get,” he tells me, “the more important I think it is to stress jokes.” Which is another reason he loves America. “One of the great contributions that America has made to civilization,” he deadpans, “is the one-liner.” The one-liner, he says, was “invented, or at any rate brought to the forefront, by Benjamin Franklin.” Mark Twain’s were the “greatest of all.”

And then there was Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan had thousands of one-liners.” Here a grin spreads across Mr. Johnson’s face: “That’s what made him a great president.”

Jokes, he argues, were a vital communication tool for President Reagan “because he could illustrate points with them.” Mr. Johnson adopts a remarkable vocal impression of America’s 40th president and delivers an example: “You know, he said, ‘I’m not too worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.’” Recovering from his own laughter, he adds: “Of course, that’s an excellent one-liner, but it’s also a perfectly valid economic point.” Then his expression grows serious again and he concludes: “You don’t get that from Obama. He talks in paragraphs.” …

IBD editors look over the GOP contenders and see no obvious candidate and they like that.

… A weak field? We can’t imagine any of them bowing to a foreign leader or public-sector unions. And we remember 1980 when Democrats couldn’t wait to run against Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom they dismissed as a likable but unelectable former actor.

Instead of agonizing over who can be elected, Republicans need to realize one of their own, perhaps even a name not now being considered, must be elected. Maybe none of these candidates is the next Reagan, but what’s clear is that this nation cannot afford four more years of the second Jimmy Carter.

Last month the federal government had the worst monthly deficit ever. Imagine what they could have done if it wasn’t a short month? These guys in DC, they’re good!

According to press reports, the federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at $223 billion, according to preliminary numbers the Congressional Budget Office released this morning. Matt Drudge does us the service of linking to an October 5, 2007, story that reported that the “Congressional Budget Office estimated … that the U.S. federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2007, which ended Sunday, was about $161 billion, or 1.2% of gross domestic product.”

In other words, the FY 2007 deficit for the year was $62 billion lower than the deficit for last month. And to make matters worse, President Obama, rather than reining in federal spending, is adding mightily to it.

On the fiscal side of things, Barack Obama is turning out to be a record-setter, though not in the way he or we had wanted.

From The Corner we learn Charles Krauthammer is writing a book.

It’s hard to think of a more important contemporary standard-bearer of American fusionist conservatism — small-government domestic policy coupled with a muscular and liberty-advancing presence abroad — than Dr. Charles Krauthammer. Over the last two-plus decades, he has been an almost singularly influential columnist; and of late, he’s also been a ubiquitous cable-news presence, with a rare complement of insights that makes him equally comfortable proffering ground-level political analysis and grand first principles. Perhaps rarer still is that he is widely respected by both the Right and the Left — he has made frequent contributions to The New Republic, and Bill Clinton recently called him “brilliant.” A Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award winner, Dr. Krauthammer is by all appearances at the peak of his powers, which makes the sole lacuna in his formidable résumé somewhat jarring: He has never written a book-length work of original material.

But that’s set to change. This morning, Crown Forum will announce that Krauthammer is working on a new book, set for release in the months ahead of the 2012 elections, detailing his prescription of a “minimalist domestic policy” and realist-grounded democracy promotion abroad as the way forward for an America limping through the second (and perhaps last) decade of its unipolar moment. …

The importance of Krauthammer made Pickerhead think of David Brooks whose mind has turned to mush. He has a new book out, a review of which is here tonight. First though, we have a Brooks column from February seven years ago. Bush the Younger had just been interviewed by Tim Russert and Brooks columned on how Bush could have articulated his views better.

Like most of us, President Bush doesn’t have the facility for perfectly expressing his situation in conversation. But if he did, he might have said something like this to Tim Russert in the interview broadcast Sunday:

President Bush: Tim, I know I’m repeating myself, but I am a war president. Do you remember how you felt on Sept. 12, 2001? Do you remember the incredible sense of shock, sadness, anger and pride, all welling up into a consuming sense of urgency? That’s how I still feel every day.

I wake up every morning and get briefed about the terrorist threats that menace this country. I read about terrorists in Iraq who murder doctors and teachers so they can abort freedom. I wake up every morning and stare into the hole where civilization used to be.

I have staked the security of this nation on two propositions; this election will be about whether those propositions are true. The first is that the war on terror means we have to escalate our alert status. We cannot wait for our enemies to launch their attacks because we are a nation already at war. We cannot wait for countries like France, China and Russia to see things our way because we are a nation at war.

I made a decision that we would take the fight to the enemy every day, and that every sin we would commit — and we would inevitably commit some — would be a sin of commission, not a sin of omission. We would not repeat the mistakes of the previous decade. …

… I do feel called upon to use American power to help create a freer world.

I could lose this election. I don’t know whether the American people are with me or not. But I know our hair-trigger reputation has jolted dictators in Libya, North Korea and elsewhere. I know that if in 20 years Iraq is free and the Arab world is progressing toward normalcy, no one will doubt that I did the right thing.

Here is Newsweek’s review of Brooks’ book. You will see why he no longer spends much time on our pages.

Seated in a booth at Equinox, a generically posh restaurant across the street from his office in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, David Brooks seems shy for a public figure—someone who would rather talk about his heroes Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton than himself. At other tables, men in suits talk in loud voices; Brooks talks in a soft voice, and is wearing a gray sweater, no tie. His media persona, the ubiquitous commentator you see on television, popping up after State of the Union speeches to analyze the president’s performance, is nowhere in evidence. The self-assured columnist we read in the Times has been supplanted by a nervous author preparing for the reception of his new book, The Social Animal. A mint copy had just arrived that morning with no blurbs on the back, only a brief description of the contents adapted from the text. “I don’t think blurbs do much good. I just wanted to explain the book.”

There’s a lot to explain. The book’s subtitle—The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement—conveys its ambition. Brooks’s first two books, Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, were acutely witty satires of a social group whose name he coined: bobos, or “bourgeois bohemians,” the “affluent educated class” that frequents “gourmet coffeehouses” and issues corporate reports “with quotations from Émile Zola.” The books are smart—Brooks is a shrewd anthropologist of this fanciful type—and hugely entertaining. But they lack gravitas. The Social Animal is of a whole other order: authoritative, impressively learned, and vast in scope.

Its thesis can be stated simply: who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. …

Your indulgence please as we look at what Car Lust Blog calls the first SUV, the Jeep Wagon. Pickerhead learned to drive in one of these. When 14 years old, permission was granted to use the Jeep to take sails to the boat. So some summer days I went sailing three or four times! Perhaps David Brooks would say that is why an Escalade is in my garage. Ours had a steering-column mounted three speed manual transmission. Occasionally it would stick in 1st gear. The fix was to open the hood and pry the linkage loose with a monster screw driver we kept in the car. My mother was proud of the times she would do this in front of an audience of open-mouthed friends. 

… I hereby posit that pride of place as The First SUV goes to Willys-Overland. In the late 1940s, they came out with a wagon-ish version of their famous Jeep that was directly aimed at a consumer rather than commercial market: The Jeep Station Wagon. Besides being a consumer vehicle, it seems to me to also have those key attributes that anyone today would recognize as An SUV. Later, they even tried to broaden the reach of this new class they had invented and, arguably, produced the first crossover SUV, the Jeepster. …

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David Harsanyi contemplates a Trump run.

Our nation, fractured and beleaguered, can finally embrace a moment of consensus. From Tea Party to union activists to undecided moderates, we must demand Donald Trump run for president.

Trump, as you’ve no doubt heard, is actively pretending to dip his loafers into the pool of Republican presidential hopefuls. And if conservatives — nay, all Americans — are yearning for anything in politics, it’s a mogul celebrity without a coherent ideological viewpoint but with malleable political values and a reality show.

The Donald, if I may — and actually, I must, because like you, I feel I know the man — has been a ubiquitous pontificator on policy issues these days. Regis and Kelly, Rush Limbaugh, you name it. Of course, Trump has never shied away from unleashing blunt nuggets of wisdom, like the time he reportedly claimed, “Everything in life is luck.”

If you listen to Trump talk for more than a few minutes. you will be forced to concede this statement must, in fact, be true. …

Continuing with nonsense, Dilbert blogs on Charlie Sheen.

I met Charlie Sheen a few years ago, on the set of his show, Two and a Half Men. The writers made a few references to Dilbert in an episode, and that turned into an invitation for Shelly and me to come down and watch the taping.

Charlie was very friendly, and acted as though he was familiar with Dilbert. I often tell the story of Charlie doing a head-to-toe visual assessment of my wife from four feet away. He wasn’t kidding around. Just curious, I guess. Somehow he made it seem normal.

In my two minutes of interaction with Charlie, I got the strangest vibe from him. There was something extraordinarily deep, or maybe dark, or intense, about him. You often hear it said of celebrities “He’s so normal.” I didn’t get a normal vibe from Charlie. Not even close. It wasn’t a crazy vibe, or a drug vibe. It just wasn’t anything I’ve seen before. It was haunting. …

Wanna know how Washington works? Tim Carney shows how lobbyists have captured “green’ initiatives.

Environmental policy is not driven by tree-hugging activists, earnest liberal bloggers, or ecologically minded citizens. Instead, it flows from the lobbyists and executives of well-connected multinational corporations and built-for-subsidy startups that see profit in the loan guarantees, handouts, mandates, and tax credits Congress creates in the name of saving the planet.

K Street is the epicenter of this green-industrial complex, and ground zero might be the firm founded by Democratic revolving-door earmark lobbyist Steve McBee.

McBee, a former top staffer for Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and powerful House Appropriations Committee member Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., reportedly wrote key provisions in the stimulus bill to open the spigot of green corporate welfare. Also, he has hired up the Capitol Hill staff at the center of big environmental legislative pushes like cap and trade.

Exploring corporate lobbyists’ central role in Obama’s “green energy” push provides us two important lessons. First, it reveals as hypocritical the Democratic attack that opponents of cap and trade and other green policies are simply shills for big business. …

We have more to make you cringe thinking about “green” folks. The LA Times follows the career of Larry Eisenberg, the man picked to oversee a $6 Billion construction program at Los Angeles Community Colleges. His bad luck was he was selling his snake oil to college presidents well grounded in reality. He should have called on the Ivy League, or maybe signed on to the present administration.

… Eisenberg, now 59, grew up in Sun Valley, the son of a TV repairman and a secretary for the probation department. He was student body president of North Hollywood High School and became the first member of his family to attend college. He earned a bachelor’s degree in urban studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s in public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

After a succession of jobs managing public buildings in Wisconsin, Eisenberg was hired in 1993 as facilities chief for Washington County, Ore., which encompasses suburbs of Portland.

In 1995, he and his wife, Christine, filed for personal bankruptcy, listing assets of $236,000 and liabilities of $262,000. Most of the debt, aside from their home loan, was to credit-card companies; they also owed $21,000 in back taxes. The bankruptcy case was closed after the couple completed a payment plan in 1999.

Eisenberg ran into difficulties at his job as well.

His boss, Bob Davis, “wanted to get rid of Larry because of mismanagement,” Washington County Commissioner Andy Duyck said in an interview. Duyck said he did not know the reason for Davis’ displeasure, and Davis, the county administrator, declined to comment.

Eisenberg recalled that Davis “let me know he was unhappy” with his job performance. He depicted it as a clash of management styles: Davis’ was conservative, while his own was creative and entrepreneurial, Eisenberg said.

“I’m not risk-averse,” Eisenberg said. “In retrospect, maybe they think they should have gotten rid of me sooner.”

Eisenberg left the Oregon job in August 2003 to become head of facilities and new construction for the Los Angeles college district. He acknowledged that he had not told district officials about his bankruptcy. He said it had no bearing on his professional life.

Eisenberg was put in charge of the campus construction program, one of California’s largest public works projects.

A mandate from the district’s Board of Trustees to incorporate renewable power into new buildings offered him a chance to make his name as a leader in green construction.

He was tireless in promoting the program’s eco-friendly aspects, traveling at taxpayer expense to Zurich, Switzerland, to speak at a conference of the International Sustainable Campus Network. He made similar presentations in New Orleans, Seattle and Atlanta.

His advocacy had a messianic tinge. In one e-mail to his advisors, he described his renewable-energy agenda as “what the world needs now. No one else is doing it. We can and will.”

The trustees encouraged Eisenberg’s push for green energy, even as his plan grew steadily more ambitious. They liked the idea of freeing the colleges from dependence on fossil fuels and were content to leave the practical details to him.

But Eisenberg’s enthusiasm obscured an inconvenient reality: With the technology now available, the cost of renewable power exceeds that of energy derived from burning coal and natural gas.

Green energy advocates often argue that the added cost is justified by the reduction in pollution, particularly carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

Eisenberg talked up the environmental benefits of his plan. But he also insisted that it would cost less than continuing to rely on conventional sources of electricity. Private investors, he explained, would put up almost all the money in order to take advantage of tax breaks, and they would pass the savings on to the district.

In the end, he said, government subsidies would reduce the district’s purchase and installation costs as much as 90%.

One thing was for sure: No matter how it was financed, the bill for all those solar panels and wind turbines would be huge. Eisenberg’s cost estimates for taking the nine campuses off the grid ranged as high as $975 million — this for a college system that in 2010 spent less than $8 million on power bills. …

A serious look at the cause of baby dolphin deaths ends up dwelling on randy dolphins. Planet Gore of NRO is responsible.

… Like most Hollywood stars, dolphins aren’t as cute in real life as they are on the silver screen. They make Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan look like model citizens, since, as Slate reports, they’re prone to murder baby dolphins and their close relative, the porpoise, as well as to rape and sexually harass.

Not just other dolphins, either. Gossip tabs report that Demi Moore had a close encounter, as did Jessica Alba while filming the remake of Flipper. Said Alba to MTV:  ““I don’t know if anybody knows this but dolphins get excited, even when you are a human being — and they have long, long.#…#I didn’t know this until I was being poked by a few of them, which was very rude. I think I learned my lesson. I sort of request female dolphins after that because those are horny little b*******.” …

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Mark Steyn reacts to the strange reaction to last week’s attack on American airmen in Germany.

According to Bismarck’s best-known maxim on Europe’s most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.

Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did — and without any pesky U.N. resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them. Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And the Left didn’t mind at all —  because, for a modern Western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Unlike Iraq and all its supposed “blood for oil,” in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called “liberal interventionism,” which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.

A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling “Allahu akbar!” The strange shrunken spectator who serves as president of the United States, offering what he called “a few words about the tragic event that took place,” announced that he was “saddened,” and expressed his “gratitude for the service of those who were lost” and would “spare no effort” to “work with the German authorities” but it was a “stark reminder” of the “extraordinary sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making . . . ”

The passivity of these remarks is very telling. …

George Will takes a look at two of the GOP’s embarrassments; Huckabee and Gingrich. 

… Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.

Speaking of embarrassments, Paul Krugman gets a once over from the Streetwise Professor.

Paul Krugman is obsessed with Texas. He repeatedly attacks the state, primarily because it has chosen to cut spending to address its budget shortfalls, rather than raising taxes.  This is an anathema to Krugman, so he lambastes the state repeatedly.

As an I-got-here-as-soon-as-I-could Texan, Krugman’s antipathy is actually a badge of honor.  And he adds to the pride with his most recent column.  Perhaps in anticipation of Texas Independence Day (yesterday, 2 March), on Monday Krugman launched an all-out assault.  His main target was Texas schools: …

Charlie Cook looks at the race for the GOP nod. 

Consider yourself clairvoyant if you can correctly predict who is going to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The race is that wide open.

In most years, Republicans tap the person whose “turn” it is to be the party’s standard-bearer, and that individual’s identity is often known long before the start of the primary and caucus season. This time, the race looks different. One could argue that it is former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s turn because she was the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008. Or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s turn because he won the Iowa caucus last time around. Or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s turn because he was eventual nominee John McCain’s toughest rival in 2008. But none of those arguments is particularly convincing.

In most years, current and former U.S. senators are grossly overrepresented in presidential fields. But with the announcement by Sen. John Thune of South Dakota that he isn’t going to run, it appears no sitting GOP senator will enter the race. …

Jay Cost in The Weekly Standard Blog takes a look at the unemployment rate and what it might mean for the president’s re-election – not much.

This item from Reuters caught my eye:

“With a leading Republican candidate yet to emerge, the biggest risk to President Barack Obama’s quest for a second term next year is a jobless rate that has hovered between 9 and 10 percent for months.

Friday’s jobless report is expected to show nonfarm payrolls soared in February by 185,000 jobs, but the overall unemployment rate is nonetheless expected to edge up to 9.1 percent…

Analysts say the jobless rate needs to drop below 8 percent by autumn 2012 for voters to feel optimistic about the economy — and Obama’s handling of it — when they go to the polls that November.”

This notion — that 8 percent is a magic threshold — has been making the rounds of late. It has absolutely no basis in established fact. None whatsoever. It is pure speculation. Here’s why: …

Michael Barone wants to know why taxpayers are funding the Dems.

Everyone has priorities. During the past week Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people.

But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”

Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle. …

Jennifer Rubin interviews Andrew Ferguson about his book on a parent’s view of the college admission process.

Andy Ferguson of the Weekly Standard has written a whimsical and fascinating book, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College. It has received superlative reviews including one from The Post. I confess my bias since Andy is a friend, but in this case the reviews don’t quite capture Andy’s ability to combine parental angst with serious sociological analysis. It’s also, as is all of Andy’s writing, a great and funny read.

Andy was good enough to take time to do a Q and A with him. As you will see, even his answers are funny:

1. At what part in your nightmarish experience did you decide to write the book?

It happened pretty early on — early on for our family anyway. (I soon discovered that for some families “early on” in the college admissions process means “third grade.”) These voluptuous brochures began appearing in our mailbox addressed to my 16-year-old son — gorgeous albums of color photographs printed on paper as thick and slick as a leaf from a rubber plant. He was being solicited by schools as shamelessly as a sailor in dry dock. Soon we had hundreds of these “viewbooks” sloshing around the house. It was hard evidence of something I’d heard about but never seen firsthand: that college admissions had become absurdly elaborate, expensive, competitive and overthought.

And it was something that could only happen in America. You don’t see this in Canada or France or England. Here there’s a perfect storm of national traits, if you’ll forgive the cliché, that create the college madness: financial wealth, class insecurity, the promise of social mobility, unabashed commercialism, professional ambition, a kind of deep-seated utilitarianism and of course — the truly lethal ingredient — our doting love for our children. I liked the idea that the process was uniquely American in its excess and insanity, and I liked the idea that it was totally puzzling — nobody could tell me how things got so far out of hand. So I decided to find out for myself. . 

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Krauthammer at his most ironic.

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Hussein’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Gaddafi’s. Gaddafi is a capricious killer; Hussein was systematic. Gaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a “Republic of Fear.”

Moreover, that systemized brutality made Hussein immovable in a way that Gaddafi is not. Barely armed Libyans have already seized half the country on their own. Yet in Iraq, there was no chance of putting an end to the regime without the terrible swift sword (it took all of three weeks) of the United States.

No matter the hypocritical double standard. Now that revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda, it’s not just Iraq that has slid into the memory hole. Also forgotten is the once proudly proclaimed “realism” of Years One and Two of President Obama’s foreign policy – the “smart power” antidote to Bush’s alleged misty-eyed idealism. …

IBD editors remind us of the value of our stand in Iraq.

Italian Prime Minister Sergio Berlusconi, in a September 2003 interview, said Gadhafi told him: “I will do whatever the United States wants, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.”

Mark Helprin on our missing warships.

… We have the smallest navy in almost a century, declining in the past 50 years to 286 from 1,000 principal combatants. Apologists may cite typical postwar diminutions, but the ongoing 17% reduction from 1998 to the present applies to a navy that unlike its wartime predecessors was not previously built up. These are reductions upon reductions. Nor can there be comfort in the fact that modern ships are more capable, for so are the ships of potential opponents. And even if the capacity of a whole navy could be packed into a small number of super ships, they could be in only a limited number of places at a time, and the loss of just a few of them would be catastrophic.

The overall effect of recent erosions is illustrated by the fact that 60 ships were commonly underway in America’s seaward approaches in 1998, but today—despite opportunities for the infiltration of terrorists, the potential of weapons of mass destruction, and the ability of rogue nations to sea-launch intermediate and short-range ballistic missiles—there are only 20.

As China’s navy rises and ours declines, not that far in the future the trajectories will cross. …

Evelyn Gordon explains why Israelis might be apprehensive.

Max finds it incomprehensible that many Israelis are fearful, even unhappy, over the changes sweeping our region. So as an Israeli, let me explain.

Over the past two decades, Israelis have lived through numerous regional changes, each of which, we were confidently assured — by both our own leaders and the West — would benefit us greatly. And in every single case, the change only made things worse. …

David Goldman continues to be concerned about Egypt.

… In 2009 Egypt imported $56 billion of goods but exported only $29 billion. The difference was made up by tourism, other services, foreign aid and borrowing. Even if we presume that Egypt can increase its foreign aid from other powers anxious to avoid instability, the Saudis, for example, it is hard to see how the numbers will add up. With 40 million people living on less than $2 a day, an economic disruption implies not just misery, but life-threatening misery.

Stability seems the least likely outcome. And that means that risk perceptions should keep rising.

Thomas Sowell points out the problems maintaining a government of limited powers.

… Today, we take universal literacy for granted. But literacy has not been universal, across all segments of the American population during all of the 20th century. Illiteracy was the norm in Albania as recently as the 1920s and in India in the second half of the 20th century.

Bare literacy is just one of the things needed to make democracy viable. Without a sense of responsible citizenship, voters can elect leaders who are not merely incompetent or corrupt, but even leaders with contempt for the Constitutional limitations on government power that preserve the people’s freedom.

We already have such a leader in the White House– and a succession of such leaders may demonstrate that the viability of freedom and democracy can by no means be taken for granted here.

Michael Barone addresses the possible reasons people vote on principles not pocketbooks.

It’s a question that puzzles most liberals and bothers some conservatives. Why are so many modest-income white voters rejecting the Obama Democrats’ policies of economic redistribution and embracing the small-government policies of the Tea Party movement?

It’s not supposed to work out that way, say the political scientists and New Deal historians. Politics is supposed to be about who gets how much when, and people with modest incomes should be eager to take as much from the rich as they can get. …

From The Corner we learn Eric Holder’s slip was showing.

As a litigation attorney I learned that, no matter how well prepared a witness may be, he will often make revealing admissions if he becomes flustered or angry. That happened yesterday as Attorney General Eric Holder testified before a House Commerce subcommittee chaired by Rep. Frank Wolf.  …

John Stossel discusses his stutter.

Because “The King’s Speech,” a movie about King George’s effort to overcome stuttering, won the Oscar for best picture, reporters have been interviewing me about my stuttering.

Some ask why they don’t hear me stutter on TV. Others wonder why a stutterer is on TV in the first place. Here’s my explanation. Since I was a child, my stuttering has come and gone. Sometimes I was sure the problem had disappeared — then it would return with such a vengeance I’d fear saying anything. I’d stay silent in class. I avoided parties. When I was old enough to date, sometimes I’d telephone a girl and try to speak, but nothing would come out. I’d just hang up. Now, because of caller ID, stutterers can’t do that.

I never planned on a career in TV. …