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The Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong has an unbelievable story about a former president.

Apparently panicked that Barrack Obama may supplant him as the Worst Foreign Policy President in History, in an effort to show that he gives way to no man when it comes to foreign policy idiocy, Jimmy Carter dashed off to his home-away-from-home–Pyongyang–to accuse the United States and South Korea of human rights violations for refusing to provide food aid to North Korea.

…Any mention of the fact that North Korea is the most brutal, repressive dictatorship on the planet?  Surely you jest.  Any mention of the fact that the starvation in North Korea is the product of the regime’s destructive, inhumane policies full stop?  No: Carter merely “observe[d] the country’s food rationing system.”  A rationing system that is, by the way, a major element of the regime’s mechanism of political control by which the population is brutalized.

In other words, Jimmy Carter played Enabler-in-Chief to the world’s most reprobate regime, and traveled to that country to attack his own nation.  It used to be unpardonable for any prominent American politician, let alone an ex-president, to slander his own country from abroad.  To do so from Pyongyang is beyond unpardonable. …

Toby Harnden lists ten thoughts about bin Laden’s assumption of room temperature.

5. There is likely to be a lot of “Obama got Osama” crowing from Democrats but the intelligence that led to the raid originated in 2007, during the Bush administration. Listening to the account of the long and patient process that followed, this seems like an example of the US military and intelligence community working seamlessly from one administration to the next.

6. I was struck by the way Obama used his address to highlight again and again his personal role. Fair enough – Obama, by any analysis, deserves immense credit – but this perhaps presages a campaign theme. There’s little doubt that Obama will receive a political boost from this, though ultimately the 2012 election will be decided by the economy.

7. There’s a lot of chatter about the likelihood of al-Qaeda striking back immediately. It might happen, but experience tells us that al-Qaeda tends to work on its own timetable.

Mark Steyn on the debt ceiling debate.

…Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaida terrorists. Really.”

Really?

…”They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”…

…Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have. …

In the United Press, Arnold de Borchgrave talks to George Karlweis about financial trends.

…So the man behind Soros’ original success is worth listening to today — unafraid to speak his mind in retirement.

The financial crises that have been blowing up for years are speeding up, Karlweis says, due to expenditure exceeding income, “borrowing hand over fist, even for no good reason, on ever shakier fundamentals.”

“Everyone is realizing we have gone too far,” he wrote, “The coffers are depleted … the excessive spending of the past has created a huge overhang, and no one knows how new borrowing can be financed.”

People who live on their savings, adds Karlweis, “have been fleeced. Their investments yield nothing, chances are they have lost everything.”

“Times ahead do not look pretty,” he warns. …

In the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein discusses the silver lining on the economic cloud.

…Obama’s political fortunes have often been compared to Reagan’s, because both men took office during a bad economy and saw their once high approval ratings nosedive. And if you compare the trajectory of their approval ratings using Gallup’s handy tool, the overall pattern is quite similar up until this point. Yet by this time in 1983, Reagan’s approval rating had bottomed out and had begun its recovery. While we can’t predict where Obama’s will go, economic data suggest he’s much less likely to get as big a political boost as Reagan.

This morning, the Commerce Department reported that first quarter GDP grew at a mere 1.8 percent clip. While the number is an advance estimate and could change, it’s not going to get near the 5.1 percent growth in the comparable quarter during Reagan’s first term (i.e. Q1 1983). And while growth is expected to pick up in the second quarter, it won’t get anywhere near the 9.3 percent rate of 1983′s second quarter.

…Yet it’s also important to note that Reagan was also fighting a battle on multiple fronts. He took office after a year of 13.5 percent inflation in 1980, and by 1984 it dropped to 4.3 percent. On the flip side, Obama took over at a time of low inflation, and we’re now starting to see prices rise, especially on food and gas, which Americans tend to notice. …

Al Neuharth, in USA Today, comments on the end of the space age.

President Obama plans to attend the next-to-the-last space shuttle launch scheduled today. Ironically, he’s saying goodbye to our space program at the Kennedy Space Center, named after the president who said hello to space.

The decision to phase out the shuttle program was made by President George W. Bush. But Obama has made no concrete future space plans of any kind.

Like Bush, Obama is making a mockery of something that excited and united us in the 1960s and for decades to follow. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein reports on the White House struggling with totalitarian instincts: ban a reporter who covered people protesting against Obama, then reverse position and refuse to comment.

…So what’s up with the White House? We can’t say because neither Press Secretary Jay Carney nor anyone from his staff would speak on the record.

Other sources confirmed that Carla was vanquished, including Chronicle editor Ward Bushee, who said he was “informed that Carla was removed as a pool reporter.” Which shouldn’t be a secret in any case because it’s a fact that affects the newsgathering of our largest regional paper (and sfgate)and how local citizens get their information.

What’s worse: more than a few journalists familiar with this story are aware of some implied threats from the White House of additional and wider punishment if Carla’s spanking became public. Really? That’s a heavy hand usually reserved for places other than the land of the free. …

Pickerhead’s first acquaintance with Robert W. Fogel was his 1974 collaboration with Stanley Engerman. The product of that effort was “Time On The Cross” an econometric history of American slavery. Fogel now has turned his data gathering techniques to the developments in the size of humans. NY Times reviewed his new effort; The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700.

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a small clutch of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.

…“The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable,” Mr. Fogel said in an telephone interview from Chicago, where he is the director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago’s business school. “Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.”

This “technophysio evolution,” powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, the authors argue, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.

 “I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said. …

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Charles Krauthammer is also aghast at “leading from behind.” He delivers devastating criticism of Obama’s incoherent foreign policy, and the opinions that lie beneath.

…Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.

It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.

Other presidents have taken anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership. …

Peter Wehner highlights important statistics from a Mark Helprin article.

Mark Helprin is masterful in his use of the English language. But he’s also good with numbers. In his column “The Common Defense” in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books, he writes this:

From 1940 to 2000, average annual American defense expenditure was 8.5% of GDP; in war and mobilization years, 13.3%; under Democratic administrations, 9.4%; under Republican, 7.3%; and, most significantly, in the years of peace, 5.7%. Now we spend 4.6%, but, less purely operational war costs, 3.8% of GDP. That is, 66% of the traditional peacetime outlays. We have been, and we are, steadily disarming even as we are at war.

Those numbers are worth keeping in mind as we debate the federal budget and which programs deserve to be cut and which do not. So is the Number 3—as in Federalist No. 3, in which John Jay writes, “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their safety seems to be the first” (emphasis in original). And having read that, there’s always the preamble to the Constitution, which the Federalist Papers were written to defend and which speaks about the need to “provide for the common defense.” Based on the data supplied by Helprin, the area that has the greatest claim on the federal dollar is the one that has been most neglected. As he writes, “What argument, what savings, what economy can possibly offset the costs and heartbreak of a war undeterred or a war lost?”

In Cato @ Liberty, Michael Cannon points out that the government solution to government-created problems is always more government control.

I’ve been meaning to write about how ObamaCare’s unelected rationing board — innocuously titled the Independent Payment Advisory Board — is yet another example of the Left leading America down the road to serfdom.  (Efforts to limit political speech — innocuously called “campaign finance reform” — are another.)

As Friedrich Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom (1944), when democracies allow government to direct economic activity, the inevitable failures lead to calls for a more authoritarian form of governance:

‘ Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective “talking shops,” unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen. The conviction grows that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be taken “out of politics” and placed in the hands of experts — permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies. …

In the National Review, Rich Lowry comments on the totalitarian instincts of our president. Lowry explains how Obama’s plans will increase government control, and decrease care available to seniors.

…We already have an arbitrary check on Medicare’s spending, and we already have a panel of experts to recommend changes to the program. The arbitrary check is the “sustainable growth rate,” and the panel is the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Congress has repeatedly deferred cuts under the former and ignored the recommendations of the latter. To this, Obama has an elegant solution: Bypass Congress.

Under Obamacare, IPAB is to hit a target for Medicare’s growth that significantly squeezes the program beginning in 2014 (in his budget speech, Obama said he wants to ratchet down the cap even further). Congress has limited options: It can pass the IPAB recommendations, substitute its own version of them, or by a three-fifths majority in the Senate vote to waive these requirements. If it does none of these things, the secretary of Health and Human Services automatically implements the IPAB plan. 

…The fact of the matter is that IPAB won’t make the notoriously inefficient Medicare program any more efficient. Through arbitrary reductions on payments to providers, it will simply reduce the supply of care. Even before the advent of a new, more powerful IPAB and a new, tougher limit on spending, Medicare’s chief actuary warned that Obamacare will drive providers out of the program. …

John Stossel has an interesting article on a Native American tribe that doesn’t have victim status. Of course, they prosper.

…Consider the Lumbees of Robeson County, N.C. — a tribe not recognized as sovereign by the government and therefore ineligible for most of the “help” given other tribes. The Lumbees do much better than those recognized tribes.

Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.

…”We don’t have any casinos. We have 12 banks,” says Ben Chavis, another successful Lumbee businessman. He also points out that Robeson County looks different from most Indian reservations.

“There’s mansions. They look like English manors. I can take you to one neighborhood where my people are from and show you nicer homes than the whole Sioux reservation.” …

Henry Blodget, in the Business Insider, notes a number of gloomy economic indicators.

…We learned this morning that the economy grew at a pathetic 1.8% in Q1. That’s way below the 3%-4% rate that most economists consider normal. And it’s miles below the 5%-7% growth that normally follows a recession as sharp and severe as the one we just had.

Meanwhile, the Fed still has interest rates parked at zero, and is still conducting emergency stimulus measures like QE2. And the government’s huge stimulus package from 2009 is still driving spending. And we’re still spending an absolutely mind-boggling ~$1.5 trillion per year more than we take in (federal deficit)–and piling up humongous debts in the process. And, needless to say, none of this spending–”stimulus” or just normal spending we can’t afford–has produced the desired private-sector growth.

1.8% GDP growth in the face of massive stimulus is the equivalent of your car sputtering down the highway at 45 miles per hour while you have the gas pedal floored. You might be glad that the car hasn’t broken down completely, but you certainly won’t conclude that all is well. And you also might conclude–wisely–that if 45 is the best you can do with the gas pedal floored, things may be about to get a whole lot worse. …

Peter Wehner also comments on the economy and what it means for the president.

…Today we learned that in the first quarter of this year total economic output for the country grew by an anemic 1.8 percent. This was a significant slowdown from the fourth quarter of 2010, when the growth was 3.1 percent, which was itself unimpressive, especially in the aftermath of a recession, when one would expect growth to be much more robust.

In addition, as Alana points out, the number of jobless claims increased by 25,000 to 429,000 last week (the third week in a row unemployment claims surpassed 400,000). Consumer prices were up 3.8 percent from last year (after increasing only 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010). The price of gas is 35 percent higher than a year ago. The dollar continues to decline, with the Dollar Index sliding to an almost three-year low. And real estate experts are predicting that home prices could decrease by between 10 to 25 percent before the market bottoms out.

Not coincidentally, a new McClatchy-Marist poll shows that 57 percent of registered voters disapprove of President Obama’s economic management while only 40 percent approve, the lowest score of his presidency. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say the worst is yet to come for the U.S economy. And 71 percent said the nation is still in a recession (the recession officially ended in June 2009). …

So, how would we compare the Reagan recovery to the present recovery? The Investor’s Business Daily editors talk results.

…Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).

…Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What’s more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.

In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.

The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama’s has produced neither. …

In Top of the Ticket, Andrew Malcolm blogs about Ohio Governor John Kasich’s response to the president’s take on Ohio issues.

…Kasich was asked about the president’s strong opinion. And Kasich offered his own strong response. Kasich said in the 1990s he had been House Budget Committee chairman and chief architect of the last federal budget to be balanced.

He noted that Ohioans’ elected representatives had reached this legislative agreement and, as required by law, balanced the state budget while preserving tax cuts. Then, he added:

“The president of the United States has I think a $13 trillion debt. Why doesn’t he do his job? When he does his job and gets our budget balanced and starts to prepare a future for our children, then maybe he can have an opinion on what’s going on in Ohio.”…

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley wants to know when a grown-up in DC is going to rein in the NLRB.

…This a win-win for South Carolina, for Boeing, and for the global clients who will see Dreamliners rolling off the North Charleston line at the rate of 10 a month, starting with the first one next year. But, as is often the case, a win for people and businesses is a loss for the labor unions, which rely on coercion, bullying and undue political influence to stay afloat.

South Carolina is a right-to-work state, and we’re proud that within our borders workers cannot be required to join a labor union as a condition of employment. We don’t need unions playing middlemen between our companies and our employees. We don’t want them forcefully inserted into our promising business climate. And we will not stand for them intimidating South Carolinians.

…The president has been silent since his hand-selected NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who has not yet been confirmed by the United States Senate as required by law, chose to engage in economic warfare on behalf of the unions last week. … 

Or course Donald Trump has a clothing line. Salon has found out where it is made. Justin Elliott has bad news for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has emerged in recent years as the nation’s foremost China basher, going after the Asian superpower for undervaluing its currency and for taking American manufacturing and jobs. So it’s at least ironic — and at most an example of gross hypocrisy — that Trump’s own line of men’s wear, the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection, is manufactured in China. …