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John Podhoretz blogs about a New Yorker piece from Ryan Lizza that will be getting a lot of attention. In it we learn about the White House strategy of “leading from behind.”

The most-discussed article of the week will surely be Ryan Lizza’s report on the development of the Obama foreign policy in the New Yorker, called “The Consequentialist.” The notable quote in the piece comes at the end:

“One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength.”

The crystallizing phrase “leading from behind” may not be something you’ll see on a sign at the 2012 Democratic convention, but it will almost certainly be in the acceptance speech of the nominee of the Republican party at its 2012 convention, and will be thrown in Obama’s face during the presidential debates by his GOP rival, and will be the centerpiece of the critique of Obamaism going forward. It’s so revealing, in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House goes on a hunt to find the person who said it in order to defenestrate him before he does more colossal damage to his boss’s chances of reelection.

More to come on this unexpectedly revealing article later today. Leading from behind. Hoo boy.

John Steele Gordon comments on the Podhoretz post.

When a presidential adviser is quoted in the New Yorker as using an allusion to a comic figure of fun in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to describe Obama’s foreign policy approach, the White House must know it’s in trouble.

The first person to be described as “leading from behind,” at least as far as I know, was the Duke of Plaza-Toro in  The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan’s last great success. The Duke explains that when he was in the army he occasionally led his regiment into action and “invariably led them out of it.”…

Michael Rubin starts out by having some fun, but then makes some excellent points about what should guide foreign policy.

John makes some astute comments regarding Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine. It’s just too easy to poke fun at the concept of “Leading from Behind,” so excuse me as my tongue goes fully into cheek.  Just as Barack Obama’s election led to the renaming of a handful of elementary schools, perhaps in the spirit of “Leading from Behind,” it’s time to embrace the Obama enthusiasm and recast other concepts.  …Don’t call Deepwater Horizon an oil spill: It was simply “greasing from below.”  We miss a debt payment? That’s “Financing from Behind.” Back in 1992, I got a D in an organic chemistry test. At the time, I was concerned. Now, I realize I should not have been. I was simply learning “behind the curve.” I’d certainly love to play poker with President Obama one day, because while other players might seek a full house or, at least three-of-a-kind, our president might “gamble from behind” and instead settle for a pair of threes.

More seriously, while President Obama may believe that the U.S. is reviled in much of the world, a lesson I learned from years crisscrossing the Middle East and, more broadly, Africa and Asia, is that when it comes to American policy, other nations will criticize us no matter what we do. We are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” In such circumstances, the best thing to do is to worry less about what people might think, and simply do what we think is right. There is a State Department corollary to this which became apparent during the Cold War, in the run-up to the Operation Iraqi Freedom, and many times since. Perhaps instead of seeking to change American policies to win plaudits in their countries of residence, American diplomats would be better served arguing and defending American policies, leaving no criticism unanswered.

Rick Richman blogs about more instances of “leading from behind.”

In his article “The Consequentialist” in this week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza reported the White House reaction to State Department staffer Jared Cohen, who contacted Twitter during the peak of the Green Revolution in Iran and asked it to delay its planned upgrade. Protesters were using Twitter to provide information to the international media, and the upgrade would have temporarily shut down Twitter. Lizza reported that:

White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. . . . The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.” …

Peter Wehner picks up on another quote from Ryan Lizza’s article.

Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article is every bit as devastating as John says. Among the more damning quotes is this one:

[Zbigniew] Brzezinski, too, has become disillusioned with the President. “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.”

The same people who helped give us the four awful years of the Carter presidency now feel confident enough to stand in judgment of Mr. Obama (and for sermonizing instead of strategizing, no less!).

Things are quickly heading south for the president.

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article about Obama’s intelligence.

…I hate to be prosaic about this, but what is the evidence that Obama is a complex guy? ( None of the three gurus have met or actually diagnosed him, of course, and I’d bet, just a wild guess here, that they are liberal Democrats who just think he is swell.)

After all, Obama has not blazed new political or policy trails as Bill Clinton did. He’s written no scholarly books (sorry, memoirs don’t count). His understanding of the Middle East has been so slight and his strategy so misguided that there are no Israeli -Palestinian peace talks, and we have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping the hegemonic aspirations of Iran. I mean, isn’t it just as likely that Obama’s a garden-variety liberal with poor decision-making skills?

…In Obama’s case we’re told similar lines. He’s so darn smart. He’s such a detailed-oriented guy. He’s really too complex for his own good. Come to think of it, this is what they said about Jimmy Carter. Could it be that it wasn’t too much intellect but not enough smarts (street smarts, people smarts, executive smarts) that’s the problem?

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph, UK, also has criticism.

…As the Libya campaign enters its seventh week, with Britain and France playing the leading roles, US leadership is dramatically absent. On Syria, where the Baathist regime is brutally suppressing democracy protestors, killing large numbers in the process, Washington remains largely paralysed while its dangerous strategy of engagement with the Assad regime continues. On the Middle East as a whole, the Obama administration barely has a coherent big picture strategy, hardly an advertisement for what it calls its “smart power” approach. In reality the Obama doctrine represents little more than the humbling of a superpower, and the stunning abdication of US leadership in an increasingly dangerous world. As I noted previously, America badly needs another Reagan-style revolution, not only to rebuild its economic might, but also to restore its standing in the world.

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm looks at the accumulating public relations stumbles from the White House.

…What the public sees, while it frets over stubborn unemployment and soaring gas prices, is a diffident Democrat who takes a 17-vehicle motorcade of SUVs and limos to be seen looking at clean-energy cars.

A pontificating president who suggests that one worried commuter buy a new car instead of complaining. …

…here’s a selection of other Obama activities scheduled this week: Wednesday he and wife Michelle fly to Chicago on Air Force One. They will be there for three hours. The sole purpose: to tape an Oprah show. Obama will then fly to New York City. The sole purpose: a political fundraiser.

Air Force One costs the government $181,000 an hour to operate. …

David Harsanyi comments that the green bureaucrats are winning, the price of gas is going to European levels.

…The left’s “energy” initiatives of the past decade — the entire purpose of energy policy, in fact — have been aimed at artificially driving fossil fuel prices up to incentivize the bitter clingers to embrace the government’s Utopian energy schemes. No secret has been made of it. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked by CNBC’s John Harwood, “So could the (high) oil prices help us?” Obama: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Sudden spikes are bad (politically speaking), but gradual price spikes? Helpful. That same year, current U.S. “Energy” Secretary (then just a zany professor) Steven Chu clarified that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

Who says this administration doesn’t get things done?

…Let’s not forget the Environmental Protection Agency, which, as we speak, is in the process of rolling out the “the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history,” according to Time magazine. Using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases — so, all useful energy — the EPA is trying to initiate cap and trade by fiat. It has to because even a Democratic monopoly in Washington was unable to muster the courage to launch this kind of assault on prosperity. …

In Pajamas Media, Will Collier says the economics behind increasing gas prices are simple. It’s worth looking at the graph and reading Collier relate how Bush increased drilling and oil prices plummeted.

It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts, and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.

Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.

Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline. …

In the Beltway Confidential – Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott picks up on Will Collier’s piece.

…Check out the chart that accompanies this post. Notice what happened on July 14, 2008? Oil prices suddenly plummeted from their historic high of $145 a barrel. Why?

Because that was the day President George W. Bush signed an executive order lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Overnight, the price per barrel of oil plunged, and that plunge was reflected at the pump soon thereafter.

In other words, Obama could with the stroke of a pen sign an executive order telling his appointees at EPA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy to stop throwing up obstacles to increased U.S. oil and natural gas production and instead work with the energy industry on a crash program to “drill here, drill now.” …

John Fund updates us on 2012.

…Mr. Daniels has told reporters that he is close to a decision and promises that if he does run he will boast an endorsement list and fund-raising contacts that “will blow people’s socks off.”

Mr. Barbour’s departure leaves the race without a clear Southern candidate… The rich treasure trove of Republican delegates in the South will no doubt prompt people to encourage Texas Gov. Rick Perry to enter the GOP race. Mr. Perry, the author of a new book detailing his state’s battles with the federal bureaucracy, has won statewide office six times and presides over a booming local economy. …

Jay Ambrose, in the Detroit News, comments on the travesty of justice facing Boeing.

…Boeing’s lawyers are outraged, one of them telling the New York Times this move is absolute nonsense, but absolute nonsense has been getting its way quite a bit in this country lately. If it does this time around, it’s thought it could be a bad sign for South Carolina and the other right-to-work states that think individual rights should supersede collectivist power plays.

Let’s all agree that there was a time when unions helped us get to justice in this land. But let’s understand, too, that the opposite can be more nearly true today. It’s not an accident that union membership has dropped to little more than 7 percent in the private sector. Federal and state laws prohibit the kinds of worker abuses that sometimes happened in the past.

The real strength of labor is now in the public sector where, in some states and cities, it has taken advantage of weak-kneed politicians. Rather tame attempts to tamp down on these threats have been greeted by angry protests and have been described in endless news stories as incursions on union “rights.” But there is no right of collective bargaining with the government. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa has South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley’s NLRB strategy.

Across the country, from Wisconsin to Ohio, Republican governors are battling Big Labor. Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in an interview with National Review Online, says that her state is the next front. But Haley’s foes are not graybeard professors or drum-banging state workers; she is facing off against bureaucratic activists in Washington, D.C.

…Haley, for her part, is baffled by how the feds think that they can kick around a private company, picking and choosing where it operates. “There is no case; this is ridiculous,” she says. “It is an embarrassment for the NLRB. The unions are losing and this is nothing more than a desperate attempt to see if they can make their voices relevant again.”

But it is, Haley asserts, a “national fight,” with political implications for both parties. “I am going to fight this every step of the way,” she says. “We absolutely will not accept the bullying. This is a direct assault on right-to-work states.” In the coming days, the governor will urge the president — and the Republicans hoping to beat him in 2012 — to take sides.

Haley challenges President Obama to rally behind her. “I want to ask him why he is allowing unelected bureaucrats to come in and do the unions’ dirty work on the backs of our businesses,” she says. “It’s hurting the jobs in South Carolina and every other right-to-work state. He owes us an answer.” …

In the Corner, Katrina Trinko says Newt might be an ethanol flack.

Newt Gingrich, who said he was “not an ethanol lobbyist” in a letter to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, worked as a consultant to an ethanol lobbying group in 2009. From the Center for Public Integrity:

Gingrich was a hired consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group—at more than $300,000 a year.

According to IRS records, the ethanol group Growth Energy paid Gingrich’s consulting firm $312,500 in 2009.The former House Speaker was the organization’s top-paid consultant, according to the records. His pay was one of the group’s largest single expenditures, as it took in and spent about $11 million to promote ethanol and to lobby for federal incentives for its use.

In a Growth Energy publication, Gingrich was listed as a consultant who offered advice on “strategy and communication issues” and who “will speak positively on ethanol related topics to media.”…

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Jennifer Rubin thinks the president is out of his depth.

…He’s articulate and can be (at the Arizona memorial, for example) an inspired speaker. But what does he know? Does anyone aside from his devoted spinners imagine that he grasped the limits of the United Nations and other international bodies, understood the frailty of Middle Eastern despots, correctly analyzed the root of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, appreciated the history of Keynesian failure or perceived the enormity of our looming debt crisis? As the problems become more acute, his limitations become more obvious. At this point it’s hard to imagine that he could hold his own on the same stage with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and debate their respective budget plans.

Obama has relied throughout his career on a mix of glossy rhetoric and clever pop psychology. But ask those who observed him during his brief Senate career if he showed a depth of understanding or interest on major legislation. You’ll find he wasn’t much concerned with the details of legislation or the substance of policy debates. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who had fixed principles and an overarching vision of the major international challenges we faced, Obama perpetually vamps. Each crisis and challenge comes as a surprise and is viewed in isolation from other events. He can’t fathom that there are flaws in his own inch-deep theories (e.g., Israeli settlements are the barrier to Middle East peace) or that there are well-reasoned alternative views (e.g., our Syria engagement policy is a moral and strategic flop).

…Obama and his defenders whine that these are tough times, tougher than any mortal could be expected to manage. But that’s poppycock. Reagan faced a collapse of American confidence, a sky-high “misery index”and an emboldened Soviet Union. George W. Bush faced the worst attack on American soil in 60 years. All presidents face challenges. The question is do they have the character, the depth of knowledge and the skill to manage them. In Obama’s case there is reason to doubt that he does.

In Contentions, Omri Ceren gives us an overview of the president’s failed strategy for renewing Middle East peace talks. Now we are learning, from Hamas, no less, the “settlement freeze” strategy was Obama’s attempt to drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the Israeli people.

The background on Obama’s 2009 and 2010 diplomatic offensives against Israel are now well-known enough that the narrative is inching toward conventional wisdom. The president entered the White House intent on putting daylight between the United States and the Jewish state. He choose settlements as a wedge issue designed to split Netanyahu from the Israeli public and topple the government, in the process changing the widely understood interpretation of “settlement freeze” from “no expansion outside existing blocs” to “no Jewish construction over the Green Line even in Jerusalem.” Either Netanyahu would halt all construction and lose the Israeli right, the thinking went, or he would put himself on the wrong side of the United States president and lose the Israeli center. Satisfyingly clever.

Of course the administration’s reading of Israeli polling data was flat wrong, and even Israeli opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni insisted that Jerusalem was a consensus issue. The Israeli public rallied behind Netanyahu, while distrust in Obama and his reliability as an ally — a precondition to Israel taking risks for peace — skyrocketed. But having categorically stated that it was simply impossible for the Palestinians to negotiate while Jews built schools and supermarkets in East Jerusalem, the White House couldn’t then admit that a “full freeze” was just a gambit meant to weaken Netanyahu. So that continued to be the official U.S. position through the end of 2010, until the White House had to nuance the counterproductive request. Of course by that time Palestinian negotiators, unable to be less anti-Israel than the U.S. president, had incorporated it as a precondition for talks. They didn’t have the option of abandoning it when the White House did, and the peace process remained moribund.

…The question, as always, isn’t just about the decision but about the decision-making process. Which obviously clumsy advisers convinced the president that the strategy was sound, and are they still prognosticating on Israeli calculations and Palestinian intentions? What obviously inaccurate assumptions were they using, and are those beliefs still guiding our Middle East policymaking? Because generally when someone charts a course that’s flawed in precisely predictable ways, when they dismiss those precise objections with specific justifications, and when they turn out to be precisely wrong — they generally get replaced. …

In the Daily Beast, Eric Alterman compares Obama to Carter.

…• The Times also reports that “Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office,” with well fewer than 50 percent expressing confidence in the president’s leadership or the direction in which he’s taking the country.

• Meanwhile, Obama, like Carter, is reacting to these warning signs not by rallying his own side, or focusing on those aspects of his party’s platforms that remain popular, but by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans. According to recent polls, only 29 percent of Americans questioned believe that this rush to slash the deficit will help create jobs. Seventy-two percent favor Obama’s promise to restore pre-Bush tax rates for those enjoying incomes of $250,000 a year, but of course he caved on that in 2010, and it’s hard to see why he won’t do so again in another election year. When asked specifically about Medicare, those questioned say they are willing to pay higher taxes rather than see its services cut, and a plurality of 45 percent prefer military cuts instead.

So what does Obama propose? Well nothing so simple as his own party’s highly popular political platform for this president. He’s too smart for that. Rather, as Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter. …

In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino explains the only incentive on Wall Street.

…In recent weeks, firms like megabank JPMorgan have been scrambling to issue reports predicting apocalypse unless Congress allows the country to borrow ourselves into oblivion.

…Just recently, Goldman economists told us that if Republicans forced the president to accept a mere $61 billion in budget cuts, the country might slip back into recession.

As one long-time Wall Street economist recently told me, “Goldman is the worst,” but every major firm’s economic department now overtly “supports government spending stimulus and Fed pump-priming” as the path to economic nirvana.

Which gets us closer to the real conflict: The free money the Federal Reserve has printed and the massive government spending under Obama have been very, very good to Wall Street.

…Wall Street surely will give us more doomsday talk as the debt-ceiling debate rages on, but consider the source. After all, some of these same guys not long ago were making huge bets that housing prices would keep rising forever. …

Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph, UK, puts the Donald into perspective.

He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, showered praise on Bill and Hillary Clinton and suggested that Ronald Reagan was a con man with little “beneath that smile”.

A divorcé whose current wife, number three, is a Slovenian former model and jewelry designer, he once favoured Canadian-style single payer healthcare and abortion rights. These days, he is best known as a reality television host.

…So why is brash, egotistical, big mouthed weirdo Donald Trump suddenly being treated as a realistic candidate for the Republican party nomination for the presidency? …

Jennifer Rubin says the Trump boomlet is proof of the embarrassment that is the main-stream media.

…There are plenty of rationales, none convincing, as to why the media establishment that bemoans the prospect of defunding public broadcasting (the end of serious journalism!) simultaneously chases a contrived story. Trump is not and never has been a serious political figure…His schtick is to sell himself — bombastic, obnoxious and aggrandizing — not to lead the country or offer solutions to real problems. At least Ross Perot, the last eccentric billionaire candidate, was promoting an agenda other than himself.

…Trump is not a legitimate candidate, and coverage of him isn’t news. Rather, it’s embarrassing evidence of how easy it is for the media to be employed as the PR team for celebrities. (Is the Lindsay Lohan candidacy next?) …

In Financial Times, Gillian Tett tells us how businesses get started.

…Outside America, for example, most people think that “entrepreneurship” is all about Silicon Valley kids. Not so. Right now, the highest rate of entrepreneurship is actually found in Montana and Oklahoma, where 470 out of every 100,000 adults a year are creating new businesses, according to Kauffman data. And most entrepreneurs are found in the 35-44 age range. That may be because these entrepreneurs lost their jobs (in 2009, the level of start-ups was the highest for 14 years). But another fascinating wrinkle in the data is that new companies are now hiring fewer people than before.

However, for the Kauffman Foundation, these data are just the start: it is now campaigning for a range of policy changes to create more entrepreneurs (such as less business red tape, fewer immigration controls, more supportive tax code and patent law and so on). The foundation is also trying to create entrepreneur “labs”, boost education, and expand its international reach.

So far, so worthy. After all, it is hard to dispute the value of cutting red tape, boosting education or getting better data about the world. And yet, as the Kauffman Foundation rolls on, with its vast cash pile, I cannot help chuckling at the irony of all this. Free-wheeling, dirt-poor entrepreneurs might have made America great. But these days, even the magic of innovation comes with a lobbying price tag. Or perhaps this is the ultimate form of modern entrepreneurship. In a world where money is needed to get a voice, the Kauffman Foundation is a fable for our times.

Speaking of business, Thomas Sowell writes about the business cluelessness of today’s intellectuals. 

…Intellectuals who have never run any business have been remarkably confident that they know when businesses have been run wrongly or when their owners or managers are overpaid.

…Lenin said that running a business involved “extraordinarily simple operations” which “any literate person can perform,” so that those in charge of such enterprises need not be paid more than any ordinary worker.

Just three years after taking power, however, and with his post-capitalist economy facing what Lenin himself later called “ruin, starvation and devastation,” he reversed himself …

…In short, the first time that the theory of how easy it is to run a business was put to a test, it failed that test disastrously.

As the 20th century unfolded, that theory would fail repeatedly in other countries around the world, to the point where even most communist and socialist governments began to free up markets by the end of the 20th century, usually leading to higher economic growth rates, as in China and India. …

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John Fund compares the business climates of Texas versus California.

…The contrast is undeniable. Texas has added 165,000 jobs during the last three years while California has lost 1.2 million. California’s jobless rate is 12% compared to 8% in Texas.

…Hours after the legislators met with Mr. Perry, another business, Fujitsu Frontech, announced that it is abandoning California. “It’s the 70th business to leave this year,” says California business relocation expert Joe Vranich. “That’s an average of 4.7 per week, up from 3.9 a week last year.” The Lone Star State was the top destination, with 14 of the 70 moving there.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of Hardee’s Restaurants, was one of many witnesses to bemoan California’s hostile regulatory climate. He said it takes six months to two years to secure permits to build a new Carl’s Jr. restaurant in the Golden State, versus the six weeks it takes in Texas. California is also one of only three states that demands overtime pay after an eight-hour day, rather than after a 40-hour week. Such rules wreak havoc on flexible work schedules based on actual need. If there’s a line out the door at a Carl’s Jr. while employees are seen resting, it’s because they aren’t allowed to help: Break time is mandatory.

“You can’t build in California, you can’t manage in California and you have to pay a big tax,” Mr. Puzder told the legislators. “In Texas, it’s the opposite—which is why we’re building 300 new stores there this year.” …

Ed Morrissey comments on John Fund’s article.

When California politicians want to visit California jobs, they increasingly have to leave California to do so.  That’s why Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom traveled with a small entourage of other Golden State politicians to Texas, the biggest beneficiary of California’s economic policies.  So many jobs have fled California to Texas, John Fund writes for the Wall Street Journal, that the governing class needed lessons from Texas Governor Rick Perry on how not to repel business…

…The state needs to rid itself of its penchant for regulation, especially demonstrated in the episode concerning the California Air Resource Board’s use of a questionable study authored by an academic fraud that not only threatens to put independent trucking companies out of business, but also honest scientists that blow the whistle on the unseemly relationship between state-based Academia and regulatory boards such as CARB.

And that doesn’t even start to address California’s ridiculously high taxes, and the overly progressive nature of its income tax system that guarantees revenue crashes during economic downturns.

Until Californians come to grips with the fact that they have overregulated the state into non-competitiveness, taxed it to the point of overwhelming investor risk, and continue to spend far beyond its means, jobs will continue to disappear from the Golden State at a rapid pace. …

Robert Samuelson criticizes the president for not getting serious about the budget.

…The president keeps promoting an “adult conversation” about the budget, but that can’t happen if the First Adult doesn’t play his part. Obama is eager to be all things to all people. He’s against the debt and its adverse consequences, but he’s for preserving Social Security and Medicare without major changes. He’s for “tough cuts,” but he’s against saying what they are and defending them. He pronounces ambitious goals without saying how they’d be reached. Mainly, he’s for scoring political points against Republicans.

…Given better health, longer life expectancy and wealthier elderly, why shouldn’t Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages be raised and means-testing broadened? The president doesn’t broach this debate. Farmers receive about $15 billion a year in crop subsidies to help offset the insecurities of weather and fluctuating prices. Considering that volatile markets impose similar insecurities on many Americans, why do farmers deserve special protection? The president doesn’t engage that debate. Might not a higher gasoline tax reduce budget deficits and oil imports? Obama is silent there, too.

All this may be politically shrewd. Voters disdain hard choices. Liberal pundits loved Obama’s speech. But another audience is less impressed — global money managers. The Financial Times’ respected columnist Gillian Tett recently asked whether the administration’s “reassuring patter on debt” could be believed. Not entirely, she concluded. Shortly thereafter, Standard & Poor’s warned that it might downgrade U.S. government debt. Obama is flirting with trouble, even if he doesn’t realize it.

In the WaPo, Charles Lane looks at the fiscal train wreck that is China’s high speed rail project.

…Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.

…The fact is that China’s train wreck was eminently foreseeable. High-speed rail is a capital-intensive undertaking that requires huge borrowing upfront to finance tracks, locomotives and cars, followed by years in which ticket revenue covers debt service — if all goes well. “Any .?.?. shortfall in ridership or yield, can quickly create financial stress,” warns a 2010 World Bank staff report.

Such “shortfalls” are all too common. Japan’s bullet trains needed a bailout in 1987. Taiwan’s line opened in 2007 and needed a government rescue in 2009. In France, only the Paris-Lyon high-speed line is in the black. …

We have more commentary from Ed Morrissey on the NRLB’s recent power grab. Your government at work for the unions.

I’ve heard plenty of people dismiss Atlas Shrugged (the book as well as the movie) as overwrought, contrived paranoia about the regulatory state.  The government can’t run companies through its regulatory system, critics scoff, no matter what a Russian ex-patriate thought more than 50 years ago.  No one is marching into manufacturers in the US and telling the Hank Reardons of the world what they can build and where.

Of course not:

…The NLRB obliged with its complaint yesterday asking an administrative law judge to stop Boeing’s South Carolina production because its executives had cited the risk of strikes as a reason for the move. Boeing acted out of “anti-union animus,” says the complaint by acting general counsel Lafe Solomon, and its decision to move had the effect of “discouraging membership in a labor organization” and thus violates federal law.

Ah, that must be the Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Law, or one of the Fairness Laws, or something, right?  The WSJ isn’t sure what law the NLRB is talking about, either.  Not only do businesses routinely relocate to find the most advantageous environment possible, states and cities compete for that business by calculating their business climate. …

In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney explains that the Boeing-NRLB story is even more interesting than it first appears.

…This extraordinary abridgement of economic freedom might suggest an anti-Boeing vendetta from President Obama, except that this administration’s Export-Import Bank has subsidized Boeing with nearly $15 billion in loan guarantees in the past two years — roughly three-quarters of all of Ex-Im’s guarantees during that time.

…Boeing and Obama, both based in Chicago, have a real political friendship. In 2008, Obama was by far the biggest recipient of campaign contributions from Boeing employees and executives, hauling in $197,000 — five times as much as John McCain, and more than the top eight Republicans combined.

Boeing’s lobbyists include some of Obama’s closest allies. The Podesta Group, co-founded by Obama’s transition director and John Podesta, represents the jet maker, with Democratic fundraiser Tony Podesta and former Obama campaign aide and administration official Oscar Ramirez as two of the lobbyists on the account. Linda Daschle, wife of Obama confidant Tom Daschle, is a longtime Boeing lobbyist.

…In fiscal 2009, 2010 and 2011 so far, Boeing has received more than $45 million in government contracts. Documents made public by Wikileaks showed how much work U.S. diplomats do to persuade foreign leaders to buy Boeing jets for their state-owned airlines. …

In the NY Times, Steven Greenhouse has more on the liberal turn at the NLRB.

…The Boeing case was not the first time that Mr. Solomon has riled the business community and its Republican allies. Saying it is the domain of the federal government, he recently threatened to sue four Republican-heavy states — Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah — in an effort to invalidate recent constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector workers from choosing a union by signing cards, a process known as card check.

He has also sought to extend the labor board’s reach into the world of the Internet. He approved requests from regional labor board officials to bring complaints against businesses that punished employees for Facebook and Twitter posts, including one case against Reuters. Mr. Solomon has also proposed that electronic voting be used when workers decide whether they want to unionize their workplace — a proposal that business groups maintain will make it easier for unions to coerce workers.

In an interview, Mr. Solomon, a 61-year-old Arkansas native, insisted that he was no radical. …

Mark Steyn had contraband confiscated at the border.

I am looking this bright Easter morn at a Department of Homeland Security “Custody Receipt for Seized Property and Evidence”. Late last night, crossing the Quebec/Vermont border, my children had two boxes of “Kinder Eggs” (“Est. Dom. Value $7.50?) confiscated by Customs & Border Protection. …

…Kinder Chocolate Eggs are hollow milk chocolate eggs about the size of a large hen’s egg usually packaged in a colorful foil wrapper. They are a popular treat and collector’s item during holiday periods in various countries around the world, including those in Europe, South America and even Canada. A toy within the egg is contained in an oval-shaped plastic capsule. The toy requires assembly and each egg contains a different toy. Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children.

And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked. …

…PS My kids asked the CBP seizure squad if they could eat the chocolate in front of the border guards while the border guards held on to the toys to prevent any choking hazard – and then, having safely consumed the chocolate, take the toys home as a separate item. This request was denied. Could have been worse. Could have been a $300 fine, plus a $250 fee for seized-egg storage.

PPS The real choking hazard is the vise-like grip of government.

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Mark Steyn’s topic this week is the S&P downgade of our credit.

…The average individual attempts to insure against future uncertainty in a relatively small number of ways: You buy a house because that’s the surest way to preserve and increase wealth. “Safe as houses,” right? But Fannie/Freddie subprime mumbo-jumbo and other government interventions clobbered the housing market. You get an education because that way you’ll always have “something to fall back on.” But massive government-encouraged expansion of “college” led Americans to run up a trillion dollars’ worth of student debt to acquire ever more devalued ersatz sheepskin in worthless pseudo-disciplines. We’re not talking about the wilder shores of the stock market – Internet start-ups, South Sea bubbles and tulip mania – but two of the safest, dullest investments a modestly prudent person might make to protect himself against the vicissitudes of an unknown future. And we profoundly damaged both of them in pursuit of fictions.

I don’t claim absolute certainty about what the world will be like in 2023, but I know what our governing class is telling us. At Tufts University, Nancy Pelosi urged her “Republican friends” to “take back your party, so that it doesn’t matter so much who wins the election – because we have shared values about the education of our children, the growth of our economy, how we defend our country, our security and civil liberties, how we respect our seniors. Elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

The last line attracted a bit of attention, but the “shared values” – i.e., the fetid bromides of conventional wisdom – are worth decoding, too: “Education of our children” means more spending on an abusive and wasteful unionized educrat monopoly; “growth of our economy” means more spending on stimulus funding for community-organizer grant applications; “how we defend our country” means more spending on defense welfare for wealthy allies; “our security and civil liberties” means more spending on legions of crack TSA crotch fondlers; “how we respect our seniors” means more spending on entitlements for an ever more dependent citizenry whose sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make any sense.

Nancy Pelosi fleshed out the Obama plan: More spending. More more. Now and forever. That’s what S&P understands. The road to hell is paved with stimulus funding. …

For Pickerhead, the most outrageous story for a long time is the NLRB complaint against Boeing’s decision to build a plant in South Carolina. Michael Barone points out how the administration works to manipulates big business for political gain.

So the Obama administration is now telling companies where they can build their factories. That’s the takeaway from the National Labor Relation Board’s action challenging Boeing’s ongoing plans to set up a plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, to build the 787 Dreamliner. The NLRB doesn’t like this because the plant won’t be unionized and won’t be subject to strikes—like the 58-day strike in 2008—which shut down Boeing plants in Washington state.

This reminds me of Barack Obama’s earlier order that General Motors executives keep their offices in the Renaissance Center in Detroit rather than in the GM Tech Center in suburban Dearborn.

Obama’s motives in both cases are clear. Keep tax money flowing into Detroit’s monstrously dysfunctional city government in a city that voted 94% Democratic in 2008. Keep the union dues money going into unions which contributed $400 million to Democrats in the 2008 cycle. …

The Chicago Tribune editors have more on the Boeing bullying by our gangster government.

…Boeing executives have acknowledged that they were reluctant to expand in Washington state because of the risk of a labor strike. Boeing’s workers in Washington belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Its plant in South Carolina would be nonunion.

…Seizing on the words of Boeing executives, the NLRB inferred that the decision to choose South Carolina was retaliation against the union. The labor board demands that Boeing open the second production line in Washington.

…Boeing says it will move forward with plans to begin assembly in South Carolina in July. The plant is ready for about 1,000 workers. The NLRB filed its complaint 18 months after Boeing announced it would expand in South Carolina.

The NLRB says Boeing is free to do business there — but its second production line has to run in Washington.

This is a gross intrusion by the NLRB. The disastrous, unintended message to a major U.S. employer: Keep your mouth shut and find another country to do business.

Jonah Goldberg highlights more commentary on the bureaucrat-dictators at the NLRB.

This is truly outrageous. The NLRB wants to simply order Boeing to build a factory in Washington State and not South Carolina. From the Examiner:

“Can federal bureaucrats tell a private company where to build a factory? Members of President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board think they can. In a decision that even the New York Times is describing as “highly unusual for the federal government,” Lafe Solomon, who was appointed to the board by Obama, filed a complaint on behalf of the NLRB on Wednesday seeking to force the Boeing Co. to build an assembly line in Washington state instead of South Carolina. The NLRB action stems from Boeing’s October 2009 decision to build a new factory for its new 787 Dreamliner airplane near Charleston, S.C. Boeing first sought to build the new plant near its existing facility in Puget Sound, but negotiations with the International Association of Machinists broke down when the union refused to agree to a long-term no-strike clause. The IAM had struck four times since 1989, costing Boeing at least $1.8 billion in revenue.

That’s when Boeing chose South Carolina, a right-to-work state where, unlike Washington, workers are not forced to join unions. As a result of this policy, only 6.2 percent of South Carolinians belong to unions. Construction of Boeing’s new Charleston factory is nearly complete, and the company has already hired more than 1,000 new employees, drawn mostly from within the immediate region. And back in Washington, Boeing has actually increased employment at its Puget Sound plant by 2,000 workers. But that isn’t good enough for the IAM or the Obama White House. After suffering major defeats in Wisconsin and Ohio, the labor movement is looking for a scalp. Obama’s NLRB is trying to turn Boeing into one.”

Mark Steyn comments on Jonah Goldberg’s piece.

Jonah, you got everything right but the title. It’s national fiat*: There’s nothing “federal” in any meaningful sense of the word in an ever more centralized government ordering a private company to build in a state that suits the national government’s priorities rather than a state that suits the company’s.

…PS On the other hand, Federal-Fiat would make a good corporate name for the new Chrysler.

[*UPDATE: On reflection, I think I'll go with "central fiat", which has the appropriate whiff of Soviet planning about it.]

Karl Rove offers some advice to Republicans on the upcoming debt ceiling debate.

…For this fight, President Barack Obama’s strategy is three-fold. First, warn of catastrophic consequences if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by early July when the Treasury Department runs out of fiscal tricks to keep from breaching the limit. Second, demand a “clean” debt ceiling increase, unencumbered by the tough spending and deficit caps that some congressional Republicans want to strap on the measure. Finally, blame the GOP for holding our economy hostage as often as possible.

…The GOP needs to push back now—thoughtfully and aggressively. …

…If congressional Republicans wait until June to offer their proposal, they’ll have fallen into the Democratic trap. Mr. Obama will beat them like a drum, blaming them for any hiccups in the markets and every bit of bad economic news, all while demanding a clean debt ceiling.

…Settling on a fiscally responsible package soon would put Democrats on the defensive. It would define the fight in terms favorable to Republicans and increase tensions inside the Obama administration, which is split into two camps. …

Claudia Rosett remarks on the strange barter system we have developed with North Korea. Naturally is involves the village idiot from Plains, GA.

…In 2009, when Pyongyang was haggling over terms for the release of two Al Gore employees who had moseyed onto North Korean turf, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, North Korean officials turned down a potential rescue mission by Jimmy Carter. In a memoir about her months as a prisoner in North Korea, Ling records that North Korean officials were infuriated by her suggestion that Carter be enlisted as the high-profile American to come retrieve her. They viewed Carter as washed-up and out of office for too long — a retread unfit to grace a photo-op dignifying Kim Jong Il. “Carter, Carter, Carter!” one official told her. “You have upset many people by asking for Carter.” They held out instead for the bigger prize of a visit by Bill Clinton.

Last summer, having captured another American, Aijalon Gomes, North Korea did agree to let Jimmy Carter come get him. But Kim Jong Il didn’t bother to stick around for the visit. Carter had to make do with a reception by North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-Gwan.

This time around, with North Korea reportedly holding yet another American in custody, there’s speculation that this latest prisoner will be released to Carter — as part of what’s becoming a hostage-politics routine in which North Korea’s regime turns over American detainees, like door prizes, to visiting American ex-presidents. …

In the National Review, Conrad Black writes about liberal bias in the media.

…By complete accident, I have seen this program a number of times in the last few weeks, and it is always the same: Eliot Spitzer is a loud, fast-talking, overbearing know-it-all, who has rehearsed his arguments and unleashes himself on guests, or directly at the camera, in a torrent of imperious blowhardism. He is even more irritating than Bill O’Reilly, because he is just as strident and ear-splitting, but more sinister. He has more than a desire to win an argument, like O’Reilly has; Spitzer has a will to dominate, to bulldoze his interlocutor. O’Reilly is opinionated, but Spitzer is belligerent. I normally move to the classical-music channel after a few minutes of either of them. But this self-adjudicated moot court Spitzer conducted about his own fairness and balance put me in mind of other recent outrages of liberal-media partisanship.

The left-wing media played up the showdown in Wisconsin over the governor’s reining in of the public-service unions with even greater ardor than the media of the Right, most of them associated with News Corp. As long as the betting was that the issue would be decided by the election of a pro-union judge, the Left touted the escalating battle as if it were a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. When the liberal judge claimed victory by 200 votes, this was widely portrayed as the most heartwarming election since John F. Kennedy supposedly defeated Richard Nixon (with, as he put it himself, the help of “a few honest crooks”). When it emerged that a whole, largely Republican town had not been counted, and that in fact the more conservative candidate won safely enough, the story died. Only the most determined and meticulous scourers of the liberal media could find the dénouement, which was the principal reason I surmised that the conservative candidate had won after all. …

Scott Adams, if Dilbert fame, likes Trump.

It has come to my attention that there are still a few people in the world that I have not offended. I’d like to fix that by endorsing Donald Trump for president. But not for the reasons you might think.

This morning I read a news item saying that some folks at NBC think Trump might be pretending to run for president to boost ratings. The story noted that ratings for his TV show are up 20% lately. I laughed out loud because sometimes I forget that at least half the country doesn’t realize he’s just screwing with the media. 

…Trump is smart enough to never admit that his presidential aspirations are no more than marketing. To admit the trick would damage his brand. But he has no need to ever expose the prank. …The people who are in on the joke find it entertaining. The people who will never know it’s a joke have raised their opinion of him so much that he’s the leading Republican presidential contender. And his TV ratings are up, so from a marketing standpoint it’s working. …

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Charles Krauthammer looks at the current Republican field.

…The 2010 Democratic shellacking had the distinction of being the most ideological election in 30 years. It was driven by one central argument in its several parts: the size and reach of government, spending and debt, and, most fundamentally, the nature of the American social contract. 2010 was a referendum on the Obama experiment in hyper-liberalism. It lost resoundingly.

Of course, presidential elections are not arguments in the abstract but arguments with a face. Hence, Axiom Two: The less attention the Republican candidate draws to him/herself, the better the chances of winning. To the extent that 2012 is about ideas, about the case for smaller government, Republicans have a decided edge. If it’s a referendum on the fitness and soundness of the Republican candidate — advantage Obama.

Which suggests Axiom Three: No baggage and no need for flash. Having tried charisma in 2008, the electorate is not looking for a thrill up the leg in 2012. It’s looking for solid, stable, sober and, above all, not scary.

Given these Euclidean truths, here’s the early line. (Remember: This is analysis, not advocacy.)…

From The Corner, an interesting story about Krauthammer and Trump.

On Special Report tonight, Charles Krauthammer revealed that Donald Trump placed a call to him after Krauthammer had repeatedly slammed the celebrity developer, as the Republican Al Sharpton among other things. When he learned who was on the other end of the line, Krauthammer said he felt he’d have to put on “a helmet and a flak jacket.” But Trump was “very courteous” and “made his case,” arguing that “I’m a serious business man, a serious man, a serious candidate.” The two had a full and frank exchange of views, including on Trump’s birtherism. But “the tone was no worse than Juan and me” every night, according to Krauthammer.  ”At the end,” Krauthammer said, “I felt I ought to tell him my column was going to be even worse than what I said about him on television.” Krauthammer concluded that Trump is “absolutely” running for president: “I give him credit for his sincerity.”

Daniel Henninger thinks acting unpresidential will cost votes.

…The Obama migration from the high road to the low road is evident even in nonpolitical settings. Here he is last weekend talking about the White House phone system: “You know the Oval Office always thought I was going to have like real cool phones and stuff. I’m like ‘come on guys, I’m the president of the United States.’ Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff, and the big screen comes up? It doesn’t happen.”

I’m like? Real cool phones and stuff? Would Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy ever have affected whatever their generational equivalent was of “Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff?”

…What voters like is the memory of the historic Obama they voted into the office of the presidency. The person they voted for in 2008 is different than the person who kicked off his presidential campaign last week by personally stomping his opposition. …

In the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein comments on federal spending.

…Since the 1970s, federal spending has averaged about 21 percent of the nation’s economic output, and federal revenue has averaged about 18 percent, with deficits making up the difference. Ryan intends to lock in revenue at about 19 percent of the economy. Meanwhile, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, his plan would initially stabilize spending at around 21 percent but eventually squeeze it to 19 percent in 2040 and to less than 15 percent in 2050. Federal spending as a share of the economy hasn’t been that low since 1951, before not only Medicare and Medicaid but even the interstate-highway system existed.

…To reduce total federal spending amid those pressures requires Ryan to massively shift costs from government to seniors (through his Medicare voucher plan) and to roll back discretionary domestic and defense outlays to less than half of the lowest spending level as a share of the economy that the U.S. has seen in any year since World War II. So a serious debate over Ryan’s plan could compel voters to examine how many government services they would surrender to maintain low taxes.

A serious debate over Obama’s vision would pose the opposite question. The president’s 2012 budget envisions federal spending receding from its current elevated levels but then settling in around 23 percent of the economy. Given the demographic pressures, some increase above the modern average spending level is probably a more realistic assumption than Ryan’s. Hitting even Obama’s target would require significant spending reductions.

But Obama can’t plausibly pay for that government while upholding his promise to raise taxes on only those earning $250,000 or more. “If you want a government that is providing even close to the level of services we’ve become used to, you’re going to need more revenue than you get just … from high-income people,” Burman says. …

Mark Steyn takes a different perspective.

…The government of the United States is currently borrowing about $4 billion a day. The Republicans recently secured an alleged landmark victory over Democrats that cut 38-point-something billion dollars from the budget. How many weeks of clenched-teeth high-stakes brinkmanship did it take to negotiate ten days’ worth of cuts?

Did I say ten days’ worth? Oh, wait. That was on Friday night. By the following Tuesday afternoon, over half of the $38.5 billion had been exposed as various meaningless sleights of hand of which government, unlike Walmart, can avail itself very easily — for example, counting money in the Justice Department’s crime victims’ reserve fund that was never scheduled to be spent this year as a “savings” of $4.9 billion. Real savings — that’s to say, the kind that would pass muster according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles — were around $14 billion — or, in other words, less than the U.S. government borrowed in the four days between the announcing of the “historic cuts” and their exposure as utterly fraudulent. 

…And so as the ship fills up with water we congratulate ourselves on agreeing to pass out the thimbles. …

In Forbes, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren from the Cato Institute teach us how to tell if speculators are affecting the price of gas.

…If the price for crude oil tomorrow–thanks to the speculators–is higher than the cost of crude oil today plus the cost of storage, then everyone (investors, refineries, your Uncle Phil) could make money by buying crude in the spot market, storing it somewhere, and guaranteeing its higher selling price through the purchase of a futures contract. This would reduce current supply and increase current price while increasing future supply and decreasing future price.

If this is going on we would expect to see some sort of inventory buildup. While crude inventories in the U.S. are increasing, they always increase at this time of year, and this year’s increase is well within the normal range. More important, gasoline inventories are decreasing and decreasing much more rapidly than normal. Hence, there’s no evidence that speculators are reducing the supply of crude or gasoline through increased storage.

…More formal statistical tests (known as “Granger-causality tests” to economists) examine the impact of traders’ behavior on prices within futures markets. Do futures prices follow the bets taken by market participants or do those bets follow prices? A federal interagency task force undertook one such econometric analysis in 2008 and found that futures price changes from January 2000 to June 2008 preceded net position changes by any group of traders. …

Axel Bojanowski writes about the UN’s latest unfounded global climate scare tactic, in Der Spiegel.

…In October 2005, UNU said: “Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of ‘refugee.’”

…Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

…But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. …

…Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said — for 2020.

From The Washington Times we learn one business owner is beating speed cameras.

Will Foreman has beaten the speed cameras.

Five times and counting before three different judges, the Prince George’s County business owner has used a computer and a calculation to cast reasonable doubt on the reliability of the soulless traffic enforcers.

After a judge threw out two of his tickets Wednesday, Mr. Foreman said he is confident he has exposed systemic inaccuracies in the systems that generate millions of dollars a year for town, city and county governments.

…The method?…

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David Harsanyi believes in equal taxation.

…Many conservatives argued that lowering the tax burden would free up capital and induce job creation. “Washington would likely see increased revenues as prosperity grows,” they claimed. This must be a fact, as economists I choose to believe say it is. It’s unfortunate, though, that most Republicans won’t go further and argue that everyone, even the rich — even the super-filthy rich! — deserves to be treated equally by the government.

It is also too bad that these politicians won’t admit that revenue, whether we have more of it or less, is basically irrelevant. After all, doesn’t the federal government have enough money? We need spending caps and entitlement reform, not ways to generate more revenue — as if Washington’s expenditures ever match revenue anyway. …

Once again, Tony Blankley calls attention to the fact that our government has driven our nation to the brink.

If future historians look back on the ruins of the American economy after a U.S. bond crisis struck in the second decade of the 21st century, many causes will be noted. Obviously, it will be seen that for decades before the catastrophe, the United States was spending vastly more than it could afford on government health and retirement programs.

Just as after the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, 2011, blue-ribbon commissions will be incredulous that all the telltale signs of the coming disaster were in plain view yet were ignored.

…Even the Ryan plan, solid as it is, probably will be judged as not containing enough deficit reduction soon enough. The only proposal put forward so far that clearly deals with the danger is that of the Republican Study Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Where Mr. Obama would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion – and never achieve balance – and Mr. Ryan would reduce it by about $6 trillion – and get to balance in the late 2030s – the Jordan plan would reduce it by $9.1 trillion and reach balance by 2020.

If the Jordan plan or something like it is not enacted into law in the next year and a half and the crisis hits, its non-passage may become one of the great, tragic “what-ifs” of history. …

In InvestorPlace.com, Jeff Reeves looks at the issues that will thwart an Obama second term.

…The average American consumer is poorer because of the financial crisis, according to a survey released by the Federal Reserve. How can this be, considering the market is off only about -13% from its 2007 peak?

Well, because housing values have fallen off a cliff – and if you’ve seen a 20% decline in the value of your $300,000 loan, that’s a cool sixty grand you’re in the hole on paper. Also, many folks had to tap 401k plans or savings to get through lean times due to a job loss. Lastly, while many savvy investors bought the bottom of the market in 2009 many others panicked and headed for the hills – or were left holding the bag on Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, AIG, Citigroup, GM or a host of other investments that could have crippled even a diversified portfolio.

Like the unemployment picture, a family’s rainy day fund or retirement nest egg can’t be replaced overnight. But unfortunately for Obama there is no wiggle room in the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Considering that the worst of the financial crisis came to roost in 2009 via staggering unemployment and foreclosure trends, the answer for many voters will be a decided “no.”…

The WSJ editors place the negative US bond outlook on the president’s shoulders.

…S&P, as did many others, said it saw the Obama and Ryan budget proposals “as the starting point of a process,” but “That said, we see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide.” And: “We believe there is a significant risk that Congressional negotiations could result in no agreement.” And this stalemate will continue “over the next two years.”

S&P is simply connecting the political dots after last week’s un-Presidential tirade against the GOP.

S&P’s analysis also discussed fiscal conditions, most notably the scale of the deficit problem before and after 2008: “[I]n 2003-2008, the U.S.’s general (total) government deficit fluctuated between 2% and 5% of GDP. Already larger than that of most ‘AAA’ rated sovereigns, it ballooned to more than 11% in 2009 and has yet to recover.” This surely is one Bush comparison that the Obama team wishes to bury.

…The ratings agencies are hardly the last word on U.S. economic health. But the S&P outlook is a warning to the White House that financial markets have noticed that this President seems to have decided that his path to re-election lies in demonizing his opponents rather than seeing to the nation’s fiscal well-being.

Abe Greenwald notes the irony and tragedy of Obama’s vapid phrases.

Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook for the United States from “stable” to “negative,” and said there is a one in three chance it will downgrade the U.S.’s triple-A credit rating in the next couple of years. We’ve enjoyed that credit rating since 1917. Barack Obama can cook up entitlement schemes as much as he likes, but if America loses its ability to borrow money on favorable terms there will be no safety net big enough to catch us all.

And what is the president’s message at this defining crisis moment? The New York Times reports, “Mr. Obama implored the crowd [in a speech today] not to lose heart, declaring that the vision of America he laid out in his fiscal speech — one in which ‘we are connected to one another; that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper’— would animate his campaign and drive the debate in the 2012 election.”

The U.S. may lose its triple-A rating and the best Obama can do is peddle feel-good pop slogans in defense of suicidal entitlements. If only he believed what he was saying. Indeed, we are connected to one another. Which is why entitlements put all of us in debt, why taxing income for some of us will shrink our national tax base, and why every last one of us will go down with the ship unless the administration acquaints itself with reality. …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson writes about America’s choice.

…The most heartening thing about our road trip was the realization that such questions are not only on the minds of statesmen and professors. The students we met were also eager to discuss finance and politics. Even Joe Public now gets it: according to Gallup, 17 percent of Americans now see the deficit as the biggest problem facing the United States, compared with just 5 percent six months ago and practically zero a year ago.

Churchill had it right. The United States will always do the right thing once all the other possibilities have been exhausted. For a long time many people clung to the delusion that the United States could simply borrow $1 trillion a year for the rest of time. Now only two possibilities remain.

The first possibility is the one devised by Rep. Paul Ryan, which would eliminate the deficit largely through deep spending cuts and Medicare reform. Possibility two is President Obama’s bid to close the budget gap with more modest cuts and tax hikes on “millionaires and billionaires.”

It’s a bracingly binary choice. Shrink the government. Or squeeze the rich. …

William McGurn, in the WSJ takes a look at negative incentives created by government intervention in higher education.

…”Right now the incentives for our colleges and universities are all wrong,” says Ohio University economist Richard Vedder, who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. “It’s wrong for colleges, who have no incentive to keep down costs. It’s wrong for students, whose needs are ill-served by loans and grants that go directly to the school. And it’s wrong for taxpayers, whose dollars are making education more expensive without expanding opportunity for those who most need it.”

Translation: If you are a mom or dad with college-age kids and you think the system is rigged against you, you’re right.

…A good start would be a new structure for college financing that promoted genuine opportunity without feeding the inflation it is supposed to solve. President Obama, alas, seems wed to the same government-heavy approach he had for health care. Indeed, the “reform” he signed last spring—restructuring federal grants and loans—will likely fuel rising costs as schools absorb that money, spend it on their own priorities, and continue to raise tuition at rates that outstrip the Consumer Price Index. .. 

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In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler blogs about the UN and climate change.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) predicted that there would be 50 million refugees in 2010 due to climate change. An enterprising reporter wondered what happened to UNEP’s prediction, and found that those areas UNEP claimed were most at risk have actually gained population. How did UNEP respond? According to Anthony Watts, UNEP tried to erase the evidence of its initial claim — without success. It seems folks at UNEP were unaware of Google caches.

The original UNEP claim was ridiculous on its face, and UNEP’s subsequent effort to rewrite history is farcical. Regrettably, we’re unlikely to hear much about this story from the environmentalist community or those who allegedly police the politicization of science. And this is part of the problem. Climate change is real, and the evidence of a human contribution to the gradual warming of the atmosphere is strong. There’s no need to conjure fantastical projections of an impending climate apocalypse. But UNEP and various organizations insist on doing so nonetheless — indeed, UNEP is now claiming there will be 50 million climate refugees by 2020 — and the climate community raises not a peep. In the end, this ends up doing more to discredit legitimate concerns about climate change than to encourage action.

Also in Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson comments on Adler’s blog and the UN’s goals.

A quick further comment to Jonathan’s post below on the missing 50 million climate change refugees that were supposed to be migrating across the globe by 2010 and, if I read the update correctly, are now supposed to materialize by 2020.  We are used to reading such stories as the politicization of science and its corruption by the politics of the UN, funders, and, to be sure, the desire of some scientists to switch professions from research to policy.  We hear about it because it is correct.

But there is another — no less unimpressive — way to understand the story.  That is from the standpoint of the long term incentives of the United Nations and its many agencies. Seen from the standpoint of climate change and its scientists and environmental activists alone, this story looks to be about hyperbolic claims about the immediate effects of climate change.  Seen from the standpoint of the longer history of the UN, it is much more about the long-running movements by the UN to find issues that tend to do two things.  One is to increase the institutional UN’s governance responsibilities, authority, legitimacy, and power.  The other is to increase the amount of money that runs through UN mechanisms from rich countries to poor countries, with an administrative cut to the UN itself.

…apocalyptic rent-seeking is an institutional feature of the UN, and likewise its complete willingness to throw over one cause for another when it appears that the previous one had run out of steam either in garnering greater governance authority to the UN or attracting cash through a planetary income transfer arrangement. …

John Fund points out the continued need to improve election procedures in the US.

…Wisconsin voters went to the polls on April 5 in an election that could have flipped the state Supreme Court’s majority from conservative to liberal. On the morning of April 6, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg declared victory by a margin of some 200 votes. But the next day Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus announced that she had excluded some 14,000 votes from the city of Brookfield when she gave her final tally to the Associated Press on election night. The revised tally put conservative incumbent David Prosser more than 7,000 votes ahead of Ms. Kloppenburg, and he has since been verified the clear winner.

Ms. Nickolaus’s error could have been easily avoided through transparency. She had ended the prior clerk’s practice of reporting election results for individual cities because it was “not her responsibility” and she didn’t “have the staff to enter all the data”—an absurd statement given that many smaller counties post such data on their websites. Many states, such as Kentucky, offer user-friendly websites to track returns statewide.

…Mexico—which has a national photo ID requirement for voting—spends roughly 10 times more per capita than the U.S. and has virtually eliminated charges of voter fraud or incompetence. We can vastly improve our system with much smaller investments. …

Michael Barone discusses the problems with White House strategy.

…If Obamacare is so great, why are so many trying to get out from under it? And, more specifically, why are so many Democratic groups trying to get out from under it?

The fact is that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has granted more than 1,000 waivers from Obamacare. Many have been granted to labor unions. Some have been granted to giant corporations like McDonald’s. One was granted to the entire state of Maine.

By what criteria is this relief being granted? That’s unclear, and the GAO audit should produce some answers. But what it looks like to an outsider is that waivers are being granted to constituencies that have coughed up money (or in the case of Maine, four electoral votes) to the Democrats.

If so, what we’re looking at is another example of gangster government in this administration. The law in its majesty applies to everyone except those who get special favors. …

Peter Wehner comments on how the president is unfairly criticizing opponents rather than dealing with the issues.

In his remarks last week, President Obama had this to say: “When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure he’s just being America’s accountant . . . this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill—but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level.”

…Put out of your mind the fact that Bush’s tax cuts, especially the ones in 2003, led to economic growth that in 2007 helped to trim the deficit to barely more than one percent of GDP. Set aside the fact that the prescription drug plan Ryan supported was less than half the cost of what Democrats were proposing. Forget too that the free-market reforms helped the new plan beat its cost projections by around 40 percent. The point is that Obama has decided to get down and dirty this week rather than to engage the fiscal debate in a serious and honest fashion. …

Keith Hennessey sums up the White House playbook.

…The President made his budget strategy clear.

Try for a small short-term bipartisan deficit reduction deal this year – tweaks to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements, maybe combined with some defense cuts. Save maybe $100 – $400 B over 10 years, roughly an entitlement parallel to the recent appropriations deal. Use the new VP-led negotiating process to steer those negotiations. See if you can split off a few Senate Republicans from the pack.

Push for tax increases as part of this short-term deal, but abandon them as needed to get to a deficit reduction signing ceremony.

Get a signing ceremony for this bill to demonstrate the President can work with “reasonable Republicans.” The photo op of the President signing a bill with Republicans standing next to him is critical for the 2012 campaign. Frame the bill as a demonstration of good faith and a first step toward a long-term solution.

Use the photo, combined with claimed but unsubstantiated deficit reduction from yesterday’s speech, to build credibility with independents for November 2012.

Blast away at Republicans on the big spending issues. Take long-term entitlement reform off the table, reassuring his base. Demagogue on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Pick a fight over the top tax rates, exciting your political base. Try to restore the Clinton 90s framing of “Medicare and Medicaid vs. tax cuts for the rich.”

The President’s new strategy guarantees two more years of fiscal stalemate and poisons the well on the most important economic policy question facing American policymakers: how to permanently solve the long-term fiscal problem caused by the unsustainable growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Investor’s Business Daily editors have stark economic data in this editorial.

…• The U.S. dollar has fallen so much and foreign nations have so little confidence in our ability to run our fiscal affairs that the “BRIC” nations — the mostly fast-growing former Third World nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China — are talking about replacing the U.S. dollar in foreign trade with the Chinese yuan.

• Just 45.4% of Americans had jobs last year, the lowest since 1983, according to census data crunched by USA Today. Among men, just 66.8% had work last year, the lowest ever.

• …last year’s real private sector GDP was in fact still down 1.1% from its peak in 2007 — so all of the “expansion” has been in government, not the private sector.

• …under Obama, spending has risen farther and faster than under any president in history. At current rates, government at all levels will take up more than half of all economic activity by 2050. …

Peter Wehner says that with a record like Obama’s, all that’s left to campaign with is partisan attacks and provoking class resentment.

…The White House strategy is clear: argue that Obama wants to restore fiscal balance by raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” while those who don’t favor higher taxes on the wealthy are fundamentally unserious. As a political matter, of course, class warfare does not have a particularly successful track record. But, to keep it that way, Republicans need to provide a compelling response to the Obama strategy. Fortunately such a response exists.

Obama’s argument is built on sand. A tax increase on the wealthy would fall far short of the revenues needed to reverse our fiscal trajectory. Our budget problems are significantly worse today than they were in the 1990s. There are not nearly enough wealthy people in the nation to tax in order to tame our debt. If the president wants higher taxes to improve our fiscal imbalance, he will need to embrace a massive middle-class tax increase and/or a value added tax (VAT). But Obama hasn’t shown the slightest preference for that option. It’s pure fiction to pretend that higher taxes on those making more than $200,000 will make much of a dent in our debt, given the size of our long-term spending problem. Obama’s argument isn’t with Republicans. It’s with basic arithmetic.

…Barack Obama has amassed a dismal economic record as president. (Former senator Phil Gramm points out that if Barack Obama had matched Ronald Reagan’s post-recession recovery rate, 15.7 million more Americans would have jobs.) Obama can’t campaign on his record—so he’s betting his reelection chances on stoking embers of anger and resentment. That’s about all that’s left of hope and change.

In the NYTimes, Joe Nocera thinks we should switch to natural gas.

Some readers of The New York Times are unimpressed with the idea of substituting natural gas for imported oil, even though such a move would help wean the country from its dependence on OPEC. Or so it appears after I made that argument in my column on Tuesday, noting that natural gas is a fossil fuel we have in abundance and is cleaner than oil to boot.

…The truth is, every problem associated with drilling for natural gas is solvable. The technology exists to prevent most methane from escaping, for instance. Strong state regulation will help ensure environmentally safe wells. And so on. Somewhat to my surprise, this view was seconded by Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica who has probably written more stories about the dangers of fracking than anyone. In a comment posted online to my Tuesday column, he wrote that while the environmental issues were real, they “can be readily addressed by the employment of best drilling practices, technological investment, and rigorous regulatory oversight.”

The country has been handed an incredible gift with the Marcellus Shale. With an estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of reserves, it is widely believed to be the second-largest natural gas field ever discovered. Which means that those of you who live near this tremendous resource have two choices. You can play the Not-In-My-Backyard card, employing environmental scare tactics to fight attempts to drill for that gas. …

 Ed Morrissey gives a thumbs up to the new film, Atlas Shrugged Part 1.

While some people waited excitedly for the premiere of the first cinema installment of Ayn Rand’s seminal novel Atlas Shrugged, I have to admit that I didn’t hold out high expectations for the film.  The book was a smashing exercise in philosophical, economic, and political study — absolutely brilliant.  As entertainment, however, the novel has its problems, and even the most determined reader can find getting through the book’s massive size a daunting and patience-testing task.  I read Atlas Shrugged twenty-five years ago, and while I appreciated its brilliance, I have had little desire to revisit it since.

So it’s fair to say that I prepared myself for a difficult slog, but to my surprise, Atlas Shrugged Part I turned into an intriguing, stylish film that did not water down the Randian message in the least.   In fact, the film format seems to free the characters in some sense from the limitations of Rand’s prose and give more clarity and purpose to the story, while keeping its message firmly at the film’s center.

…The best word to describe Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is … surprising.  It’s surprisingly well-paced, surprisingly intelligent, surprisingly well-acted, and surprisingly entertaining.  Perhaps most surprising of all, it has me thinking about re-reading the novel again.  I would highly recommend it to friends and their families. …

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Phil Gramm has a wonderful piece in the WSJ that puts the current economic situation in historical perspective. The Senator shows what Obama and his policies have cost us in diminished growth.

…If we had matched the 1982 recovery rate, today annual per-capita income would be $4,154 higher than before the recession—that’s an extra $16,600 for a family of four—and some 15.7 million more Americans would have jobs. That’s enough jobs to employ 100% of the 13.5 million Americans currently classified as unemployed. In addition, we would have provided jobs for 30% of both the 2.4 million discouraged or marginally attached workers and the 4.8 million who have totally dropped out of the work force since January 2008.

A compelling case can be made that Reagan’s tax cuts, Social Security reforms, regulatory reforms, and limits on the growth and power of the federal government not only helped the economy shake off the malaise of the 1970s but generated an economic growth premium that bore dividends for Americans until 2007.

And if the Reagan policies of the 1980s were sufficiently different from those of the previous decade to generate a growth premium, cannot a case be made that the policies of the Obama administration are sufficiently different from those of the previous quarter-century to alter the growth trend and impose a growth discount?

…Americans did not realize that the price they might pay for big government would be 15.7 million fewer jobs and $4,154 less in per-capita income. Big government costs more than higher taxes. It is paid for with diminished freedom and less opportunity. You can’t have unlimited opportunity and unlimited government.

Ed Morrissey has an exciting update on Wisconsin’s budget.

…Walker has played long ball, however, and his economic policies got a major boost yesterday from the state’s budget office.  His new budget will keep property taxes from rising more than 1% each of the next two years, and his proposal has all but eliminated the state’s deficit:

The property tax bill on the typical Wisconsin home would rise by less than 1% annually over the next two years under Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget, the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office reported Friday.

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau also said Walker’s plan would put the state’s finances in the best shape they’ve been in for more than 15 years. …

Wisconsin voters sent Republicans to Madison to fix the state’s finances.  Democrats controlled state politics for decades and left a legacy of overspending and debt, and Republicans were given an opportunity to fix it. It looks as though they’ve succeeded, and that’s very bad news indeed for unions and their Democratic allies. …

Mark Steyn takes aim at the president’s pretty words about wasting money. And he brings attention to an alarming statistic.

…Vegas is no longer the world’s biggest gambling resort; America is. Barack Obama says we need to “win the future,” and one more roll of the dice should do it: A trillion dollars of chips on the stimulus came up empty but let’s pile another couple trillion on Obamacare, and “high-speed rail,” and “green jobs” and “broadband access… But don’t worry, we’re not just throwing our money away. We’re playing to a system! The president calls it “investing in the future.”

How do you “invest in the future”? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That’s what the Government of the United States is doing. It’s spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour of every day of every week – all for your future!

…Government is not alone in “investing” in “the future.” The New York Times reported last week that in 2010, for the first time, student-loan debt topped credit-card debt. This year, college debt is projected to be over a trillion dollars – a spectacular increase in just the past decade. America is now dumping two-thirds of Canada’s or India’s GDP not into overall debt but into one small niche market of debt. Yet, in a nation with a trillion dollars of student debt, 40 percent of Americans work in minimal-skill service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology…

Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you’ve spent it and no longer have one?…

In the Daily Beast, Patricia Murphy reports on how some liberal politicians are reacting to the budget deal.

…There is no more visible symbol of Democratic disgruntlement than the woman who was perhaps the president’s closest ally when she wielded the speaker’s gavel. When Nancy Pelosi voted against the budget measure Thursday, she did little to hide her anger with the White House over the fact that Obama, for the first time, had left her out of the negotiations on a major deal. Instead, he chose to work directly with Boehner and Reid to hammer out the compromise that each could take back to their caucuses for approval.

…For many Democrats, the budget bill was only the latest in a string of disappointments served up from the White House since 2009, when Obama swept into office on a tide of goodwill and a platform of base-pleasing promises they say he hasn’t lived up to. On the list are his pledges to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, pass comprehensive immigration reform, and end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

…Some legislative grumbling is inevitable when a party returns to power after eight years. But a number of Democrats are past protesting the president, discussing among themselves ways to recruit a primary challenger in 2012. …

In Gallup, Jeffrey Jones breaks down the president’s job approval numbers.

The latest Gallup Daily tracking three-day average shows 41% of Americans approving of the job Barack Obama is doing as president. That ties his low as president, which he registered three times previously — twice in August 2010 and once in October 2010.

…Obama’s approval rating in April 12-14 polling is down most among independents when compared with his 2011 average to date as well as his term average among this group. Currently, 35% of independents approve of the president, nine points off his average from independents this year. Democrats’ current ratings are also below what he has averaged thus far in 2011 (down four points), while Republicans’ are the same. …

Craig Pirrong tells of his recent encounter with a TSA officer.

I read this article about how the TSA is targeting complainers right before heading out to the airport.  Not that it made any difference (as you’ll see in a bit).  The line at Terminal C of IAH was interminable–35 minutes in mid-afternoon.  There weren’t that many people in line, but TSA had only 1 lane open and was making everyone go through the body scanner so the line moved at a glacial pace. In preparation for the scanner, I took off my watch, and removed my wallet, boarding pass, and plastic comb from my pockets (the last item having been identified as suspicious in one of my previous nude photo shoots).  I went through the machine, fingers touching over my head as instructed.  (Guess which ones.)  I get out of the scanner, and Officer Friendly says (I quote exactly): “I need to inspect your buttocks.”

Oh joy.

So he gropes, and says, “What’s in your back pocket?”  I thought I’d taken out everything, but I reached in and found a piece of Kleenex balled up at the very bottom.  I show the worthy public servant, who barks at me: “We told you to take EVERYTHING out of your pockets.”  I replied: “Sorry.  So relieved to know you are keeping the skies safe from the Kleenex threat.”  Apropos the article, that set me up for special treatment: the bomb swab.

I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that I passed.

What’s the point of having expensive technology that can provide precise, anatomically correct 3D images of your junk, but can’t identify a plastic comb–or a piece of facial tissue–as harmless? …

Neatorama takes a fond look back at the development of one time-saving appliance.

There are many brilliant products that were discovered by accident and the microwave just might be one of the most amazing. In 1945, Percy Spencer was hired by Raytheon to improve radar sets through the use of magnetrons, which generate microwaves that allow for smaller objects to be detected on radars.

He was working on one of his radar sets when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt. He quickly realized the melting was caused by the microwaves being emitted from the magnetrons and he started experimenting with cooking different foods in the waves. He soon developed a large metal box which would prevent the microwaves from escaping. The device was extremely effective at cooking foods in a short amount of time.

Raytheon filed a patent for the microwave in 1945 and gave one of their devices to a Boston restaurant for testing. The tests were a success and in 1947, the company released their first commercial version to the public. It was 5’11” tall, weighed about 750 pounds and cost $5000 (about $49,500 after inflation). The first one of these devices was installed in the NS Savannah, a nuclear-powered ship. It’s still there today. …

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John Podhoretz thinks the prez may have an uphill battle when it comes to his re-election campaign.

As Barack Obama was delivering his speech on the nation’s long-term debt crisis, word came that JP Morgan has radically downgraded its projection of the nation’s short-term prospects for economic growth. Morgan now thinks the economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.4 percent this year. This comes hard on the heels of Macroeconomic Advisers lowering its growth projection for 2011 from 4 percent at the beginning of the year to 1.7 percent today.

These aren’t just horrible numbers for the U.S. economy. They are a potential death knell for Barack Obama’s presidency. There is no way tepid growth of this sort is going to make a dent in the nation’s overall employment numbers—and it stands to reason that if unemployment is higher at the time of the 2012 election than it was when he took office in 2009 (7.6 percent), he is exceedingly unlikely to win a second term.

Combine that with the runup in gas and food prices, and you are looking at a presidency in serious condition—not yet critical, because these are projections, after all, and who knows? Economists get this wrong all the time. There was also good potential news today on the employment front, that the number of posted job positions is at its highest since 2004. …

Peggy Noonan too.

…We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. …

…The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic.

…You would think Democratic professionals, who read the same numbers Republicans do and pick up similar trends, would be hanging their heads in despair.

They are not. They have hope. Their hope is that Republicans in the early caucus and primary states will go crazy. They hope the GOP will nominate for the presidency someone strange, extreme or barely qualified. They hope that in a mood of antic cultural pique, or in a great acting out of disdain for elites, or to annoy the mainstream media, Republican voters will raise high candidates who are unacceptable to everyone else. Everyone else of course being the great and vital center, which hires and fires presidents. …

The bad news keeps coming for the White House. Nile Gardiner blogs about recent polls.

…The latest Gallup figures are even worse than the most recent Quinnipiac University national poll released at the end of March, which tracked Obama at just 42 percent approval. As I noted in a previous piece, President Obama receives strong negativity ratings for his handling of virtually all key issues, including the economy, budget deficit, health care, foreign policy and energy policy…

And if his heavily panned performance this week on the budget deficit is anything to go by, it is unlikely that the president’s ratings will be significantly improving anytime soon. Barack Obama faces an increasingly disillusioned electorate which, as the latest RealClear Politics average of polls shows, overwhelmingly believes the country is heading down the wrong track. With deep-seated fears over the economy, including towering levels of federal debt, dominating voter concerns, the Obama presidency seems destined for another fall, perhaps on an even bigger scale than the setback the Left suffered last November.

In sharp contrast to his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, who did survive low ratings in his third year to ultimately win a second term, Obama is drifting further to the left rather than the political centre, a move which will only further alienate independents who moved decisively against him in the mid-terms. And as for comparisons with Ronald Reagan, who also recovered from low approval ratings to bounce back in 1984, the Gipper was simply in a different league to Barack Obama, displaying the kind of decisive, principled leadership that is sorely lacking in the White House today.

True-believing Dems still think that their man has a good shot at a second term. In the New Republic, William Galston looks ahead.

…First, Obama will try to persuade the electorate (in particular, the Independents who deserted Democrats in droves last year) that he’s really the guy they thought they were voting for in 2008—the conciliator who puts partisanship and ideology aside to get things done. In that context, the lame-duck budget deal wasn’t a one-off, but rather a harbinger of things to come. That’s why the president gave more ground than many congressional Democrats liked to reach agreement on the 2011 budget, and why he now seems prepared to accept a linkage he had previously rejected between raising the debt ceiling and movement toward long-term fiscal restraint.

Second theme: Despite the expensive but necessary response to the economic emergency of 2008-2009, Obama’s not a big spender determined to expand the reach and cost of the federal government. He cares about getting deficits and debt under control, but unlike the Republicans, he wants to do it in a way that honors our values and builds our future.  That’s why he has chosen to deliver a speech on long-term fiscal policy that seeks simultaneously to get him on the playing field while distinguishing his approach from that of Representative Ryan and the House Republicans.

Which brings us to the third building-block of the reelection effort. The 2011 State of the Union announced a theme—winning the future—that the Obama team seems to take seriously even if the commentariat doesn’t. The intention is to convey an optimistic vision of a better future that is within our grasp if we make the right investments. It also represents an effort to rebrand twenty-first century liberalism as looking forward rather than backward; as oriented toward growth and opportunity rather than redistribution and security. In that context, the president can be expected to defend tenaciously what he regards as key investments in the future—education, basic research, innovation, and infrastructure—against Republican attacks. The “winning the future” agenda would become Obama’s equivalent of the famous “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment” quarter that Bill Clinton used to draw the line against Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans in 1995. …

Jennifer Rubin attended a Q&A session with Representative Paul Ryan, and shares his response to the president’s speech.

…Much of the president’s rhetoric was simply untrue. Ryan said the president had dismissed the Republicans’ plan for “cutting” taxes on the wealthy. This is simply wrong. “We don’t include his tax increases. We keep revenues where they are and reform the tax code along the lines of the debt commission.” He explained that broadening the base and taking away loopholes will at least get the wealthy to pay tax on more of their income. “Right now they aren’t paying any taxes on money they shelter,” he observed.

…He also debunked the idea that he wanted to destroy entitlement programs. He made a pass at unraveling Obama’s wild claims about his plan’s impact on seniors. But the essence of his approach, he said (sorry, libertarians), was to save the welfare state. “We believe you need to have a social safety net. We think there is a consensus on that.” He wants to allow those programs to function, but to make sure we are a “paycheck nation,” not one promoting dependency. Rather than wait for the debt crisis to arrive, as it has in Europe, where draconian cuts are immediately implemented, Ryan said, “If you do it now and fix this problem, we do it on our own terms.”

…He explained that the president’s analysis that the debt was caused by two wars and the Bush tax cuts was wrong. The debt problem has been a long time in the making. “The big drivers are entitlement programs,” he said, and he readily acknowledged that “both parties are to blame.” …

In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino tells us the back story on the debt commission.

One way to know that President Obama’s much-hyped “fiscal austerity” speech bombed is that even members of his own deficit-reduction commission apparently felt betrayed.

Sure, Erskine Bowles, the commission’s Democratic chair, and Alan Simpson, the Republican, made some nice public statement about Obama’s deficit-reduction plan after they met with him yesterday — one day after the president unveiled his scheme to miraculously cut $4 trillion without reining in the looming catastrophes of Medicare and other entitlements. But people I spoke to in corporate America got a more unvarnished reaction in private from the debt-committee chieftains.

“What these guys can’t understand is how Obama can ask them to come up with something, and then he doesn’t listen to what they proposed,” a Wall Street executive who knows both men well told me a few hours after the president’s address on Wednesday.

…The Republicans were willing to listen to them: Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, released last week, follows the commission in proposing major tax reform — closing loopholes, lowering rates and using some of the savings to balance the federal books. …

The Gulf Of Aden Operations has interesting news of a private venture to reduce Somali piracy.

Insurers in the City of London are finalising plans to set up a private fleet of armed patrol boats in the Gulf of Aden, in a new drive to stamp out Somali piracy.

The naval protection force was conceived by leading figures in the Lloyd’s of London market. They have been working with ship owners, freight operators and governments for months, marshalling support for their plan.

The goal of the Convoy Escort Programme is to provide protection for tankers trying to navigate the seas off war-torn Somalia while also reducing the soaring costs of insuring vessels, cargo and crews against increasingly vicious attacks by pirates.

…It is understood that the industry-led project is being monitored by the Royal Navy and its counterparts. The Times understands that the Navy would regard the escorts as a trial which, if successful, would allow naval vessels to hunt pirates in other areas. If the fleet can secure funding and win the support of the shipping community, it could be up and running within six months. …

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Much of Pickings today are comments on the speech used by the president to catch up to the concerns of the American public about government spending. In the Corner, Yuval Levin reviews the speech, and points out that perhaps reality is beginning to prevail.

…And yet, for all of its profound inadequacy…this speech is on the whole a good sign. …It accepted Paul Ryan’s definition of the fiscal problem, and it accepted more or less his broad outline of what a solution would look like in fiscal terms—in terms of deficit and debt reduction. And so it defined the debate going forward as a debate about how best to achieve the Republicans’ fiscal goals.

President Obama’s answer to that question is that we can achieve those goals by slight technical modifications of the welfare state we have had since the mid-1960s. Paul Ryan’s answer is that we can achieve those goals by reimagining the welfare state for the 21st century—for an age when the legitimacy of capitalism, the efficacy of markets, the capacity of consumers to make sensible decisions, and the value of choice and variety are hardly questioned; for an aging society that for too long has spent its economic and human capital without giving thought to how they might be replenished and now wants to correct its mistakes. That debate will be the essence of our domestic politics in the coming years. It is a debate about how to fix the terrible mess created by the Great Society—a debate we have put off for too long, and that most on the left would still like to avoid at all costs. It is a debate for which (thanks especially to Ryan) Republicans are suddenly unusually well prepared, and for which (as Obama’s speech demonstrated) Democrats are dismally unready.

It is a good sign that President Obama has judged that he can’t simply avoid this debate, even if he intends to engage in it in such an unserious way. It won’t be a calm, civilized dispute among wonks, and it shouldn’t be. It will be a political struggle, fought out over several elections and no doubt beset on all sides by gimmicks, distortions, and posturing. There is no getting away from that in our democracy. But it is a debate the country could really use and which, in the long run, if we’re lucky, might even allow us to find for ourselves again the path of shared prosperity and constitutional government. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on the speech. 

The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would “sacrifice the America we believe in.” The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions in debt and doesn’t balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, the critics say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.

But they miss the point. You can’t get there from here without Ryan’s plan. It’s the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don’t need Republicans for that. That’s what Democrats do. The president’s speech was a prose poem to higher taxes — with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats. …

… Given the Democrats’ instinctive resort to granny-in-the-snow demagoguery, the Republicans are right not to budge on taxes until serious spending cuts are in place. At which point, the grand compromise awaits. And grand it would be. Saving the welfare state from insolvency is no small achievement.

Roger Simon has the best take on Biden nodding off during yet another boring speech.

…what is it about Obama that makes him so boring? I submit it is something quite simple — he has nothing to say. He is a boring person, the quintessential “hollow man” in the T.S. Eliot sense. He is kind of a socialist, kind of a liberal, kind of a multi-culturalist, kind of an environmentalist, kind of globalist, kind of a budget cutter — but none of them with any real commitment. Basically, he’s a vague and uncommitted person pretending to be otherwise. He is the man that voted “present,” now in the presidency. The fact that he never specified the targets of “hope” and “change” during his election was far from a campaign ploy and more typical than we ever dreamed. …

Craig Pirrong’s turn at Streetwise Professor.

…No serious person believes that cuts in defense and tax increases on the wealthy will make a substantial difference in the nation’s long run fiscal health.

No serious person believes that large amounts of current spending is hugely stimulative, but that large tax increases are not a drag on the economy.

No serious person believes that labeling government spending “investment” magically transforms dross into gold.

No serious person believes that “clean energy” is a viable alternative to traditional fuels over the next several decades.  And certainly no serious person believes that the government has the knowledge, wisdom, or incentives to invest wisely in it.

I could go on.  Suffice it to say that no serious person would give credence to a word that Obama said. …

Peter Wehner criticizes the president’s characterizations.

President Obama’s speech today was both outrageous and insulting, a practically perfect combination of demagoguery and shallowness. It was not a serious substantive speech; it was a political missile whose intention is was to destroy, through libel, the House Republican’s 2012 budget. It was not an effort to engage in a serious discussion; it was an effort to create a cartoon image of Obama’s critics.

…If anyone had any doubts what we’re dealing with when it comes to Obama, those have been allayed. He is a deeply irresponsible and arrogant man whose thirst for political power is overriding virtually every good and decent instinct he might have.

W. W. from The Economist’s – Democracy in America Blog. 

… In 2008, the top 1% paid 38% of all federal income taxes, and the top 5% paid 58%. Indeed, America is the industrialised world’s champion of income-tax progressivity! If any country’s upper-crust pays its fair share, America’s does.

But you wouldn’t know it listening to Mr Obama. He repeatedly and misleadingly portrayed the tax burden carried by America’s top earners as unfairly light, and the top-rate tax cuts under President Bush as a leading cause of America’s dire fiscal straits. He even proposed that itemised deductions available to every other American taxpayer be eliminated for the top 2%, which strikes me as precisely the sort of thing a country that values fairness would not do. In any case, to the extent our woes flow from a paucity of revenue, the problem is that America’s vast middle-class pays too little, not that its rich do. The widely-admired Scandinavian countries collect a much larger portion of GDP in taxes not because their top earners bear a relatively larger tax burden than do America’s top earners, but because they don’t. The president’s confusion on this matter was evident in his open admission that “I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans”. But without a tax hike on middle-class Americans, there’s simply no hope for serious deficit reduction. That is, there’s no hope as long as Mr Obama insists on cutting spending with a “scalpel” and “not a machete”. Were he really serious about deficit-reduction, Mr Obama would have let all the Bush tax cuts expire. …

Peter Wehner has more.

Jake Tapper, the best White House correspondent in the business, provides a devastating comparison of Barack Obama, Then and Now.

President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:

“We’re not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that’s—the other party’s being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”

President Obama today:

“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. . . . This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”

No commentary was provided by Tapper. None was needed.

And more criticism of the speech, this time from Clive Crook in the Atlantic.

…Bowles-Simpson proposes a base-broadening assault on tax expenditures and a lowering of marginal rates, for an overall increase in revenue. Obama picked up the tax-expenditure idea, mentioning Bowles-Simpson as he did so, but combined it with reaffirmed hostility to lower tax rates for the rich. (Again with the millionaires and billionaires.) He is still proposing an increase, not a decrease, in marginal rates on high incomes combined with restricted tax expenditures for those at the top of the income distribution–that is to say, two rounds of increases in high-income tax rates. The rich can pay for it all. That is Obama’s tax policy. …

Jennifer Rubin reviews Paul Ryan’s response.

…Ryan’s statement was accompanied by a listing of some of the problems with Obama’s speech, including these on the debt commission:

• Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security — puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.

• Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year .?.?.

• Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?…

David Harsanyi makes fun of liberal scare tactics gone awry.

…Markey went on to claim that Republicans wanted to “shut down the Internet” when they had voted to strip censors at the Federal Communications Commission of the power to regulate the Internet. Conservatives wanted to padlock the Web by keeping it open? As devious plots go, this one is as counterintuitive as it is dastardly. No, the Web has never been regulated, and it seems — to the untrained eye, at least — to function more efficiently and freely than any industry overseen by a three-letter acronym. But that’s probably the problem.

The irascible Markey, author of the cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, also groused about Republicans (he must have forgotten to mention the Democrats) who are attempting to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon dioxide — or, in other words, everything. …

…And so it goes. The Democratic mayor of Washington, Vincent Gray, called on citizens to “fight back against oppression.” What oppression, you ask? Riders to the 2011 federal budget would end taxpayer funding for abortions and allow a handful of poor kids in D.C. to once again escape public schools. (Talk about fighting oppression.) Choice, as you know, is tyranny. Sometimes. …

Thomas Sowell explains that liberals aren’t merely looking to increase government revenue.

…For more than 80 years, the political left has opposed what they call “tax cuts for the rich.” But big cuts in very high tax rates ended up bringing in more revenue to the government in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations. This included more– repeat, more– tax revenue from people in the highest income brackets than before.

…”the rich” paid that larger sum of taxes only because their incomes had risen. Their paying a higher share of all taxes doesn’t matter to the “progressives,” who see high tax rates as a way to take a bigger bite out of the incomes of higher-income people, not just provide more revenue to the government.

Tax rates are meant to make an ideological statement and promote class-warfare politics, not just bring in revenue. …

…The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against “the rich” and big business, they don’t care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up unemployed. …

Debra Saunders reports what happened when one scientist challenged a cherished liberal initiative.

If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom.

In 2008, Enstrom thought that a report on the health effects of diesel emissions presented by the California Air Resources Board was faulty. As it turns out, CARB’s nitrous oxide emission estimates were overstated by 340 percent. Enstrom and others had trouble believing that a Ph.D. statistician would make some of CARB’s findings. They dug around and found that CARB researcher Hien Tran had falsely claimed to have a doctorate in statistics from UC Davis. In fact, Tran had a master’s degree from UC Davis, but his doctorate came from an unaccredited school.

CARB has since scaled back the diesel regulations it had previously approved – although spokesman Stanley Young asserts that the policy change “was not related to the research” – which officials have maintained were overestimated because of calculations made prior to the recession. CARB did demote Tran and cut his monthly pay by $1,066 to $7,899 per month.

…In February 2010, after renewing his research grants regularly since 1976, UCLA notified Enstrom that he had lost his funding. Unlike Tran, he would be out of a job. …