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Toby Harnden starts off the coverage of the open mic in Korea.

Caught on an open mic during a photo op with outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul, President Barack Obama did something very, very stupid. He got caught committing what is known in Washington as the ‘Kinsley gaffe’ – being accidentally caught telling the truth – which is, naturally, the most damaging type of all.

‘On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space,’ he told Medvedev, who responded: ‘Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…’

Barack Obama was chatting with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul Obama then cut him off to stress, ‘This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility’ before tapping the Russian reassuringly on his forearm. Medvedev indicated that the message had been received loud and clear: ‘I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.’

Great. So once the election is over, Vladimir Putin, the incoming Russian president, will know that a re-elected Obama can abandon all his campaign promises about taking a tough line with the Russians blah blah because he will never again have to face voters. …

Andrew Malcolm enjoys the flap too.

Barack Obama has, like most in public life, made his share of gaffes–the president of Canada, 57 states, the Austrian language, E Pluribus Unum, the pronunciation of corpsman, among others. To be sure, they are stunning signs of ignorance of things that are common wisdom for most, even Harvard alums.

Closet Obama supporters will seek to downplay the incident. But his Monday mis-step is huge politically and may well come to haunt and hurt him as Republican Mitt Romney rolls out the attack plan for this fall’s campaign and before. Of all the GOP wannabes, Romney has been Obama’s most outspoken critic, especially on the Democrat’s “failed leadership” in foreign policy.

A main strain of Romney’s assaults has been basically, Given the spending, chronic ineptness and apologies for America, can you imagine what Barack Obama would do in a second term unrestrained by any need to face voters ever again?

That’s an effective line because it leaves the worst things possible to voters’ imagination. And there is no response. What can Obama say, “My secret plans aren’t as bad as you think.”

What makes Obama’s Monday blunder so bad is that it doesn’t come from any sort of dismissable ignorance by someone who spent formative childhood years in Indonesia. It was clearly backstage conniving on Obama’s part and feeds directly into Romney’s ‘Can you imagine’ line.

Plus, it fits with the suspicions of millions that the community organizer has unspoken plans to take America in a transformative direction involving much more government. How else to explain his baldly touting more domestic energy while reducing federal drilling permits and torpedoing the Keystone pipeline? …

More on this from Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor, who has a more sophisticated understanding of Russia and its place in the world.

… Obama is trying to deceive someone.  He is either deceiving the American people, by his refusal to be honest with his intentions regarding missile defense, or he is attempting to deceive Medvedev (and Putin-the “him” referred to in Obama’s “give me space” remark), by insinuating that he will make a deal after the election.  But even the latter interpretation involves an attempt to dodge the US electorate: if he convinces Russia to tone down its rhetoric on BMD, he takes this issue-and the issue of Russia generally-away as a campaign matter.  This relieves him of the necessity of dealing honestly and forthrightly with a potentially contentious issue, and permits him to avoid accountability for the complete lack of concrete results arising from the vaunted Reset.  If the Russians continue to be cantankerous about missile defense, the Reset looks like a sham.  (Well, it is, but it will be obvious to everyone.) If Putin tones it down, based on Obama’s wink and stroke, Obama can continue to claim that he has improved relationships with Russia.

But given the fact that Obama is obviously playing somebody, do you really believe that Putin will conclude that Obama is playing the American electorate, and not Putin?  Given Putin’s suspicions of the US, I doubt it.

But I think that Americans have to take seriously the possibility that Obama is planning to conceal actively his intentions regarding a second term.  If he is willing to be “flexible” after the election-i.e., if he is willing to do things after the election that are contrary to what he says before it–about Russia and missile defense, what else is he being “flexible”-i.e., lying-about?

In other words, this exchange with Medvedev raises serious additional questions about his sincerity and honesty.  I don’t think he deserves space.  He deserves to be pressed repeatedly on his intentions, and this video provides a perfect pretext for the pressing.

The exchange with Medvedev was also notable for its confirmation of Medvedev as Putin’s errand boy: “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”  How embarrassing, mainly because Medvedev says that without a trace of embarrassment.  He is well and truly whipped. He has his mind right.  He knows who is boss.

In fact, pretty much anybody paying attention knew who was boss from day 1.  But Obama predicated the Reset on the idea that Medvedev was a rival of Putin’s.  How’s that looking now? …

Karl Rove has advice for the GOP on how to handle the open mic.

… Just as Senator John Kerry’s explanation in 2004 that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” exposed the Massachusetts Senator as a pandering flip-flopper, so may Mr. Obama’s private-turned-public remarks confirm doubts that he’s not shooting straight with the American people. It may also contribute to a belief that he holds voters in thinly disguised contempt.

Is Mr. Obama also concealing unpopular domestic policies he’ll spring on the country in a second term? What the president calls “flexibility” with Russian autocrats, Americans voters will likely view as a lack of candor with them. If that’s the case, it could seriously undermine the president’s chances for reelection.

This won’t all happen by itself. To make the most of Mr. Obama’s statement, Republicans will need to raise it again and again in speeches, ads, videos and debates. After all, Mr. Kerry’s March 2004 remark became an issue only when repeated endlessly in ads and on the stump by the GOP’s surrogates. Then and only then did it become the “a-ha!” moment that shaped perceptions of the Democratic nominee and helped bring about his defeat.

Alana Goodman deals with excuses from Obama and the NY Times.

… Read the New York Times coverage of Obama’s explanation this morning to get an idea of how fast the media is trying to sink this story. The spin is that Obama was simply being pragmatic. Of course he can’t deal with an issue as complex as missile defense during an election year, what with all those radical Republicans in Congress trying to sabotage his chances in November, and the media jumping all over every little perceived controversy. “I think the stories you guys have been writing over the last 24 hours is pretty good evidence of that,” Obama told reporters this morning. Can you believe the nerve of the press to actually report on the president’s hot-mic conversation with Medvedev?

If Obama had been caught on the hot mic saying, “This is my reelection year. After my election, I can actually get something done on this,” that might mesh with his excuse today that he can’t “get this stuff done” because the politically-charged election year “is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.”

But Obama didn’t say that. He said: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” That doesn’t sound like someone who is primarily concerned about reaching a bipartisan agreement with Congress. That sounds like someone implying that he can personally offer more after he’s no longer beholden to voters (the key words being “my last election”). …

For a change of pace we have a few items on Mitt Romney’s success lately. Bloomberg News says the GOP is beginning to get behind him.

Republican leaders across the party’s ideological spectrum are lining up behind front-runner Mitt Romney in an escalating effort to conclude the presidential primary battle and close ranks before the general election.

Even as Rick Santorum vowed from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) to continue his challenge to Romney, calls for an end to the contest echoed yesterday across Capitol Hill. Some Republicans fear a prolonged fight could damage their party’s prospects in November.

“Every day we continue to have a protracted primary is one less day you can get prepared for the big race in November,” Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who hasn’t endorsed a candidate, said in an interview.

A series of elected officials, business leaders and party activists have raised similar concerns in recent days, urging Republicans to unite around Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, to avoid further damaging the standing of their nominee against President Barack Obama in the November election. …

According to Naomi Decter at Contentions, Romney was a big hit on Jay Leno two nights ago.

Did my ears deceive me? Was that the “Tonight Show” audience Tuesday night giving Mitt Romney big ovations? On everything from foreign policy to health care and the tax code to Rick Santorum?

They cheered when Mitt said President Obama shouldn’t have hinted to Dmitri Medvedev – even away from a hot mic – that there would be more “flexibility” on missile defense once Obama was reelected. They cheered when Mitt said that if Vladimir Putin was really on our side, he would be fighting for freedom, not for oppression. They cheered when Mitt said he hopes to be the Republican nominee (and laughed when he spontaneously suggested Santorum as press secretary in a Romney administration). They cheered when Mitt said we should encourage businesses to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. They even cheered when Mitt said it’s a dangerous world, and we shouldn’t reduce the size of our military! Oh, and there was a smattering of applause for Marco Rubio; maybe a few tourists from Florida? …

Andrew Malcolm brought us the transcript of the Romney/Leno dialogue.

JAY LENO:  Now, this whole election, at least to me, it seems to be about the economy, or it should be about the economy. What would you change about the tax code? What would you do there?

MITT ROMNEY: What I want to do with tax code is create more growth that creates more jobs, and puts more people in a position to have rising incomes, and to pay their taxes. So how do you create a tax code that encourages small businesses to hire? 

And the answer is, you bring down the marginal rates, at the same time you get rid of some deductions and exemptions, or you limit them, so that you stay with a code that’s progressive. But you bring down those top tax rates, you get rid of some of the special deals, and by doing that you encourage investment and hiring of American workers.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO:  You said something interesting a while back. What is the tax rate for corporations in most of the rest of the world?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, it’s in the 20s. Some nations are lower than that. Our corporate tax rate is 35 percent. So I would want to bring that rate from 35, down to 25. Get rid of some of the special breaks and special deals so we keep the same revenue coming in, but have a lower tax rate so it’s a more attractive place for people to come and invest. But do you know that 54 percent of American workers in the private sector work in business that are taxed at the individual tax rate, not the corporate tax rate?

JAY LENO:  Right.

MITT ROMNEY: So when the President says he wants to raise that tax rate from 35 to 40 percent,    he’ll kill jobs and small business. And I want to take that tax rate, bring it down to 28 percent so we can create more jobs.

(Applause.) …

Thomas Sowell has nice things to say about Jerry Rivers. Oh wait, I meant Geraldo Rivera.

It is not often that I agree with Geraldo Rivera, but recently he said something very practical and potentially life-saving, when he urged black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies.

There is no point in dressing like a hoodlum when you are not a hoodlum, even though that has become a fashion for some minority youths, including the teenager who was shot and killed in a confrontation in Florida. I don’t know the whole story of that tragedy, any more than those who are making loud noises in the media do, but that is something that we have trials for.

People have a right to dress any way they want to, but exercising that right is something that requires common sense, and common sense is something that parents should have, even if their children don’t always have it.

Many years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, there was a warning to all the students to avoid a nearby tough Irish neighborhood, where Harvard students had been attacked. It so happened that there was a black neighborhood on the other side of the Irish neighborhood that I had to pass through when I went to get my hair cut.

I never went through that Irish neighborhood dressed in the style of most Harvard students back then. I walked through that Irish neighborhood dressed like a black working man would be dressed — and I never had the slightest trouble the whole three years that I was at Harvard. …

Turns out popcorn is a very healthy snack. At least that’s what the Daily Mail says.

As well as being a great diet food, popcorn also contains a high level of antioxidents, which help fight harmful molecules.

Plain popcorn has already been hailed as a great diet food for its low calorie content but now a group of scientists claim it may even top fruits and vegetables in antioxidant levels. Antioxidants – known as polyphenols – have huge health benefits as they help fight harmful molecules that damage cells. Popcorn was found to have a high level of concentrated antioxidants because it is made up of just four percent water while they are more diluted in fruits and vegetables because they are made up of up to 90 percent water.

Researchers discovered one serving of popcorn has up to 300mg of antioxidants – nearly double the 160mg for all fruits per serving. …

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Mark Helprin was in the Journal yesterday wondering why the president wishes to emulate Europe. 

Both in his re-election campaign and as the core principle of his presidency, Barack Obama asks America to cast off reliance on the free market—because, in his characterization, the free market “doesn’t work”—in favor of the European model of ever-tightening, ever-regulating, ever-expanding governance. This he does, astonishingly, at the very moment of the European model’s long-predictable crisis, collapse, bankruptcy, and devolution.

With his trademark certainty he proposes—indeed, at times commands—that we follow him over the Niagara to which his back is turned. The writer Henry James cautioned that, “It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” Promiscuous endorsement of things European, inveterate in the president’s academic coterie, has long been characteristic of American snobs. As Harvard once dispatched missionaries to better the savages, it now sends students abroad so they might better us. To be wrong on both counts requires congenital blindness to the facts, which suggest that despite our own grievous failings Europe is hardly worthy of imitation.

As a museum of culture, it has few competitors. Europeans make better movies; their cuisine is better (except in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia, England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland); and they do a better job of suppressing modern architecture, for which they are to be commended.

But in suppressing and over-engineering their economies they court national bankruptcies. Just as reckless are their efforts to ameliorate economic stagnation via the all-guzzling welfare state. Shall we create more jobs by aping Europe, which since 1990 has averaged 9.16% unemployment while ours was 5.95%?

European structural unemployment is supposedly tolerable in the context of less income inequality and greater social analgesia, but although income equality may be the socialist ideal, isn’t the more civilized object to provide as abundantly as possible rather than to annihilate the potential for envy? Incomes are perfectly level in the Gulag, whereas in Boston and Singapore they are not. …

Bill McGurn of the WSJ was featured in a recent issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. His subject was public employee unions.

These days, when conservatives get together to discuss the debilitating role played by government workers, we reassure ourselves with statements by FDR and labor leader Samuel Gompers about the fundamental incompatibilities between a union of private workers working for a private company and a union of government workers laboring for our city, state, or federal governments. We also trace the line of expansion to various events, including John F. Kennedy’s executive order that opened the path for collective bargaining for public employees at the federal level.

I don’t want to rehash that today. Today I want to talk about the situation as we find it, and suggest that the first step toward a cure is to diagnose the illness accurately. This means changing the way we think of public sector unions. And in what I have to say, I will concentrate on public sector unions at the state and local levels. …

… Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. New Jersey has been telling here. Look at our former governor, Jon Corzine. …

… When workers at Rutgers University were planning to unionize, he (Jon Corzine) turned up at their rally. This was too much even for the liberal Star Ledger, which—in an article entitled “Jon Corzine, Union Rep?”—noted that Mr. Corzine’s appearance at the rally raised the question whether he truly understood that “he represents the ‘management’ side in ongoing contract talks with state employees unions.”

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money. …

… My second point relates to my first. Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them.

Take the case of Northvale, a small, affluent town of about 4,600 people at the northeast tip of New Jersey. Its median income is about $99,000, comfortably above both the New Jersey and national levels, and its budget is $21.8 million. Of this, $13.2 million—or nearly two-thirds—goes to the schools. The lion’s share of that, of course, goes to salaries and benefits.

Northvale’s school budget is voted on in the spring. That’s part of the scam, because turnout for these elections is much lower than it is in November for the regular elections. With lower turnout, it’s easier for teachers and other interested parties to dominate the elections. Thus the great bulk of Northvale’s budget is not determined in the regular elections, or by the mayor and city council. Effectively, it is determined by the education lobby and school officials—who in turn are chosen in elections involving only 20 percent of the electorate. …

.. My father was a federal employee, as an FBI agent. I spent some time as a government worker in the White House. I also know many fine and devoted people on the public payroll who work hard, are good at what they do, and earn everything they get. But there are also those who work without results. I believe Americans are a generous people who can recognize the difference. We need to restore our public sector to a place where those in charge can make those distinctions and allocate rewards and resources accordingly.

In the meantime, I think the best thing we can do is speak honestly. That is what Mr. Christie is doing in New Jersey. His style isn’t for everyone. Yet his popularity suggests that Americans appreciate a politician willing to talk about the reality of public employee unions today—and the unreasonable costs they are imposing on our society.

We’ll never return to the ideal of public service until the rest of us start speaking honestly as well.

It was October 2009 when a reporter asked Pelosi about the constitutionality of the healthcare law. She answered, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”  The NY Times profiles the law professor who led the charge that became the very bad day the Affordable Care Act had yesterday at the Supreme Court.

When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.

But over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.

“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”

On Monday, as the court began three days of arguments, questioning by the nine justices suggested they were ready to review the law now rather than wait until it has fully kicked in. That lays the groundwork for arguments for the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.

Professor Barnett, who watched Monday from the spectator seats, was not the first to raise the constitutional critique of the health law, but more than any other legal academic, he is associated with it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

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Looking at the healthcare debate, Jonathan Tobin wonders if economic freedom is still imaginable.

The nation will be holding its political breath this week when the U.S. Supreme Court spends three days hearing arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Though the issue is split into three parts, the main event will be on Tuesday, as the question of whether the Commerce clause of the Constitution can be interpreted in such a manner as to allow the government to require Americans to engage in commerce rather than to merely regulate it, is debated.

For most liberals, including President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress that rammed this law down the throats of an unwilling people two years ago, the notion that there are any such limits on the power of the federal government is laughable. To be fair to them, they do have much of the history of 20th century American politics on their side. During the last century, Washington’s power has expanded to the point where there is almost nothing that can be imagined that can’t be justified by the Commerce clause. That’s why this case is so important. Barring an electoral revolution this November in which Republicans sweep both Houses of Congress and the White House, we will have lost our last chance to preserve our freedom. …

Just in case anyone is interested, Robert Samuelson says health insurance is not necessary for good health.

As the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — Obamacare, as many call it — the justices will probably share at least one assumption: that their decision will have a big effect on the health of Americans. Ideally, everyone ought to have insurance, and it’s popular wisdom that this would significantly improve people’s health. But it’s not true. The ACA’s fate will dramatically affect government and the health-care system; the impact on Americans’ health will be far more modest.

Rarely has a program with so little potential inspired so much contention. Although millions would benefit from health insurance, the overall relationship between people’s insurance status and their self-reported health is underwhelming. Consider a study of Massachusetts’s universal coverage program, enacted under former governor Mitt Romney, by economists Charles J. Courtemanche of the University of Louisville and Daniela Zapata of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It estimated that about 1.4 percent of the state’s adult population moved into the “very good” or “excellent” health categories.

Another study by economist Daniel Polsky of the University of Pennsylvania examined what happened to uninsured Americans who went on Medicare at age 65. Polsky found “no significant health effect for the uninsured relative to the insured upon reaching Medicare eligibility.” Although other studies report somewhat larger effects, most share a weakness. They rely on people’s self-reported assessment of their health. Just receiving government-subsidized insurance, worth $8,000 to $12,000, may make people feel better. It shields them from financial setbacks.

On reflection, the loose relation between health and insurance is not puzzling. …

John Hinderaker of Powerline spots a Telegraph, UK story about Britain’s National Health Service denying care to elderly.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Obamacare today, which makes the timing ideal to consider this news story from the cradle of socialized medicine, the United Kingdom. The article is titled “Elderly dying due to ‘despicable age discrimination in NHS.’”

“Thousands of elderly people are dying unnecessarily early because “despicable” age discrimination in the NHS is denying them treatment for cancer, a charity has warned.

A lack of treatment or insufficient treatment is contributing to 14,000 deaths a year in people over the age of 75, Macmillan Cancer Support has found, in what it called an “unacceptable act of discrimination”.

Deaths from cancer are reducing in most age groups but at a slower rate in those aged 74 to 84 and are increasing in people aged 85 and over, the report said. The report, The Age Old Excuse: the under treatment of older cancer patients, said treatment options are too often recommended on the basis of age rather than how fit the patient is.”

This point is especially salient, given the current debate over health care in the U.S.:

“According to research published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, there would be 14,000 fewer deaths from cancer in those aged over 75 per year if mortality rates from cancer matched those in America.”

A gaff is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. The president did that today in Korea when an open microphone caught him telling Medvedev he would have more flexibility after the election. You can figure we’re gonna hear about this again and again up to the election. Peter Wehner has the story.

ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that at the end of his 90-minute meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev today, President Obama said he would have “more flexibility” to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense, but incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to give him “space.”

The exchange was picked up by microphones as reporters were let into the room for remarks by the two leaders.

Here’s the exchange:

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

I imagine scores of voters will find it comforting to know President Obama is sharing his plans for a second term with both Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, even if he’s keeping them secret from the American people. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

… is there anyone who thinks Obama, should he get a second term, wouldn’t run wild with policies and positions that the majority of the electorate oppose? Otherwise, he’d roll them out now, of course.

It’s remarkable, actually, that Obama could be any more flexible with Russia after the election than he’s already been under the “reset” that is indistinguishable from appeasement. He praised the rigged Russian elections, helped get Russia into the World Trade Organization, has tried to slow down human rights legislation aimed at Russian perpetrators and yanked missile defense sites out of Eastern Europe. One can only imagine how much worse things would get if he no longer had to worry about public opinion and all those troublesome human rights groups nagging him.

The same is, of course, true on everything from gay marriage to Israel policy to taxes. …

All during the coming campaign the administration will be reminded of their energy record. Victor Davis Hanson starts the parade. 

When the summer driving season starts soon, and tension heats up about Iran, gas may reach $5 a gallon. Nothing bothers voters more than paying an extra $20 or $30 every time they fill up. In times like these, they soon might prefer even an oilman in the White House to an ideologue whose opposition to new oil development seems more religious than empirically based.

All presidents, of course, usually get the blame when the price of gas skyrockets and praise when it plummets, just like they own a bad or good economy, or a successful or failed war.

President Obama, however, earns additional blame for the gas rise for reasons well beyond the normal oil bogeymen – tension in the Middle East, rapacious OPEC dictators, oil company greed and Wall Street speculation.

Why? Americans remember that his team boasted about wanting higher energy costs in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still basking in hope-and-change adulation. Steven Chu, then the energy secretary-designate who doesn’t own a car, pontificated about wanting higher American gasoline prices, hoping they would somehow reach European levels.

Candidate Obama breezily warned of skyrocketing energy prices – the necessary cost of his planned cap-and-trade, anti-global-warming legislation.

Sen. Kenneth L. Salazar, Colorado Democrat who was soon to become Interior secretary, bragged that even if gas reached $10 a gallon, he would not vote to open up new federal offshore oil leases.

Once upon a time, Mr. Obama and his supporters believed that high gas and oil prices were either helpful in ensuring that favored subsidized green energies would be cost competitive, or that they helped the environment. That’s why a now-embarrassed Mr. Obama digs in by mocking opponents who call for increased drilling. …

If you’re surprised the recovery is so slow, David Boaz has a great post at Cato.

Here are some news stories you could find in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Reserve is holding an international conference of central bankers to reassure themselves that their “easy-money policies” are working and won’t cause too much inflation this time.

The IRS is ramping up audits of the most successful people in the economy. If you make more than $5 million in a year, you can pretty much expect a time-consuming audit.

“Federal regulators are preparing a drive to tell workers at nonunionized businesses they have many of the same rights as union members, a move that could prompt more workers to complain to employers about grievances ranging from pay and work hours to job safety and management misconduct.”

“The Department of Energy has placed nearly one-third of its clean-energy loan portfolio on an internal ‘watch list’ for possible violations of terms or other concerns, according to a copy of the list obtained by The Wall Street Journal, highlighting how such concerns have spread beyond the now-bankrupt Solyndra LLC.”

The European Union is beefing up its permanent bailout fund to keep failed businesses alive.

States are circling Amazon and other online retailers, about to pounce with new taxes.

The Labor Department has “stepped up pressure” on PulteGroup, demanding thousands of records on its contracts with employees and subcontractors.

That’s one day’s stories about new government assaults on wealth creation and new political transfers of wealth. And so maybe it’s no surprise that the paper also carries these stories:

FedEx scaled back its forecasts for domestic and global growth.

“New signs of a slowing global economy rattled investors on Thursday and put stocks on pace for their worst week this year.”

Burton Malkiel writes that, while stocks don’t look as bad as bonds, “we are likely to be in a low-return environment for some time to come.”

Note that few if any of these stories made headlines, or even appeared in other newspapers. Many voters know about Obamacare, the massive 2009 stimulus bill, and Cash for Clunkers. Many fewer realize the tax tsunami planned for 9 months from now. Hardly anyone knows about the costs of stepped-up regulation and regulatory enforcement. But everyone wonders why the recovery is so slow and unemployment remains so high. Just read the papers — in detail.

If you own gold, or are thinking of purchasing some, you will want to read this story from ZeroHedge.com. A one kilo gold bar has surfaced in the UK that was doctored.

The last time a story of Tungsten-filled gold appeared on the scene was just two years ago, and involved a 500  gram bar of gold full of tungsten, at the W.C. Heraeus foundry, the world’s largest metal refiner and fabricator. It also became known that said “gold” bar originated from an unnamed bank. It is now time to rekindle the Tungsten Spirits with a report from ABC Bullion of Australia, which provides photographic evidence of a new gold bar that has been drilled out and filled with tungsten rods, this time not in Germany but in an unnamed city in the UK, where it was intercepted by a scrap metals dealer, and was supplied with its original certificate. The reason the bar attracted attention is that it was 2 grams underweight. Upon cropping it was uncovered that about 30-40% of the bar weight was tungsten. So two documented incidents in two years: isolated? Or indication of the same phenomonenon of precious metal debasement that marked the declining phase of the Roman empire. …

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Mark Steyn thinks our profligate ways are going to catch up to us soon.

I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Well, what does some rinky-dink ‘roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later

I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the Treasury Secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.” …

George Will says the Institute for Justice has filed a compelling amicus brief in the healthcare case.

On Monday the Supreme Court begins three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central to the debate as it should be.

Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm, has focused on this fact: The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.

The brief, the primary authors of which are the IJ’s Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson, says that Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law “from which there is no escape.” And “coercing commercial transactions” — compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies — “is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today.” …

Bill Kristol on Etch A Sketch politics.

… A healthy politics realizes that calling an expensive piece of legislation the “Affordable Care Act” doesn’t make it affordable, that promising you can keep your doctor doesn’t mean you’ll be able to, and that calling an Independent Payment Advisory Board independent and advisory doesn’t make it so.

The American public tends to appreciate these realities. Many in the political class—indeed many of our elites, especially those of us who etch and sketch for a living—tend to want to show our cleverness by arguing realities away. Sophistry is the fatal conceit of the political class in our time. For reasons having to do with the very nature of modern liberalism, the left is more expert at sophistry than the right. That’s why Republicans will have difficulty winning an Etch A Sketch election. Obama is the master of transient talk and vanishing promises. The Republican nominee won’t beat him at his own game. But the Republican nominee can elevate our politics and prevail by putting before the public a reality-based choice.

Citigroup report says North America oil fields could become the new Middle East. Telegraph,UK has the story.

Deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tapping shale deposits for gas and oil and Canada’s oil sands are among the ingredients that could see North America’s production of oil and natural gas liquids almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020, according to a report by analysts at Citigroup.

“The energy sector in the next few decades could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalisation and reindustralisation of the US economy,” the 80-page report said.

The vexed question of America’s future energy needs and how to meet them has dominated the battle for The White House in recent weeks, as the Republican challengers blame President Barack Obama for the recent rise in petrol prices.

Experts say the subject is also gaining political traction among both Republicans and Democrats because the US is at an important crossroads on its future energy policy. 2011 was the first year since 1949 that the country exported more petroleum products than it imported.  …

Wither the Nobel? Andrew Roberts reviews Jay Nordlinger’s book on the Prize.

… In an absorbingly well-researched, well-written and thoughtful history of the Peace Prize, the distinguished National Review senior editor and New Criterion writer Jay Nordlinger looks with a critical but not jaundiced eye at the laureates who have been feted in Oslo, Norway, every December since 1901, and has come up with a number of remarkable conclusions. In the course of his deliberations he has thought deeply about what genuinely constitutes peace, and whether several of the laureates have genuinely fulfilled the stipulation in Alfred Nobel’s will that the committee should find “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Al Gore, anybody?

There has been an identifiable trend of anti-Americanism in recent years, or at least anti-Republican Americans. When once it was awarded to Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg and Henry Kissinger, by the 1980s a deep strain of leftist assumptions had taken root. Instead of awarding the Peace Prize to President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II for their part in the destruction of Soviet Communism, the most vicious system of oppression to besmirch the face of humanity since the Nazis, in 1987 the Nobel Committee apparently told Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that they were giving him the prize as a weapon against Ronald Reagan.

“At one time,” said Yelena Bonner, the widow of the 1975 winner Andrei Sakharov, “the Nobel Peace Prize was the highest moral award of our civilization. But after December 1994, when Yasser Arafat became one of the three new laureates, its ethical value was undermined.” Yet still the world pays lip service to the prize of which Kissinger said: “There is no comparable honor.”

The speeches the winners give are sometimes uplifting. But more often, in Clare Booth Luce’s term, they’re “globaloney.” …

At least the Danish press is not in the tank for Obama. You will enjoy the irreverent look at the president from Danish TV brought to us by the Weekly Standard. 

Thomas Buch-Andersen, host of the Danish TV show Detektor, mocked President Obama’s political rhetoric in a recent episode. “Obama used a metaphor from boxing to explain Denmark’s role in the world,” says Buch-Andersen, introducing the segment.

He then roles the tape. “That’s fairly typical of the way that Danes have punched above their weight in international affairs,” President Obama says at a press availability in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark.

“It’s nice to be praised,” Buch-Andersen remarks. “We punch harder than our weight class would suggest. But how much should we read into his words? According to Obama, are we doing any better than, say, the Norwegians?”

The TV host again turns to the tape, this time showing President Obama in the Oval Office with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. “I’ve said this before, but I want to repeat: Norway punches above its weight,” Obama says. …

Now you can roll the tape.

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Craig Pirrong has some thoughts about the president’s trip to Oklahoma.

… Talk about chutzpah.  Unbelievable.  It is worse than the rooster claiming credit for the sun rising, because the cock doesn’t know any better, but Obama should.

Fact: the US government generally, and Obama and his administration particularly, have nothing to do with the construction of this pipeline.  It is an eminently rational commercial response to price signals.  It is the market in action.  It is what happens when the market is allowed to operate.

If Obama were a thoughtful, fair minded man, rather than a somewhat dim political hack and complete economic ignoramus bent on re-election, instead of conscripting Keystone into his demented narrative about his cockamamie energy policy, he would learn a lesson.  That lesson would be: market participants responding to price signals will undertake the investments necessary to produce and transform energy.  Maybe I should get out of the way and let the market work.

But Obama will never acknowledge any such thing.  The only thing he is invested in is a delusional energy policy that is determined to ride roughshod over price signals.  A policy that is predicated on a worldview that distrusts-and arguably hates-markets.  A policy that is hell-bent on subsidizing losers (the losses being a flashing red-light price signal) and stymieing winners.

And the hits keep on coming.  He wants to tax Chinese solar panels because the Chinese subsidize their production.  Look, solar is one of the biggest losers, but if the Chinese are going to be so generous as to make them less loser-like by selling panels below cost, we should thank them.  It means that the Chinese are bearing some of the cost of our stupidity.

But I forgot.  The solar manufacturing sector is teeming with Obama supporters and donors. Go figure.

Taking heat on his energy policy, such as it is, Obama had the loathsome and aptly named Jay Carney (who makes me pine for Robert Gibbs!, which is a staggering thought) lecture the world on the subject.  Apparently anyone who disagrees with Obama’s policy has “severely diminished capacity.”  …

Snarky comments by Jay Carney get more play in the Examiner.

If the tone of the rhetoric coming from the White House is a reflection of how President Obama feels about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new Path to Prosperity plan, then the Wisconsin Republican has scared Obama silly.

Yesterday, from a podium in front of the White House seal, Press Secretary Jay Carney said of the clean energy subsidy cuts in Ryan’s budget, “You have to be aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century. You have to have severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.”

Which is an interesting statement considering an anecdote liberal author Noam Scheiber revealed in his new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:

“Energy was a particular obsession of [Obama]’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.” …

Even Dems are piling on. This from Roll Call.  

… Rep. Dennis Cardoza said the president’s move wouldn’t satisfy anybody and would merely keep the issue alive.

“I think it’s the most idiotic political move I’ve ever seen,” said Cardoza, who supports the pipeline. The California Democrat said the president needs to make a decision one way or another and stick to it.

If he’s going to build it, “do it, take your lumps, be done with it,” he added.

Cardoza said the latest maneuver amounts to “highlighting a waffle.”

“They don’t build statues to wafflers,” he said. …

Etch A Sketch comments by one of his advisors raise issues about Romney’s hold on firm principles. In that light, American.com calls attention to the fact that Mitt has been the only GOP candidate who has not panicked in his Afghanistan comments.

… How have the GOP contenders responded to this rising call for retreat? Newt Gingrich has led the rush to the exits, declaring that America’s mission in Afghanistan is “not doable” and our presence in the country “is probably counterproductive.” Perhaps this is a desperate bid to win over some Ron Paul voters, but it pretty much disqualifies him as commander in chief. Rick Santorum has not gone as far as Gingrich, but the once hawkish candidate has softened his support for the mission in the wake of recent events, declaring: “We have to either make the decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done, or we have to decide to get out, and probably get out sooner.” Not exactly channeling Winston Churchill.

So among the three leading contenders, that leaves Romney as the only one who has refused to pander to the rising sentiment for retreat. Speaking on CNN after the shootings, Romney said “You don’t make an abrupt shift in policy because of the actions of one crazed, deranged person” adding “to say we’re going to throw in the towel without getting the input of General Allen or actually making trips to Afghanistan and meeting with leaders there and meeting with our commanders there and troops there, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. I’m more deliberate when it comes to the lives of our sons and daughters and the mission of the United States of America.” …

Peggy Noonan.

… It is not fatal that Mr. Romney has been tagged as Etch A Sketchy. Almost all of 2012 will come down to plans and policy, to which path seems likely to get us out of the muck. The American people are in a post-heroic presidential period. They just want to hire somebody to come in and fix some essential problems.

Mr. Romney should feel optimistic.

If the issue is our national economic life, the GOP will very likely win. If the subset of that issue is freedom and personal liberty, the GOP will win with meaning.

The Obama campaign knows this. That’s why they’ll do anything to throw Republicans off those subjects. Two weeks ago it was contraception, next week it will be another social question. They used to scorn Republicans for using wedge issues, but now their entire strategy is a tribute to the political hacks they hated. And if any Republicans were sad that contraception actually came up as the subject of public debate, they were not as sad as Democratic strategists, who were hoping to save it for September.

If the economy significantly rebounds between now and November, will that leave Mr. Romney without an issue? No. First of all, magic is not about to occur. But more important, if unemployment plummeted to 6%, the American people would think, “Nothing personal, but this didn’t happen because of Obama, it happened in spite of him.”

No one thinks he’s got a good hand on the economy. No one, not even his supporters.

Charles Krauthammer says ObamaCare is back in our faces.

Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground.

Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.

Cost: Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.

But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.

It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.

Constitutionality: Beginning March 26, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. …

Joe Queenan doubts the media’s economic news.

… It is always dangerous to base assumptions about the state of the economy on anecdotal information, but in my experience, anecdotal information trumps government statistics any day of the week. I live in a typical small town, with the typical mix of businesses and a typical citizenry. My town is still reeling.

The large store that used to be a bike shop is empty. The space that used to be an optometrist’s shop is empty. The ice cream parlor down the street, the one that used to be a Carvel’s and then became a Brainfreeze, is gone. The gelato place at the foot of the hill has closed its doors. The massive gourmet shop that used to occupy the center of town has been shuttered for two years, vastly reducing traffic for other merchants. We’ve got plenty of nail salons and bars and pizza parlors, but that doesn’t really suggest a booming economy. And no, the barber shops and hair salons are not turning away customers, either.

There’s more. The commercial building where I work has five suites. Over the years, they have been occupied by psychologists and tour promoters and expert numismatists and accountants and software engineers and import-export companies and even a local newspaper. Four of them are now empty. Three of them have been empty for more than two years. The rents are not excessive; one two-room unit lists for $500 a month. Offer $450 and it’s yours! There are no takers in sight. The last thriving business in this building was a massage parlor that the cops finally padlocked. Now I’m the only one here. This is one spooky building. This is one spooky economy.

As for jobs, forget it. Lots of my friends’ kids are going to law school, because there’s no work out there. Others are going to grad school to get an even more useless degree than the one they already have. Everyone is waiting tables, or parking cars, or pinch-hitting as a substitute teacher, or on the prowl for a nonpaying internship. When you hear that a kid with a college degree actually got a job earning more than the minimum wage, it feels like someone just won the Stanley Cup or the Nobel Prize. …

A Blast from the past from a blog named Thepastisablast. They have a menu from the restaurant counter of a 1957 Woolworth’s.

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In his weekly WSJ column, Karl Rove reviews the White House campaign film.

… The film is riddled with other inaccuracies and misleading claims. For example, the United Auto Workers may not have gotten “money” in the bailout, but as an unsecured creditor, the union received a 17.5% ownership interest in General Motors and 55% of Chrysler, while the companies’ bondholders got hosed.

The film asserts that the auto companies “repaid their loans.” But they still owe taxpayers $26.5 billion, and the Treasury Department’s latest report to Congress noted that nearly $24 billion of the bailout money is gone forever.

The film includes Mr. Obama’s 2008 claim that the death of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, from cancer “could have been prevented” if only she “had good, consistent insurance.” But earlier this year, a biography of Dunham by Janny Scott, “A Singular Woman,” revealed that she had health insurance that covered most all her medical bills, leaving only a few hundred dollars a month in deductibles and uncovered costs. For misleading viewers, the Washington Post fact checker awarded this segment of the film “Three Pinocchios.”

The film also offers up numerous straw men. For example, opponents of Mr. Obama’s auto industry bailout, we’re told, just wanted to “let it go,” as if an orderly bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler in the courts rather than by presidential fiat was never an option. It was. …

WSJ has a profile on one of Rove’s big donors.

Few people want to defeat President Barack Obama more than billionaire Harold Clark Simmons, who is willing to spend many millions of dollars in the quest. As it happens, campaign rules now give him the opportunity.

Watching a TV news report that Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum was rising in polls last month, Mr. Simmons wondered about the prospects of the former Pennsylvania senator. He called his personal political muse, Republican strategist Karl Rove.

Harold Simmons, who has donated more than $18 million to conservative super PACs to beat President Obama, aims to double that amount by November. WSJ’s Monica Langley spoke with Jerry Seib about her interview with the press-shy Texas billionaire.

“Is he worth investing into his super PAC?” Mr. Simmons asked. He rose from his leather recliner in the den and stood at a bay window overlooking swans gliding on a lake encircled by 17,000 tulips. “Does he have a chance?”

“Yes, I wouldn’t count him out,” Mr. Rove said. Mr. Simmons’s wife, Annette, who was keen on Mr. Santorum, promptly donated $1 million to his super PAC, cash badly needed for an ad blitz ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.

The 80-year-old Texan, who heads Contran Corp., a chemicals and metals conglomerate, gave hefty donations to the super PACs supporting other GOP candidates during similar moments in the spotlight: Rick Perry’s optimistic entry into the race last summer, and after the debate-driven surge of Newt Gingrich. Mr. Simmons has so far given $800,000—including $500,000 this week—to super PACs backing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the Illinois primary Tuesday and contends no rival can catch him in the GOP delegate race.

It isn’t particularly important which man wins the nomination, for Mr. Simmons simply wants to defeat the president and reduce the reach of government. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” said Mr. Simmons during two days of rare interviews at his Dallas home and office. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive…because he would eliminate free enterprise in this country.”

The tall, lanky, soft-spoken industrialist has given more than $18 million to conservative super PACs so far, making him the 2012 election’s single largest contributor—ahead of billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Mr. Gingrich’s financial patron, and Foster Friess, Mr. Santorum’s biggest donor.

Sipping lemonade iced tea made with lemons grown on his California estate east of Santa Barbara—next door to Oprah Winfrey’s place in Montecito—Mr. Simmons said he planned to spend $36 million before the November election.

Unlike some big donors—including Mr. Adelson—Mr. Simmons isn’t driven by an attraction to a specific candidate or policy. His motivation is broader: to elect Republicans up and down the line in the hopes they will change the overall U.S. tax and regulatory approach.

That helps explain why the biggest chunk of his political contributions in this election cycle have gone not to individual candidates but to Mr. Rove-advised super PAC American Crossroads—its stated mission to defeat Mr. Obama and elect “majorities in both the House and the Senate that are 100% dedicated to rescuing our economy from the Obama agenda.”

Mr. Simmons has some businesses that are heavily regulated, which helps explains his interest in deregulation. He also pushes for tort reform. One of his companies, NL Industries Inc., has fought lawsuits from school districts and businesses over lead paint that it made before Mr. Simmons acquired it.

More broadly, he said, he and other individuals need to contribute to match the “unlimited amounts from labor unions” that benefit liberal candidates.

“I’ve got the money, so I’m spending it for the good of the country,” …

There’ll be a lot of buzz this weekend about the opening of the movie Hunger Games. John Tamny has a libertarian take.

It’s said about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster novel that will be released in movie form this Friday, that it appeals to a broad demographic ranging from teens to senior citizens. If so, it’s fair to assume that a not insignificant portion of the book’s devotees see a political message within. Cue up the hateful comments, but my libertarian instincts tell me the novel is a boisterous comment about the certain horrors of big government.

To provide background for those who’ve not yet read the book, The Hunger Games takes place in a post-modern North America where society has collapsed thanks to drought, famine and war. The country is Panem, which has a major city called Capitol run by the governing elite. Those in power oversee twelve districts.

Each year at the pleasure of brutal politicians desperate for sadistic entertainment, two representatives from the twelve districts engage in a televised game of survival whereby only one person comes out alive. Though the novel has a variety of characters, most of the story centers on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, Hunger Games representatives from District 12 (presumably West Virginia), and their efforts to emerge from the games alive.

On its face the book reveals the oppressive cruelty that is big government. Indeed, while the global political class and their enablers in the media to this day try to explain away droughts and the resulting famines from an “Act of God” point of view, the simple truth is that economically free countries don’t suffer them.

Though food is surely the most essential, life-enhancing good on the planet, it’s plentiful in the most barren of climates where it’s not grown or farmed owing to the free-trade truth that we trade products for products; all manner of non-perishable items exchanged for food with great regularity. Simply put, visitors to Arizona don’t witness distended bellies among the citizenry due to a lack of farmers, instead Arizona is prosperous and its citizens well fed for the latter pursuing all manner of work the product of which enables them to freely exchange the fruits of their labor for other goods, including groceries.

Joel Kotkin says while it lays waste to the rest of the country, one city is booming – Washington, DC.

… Boom times in the capital — particularly amid a weak recovery elsewhere — are driving this growth. Since 2007, notes Stephen Fuller at George Mason University, the D.C. region’s economy has expanded 14 percent compared with a mere 3 percent for the rest of the country. Washington’s unemployment never scaled over 7 percent, well below the national average, and is now down to around 5.5 percent, about the lowest of any major metropolitan area. Unemployment of course is much higher, reaching 25 percent, in some of the district’s poorer neighborhoods.

This prosperity is rooted largely in the steady growth of the federal workforce, as federal spending accounts for one-third of the region’s economy. Over the past decade 50,000 bureaucratic jobs have been added in the area while local federal spending grew 166 percent. The D.C. region, with 5 percent of the nation’s population, garners more than three times that percentage in payroll and more than four times that percentage in procurement dollars.

This debt-financed gusher has helped expand the economy beyond simply federal workers. You think California is the biggest beneficiary of the current tech boom? Think again. Washington’s tech sector employment , according to an analysis by Economic Modeling Systems Inc., has expanded by more than 5 percent since 2009, more than twice the national and California average of barely 2 percent. California may have Facebook, Google and Apple, but Washington tech has federal agencies, the defense establishment, a growing media sector and the lobbying industry to feed upon.

Washington also ranks fourth in middle-income job growth, with employment in that category expanding at four times the national average over the past two years. The relatively higher salaries — and far better benefits — propel even modestly educated workers into middle incomes. The recession may have been brutal for the middle class, but not those who work for Uncle Sam. Not surprisingly, according to Gallup, Washingtonians are the most optimistic in the country about the improvements in the economy. …

LA Times reports on monster container ship that docked at Long Beach.

The largest cargo container ship to ever dock in the Americas made a fog-shrouded first voyage into the Port of Long Beach on Friday morning, sending a message to competitors that Southern California can handle the giant vessels most others can’t welcome for at least two more years.

Out by the breakwater, it looked as though a man-made island had sprung up overnight, but the dark shape was a vessel called the Fabiola, gliding very slowly toward port.

The Fabiola is one of a new generation of vessels that can carry 11,000 or more containers, favored by ocean cargo lines because packing more freight boxes onto each ship lowers costs.

“She’s way beyond our previous record for size,” said Dick McKenna, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which logs the arrival and departure of all ships calling at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s largest seaport complex. “This is quite a significant jump for us.”

The Fabiola, owned by Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Co., can carry 12,500 containers. The ship is just 30 feet shorter than the Empire State Building is tall, as wide as a 10-lane freeway and big enough to carry the contents of eight 1-million-square-foot warehouses.

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Jonathan Tobin catches White House minions, this time the documentary film makers, repeating one of Obama’s lies. Pickings of July 21 last year carried a story by Byron York on the first discovery the president had not told the truth about his mother’s health insurance.

Last summer, a brief stir was caused when a book published by New York Times Janny Scott uncovered an uncomfortable fact about President Obama: He had been lying about his mother’s health insurance problems. During the 2008 campaign and throughout the subsequent debate over his signature health care legislation, the president used his mother’s experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for treatment for what her insurer said was a pre-existing condition as an emotional argument to sway skeptics. But as Scott discovered during the course of writing her biography of Anne Dunham, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, it turned out that her correspondence showed that “the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.”

At the time the White House chose not to dispute Ms. Scott’s findings. But apparently the Obama campaign thinks the public’s memory is mighty short. As Glenn Kessler writes today in the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, the president’s much ballyhooed campaign biography film “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks repeats the same line that Scott debunked. Though the film’s script tries to avoid repeating the president’s false claims from 2008, as Kessler says, any reasonable person would infer from the movie that the president’s mother died because her insurance was denied.

As Kessler notes, the filmmakers were aware of the fact that the president had been caught in a lie about his mother’s insurance but were determined to get this story into the film without exactly repeating his mendacious statement. …

More on the film from Peter Wehner.

… The main emotion the producers of “The Road We’ve Traveled” are hoping to tap into is pity. We’re told Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression (Ronald Reagan actually inherited a sicker economy than Obama did) and took steps that prevented the ship from hitting the rocks. In fact, though I realize this isn’t supposed to be said in polite company, it was George W. Bush who did the heaviest lifting when it came to taking emergency measures that kept the economy from collapsing and credit from freezing.

What’s most striking, though, is how little Obama has to show for his efforts. The documentary focuses almost exclusively on inputs, not outputs; on legislation passed, not successes attained; on narrative, not empirical progress.

In the film we don’t hear anything about the deficit or the debt, the unemployment rate, economic growth, our standard of living, the housing crisis, bending the health care cost curve down, poverty, America’s credit rating, et cetera. That is because on these crucial measures, Obama has no story to tell, no successes to cite, nothing to look back to with pride or forward to with hope.

Obama’s tenure has been, by any reasonable standard, a failure. Not even a Tom Hanks-narrated documentary can change that.

GE’s Jeff Immelt has figured out he was used by the administration says Charles Gasparino.

Back when he agreed to advise the Obama administration on economics, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told friends that he thought it would be good for GE and good for the country. A life-long Republican, Immelt said he believed he could at the very least moderate the president’s distinctly anti-business instincts.

That was three years ago; these days Immelt is telling friends something quite different.

Sure, GE has managed to feast on federal subsidies, particularly the “green-energy” giveaways that are Obamanomics’ hallmark.

But Immelt doesn’t think he’s had anywhere near as much luck moderating the president’s fat-cat-bashing, left-leaning economic agenda of taxing businesses and entrepreneurs to pay for government bloat.

Friends describe Immelt as privately dismayed that, even after three years on the job, President Obama hasn’t moved to the center, but instead further left. The GE CEO, I’m told, is appalled by everything from the president’s class-warfare rhetoric to his continued belief that big government is the key to economic salvation. …

Andrew Malcolm’s story on the Dem fund-raising troubles suggests there are many like Immelt.

… Except for Warren Buffet, Obama has been bashing rich Americans like himself for months now. And guess what? A lot of them are not writing him the big checks they did back in 2007-08 when he raised $745 million and his unopened promise bag was full of hope and change.

Last summer after 17 months of hope and change, only 7% of Obama’s 2008 supporters were renewing their support for 2012. That’s about one-third the rate George W. Bush had in his 2004 reelection bid.

The Washington Post just reported that around 11,000 donors had contributed at least $2,000 to the Obama campaign or Democratic National Committee since last spring. That’s less than half as many as at this point in 2008 and less than a quarter of Bush’s 2004 turnout, jeopardizing their once assured goal of a billion dollar campaign this time. Obama’s large donor rate is also less than Mitt Romney is collecting from his big supporters.

The reasons, interviews of money bundlers determined, are several: the continuing poor economy, unhappiness with some of Obama’s actions (or inactions) and over-confidence about his success against the still-competing Republican field. And the impact of rising gas prices, now showing up in national polls.

As one result, the Obama camp has had to focus more on smaller donors. Their almost daily e-mail appeals now seek a $3 minimum contribution, instead of the previous $10-$50. And as an incentive, they promise a lottery chance to dine with the president. Three dollars is better than none now and any new donors can count on being tagged again and again.

To be sure, Obama is raising more than any of the four remaining Republican competitors. But the key is how fast he’s spending it.

Turns out, this Democrat president spends campaign cash like it was taxpayer dollars. In January, even with no big TV buys, the Obama campaign burned through 158% of what it raised (vs 60% for Bush eight years before). That left Obama and the DNC with $91.7 million in the bank (vs $122 million in 2008). …

Interesting article from American.com on the health care debate. 

The epic debate over President Obama’s controversial individual health insurance mandate finally reaches the Supreme Court this month. Stripped of legal jargon, the administration’s defense of the mandate — and the broader Affordable Care Act — boils down to this: The U.S. healthcare system was badly broken, so we had to fix it.

Indeed, the fierce battle over reform was based on the perception that Americans did not get good value for their money. Many of the global comparisons that informed this view, however, were flawed, incomplete or misleading. It’s time to set the record straight.

“The U.S. health system is far superior to the statistical caricature critics have presented.” – Christopher J. Conover

The U.S. spends too much compared to other countries.

This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by reformers who sought to argue that other countries, especially those with single-payer systems such as Canada or Britain, outperform the United States. Thus it was feasible to imagine that the U.S. could dramatically expand access to care without spending more money.

But throughout the world, as income rises, so does willingness to pay for healthcare. In fact, differences in income per capita explain about 85% of the variation in health expenditures per capita across industrialized countries.

Conventional models purportedly show that the U.S. spends 60% more on healthcare than it should given its level of per capita income. These models treat all nations the same so that the United States and its 300 million people is compared with very small countries such as Iceland, population 500,000. But a more precise model that compares apples to apples shows that the U.S. spends only 1.5% more than it should. By contrast, France spends about one-fifth too much, while Canada and Britain spend about one-fifth too little. …

John Stossel argues for less rules.

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total. 

So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

That’s not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to “simplify.” But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It’s just natural. It’s how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, “What laws did you pass?” If they don’t pass new laws, the media whine about the “do-nothing Congress.”

This is also not good. …

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Our favorite Brit contributors were less than impressed with the PM’s speechmaking during the his visit to America. Toby Harnden is first.

… Then comes what must surely be one of the most obsequious things Obama – who is well used to adulation – has ever heard. Obama, says Cameron ‘has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’.

What? Pass the sickbag. Whichever way you look at it, that’s ridiculous. Under Obama, despite his campaign promises and indeed an executive order when he took office, Guantanamo Bay has remained open. Drone strikes have increased exponentially – it being judged easier to kill suspects than capture and interrogate them. Military trials outside the federal system continue, as does indefinite detention without trial.

Certainly, Obama has delivered some ‘beautiful words’ around the world, starting in Berlin before he was even the Democratic nominee and continuing in Cairo. In Strasbourg, he apologised for the times when ‘America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ towards its allies.

But Obama has certainly shown arrogance and dismissiveness towards the UK in a way that President George W. Bush never did. Israel considers the US an unreliable ally under Obama. Iran’s green revolutionaries might question Obama’s ‘moral authority’ after he allowed them to be crushed by Tehran’s theocratic regime, as might the Syrian rebels and civilians currently dying at the hands of President Bashar Assad.

Then there was this passage, in which Cameron chucks in the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King for no apparent reason at all – other than, presumably and patronisingly, because Obama is black: ‘Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

‘But in the fight for justice and the struggle for freedom, there is no end, because there is so much more to do to ensure that every human being can fulfill their potential. That is why our generation faces a new civil rights struggle, to seek the prize of the future that is open to every child as never before. Barack has made this one of the goals of his presidency, the goal he’s pursuing with enormous courage.’

What on earth is Cameron talking about? …

Nile Gardiner next.

… The prime minister and his team made a conscious decision this week to do everything they could to curry favour with a Left-wing administration with a track record of sneering at Britain and other key US allies, including Israel. They also chose not to meet with a single conservative leader, even though the Republicans currently control the House of Representatives. In addition, Cameron allowed himself to be used as an Obama campaign prop, cynically wheeled out at a basketball game in the crucial swing state of Ohio, as well as agreeing to a state dinner stuffed by the White House with fundraisers for the Obama re-election team. Even US liberal commentators are now mockingly referring to David Cameron as “Obama’s guard dog”, an undignified image that may haunt him post-November.

David Cameron’s wholehearted support for Barack Obama has significantly harmed the image of the British Conservative Party among US conservatives, who revere its greatest figures Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. This was not an example of British leadership, but a sad exercise in hero-worship before an extremely liberal White House that has taken every opportunity in the past to insult America’s closest friends across the Atlantic, and which continues to knife London in the back over the Falklands. The prime minister has nailed his flag this week to the Obama presidency, a short-sighted and disastrous move that undercuts conservatives in America who are the real friends of Great Britain and the Special Relationship.

The White House has produced a film praising – guess who? Turns out the film makers put the lie to an administration excuse about the economy. Jennifer Rubin has the story.

President Obama and his economic team promised that if the stimulus passed, unemployment would not go above 8 percent and we would now be at 6 percent.

When that didn’t happen, the administration claimed, “Oh, we didn’t know at the time how bad things were.” …

… we now have definitive proof that this excuse is false. And it comes straight from the mouths of Obama advisers in his campaign spin-umentary, “The Road We’ve Traveled.” The New York Times provides a helpful summary:

The story narrated by [actor Tom] Hanks starts with elation on election night in 2008 and quickly segues to despair with the beginning of the Great Recession.

David Axelrod, the president’s senior campaign strategist, likens watching the president’s first major economic briefing to a horror movie. “All I was thinking at that moment was: ‘Can we get a recount?’ ” he says.

Adds Mr. Hanks, “Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.”

Umm. So I guess they did know what they were facing. The stimulus just didn’t perform as advertised.

You see, Obama can’t have it both ways. He either knew the depth of the problem and his policies were not up to the task of reviving job growth, or he was in the dark and made the right decision based on available facts. …

Back in the day of CB radios, a trip to the west coast of the country was a trip to the “shaky side” in reference to earthquake prone California. Oregon and Washington state were just along for the ride. Nobody thought of earthquake dangers there. Turns out folks were wrong - to a fault. Discover Magazine features a piece on the dangers in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

… Cascadia, however, is classified as the quietest subduction zone in the world. Along the Cascadia segment, geologists could find no evidence of major quakes in “all of recorded history”—the 140 years since white settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest and began keeping records. For reasons unknown, it appeared to be a special case. The system was thought to be aseismic—essentially quake free and harmless.

By the 1970s several competing theories emerged to explain Cascadia’s silence. One possibility was that the Juan de Fuca plate had shifted direction, spun slightly by movement of the two larger plates on either side of it. This would reduce the rate of eastward motion underneath North America and thus reduce the buildup of earthquake stress. Another possibility was that the angle of the down-going eastbound plate was too shallow to build up the kind of friction needed to cause major quakes.

But the third possibility was downright scary. In this interpretation, the silence along the fault was merely an ominous pause. It could be that these two great slabs of the Earth’s crust were jammed against each other and had been for a very long time—locked together by friction for hundreds of years, far longer than “all of recorded history.” If that were true, they would be building up the kind of stress and strain that only a monster earthquake could relieve.

In the early 1980s, two Caltech geophysicists, Tom Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori, compared Cascadia to active quake-prone subduction zones along the coasts of Chile and Alaska and to the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. They found more similarities than differences. In fact, they found that the biggest megathrust events in these other zones were directly related to young, buoyant plates’ being strongly coupled to the overlying landmass at shallow angles—which fit the description of Cascadia perfectly. Bottom line: If giant ruptures could happen there—in Chile, Alaska, or Japan—the same would probably happen here, in the Pacific Northwest.

The problem, as Heaton explained it to me, was that there was no direct physical sign of earthquakes. All the comparison studies in the world could not prove unequivocally that Cascadia’s fault had ruptured in the past. What everyone needed and wanted was forensic evidence. In the breach, significant doubt and strong disagreement had separated the scientists into opposing camps. “There was plenty of skepticism out there among geophysicists that the zone really was capable of doing this stuff,” confirms paleogeologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The only thing that could put an end to the back-and-forth debate would be tangible signs of past ruptures along the entire subduction zone. If the two plates were sliding past each other smoothly, at a constant rate, and without getting stuck together, then there should be a slow, continuous, and irreversible rise in land levels along the outer coast. On the other hand, if the two plates were stuck together by friction, strain would build up in the rocks and the upper plate would bend down along the outer edge and thicken inland, humping upward until the rocks along the fault failed. In the violent, shuddering release of strain during an earthquake, the upper plate would snap to the west, toward its original shape. The clear signal—the geodetic fingerprint—of a large subduction earthquake would be the abrupt lowering of land behind the beaches when the upper plate got stretched like taffy, snapped to the west, and then sank below the tide line.

That was something Atwater figured he could probably measure and verify—or disprove. “When they said the Pacific Coast was rising three millimeters a year relative to Puget Sound, I said, ‘Aha! Three meters per thousand!’?” He would go out to the coast and find out whether a 3,000-year-old shoreline was now 30 feet above sea level, simple as that. …

… It turns out that Cascadia is virtually identical to the offshore faults that devastated Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011—almost the same length, the same width, and with the same tectonic forces at work. Cascadia’s fault can and will generate the same kind of earthquake we saw last year: magnitude 9 or higher. It will send a train of deadly tsunami waves across the Pacific and crippling shock waves across a far wider geographic area than all the California quakes you’ve ever heard about.

Based on historical averages, the southern end of the fault—from Cape Mendocino, California, to Newport, Oregon—has a large earthquake every 240 years. For the northern end—from mid-Oregon to mid-?Vancouver Island—the average “recurrence interval” is 480 years, according to a recent Canadian study. And while the north may have only half as many jolts, they tend to be full-size disasters in which the entire fault breaks from end to end.

With a time line of 41 events the science team at OSU has now calculated that the California–Oregon end of Cascadia’s fault has a 37 percent chance of producing a major earthquake in the next 50 years. The odds are 10 percent that an even larger quake will strike the upper end, in a full-margin rupture, within 50 years. Given that the last big quake was 312 years ago, one might argue that a very bad day on the Cascadia Subduction Zone is ominously overdue. It appears that three centuries of silence along the fault has been entirely misleading. The monster is only sleeping.

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Charles Krauthammer looks at the president’s energy ideas.

… Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable.

Mark Steyn has a take on the Rutherford Hays flap.

… Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:

“Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail – [Laughter] – they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society [Laughter]. They would not have believed that the world was round [Applause]. We’ve heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, ‘Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan’ [Laughter]. One of Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad’ [Laughter].”

The crowd loved it. But President Algae Solyndra wasn’t done:

“There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ [Laughter]. That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore – [laughter and applause] – because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards [Applause]. He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.”

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health care reforms, 1930s New Deal-size entitlements premised on mid-20th century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. ……

… It’s not clear why it (A great nation) needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle “Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies” as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison… How does that song continue? “They laughed at me…”

At Prince George’s Community College they didn’t. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

Jennifer Rubin has more.

For a guy touted as an “intellectual,” President Obama does get a lot of history wrong. In a speech attacking Republicans as “flat-earthers” Obama asserted: “One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.” The Post’s Glenn Kessler easily nails him with four Pinocchios for his slur on Hayes:

‘ Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.” . . .

Note that Hayes first tried the “wonderful” telephone at the end of June, and then had it installed in the White House just four months later. So, rather than “not looking forwards,” as Obama put it, Hayes quickly embraced the new technology. . . . ‘ …

Thomas Sowell examines another area where the president knows lots of things that are not so.

… As a full professor at the Harvard law school, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either faculty or students at the Harvard law school — or, more important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at the Harvard law school have.

There were no doubt other law schools where he would have been a respected colleague, but these were not Stanford or Harvard. Yet it is worth remembering that millions of people have led happy and fulfilling lives without ever being at Harvard or Stanford.

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Bell even said that he took it as his mission to say things to annoy white people. Perhaps he thought that was better than being insignificant in his academic setting. But it was in fact far worse, because the real damage was to impressionable young blacks who took him seriously, including one who went on to become President of the United States.

Abby Thernstrom says Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may soon get the ax.

Minority-voting-rights activists are all aflutter over the possibility that the Supreme Court will soon hold an important section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional — or at least in need of drastic modification. Section 5 is the provision whose life may be on the line. It gives federal authorities the power to veto proposed new methods of voting in what are called “covered jurisdictions” — almost all of them in the South — if they see them as racially suspect. That constitutionally extraordinary power may not survive a new round of close judicial scrutiny — although the Court’s view of Section 5 may end up being quite irrelevant to the long-run fate of the provision.

When a districting map, newly drawn after a decennial census, does not meet with federal approval (and is thus not “precleared”), state legislators must start again and draw lines that increase the odds that minority voters will have the ability to elect the candidates of their choice. Courts have described the revised, racially gerrymandered districts as resembling a “Rorschach ink-blot test” or a “bug splattered on a windshield.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, among others, has labeled them “segregated.” Their race-conscious contours are designed to separate whites from blacks or Hispanics in an effort to protect minority candidates from white competition in contests for legislative office. The result is that seats are reserved for minority officeholders: De facto racial quotas are created on legislative bodies, on the assumption that only black and Hispanic legislators can authentically speak for minority interests.

Although Hispanics as well as blacks are covered by Section 5, ensuring a political voice for blacks has always been the main concern. Yet what the ACLU has called “max-black” districting is possible only if black voters remain residentially concentrated enough to allow the creation of constituencies in which blacks are a majority. If a significant number of black families escape inner-city Chicago, for example, and move to suburban Oak Park, it’s no longer so easy to draw lines that promise minority voters a safe seat for the candidates of their choice, assumed to be almost always black or Hispanic. And in fact, neither blacks nor Hispanics are staying put. Their residential mobility and resulting residential integration — which civil-rights groups would normally applaud — is a problem for voting-rights activists.

In 1960, just 15.2 percent of blacks lived in a suburb, while today — strikingly — a majority of blacks (51 percent) who live in the 100 largest metropolitan areas reside in the suburbs rather than the central city. Over the 1990s, the total number of blacks declined in eight of the 25 cities with the largest black populations, and between 2000 and 2010, black flight occurred in 16 of the 25. …

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As only he can do, Karl Rove drills into Obama’s fundraising results. This will help you understand why he has stiffed the Senate and House Dems. 

Last July, President Obama’s campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign’s goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I’m even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

It’s not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor’s pace).

The president faces other fund-raising challenges. For one, there are only so many times any candidate can go to New York or Hollywood or San Francisco for a $1 million fund-raiser. Team Obama is running through its easy money venues quickly.

For another, many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again. The Obama campaign itself reported that fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign. That’s about one-quarter to one-third of a typical renewal rate: In the first quarter of the Bush re-election campaign, for example, about 20% of the donors renewed their support. …

Ross Douthat, NY Times columnist, tries to figure why Obama’s polls are so weak.

Why aren’t President Obama’s poll numbers higher? That’s the question unsettling the Washington conventional wisdom this week. Amid improving economic growth, a grim and grinding Republican primary campaign and the White House’s skillful exploitation of Rush Limbaugh’s boorishness, Obama’s reelection was being taken almost for granted in many political circles. But then came a pair of surveys – one from the Washington Post and ABC and one from the New York Times and CBS – that showed the president’s approval ratings sinking this month back toward the lower 40s after a steady winter climb.

Everyone has a theory. Maybe it’s rising gas prices. Maybe it’s anxieties over Iran and Afghanistan. Maybe it’s a backlash against the president’s overconfident selling of a still-weak recovery. Maybe it’s evidence that the White House’s claim that religious resistance to its contraception mandate represents a “war on women” isn’t finding as many takers as the media narrative suggested.

But maybe the specific “why” doesn’t really matter all that much. Whatever tugged the president’s numbers back downward is clearly a small issue (or issues), not something huge and earth-shattering – and it’s precisely that smallness that should have the White House worried.

The message of the latest polls isn’t that springtime gas prices and culture war debates will determine who wins the White House in November. Rather, it’s that Obama’s political position is tenuous enough that it doesn’t take all that much bad news – particularly on the economy — for his approval ratings to go negative. …

Remember the end of last week when we had Ann Coulter who wrote on the White House campaign to keep Romney off the ballot. Of course, the press wants to help their man. Ross Douthat spotted The New Yorker doing it’s best for Obama.

And the beat goes on: Mitt Romney loses a couple of primaries that he was always likely to lose (while winning the majority of the night’s available delegates), and there’s a rush to declare that the race might still be wide open, Rick Santorum might be the nominee, we might have a convention surprise, etc. This time, it’s the New Yorker’s John Cassidy’s turn to set my teeth on edge: …

So how do the Dems deal with the shortages of cash? Andrew Malcolm notes the number of campaign bundlers invited to last week’s state dinner. The pliant press was invited too.

… state dinners are Big Deals in the suck-up social hierarchy of Big Deals in D.C. and beyond. Soldiers are assigned to stand stiffly at attention watching the designer dresses pose and mingle. Music plays. The presidential party and Joe too make grand entrances down the staircase from the private quarters. 

People would bundle a lot of campaign cash to wangle a pair of those invites.

Funny you mention that because dozens of the 360 attendees Wednesday evening were actually current money bundlers for Barack’s reelection campaign that wants a billion bucks this time. Guys like Harvey Weinstein, Barry Karas, Gerald Acker and some of the boys from the Chicago gang, Neil Bluhm, Wally Brewster Jr. and, of course, Fred ‘Count on Me’ Eychaner.

These are not your middle-class Americans that Obama says he sees through his teleprompter. They donate to the max, then collect similar checks from numerous friends who do the same to their friends. Like those junior high chain letters, only this money’s wonderfully real. 

They say raking in millions to enable a politician to buy an office also buys the bundler special access later that ordinary Americans simply don’t have. Well, first, why should un-rich Americans have access to elected representatives simply for donating a vote? How does that help the current system work? Or just because a citizen pays their taxes, unlike three dozen Obama aides, according to the IRS? Makes no sense in 2012.

And anyway that special access stuff is bunk. If being a multi-million-dollar campaign bundler really bought special treatment, then one of them from somewhere such as Oklahoma would have gotten like a $545 million federal loan guarantee for his solar panel company that was going bust. …

Marc Thiessen shows how this works for the crony capitalists.

In a speech this morning to the United Auto Workers Local 12 Hall in Toledo, Ohio, Vice President Joe Biden declared:

“Stated simply, we’re about promoting the private sector. They’re about protecting the privileged sector. We’re a fair shot, and a fair shake.… And ultimately that’s what this election is all about. It’s about a choice. A choice between a system that’s rigged, and one that’s fair.”

This is laughable. If Obama and Biden want to run on the idea that Republicans are defending a “rigged” system while they are “promoting the private sector,” they are going to run into a little problem of their own making called the Obama green energy program. …

Carl Cannon posts on the Rutherford B. Hays misquote.

… Speaking yesterday about energy, the president found it necessary to casually slander Rutherford B. Hayes. In Obama’s telling, Hayes was a Luddite who, when confronted with the invention of the telephone, wondered who would ever want to use one.

“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama intoned. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”

It’s hard to know where to begin unraveling this, but a good place to start is the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, where resident scholar Nan Card confirmed to any journalist who bothered calling her — which is more than you can say for the White House speechwriting crew — that Hayes never said anything of the kind about the telephone, or any other invention.

According to contemporaneous accounts, what Hayes really said when he first used the phone was, “That is wonderful.”

In fact, Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House, along with the first typewriter, and invited Thomas Edison in for a visit to show off the phonograph — and was no one’s idea of a technophobe. “He really was the opposite,” Card told Benjy Sarlin of Talking Points Memo. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”

This is not first time Obama and his communications team have fallen for a quote they apparently ripped from the Internet. …