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Richard Epstein expounds on the problems that accrue from the president’s government-by-waiver.

One of the great achievements of Western civilization is what we commonly call “the rule of law.” By this we mean the basic principles of fairness and due process that govern the application of power in both the public and the private spheres. The rule of law requires that all disputes — whether among private parties or among the state and private parties — be tried before neutral judges, under rules that are known and articulated in advance. Every party must have notice of the charge against him and an opportunity to be heard in response; each governing rule must be consistent with all the others, so that no person is forced to violate one legal requirement in order to satisfy a second. In the United States, our respect for such principles has made our economy the world’s strongest, and our citizens the world’s freest.

Though we may take it for granted, the rule of law is no easy thing to create and preserve. Dictators and petty despots of all sorts will rebel against these constraints in order to exercise dominion over the lives and fortunes of their subjects. But anyone, of any political persuasion, who thinks of government as the servant of its citizens — not their master — will recognize that compliance with the rule of law sets a minimum condition for a just legal order.

That, however, is precisely where the difficulties begin — for minimum conditions by themselves are not enough. Law is not just an idealized system of rules: It also involves the public administration of those rules by a wide range of elected and appointed officials in an endless array of particular circumstances. For those who would defend a just legal order, the basic challenge is to strike a proper balance — between limiting the discretion of these officials so that they do not undermine the rule of law, while also allowing them enough leeway to perform their essential roles.

Lately in America, we have done a poor job of preserving this balance. In practice — and, increasingly, in legal theory — government officials have been given unprecedented ability to make exceptions to the law, both in enforcing it and in respecting the rights granted under it. Indeed, the past year has seen two of the most enormous pieces of legislation in U.S. history — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — make the imbalance far worse. Both laws seek to dramatically transform vast swaths of the American economy; both give enormous power to the government to bring about these transformations. And yet both laws are stunningly silent on exactly how these overhauls are to take place. The vague language of these statutes delegates much blanket authority to government officials who will, effectively, make the rules up as they go along.

As these officials stumble through how to implement these sprawling new laws, they will inevitably come up against unanticipated obstacles (or powerful interests) that will demand exceptions to the statutes’ far-reaching provisions. In some cases, special benefits or permissions releasing companies from government regulations will simply be granted. In others, the releases will be provided only if the regulated parties agree to waive some legal protection to which they would otherwise be entitled.

Neither of these practices — providing waivers or demanding waivers — is necessarily pernicious. Indeed, in some cases, they are part and parcel of the ordinary course of business in the modern administrative state. But both are open to abuse, and that abuse makes for a particularly dangerous form of government power. …

… Of course, a total transformation of the role of government will not happen any time soon. Meanwhile, the problem of government by waiver — like the larger danger of excessive discretion — can be limited only by a greater awareness of these perils on the part of judges and administrators. The best we can hope for, then, is enlightened leaders.

And that is precisely the problem. The fate of our rights and liberties is left to the wisdom and discretion of individuals; we are therefore governed by men, not by laws. It was this exact circumstance that our system of government was designed to avoid: As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” In this sense, the problem of government by waiver shows us just how far we have strayed from the intentions of those who created our system of government — and how we risk betraying their hope that we might preserve it.

Tony Blankley knows what is behind the president’s new fiscal caution.

… no president who is confident of re-election chooses to embarrass himself by so conspicuously reversing himself on the central domestic issue of his time within two months unless he fears a new mood among the voters.

I don’t know what new Washington conventional wisdom the network parrots will be reciting Thursday morning after the president’s remarks, but let me offer a broad assessment of the fast-emerging debt- and deficit-reduction fight strategies.

The Republicans have bet the farm that the American public will more likely punish them for inaction than action. Good. The president seems to have come to the same conclusion regarding his chances with the 2012 electorate. So a fight over something that looks like real legislative action on the deficit crisis is going to be joined by the two parties.

But the nature of the Democratic Party’s coalition for power must drive it to protect the excessive spending at all cost. The Democratic Party coalition since Franklin D. Roosevelt has been premised on the concept of “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” The phrase was first reported in the New York Times by reporter Arthur Krock in 1938, allegedly as a quote from FDR’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins denied having said it at the time, but it encapsulated the Democratic Party’s successful method of getting elected by taxing the rich and upper-middle class, spending on the poorer public and thereby getting re-elected by that public.

If the Democratic Party gives up the vast spending that is driving the nation to fiscal catastrophe, that undermines its ability to win elections as a national political party. Democrats will fight for years to prevent such a spending “drought.”

But as it has suddenly become clear to the president and his strategists that they cannot be seen to be on the sidelines, they will have to offer what may seem like a plausible solution. …

It is conventional wisdom that the “Arab Spring” has threatened Israel in new ways. David Goldman, writing as Spengler takes a different view, claiming it provides Israel with better chances to protect herself.

Civilian casualties are the currency of Middle East diplomacy. The military issue in the region has never been whether Israel had the power to crush its opponents, but whether it had permission to do so. Iran and Syria have supplied Hezbollah with 50,000 rockets, many capable of hitting any target in Israel with precision. Many are emplaced under homes, schools and hospitals. Thousands of civilians used as unwilling human shields would perish if Israel were to destroy the missiles.

Too much collateral damage will “stain the conscience of the world”, as United States President Barack Obama intoned over Libya. By this reckoning, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and other Arab dictators have enhanced Israel’s strategic position by cheapening Arab life.

Another 34 Syrians died in last Friday’s protests, the largest to date, bringing the body count to 170 in the past three weeks.

Estimates of the dead in Libya’s civil war, meanwhile, range from 1,000 to 10,000. No one paid much attention to the dozen and a half dead in Israel’s latest retaliatory strike in Gaza. At the US State Department briefing April 7, spokesman Mark Toner condemned the latest rocket attacks on Israel “in the strongest possible terms”, but said nothing about the Israeli response.

That is harbinger of things to come. …

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Christopher Hitchens wants to know why Mugabe is still ensconced in Zimbawe.  

…the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe predates the “Arab spring” by several years and must now count in its own right as one of the world’s most stubborn and brave movements.

Peter Godwin’s most recent book, The Fear, updates the continuing story of popular resistance. In my opinion it’s not quite as powerful as his earlier book, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, but it does convey the awful immediate reality of a state where official lawlessness and cruelty are the norm. …

…But don’t read them just for outrage at the terrible offense to humanity. They also describe a new sort of Zimbabwean, emancipated from racial and tribal feeling by a long common struggle against a man who doesn’t scruple to employ racial and tribal demagoguery. In those old days of arguing with the white settlers, one became used to their endless jeering refrain: “Majority rule will mean one man, one vote—one time!” They couldn’t have been more wrong. Since gaining independence three decades ago, the Zimbabwean people have braved every kind of intimidation and repression to go on registering their votes. They have made dogged use of the courts and the press, which continue to function in a partial way, to uphold pluralism and dissent. Mugabe has lost important votes in Parliament and—last time—his electoral majority in the country at large. Only the undisguised use of force and the wholesale use of corruption have kept his party in office. One day, the civic resistance to this, which was often looked-down upon by people considering themselves revolutionary, will earn the esteem and recognition it deserves.

Scott Adams writes an informative article about how college, and life, taught him to be an entrepreneur.

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans. …

… If you’re having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn’t work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. …

Andrew Malcolm writing in the LA Times explains why the president is speaking on the deficit today.

If President Obama is in political trouble, just wait a minute. He’ll give a speech. He thinks speech-making is his best skill and clearly prefers campaigning over presidenting at a desk.

Oh, look! Obama’s giving another speech this afternoon.

It’s at George Washington University, the administration’s new favorite homefield speech-giving place where Obama had Hillary Clinton talk about foreign policy a few weeks ago.

Obama has looked distracted in recent weeks. He launched a war in Libya while taking his family around South America. For more than a week Obama had Clinton do the public explaining and take the “Say What, a Third War?” heat for the guy who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries by arguing against such irrelevant foreign conflicts.

Nine days after the first Tomahawks blew something up in Tripoli, a besieged Obama finally talked about how it was suddenly in America’s interest to end the 42-year reign of a notorious bad guy. Obama said he was worried that Kadafi would kill innocent civilians, although worse threats to civilians go on every day in countless lands without U.S. military intervention.

This includes Syria, where scores have died to government bullets in recent weeks and Obama only sent out his press secretary Jay Carney to strike fear into the heart of President Bashar al-Assad by issuing two stern warnings.

Last week when the United States government faced an historic shutdown, Capt. Quixote was off in Philadelphia talking of windmills before speaking at an Al Sharpton gala in New York. …

In the Right Wing News, John Hawkins interviews Thomas Sowell on his new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Second Edition.

…Now many people blame the economic issues in Africa, India, Pakistan, the Middle East on colonization by Western nations and stinginess on the same part by those nations. …

…The hard data shows the opposite of what they’re saying. You can look at the case of those countries which finally opened up to the rest of the world and allowed foreign investors in and foreign businesses in, the two biggest examples in recent times, India and China. People by the millions have risen out of poverty in China and in India after they began to open up their markets to Western investments.

None of this is mysterious. When people come in to build phones or other devices in China, the people who set up those business in China make money, but the people in China also make money. The reason is because there is a net increase in the wealth produced by the country. I’m always amazed at how little interest people on the Left have in what does and does not increase the actual production of wealth. They are hypnotized by the notion of redistribution of wealth without any concern about how is the wealth produced in the first place. You can’t redistribute it until it’s produced and if your methods cause less to be produced, people are going to be poorer. …

We have a couple of views on the effects of the Tea Parties. First, from Forbes, a cheerleader.

… It was President Obama’s abuses of power and extravagant spending that launched the modern Tea Party. Like King George, Obama thinks himself above the law. The stimulus spending did more to funnel taxpayer money to those who helped elect him than boost the economy. He mandates we buy insurance then scurrilously dispenses Obamacare waivers according to potential votes or campaign contributions. Without abiding by the Constitution, the law is whatever Obama deems it. Justice becomes whatever he can get away with.

Society instituted governments to defend the God given inalienable rights resident in our persons and property; not to favor certain parties or promote specific outcomes according to political calculation. If everyone was just or we could all defend ourselves, government would be redundant. As James Madison encapsulated, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” We’re not angels so government must protect against crime, fraud and foreign invasion, but those inhabiting government aren’t angels either. Their authority must be well-defined and limited. Domestic functions are best administered locally where politicians are more easily held to account. …

Then W. W. from the Economist Blog – Democracy in America, who says the GOP would have done just fine in 2010 even if the Tea Party had never existed.

… So why did Democrats suffer a whupping in November? As someone once said, it’s the economy, stupid. Again and again political scientists find that macroeconomic variables drive electoral outcomes more than any other factors. The Democrats did about as badly as we should expect the majority party to do during a brutal recession. Nevertheless, humans have story-hungry minds that see agency and intention everywhere. It rains because the gods want it to rain, and Republicans seized the House because Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers funneled a fortune into an astroturf movement that got out the conservative vote. … 

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We start off with more on Congressman Paul Ryan’s reform plan, this time from Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle.

President Obama has dedicated his time in office to soaking up applause and shifting blame. Last year, when Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate, Congress didn’t even bother passing a budget. Obama didn’t seem to mind. But when Republicans put together a stopgap measure to fund the military and prevent a government shutdown, Obama promised to veto it. Obama called the measure “a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of fiscal year 2011.”

There must have been a lot of distractions last year.

Obama has failed to propose a serious plan to reform entitlement spending and take control of runaway federal spending. Last week, however, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., stepped into the void by releasing a budget plan that would trim $6.2 trillion from Obama’s 10-year spending plan. Dubbed “The Path to Prosperity,” the GOP plan already has passed through Ryan’s committee.

Ryan rightly argues that the sooner Washington addresses annual deficit spending and unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare, the less harsh the cuts need be. But also, the GOP wants Washington to focus on “core” responsibilities. As the plan notes, “When government takes on too many tasks, it usually does not do any of them very well.”  …

Jennifer Rubin thinks that politicians’ responses to the budget deal tell us more about the politicians than the deal.

…On the Democratic side you have the president, his flacks, the Democratic National Committee and a few others who see the deal as a big “win” for President Obama.When the White House sends David Plouffe rather than a serious policy adviser on “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday,” you understand that the White House is in spin mode. And how preposterous is the spin that a continuing resolution with significant cuts Obama had opposed, which was struck with zero assistance from the White House, is a reflection of his leadership. Are we supposed to take seriously Plouffe’s line that Obama intended all along to “not get engaged” in the back-and-forth? You understand the game here is to justify a strategy of do-nothingism. Maybe that is why Obama signed the CR in private, with no press or fanfare.

But there is silliness on the Republican side as well. You hear a few hard-line congressmen proclaim that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t get “enough” or that a shutdown would have been a win for the Republicans. These are the voices of the perpetually aggrieved on the right who will oppose any deal because their aim is not conservative governance but confrontation and incitement of an anti-Washington base. For these folks the “best deal possible” is not a statement of mature leadership, but a sell-out.

Nevertheless, we also know that the cranky voices are a very small minority in the House (only 28 Republicans voted against the short-term CR in the wee hours of the night). Moreover, Tea Partyers whom the Democrats were setting up to take the fall in the event of a shutdown were overwhelmingly positive about the deal. Perhaps the anti-dealmaking right is largely a creation of liberal media and of a few sour conservative pundits. …

Robert Samuelson discusses what results from the government trying to solve every problem.

We in America have created suicidal government…government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies. The census list doesn’t include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction and 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

“Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything,” writes the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson…The concept of “vital national interest” is stretched. We deploy government casually to satisfy any mass desire, correct any perceived social shortcoming or remedy any market deficiency. What has abetted this political sprawl, notes Wilson, is the rising influence of “action intellectuals” — professors, pundits, “experts” — who provide respectable rationales for various political agendas. …

In the Daily Caller, Mickey Kaus gives evidence that the federal bureaucracy is unaffected by the recession.

If you worry that the federal government can’t afford $38 billion in cuts, please read Chris Moody’s article from two weeks ago. There’s a $1.6 trillion deficit but the feds are still hiring. As of March 23 they were hiring someone to run a Facebook page for the Deparment of the Interior (at up to $115,000 a year). They were hiring equal opportunity compliance officers at the Peace Corps and Department of Interior for $150,000 to $180,000 a pop. They were hiring deputy speechwriters for officials at relatively obscure agencies. …P.S.: The point isn’t so much that these federal employees are overpaid, though they are. The point is that if there were any actual sense of a deficit crisis in Washington these are jobs that would not be filled at all. … Well, maybe the Facebook editor. …In effect, the respectable ”pivot to entitlements” position says,”we’re going to cut Social Security checks and Medicare for mid-income old people to save the jobs of $180K equal opportunity officers at the DOT.” … Why not wring the fat out of government first? … Update: Here’s the current list of jobs the government is still filling. …

Check the list. It will blow your mind. …

The Economist unpacks the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and what should be done to prevent it.

…All this matters because antibiotic resistance has both medical and financial costs. It causes longer and more serious illnesses, lengthening people’s stays in hospital and complicating their treatment. Sometimes people die unnecessarily. In one study, which sampled almost 1,400 patients at Cook County hospital in Chicago, researchers found resistant strains of bacteria infecting 188 people, 12 of whom died because they could not be treated adequately. At the moment, resistant bacteria threaten mostly children, the old, cancer patients and the chronically ill (especially those infected with HIV). However, there could be worse to come. Nearly 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are recorded each year; one-third of these people die from the disease. More than a quarter of new cases of TB identified recently in parts of Russia were of this troublesome kind.

…Broadly, there are three possible responses to this state of affairs. One is to do nothing, treating the various problems created by resistance as acceptable costs when set against drugs’ much greater benefits. Here, a sense of history helps. Before penicillin—that is, before the mid-1940s—it was possible for a perfectly healthy individual to die of septicaemia from a casual, everyday cut. Many other bacterial infections, most notably TB, were similarly routine killers. The Shakespearean curse, “a plague on both your houses”, would have had real resonance then. But antibiotics and vaccines have turned it into an anachronism. Worrying about even 150,000 TB deaths a year, compared with the millions who used to die, can thus sound like a counsel of perfection. …

…A big part of the trouble is that the gains from the overuse of antibiotics are private, whereas the losses are public. Problems such as these are rarely soluble without outside intervention. Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University, who has been thinking for many years about how to deal with the question of resistance, suggests the answer is a mixture of incentives and scourges. Prize funds, or guaranteed-purchase arrangements for new drugs and the rapid-diagnostics systems that would allow them to be deployed appropriately, would help overcome the financial problem of antibiotics being cures, rather than just treatments. Stricter dispensing guidelines for doctors and pharmacists might help deal with the moral hazard of overtreatment.

A bit of realism would be good, too. Derrick Crook, a consultant microbiologist at Oxford, where Florey and Chain once worked, observes, “It is hard to massively restrict the use of antimicrobials when they are doing good. It is possible that the enormous use in Asia is a good thing for a short time in a given country.” That, combined with ignorance about precisely how much the unnecessary use of antibiotics contributes to increasing resistance, makes restriction highly controversial. …

In the WSJ, Peter Landers reports on a scientist who predicted the monster tsunami.

…Dr. Shishikura’s studies of ancient earth layers persuaded him that every 450 to 800 years, colliding plates in the Pacific triggered waves that devastated areas around the modern city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, as well as in Fukushima Prefecture.

…”We cannot deny the possibility that [such a tsunami] will occur again in the near future,” he and colleagues wrote in August 2010. That article appeared in a journal published by the Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center in Tsukuba, the government-funded institute where Dr. Shishikura works.

…His work is part of a young field called paleoseismology. Kerry Sieh, a pioneer in the specialty, says that the few dozen people who do this kind of work are usually doomed to be ignored. Humans are made to trust what they have seen themselves, or what someone they know has seen. They aren’t designed “to deal with these once-in-500-year events,” says Dr. Sieh, formerly of the California Institute of Technology and now head of the Earth Observatory of Singapore…

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In Forbes, Paul Johnson discusses the moral obligation of being a superpower.

… Poor Mr. Obama! So eager to show himself as totally different from George W. Bush. He has now landed in the same sort of warlike commitment–but with the disadvantage of having been dragged into it. One feels like asking Mr. Obama if, when he decided to run for President, he didn’t realize that this is exactly the kind of geopolitical hardship a U.S. President has to accept and then get his countrymen to rally behind. Has he not studied any history or absorbed any of its painful lessons?

There are two fundamental truths that any American taking over the White House and beginning his watch in the Oval Office has to accept–one moral, the other physical. The moral point can be briefly stated. No country–not even the U.S.–is obliged to try to make the world perfect. It will always be imperfect, with most of its ills beyond remedy or mitigation (witness the appalling earthquake/ tsunami disaster in Japan).

But if a great nation such as the U.S. believes in freedom, practices democracy, accepts a Judeo-Christian sense of morality as an ideal, honors human rights, and deplores and denounces all the evils of the totalitarian state…then that nation cannot allow a dictator, before the eyes of the world, to violate all the principles of justice and humanity if said nation has the means to prevent it.

Which brings us to the second point. President Obama, in the recesses of his curious worldview, may not like the fact, but America is a great power and is likely to remain the only superpower for some time. …These forces are provided at huge expense by the American taxpayer and are staffed by thousands of dedicated young American men and women whose express purpose is to protect civilization from barbarism. That, as they see it and have been taught to see it, is precisely what America stands for. ….

The President wants you to deal with the rising price of gas by buying a new car. Mark Steyn has this response.

…America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there, beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders, are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.

So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.

Another 10 years of this, and large tracts of America will be Third World. Not Somalia-scale Third World, but certainly the more decrepit parts of Latin America. There will still be men with motorcades, but they’ll have heavier security and the compounds they shuttle between will be more heavily protected. For them and their cronies, the guys plugged in…life will be manageable, and they’ll still be wondering why you loser schlubs are forever whining about gas prices, and electricity prices and food prices. …

David Warren tells us a little about a tax code issue in Canada. He starts off by making a great point.

Should the government be telling us how to live? Or should we be telling the government?

Expressed baldly like that, I dare say many of my gentle readers would opt for, “We tell the government.” And according to the older school of constitutional thought, we have elections in which our instructions are made known. This is indeed what the Tea Party is all about, south of the border: “Now we will speak, and you will listen.” …

Michael Barone reviews recent events related to budget battles.

…Democrats and public employee unions rallied against the bill sponsored by Republican Gov. Scott Walker and passed by the legislature scaling back public employee unions’ bargaining privileges and stopping the automatic flow of dues money from the state treasury to the unions and their allies in the Democratic Party.

The public employee unions hoped to defeat a Republican Supreme Court justice and create an activist liberal majority that might overturn the law. Turnout increased from 793,000 in April 2009 to 837,000 in the February 2011 primary to 1,494,000 last week, and examination of the returns shows big increases where unions are strong.

But the anti-spending enthusiasm that brought so many conservatives to the polls in November was still operative in April, and the Republican seems to have won by 7,000 votes. And Democrats’ efforts to recall Republican state senators seem unlikely to net them the three seats they need for a majority. …

In Newsbusters, Noel Sheppard catches Andrew Sullivan acting like his old self.

Bill Maher and Eliot Spitzer on Friday’s “Real Time” not surprisingly attacked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for his 2012 budget proposal.

Showing glimpses of the conservative that used to occupy his body many years ago, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan not only defended the Republican as deserving a lot of credit for his bold plan, but also exposed Maher and Spitzer as ignorant hypocrites when it comes to the nation’s fiscal policy…

Rick Richman has more thoughts on Obama’s “Let them drive hybrids” comment.

…Some might be tempted to shrug this off as an anecdote about a clueless ruler…unsympathetic to people clinging to their vans and religion. But we all occasionally say silly things—we’re only human, not  sort of a deity—and it would be unfair to equate the president’s response with Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” remark, because Marie Antoinette did not actually say that.

The phrase is commonly misascribed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no record of her ever saying it; it may have originated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, completed in 1769 when Marie Antoinette was only 13, attributed to a “great princess” who may have been a fictional character. The  misattribution came later…

So Marie Antoinette was the victim of the tea partiers of the day, who attributed to her a remark she never made. Monsieur Le Deficit, on the other hand, actually made the remark that historians will not be able to find in the Associated Press. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders comments on one of Obama’s butt-boys.

The New York Times reported last month that General Electric earned $14.2 billion in international profits, including, $5.1 billion in the United States. Yet GE did not pay a dime in federal income taxes last year. Oddly, President Obama chose GE Chairman and Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt to head his President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

According to the Associated Press, Immelt’s compensation package doubled to $15.2 million last year, while this year GE is seeking major concessions from the unions that represent its shrinking American workforce. That makes Immelt the wrong guy for the job of jobs czar.

Or as former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold wrote, “Someone like Immelt, who has helped his company evade taxes on its huge profits – and is now looking to workers to take major pay cuts after his compensation was doubled – should not lead the administration’s effort to create jobs.” …

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Tony Blankley advocates staying in Iraq until it is on more stable footing.

…A commendable editorial appeared in Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post calling for Mr. Obama to negotiate quickly an extension for our troop presence. It pointed out if our troops are forced to leave at the end of the year, “military experts warn, next year Iraq will lack critical defense capacities: It will be unable to defend its airspace or borders, protect oil shipments or platforms in the Persian Gulf, or partner with U.S. Special Forces in raids against al Qaeda. Perhaps most seriously, American soldiers who have been serving as de facto peacekeepers in the city of Kirkuk and along the sensitive border zone between Iraqi Kurdistan and the rest of the country will disappear. Many experts believe that in their absence violence could erupt between Kurds and Arabs.”

…One of the greatest dangers to Iraq – as both anti-war and pro-war advocates agree – is that Iran may come to dominate the Iraqi government. That risk has just increased in the past few months as cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the murderous Shiite militia leader turned political leader, has returned to Iraq from Iran…

…The danger from this is that if the stabilizing, confidence-building American troops are removed from the power equation in Iraq, the Iranian pawn, Mr. al-Sadr, may convert his community-level service portfolio into renewed sectarian violence.

How and when we leave Iraq is now vastly more important than how and why we entered Iraq. Both our interests in the Middle East and the interests of the Iraqi people hang in the balance with President Obama’s judgment. It would be a tragedy if we lose all after paying so much. …

More on the Goldstone recant. This time from Jeff Jacoby.

…But in an article published Friday in The Washington Post, Goldstone admitted that his mission’s venomous central allegation — that Israel purposely murdered Palestinian noncombatants — was false:

“If I had known then what I know now,’’ he writes in his opening paragraph, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.’’ What he knows about Israel now is “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.’’ By contrast, “that the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.’’ He acknowledges that Israel has been conscientiously investigating incidents in which civilians were killed, whereas Hamas has investigated nothing. And he states the most elemental truth about the Islamist extremists who rule Gaza, a truth nowhere mentioned in the UN report that bears his name: “Hamas . . . has a policy to destroy the state of Israel.’’

That is a point that an honest investigation of the fighting in Gaza would have stressed. It would have explained the conflict’s asymmetrical nature — Israel, a nation-state that bends over backward to avoid harming civilians, was facing Hamas, a terrorist organization that not only targets Israeli civilians, but deliberately puts Palestinian civilians in harm’s way.

…Goldstone’s panel claimed not to know “that Hamas hid its fighters among civilians, used human shields, fired mortars and rockets from outside schools, stored weapons in mosques, and used a hospital for its headquarters, despite abundant available evidence.’’…

Goldstone thoughts from Charles Krauthammer.

On Richard Goldstone’s retraction in a Sunday Washington Post op-ed of the central finding of his U.N. report charging Israel with war crimes:

That Amnesty International reaction [reaffirming Israeli war guilt] is an indication of how much the Goldstone op-ed, this retraction, this weasely, excuse-laden retraction, is too little and too late [to undo] what he did in this report, the one that he’s now saying wasn’t true — [it] did incalculable damage to Israel by accusing it [of war crimes]. Remember, the only Jewish state on the planet is accused of carrying out a war in which it deliberately, as a matter of policy, attacks innocents — which was never true. …

Charles Krauthammer likes Paul Ryan’s proposed reforms.

…Critics are describing Ryan’s Medicare reform as privatization, a deliberately loaded term designed to instantly discredit the idea. Yet the idea is essentially to apply to all of Medicare the system under which Medicare Part D has been such a success: a guaranteed insurance subsidy. Thus instead of paying the health provider directly (fee-for-service), Medicare would give seniors about $15,000 of “premium support,” letting the recipient choose among a menu of approved health insurance plans.

…Ryan’s plan is classic tax reform — which even Obama says the country needs: It broadens the tax base by eliminating loopholes that, in turn, provide the revenue for reducing rates. Tax reform is one of those rare public policies that produce social fairness and economic efficiency at the same time. For both corporate and individual taxes, Ryan’s plan performs the desperately needed task of cleaning out the myriad of accumulated cutouts and loopholes that have choked the tax code since 1986.

…But the blueprint is brave and profoundly forward-looking. It seeks nothing less than to adapt the currently unsustainable welfare state to the demographic realities of the 21st century. …

Karl Rove tells us more about Paul Ryan’s reform plan.

…The Path to Prosperity would return discretionary spending to its 2008 levels and hold it flat for five years; reduce the federal government’s work force by 10%; slash corporate welfare; reform the tax code; and reduce the corporate and top personal rate to 25%. It would repeal ObamaCare, change Medicare so the government helps all seniors pay for an insurance policy they choose, and send states money for each person covered by Medicaid, plus the flexibility to spend that money as they see fit.

…Mr. Ryan would have the government spend $40 trillion over the next 10 years, $6.2 trillion less than Mr. Obama’s budget plan of $46 trillion. This is an overall reduction in what the government plans to spend, not a cut from what it is spending today.

Under Mr. Ryan’s proposal, for example, health-care spending would still rise for both Medicaid, which serves the poor, and Medicare, which serves seniors. The $275 billion spent on Medicaid this year would grow to $305 billion in 2021 while the $563 billion spent on Medicare this year would grow to $953 billion in 2021. Nor would anyone 55 years or older be affected by any Medicare reforms. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on how President Obama’s energy policies are hurting taxpayers and the economy.

…Obama said there was “not much we can do next week or two weeks from now” about gas prices. He didn’t address his two-year war on domestic energy including a seven-year moratorium on oil drilling off both coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska.

He could lift that ban today, sending a powerful supply-and-demand signal to the market. He could unlock areas in the West where oil shale reserves are estimated to be triple the crude Saudi Arabia has underground.

He could support the Keystone pipeline project to deliver oil from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. market. That project would build a 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta to refineries near Houston, create 13,000 “shovel-ready” jobs and provide 500,000 more barrels of oil per day. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks our Speaker is surpassing expectations.

…In the run-up to the unveiling of the 2012 budget, the media concocted a rivalry between Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The reality is different. Sources directly involved in the process tell me Boehner never asked Ryan “not to go there” or tried to dissuade him from putting out a very dramatic budget. To the contrary, he gave Ryan license to invade turf usually held by other committees. What other budget has put forth a tax scheme? That’s usually the jurisdiction of the Ways and Means Committee. As the committee chairman raised this or that objection to Ryan’s scheme, Ryan was, according to senior leadership staff, consistently supported by Boehner as well as Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

That brings us to the drama over the 2011 continuing resolution. I’ll be blunt: Boehner has played the Congress, the president, the Senate and the media like a fiddle. He could, days ago, have reached a compromise with the Democrats, taken the last spending cut offer and dumped the policy riders. After all he could have used Democratic votes to pass a lowest-common-denominator CR. He didn’t. Instead, he has extended the negotiation up to the deadline. He’s not going to leave a dollar on the table. And most important, the freshmen congressmen can rest assured he has gotten the best deal possible. The smartest move yet? Boehner did not allow Obama to announce a deal last night, stealing the thunder after doing virtually nothing to forge a deal. Why is this important? It demonstrates to his caucus and to the president and the Democratic Senate that he isn’t going to crumble whenever the president unleashes a new round of condescending rhetoric. …

…Maybe the pundits and pols should stop underestimating Boehner. So far, he’s won every battle.

Jennifer Rubin gives us some interesting insight into the budget negotiations.

Maybe it’s my 20 years as a labor lawyer, having gone through dozen and dozens of collective bargaining negotiating sessions, but I’m amazed at how little the press and activists on both sides understand what is going on.

A shutdown is like a contract end date, with the potential for a strike or lockout. The chief negotiator for the GOP is Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). It’s not who is in control on the other side. In order to get the best deal for his side, the chief negotiator has to convince both his own side and the other side that there is no more room to spare. So, first you let the clock run down toward midnight. The media hysteria helps Boehner in this regard. Then — and this is important — it can not come down to a single issue. A savvy negotiator needs two. Oh, and look — Boehner has two. He has the riders and he has the amount of cuts.

If the Democrats really can’t abide by the riders, they have to agree to more cuts. If they can’t go any higher on cuts, they need to fork over something on riders. This is rudimentary negotiation strategy. …

George Monbiot continues with thoughts about his conversion to nuclear power.   

…The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world’s leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.

‘ Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.

In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising “almost entirely” from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure”. People living in the countries affected today “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident”. …’

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More on Paul Ryan’s budget. This from Michael Barone.

“My worst experience was the financial crisis of September 2008,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Tuesday in response to a reporter’s question about Democrats’ attacks on the budget he unveiled earlier in the day.

“What if the president and your representative saw it coming and could have prevented it from happening?” Ryan said. “What would you think of them if they didn’t?” A hush came over the audience at the American Enterprise Institute, where I am a resident fellow.

It was Ryan’s way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.

“This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country,” he went on. “We are on our path to a debt crisis” like those we’ve seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under President Obama’s budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent. …

Ross Douthat of the NY Times also has praise for Ryan’s budget attempt. And, he points out something of note about the GOP house leadership.

… Credit also goes to John Boehner, who in many respects is the anti-Paul Ryan. He’s the least wonky figure imaginable —a politician’s politician, the quintessential backroom dealmaker, the man who creates a smoke-filled room wherever he goes. He is the kind of party leader who one would expect to throw up every obstacle imaginable to a document like this budget — a document that may have no political upside, a document that’s wonk-approved rather than poll-tested, and a document that’s essentially a repudiation of the kind of “Mediscare” tactics that played a not-insignificant role in making Boehner Speaker of the House in the first place. Instead, he essentially gave Ryan a free hand in the budget process, and agreed to put the weight of his office behind the results. And he did so, perhaps just as crucially, without any of the self-aggrandizement and histrionics that defined the G.O.P. leadership under Newt Gingrich, the last time these kind of issues were on the table. …

Bloomberg News contributor comments on the two budget fights – 2011 and 2012.

The two parties are having a heated debate over the Republican plan to slice $61 billion off Uncle Sam’s projected $3.6 trillion budget. If the Republicans get their way, the deficit will fall from 9.5 percent of gross domestic product to 9.1 percent. If they don’t, they’ll probably shut the government for a couple of days. Then they’ll compromise on, say, a $40 billion budget cut, having proved they gave it their best shot.

Arguing over lowering our deficit by just 0.4 percent of GDP when we need to run massive surpluses to deal with the baby boomers’ impending retirement is, pick your metaphor — rearranging the Titanic’s furniture, Nero’s fiddling, Custer’s Last Stand. …

Marty Peretz looking at the aftermath of the Goldstone recantation, settles some scores.

… Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic made the point early on after the judge confessed to his sins: “Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.” Maybe Washington, which voted against the report, will take the leadership role on this. The president, the secretary of state, and the American ambassador to the United Nations have, it bears remembering, argued that our presence at the Human Rights Council can make a difference. Will President Obama even try? It would mean that another one of his exemplary lessons in creative engagement will collapse.

There should be many shamed faces in the crowd. The foreign high priest of the Palestinian cause is Desmond Tutu, who, like his rival Jimmy Carter, finds no charge against Israel too preposterous to leave to, well, the gagasphere. But they have neither been heard from on Goldstone nor explained their silence. The Financial Times, which is the most consistent and hyperbolic critic of Israel in the United Kingdom, initially went bananas in praise of the “Goldstone Report.” It has now welcomed the jurist’s mea culpa, but reiterated its criticism of Israel. Human Rights Watch? Ditto. Stephen Walt, Juan Cole, John Esposito, Naomi Klein, Michael Lerner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, J Street (which peddled the report door-to-door on Capitol Hill): I predict that not one of them will come clean. As is the case with the Israeli “peace left”: not Peace Now, not the New Israel Fund, not B’tselem, not Agudah Lezchuyot Haezrch. And not Ha’aretz, either. They have too much invested in Goldstone’s original lie.

Thomas Sowell shows the essential contradictions of the modern state.

When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But, in politics, you get mad at whoever tells you that there is no money.

One of the secrets of the growth of the welfare state is that politicians get a lot of mileage out of making promises, without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises.

When Congress votes for all sorts of benefits, without voting for enough taxes to pay for them, they get the support of those who have been promised the benefits, without getting grief from the taxpayers. It’s strictly win-win as far as the welfare-state politicians are concerned. But it is strictly lose-lose, big-time, for the country, as deficits skyrocket.

Anyone who says that we don’t have the money to pay what was promised is accused of trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare or Obamacare– or whatever other unfunded promises have been made. It is like blaming the bank for saying that the check bounced. …

Mark Steyn looks into national decline and what it might mean.

… Incremental decline is easy to get used to. I’m sure a few of my correspondent’s fellow commuters are equally droll about it and a few more get angry, but untold thousands more just shuffle uncomplainingly up and down, scuffing shoes and bumping backpacks. That’s the trick with decline: persuading people to accept it. The Transportation Security Administration, which in a decade of existence has never caught a single terrorist, has managed to persuade freeborn citizens to accept that minor state bureaucrats have the right to fondle your scrotum without probable cause. The TSA is now unionizing, which means that this hideous embodiment of bureaucratized sclerosis will now have its fingers in your gusset until the end of time.

What was it they used to say? If we give up our freedoms, the terrorists will have won! Whether or not the terrorists have won, the bureaucrats have. And they’re a more profound existential threat to America than the terrorists will ever be. My accountant was trying to explain to me the new 1099 requirements of Obamacare, but who cares? In the Republic of Paperwork, there’ll be a new set of new requirements along any minute. I’m ashamed of myself for even knowing what a 1099 is. But that’s the issue: Once you accept the principle that one citizen cannot contract with another without filing paperwork with the state, imposing ever more onerous conditions is merely a difference of degree.

In such a world it becomes more difficult to innovate, and frankly not a priority. …

The problems at Japan’s Fukushima electric generating plant have helped a Green in Britain grow up and learn to love nuclear power. George Monbiot with his mea culpa in The Guardian, UK.

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn’t work. …

Reason’s Ron Bailey has fun with predictors.

… In this excellent book, Gardner romps through the past 40 years of failed predictions on economics, energy, environment, politics, and so much more. Remember back in 1990 when Japan would rule the world? MIT economist Lester Thurow declared, “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economic honors of owning the 21st century.” Thurow was far from alone. Back in 1992, George Friedman, now CEO of the geopolitical consultancy Stratfor, predicted The Coming War With Japan. Twenty years later, for those hungering for more predictive insights from Friedman, he has recently published, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.

As oil prices ascend once again, naturally many predict that the end of oil is nigh. Back in 1980, Gardner reminds us, The New York Times confidently declared, “There should be no such thing as optimism about energy for the foreseeable future. What is certain is that the price of oil will go up and up, at home as well as abroad.” By 1986 oil prices had fallen to around $10 per barrel. On the accuracy of oil price predictions, Gardner cites U.S. Foreign Service Officer James Akins, who said: “Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.”

Akins’ observation was made in 1973 and it’s as true today as it was then. Consider the 2008 claim made by analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs that oil prices could surge beyond $200 per barrel in as little as six months. In fact, in as little as six months, the price of petroleum had fallen to $34 per barrel. …

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Today is Paul Ryan day. To introduce it we turn to David Brooks who was once in ObamaLove. To show his evenhandedness and retain his bona fides at the NY Times, he includes a gratuitous slap at Mitch McConnell, but other than that, he looks today like the David Brooks of old.

It was a season of fiscal perestroika. Last fall, the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission released a bold report on how to avoid an economic catastrophe. For a few weeks, the think tanks and government offices were alive with proposals to reduce debt and reform entitlements, the tax code and just about every other government program.

The mood did not last. The polls suggested that voters were still unwilling to accept tax increases or benefit cuts. Smart Washington insiders like Mitch McConnell and President Obama decided that any party that actually tried to implement these ideas would be committing political suicide. The president walked away from the Simpson-Bowles package. Far from addressing the fiscal problems, the president’s budget would double the nation’s debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But the forces of reform have not been entirely silenced. Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.

The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate. …

Here’s Paul Ryan outlining his proposal in The Journal.

Congress is currently embroiled in a funding fight over how much to spend on less than one-fifth of the federal budget for the next six months. Whether we cut $33 billion or $61 billion—that is, whether we shave 2% or 4% off of this year’s deficit—is important. It’s a sign that the election did in fact change the debate in Washington from how much we should spend to how much spending we should cut.

But this morning the new House Republican majority will introduce a budget that moves the debate from billions in spending cuts to trillions. America is facing a defining moment. The threat posed by our monumental debt will damage our country in profound ways, unless we act.

No one person or party is responsible for the looming crisis. Yet the facts are clear: Since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams. Government health and retirement programs are growing at unsustainable rates. The new health-care law is a fiscal train wreck. And a complex, inefficient tax code is holding back American families and businesses.

The president’s recent budget proposal would accelerate America’s descent into a debt crisis. It doubles debt held by the public by the end of his first term and triples it by 2021. It imposes $1.5 trillion in new taxes, with spending that never falls below 23% of the economy. His budget permanently enlarges the size of government. It offers no reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership.

Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. …

Peter Wehner comments in Contentions.

… For two years President Obama, a man of the left whose stated purpose was to “transform” America, had his way. But he badly overreached; Republicans have pushed back with vigor and passion and now, thanks to Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, a compelling governing alternative. So here we are at a political and philosophical inflection point, where issues of first principles are being debated and decided. There are worse things that can happen in a republic.

James Pethokoukis in his blog at the Reuters site.

Is Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” potentially the most important and necessary piece of economic legislation since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981? Quite likely. The blueprint embraces free markets and individual choice to radically reshape America’s social welfare state for the 21st century and shrink government. Instead of looking for ways to finance an ever-expanding public sector, it would prevent Washington from growing to a projected 45 percent of GDP by 2050 (vs. 24 percent today) and instead reduce it to just under 15 percent by that year. Ryan would downsize government to its smallest size since 1950 and prevent the Europeanization of the American economy. The Ryan Path embraces dynamic growth, not managed decline and stagnation. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the roll out of the Ryan plan.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R- Wis.) and his staff obviously planned the budget roll-out with meticulous care. The right is gushing (at Heritage, at Americans for Tax Reform, and on talk-radio with conservative favorites such as Bill Bennett, Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh). In the Senate, Ryan snagged the support of two stalwart conservatives Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) praised the effort.

This tells us a few things. First, there is very little room on the right to criticize the Ryan budget. To be blunt, is a Republican freshman going to accuse Ryan of “selling out” when Ryan has so many rock-solid conservative rock stars on his side? Second, this doesn’t happen by magic. I’m guessing — wild guess here — that Ryan and his staff spent hours and hours lining up support. …

And starts the defense.

Liberals with furrowed brows are conjuring up attacks (many contradictory) on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget. To save them time, I’ve come up with 10 of these that don’t pass the laugh test ( and I even explain why the arguments aren’t worth making):

1. It doesn’t balance the budget in 10 years. Ryan’s budget puts us in “primary balance” ( the term President Obama is fond of using) in 2015; Obama’s never does. In 2012 the deficit is less than $1 trillion; Obama’s is over a trillion in 2012, the fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits. If you want to balance the budget in a decade you are looking at massive tax increases and substantial cuts in entitlement benefits for current retirees. Does Obama want to make that proposal?

2. It favors the rich. Actually, the rich are “hurt” by items such as Medicare means testing and by wiping out corporate welfare. The White House’s plan to do nothing on Medicaid will eventually leave the poor with a defunct health plan. …

We close with kudos from WSJ editors.

Well, so much for dodging entitlements. This year’s trendy complaint, shared by the left and the tea party, that Republicans hadn’t tackled the toughest budget issues was blown away yesterday with the release of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget for 2012. We’ll now separate the real reformers from the fiscal chickenhawks.

Mr. Ryan’s budget rollout is an important political and policy moment because it is the most serious attempt to reform government in at least a generation. The plan offers what voters have been saying they want—a blueprint to address the roots of Washington’s fiscal disorder. It does so not by the usual posturing (“paygo”) and symbolism (balanced budget amendment) but by going to the heart of the spending problem, especially on the vast and rapidly growing health-care entitlements of Medicaid and Medicare. The Wisconsin Republican’s plan is a generational choice, not the usual Beltway echo. …

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The infamous Goldstone Report of a few years ago was so typical of UN/Euro treatment of Israel it passed without notice in these pages. Now Mr. Goldstone has decided to recant and becomes of interest. Jonathan Tobin begins a few comments.

In what must be considered as shocking a turnaround as any we have seen in recent years, Richard Goldstone, the chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s fact-finding commission about the conflict in Gaza, has retracted his claim that Israel deliberately sought to target and kill Palestinian civilians.

A product of the Human Rights Council, an organization that is singularly dedicated to besmirching and attacking Israel while ignoring serious crimes elsewhere (including those committed by the nations that makes up its membership), the Goldstone Report was widely criticized for its one-sided nature and the inaccuracy of its claims. But with Goldstone, who is a prominent South African Jew, as its front man, the report became the centerpiece of a new round of efforts aimed at both delegitimizing the Jewish state and its right of self-defense. His claims were taken up by anti-Zionists across the globe and in particular by those American left-wingers such as the J Street lobby and Michael Lerner’s Tikkun, which have both sought to establish themselves as Jewish critics of Israel and its defenders in this country.

But in an op-ed penned by Goldstone that was first published by the Washington Post on Friday night, the former judge admitted that his report was wrong. …

National Review editors.

Nobody in recent memory has given the world such a startling example of the useful idiot as Richard Goldstone, the former South African judge who wrote a report for the U.N. Human Rights Council on the events in the Gaza Strip beginning in December 2008.  Nothing in today’s public life quite matches his performance for credulity and ignorance.

Over the years, Hamas had acquired the habit of firing rockets and mortar shells by the thousand from Gaza across the border into Israel. Enough was enough, and Israeli armored columns put an end to it. For Hamas and its ally, the Human Rights Council, any attempt on the part of Israel to defend itself is aggression, and they do whatever they can to spread this smear in order to damage and delegitimize Israel. Here was a chance to enlarge their campaign, and Goldstone was the man to lead it.

John Podhoretz.

So Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who fronted the U.N. report bearing his name that alleged massive Israeli war crimes in the Gaza war of 2008-2009, has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to say, in effect, “never mind”: …

… He was then, and is now, an entirely despicable public figure—and so is his op-ed, by the way, which continues to act as though it is appropriate to draw parallel inferences about Hamas and the state of Israel. It would be right for world Jewry that his name be hereafter summoned as we summon Benedict Arnold’s, or Tokyo Rose’s.

Wall Street Journal editors.

… We would welcome this apologia if we didn’t think a jurist of Mr. Goldstone’s stature should have known the difference between a democracy like Israel with a history of investigating its own failings under the rule of law, and a self-avowed terrorist state like the one Hamas runs in Gaza. “Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel,” Mr. Goldstone now concedes in stating the obvious, which at least proves he wants to retain a shred of his former reputation.

As our friends at the New York Sun note, Mr. Goldstone should now have the decency to retire from public life.

Jennifer Rubin.

… Even in confessional mode, Richard Goldstone blames the victim — Israel brought this all on itself by not giving him information. In all his glorious ignorance he therefore had no qualms about accusing Israel of war crimes. You see, he had no choice. (There is a theme running through his career, isn’t there? Playing the role of hanging judge in South Africa wasn’t his idea, mind you.)

I have no idea what motivated Goldstone’s reversal. I leave to others whether he can atone for actions as despicable as his by merely saying, “Never mind. And not my fault.” I do however agree entirely with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who observes, “Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.” Maybe Goldstone will enlighten us on how he will try to undo the damage he has caused.

But what now? There is a fleet of nongovernmental organizations that has used the Goldstone report for fodder in the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. Will these groups recant? ( J Street helped pen Goldstone’s defense and showed him around Capitol Hill, so it seems that group has a special obligation to recant its role in popularizing the Goldstone libel.) …

Volokh Conspiracy has more in “Richard Goldstone; Chief Kangaroo.”

… Goldstone apparently is starting to regret his role in the whole fiasco, and it’s certainly amusing to read various anti-Israel blogs that formerly lauded Goldstone as a hero for speaking truth to power now worrying about the “damage” he is doing to their cause. The key lines in his op-ed: while “the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional,” “civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy.”

But Goldstone agreed to lead a kangaroo court appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which includes such human rights stalwarts as China, Cuba, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Penance is always welcome, but Goldstone will go down in history as the head kangaroo. …

Speaking of “nevermind”, the president and attorney general have decided to cancel KSM’s trial in Manhattan. Ed Morrissey does the honors.

… For Holder and Barack Obama, however, the decision to send KSM back to a military commission is an unmitigated political defeat.  Obama stopped the commission’s trial of KSM immediately upon taking office even though KSM had indicated he’d plead guilty.  Now that process has to start over, wasting more time and resources for nothing more than two years of grandstanding.  In the end, Obama not only didn’t close Gitmo, he actually showed how necessary it is for dealing with terrorists captured abroad by our military and intelligence assets. …

George Will columns on one of the latest clients of The Institute for Justice.

A dialectic of judicial deference and political arrogance is on display in St. Louis. When excessively deferential courts permit governmental arrogance, additional arrogance results as government explores the limits of judicial deference. As Jim Roos knows.

He formed a nonprofit housing and community development corporation that provides residences for people with low incomes. Several times its properties have been seized by the city government, using “blight” as an excuse for transferring property to developers who can pay more taxes to the seizing government.

The Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision legitimized this. It permits governments to cite “blight” — a notoriously elastic concept, sometimes denoting nothing more than chipped paint or cracked sidewalks — to justify seizing property for the “public use” of enriching those governments.

Roos responded by painting on the side of one of his buildings a large mural — a slash through a red circle containing the words “End Eminent Domain Abuse.” The government that had provoked him declared his sign “illegal” and demanded that he seek a permit for it. He did. Then the government denied the permit. …

More about IJ’s interests from its president, Chip Mellor in Forbes.

If Americans want to see how to create jobs, they should stop looking to Washington, D.C. for answers and turn their attention southward to Florida. There, as a means of reducing the state’s higher-than-national-average unemployment rate, Gov. Rick Scott has proposed eliminating job-killing licensing requirements in 20 occupations, ranging from auto repair shops to ballroom dance studios and hair braiders.

But businesses that have long benefited from government-enforced cartels in these occupations aren’t giving up without a fight. The most vocal of those seeking to maintain their protected status are interior designers. Florida is one of only three states that regulates the practice of interior design; the other two are Louisiana and Nevada. Even though no less than the Florida Attorney General’s office has admitted there is no evidence that interior design licensing has benefited the public in any way, the designers’ cartel has hired a high-powered lobbyist to wage an aggressive PR campaign to remove interior design from the should-be deregulated industries.

Among other efforts, the cartel bused in interior design students to Tallahassee from across the state to tell legislators that their degrees would become “worthless” if other people could freely practice interior design in Florida the way they can in 47 other states. One designer claimed that allowing just anyone to practice interior design would contribute to 88,000 deaths annually because of poor fabric selection. …

Joe Nocera writes on the troubles at Berkshire Hathaway.

Whenever the world’s greatest investor gets in a tight squeeze, he straps on his angel wings, readjusts his halo, and leans on his reputation for avuncular straight talk to make the problem go away.

Warren Buffett did it in the early-1990s, when one of his holdings at the time, Salomon Brothers, was caught in a Treasury bond scandal. He did it in the mid-2000s, when executives at General Re, owned by Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, were prosecuted for concocting a phony transaction with A.I.G.

Now he’s doing it again as he attempts to gloss over the actions of a close associate that look suspiciously like insider trading. The deputy, David Sokol, resigned earlier this week, claiming he wanted to concentrate on his “philanthropic interests.” (That’s what they all say.) The resignation, said Buffett, came as a “total surprise.” (They all say that, too.) …

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Mark Steyn comments on the president’s judgment.

The Tunisians got rid of Ben Ali in nothing flat, Mubarak took a couple of weeks longer to hit the road, and an exciting new “Islamic Emirate” has just been proclaimed in South Yemen. But, with his usual unerring instinct, Barack Obama has chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement who can’t get rid of the local strongman even when you lend them every functioning Nato air force. …

Corner Post from Steve Hayward says majority of Americans are now disabled.

Years ago the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky in a classic essay entitled “The Search for the Oppressed” concluded that 374 percent of the American people were minorities and victims. This exploration into the advanced victimology of liberalism is based on simple math, starting with the fact that according to Ralph Nader, all consumers are victims, so since we’re all consumers, we’re already at 100 percent of the population; women are victims, too, and since they are half the population, we’ve reached 150 percent of the population before we even start with the historically oppressed people of color. From there it is easy to fill out the list and get to 374 percent of the population. …

Now three million are exempt from ObamaCare.

Sure, ObamaCare is great for you. So great that the president is now offering 3 million members of his base ObamaClemency:

“The Obama Administration has rolled out another 129 waivers to one provision of the new health reform law, with almost half of those new exemptions going to various union groups.” …

Joel Kotkin finds markets alive in Vietnam.

Along the pitted elegance of Pho Ngo Quyen, a bustling street in Hanoi, Vietnam, you will, predictably, find uniformed men in Soviet-style uniforms, banners with Communist Party slogans, and grandfatherly pictures of Ho Chi Minh. Yet, capitalism thrives everywhere else in this community — in the tiny food stalls, countless mobile phone stores and clothing shops  offering everything from faux European fashion to reduced-price children’s wear,  sandals and sneakers.

Outside a ministry office, someone is cutting hair on the street. Nearby a woman is drying squid to sell to customers. Internet cafes proliferate, filled with young people.  Virtually every nook and cranny has a small shop or workplace for making consumer goods.

In some ways, Hanoi seems very much a third-world city in terms of its infrastructure and cracking sidewalks, and it shares some characteristics with the slums featured in this Megacities project, such as underground economies and a growing population migrating from rural areas. But its poverty pales compared to places like Mumbai or Rio. The poor sections are rundown and crowded, but you don’t see people sleeping on the streets. This is a city clearly on the way up — in a country with nearly 95% literacy and a countryside that not only feeds itself but remains the largest source of export earnings. …

Some more Southeast Asia focus comes from Der Spiegel which has a story from Nepal on young girls sold into slavery.

Like many Nepalese girls from poor families, Urmila Chaudhary was sold into bonded labor until she liberated herself. Now 20, she works with a team of former victims, traveling throughout Nepal to free other girls from the clutches of their unrepentant masters.

The man who once bought Urmila squats on the threshold between her past and her new life, picking a piece of chewing tobacco from his teeth. He spits a black stream of saliva into a bucket next to him on the living-room floor. Urmila Chaudhary, who hasn’t been his property for the last four years, kneels on the carpet at his feet and hands him a tray holding a cup of sweetened tea.

She ought to hate, curse and berate this man. But, instead, she bows to him and calls him “father.”

Urmila was taken from her family and enslaved as a young child. Now 20, she has long, black hair and a gentle, melodious laugh. She wears blue smiley-face earrings and a colorful skirt with a red stripe along the hem, the traditional attire of women from Nepal’s Tharu people. Her clothing says a lot about the story of Urmila and this man — and about the thousands of other young girls who are sold every year as soon as they are big enough to look over the edge of a table and yet still young enough to grow into their new roles as servants.

Her former owner wears his black hair carefully parted, a bomber jacket and tracksuit pants. He was astonished when he saw Urmila on television and in a newspaper photo that depicted her standing next to the country’s president.

“I thought you would have forgotten us,” he says.

“No,” Urmila replies. …

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Mark Steyn notes we now have threatened to bomb the Libyan rebels. You know, the ones we were helping by bombing Gadhafi’s forces.

… So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we’re also happy to serve as the Gadhafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it’s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist that he’s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn’t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we’ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Gadhafi’s forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?

Who are these rebels we’re simultaneously arming and bombing? Don’t worry, the CIA is “gathering intelligence” on them. They should have a clear idea of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America’s commander-in-chief thinks they’re pretty sound chaps. “The people that we’ve met with have been fully vetted,” says President Obama. “So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they’re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors – people who appear to be credible.”

Credible people with credentials – just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashir Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful midlife career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashir a “reformer,” by which she means presumably that he hasn’t (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn’t done that (yet), so he’s a reformer, and we’re in favor of those, so we’re not arming his rebels. …

Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor posts on Jennifer Rubin’s reaction to Gates’ recent testimony.

Jennifer Rubin says that SecDef Robert Gates should resign for his statement that ground troops will not be committed to Libya while “I’m in this job.”  Rubin interprets Gates’s remark as a threat to the president.

That is a very plausible interpretation.  What should we make of it then?

The first thing to note is that Gates is not in the habit of making threats.  He is not a grandstander.  He is not a prima donna. He has a long record of service as a loyal servant in several administrations.  His remarks are an exception.  There must be an exceptional reason for him to make them.

Recent events provide clues for Gates’s outburst–which his remarks were, compared to his very low key norm.  In particular, the let-the-rebels-do-it “strategy” has proved to be utterly fantastic and farcical.  As a Patton, not a Gates, would have put it, these rebels couldn’t fight their way out of a p*ss-soaked paper bag. Testimony by Gates and Admiral Mullen revealed that there are perhaps 1000 with any military training.  They have no heavy weapons.  No discipline.  They are prone to indiscriminate killing–so much so that NATO has threatened to bomb these ostensible “allies” in the fight against Khaddafy unless they knock it off. Good luck with that.

Recognition of this is predictably leading to a serious potential for mission creep.  For instance, since the effectiveness of air power is sharply limited in supporting offensive operations by the lack of targeting assets on the ground, a proposal is afoot to have US troops train rebels as forward observers.

Please.  FO is a very demanding job that takes intensive training. …

Charles Krauthammer reacts to the administration’s attitude towards Syria’s Assad.

… During the worst days of the Iraq war, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.

Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.

And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind it. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them. …

Tony Blankley suggests a long term view of the turmoil in Islam. 

In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed at the time to Sultan Murad Khan, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl, the co-rulers of the Aztecs, or to Rao Kanha, one of the princes of Jodhpur in India – it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it was an early indication of an historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that would lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world. Nor would they have foreseen a renaissance of European thought that would give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least a half a millennium.

Today, no European or American leaders with whom I am familiar have tied together the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the various Islamist bombings around the world, the push for Shariah law in the West, and the current disturbances in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria and Bahrain as symptoms of one larger phenomenon. …

John Fund does a good job outlining the stakes in Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin.

… Liberal groups are doing all they can to politicize this judicial race. An American Federation of Teachers local has sent a letter to its members asserting that “a Kloppenburg victory would swing the balance (on the court) to our side. A vote for Prosser is a vote for [Gov.] Walker.” It is time, the letter says, “to get even.” Ms. Kloppenburg certainly isn’t discouraging such thinking. She told the Madison Capital Times that “the events of the last few weeks have put into sharp relief how important the Supreme Court is as a check on overreach in the other branches of government.”

Why are the unions and their liberal allies so desperate to block Mr. Walker’s reforms? It’s all about the money. Unions can’t abide the loss of political clout that will result from ending the state’s practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For most Wisconsin public employees, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year, much of which is funneled into political spending to elect the officials who negotiate their contracts.

Union officials recognize what can happen if dues payments become voluntary. Robert Chanin, who was general counsel of the National Education Association from 1968 to 2009, said in a U.S. District Court oral argument in 1978 that “it is well-recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction, you won’t collect a penny from these people, and it has nothing to do with voluntary or involuntary. I think it has to do with the nature of the beast, and the beasts who are our teachers . . . simply don’t come up with the money regardless of the purpose.” …

Corner Post from Brian Bolduc on the same subject.

NY Times Caucus Blog catches Schumer giving marching orders.

Um, senators, ever heard of the mute button?

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process. …

And the National Journal caught Howard Dean telling the truth.

Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sees an upside to a looming government shutdown – at least politically.

“If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it,” said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. “I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.” …

Jim Lacey goes after the president’s energy speech.

If you want to lower the price of something, the best solution is to produce more of it. This is basic Econ 101 stuff. But nowhere in the administration’s new energy proposals, presented by the president this Wedesday in a speech at Georgetown University, is the idea of pumping more oil in the United States addressed, except to say it is impossible.

To reach this conclusion, the president had to speak a gross untruth, one he tells so often that he even felt a need to apologize before saying it again: that the United States sits on only 2 percent of the world’s oil supplies, while using 25 percent of the world’s oil. As I pointed out in an article recently, the Department of Energy, which most assuredly vetted this speech before it was released, has known for years this is wrong. In just one 35-miles-square area of the Midwest there is more recoverable oil than in the entire Middle East.

This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Oil shales throughout the region may hold trillions of barrels more. There may even be hundreds of billions more barrels off our coasts and in other areas from which they can be recovered relatively cheaply. …

Ditto Steven Hayward in the Journal.

The Obama administration’s energy policy is in the midst of transition from being stubbornly ideological to being wholly incoherent. That much was clear when President Obama unveiled his Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future this week. …