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John Fund introduces today’s topic – the media’s Palin obsession and where it has led.

Call it the stalking of Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska has been an object of fascination and derision for many reporters ever since she burst onto the national stage in 2008. But the level of continued interest is nonetheless stunning.

Three years ago the left-wing magazine Mother Jones requested Ms. Palin’s gubernatorial emails during the 2008 election. After lengthy delays they were released last Friday in Juneau. The fact that you heard almost nothing about them is because there is almost nothing salacious or scandalous in them. As Britain’s Daily Telegraph noted, “the trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska . . . paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.”

But the buildup to their release was treated like the prelude to the release of the Pentagon Papers. David Corn of Mother Jones salivated at the prospect of what might be in the 24,199 pages being released. “I have a reporter in Juneau who will grab our set of documents and scan the docs for us in the DC bureau,” he wrote. “I and the eight reporters in my bureau will then pore over these pages. Mother Jones, msnbc.com, and ProPublica will be putting up a searchable online database — very quickly — which will allow everybody (other reporters, readers, and GOP opposition researchers) to join in.”

Other media outlets joined in. …

Charles Krauthammer has a term for this.

… You don’t send it out to strangers to look for gotcha stuff…. And that’s exactly what the mainstream media are doing, and I think it is utterly egregious. …

… Palin Derangement Syndrome. That’s what it is.

Steve Hayward in The Corner.

Increasingly I think Sarah Palin is a real political genius. How else to appreciate how the media have made utter fools of themselves — again — gorging on her e-mail trove like it was the Nixon Watergate tapes or the Starr Whitewater/Lewinski report. The only thing that would have been better is if she’d somehow contrived to delay the release of the e-mail trove until January, when the media would have had to endure the long night and cold temperatures of an Alaska winter.  

Toby Harnden of the Daily Telegraph gets the matter right in his column Saturday.

John Fund, Steve Hayward, and later Andrew Malcolm all point to a Telegraph,UK article by Toby Harden. Here it is. 

 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.

One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.

If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. …

…To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the state at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated. …

Peter Kirsanow lists the stories that are less important than the Palin emails.

? China is about to launch its first aircraft carrier.

? A RAND nuclear expert calculates that within two months, Iran will have enough weapons-grade uranium to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

? An analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that if the number of people looking for work today were the same as the number when President Obama took office, the reported unemployment rate for May would be 11 percent rather than 9.1 percent.

? Hearings are beginning in the House on allegations that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly allowed criminal suspects to purchase weapons and smuggle them into Mexico for Mexican drug cartels.

? The president is creating yet another commission — this time to cut government waste.

Matt Welch, for CNN, discusses how the MSM disregard their professional duties to follow their liberal bias.

…Three weeks ago, the journalism navel-gazing community was abuzz over an academic study of more than 700 news articles and 20 network news segments from 2009 that addressed a single controversial claim of the health care reform debate.

Was it President Obama’s oft-repeated whopper that he was nobly pushing the reform rock up the hill despite the concentrated efforts of health care“special interests?” Was it his oft-repeated promise that “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan,” something that is getting even less true by the minute? Was it the way Obama and the Democrats brazenly gamed and misrepresented the Congressional Budget Office’s price-tag scoring of the bill?

No. The cause for Obamacare-coverage reconsideration was not the truth-stretching claims made by a president seeking to radically reshape an important aspect of American life, but rather the Facebook commentary of … Sarah Palin. “In more than 60 percent of the cases,” the authors found, “it’s obvious that newspapers abstained from calling [Palin's] death panels claim false.” Horrors.

There is no shortage of politicians deserving to have their e-mails combed through, no dearth of urgent stories that could benefit from the kind of journalistic enthusiasm we saw Friday afternoon. …

We have a few of the opinions NY Times readers posted.

Journ-O-Lism hard at work.
Could you be any more contemptible, more bereft of integrity, more loathsomely propagandist? More intellectually dishonest? More hypocritical?
Absolute sellout hackery.

So jobs at McDonalds and Sarah Palin Investigations are the President’s plan to rescue us from unemployment?

I’m not a fan of Palin’s and I’m not a hater of Obama’s, but this is just plain pathetic. If you’re going to enlist your supposedly more-detail-oriented-and-investigatively-gifted-than-thou readers to do your work for you, please do it for any number of newsworthy stories that you aren’t currently giving enough attention to. I’m disgusted that anyone even thought this was a good idea.

The New York Times are just using the conditions of our economy to their benefit. This is a great idea! They know that because of Obama, there are so many people out of work with nothing to do, they can have thousands upon thousands of people doing their work for free. Great example of another Obama success story! Unemployment rate helps the NYT save money!

Wow – anyone you brings on this much hate from the NYtimes must be of great value!
I believe I just fell in love with Sarah!
Thanks!
You go girl!

NY Post editors weigh in.

Could Big Media look any dumber?

The all-points-bulletin attention that national media organizations gave to the release last week of official e-mails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as Alaska’s governor sure backfired. Not only was Palin not discredited by the emails, but they exposed to the public a competent leader and a rather decent human being. Imagine the disappointment of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other outlets.

To help sift through 24,000 pages of e-mails, coughed up via freedom-of-information requests, the publications recruited readers to wade through the pages online, in search of embarrassing tidbits. This, in addition to the teams of reporters they sent. It all yielded precious little.

A governor who tried to keep spending under control and taxes low? Simply shocking. …

Here’s what Jon Stewart thinks of the media’s obsession.

We close with a post from Anthony Malcolm in which he shows us a Palin communiqué that surfaced during the search. It is her announcement to family, friends and interested parties of the forthcoming arrival of their son Trig. This was where they told of his Down’s Syndrome. It is written as if it was God’s explanation of why this child was joining this family. The letter is a lovely example of abiding faith.

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Walter Russell Mead thinks the story of the real estate boom, bust, and great recession is finally being told. He reviews a new book that came out of the belly of the beast.  

Democrats, watch out.

The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction — and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener’s rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle — a big if — then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981.

The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America’s best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

If the GOP can make this narrative mainstream, and put this picture into the heads of voters nationwide, the Democrats are toast.  The party will have to reinvent itself (or as often happens in American politics, be rescued by equally stupid Republican missteps) before it can flourish.

If Morgenstern and Rosner are to be believed, the American dream didn’t die of old age; it was murdered and most of the fingerprints on the corpse come from Democratic insiders.  Democratic power brokers stoked the housing bubble and turned a blind eye to the increasingly rampant corruption and incompetence at Fannie Mae and the associated predatory lenders who sheltered under its umbrella; core Democratic ideas may well be at fault.

This is catnip to Republicans, arsenic to Dems.  If Morgenson and Rosner are right, there is someone the American people can blame for our current economic woes and it is exactly the cast of characters that a lot of Americans love to hate.  Big government, affirmative action and influence peddling among Democratic insiders came within inches of smashing the US economy. …

… The story also undercuts what little is left of the credibility and the moral authority of the American establishment.  What is especially shocking in this story is that the higher up and more powerful people are usually the most venal and corrupt.  Low level researchers and bureaucrats are constantly raising questions and preparing devastating reports that expose the flawed premises behind Fannie Mae’s policies.  They are being constantly slapped down by the well connected and the well paid.  The American establishment does not have the necessary moral strength and intellectual acuity to run the affairs of this country; Tea Party believers will find much in this book that confirms their worst fears.

Republicans of course have a few financial scandals of their own that Democrats can take out and rattle.  But because Fanniegate offers a clear storyline, identifiable villains linked to specific disasters that have hit tens of millions of Americans in the pocketbook, and is overwhelming a story of Democratic abuses of Democratic ideas, it is potentially a game changing event.  It is also an issue that a GOP candidate for the nomination can use to break away from the field; it is an issue a contender could ride all the way to the White House.

Paul Krugman once told me that he thought that Enron would have a greater impact on American politics than 9/11.  He was wrong about that scandal, but if the GOP plays its cards right, Fanniegate could push this country into a new political era.

Mead continues the thought with a post about the “jumping of the shark” by our government.

In my last post, I wrote about “Fanniegate“, the scandalous goings on by well connected Democrats that trashed the nation’s financial system.  It was not that Republicans didn’t join the fun or that Republican malefactors of great wealth weren’t abusing the public trust in other ways.  The moral and intellectual meltdown of the American elite is a robustly bipartisan affair and there is plenty of mud to throw at all sides.

But Fannie Mae represents a special problem for the Democratic Party and Democratic ideas.  It is not just a vitally important institution led by prominent Democratic figures and part of a broader Democratic patronage network; Fannie Mae is one of the original New Deal institutions and the vision it was intended to serve stands at the heart of the concerns of the Democratic Party of the 20th century.

The fall of Fannie Mae is bigger than just another politicos run wild scandal.  It stands as one of several signs that our current way of life is reaching its limits and that big changes are on the horizon.  The Fanniegate debacle tells us that the progressive ideal is in the process of jumping the shark.

Jumping the shark, as many readers know, is an expression from the wonderful world of TV.  When the original premise of a show has gone stale, producers try to recapture audience interest by putting familiar characters in outlandish settings where strange things happen to them — notoriously, when Fonzie literally jumped over a shark as Happy Days moved into its sunset years.  When something jumps the shark, the death spiral has become irretrievable; the show has nowhere to go but down.

The progressive ideal of the last 100 years is reaching that point. …

… The fierce commitment of progressive lobbies today to dysfunctional institutions and programs has brought matters to a crisis stage; the progressive legacy is morphing from white elephant to shark.  Fierce attacks on anyone seeking to reform dysfunctional institutions combine with unreasoning devotion to unsustainable entitlements.  “Progressives” today are too often grimly determined to achieve two incompatible ends: an indefinite expansion of entitlements and benefits on the one hand — and the preservation and even the extension of inefficient organizations and methods on the other.   Everyone must have a college education, but the archaic and inefficient organization of universities cannot be touched.  Public services must be vastly expanded, but every effort to rein in pensions and benefits for government employees, or to trim the size of the public labor force through greater efficiency, must be fought to the bitter end.

Unfortunately, the process doesn’t stop here.  When enough progressive programs have become both unsustainable and untouchable, we move to the final stage.  It is bad enough when a government program becomes a shark; it is much, much worse when a social paradigm as a whole jumps past the shark stage.  A cluster of unsustainable but untouchable policies and institutions sooner or later reaches the point when it no longer threatens the country with ruin at some indefinite point in the future: imminent ruin stares us direct in the face. …

… We cannot throw away the hopes with which we have been entrusted in a futile effort to sustain insupportable programs under the shadow of bankruptcy and collapse.

We are approaching the time when the false promises can no longer be sustained.  There is a little time left.  We have not, I think, quite jumped the shark yet.  Reform is still possible, though the great white sharks thrashing around our boat are formidable — and hungry.

We can still act to conserve the essential accomplishments of the progressive era while preparing to move beyond it.  But only aggressive and accelerating reform can make that happen.  It needs to begin soon.  The money is running out. …

… We must impose our will on the fiscal chaos before the chaos works its will upon us.

The American government must not jump the shark.

We have three reviews of the book from mainstreamers. Washington Post is first.

In “Reckless Endangerment,” Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner argue that cozy connections between government and the financial industry were the primary cause of the financial crisis. In a series of clearly written narratives with many names, dates and figures, they show that government officials took actions that benefited well-connected individuals, who in turn helped the government officials. This mutual support system thwarted good economic policies and encouraged reckless ones. It thereby brought on the crisis, sending the economy into a tailspin.

While many economists — including this reviewer — have argued that government actions caused the crisis, Morgenson and Rosner use their investigative skills to dig down and explain why those actions were taken. To avoid reckless policies in the future, we need to understand their causes, and the authors’ identification of government-industry links deserves careful consideration by anyone interested in improving the economy.

The book focuses on two agencies of government, Fannie Mae and the Federal Reserve. The mutual support system is better explained and documented in the case of Fannie, the government-sponsored enterprise that supported the home mortgage market by buying mortgages and packaging them into marketable securities which it then guaranteed and sold to investors. The federal government supported Fannie Mae — and the other large government-sponsored enterprise, Freddie Mac — by implicitly backing up those guarantees and by providing favorable regulatory treatment and protection from competition. These benefits enabled Fannie to rake in excess profits — $2 billion in excess, according to a 1995 study by the Congressional Budget Office. …

The Financial Times.

… Morgenson and Rosner are particularly critical of James A. Johnson, the long-serving chief executive of Fannie Mae and an ambitious Washington operative who aspired to be Treasury secretary. Morgenson des­cribes Johnson as the architect of Fannie Mae’s drive to become “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world” and then cites numerous examples of how he used his political connections to advance Fan­nie’s – and his own – agendas.

Although Johnson left Fannie in 1998, by the time it failed in 2008, Morgenson claims, “Fannie Mae bec­ame the quintessential ex­ample of a company whose risk-taking allowed its executives to amass great wealth. But when the gambles went awry, the taxpayers had to foot the bill.” Although the authors say they tried for five months to interview him, Johnson apparently never responded to their requests.

The authors’ arguments are powerful, drawn from decades of Rosner’s res­earch into the housing market, the GSEs and the risks created by a combination of a relentless push for homeownership by presidents Clinton and Bush, and by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s decision after the terror attacks on September 11 2001 to lower interest rates dramatically.

Among the many others whose record is challenged by the authors is Barney Frank …

The NY Times gave it to Robert B. Reich to review.

It’s hardly news that the near meltdown of America’s financial system enriched a few at the expense of the rest of us. Who’s responsible? The recent report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blamed all the usual suspects — Wall Street banks, financial regulators, the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and subprime lenders — which is tantamount to blaming no one. “Reckless Endangerment” concentrates on particular individuals who played key roles.

The authors, Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter and columnist at The New York Times, and Joshua Rosner, an expert on housing finance, deftly trace the beginnings of the collapse to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration called for a partnership between the private sector and Fannie and Freddie to encourage home buying. The mortgage agencies’ government backing was, in effect, a valuable subsidy, which was used by Fannie’s C.E.O., James A. Johnson, to increase home ownership while enriching himself and other executives. A 1996 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that Fannie pocketed about a third of the subsidy rather than passing it on to homeowners. Over his nine years heading Fannie, Johnson personally took home roughly $100 million. His successor, Franklin D. Raines, was treated no less lavishly.

To entrench Fannie’s privileged position, Morgenson and Rosner write, Johnson and Raines channeled some of the profits to members of Congress — contributing to campaigns and handing out patronage positions to relatives and former staff members. Fannie paid academics to do research showing the benefits of its activities and playing down the risks, and shrewdly organized bankers, real estate brokers and housing advocacy groups to lobby on its behalf. Essentially, taxpayers were unknowingly handing Fannie billions of dollars a year to finance a campaign of self-promotion and self-­protection. Morgenson and Rosner offer telling details, …

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Mark Steyn on the economy and the emperor who has no jobs.

…”I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it’s such a smart idea to let one’s breezy insouciance out of the bag when you’re giving a press conference. In May, the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.

So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald’s. That’s amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized hiring spree, but the fact that there’s fellows at Morgan Stanley making a bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts. Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle Obama’s dietary admonitions. …

…A couple of days later, Chet’s announced it was closing after nine decades. “It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything,” said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months – the longest it’s been since they’ve been tracking the numbers. Long-term unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a fast-food job to open up. …

Charles Krauthammer looks for the argument that will beat the president.

…It’s not that the ideological case against Obama cannot be made. Obamacare with its individual mandate remains unpopular. The near-trillion-dollar stimulus remains an albatross. Even the failed attempt at cap-and-trade — government control of energy pricing — shows Obama’s determination to fundamentally transform America. And he is sure to try again to complete his coveted European-style social-democratic project if you give him four more years.

Medicare has nonetheless partially blunted that line of ideological attack. Yet, just as the Democrats were rejoicing in the fruits of their cynicism, in came the latest economic numbers. They were awful. Housing price declines were the worst since the 1930s. Unemployment rising again. Underemployment disastrously high. And as for chronic unemployment, the average time for finding a new job is now 40 weeks, the highest ever recorded. These numbers gravely undermine Obama’s story line that we’re in a recovery, just a bit slow and bumpy.

Suddenly, the election theme has changed. The Republican line in 2010 was: He’s a leftist. Now it is: He’s a failure. The issue is shifting from ideology to stewardship.

…I would still prefer to see the Republican challenger make 2012 a decisive choice between two distinct visions of government. We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation debate about the nature of the welfare state (entitlement vs. safety net) and, indeed, of the social contract between citizen and state (e.g., whether Congress can mandate — compel — you to purchase whatever it wills). Let’s finish that debate. Start with Obama’s abysmal stewardship, root it in his out-of-touch social-democratic ideology, and win. That would create the strongest mandate for conservative governance since the Reagan era.

In the National Review, Rich Lowry looks at long-term unemployment.

…The insidious thing about long-term unemployment is that it builds on itself — the longer you are without a job, the harder it is to get one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the chance of someone unemployed for less than five weeks finding a job in the next month is about 30 percent. For someone unemployed 27 weeks or more, it’s just 10 percent.

For an economy so famously on the mend that it experienced “recovery summer” last year, the trend has been in the wrong direction. A Pew study notes that the number of people unemployed for a year or more increased by 25 percent from December 2009 to December 2010.

The job market is now segregated by levels of educational attainment, but long-term joblessness disregards schooling. Once they are unemployed, about 30 percent of college graduates, high-school graduates, and high-school dropouts are out of a job for more than a year. It doesn’t matter what sector of the economy they come from. “More than 20 percent of unemployed workers in every non-agricultural industry,” Pew writes, “have been out of work for a year or more.”

…Democrats may want next year’s election to be about Medicare; Republicans may have thought it would be about debt. But if current conditions hold, it will instead be about unemployment and the associated economic travails of stagnant wages, falling home values, and rising prices. There is no more natural theme in our politics than “putting America back to work.” Next year, Obama could be vulnerable to it. It’s the flashing red light of his reelection.

There was a debate last night. Michael Barone had impressions of each candidate and a summary.

… This was a New Hampshire debate, but it has serious ramifications for Iowa as well. I have disparaged the idea that Romney is the frontrunner; I continue to think that given the polls no one is the frontrunner. But Romney behaved like a frontrunner tonight, one with confidence and sense of command and with the adroitness to step aside from two major issue challenges (Romneycare, his various views on abortion) he faces. Romney has wisely eschewed the Iowa caucuses this time, leaving as two major competitors there Pawlenty (from next door Minnesota and a genuine religious conservative) and Bachmann (not only from next door Minnesota but also born and raised in Iowa). Presumably they will both be competing not only in the Iowa precinct caucuses, but in the August 13 Iowa Republican straw poll in Ames. I think Bachmann emerged from this debate a more serious competitor and Pawlenty not a stronger one than he was before. You could extrapolate much from Pawlenty’s performance in support of the proposition that he is a serious candidate for the nomination. But you could extrapolate much from Bachmann’s performance that she is a serious competitor in the Ames straw poll. And if she could come out ahead of him, that would certainly shake up the race, and leave the way open for another competitor. Perhaps for Jon Huntsman, who wasn’t there tonight and who has indicated that he won’t compete in Iowa. Or perhaps for Texas Governor Rick Perry, whose 2010 race top advisers were part of the mass resignation last week from Newt Gingrich’s campaign, but who may not turn out to be a wine that will travel. Or perhaps for a draft for Paul Ryan, who it might be argued could enter late and be a substitute for Pawlenty as the competitor for Romney which Pawlenty did not succeed in being at St. Anselm’s flashy auditorium.

More debate thoughts from Jonathan Tobin.

Coming into this debate, a lot of pundits thought Mitt Romney would benefit from having the other challengers gang up on him about health care. They were wrong since doing so would have exposed Romney’s vulnerabilities not confirmed him as the frontrunner.

Unfortunately for Tim Pawlenty, he listened to those voices urging caution and that provided the debate’s signature moment. Offered an opportunity to hit his main opponent hard on Obamneycare as he called it just a few days ago, Pawlenty whiffed. In the end, it really doesn’t matter whether it was because he was too nice or not courageous enough to call out Romney to his face. Either way he failed. It was a key moment in this race and one that Pawlenty will rue in the months to come. He walks away from the debate clearly weakened by this astonishing failure of either nerve or imagination. Instead of winning the competition between the two mainstream candidates, Pawlenty is now in danger of slipping back into the second tier. …

John Podhoretz has an enjoyable riff on David Mamet’s political conversion.

David Mamet tells me he’s like the character in one of the greatest comedies ever written, Moliere’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” who declares: “Good heavens! For more than 40 years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.” Mamet says he made a similar discovery a few years ago: He is a conservative and has been for decades without knowing it.

The self-mocking comparison to Moliere’s “bourgeois gentleman” is a mark of the modesty with which America’s most celebrated and successful serious playwright discusses his latest book — a white-hot work of non-fiction called “The Secret Knowledge” that is both an account of his discovery and an explication of the views he now espouses with a discoverer’s intensity.

…Mametbureaucrat — the person whose entire profit comes from skimming off the labor of others. It is only a failure to understand the independent value of work that leads people to believe it is acceptable to use the law to redistribute the earnings of a productive laborer and transfer them to someone else in the name of fairness and equity. …

, who knows a great deal about the darker recesses of the human heart, has freed himself here to express unambiguous love — love of country, love of tradition, love of his own people and (most exciting in terms of the book itself) the love of a good day’s work.

…Mamet is indeed an unapologetic “bourgeois gentleman” who believes there is nothing more profound than people working, together or separately, to produce something.

…What he loathes is the middleman,

Andrew Malcolm rounds up the late-night jokes for the LA Times.

Conan: Democrats and Republicans calling for Congressman Weiner to resign. Meanwhile, late-night comedians are calling for him to hang in there.

Leno: President Obama’s top economic advisor Austan Goolsbee is being replaced by something a little more effective — the Magic 8-Ball.

Fallon: Good news. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the economy will pick up in the second half of the year. So you know what that means -– absolutely nothing.

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In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin comments on how Obama has ruined his chances at brokering peace in the Middle East.

From the beginning of the Obama presidency, the Palestinian Authority has shown that it will never allow itself to accept less than whatever the United States has demanded on its behalf. Thus, when the administration asked Israel for a settlement freeze that became a Palestinian precondition for talking with Israel. When the president decided that building in existing Jewish neighborhoods within Jerusalem was an “insult” to the United States, a freeze in Israel’s capital became another Palestinian precondition.

Now in the wake of President Obama’s decision to demand that the 1967 lines be the starting point for future Middle East negotiations, the Palestinians have adopted that point as their latest precondition for talks. Earlier this week, PA “negotiator” Saeb Erekat stated that they would only return to the talks with Israel that they have largely boycotted for three years, if Netanyahu accepts Obama’s dictat.

…While Obama may have though that each time he sought to impose conditions on Israel without making similar demands on the Palestinians he was jumpstarting the peace process, he has done the exact opposite. It isn’t clear whether the Palestinians will ever recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders may be drawn. But they will never do so long as they think the Americans will do their negotiating for them. Every Obama statement about what Israel should give up has become an ironclad Palestinian demand. One would have thought that Obama would have learned his lesson during his first two disastrous forays into Middle East peace processing but that was not the case. American diplomats are fond of discussing what they believe to be the prime obstacles to peace. But this latest exchange proves that there is no greater obstacle to negotiations, if not peace, than the foolishness of Barack Obama.

In the NY Post, Michael Walsh discusses the government cancer that is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.

…The government racked up $5.3 trillion in new fiscal obligations last year alone — bringing the current unfunded tab for future expenses on things like Medicare, Social Security and military medical and retirement programs to a whopping $61.6 trillion, or $534,000 per American household. Then there’s today’s bills: We’re borrowing $125 billion a month that we have no hope of ever paying back on our current course.

…And now Obama says he’s not worried about a double-dip recession. Easy for him to say: For Americans not feeding at the government trough, the first recession never ended. We are witnessing the total failure of academic Keynesian economics, with its heavy emphasis on high taxes and exorbitant government spending. Yet Obama sails blithely on, already in full campaign mode and still blaming George W. Bush and the Republicans (admittedly no models of fiscal restraint or responsibility) for everything.

Worse, the what-me-worry president continues to insist that the ongoing hard times are just a “bump in the road” — that if we can just get the “fortunate” rich to “pay a little more” everything will be just fine. Never mind that most of the “rich” got their own money by inventing a product or providing a service in the private sector. That they invested an enormous amount of their own capital and sweat equity before it paid off. …

…The truth is, the only jobs the government can “create” are more government jobs. That’s why real-estate values in DC are booming even as they’ve plunged everywhere else. …

Craig Pirrong reports on a recent world-wide Tim Geithner smackdown.

…Timmy! lectured—or should I say hectored—the world on derivatives, saying, for all intents and purposes, our way or the highway.

To say this went over like the proverbial, uhm, lead balloon would be the understatement of the year.  The Singapore Monetary Authority and the Hong Kong Monetary authority took umbrage at Geithner’s implication that they were lax regulators.  The CEO of the Futures and Options Association, Anthony Belchambers, was quite biting in his reply:

‘US Secretary Geithner’s comments do not appear to take any account of the fact that the SEC, arguably, was an equally tragic failure – and by a regulatory authority that was notably “heavy touch” but also in some areas “no touch”!’

Ouch!  Can you say “Bernie Madoff”?  I knew you could. …

Craig Pirrong has more on the smackdown.

I cannot recall a situation where a US Secretary of the Treasury, or any cabinet member, for that matter, has been the subject of such scathing rebuttals as Timothy Geithner.  The disdain that his lectures on derivatives regulation unleashed is pretty amazing.  It was not respectful disagreement.  It was disrespectful disagreement.  And not from anonymous sources, but from named representatives of government and industry bodies.  Nor is this a new thing.  The Chinese and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, to name but two, have been brutal in their criticisms of Geithner.

This makes it all the more curious to read in the WaPo piece that I linked to yesterday that Geithner has a very close relationship with Obama, arguably the closest relationship of all the cabinet members.  But perhaps that’s not so curious after all: for all his rhetoric about rebuilding relationships with other nations, Obama apparently has a very poor relationship with the leaders of most other countries–worse relationships than Bush.  This suggests that Obama, a notoriously aloof individual, doesn’t really care about what them furriners think.  And as the foreign criticism of Geithner demonstrates, I think those feelings are reciprocated.

Peter Schiff says the economy is only going to get worse.

…Although I have made these comparisons before, the parallel between drug addiction and the reliance on economic stimulus is just too strong to ignore. And as with drug addiction, an economy builds up a tolerance. Each time the government successively stimulates with printed money or deficit spending, ever larger doses are needed to achieve the same result. Lest we forget, coming into the Crash of 2008, the economy had been on the receiving end of years of over stimulus. President Bush and Alan Greenspan never fully weaned the economy of their shock treatments that followed the dot.com crash and the shock of September 11th. 

This time around, the stimulus-fueled recovery is so mild that the economy is already relapsing into recession before the Fed has even begun to tighten. This puts Bernanke in a very difficult position. He either follows through on his loudly trumpeted plans to end quantitative easing this summer, or abandon those plans in favor of more stimulus. Both choices are unappealing. 

…The government needs to admit its mistakes and write a completely different script. This time the story line must allow for a real restructuring. Real estate prices must fall further, and many financial institutions holding bad mortgages must fail. This means investors, creditors, and depositors will lose money. Labor and capital must be re-allocated away from services into goods production. That means jobs must be lost in government, retail sales, finance, health care, and education; and jobs must be created in technology, manufacturing, textiles, mining, energy, and agriculture. This guarantees major short-term pain. But breaking an addiction is not easy. Those who say it is are living in a fool’s paradise.   

This transition does not require any positive action from government. All it needs to do is simply get out of the way. That does not mean there is nothing the government can do to help the process. It can remove as many regulations and taxes as possible that inhibit market forces from working their magic. But this requires a completely different mindset among our elected officials. They will need the courage and knowledge to level with the American people, and do what is in our nation’s economic interests, not simply what is in their own political interest. …

David Harsanyi talks Obamacare.

…That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who really need support. The president has generously handed out nearly 1,400 Obamacare waivers to the neediest among us. About 20 percent of them have been awarded to an upmarket district in San Francisco that, by pure chance, is represented by Nancy Pelosi. Others, such as the AARP and local unions, had demanded we pass Obamacare so they could not take part in it immediately.

We’ll also soon be hearing more about the lawsuits challenging Obamacare’s individual mandate. Randy Barnett, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, recently asked, “If Congress can impose this economic mandate on the people, what can’t it mandate the people to buy?” …

And let’s not forget it was Obama, the newfound holy savior of Medicare, who pinned the key cost control component of health care reform on Medicare through his Independent Payment Advisory Board, or what bitter righties call a rationing board.

Rationing boards. Political favors. Lies. Coercion. Broken promises. Precedents that can force us to buy about anything. It might not be socialism, technically speaking. But really, what’s not to like?

George Will wades into another constitutional swamp, brought to us by the politicians who voted for Obamacare: the entrenchment of a bureaucratic panel that rations healthcare.

…Diane Cohen, the institute’s senior attorney, demonstrates that the IPAB is doubly anti-constitutional. It derogates the powers of Congress. And it ignores the principle of separation of powers: It is an executive agency, its members appointed by the president, exercising legislative powers over which neither Congress nor the judiciary can exercise proper control.

Unfortunately, the IPAB may not be unconstitutional. This is because the Supreme Court, having slight interest in policing Congress’s incontinent desire to give to others the power to make difficult decisions, has become excessively permissive about delegation. Cohen notes this from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in a 1989 case wherein the Supreme Court affirmed the power of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to set “guidelines” that, being binding, have the effect of statutes:

“I anticipate that Congress will find delegation of its lawmaking powers much more attractive in the future. .?.?. I foresee all manner of ‘expert’ bodies, insulated from the political process, to which Congress will delegate various portions of its lawmaking responsibility. How tempting to create an expert Medical Commission .?.?. to dispose of such thorny, ‘no-win’ political issues as the withholding of life-support systems in federally funded hospitals.”…

Robert Samuelson looks at current Medicare issues and what Representative Ryan’s plan may bring.

…few doubt that today’s health-care system has much waste: medical care that does no good; high overhead costs. In a paper, Cutler documented some evidence. In one survey, 20 percent of patients reported that doctors repeated tests because records were unavailable; the health-care sector has twice as many clerical workers as nurses and nine times as many as doctors; care of patients with chronic conditions is often slapdash, so that, for example, only 43 percent of diabetics receive recommended treatment.

Fee-for-service is open-ended reimbursement; the government’s main tool to control Medicare’s costs is to hold down reimbursement rates. Doctors and hospitals respond by ordering more services to offset the rate limits. For all its flaws, say Ryan’s critics, this system beats his. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that in 2022, Ryan’s plan would be more than a third costlier than the status quo, because Medicare’s size makes it more effective at restraining reimbursement rates.

If the CBO is correct, Ryan’s plan fails; beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs would roughly double to cover the added expense. But the CBO may be wrong. When a voucher system was adopted for Medicare’s new drug benefit, the CBO overestimated its costs by a third; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ overestimate was 42 percent. When fundamental changes are made to a program, the green-eyeshade types can’t easily predict the results. Moreover, as health expert James Capretta notes, “managed care” plans in the Medicare Advantage program in 2010 did not have higher costs than Medicare’s fee-for-service for similar coverage. …

Karl Rove points out that Obama is not only shirking presidential duties, but he is breaking the law.

…Mr. Obama has ignored a law requiring he send Congress a plan to strengthen Medicare’s finances—even though members of his own cabinet have reminded him in writing of his duty to do so.

Medicare was originally designed to be paid for mostly by special dedicated taxes. Yet it has become increasingly dependent on general revenues as expenses have far outrun both projections and Medicare tax receipts. By 2024, according to the annual report of the Medicare trustees, the hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted.

To force Washington to take action before Medicare overwhelms the federal budget, fiscal experts wrote a presidential obligation into the Medicare Reform Act of 2003. Under that provision, if Medicare’s trustees forecast that general revenues will be required for 45% or more of the program’s outlays within a seven-year period, then the president must propose legislation to correct the problem within 15 days of his next budget submission. Congress then has to give the proposal expedited consideration. …

In Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel takes a dim view of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

…By the end of last year, CFLs had managed to capture only 25 percent of the general-purpose light-bulb market — a decent business, sure, but hardly the radical transformation evangelists were going for. Most Americans, for most purposes, have stuck to traditional incandescents.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Of such deals are Tea Parties born. …

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In the WSJ, Martin Feldstein reviews the dismal economic numbers, and how the government is negatively impacting the economy. Feldstein, an econ prof, was Reagan’s economic advisory chair.

…Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future. But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department. Instead, President Obama allowed the Democratic leadership in Congress to design a hodgepodge package of transfers to state and local governments, increased transfers to individuals, temporary tax cuts for lower-income taxpayers, etc. So we got a bigger deficit without economic growth.

A second cause of the continued economic weakness is the president’s emphasis on increasing tax rates. Although Mr. Obama grudgingly agreed to continue the Bush tax cuts for 2011 and 2012, his budget this year repeated his call for higher tax rates on upper-income individuals and multinational corporations. With that higher-tax cloud hanging over them, it is not surprising that individuals and businesses do not make the entrepreneurial investments and business expansions that would cause a solid recovery.

A third problem stems from the administration’s lack of an explicit plan to deal with future budget deficits and with the exploding national debt. This creates uncertainty about future tax increases and interest rates that impedes spending by households and investment by businesses. The national debt has jumped to 69% of GDP this year, from 40% in 2008. It is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reach more than 85% by the end of the decade, and to keep rising after that. The reality is even worse since ObamaCare alone will cost more than $1 trillion in its first 10 years. The president’s boast that his health legislation would not “add a dime” to the national debt was possible only by combining that increased spending with proposed new taxes and with projected cuts in Medicare spending that will never occur. …

Jonah Goldberg is fed up with liberal spin.

…Consider that when President Reagan oversaw a huge jobs boom, the media recycled the untrue claim that these were all low-paying “hamburger flipper” jobs.

Well, McDonald’s alone may be responsible for a quarter to a half of the new jobs created in the last month. And that hiring probably wouldn’t have happened if Mickey D’s hadn’t been given a waiver from Obamacare.

And then there’s the stimulus, which the White House still touts as an unqualified success. Well, during Obama’s first year in office, more than half (119,000) of all the new jobs in the United States were created in business-friendly Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If Obama created those jobs, why’d he put so many of them in, of all places, George W. Bush’s home state?…

Jennifer Rubin comments on liberals’ version of events.

…Just when did Obama embrace deficit cutting? The centerpiece of his presidency has been the flurry of bailouts and stimulus plans. Are we to imagine that the itsy-bitsy savings obtained in the 2011 continuing resolution — budget dust in the grand scheme of things — is real“deficit cutting”?

…It is more accurate to say that Obama has never pivoted to effective pro-jobs policies. Feldstein suggests a few:

“The economy will continue to suffer until there is a coherent and favorable economic policy. That means bringing long-term deficits under control without raising marginal tax rates—by cutting government outlays and by limiting the tax expenditures that substitute for direct government spending. It means lower tax rates on businesses and individuals to spur entrepreneurship and investment. And it means reforming Social Security and Medicare to protect the living standards of future retirees while limiting the cost to future taxpayers.

All of these things are doable. But the Obama administration has not done them and shows no inclination to do them in the future.”

But for the left, such talk is an anathema, for implicit in that analysis is a rejection of the Keynesian economics that failed in the New Deal and failed again under Obama. Better to label the biggest spender in U.S. history as too frugal, than to own up to the failure of the liberal economic playbook. …

John Podhoretz comments on the truly frightening liberal explanation why the stimulus didn’t work: not enough money. Liberals apparently believe they can make up for their ignorance by increasing the amount of money they waste. Perhaps they also think they can fly, but only if they jump from a tall enough building. It reminds us of John Tamny’s excellent article in Friday’s Pickings, when government spending was cut in half during the 1920-21 recession and beyond, and the economy recovered. No point in politicians doing what works, though.

By now it is clear to everyone that the Obama administration bungled the 2009 stimulus package. The dispute now is over the reasons for its failure. The conventional wisdom is coalescing around a view crystallized in a column by Mr. Conventional Wisdom himself, Charlie Cook of the National Journal: “The administration’s initial response, the much-maligned economic-stimulus package, was far too modest and unfocused.”

Cook is a rational analyst, so it is striking that he is able to advance an argument that is, on its face, nothing short of demented. The idea that the 2009 stimulus, which cost $840 billion, could have been less “modest” and more “focused” does violence to the facts of very recent American history and to the arugments made for the stimulus by its advocates at the time.

…The growing consensus is that Obama’s economic policies have failed, and precisely in the ways that those skeptical of the stimulus predicted. The most expensive government intervention into the economy in this country’s history proved to have negligible macroeconomic impact. (UPDATE: A friend points out that if one adds together all the efforts taken by the administration to stimulate the economy directly, the number is not $840 billion but something like $2.1 trillion.)  This fact should force supporters of the stimulus to acknowledge that the problem was not with the stimulus as it was implemented, but with the very idea of stimulus itself. And they just can’t.

John Fund notes that Representative Weiner may still lose his seat when NYC loses a congressional district.

New York Democrats are furious with Rep. Anthony Weiner over his fall from grace and his decision to remain in Congress, which will be a lingering embarrassment to them. But even if Mr. Weiner manages to survive a pending House Ethics Committee investigation, his district may not survive the redrawing of congressional district lines that is about to be conducted by state legislators in Albany.

New York must lose two House seats in 2012 due to slow population growth, and one of those districts is almost certain to be in New York City. Mr. Weiner represents a sprawling district in Queens and Brooklyn that borders six other congressional districts and thus could be an easy target for elimination. Due to the Voting Rights Act, none of the existing districts with a majority of black or Hispanic voters can be realistically rubbed out. But Mr. Weiner lacks that protection and already sits in a district where he is on shaky political ground, having won with only 59% of the vote in the Democratic landslide year of 2010. …

In Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro has an exciting post on the litigation against Obamacare.

ATLANTA — In the most important appeal of the Obamacare constitutional saga, today (June 8) was the best day yet for individual freedom.  The government’s lawyer, Neal Katyal, spent most of the hearing on the ropes, with the judicial panel extremely cautious not to extend federal power beyond its present outer limits of regulating economic activity that has a substantial aggregate effect on interstate commerce.

As the lawyer representing 26 states against the federal government said, “The whole reason we do this is to protect liberty.” With those words, former solicitor general Paul Clement reached the essence of the Obamacare lawsuits. With apologies to Joe Biden, this is a big deal not because we’re dealing with a huge reorganization of the health care industry, but because our most fundamental first principle is at stake: we limit government power so people can live their lives the way they want.

This legal process is not an academic exercise to map the precise contours of the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause — or even to vindicate our commitment to federalism or judicial review. No, all of these worthy endeavors are just means to achieve the goal of maximizing human freedom and flourishing. Indeed, that is the very reason the government exists in the first place.

And the 11th Circuit judges saw that. Countless times, Judges Dubina and Marcus demanded that the government articulate constitutional limiting principles to the power it asserted. And countless times they pointed out that never in history has Congress tried to compel people to engage in commerce as a means of regulating commerce. Even Judge Hull, reputed to be the most liberal member of the panel, conducted a withering cross-examination to establish that the individual mandate didn’t help that many people get affordable care, that the majority of people currently without coverage would be exempt from the requirement (presumably due to their income level).

In short, while we should never read too much into an oral argument, I’m more optimistic about this case now than any other.

Jonah Goldberg is also fed up with Thomas Friedman; modern day Malthus.

As I already mentioned over at the Corner, Tom Friedman lets his inner Malthus out for a drive today:

…This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.”

…first a few easy shots. One of the standard complaints against Friedman is that he leaps from anecdotes and conversations…to sweeping conclusions about the state of the Universe. …

In today’s New York Times column, Friedman says that he saw a tanker truck delivering water in Sana. And this is supposedly a rich reportorial nugget suggesting that Sana may run out of water. Well it might. I confess to not knowing much about Sana. But I do have some experience seeing water trucks. I’ve seen them in lots and lots of places, from Mexico to Alaska. I’m pretty sure that if I jumped to the conclusion that Fairbanks, Alaska was running out of water because I saw a water truck, few reasonable people would find that persuasive.

I saw a taco truck setting up in downtown DC on my way into work today. Does that mean DC has reached “peak taco”? …

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin has an excellent article describing the fanatical ideology that is decimating California’s economy.

Ideas matter, particularly when colored by religious fanaticism, wreaking havoc even in the most favored of places. Take, for instance, Iran, a country blessed with a rich heritage and enormous physical and human resources, but which, thanks to its theocratic regime, is largely an economic basket case and rogue state.

Then there’s California, rich in everything from oil and food to international trade and technology, but still skimming along the bottom of the national economy. The state’s unemployment rate is now worse than Michigan’s and ahead only of neighboring Nevada.  Among the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan regions, four of the six with the highest unemployment numbers are located in the Golden State: Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. In a recent Forbes survey, California was home to six of the ten regions where the economy is poised to get worse.

…But people involved in the tangible, directly carbon-consuming parts of the economy — manufacturing, warehousing, energy and, most important, agriculture — are those who bear   the brunt of the green jihad. Farming has long been a field dominated by California, yet environmentalist pressures for cutbacks in agricultural water supplies have turned a quarter million acres of prime Central Valley farmland fallow, creating mass unemployment in many communities.

…Other key blue collar industries are also threatened, from international trade to manufacturing. Since before the recession California manufacturing has been on a decline.  Los Angeles, still the nation’s largest industrial area, has lost a remarkable one-fifth of its manufacturing employment since 2005. …

Michael Barone reports that the federal government doesn’t think they’ve created a large enough deficit, and are currently shoving a high-speed train boondoggle down the throats of Florida’s taxpayers.

…The FTA wants state and local governments to put in $175 million to cover half the estimated costs for Sunrail. You might not be surprised to learn that, as three European researchers cited by Cox have found, the average fixed rail project costs 45% more than projected and that 80% cost overruns were not unusual. They also found that ridership estimates turn out almost always to be hugely inflated, which means either higher fares or bigger operating deficits or both, almost inevitably. And, as Cox points out, the feds require a giveback of some federal aid if ridership levels don’t meet certain standards.

…So why do the feds continue to push fixed rail? Partly because it’s an existing program and there’s an incentive to shovel money out of the door. But why was the program created in the first place? Because of some “progressive” notions. Europe has a lot of fixed rail, and everyone knows that Europeans are more progressive than we benighted Americans are (which overlooks the fact that population density is much greater in Europe than in almost any part of the United States except the inner portions of metro New York). Fixed rail takes people out of polluting cars into energy-efficient trains (except that the trains may not be significantly more energy-efficient if they don’t have many passengers). …

What I think is at work here is bossiness: planners yearn to make everyone else live in the patterns they think are progressive. …The fact that promoters of fixed rail almost inevitably produce hugely optimistic projections of cost and ridership indicate that we are dealing here with people who are less committed to rational argumentation than they are to the promotion of something which for them takes on the importance of a religious faith.

In the WSJ, Richard Vedder makes some brilliant suggestions to dramatically decrease the price of a college education.

In a study for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe and I concluded that tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.

Such a move would require the bulk of the faculty to teach, on average, about 150-160 students a year. For example, a professor might teach one undergraduate survey class for 100 students, two classes for advanced undergraduate students or beginning graduate students with 20-25 students, and an advanced graduate seminar for 10. That would require the professor to be in the classroom for fewer than 200 hours a year—hardly an arduous requirement.

…much research consists of obscure articles published in even more obscure journals on topics of trivial importance. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, once estimated that 21,000 articles have been written on Shakespeare since 1980. Wouldn’t 5,000 have been enough? Canadian scholar Jeffrey Litwin, looking at 70 leading U.S. universities, concluded the typical cost of writing a journal article is about $72,000. If we professors published somewhat fewer journal articles and did more teaching, we could make college more affordable. …

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It’s getting so bad for the president, the Washington Post is calling BS on his speeches. Glenn Kessler gives him three out of four Pinocchios for the auto speech.

With some of the economic indicators looking a bit dicey, President Obama traveled to Ohio last week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story: the rescue of the domestic automobile industry. In fact, he also made it the subject of his weekly radio address.

We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.

What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan. …

David Skeel, in the WSJ, has more on the auto bailouts.

…The claim that the bailouts were done at little cost is even more dubious. This side of the story rests on the observation that GM’s success in selling a significant amount of stock, reducing the government’s stake, and Chrysler’s repayment of its loans, show that the direct costs to taxpayers may be lower than many originally feared. But this doesn’t mean that taxpayers are off the hook. They are still likely to end up with a multibillion dollar bill—nearly $14 billion, according to current White House estimates.

But the $14 billion figure omits the cost of the previously accumulated tax losses GM can apply against future profits, thanks to a special post-bailout government gift. The ordinary rule is that these losses can only be preserved after bankruptcy if the company is restructured—not if it’s sold. By waiving this rule, the government saved GM at least $12 billion to $13 billion in future taxes, a large chunk of which (not all, because taxpayers also own GM stock) came straight out of taxpayers’ pockets.

The indirect costs may be the worst problem here. The car bailouts have sent the message that, if a politically important industry is in trouble, the government may step in, rearrange the existing creditors’ normal priorities, and dictate the result it wants. Lenders will be very hesitant to extend credit under these conditions.

This will make it much harder, and much more costly, for a company in a politically sensitive industry to borrow money when it is in trouble. As a result, the government will face even more pressure to step in with a bailout in the future. In effect, the government is crowding out the ordinary credit markets.

None of this suggests that we should be unhappy with the recent success of General Motors and Chrysler. Their revival is a very encouraging development. But to claim that the car companies would have collapsed if the government hadn’t intervened in the way it did, and to suggest that the intervention came at very little cost, is a dangerous misreading of our recent history.

John Tamny wan a brilliant explanation of how the present government hinders economic growth, in Real Clear Markets.

…If we then look back to the most substantial economic contraction of the 20th century in 1920-21, the fact that the gold standard was unshaken amid this unsettling decline in economic activity tells why the economy rebounded so quickly. With investors confident that their delayed consumption (meaning investment) wouldn’t be clipped by the monetary authorities, capital flowed to wealth enhancing activities and the economy roared.

The early ‘20s offer other lessons that tell us why the economy boomed 90 years ago, but sags at present.

Indeed, contrary to the Krugmanesque view that governments must spend uncontrollably when economic spirits are down, in the early 1920s our federal government greatly reduced its spending burden on the U.S. economy. Though it spent $6.4 billion in 1920, by 1923 total spending had declined to $3.3 billion.

…Entrepreneurs can’t be entrepreneurs without capital, so during periods of economic ill health it’s more than necessary for governments lacking resources other than those they tax or borrow from the private sector to sit on their hands. Better to leave always limited capital in the private sector where it can fund real productivity…

In the WSJ, William McGurn explains why the NAACP doesn’t want better schools for children.

There are two ways to look at our big city public schools. The first way is to see them as institutions that give our children the tools they need to make their way in society. When the education is good, it is a great equalizer for those boys and girls without the advantages of wealth or social standing.

The second way to look at our big city public schools is this: as a vast jobs program for teachers.

Those who assume the first view find it hard to understand why it is so difficult to fire bad teachers, pay the good ones more, or close down failing schools. In the same way, they cannot understand why one of the nation’s oldest and most venerable civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—would be suing with the United Federation of Teachers to stop New York City from closing about two dozen of its worst schools and opening charters. Even the Washington Post, which ran a terrific editorial criticizing the NAACP, called it a “mystifying decision.” …

Michael Lomax and Michelle Rhee comment on the NAACP selling out the people who need help the most, in the NY Daily News.

…The lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers and the NAACP…seeks to block the city from shutting down about two dozen traditional schools whose students are not learning what they need to know to succeed at the next level – and prevent 19 public charter schools from sharing facilities with existing traditional schools. Were the plaintiffs to succeed, these schools would either be unable to enroll new children or could face closure.

…The charters in question include those operated by KIPP, Uncommon Schools and Harlem Children’s Zone, which have remarkable track records of success and primarily serve low-income kids of color. Two separate studies out of Stanford University have shown that charter schools in New York City in general outperform traditional schools. Parents and students understand this; that’s why they want their kids to enroll. This year, 50,000 New York students were declined admission to public charter schools due to a lack of seats.

…in this fight – the fight for children’s right not only to go to school but to get a good education – the NAACP seems to have switched sides. It’s fighting not for the right of kids of color to get a good education, but to keep failing public schools open and to limit kids’ ability to go to public schools that are working. …

More commentary on how the NAACP has lost its way, from Stanley Crouch, in the NY Daily News,

…Parents and visionary education reformers like Geoffrey Canada spoke out against the suit in a Harlem gathering. One parent asked, “Why is the NAACP trying to block access to a better education for my child?”

Exactly.

The suit is proof of how low a great civil rights organization has fallen since its days of advocating for racial equality in the face of tremendous hatred. …

In the National Review, Kevin Williamson discusses one man’s big plans for your money. It is about T. Boone Pickens and his plan to pick our pockets.

…Mr. Pickens is trying to sell Congress something called the Pickens Plan, a madcap, Rube Goldberg political contraption designed to appeal to the worst elements of American politics — corporate self-dealing, xenophobia, economic illiteracy — while directing billions of dollars of subsidies into businesses in which Mr. Pickens has a financial interest. The plan goes like this: T. Boone Pickens and associates build some enormous wind farms on the Great Plains, which will produce a great deal of electricity. Unfortunately, the Great Plains are sparsely populated, and the current infrastructure for transmitting electricity would not support the efficient transmission of power from Mr. Pickens’s wind farms to the country’s population centers. So, somebody has to build a new system, and somebody has to pay for it: Mr. Pickens is nominating the American taxpayer to play that role. 

But wind power is just the beginning of it. Mr. Pickens wants to create that new wind power so that he can divert a great deal of the natural gas currently feeding the nation’s electric-power plants into the transportation market, specifically into the tractor-trailer rigs that haul food and freight and much else around the nation. Mr. Pickens is deeply invested in the natural-gas business and is the majority shareholder in the leading supplier of compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicle fuel. Unfortunately for him, the nation’s freight carriers have shown very little interest in converting their 18-wheelers into vehicles powered by compressed natural gas. The reason for this is that CNG conversion is expensive and inconvenient. And because there aren’t many trucks running on natural gas, there are not a lot of gas stations and such set up to fill up CNG vehicles. You can see how this would inconvenience Mr. Pickens and his colleagues.

Since the people who buy 18-wheelers haven’t shown much interest in buying CNG-powered versions, the Pickens Plan would help them to see the light, with a combination of mandates and bribery. (The original version of the NAT GAS Act, the Pickens Plan’s enabling legislation, contained a mandate that a certain proportion of new trucks be CNG-powered. That provision has been dropped, but an industry mandate, or the threat of such a mandate, remains as essential to the Pickens Plan as the individual mandate is to Obamacare.) Converting to CNG is expensive — the tax credits would run up to $64,000 per truck, with about 8 million or so trucks operating in the country, and $100,000 per filling station to retrofit. Mr. Pickens proposes to offset that pain by offering a bunch of subsidies for the people who would be obliged to endure it. Somebody has to pay for those, too, and Mr. Pickens again nominates the American taxpayer. …

Nile Gardiner comments on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the US, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

The visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Washington has attracted little attention in the US media, perhaps further proof that Berlin barely ranks as a world power these days, and consistently punches under its weight in international affairs. Compared to both David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, Merkel is a remarkably low-key figure when it comes to global impact, despite the size of the German economy.

Judging by the content of today’s joint press conference in the White House East Room, which has to rank as among the most dull in recent memory, almost nothing of any real substance come out of the US-German discussions. Merkel gave no ground on Berlin’s refusal to join the NATO-led military operation in Libya, and bizarrely championed the cause of European integration while the EU economic project is going up in flames back home.

Obama declared that he wasn’t concerned about the prospect of a “double-dip recession”, while noting that “we’re experiencing some headwinds”, i.e. some catastrophic bad news on the economic front. He also gave Iran yet another half-hearted warning over its extremely well-advanced nuclear programme, threatening “additional steps, including potentially additional sanctions” – whatever that means. In the meantime, Germany remains a huge trading partner with Tehran, actually increasing its trade with the Islamist, terrorist-supporting regime in 2010. … 

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In the Weekly Standard blog, Mark Hemingway says the jobs number is even more dismal than you think.

According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent. However, this report from MarketWatch suggests the data is much worse than that:

“McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 — after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted — in which 62,000 jobs were added. That’s not a net number, of course, and seasonal adjustment will reduce the Hamburglar impact on payrolls. (In simpler terms — restaurants always staff up for the summer; the Labor Department makes allowance for this effect.) Morgan Stanley estimates McDonald’s hiring will boost the overall number by 25,000 to 30,000. The Labor Department won’t detail an exact McDonald’s figure — they won’t identify any company they survey — but there will be data in the report to give a rough estimate.”

If Morgan Stanley is correct, about half of last month’s job growth came from the venerable fast-food chain. That is hardly the sign of a healthy economy.

Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor, strikes at the heart of the problem with our current gangster government. Equal treatment under law is replaced with arbitrary rulings based on the political whims of the government class. In the instance Pirrong relates, the DOE warns (threatens) a company that has been given license to export natural gas.

…Greg Meyer of the FT, who wrote a good article on the company’s change in fortune, pointed out to me this language in the Department of Energy’s decision approving Cheniere’s application to export gas:

“We intend to monitor those conditions in the future to ensure that the exports of LNG authorized herein and in any future authorizations of natural gas exports do not subsequently lead to a reduction in the supply of natural gas needed to meet essential domestic needs. The cumulative impact of these export authorizations could pose a threat to the public interest. DOE is authorized, after opportunity for a hearing and for good cause shown, to take action as is necessary or appropriate should circumstances warrant it. Furthermore, DOE/FE will evaluate the cumulative impact of the instant authorization and any future authorizations for export authority when considering any subsequent application for such authority.”

…It is a threat to micromanage trade…through coercion. …

It is also a piece with this administration’s modus operendi–what Richard Epstein calls “government by waiver” in this typically incisive article.  A government agency arrogates to itself the discretion to permit or disallow individuals and firms to engage in voluntary transactions, with only the vaguest statement of the criteria it will use to make these decisions.  …Note that there is not even an assertion–let alone a proof–of a real externality (as opposed to a pecuniary, distributive one) to justify this threat of intervention.  This is purely a threat to use coercion to achieve a politically desirable distribution of wealth between producers and consumers of natural gas.

…All this really means is: we will do what we want when we want for whatever damn reason we want.  It is, as Epstein argues, the antithesis of the rule of law…

…When every regulator at every government agency has the power–and the active encouragement of the political authorities–to say “Nice little business you got here. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it, would you?” one should not be surprised that these businesses are reluctant to invest or hire.  Not in Putin’s Russia.  Not in Obama’s United States. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner posts that listening to Paul Ryan speak reminds him of another great optimist who had faith in the greatness of America.

…Like Reagan, Ryan is driven by a deep-seated belief in free market conservatism, in addition to a powerful sense of American greatness and exceptionalism. He also shares Reagan’s mantra that America’s prosperity and projection of power in the world can only rest upon a sound national defence, with the strong investment in the nation’s military that entails.

…No doubt in response to President Obama’s penchant for apologising for America’s past and his “leading from behind” foreign policy, Ryan also made a Reagan-like tribute to American exceptionalism, and a firm defence of Western civilisation:

“Today, some in this country relish the idea of America’s retreat from our role in the world. …

This view applies moral relativism on a global scale. Western civilization and its founding moral principles might be good for the West, but who are we to suggest that other systems are any worse? – or so the thinking goes.

Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed; and a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today. …”

Jennifer Rubin comments on various topics in Representative Ryan’s recent speech.

…And finally on defense spending, he rejects the sort of penny-pinching isolationism of Jon Huntsman or Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.):

‘A more prosperous economy enables us to afford a modernized military that is properly sized for the breadth of the challenges we face. Such a military must also be an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people. The House-passed budget recognizes this, which is why it includes the $78 billion in defense efficiency savings identified by Secretary Gates.

By contrast, President Obama has announced $400 billion in new defense cuts, saying in effect he’ll figure out what those cuts mean for America’s security later. Indiscriminate cuts that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous to America and America’s interests in the world. Secretary Gates put it well: “That’s math, not strategy.” ‘

This should dispel any doubts as to whether Ryan is simply a “budget guy.” He is, rather, one of the few politicians on the national stage who can weave specific policy themes with particulars and can demonstrate the connection (misunderstood or entirely missed by some of the GOP contenders or former contenders) between conservative economic principles and American foreign policy and values. And who else could get the support of the Hamilton Society and Tea Partyers?

Alana Goodman, in Contentions, highlights quotes from Ryan’s speech.

…On American exceptionalism. “America’s ‘exceptionalism’ is just this—while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America’s foundations are not our own—they belong equally to every person everywhere. The truth that all human beings are created equal in their natural rights is the most “inclusive” social truth ever discovered as a foundation for a free society. ‘All’ means ‘all’! You can’t get more ‘inclusive’ than that!”

…On human rights. “Now, if you believe these rights are universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on foreign policy. It leads you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rulers are to American interests. . . .

On the policy of appeasement. “We have a responsibility to speak boldly for those whose voices are denied by the jackbooted thugs of the tired tyrants of Syria and Iran.” …

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell discusses declining housing values and criticizes the homebuyer’s tax credit.

…You can see why the market for poor people’s homes might be weaker than the market for rich people’s. The less well-off get punished on both the supply side and the demand side. On the supply side there is an overhang of about 4 million homes that have either been foreclosed on or are severely delinquent. Of these about 2 million are foreclosed properties, according to Zillow. (A Wells Fargo expert quoted in the Washington Post puts the figure somewhat higher, at 2.2 million.) On the demand side, almost every month sees a retreat in the percentage of homes that are owner-occupied. It reached close to 70 percent in the middle years of the Bush administration. It now stands at 66.2 percent, roughly where it was midway through the Clinton administration. One can assume that poorer buyers are leaving the market disproportionately.

This is how we know that this recent collapse in house prices was not anticipated, at least not by anyone in a position of authority. Right now, the real estate market is a mighty engine of regressivity. The government, following its familiar model, has used an $8,000 tax credit to lure the poor into the market and saddle them with an asset that is rapidly losing value. 

This is a model that goes beyond real estate. It was also the philosophy of the cash-for-clunkers program. At vast expense, the government creates a tiny bit of consumer demand that fizzes and sparkles for a few months and then disappears without leaving a trace—except in the federal deficit.

We have more commentary on David Mamet’s new book and new views; this time from Kurt Loder, in Reason.

…Now, his migration complete, Mamet says, “I look back upon my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder—as another exercise in self-involvement—rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.”

…it is exhilarating to hear so much common sense expressed with such forceful eloquence: “The honest man might observe…that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.”

Mamet is not a man with a plan. Neither the right nor the left is to be entirely trusted, and a complete national salvation may remain forever beyond our grasp. “We are a democracy,” he writes, “and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.”

Andrew Malcolm rounds up late-night, in the LA Times.

…Fallon: Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, says he’s running for president. And this is cool — if his campaign isn’t over in 30 minutes or less, you get your pizza for free!

…Conan: Over 6 million people attended Cuba’s International Book Fair a while back. As usual, the most popular book sold was “How to Build a Raft Out of This Book.”

…Fallon: Today is National Hug Your Cat Day! Or as cats call it, “Yeah, don’t do that.”

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The New Editor highlights additional proof that the federal government has taken care of its own while the country has suffered.

According to this list from Forbes magazine, four of the top five richest counties in the US are in the Washington, DC, area. Five of the top ten are in the Washington, DC, suburbs.

Number six on the list is Los Alamos County, NM, where about 60% of those employed work for the federal government.

Here is the list…

…Is there anyone who actually thinks this is healthy for the country?

Mark Steyn enjoys joking about the latest lewd topic.

…”British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.”

True. If MI6 can break into a Yemeni website run by Anwar al-Awlaki and infect it with home-baking favorites from “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” I don’t doubt that the same spooks could easily hack into Anthony Weiner’s computer and Tweet his cupcake to that poor college girl in Seattle.

But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”

It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet …

In the WaPo, Kevin Chavous has an amazing story of the NAACP working against better education opportunities for African Americans, and Harlem parents protesting against the NAACP.

…How did it get to the point that the country’s foremost civil rights organization is the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve? Forty years ago, Harlem was marching alongside NAACP leaders in the fight for justice and education equity for African Americans. So what happened?

Harlem residents gathered last month to urge the NAACP to drop a lawsuit it had filed with the teachers union against the New York City Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 bad schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space. The lawsuit essentially could lead to the closing of several high-performing charter schools that primarily serve black children in Harlem. Seeing this threat, thousands of parents took to the street against those who would deny their child a good education — even if that meant marching against the NAACP.

In response, an NAACP spokesman says that the group supports alternative schools but doesn’t want the city to neglect its public schools. But wait a minute. Charter schools are public schools. What the NAACP seems intent on preserving is the “system” of New York public schools that has failed kids in Harlem for far too many years. System preservation has emerged as the common refrain from those fighting expanding charter schools and quality educational options for parents. Preserving such a system in its current form would ensure that thousands of low-income minority children fail to get the education they deserve. Ironically, the NAACP has become the protector of the status quo it once fought. …

Clive Crook talks about what the government can do to help the economy, including more stimulus.

…Within weeks, federal borrowing will collide with the statutory debt ceiling, raising the possibility of default; talks to prevent this are getting nowhere. The Federal Reserve’s second programme of quantitative easing, or QE2, is at an end. Higher commodity prices have caused a blip in inflation. All these factors should have lowered the price of US government debt, pushing long-term interest rates higher. But such is the concern about the flagging recovery that 10-year rates fell to less than 3 per cent last week, lower than they have been all year.

Even with a government that worked, remedial action would be hard to devise. Fiscal and monetary policy are both stretched, the options for more action limited and risky. But the very notion of optimal policy just now is Utopian because the US does not have a government that works. If it did, the clock would not be ticking down to a congressionally mandated default even as the economy stalls.

Though asking the question is no more than an academic exercise, what ought US fiscal policy to do? It should combine renewed short-term stimulus (in forms that subsidise jobs) with measures to reduce borrowing (revenue increases and entitlement reforms) in the longer term. How could something so obvious be controversial? In a way, in fact, there is no controversy: Democrats and Republicans are agreed in rejecting this out of hand. …

In the Economist, W.W. blogs about the lack of recovery and offers an explanation that will give liberals fresh reason to blame Republicans.

MITT ROMNEY officially threw his hat in the ring yesterday. That “Barack Obama has failed America” by exacerbating and prolonging the recession is emerging as a main theme of Mr Romney’s campaign. Last week I reported on Mr Romney’s speech in Des Moines, in which he pressed hard on the claim that Mr Obama’s policy initiatives have retarded recovery by sowing uncertainty precisely when certainty about “the rules of the game” was most needed. In a Bloomberg column earlier this week Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, offers some anecdotal evidence in favour of the “regime uncertainty” argument collected from a guy he sat next to on an airplane:

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”

He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost. …

The Economist interviews historian Timothy Snyder about his book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

SOME topics are so dark that even scholars feel intimidated. Yet Timothy Snyder is not so easily daunted. A professor of Eastern European history at Yale, his most recent book, “ Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”, examines some of the most devastating collective memories of the modern world. With scholarly rigour and engaging prose, he seeks to explain both the causes and effects of the two most haunting mass murderers of the 20th century. The “bloodlands” of the title describes the area where the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered 14m civilians. The Economist has praised the book for being a “revisionist history of the best kind”, one that “makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history.”

…What are some of the most common misconceptions of the history of the so-called “bloodlands”?

The first is that there’s something that people think they understand and it turns out that they don’t, and that thing is the Holocaust. The reality of it is, if anything, worse than they think, much more face-to-face, much more barbaric, much more unforgettable. People think that the Holocaust is something that happened in Germany, generally to German Jews. They think it’s something that happened only in Auschwitz. They generally don’t know about any of the other death facilities besides Auschwitz; they generally don’t know that half of the Jews who were killed were shot rather than gassed.

Hitler and Stalin killed virtually in the same place, and that is Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states, western Russia. The Holocaust happened in a place where millions and millions of people have just been killed due to the Soviet policies. …

Gerald Traufetter, in Der Spiegel, has an excellent explanation of the information overlooked by the French investigation into the crash of flight Air France 447.

…Lawyers and technical experts for the families of German crash victims suspect that a hidden software error in the automated flight control system — specifically concerning a vital stabilizer flap on the plane’s tail — doomed to failure all pilot efforts to regain control of the plane. They are demanding that the Parisian court investigating the crash take action. “We petition that appropriate action be taken to prevent a catastrophe similar to that which befell AF 447 from happening again,” reads the letter submitted to Judge Sylvie Zimmermann, which SPIEGEL has obtained.

The families’ attorneys are demanding that the court require Airbus to undertake “technical improvements” so that “speed sensors can no longer ice up in the future.” Should that not be possible, then Airbus planes must be “outfitted with software for the electronic flight control system that precludes the sudden occurrence of an uncontrolled flight situation.”

The letter also raises the possibility that the entire fleet of Airbus A330s as well as that of the sister model A340 might have to be temporarily grounded. More than 1,000 planes would be affected by such an order. …

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Tevi Troy, who worked in W’s White House writes in The Tablet about the Koch Test. No, it’s not about Anthony Weiner, but about Ed Koch who appears in these pages often. Koch is a former mayor of New York who famously refused to back Jimmy Carter for a second term. Guess who might get his “Carter Treatment” this coming election?

Ed Koch had a piece on the political website Real Clear Politics recently that should worry President Barack Obama. Koch, who backed Obama in the 2008 election, wrote that “If President Obama does not change his position [on Israel], I cannot vote for his reelection.”

One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.

In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. …

More in this vein from Roger Simon.

Rahm Emanuel’s idolatrous and predictable oped in the Washington Post — Obama’s commitment to Israel — would not be worth commenting on were it not that the perpetual love affair between Americans Jews and the Democratic Party… for the first time ever… perhaps, maybe, perhaps… is approaching a break up.

As Alana Goodman aptly put it at Commentary’s Contentions blog: “You know Democrats are getting panicky about President Obama’s alienating the pro-Israel community when they drag out Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to defend the president’s statements.”

Goodman goes on to eviscerate the mayor’s argument:

“Emanuel, unsurprisingly, misses the major point here. The problem with Obama’s speech was that he called for the 1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations, without reaffirming that Israel would absorb the Israeli-majority settlement blocs across the green line. He also didn’t reject the Palestinian right of return. In other words, he implied that the U.S. would take the Palestinian negotiating position on the issue, putting our ally Israel at a significant disadvantage.”

I would say deliberately misses the point, rather than “unsurprisingly,” but no matter. …

Writing before Friday’s dismal jobs report, Nile Gardiner suggests the president is in big trouble next year.

On a recent visit to London I was struck by how much faith many British politicians, journalists and political advisers have in Barack Obama being re-elected in 2012. In the aftermath of the hugely successful Special Forces operation that took out Osama Bin Laden and a modest spike in the polls for the president, the conventional wisdom among political elites in Britain is overwhelmingly that Obama will win another four years in the Oval Office. Add to this a widespread perception of continuing disarray in the Republican race, as well as a State Visit to London that had the chattering classes worshipping at the feet of the US president, and you can easily see why Obama’s prospects look a lot rosier from across the Atlantic.

But back in the United States, the reality looks a lot different. Many political leaders in Britain fail to understand the degree to which the American people are deeply unhappy with their president’s poor handling of the economy. Nor have they grasped the epic scale of the defeat suffered by the president in the November mid-terms, and the emphatic rejection by a clear majority of Americans of the Big Government Obama agenda. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz writes about the Republican who can win.

… The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring “USA! USA!” at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Two years ago an Air France jet fell into the Atlantic on its way to Brazil. Last month the flight data recorder was recovered from two and a half mile deep water. Der Spiegel reports on what has been learned.

… The crash of the A330 had made millions of airline passengers uneasy. How, many wondered, was it possible for a passenger jet to simply be lost as it traversed the ocean? It was reminiscent of ships disappearing without a trace on the high seas in bygone centuries. Would the data recorders finally solve the mystery?

It was only much later, after hours of radio silence and well after the plane was scheduled to have completed its crossing of the Atlantic, that planes were dispatched to search for the missing Airbus.

Even experienced accident investigators were caught completely off guard by the calamity. “This is a mysterious crash,” said Peter Goelz, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington. He said it was in the same category as air disasters such as that on the island of Tenerife in 1977, with 583 deaths, the deadliest in the history of air travel.

On Wednesday of this week, families of the victims — from 32 countries — are set to gather in Paris and Rio de Janeiro to mark the second anniversary of the crash. The meeting is taking place at a time when the veil that has covered the accident in mystery may slowly be lifting. The four-page BEA report provides answers to several of the most pressing questions the crash left behind — and raises just as many additional issues.

The drama began at 2:10 a.m. and 5 seconds GMT: Without warning, the autopilot and the auto-thrust disengaged. The report is silent as to why. But crash investigators have an explanation: The three speed gauges on the outside of the aircraft, known as pitot sensors, had become iced up. …

… But why were all the crew’s efforts in the cockpit in vain? Did the plane no longer react to the cockpit commands as it fell? Or did the horizontal stabilizer, which was still almost fully deflected at 13 degrees, continue to force the nose of the plane up?

Airbus vehemently denies that the plane’s automatic controls could have worked against the pilots’ commands. Were the suspicions proven true, however, then the software would have to be replaced in over a thousand A330s and in its sister model, the A340. The costs would run into hundreds of millions of euros.

In any case, flight engineer Hüttig, who also advises the victims’ families regarding technical issues, is concerned about the description of the horizontal stabilizer as being at 13 degrees. That is consistent with behavior he observed in an Air France A330 simulator in Paris a few months ago, when he replicated the situation together with other pilots. “The phenomenon is startlingly similar,” he says. …

WHO warns; Killer cellphones! USA Today op-ed says don’t believe it.

… This is the same WHO that inflamed and accelerated the swine flu scare in 2009, quickly elevating it to pandemic status and authorizing the production of millions of doses of vaccine that ultimately had to be discarded.

What has changed since last week is not the actual risk associated with cellphones, but simply our perception, which is linked to society’s reasonable fear of cancer. But so far the science doesn’t back up these new concerns.

More than two dozen studies done in Europe, the United States and New Zealand have not established a definitive link between cellphones and brain cancer. Of course the results are limited because they rely on survey data, which is the weakest kind of science. One study showed a possible association between heavy cellphone use and cancer, but the study was severely limited because it questioned people who already had brain cancer and asked them to try to recall how frequently they had used their cellphones. …

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David Harsanyi blogs about our continuing economic woes. And he has a unique chart illustrating the dimensions of the Obama job fail.

…The housing market still stinks, as does do other foundations of the economy. The answer from the Democrats has been bailout after bailout, antiquated economic schemes, huge expansion of regulation, calls for higher taxes, attacks on the profit motive, roadblocks to energy production, increasing moral hazard in markets, more crony capitalism, food stamps, dependency, massive new entitlement program, sharing of the prosperity but less new prosperity, the same wars (and more!), but no budget, no spending cuts and little economic hope.

Ian Murray at The Corner explains:

“Today’s much weaker than expected employment numbers show that the president’s agenda of more regulation and increased spending has undoubtedly failed. However much money he throws at the problem, entrepreneurs are not going to start adding jobs to the economy while the burden of regulation is so high. Regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion each year. It is regulation that is dragging us back to recession.” …

…Republicans might have the wrong answers. They usually do. But what exactly has this administration done right? What creative ideas have they offered? How many alternative realities (you know, ‘things could have been worse’?) do we have to accept? Fact is, while these condescending technocrats accuse their opponents of being nihilists, ideologues and radicals, they are the ones that refuse to deviate from dogma no matter how much evidence of failure confronts them.

Charles Krauthammer thinks the debt limit fight is a “thing of beauty.”

In this spending-cut tug of war, it is of paramount importance to frame your demands in a way that the public sees as reasonable. The side that can command public opinion will prevail — the other side will ultimately cave for fear of being blamed for whatever dislocation occurs. Republicans should not be asking for, say, repeal of Obamacare as the quid pro quo for raising the debt limit. These are bridges much too far for these negotiations.

Which is why House Speaker John Boehner’s offer of a dollar-for-dollar deal — raise the debt ceiling to match corresponding spending cuts — is a thing of beauty. It is eminently logical and easy to understand. In a country with a 47 percent to 19 percent plurality opposed to raising the debt ceiling, the Boehner offer is difficult for the president to refuse.

After all, it invites Obama to choose how much to cut. For example, $500?billion buys him a $500?billion debt-limit hike — and only a short-term extension. Not wanting to go through this process again, Obama would like a $2 trillion debt-limit hike to get him past Election Day 2012. For that, he’ll have to come up with $2 trillion in spending cuts.

It may be blackmail. But it is progress.

John Fund reports that Lech Walesa doesn’t think much of Obama.

…Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, wasn’t exactly eager to meet President Obama during Mr. Obama’s trip to Warsaw on Saturday. He instead left for a religious festival in Italy, telling Polish reporters: “It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”

Mr. Walesa also made clear his disdain for Mr. Obama when he was in Washington last week, where he received the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation award for services to spreading freedom around the world. Previous recipients of the award have included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Margaret Thatcher.

The dinner, which was attended by about 500 people, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, featured a speech by Mr. Gates along with remarks by Mr. Walesa. The Nobel laureate and former head of the Polish trade union Solidarity recognized the lateness of the hour and kept his remarks brief, but he couldn’t resist relating current conditions in the U.S. to Reagan’s time in office. He noted that back then the U.S. represented a “good empire,” in contrast to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union that Reagan excoriated. “But now I observe you have not a very good leadership,” he told the audience through an interpreter. He said that the U.S. seemed less interested in exercising leadership in the world. …

Tony Blankley looks at the political changes that may be coming to Europe.

…Note that the voters are aroused in both the nations whose debt can no longer be locally paid and those nations that are being asked to pay the debts of foreign countries. That is to say, the European social-welfare-deficit-debt problem has outraged both the debtors and the creditors. It takes a singularly disconnected and arrogant social class to create a set of policies that satisfies neither creditor nor debtor.

Both economic and immigrant policies have been the cause of weakened European governments from Finland to Germany to Spain and beyond in the elections of 2009 and the more recent elections. Caught in the pincers of these two emerging issues seen by many middle-class European voters as existential to their culture, we should expect to see some existing governments fall by vote or, conceivably, by other means.

We are observing a rare process: Stark economic and cultural reality is neutering conventional political methods. Established European political parties and politicians may become extinct quite suddenly. So far, the primary political beneficiaries of this crisis are third, fourth and fifth parties – some of them considered disreputable by the tottering ruling class: in the Netherlands, the heroic Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; in Hungary, the center-right Fidesz Party and the anti-immigrant, hard-right Jobbik Party; in Austria, the right-wing Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO); in Denmark, the hard-right Danish People’s Party; in Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League; in Finland, the anti-illegal-immigrant, Euro-skeptic True Finns party; in Britain, the racist British National Party and the libertarian, anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party; and in France, Jean-Marie (and now his daughter Marine) Le Pens’ patriotic National Front. There are others in almost every European country. …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, comments on the Washington’s out-of-control spending. He highlights a quote from Congressman Paul Ryan.

…It is little wonder that 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will finally run out of their money, and Moody’s Investors Service is threatening to downgrade America’s sterling credit rating unless it gets to grips with the debt crisis. Undoubtedly, the very future of the United States’ position as the word’s only superpower is at stake in the next few years. And as Congressman Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the House Budget Committee warned in a superb speech last night to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington:

The unsustainable trajectory of government spending is accelerating the nation toward the most predictable economic crisis in American history. Years of ignoring the real drivers of our debt have left us with a profound structural problem. In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy.

This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt – and that’s according to optimistic projections… This course is simply unsustainable. If we continue down our current path, then a debt-fueled economic crisis is not a probability. It is a mathematical certainty. …

Thomas Sowell tells it like it is. He discusses a number of insults that the president has leveled at foreign friends.

…Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama’s ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. However complex the ramifications of this ideology, and however clever the means by which Obama has camouflaged it, that is what it has amounted to.

No wonder he was moved to tears when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright summarized that ideology in a thundering phrase— “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”

…at home or abroad, Obama’s ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback. …

…The fate of the United States of America may depend on how savvy we the people are in seeing what he is doing— and how soon, before the situation becomes irretrievable.

In the Education Intelligence Agency, Mike Antonucci has some unbelievable statistics about education spending, and why you will never be taxed enough to satisfy the government’s appetite.

…The latest Census Bureau report provides details of the 2008-09 school year, as the nation was in the midst of the recession. That year, 48,238,962 students were enrolled in the U.S. K-12 public education system. That was a decline of 157,114 students from the previous year. They were taught by 3,231,487 teachers (full-time equivalent). That was an increase of 81,426 teachers from the previous year.

…Twenty-seven states had fewer students in 2009 than in 2008, but 16 of them hired more teachers.

…From 2004 to 2009, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.7 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 6.5 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 26.7 percent (about 12.5% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 27.5 percent. …

More on Buying Union from David Harsanyi.

…Americans — people who can do almost anything, including, but not limited to, electing politicians who keep rotten companies buoyant for political gain — have a patriotic duty to buy poorly conceived automobiles. You have an obligation to insulate Washington’s favorite companies from responsibility. For God and for country, taxpayers must purchase cars from corporations that have not come close — despite the contention of the administration — to paying back what they already owe you.

But hey, the car was assembled in Michigan. If that’s not a sign of American exceptionalism, I don’t know what is.

Even if Wasserman Schultz’s “Buy American” rhetoric were genuine, it would be severely misguided. Every time we overpay for an American-made product (whatever it is), don’t we also spend less on an array of other services and products that create jobs at home? Real jobs. Self-sustaining jobs. If we all mechanically bought American, wouldn’t we allow manufacturers to avoid competition and rely on their locations rather than the excellence of their products? Sounds like the opposite of exceptionalism.

Companies on the dole also have incentive to please their benefactors in Washington — a place that has the power to offer more handouts or to stifle competition. …These companies, though, have less incentive to keep prices low or to innovate or to meet consumer demand. …

Scott Adams thinks paying taxes should be everyone’s responsibility.

Yesterday I went to Walmart and demanded that they give me a cartload of merchandise for free. This demand was not well-received, so I didn’t get to the second part of my plan which would have involved criticizing the job performance of the people who were giving me free stuff.

Okay, I didn’t really go to Walmart and demand free stuff. You probably knew that because it sounded ridiculous on face value. We all understand that no entity can survive for long if it gives away its resources while asking nothing in return. And this leads me to my point: In the United States, 51% of adults pay zero federal income tax, and yet they have the right to vote. That’s the very definition of a system that can’t last.

I’m not sure where the tipping point is. So far, the power of the non-tax-paying majority has been blunted by the influence of political parties and the misdirection of the media. If the majority ever figures out that they can legally confiscate the wealth of the minority, tax rates will double overnight. My best guess is that the United States will go into a death spiral at about the point that 55% of adults pay no federal income taxes. We’ll probably get to that point as baby boomers continue to retire in large numbers. …

The Palin/Trump pizza meeting brought about a great exchange in The Corner about pizza in NY and Northern NJ. First Jonah Goldberg links to Jon Stewart’s riff on Trump’s pizza knowledge and consumption style. 

“Donald Trump disrespects New Yorkers by taking Sarah Palin to a pizza chain and eating his stacked slices with a fork.”

Then, Daniel Foster explains why North Jersey has better pizza than NY; especially Manhattan.

… But while we’re on the topic of New York City street cred and pizza, I think this Famiglia’s atrocity illustrates a point I’ve been making for years and years to anyone who’ll listen. Namely: If you took two blindfolded tourists and dropped one in a random location in New York and the other in a random location in North Jersey and told them to go find a slice of pizza, the one in North Jersey would, on average, find a better slice. What I mean is, when you take away the outliers — the legendary joints like Totonno’s and DiFara and Grimaldi’s, and the biggest of the lowest common denominator national chains — the median slice in Bergen, Passaic, Essex, Hudson and Union counties is better than the median slice in the five boroughs. I bet the disparity would be even greater if you pitted North Jersey against just Manhattan. I say this not just because I’m a Jersey boy from a proud family of pizza-makers (five uncles who tossed dough for beer money at Vinnie’s Pizz-a-rama and Brother Bruno’s in Wayne, NJ!), but because anyone who’s ever seen me can tell you I’ve eaten a lot of pizza in my day. …