Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund reviews an interesting new Reagan book.

Ronald Reagan was known as “The Great Communicator.” What isn’t well-known is just how hard he worked to earn that title. One of his secrets was a stack of 3 x 5 inch note cards that he compiled throughout his public life. Consisting of quotes, economic statistics, jokes and anecdotes, they became the core of Ronald Reagan’s traveling research files.

An annotated selection of those cards has just been published as a book. “The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom” is edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, and the book’s release is being accompanied by a display of some of the note cards at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

…While Reagan was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me — a 15-year-old high school student — how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches. …

Mark Steyn has strong words about the train wreck called Romneycare, and other government interventions that have made Americans worse off. If Republicans actually select Romney as their 2012 candidate, the silver lining will be the Tea Party transformation that follows. Mark also has some sobering words about the debt ceiling.

… In the real world, debt ceilings are determined by the lenders, not the borrowers. In March, Pimco (which manages the world’s largest mutual fund) calculated that 70 percent of U.S. Treasury debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve.

So under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the United States government spends $188 million it doesn’t have, $130 million of which is “borrowed” from itself. There’s nobody else out there.

In other words, however Congress votes, we’re rubbing up against the real debt ceiling – the willingness of the world to continue bankrolling American debauchery.

Barack Obama is offering us a Latin American future – that’s to say, a United States in which a corrupt governing class rules a dysfunctional morass. He’s confident that, when the moat with alligators is put in, he’ll be on the secure side. If you figure you’ll be, too, you can afford to vote for him. …

…The problems with RomneyCare are well known: Mitt argued that Massachusetts needed to reform its health care system because the uninsured were placing huge strains on the state’s emergency rooms, and the rest of the population had to pick up the tab for the free-riders, and that was driving up Massachusetts health costs. So, as a famous can-do technocrat, he looked at the problem and came up with a can-do technocratic solution. Three years later, everyone was insured, but emergency room use was higher than ever, and 70 percent of those newly insured were all but entirely subsidized by the state, and Massachusetts residents were paying 30 percent more for their health care than the U.S. average, and Boston had the longest wait time in the nation to see a new doctor. …

American conservatives’ problem with RomneyCare is the same as with ObamaCare – that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the Constitution is dead. …

The inflationary factor in Massachusetts health care was not caused by deadbeats using emergency rooms as their family doctor but by the metastasizing cost distortions of government intervention in health care: Mitt should have known that. As he should know that government intervention in college loans has absurdly inflated the cost of ludicrously overvalued credentials and, in a broader sense, helped debauch America’s human capital. As he should know that government intervention in the mortgage market is why, every day, more and more American homeowners are drowning in negative equity.

So RomneyCare is not just an argument about health care. It exemplifies what’s wrong with American political structures: It suggests that our institutions are incapable of course correction; it reminds us…that Republicans are either easily suckered or too eager to be bipartisan fig leaves in embarrassing kindergarten kabuki; it confirms that “technocracy” in politics is a synonym for “more” – more government, more spending, more laws, more bureaucrats, more regulations, more paperwork, more of what’s killing this once-great republic every hour of every day. In defense of Romney, one might argue that politics is the art of the possible. But in Massachusetts what was possible made things worse. …

Richard Epstein writes a well-measured explanation of the problems with executive overreach.

…One of my constant concerns with the Obama administration is that its vision of executive power means that it has not recognized the need to rein in its discretion. Quite the contrary, in a variety of areas it seems only too eager to use its discretion to maximum advantage, often to support its own political agenda. That is the chief charge against the way Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has instituted litigation against The Boeing Company [3] for imagined unfair labor practices when the company decided to open up its new assembly plants in management-friendly South Carolina.

That same tendency toward mischief has been revealed in two of its other recent actions, each of which sheds light on the risks of the abuse of discretion. I speak here of criminal punishment for off-label drug uses and mandatory disclosures of campaign contributions by prospective government contractors.

…The dangers of executive discretion are, if anything, greater in the Obama administration’s proposal to require key federal contractors to disclose political contributions that they have made to various parties. As reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, [8] the Obama administration is about to sign an executive order requiring all contractors that do business with the government to disclose contributions that they and their chief officers have made to political parties during the past two years as a condition of getting government business. Needless to say, this restriction does not apply to the president’s favored clientele, including unions and environmental groups.

…When a government official knows that a business bidder or its top officials have supported the opposition candidate, that information can be used to steer lucrative contracts toward those organizations whose political contributions line up with the Obama administration’s own political agenda. The point here is not that Democrats are inevitably corrupt while Republicans are undyingly noble. Rather, it is that sensitive information often can do harm when it is put in the hands of government officials who use it in pursuit of their own political ambitions. …

2012 can’t come too soon, with the damage that this administration is inflicting. The Investor’s Business Daily editors explain.

…Before the mortgage crisis, Attorney General Janet Reno accused banks of racism for failing to market mortgages to poor minorities with weak credit. Fear of prosecution set off a stampede of risky inner-city lending that led, in part, to today’s record home foreclosures.

Now Reno’s deputy — current Attorney General Eric Holder — is prosecuting banks for doing too well what he and Reno ordered them to do before the crisis: “targeting of minority communities” for subprime and other high-cost loans. He calls this “reverse redlining,” or the opposite of what banks were accused of doing in the past — drawing red lines around inner-city areas deemed too risky for lending. Only, Holder’s also suing lenders for tightening credit in now-devastated urban areas to guard against future defaults.

…He’s also appointed a special lending cop to run the new crusade — Special Counsel for Fair Lending Eric Halperin, who also happens to have worked for Reno. Featured in the anti-bank film “Inside Job,” Halperin answers to Civil Rights Division chief Tom Perez.

Another Reno-era retread, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference, he says, is bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print.” He says this kind of racism — though more subtle — is “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.” …

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm has a story about Beltway ethics for us.

…July 2009 — President Obama appoints Meredith Attwell Baker as one of two Republican members among the five on the Federal Communications Commission.

January 2011 — Baker joins three other commission members in approving the mega-takeover of NBCUniversal by Comcast Corp.

May 11, 2011, early — Baker announces her FCC resignation effective June 3.

May 11, 2011, later — Comcast announces Baker will become senior vice president of government affairs for the same NBCUniversal unit that she recently agreed could be swallowed by Comcast.

That’s how smoothly it works.

Bill McGurn gives a cogent review of the interrogation debate. 

In scarcely a week, we have seen two of the most important advances in the war on terror since the 9/11 attacks. And President Obama deserves full credit.

The first was his go-ahead for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The second was more inadvertent, but arguably more important. This is the opening his spin has given to Republicans to force what we should have had in 2008: an honest debate on America’s antiterror policies.

The opening began Sunday night, when Mr. Obama rushed a national address on the bin Laden killing. Notwithstanding his later comment to “60 Minutes” that Americans do not “spike the football,” the president appears incapable of doing what would serve him best here: Letting the action speak for itself, and heaping praise on his predecessors (Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush) for their contributions. Instead we got the implication that no one was trying to get bin Laden until Barack Obama arrived in town.

At the same time, all the president’s men were put in the position of denying something the Navy SEALs had made obvious: They owed much of their success to information resulting from policies authorized by President Bush but opposed by Mr. Obama. Thus Leon Panetta found himself bobbing and weaving when NBC’s Brian Williams kept asking the CIA chief whether waterboarding had anything to do with finding bin Laden. When you’ve lost Brian Williams, you’re really lost. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff talks gold.

…In a remarkably under-reported story, the University of Texas’ endowment fund-the second largest in the country, after Harvard’s-added about half of a billion dollars worth of gold to its portfolio just this month, on top of the half-billion it purchased several months prior.

The university’s endowment now owns a staggering 6,643 bars of bullion (664,300 ounces) – which have already appreciated by nearly $40 million since mid-April , when the bars were delivered to a dedicated HSBC-owned vault in New York City. Not a bad start.

Kyle Bass, the well-known Hayman Capital hedge fund manager and UT endowment board member, advised the university on the purchase. He stated his reasoning plainly: “Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services? I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.” …

If you read last Thursday’s post, you might remember this prediction: Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Guess what showed up Saturday night? 

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-situation-room-cold-open/1327352/

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg has an excellent article on the Arab Spring, and some of Natan Sharansky’s thoughts on the matter. We highlight Greenberg’s stirring commentary.

…Freedom is no simple thing. It can be a slow, tricky, unpredictable process. It can percolate through a society slowly — or hit like a flash flood. As if out of nowhere. Americans should have learned as much by now, the 150th anniversary of the great war that made us a nation. O, Freedom! It can be long in coming, but it will come. Something in man will stir, and when it does … all deals are off.

Keeping faith with freedom will require strong nerves and constancy of purpose. Just as it does now in Egypt, where a new regime is flirting with the mullahs in Iran and trying to cloak one of the world’s more notorious terrorist outfits — Hamas, in the Gaza Strip — in respectability. It is at such times that Washington should do even more to support Egypt’s democratic parties against the Muslim Brotherhood — just as, after World War II, when the Communists threatened to overwhelm Western Europe’s political system, this country did everything it could to support the democratic parties that eventually prevailed.

Cynics will scurry about looking for complicated explanations for these latest revolutions in the Middle East when the simplest is staring them in the face: Freedom will not be denied forever. No more than it can be turned back in this Arab Spring. It may have to go underground for a time, like a fresh-water spring. Or it may recede like a river returning to its banks. But it will flow on somewhere, and one day break through to the surface, an undeniable fact. Even if it can be diverted for a time, it will come back stronger than ever, like the sea overwhelming Pharaoh’s chariots. …

Spengler explains the magnitude of the crisis looming over Egypt.

Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running out of money with which to buy it. The most populous country in the Arab world shows all the symptoms of national bankruptcy – the kind that produced hyperinflation in several Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s – with a deadly difference: Egypt imports half its wheat, and the collapse of its external credit means starvation.

The civil violence we have seen over the past few days foreshadows far worse to come.

…The collapse of Egypt’s credit standing, meanwhile, has shut down trade financing for food imports, according to the chairman of the country’s Food Industry Holding Company, Dr Ahmed al-Rakaibi, chairman of the Holding Company for Food Industries. Rakaibi warned of “an acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally, as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meats and oils”. According to the country’s statistics agency, only a month’s supply of rice is on hand, and four months’ supply of wheat. …

Charles Krauthammer decimates the “facts” and “logic” in the president’s latest speech.

…Accordingly, the El Paso speech featured two other staples: the breathtaking invention and the statistical sleight of hand.

“The [border] fence is now basically complete,” asserted the president. Complete? There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles — 15 percent — are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk right through.

Obama then boasted that on his watch 31 percent more drugs have been seized, 64 percent more weapons — proof of how he has secured the border. And for more proof: Apprehension of illegal immigrants is down 40 percent. Down? Indeed, says Obama, this means that fewer people are trying to cross the border.

Interesting logic. Seizures of drugs and guns go up — proof of effective border control. Seizures of people go down — yet more proof of effective border control. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs about the latest White House attempt to practice Chicago thuggery in DC.

President Obama, as I noted previously, has an executive order ready to go that would require government contractors (well, not professors and labor unions) to disclose political contributions. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) already has come out in opposition, and now it’s a flood of lawmakers who won’t buy the plan to bring Chicago-style favoritism to federal contracting. Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have sent a letter to the president telling him to forget it.

As the Hill notes, these are all the key players on the issue. (“Lieberman is chairman, and Collins is ranking member, of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. McCaskill leads the panel’s Contracting Oversight subcommittee; Portman is the ranking member.”) It now seems unlikely with a chorus of bipartisan criticism that the Obama executive order will ever see the light of day. …

And Jennifer Rubin reminds us how lucky we were to dodge the President Kerry bullet.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), if he had some capacity for self-reflection, would be humiliated. The foreign policy gambit with which he has been most identified — the courting of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — is now over, universally regarded as a dismal and embarrassing failure. You see, even Kerry has discovered Assad is “no reformer.” Hundreds of dead Syrians and thousands more imprisoned have convinced him that the time for reform “was lost.” But that assumes there was a time when such a hope was realistic; you can’t “lose” what was never there. … 

…Rogin, who can barely disguise his amazement, reports:

Kerry, who has served as Congress’s point man on engaging the Syrian regime, told an audience…as recently as March 16 — shortly after the current uprising had begun — that he still expected Assad to embrace political reform and move toward more engagement with America and its allies.

“[M]y judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it,” said Kerry, who has met with Assad six times over the past two years. …

Debra Saunders comments on the hypocrisy of being pro-murder but anti-waterboarding.

…Obama and Dowd long have claimed that it was morally reprehensible for the CIA to waterboard 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Candidate Obama said that waterboarding was “never acceptable” because it “contradicts our values.” Obama even criticized his now-Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for having said in 2006 that she would authorize brutal interrogation measures to prevent a terrorist attack.

Apparently it fits with Obama’s and Dowd’s values to kill an unarmed bin Laden – as long as you don’t waterboard him first to learn possible intelligence that might prevent a terrorist attack.

It’s amazing how partisan politics can make the medicine go down. …

In the WSJ, Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, discusses the company’s decision to build in South Carolina, and points out a number of negative effects from the NLRB’s overreach.

…The NLRB is wrong and has far overreached its authority. Its action is a fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago. We’ve made a rational, legal business decision about the allocation of our capital and the placement of new work within the U.S. We’re confident the federal courts will reject the claim, but only after a significant and unnecessary expense to taxpayers. …

…The world the NLRB wants to create with its complaint would effectively prevent all companies from placing new plants in right-to-work states if they have existing plants in unionized states. But as an unintended consequence, forward-thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new plants in unionized states—lest they be forever restricted from placing future plants elsewhere across the country.

U.S. tax and regulatory policies already make it more attractive for many companies to build new manufacturing capacity overseas. That’s something the administration has said it wants to change and is taking steps to address. It appears that message hasn’t made it to the front offices of the NLRB.

Brian Calle, in the Orange County Register, has a mind-blowing story for us, on the exorbitant pay of Newport Beach lifeguards. Would you believe over $200,000?

High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.

…It might be time for a career change.

…In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.” And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Jonathan Tobin takes note.

As we recalled a couple of days ago, Vice President Joe Biden’s one example of genuine wit that I’m aware of was his line that a Rudy Giuliani sentence consisted of a noun, a verb and 9/11.  Those who listen to Biden’s boss are probably thinking about that painfully accurate quip every time he takes to the stump.

As Jackie Calmes of the New York Times notes in the paper’s Caucus blog today, President Obama’s standard speech about his administration has been revised in the last week. Every address, from commemorations to fundraisers in the last week has included a section where he takes credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to Calmes, this will “be a staple of his political message into the 2012 election.” …

Tony Blankley writes on dead Osama portion of the Obama campaign.

There is a particular media conceit that, in the garb of purported impeccable disclosure, is in fact a license for news sources to market talking points. A hilarious example of the breed can be found in an article by Anne E. Kornblut in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. The article is about the White House’s intended use of the killing of Osama bin Laden and is titled “Bin Laden raid fits into Obama’s ‘big things’ message.”

The phrase in question comprises the italicized words in the following quote: “A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about internal thinking, said the White House is not developing a strategy to leverage the raid in other difficult arenas, such as the budget or debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans. The official insisted it would not change the overall message or approach of the 2012 campaign, which has long been described as a campaign focused on the economy. Still, it almost certainly will help a president elected on ‘hope’ and ‘change’ to shift his next campaign in a new direction.”

Of course, the entire point of the article was the opposite of what the unnamed official said: The White House staff is, in fact, itching to take political advantage of the bin Laden killing. Indeed, the constant quotes of clumsy denials of political calculations by senior White House officials are the artful leitmotif of the entire article. …

David Harsanyi says immigration reform is a Dem trick.

Immigration reform, huh? Well, President Obama did recently consult with Eva Longoria on this formidable policy conundrum. As goes Longoria, so goes the nation.

Then again, it certainly seems like a peculiar time to spring this divisive topic on the American people. Especially when we know full well that reform has a stimulus’s chance of success.

And weren’t we just talking about the $14 trillion debt? The budget you didn’t pass? Thuggery against Boeing? Debt ceilings? Medicare? According to a new NBC News poll, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy — an all-time high. So perhaps the discussion wasn’t helpful to the most vital imperative: electing Obama.

Remember that Obama promised to fight for reform legislation in his first year in office. Instead, Democrats used historic supremacy to cram through a number of legislative items that divided the nation — but no immigration policy. Latinos are imperative to presidents when running for office, less so when in it. Now, in the middle of the most consequential fiscal debate the nation has faced in memory, the administration shifts to immigration reform? We can guess why. …

Peter Wehner maintains the president will be vunerable in 2012. To make his point, we follow his post with articles on jobs from people who are in Obama Love; David Brooks (NY Times), Arianna Huffington (HuffPo), and Andy Kroll (Mother Jones). All of these efforts complain about the weakness in the jobs picture. These are Obama’s friends.

… We are now in the fifth month of Barack Obama’s third year in office. Unemployment is at 9.0 percent. We’re about 7 million jobs short of where things stood when Obama took office. Economic growth in the first quarter was 1.8 percent. Housing prices have fallen for 57 consecutive months. Only one in three Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the economy, the lowest point since he took office, and nearly eight in 10 American are less optimistic about the economy than they were a few months ago.

David Axelrod is anxious, and he’s right to be. His friend, the president, is caught in a political tractor beam from which few, if any, public officials escape. The only way to likely to overcome it is if the economy shows signs of a strong recovery. That has yet to happen, and one cannot help but think it may never happen, in the Obama presidency. If that ends up being the case—if a year from now the economy is more or less in the same condition as it was two years ago, last year, and what it is now—Obama will be the easiest incumbent to beat since 1980. It’s not impossible for Republicans to lose such an election, but it would be mighty hard.

Here’s David Brooks writing about the missing fifth of the male work force.

In 1910, Henry Van Dyke wrote a book called “The Spirit of America,” which opened with this sentence: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”

This has always been true. Americans have always been known for their manic dynamism. Some condemned this ambition as a grubby scrambling after money. Others saw it in loftier terms. But energy has always been the country’s saving feature.

So Americans should be especially alert to signs that the country is becoming less vital and industrious. One of those signs comes to us from the labor market. As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work.

According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. …

A. Huffington gives a go at describing the economy.

… April’s numbers were equally disconcerting: even though the economy added 244,000 jobs, the unemployment rate rose from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. Even worse, the unemployment rate for African-Americans jumped to 16.1 percent. And for those over the age of 55, the average length of time spent looking for a job is now over a year.

Add to that an anemic GDP growth rate of 1.8 percent for January through March, down from 3.1 percent for the last quarter of 2010, and the fact that, according to U.S. Census numbers released last week, the percentage of young adults living with their parents has jumped to a staggering 34 percent, largely because of their limited job possibilities.

Then there is the chilling reality that more than 28 percent of U.S. homes were underwater in the first quarter of the year, and foreclosures are expected to rise 20 percent this year. “We get tired of telling such a grim story,” Zillow economist Stan Humphries told Bloomberg News, “but unfortunately this is the story that needs to be told.”

Told, but apparently not listened to. At least not in Washington.

It’s no wonder then that, according to a recent Gallup poll, over half the country currently believes we’re in a recession or a depression. Or that a New York Times/CBS poll shows that 80 percent say the economy is in fairly bad or very bad shape.

How are these not hair on fire numbers? …

And here’s Andy Kroll from Mother Jones on the “McJobs recovery.” All of this from Obama’s fans

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald’s launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that’s more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire US economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald’s franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective [4] than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald’s hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million [5] more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages [6] around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald’s appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “McJob” as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward [7], from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward [8] in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs [9]), beating economists’ expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery? …

IBD editors note the 40th anniversary of Amtrak.

This week, Amtrak marks its 40th anniversary, which means that for decades it’s wasted tens of billions of tax dollars. Naturally, Washington wants to reward this with billions more under the guise of “high-speed” rail.

To say that Amtrak is a failed business is to be unkind to failure. Consider: ..

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

As we were about to publish we discovered a great post from Ed Morrissey about the ridiculous AP poll showing the president with 60% approval. It is now plain the news organizations do not poll for information, they poll to help Obama.

… Oddly — or perhaps not — the AP report doesn’t include a link back to the survey’s raw data.  In order to find it, one has to go to GfK’s site for its AP polls.  The partisan breakdown in the sample is found about halfway through the PDF, and it explains a great deal about how Obama managed to get such a high boost in this poll while others showed shallow bumps that had already started to subside.

The Dem/Rep/Ind breakdown in this poll is 46/29/4, as AP assigned most of the leaners to the parties.  That is a 17-point gap, more than twice what was seen in the 2008 actual popular vote that elected Obama.  It only gets worse when independents are assigned properly.  When taking out the leaners, the split becomes — I’m not kidding — 35/18/27.  Oh, and another 20% “don’t know.”  That’s significantly worse than the March poll, in which the proper D/R/I was 29/20/34, and far beyond their post-midterm sample of 31/28/26.  It’s pretty easy to get Obama to 60% when Republicans are undersampled by almost half.

Frankly, this sample is so bad that no real insights can be gleaned from it.

In the Jewish World Review, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains that Al Qaeda is not as dangerous as the Muslim Brotherhood.

…Unlike Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved and learned the hard way that the use of violence will be met with superior violence by state actors. The clever thing to do, it now turns out, was to be patient and invest in a bottom-up movement rather than a commando structure that risked being wiped out by stronger forces. Besides, the gradualist approach is far more likely to win the prize of state power. All that Khomeini did before he came to power in Iran was to preach the merits of a society based on Islamic law. He did not engage in terrorism. Yet he and his followers took over Iran — a feat far greater than bin Laden ever achieved. In Iran the violence came later.

The point is that fighting violent extremists is only part of the battle; perhaps the easier part. The bigger challenge may be to deal with those Islamists who are willing to play a longer game.

In the West, bin Laden’s ignominious death in a Pakistani hideaway has frequently been contrasted with the mass protests that have swept the Middle East in recent months. Policymakers and commentators have drawn the conclusion that the Arab Spring has triumphed over jihadism, setting the region on a high road to democracy. This is too hasty a conclusion. Let’s take Egypt as an example. …

In the WSJ, James Taranto discusses some of Bin Laden’s lesser-known political positions. He was a big fan of Jimmy Carter’s views on Israel.

The New York Times, reporting on the intelligence haul from Osama bin Laden’s house, paints a picture of the mass murderer’s politics:

In October, . . . Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.

So he was a global warmist who opposed the Iraq war, hated big corporations, was a fan of Noam Chomsky and thought Jimmy Carter was right on Israel. On the other hand, we understand he was more conservative on social issues. …

Also in the WSJ, Bret Stephens talks more about Noam Chomsky’s poisonous thoughts.

…Yet when it comes to making excuses for monsters…Among the subjects of Mr. Chomsky’s solicitude have been Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (whom he described as a “relatively apolitical liberal”), the Khmer Rouge (at the height of the killing fields), and Hezbollah (whose military-style cap he cheerfully donned on a visit to Lebanon last year).

As for bin Laden, Mr. Chomsky asks, rhetorically, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”

…So it is that Mr. Chomsky can be the recipient of over 20 honorary degrees, including from Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Chicago. None of these degrees, as far as I know, was conferred for Mr. Chomsky’s political musings, but neither did those musings provoke any apparent misgivings about the fitness of granting the award. So Mr. Chomsky is the purveyor of some controversial ideas about this or that aspect of American power. So what?…

The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on the latest maneuver by the government to limit drilling, this time, natural gas.

The Energy Department wants to find ways to make hydraulic fracturing, a fast-growing method of extracting natural gas, safer and cleaner. Say, isn’t that how the administration justified its offshore drilling ban?

…The safety mantra was raised once again last Thursday when Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the appointment of a seven-member panel to study hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” and come up with new safety standards that address concerns raised by environmentalists.

…We believe the safety issue is a cover for the Obama administration’s ideologically driven animus toward fossil fuels and its deliberate campaign to raise energy prices — and thereby to make its favored “green” alternatives look more competitive and attractive.

James Delingpole, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, blogs about the exciting possibilities for natural gas. Remember what he says about watermelons – green on the outside and red inside.

Imagine if we were to discover a new form of cheap, clean energy so abundant that it will provide our needs at least for the next two centuries, freeing us from the pervasive early 21st century neurosis of having to worry about “peak oil” or “conserving scarce resources”, causing a worldwide economic boom and with the added side-benefit of creating more fertiliser so that we can not only heat our homes more cheaply than ever before but also eat more cheaply than ever before.

…Actually we don’t need to imagine for the miracle is already here. It’s called Shale Gas and is the subject of a thrilling new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Matt Ridley with a foreword by Professor Freeman Dyson. Neither Ridley nor Dyson is in much doubt that shale gas is the answer to our prayers. …

…the economic arguments in its favour are too powerful for it to be ignored (especially in countries like Poland, which has massive shale gas reserves and, like most of the former Eastern Bloc really has no desire to be blackmailed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia any longer than is necessary). But what we are going to see in the next few months and years are very concerted efforts by green campaigners and their sympathisers in the EU to besmirch the name of shale gas in favour of their preferred (and – of course – disastrously expensive and environmentally destructive) power source, renewable energy. …

Steve Daniels, in Crane’s Chicago Business, reports on efforts to keep big businesses in Illinois.

Gov. Pat Quinn says the state’s Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity is looking at ways to keep Sears Holdings Corp. from leaving Illinois.

…Mr. Quinn has been showering incentive money on companies that promise to keep their companies in Illinois, including Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. in Libertyville, truck maker Navistar International Corp. of Warrenville and Chicago-based wireless carrier U.S. Cellular Corp.

Motorola announced Friday it will keep its headquarters in Libertyville after the state promised the company $100 million in tax breaks over the next decade. Also Friday, a bill signed by Mr. Quinn will provide a $19-million tax break to Continental Tire, which operates a facility in Downstate Mount Vernon. …

Today we have more of the Top of the Ticket’s Late Night One-Liners.

SNL: a number of new conspiracy theories are surfacing claiming that Osama Bin Laden is not really dead. Which means Barack Obama will go down in history as the first black person ever to have to prove that he killed someone. …

… Leno: Exxon Mobil claims only 6% of its profits come from gas sales. Right, so apparently 94% comes from the sale of Slim Jims and Dr Pepper. …

… Fallon: For the second year, Jacob and Isabella are the most popular baby names in the U.S. The least popular baby name? Donald Sheen Bin Laden.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Toby Harnden, in “Wanted; Dead or Dead,” brings up a remarkable irony: Obama’s positions regarding captured terrorists leave Obama with no choice but to kill terrorists rather than take prisoners. It’s a strange moral high ground.

…Under Mr Obama, drone strikes in Pakistan have increased dramatically, resulting in dead suspects, civilian casualties and fewer prisoners to interrogate.

Terrorists who would have been captured under Mr Bush so that every last morsel of information could be wrung out of them have been sent straight to their maker under Mr Obama.

…A US Navy SEAL veteran of operations in Afghanistan told me that the simpler, less risky operation would have been one designed to capture bin Laden. “You could have driven right up to the compound and crept in,” he said.

“Capturing him could have yielded an incredible amount of intelligence. But that’s not the stance of our government. Imagine the headaches: detention, interrogation,legal issues. Does Obama really want that?” …

In the WSJ, Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General, discusses the ineffective, reactionary policies of the current administration.

…The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. …

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation. …

Linda Chavez, in the Washington Examiner, has an excellent article on the Attorney General that Obama can’t control.

…CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.” Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators.

In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama’s acknowledgment of intelligence agencies’ role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed.

“Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome,” Obama said. “The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”…

Victor Davis Hanson paints a portrait of the current culture in central California.

…In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.

…about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.

…But we are experiencing a funny sort of depression, or rather a surreal sort. I grew up with stories from my grandparents of 28 people living in my present house. My grandmother, she used to brag, had a big kettle of ham bones and beans cooking nonstop each day and fed assorted relatives as they came in from the vineyard and orchard. My grandfather made one trip to Fresno (16 miles away) every 10 days for “supplies.” The pictures I have inherited from my mother show an impoverished farm — this house unpainted and in disrepair, ancient cars and implements scattered about, a sort of farm of apparent 1910 vintage, but photographed in the 1930s — one that I could still sense traces of as a little boy here in the late 1950s.

…I’ve been discussing these disconnects with farmers, a professor or two from CSU Fresno, and local business people. All come to the same conclusions. There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection. You can buy everything from a new pressure washer to tropical fruit drinks. For this essay, I stopped at one last week and surveyed their roto-tillers, lawn mowers, and chain saws, new and good brands. …

Howard Nemorov, in PJ Tatler, remarks on Victor Davis Hanson’s article.

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent piece about the disconnect between California “poverty” and economic reality. Highly recommended.

It reminds me of my 18 years in California. We were two middle-class working professionals, self-employed and trying to live like citizens. The problem was, we didn’t have an eight-digit trust fund to pay for the house. When you have 2 people earning $90,000 annually and can’t afford a mortgage, something’s wrong.

We got out before the real estate crash and moved to Texas. …

People in CA chided me about moving to redneck-land. I decided to be polite to most of them and hold my silence. But if you want to live with angry, intolerant, narrow-minded, mean-spirited people who act aggressive if you don’t agree with their views, move to California.

In Carpe Diem, Mark Perry highlights an article about the problems rent control has created in San Francisco.

The Bay Citizen — “In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago.”

The reason? The city’s pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant.  

…MP: As we know from basic economic theory, rent control laws are doomed to fail with many predictable unintended consequences in the long run: fewer new rental units are built or made available, many apartments are removed from the market, a decline in the quality of housing, lower rental rates for long-term tenants but much higher rents for new tenants, inefficient use of housing space, etc.  In other words, rent control laws guarantee that there will be less affordable housing in the long run, not more.

And here’s the article from Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, in the Bay Citizen.

…Increasingly, small-time landlords like Koniuk are just giving up. One of his Divisadero Street neighbors has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.

“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”

Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn on the raid.

…The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well – elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

…A decade later, we’re back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they’ve got the superpower all figured out – that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet but it doesn’t really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching “Dancing With The Stars” when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it’s time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way. …

John Stossel explains how speculators help keep prices stable.

…The evil oil-speculator theory also runs up against the fact that the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies (QE2) and other factors have continued the dollar’s slide against foreign currencies — to a three-year low. As the dollar loses value, oil sellers demand more for their product. “Commodities, along with most traded goods globally, are priced in dollars,” former Federal Reserve official Gerald P. O’Driscoll of the Cato Institute writes. “It is the old story of too much money chasing too few goods.”

If Sanders and other economic illiterates get their way, we’ll have new laws banning “speculation.” That will raise prices further. Don’t believe me? Think back to a previous time when a Senate committee said that “speculative activity causes severe and unwarranted fluctuations in the price. …” That was in 1958, when people got upset about the price of onions. Fools in Congress addressed that problem by banning speculation on onion prices.

The result? A Financial Times analysis found that the ban made prices less stable. This year, the retail price of onions rose more than the price of gasoline — 36 versus 24 percent. Most years, the price of onions fluctuates more than other goods. No mystery there. Speculators help keep prices stable. When they foresee a future oil shortage — that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future — speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there’s relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted. …

Michael Barone surveys the political landscape in Canada after their stunning elections.

…The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. It was a result practically no Canadian pundit or psephologist predicted.

…In Canada, Harper’s Conservatives have already cut taxes and modified spending programs, but always with the tacit consent of the separatist Bloc Quebecois or the left-wing New Democrats or the long-dominant Liberal party. Now they’re on their own, and we’ll see the results.

…The Conservatives’ triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans. One is that smaller-government policies, far from being political poison, are actually vote winners. …

Karl Rove thinks that 2012 has the potential to be a much tighter race than 2008. He breaks things down for us.

…Since the 2008 election, 18 states have experienced a change in their number of electoral votes because of the decennial census. Some (mostly red ones) have gained electoral votes and some (mostly blue) have lost electoral votes. John McCain would have closed the gap by 14 electoral votes in 2008 if the contest had been run under the 2012 Electoral College distribution.

…The 2012 presidential election is likely to be decided in 14 states. If Mr. Obama loses the three states he narrowly carried in 2008 plus Ohio and Florida, then the GOP would win back the White House by swiping any one of the nine remaining battlegrounds. This is a good place for the party to be right now.

…At this point, the 2012 election is shaping up to be much closer than 2008. Mr. Obama has the considerable benefits of incumbency but also a dismal record. The electoral map has shrunk for him: Key states that went for him last time are unlikely to do so again. This election is within the GOP’s grasp. The quality of the Republican candidate’s campaign and message will decide whether it becomes so.

In Forbes, Merrill Matthews gives a number of reasons why Obama will not win reelection.

…“It’s the Economy, Stupid.” We have former Bill Clinton advisor James Carville—who knows a little something about beating an incumbent president, Bush 41—to thank for that important insight.  Maybe Carville was anticipating Obama.

A new Washington Post poll claims that 57 percent of the public disapproves of Obama’s handling of the economy.  Those kinds of numbers can create electoral landslides—for the opponent.

…The economy will likely pick up over the next 18 months, but very slowly.  And that means millions of struggling families will head to the polls on election day and vindicate Carville’s political insight . …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, discusses recent polls.

…Significantly, a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll conducted immediately after the bin Laden announcement showed no overall bump in the president’s approval rating, which remained stuck at 48 percent. A striking 92 percent of respondents stated that the killing of Bin Laden will have no effect on the way they will vote in 2012, and just 39 percent felt that Obama was doing his job well enough to deserve re-election.

On the crucial issue of the economy, a mere 27 percent of respondents in the Newsweek/Daily Beast poll agreed that it was heading in the right direction, compared to 60 percent who felt it was not. And with the critically important independent voters, Obama remains in serious trouble. As leading pollster Douglas Schoen notes, independents retain grave doubts over the president’s handling of economic issues…

…The bin Laden raid may have succeeded in temporarily halting a sharp fall in the president’s overall approval rating, which nosedived in April, but it has made no difference to largely negative public perceptions of Obama’s leadership on the top voter issues facing the American people. Barack Obama still looks clueless and in denial on the huge economic problems facing the United States, including the towering debt hanging over the country. He continues to preside over a presidency in long-term decline, while advancing many policies that are making his country weaker, less prosperous and more indebted.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer points out the bin Laden raid was a result of Bush’s war on terror.

…The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.

Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.

…Now, it is one thing to have an argument about whether it’s over. It’s quite another to claim that our reaching this happy day — during which we can even be debating whether victory has been achieved — has nothing to do with the war on terror of the previous decade. Al-Qaeda is not subsiding on its own. It is not retiring from the field, having seen the error of its ways. It is not disappearing because of some inexorable law of history or nature. It is in retreat because of the terrible defeats it suffered once America decided to take up arms against it, a campaign (once) known as the war on terror.

In the NYPost, Michael Walsh wonders if this might be the end of jihad for awhile.

…Millenarian sects tend to falter when their confidently apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize. Now that bin Laden sleeps with the fishes — the perfect end to a jumped-up gangster — it is highly likely that his version of jihad will die with him.

Unlike the British, we’ve never had the slightest desire to occupy Muslim countries. If Muslims want to come here and accept the American way of life (which means, obviously, no jihad and no sharia), fine.

From her earliest days, America — the vision of freedom — has threatened kings and emperors and popes and potentates and pashas and Mahdis. But every one that tried to crush us failed. …

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ points out while Obama is dancing on Osama’s grave, his attorney general is threatening to indict CIA interrogators.

As the whole of America takes a bin Laden victory lap, let us pause to remember some of this celebrated event’s most forgotten men: the Central Intelligence Agency officers who sit under the cloud of a criminal investigation begun in 2009 by Attorney General Eric Holder into their interrogations of captured terrorists.

That’s right, the Americans whose interrogation of al Qaeda operatives may have put in motion the death of this mass murderer may themselves face prosecution by the country they were trying to protect.

…On June 18 last year, Mr. Holder said in a Washington speech that Mr. Durham was “close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making recommendations to me.” But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is “still ongoing.”

Ironically, the CIA’s contribution to bin Laden’s end may ensure that its people will remain under this cloud. With President Obama elated over the success of his call to take down bin Laden, his poll numbers rising and his re-election campaign insulated from charges of Democratic softness on national security, what are the chances that his attorney general would wash away all that by announcing his intention to indict the men whose work may have sent his boss into Abbottabad, guns blazing? It is zero. … 

Victor Davis Hanson looks at Obama’s previous criticisms of Bush policies that Obama has continued.

…In sum, Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.

Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

In the Daily Beast, Douglas Schoen thinks that Obama can increase his poll numbers by showing leadership on economic issues.

…President Obama received no immediate approval bump from the bin Laden kill, according to the new Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, though the subsequent days may have produced a smallish increase. The Gallup poll released on Thursday shows a six-point increase in Obama’s job approval, and the Real Clear Politics average shows a four-point bounce in Obama’s job approval rating.

…To be sure, the president garners justifiably high ratings for leadership generally and specifically on the war on terror, as 55 percent say Obama is a strong leader overall and over 60 percent see him as a leader in the War on Terror. But implications of this for the 2012 election are clear. The fact that the president got just a modest bounce in his job approval and saw no fundamental change in his overall ratings, even while six in 10 say they are more likely to vote for him because of bin Laden’s killing, indicates the profound disquiet American voters feel with current economic circumstances.

…The Newsweek/Daily Beast poll shows that the Republicans are largely discredited. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and the GOP leadership in the House are highly unpopular. Given that the GOP field has yet to take shape and Donald Trump is completely discredited, the president has the opportunity to take advantage of the enormous amount of goodwill that has been generated by this event to fill the void that has been left by the Republicans. …

Joel Kotkin reports on cities with the most jobs, for Forbes.

…no place displayed more vibrancy than Texas. The Lone Star State dominated the three size categories, with the No. 1 mid-sized city, El Paso (No. 3 overall, up 22 places from last year) and No.1 large metropolitan area Austin (No. 6 overall), joining Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood (the No. 1 small city) atop their respective lists.

Texas also produced three other of the top 10 smallest regions, including energy-dominated No. 4 Midland, which gained 41 places overall, and No. 10 Odessa, whose economy jumped a remarkable 57 places. It also added two other mid-size cities to its belt: No. 2 Corpus Christi and No. 4 McAllen-Edinburgh-Mission.

Whatever they are drinking in Texas, other states may want to imbibe. California–which boasted zero regions in the top 150–is a prime example. Indeed, a group of California officials, led by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, recently trekked to the Lone Star State to learn possible lessons about what drives job creation. Gov. Jerry Brown and others in California’s hierarchy may not be ready to listen, despite the fact that the city Brown formerly ran, Oakland, ranked absolute last, No. 65, among the big metros in our survey, two places behind perennial also-ran No. 63 Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich. …

In Tech News Daily, we see speculations about the stealth helicopter downed in the bin Laden raid.

…Photos of the tail-end of the aircraft circulated online shortly after the raid suggests it was a secret stealth helicopter — possibly a highly modified version of an H-60 Blackhawk — that was designed to fly quietly and to evade radar, experts say.

…Cenciotti noted that NASA is also known to be using motion-control technology to reduce Blackhawk noise, and the strange tail cover on the downed copter could conceivably have been used to house such technology.

…”The noise made by this helicopter compared to a conventional helicopter probably reduced the reaction time of all the personnel protecting bin Laden.”…

In Ricochet, we learn about war dogs. Rob Long’s piece starts with a wild photo and then tells us why they didn’t send a cat on the mission to Abbottabad.

…On the FP website, Rebecca Frankel does a series called “War Dogs” and each one is an amazing testament to why dogs are awesome and why cats are pointless:

…So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in Operation Neptune Spear that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s killing, there was one dog – the elite of the four-legged variety. And though the dog in question remains an enigma — another mysterious detail of the still-unfolding narrative of that historic mission — there should be little reason to speculate about why there was a dog involved: Man’s best friend is a pretty fearsome warrior.

…in the debate of Dog v. Cat, case closed.  Dogs are fierce warriors, loyal friends, hard chargers, face lickers, snack lovers, and, clearly, patriots. 

They didn’t bring a cat to kill Bin Laden.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on the importance of the Iraq war. You know, the one called a “dumb war” by the president.

If President Bush had not invaded Iraq, President Obama likely would not have found Osama bin Laden. The al-Qaida operative who fingered bin Laden’s courier was caught in Iraq helping terrorists in 2004.

…In January 2004, Kurdish forces near the Iranian border apprehended Hassan Ghul, a top al-Qaida lieutenant once under the direct command of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. After quickly being handed over to U.S. forces, Ghul was sent to one of the CIA’s foreign “black site” prisons. It wasn’t long before this particular terrorist canary started singing.

…This early key puzzle piece, without which other pieces might not have been found, came from an al-Qaida operative whose sole purpose for being in Iraq was to organize armed opposition to the U.S. presence there.

…So we have another reason it was wise to go into Iraq. Not only did the Iraq invasion topple Saddam, who used chemical weapons to commit genocide against his own people, and sought nuclear weapons to slaughter others; not only did it give the Iraqi people their first opportunity for freedom and prosperity, providing a model of liberty for other Mideast Islamic nations. On top of all that, it led to the death of bin Laden. …

In the Corner, Shannen Coffin blogs on enhanced interrogation.

Some reports now claim that KSM gave up the information that led eventually — and with a lot more legwork — to the identification of bin Laden’s courier though more conventional means of interrogation, not as the direct result of enhanced interrogation techniques. … When KSM was captured, he was resistant to any form of interrogation, conventional or otherwise. As our colleague Marc Thiessen learned in writing Courting Disaster, KSM’s resistance was “superhuman.” It was only after being subjected to waterboarding and other enhanced measures that he became compliant, and from that point forward, cooperated with more conventional techniques. As one of the CIA interrogators told Marc, “If we had not had these techniques, we would have gotten zero from him.” So enhanced interrogation methods played an integral role in all of the intelligence collected from him.

As I’ve said before, I still think the debate over the legality and morality of these measures is the subject of fair debate. Marc makes a compelling case in his book, but I respect those who articulate principled opposition. But the question of effectiveness has been answered, if these reports are correct. …

You knew this was coming …. Toby Harnden lists the 10 ways the aftermath of the wonderful strike in Pakistan was botched. 

The past few days have seemed like an extended amateur hour in the White House as unforced error after unforced error has been made in the handling of the US Government’s message about the killing of bin Laden.

We should not forget the bottom line in this: bin Laden was justifiably and legally killed by brave and skilled US Navy SEALs. The operation was audacious and meticulous in its planning and execution. President Barack Obama made the call to carry out the raid and his decision was vindicated in spades.

Having said that, the messiness since then has taken much of the sheen off this success, temporarily at least. Here’s a summary of what went wrong once the most difficult bit had been achieved: …

Andrew McCarthy, in the National Review, has an interesting summation of the war on terror.

…The slaying of this monster, the peerless capability of our armed forces it reaffirms, and the demonstration of national unity it has sparked, make this a great day for our country. They suggest, moreover, something else worth celebrating: the outlines of an effective, practical, and economic counterterrorism.

The criminal-justice system is not a deterrent to foreign terror networks that are bivouacked outside our country and thus outside the jurisdiction of its investigative agencies and courts. Nor are nation-building enterprises the answer: They are prohibitively costly in blood and treasure; they inspire sharia-based attacks against us; and they won’t make us safer — terrorists are expert at exploiting the freedoms available in democratic societies, and there is no reason to believe that country A’s becoming a democracy would make country B safer from jihadist terror. The future will not belong to the law-enforcement approach or the democracy project.

It will belong to small-scale special-forces operations that target top jihadists and their cells. It will entail diplomatic pressure and, when necessary, limited military engagements against terror-sponsoring regimes. It will feature less indulgence of faux allies like Pakistan, which do more to aid than confront the jihad. It will fashion a new legal system for the indefinite detention of al-Qaeda operatives who, for intelligence reasons, cannot or should not be tried in civilian courts. And it will require aggressive prosecution of al-Qaeda imitators inside our country, as well as those who materially support terrorists. …

Abe Greenwald discusses what we have learned from the Osama raid, in Contentions.

…Citizens of every political shape and size flooded the streets to rejoice over the terrorist’s death, but that death came as the end-result of many highly politicized Bush-era policy decisions. We now have to contend with truths that are intolerable but nevertheless have led to the country’s collective jubilation.

…Enhanced interrogation works. Crucial intelligence was extracted from detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, both of whom were subjected to techniques whose very existence spawned self-righteous movements to bring the last administration up on charges. It would be entertaining—if it were possible—to measure the overlap between those who marched in favor of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and those who celebrated publicly the success engendered by their most loathed policies.

…Genuine national security means spending big money on defense. The Wall Street Journal reports, “In December, the Central Intelligence Agency called a secret meeting with lawmakers to line up tens of millions of dollars in funding, kicking off a five-month scramble that climaxed in Sunday’s events.” Tens of millions in five months to nab a single man. Because Sunday’s operation was successful we won’t have to endure that factoid being put in service of fallacious “we need to spend that money at home” arguments. And this is not counting the billions spent prior to December on all the programs and institutions brought to bear on the hunt for bin Laden and other al Qaeda members. …

Craig Pirrong criticizes the administration’s mishandling of the PR surrounding the Osama operation.

…In the aftermath of the Osama raid, the administration is busy shooting itself in its collective foot.  First, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan spins an elaborate tale of an armed Osama resisting while cowering behind his wife.  Today, Press Secretary Carney reads a statement that says, uhm, it didn’t go down like that at all: yes, a woman was shot, but Osama wasn’t hiding behind her and he wasn’t armed.  Brennan also released the incorrect name of the Osama spawn that was killed in the firefight.

Carney wrote this off as the result of the fog of war.  Which is exactly why Brennan was a fool for shooting off his mouth before the fog cleared.

…Third, and most interesting, is the leaking at the expense of SecDef Robert Gates.  The story is that Gates wanted to flatten the Osama compound and make the rubble bounce with a B-2 strike due to the riskiness of a commando operation, but Obama overruled him.  There’s some merit to Gates’s position–if that was his position.  A commando operation is incredibly risky: if the helicopter that went down had crashed outside the compound the whole thing could have gone very, very wrong.  (I’m very skeptical, BTW, that the helo really suffered a mechanical problem.  More likely a golden BB fired by a lookout in the compound or running into some obstacle designed specifically to thwart a helo landing–which had to have been considered a major risk by those in the compound.)  That said, the counter arguments are strong too–namely, the risk of not being able to determine definitively that Osama was there and had snuffed it.

In other words, there was no compelling right choice; each alternative had its pros and cons.  Gates was doing his job of advising the president according to his best judgment.  So why shiv him on his way out the door?  Is this payback for his mutinous behavior before?  Is this the way to encourage future advisors to give their frank opinions? …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson talks inflation.

…Sensing a threat to his hopes of reelection, the president last week called on Congress to eliminate “unwarranted” tax breaks for oil companies and set up a Justice Department task force to investigate price gouging and fraud in the oil markets. Give me a break. The spike in gas prices is the result of Fed policy, which has increased the monetary base threefold in as many years, and a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East that the president and his advisers still haven’t gotten a handle on.

And the reason the CPI is losing credibility is that, as economist John Williams tirelessly points out, it’s a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used, the CPI would actually be 10 percent. Yes, folks, double-digit inflation is back. Pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out the real inflation rate just by moving the decimal point in the core CPI one place to the right.

It’s not only the BLS that speaks with a forked tongue. Members of the Council on Foreign Relations last week heard Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner say: “Our policy has been and will always be…that a strong dollar is in the interest of the country.” Fact: the dollar has depreciated relative to other currencies by 17 percent since 2009. …

Liam Halligan, in the Telegraph, UK, is concerned about quantitative easing.

…America’s currency weakness is based on fundamentals including its vast, and upward-spiralling, $14,000bn debt – and that’s just what’s “on the books”. Nothing material is being done to address this massive problem. The unspoken assumption among politicians on both sides of the aisle is that America can just “monetise” its liabilities by continuing to debase the currency.

…America’s currency depreciation trick could also backfire badly if “the rope slips” and, far from a steady decline, the world’s pivotal currency goes into free fall. That would plunge America back into recession, or worse – as inflation ballooned amid soaring import costs, forcing the Fed to raise rates in the teeth of shuddering slowdown.

A plummeting US currency would also spark broader chaos as central banks sought to protect the value of their reserves. And after the inevitable downward overshoot, the dollar would snap back, causing the carry trade to “unwind” as dollar borrowers suddenly owed more. The danger then would be that major losses at financial institutions posed renewed systemic threats. Financial markets might then go into a tailspin, reigniting concerns of a fully-blown global slump. …

David Harsanyi comments on the debt ceiling charade.

…Some economists — such as Jagadeesh Gokhale, former senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — have argued that “a temporarily frozen debt limit could … signal U.S. lawmakers’ resolve to get our fiscal house in order. It may even reassure investors about long-term U.S. economic prospects.” Immeasurable debt, on the other hand…

This kind of thinking crashes against every sacred progressive ideal the president advocates. But no worries, Republicans have already telegraphed that opposing a hike in the debt limit is nothing more than leverage for a larger deal. It is doubtful, then, that they will have the stomach to hold the line when the moment of truth comes on the debt ceiling.

If it existed. Which, technically, it doesn’t. Not if we raise it every time we hit it.

We start the humor section with a post from Andrew Malcolm’s Top of the Ticket from the LA Times. This is his compilation of late night TV talk show one-liners. 

Fallon: Did you see the royal newlyweds kissing on the balcony? I was like, hey, guys, get a castle.

Conan: Osama bin Laden’s death interrupted Sunday night’s “Celebrity Apprentice” with Donald Trump. Which begs the question: How do we kill Bin Laden again next Sunday?

Letterman: In the Osama bin Laden raid, the SEALs sent his image to a satellite facial-recognition system that said there was a 99.9% chance it was Bin Laden. Still, there’s that .01% chance it was a ZZ Top guy.

Leno: President Obama says he won’t release the Bin Laden death photos. So I guess we’ll just have to wait for Donald Trump to force him to do that too. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin highlights how Bush policies made the Bin Laden operation possible.

…John Yoo, who underwent years of investigation by inept lawyers and faced the loss of his law license for his work in setting the ground rules in the war on terror, has reason to find solace in an operation that was the anthesis of the criminalization of the war on terror. He writes:

“Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things back in 2002–2008. It would have given Miranda warnings and lawyers to KSM and other al-Qaeda leaders. There would have been no Gitmo, no military commissions — instead civilian trials on U.S. soil with all of the Bill of Rights benefits for terrorist defendants. There would have been no enhanced-interrogation program, no terrorist-surveillance program, and hence no intelligence mosaic that could have given us the information that produced this success. In the War on Terror, it is comparatively easy to pull the trigger — the truly hard task is to figure out where to aim. President Obama can take credit, rightfully, for the success today, but he owes it to the tough decisions taken by the Bush administration.”

It has always been a misnomer that the Bush administration acted ”lawlessly.” To the contrary, George W. Bush, his advisers and lawyers understood there is criminal law and there is the law of war. And they understood we should not confuse the two. The latter allows, as Congress proscribed, for military tribunals and for interrogations that fall short of torture but would not be countenanced in a civilian court. The latter allowed us to operate the Nuremberg trials. The latter was the legal tradition in this country for more than 200 years. Now Obama and his team have figured it out as well, after two years of a misguided experiment in which they castigated critics as legal and moral dunces.

But now there is agreement by both sides in this raging debate. You don’t send cops to arrest Osama. You send SEALs. Perhaps now we can set aside all that poppycock about Bush’s “shredding the Constitution.”

Peter Wehner demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Left on raising the debt ceiling.

…Dionne had particularly harsh words for Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator who said:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Hold on. Wait a minute. I’m sorry; I’ve made a terrible mistake. These aren’t the words of Senator Marco Rubio; they’re the words of then-Senator Barack Obama, from 2006. Which raises this question: Do you recall the column by Dionne excoriating Obama and other Democrats for voting against raising the debt ceiling during the Bush presidency? That’s funny; neither do I. Which tells you much of what you need to know about Dionne these days.

Peter Wehner scores another point against the hypocritical Left.

Here’s Nancy Pelosi from a press conference on September 7, 2006:

[E]ven if [Osama bin Laden] is caught tomorrow, it is five years too late. He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But, in fact, the damage that he has done . . . is done. And even to capture him now I don’t think makes us any safer.

And here’s Nancy Pelosi yesterday:

The death of Osama bin Laden marks the most significant development in our fight against al-Qaida. . . . I salute President Obama, his national security team, Director Panetta, our men and women in the intelligence community and military, and other nations who supported this effort for their leadership in achieving this major accomplishment. . . . [T]he death of Osama bin Laden is historic. . . .

This devastating then-and-now comparison comes to us courtesy of John Hideraker of Power Line. It underscores the degree to which partisanship can ravage people’s fair-mindedness and, in the process, make them look like fools and hacks. Such things aren’t uncommon in politics—but what is rare is to see such intellectual dishonesty proven so conclusively.

Michael Barone weighs on “leading from behind.” He notes how Ryan Lizza’s article shows Obama’s adolescent, reactionary views on foreign policy issues.

…Arriving in the Senate in 2005, when it was clear that things were going sour in Iraq, Obama took the side of “realists” who always advised caution about military involvement abroad rather than the “idealists” who had backed such involvements in the Clinton years and after.

…And Obama’s scornful dismissal of George W. Bush’s “idealist” calls for advancing democracy around the world had something in common with the adolescent discovery that “Dad is wrong about everything!”

Of course when Obama got to college, er, the White House, he found that Dad was right about some things. The surge in Iraq was allowed to continue succeeding and something like a surge was ordered in Afghanistan. Guanatanamo remains open and CIA interrogators are not going to be prosecuted. Robert Gates was kept in the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton installed at State.

…It’s not uncommon for college students to have wildly oscillating views on issues as the months go by. It’s more consequential for a president to do so. As foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead notes, “President Obama likes to hedge. If he puts four chips on black, he almost immediately wants to put three chips on red.”…

The WSJ editors discuss the vindictive and unethical behavior of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius.

…HHS this month sent a letter to 83-year-old Forest Labs CEO Howard Solomon, announcing it would henceforth refuse to do business with him. What earned Mr. Solomon the blackball? Well, nothing that he did—as admitted even by HHS. …

This is a threat to every health CEO in America. If Forest wants to continue to sell its drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration—the biggest buyers of pharmaceuticals—it will have to change management. Losing the federal government as a customer is potentially crippling to a drug company.

…Forest Labs is sticking by Mr. Solomon, saying the exclusion is “unjustified.” But even the company has acknowledged that if Mrs. Sebelius implements her ban, Mr. Solomon would be forced to step down at least temporarily while the company takes her to court. Every CEO in America will get the message that his job is at risk if he quarrels with an Administration’s bureaucratic orders.

…CEOs are accountable for their actions, but it is simply unjust for a powerful regulator like Mrs. Sebelius to threaten a company with ruin if it doesn’t dismiss a CEO who has had no formal charges or proof of wrongdoing brought against him. …

Clive Crook talks about how to raise taxes.

…Misguided as their opponents may be, however, Democrats are wrong to think that “soak the rich” is both good economic policy and a sure-fire electoral winner. It is neither.

…The base needs broadening, so that marginal rates can stay put or even come down while revenues go up. That is what the Bowles-Simpson commission and other fiscal inquiries have suggested. Mr Obama has inched in this direction lately by mentioning the case for reducing “tax expenditures” (ie, limiting the value of tax deductions), but the president has given the idea nothing like the prominence of higher top marginal rates.

…It worsens the problem that the president’s line between the middle class (whose taxes he has promised not to raise) and what one Democratic party spokesman recently called the ultra-rich is a household income of $250,000. The figure is too low. True, less than 3 per cent of households make that much at any one time – but a police officer married to a civil servant could sneak into this category. …

In the Weekly Standard, John McCormack comments on Paul Ryan’s town hall meetings.

…Wielding a laser pointer, Ryan lays out the federal budget, our deficit, and how entitlement programs, plus interest, are on track to consume all federal revenue in over a decade.

There are occasionally audible gasps in the crowd when the he clicks the slide that shows the gusher of red ink that consumes the budget on our current path. He then shows the GOP budget proposal to gradually eliminate the deficit and the debt. “It’s just like a mortgage,” Ryan says. “The alternative is we have a debt crisis. The alternative is everybody gets hurt.”

The final slide compares how he and President Obama would change Medicare. It’s not a debate about whether or not to reform Medicare but how. Ryan asks everyone 55 and older to raise their hands (most do). He then tells them that nothing changes under Medicare for them. Ryan describes the plan to reform Medicare for the under-54 set by subsidizing their premiums and letting them pick among a variety of plans regulated by Medicare. The Medicare prescription drug benefit came in 41 percent below Congressional Budget Office predictions because seniors get to pick among competing plans, Ryan says.

…Ryan is well aware that the debate over his proposed budget has just begun, but it seems that Ryan and the Republicans have the edge so far nationwide.

…Ryan is proof that politics is not an entirely deterministic enterprise. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Yes, structural factors matter. But candidates matter, too. Rational argument and moral suasion matter. There’s a reason why Ryan won 68% of the vote in 2010 and 64% of the vote in 2008, when John McCain only garnered 47.5% of the vote in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the Corner, Peter Kirsanow calls attention to the service of the Navy’s SEALs.

…That said, the nation once again owes a debt of gratitude to the SEALs, the elite warriors who have distinguished themselves as the tip of America’s spear. Rarely do we hear about their missions and we probably won’t know the identities of those who participated in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Whether it was Orwell, Kipling, or Churchill who said, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” the quote applies to SEALs. It’s appropriate that the last thing bin Laden saw was a rough man with an MP-5.

Mark Hemingway, in the Weekly Standard Blog, with more on the SEAL team.

It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru. Marc Ambinder has a good report that fills in some of the particulars:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code. …

Alana Goodman points out the intel from GITMO that helped us find bin Laden.

The killing of Osama bin Laden seemed to come out of nowhere, but officials have reportedly been on the terror leader’s trail for over four years…And according to the Washington Examiner, it was intelligence gleaned from a Guantanamo Bay detainee over four years ago that ended up leading to his whereabouts:

“Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.” Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago. Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.”

If it wasn’t for Guantanamo Bay, it seems highly unlikely that the government would have been able to uncover this information. We can thank the counterterrorism policies put in place by the Bush administration—and President Obama’s savvy decision to continue them—for leading intelligence officials to bin Laden.

Mark Steyn comments on the president’s speech.

…Personally, I would have liked bin Laden’s death to have been announced by whatever lowest-level official was manning the night desk at the Department of Nondescript Bureaucrats, preferably reading it off the back of an envelope. But, if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.

Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:

“Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.”

Andrew McCarthy discusses the operation in the context of foreign policy and domestic politics.

…President Obama deserves kudos for the vigor with which he has attacked al Qaeda leaders and cells in Pakistan. As I argued during the campaign, his position on the need to do this was far better than that of Sen. McCain — who regarded Pakistan as a valuable ally and portrayed Obama as reckless for threatening to conduct attacks there. Obama is also to be applauded for authorizing yesterday’s daring mission. President Carter’s failed mission to rescue the hostages in Iran is testament to how much can go wrong and how politically devastating it can be when such a mission fails. And all you need to do is read the pertinent section of the 9/11 Commission report about President Clinton’s failure to give clear authorization to kill bin Laden when we had several chances to do so in 1998–99 — i.e., before bin Laden bombed the Cole bombing and ordered 9/11. That it would have been irresponsible to pass up this latest chance to rid the world of this menace does not mean acting responsibly was without risk for Obama. We should commend him for pulling the trigger.

Still, the operation cannot but underscore the mind-bending inconsistencies in Obama’s counterterrorism — gold-plated due process for some 9/11 terrorists but assassination for others; the haste to close Gitmo even as it continues to serve valuable security purposes; the paralysis of interrogation policies that (as Shannen, Steve, and others point out) were key to obtaining intelligence that not only thwarts attacks but enabled us to find bin Laden…

We ought to take this very good news for what it is — very good news. …And we should forget about the politics of this. Whatever bump Obama gets will be about as enduring as tomorrow’s trip to the station to fill ’er up with $5/gallon gas. 

Claudia Rosett thinks the White House could have handled the announcement better.

Bin Laden’s death is great news, but the president, in his rush to claim credit, made a mistake in delivering it himself. Osama bin Laden was a pied piper of mass murder, and every effort should be made to avoid in any way dignifying anything about him. Rather than using the presidential pulpit to break the news, President Obama should have left it to one of the U.S. military commanders or spy chiefs whose men took the real risks in this operation. (Recall how President Bush, rather than grabbing the center stage, and thus dignifying the ex-tyrant of Iraq, left it to Paul Bremer to announce the capture of Saddam Hussein.) Obama should have then followed up by explaining the broader context of this war, and putting terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to Moammar Qaddafi on notice that anyone who attacks or even mortally threatens America, or America’s allies, can expect the same fate.

In the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams comments on the president and what’s ahead.

The spectacular news of Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. forces could not have come at a better time.  Al Qaida’s message that violence, terrorism, and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and throughout the Arab lands.  Al Qaida and its view of the world are being pushed aside in favor of demands for new governments, free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end to corruption.  Bin Laden’s death weakens al Qaida and Salafi movements further by taking away their most powerful symbol.

…It is therefore unfortunate that Mr. Obama seems to want more than that fair share the American people will naturally and rightly give him.  His remarks last night were far too much laced with words like “I met repeatedly,”  “at my direction,” and “I determined,” trying to take personal credit for the years of painstaking work by our intelligence community.  Mr. Obama might have noted that this work began under President Bush, but as usual he did not.  …

…Al Qaida may redouble efforts to commit acts of terror, but its prestige and power in the Arab world are on the decline.  The Administration should turn back now to the cases of Libya and Syria above all, pushing further to end the vicious and violent regimes that rule those countries.  As the republics of fear fall, al Qaida’s message will fall further into disrepute and the message of freedom that is now spreading in the Middle East will grow stronger.

In Contentions, Michael Rubin makes a good point about the criticism of Israel’s targeted terrorist killings.

The American team that killed Bin Laden should be congratulated. They have served justice and reminded terrorists that even in an age of national security dementia, they may run, they may hide, but that they won’t be forgotten. Americans are right to celebrate the demise of this mass murderer who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and others.

Much is made in the Middle East of double standards. It doesn’t matter whether the terrorist is Al Qaeda targeting Americans, Europeans, and moderate Arabs, PKK targeting Turks, or Mujahedin al-Khalq targeting Iranians. No terrorist deserves diplomatic immunity or legitimacy’s embrace. All terrorists deserve death. Perhaps it is time for Americans, Europeans, and their media elite to reexamine their most glaring double standards: If Americans can kill a master terrorist targeting civilians then Israel too should be able to target Hamas leaders in Gaza, Damascus, Oslo, or Dubai, wherever they may be.

Christopher Hitchens raises the issue of the foreign aid we’ve been giving Pakistan.

There are several pleasant little towns like Abbottabad in Pakistan, strung out along the roads that lead toward the mountains from Rawalpindi (the garrison town of Pakistani’s military brass and, until 2003, a safe-house for Khalid Sheik Muhammed). Muzaffarabad, Abbottabad … cool in summer and winter, with majestic views and discreet amenities. The colonial British—like Maj. James Abbott, who gave his name to this one—called them “hill stations,” designed for the rest and recreation of commissioned officers. The charming idea, like the location itself, survives among the Pakistani officer corps. If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

There’s perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There’s some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

…The martyr of Abbottabad is no more…Yet the uniformed and anonymous patrons of that sheltered Abbottabad compound are still very much with us, and Obama’s speech will be entirely worthless if he expects us to go on arming and financing the very people who made this trackdown into such a needlessly long, arduous and costly one.

Alana Goodman says “dittos” on Pakistan

At this point it is impossible to say whether the Pakistani military was shockingly clueless to the fact that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living in its midst, or whether there was something more sinister going. But we do know that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, declined to tell the Pakistani government about its raid on bin Laden’s compound until after the mission was accomplished.

“We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” said a senior administration official during a briefing with reporters last night. “That was for one reason and one reason alone:  We believed it was essential to the security of the operation and our personnel.”

The administration’s decision might be less of an issue if we hadn’t been giving Pakistan $1 billion a year since 9/11 for the specific purpose of helping us capture bin Laden. What exactly was the point of that if we couldn’t even trust the Pakistanis not to compromise the operation?

Max Boot has a range of interesting thoughts on the operation.

The death of Osama bin Laden—richly deserved, long delayed—is certainly cause for celebration. But let’s not get carried away. The organization he built, al Qaeda, is likely resilient enough to continue without him. Certainly many of its regional affiliates, from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, operated largely independently of their titular leader and will continue to do so. Then there are the numerous other Islamist terrorist organizations, such as Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Taliban, which did not pledge even formal allegiance to “Emir” Osama. His death is an important symbolic blow against the Islamist terrorist network but not a fatal one; at most it might lead to the decline of Al Qaeda and the rise of other, competing organizations.

Some other thoughts on the Big News:

•  The raid shows the importance of U.S. bases in Afghanistan—not only for keeping that country out of the clutches of the Taliban and other Al Qaeda allies, but also for projecting U.S. power into Pakistan which, despite bin Laden’s death, will remain a hotbed of radical Islamist activity. If it were not for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, how could Seal Team Six have reached bin Laden’s compound deep in the heart of Pakistan? According to news accounts, they were using Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters, presumably the variants specially modified for special operations. But modified or not helicopters are short-range aircraft. Thus having guaranteed access to bases in Afghanistan is crucial to the success of such missions—as they are for Predator strikes and various intelligence-gathering activities which the CIA and other agencies undertake to monitor the situation in Pakistan. …

In the National Journal, George Condon writes that Obama may feel political pressure to exit Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden’s body had barely hit the water before people were predicting the impact his death would have on the war in Afghanistan, U.S. relations with the Islamic world and President Obama’s reelection campaign. The only problem with these immediate statements is that events are unlikely to work out the way anybody expects right now.

…What soured the public on Bush’s handling of the war was the rise in American casualties—and that is a lesson today for Obama. If voters believe the killing of Osama bin Laden means the war in Afghanistan is won and can be ended, their reaction to continued American deaths could be devastating for Obama.

…Far from helping Obama politically, the latest development could increase the pressure on him to get American troops out of Afghanistan. It will, said Cordesman, “raise new questions about whether the Afghan war can really put an end to al-Qaida and other terrorist sanctuaries and lead some of those who oppose the war to state that the U.S. and its allies should now withdraw.”…