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An Irish film maker went to the Middle East and learned something he shares with us in the UK Independent.

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right — as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?

Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel’s incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.

Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions — and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.

I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish — from a country which is one of Israel’s chief critics — and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.

Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn’t a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks — neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.

These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.

But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. …

Ann Coulter gives an update on the Obama campaign to keep Romney off the ballot.

Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media’s take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night.

No matter what happens, Barack Obama’s boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times’ headline will be: “Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race uncertain.”

To explain the widening gulf in delegates won by Romney compared to the others — he now has more delegates than all other candidates combined — the media claim that a vote for any candidate other than Romney is an explicit vote against Romney.

Of course, even the NFM can’t pretend Ron Paul’s supporters would pick Gingrich or Santorum, both big-government, career politicians, as their second choice.

But in what universe would the second choice of Santorum supporters be a two-time adulterer on his third marriage, who lobbied George W. Bush to support embryonic stem cell research?

And are we to presume that voters who have no problem with Gingrich’s $1.6 million payoff from Freddie Mac would be morally offended by Romney’s hard-earned wealth? That voters willing to forgive a man who called Paul Ryan’s Social Security reform plan “right-wing social engineering” could never trust Romney?

Why isn’t it possible that votes for Santorum are votes against Gingrich, and vice versa?

The NFM doesn’t explain. Reporting their hopes and dreams rather than the facts, they simply assert that all votes for Santorum or Gingrich are “anti-Romney” votes.

It’s not Republicans who are looking for the anti-Romney. It’s Democrats.

Obama is already spending millions of dollars on anti-Romney ads. Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod, is desperately tweeting anti-Romney messages all day long. In open primaries in Michigan and Ohio, Obama’s Democratic supporters came out to vote for Santorum or Gingrich. MSNBC hosts openly encourage Democrats to vote for Rick Santorum. …

Charlie Gasparino on why the recovery has taken so long.

… The administration’s policies helped delay the rebound and make it more tepid than it might have been otherwise.

You can begin with Obama’s signature first-term economic “achievement,” the $800 billion stimulus plan that was supposed to create all those shovel-ready jobs and stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

We all know how that turned out, with unemployment hovering between 9 percent and 10 percent until recently and GDP floundering such that even some Obama supporters have attacked the stimulus’ futility. Much of the money went to states to plug their budget deficits and reduce government layoffs; another bunch went for cockamamie green schemes floated by such politically connected companies as Solyndra.

As for all the shovel-ready jobs, the president himself has joked about how they weren’t as shovel-ready as he expected.

But Obama’s biggest economic mistake wasn’t just the wasted stimulus but a war on US businesses that continues today.

Even as evidence mounted that his stimulus plan wasn’t working, the president basically ignored the nation’s economic woes and spent most of 2009 and 2010 pushing for the least business-friendly mandate to come out of Washington in years — his universal health-insurance plan.

Timing matters. Obama wasn’t pushing a new mandate during an economic boom, when employers might shrug off the costs and ignore the uncertainty, but when, as he puts it, the economy was in the ditch. Instead of giving the private sector reason for hope, he gave it more to fear — so businesses retrenched, and the “recovery summer” the administration predicted for 2010 never came.

Nor did it come last year. Again, some problems were clearly out of the president’s control. The tsunami in Japan and the euro crisis both were drags on the global economy. But so were Obama’s policies. …

A lot more detail on this from Peter Ferrara in the American Spectator. It is worthwhile reading this a few times since this is the meat of the campaign against the worst president since Jimmy Carter.

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. The American people are much poorer now because of that, and will remain poorer, falling farther and farther behind, until we change course and restore traditional American prosperity.

The recession started in December, 2007. Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research to see the complete history of America’s recessions. What that history shows is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

Dude, Where’s My Recovery?
Yes, the economy was in recession when President Obama entered office, which he never tires of telling us. But that was not unique to Obama. There have been 12 recessions in America since the Great Depression. The American people have forgotten what that was like because President Reagan and his Reaganite Republicans gave us a 25 year economic boom from 1982 to 2007 with no serious downturn.

President Obama’s responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again. His record in achieving that is not to be measured from the worst of the recession, but to previous recoveries in U.S. history. And, no, President Obama cannot say that his recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad (worse than he thought he now tells us, after spending all of 2008 telling us it was the worst recession since the Great Depression). The American historical record is that the worse the recession the stronger the recovery, as traditional, long-term, American prosperity has always been restored.

Based on that historical record, we should be in the third year of an economic recovery boom right now. That is what we experienced under Reagan, which was the last time we recovered from a recession of similar magnitude.

In the first 2 ½ years of the Reagan recovery, the American economy created 8 million new jobs, the unemployment rate fell by 3.6 percentage points, real wages and incomes were jumping, and poverty had reversed an upsurge started under Carter, beginning a long-term decline. While Obama crows about 227,000 jobs created last month, in September, 1983 the Reagan recovery less than a year after it began created 1.1 million jobs in that one month alone. In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years.

In contrast, under President Obama, unemployment actually rose after June 2009, when NBER counts the recession as officially ending, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December 2010. Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment this high since the Great Depression. Even today, 51 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers is still nearly 15%.

And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression. Under Obama’s supposed recovery, the number of working age Americans not in the labor force rose by 7.14 million. As John Lott and Grover Norquist recently observed, “There is no comparable post-World War II ‘recovery’ where this type of exodus has occurred.” …

Proof that government can work comes from John Steele Gordon writing about Walker’s Wisconsin.

… For the first time in decades, school administrations are now actually able to administer their districts without union interference, and the savings have been huge. The MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin think tank, reports that of the 108 school districts that completed contracts with employees, 74 of them, with 319,000 students, have reported savings of no less than $162 million. If this is extrapolated out to all districts, it would amount to savings of nearly $448 million.

The biggest area of savings have been in health insurance. The teachers union insisted that districts use the union’s own health insurance company to provide coverage. No longer forced to use a monopoly provider, districts have either switched providers or used the threat of switching to force the union health insurance company to dramatically lower premiums. Savings have averaged $730,000 in districts that have switched providers or forced competitive bidding.

As a result of these dramatic savings, districts that have been able to benefit immediately from the reforms (some districts are locked into long-term contracts and cannot) have been able to avoid laying off teachers despite a significant drop in state aid and to avoid raising school taxes. Indeed, school tax bills that went out last December had an average increase of only 0.3 percent.

It is hard to imagine that with results like this, Governor Walker has anything to worry about.

NY Times on India’s changes over the last 20 years.

ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer.

As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be “the final stamp of globalization.”

For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.

I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indian father and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’s austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but also culturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.

All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’s transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety.

I left for boarding school in America in 1991. By the time I graduated from high school, two years later, Indian cities had filled with shopping malls and glass-paneled office buildings. In the countryside, thatch huts had given way to concrete homes, …

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Warren Meyer in Forbes has a great post listing the ten reasons legislation goes bad. It is kind of a road map of unintended consequences. The last two are pure Frederic Bastiat.

Every year I get to teach a day of a high school economics class.   Just as the school’s resident radical progressive does a day on Marx, I get to come in as the token libertarian.    While I am always tempted to go off on a long rant about individual liberty and the role of coercion in both the Republican and Democratic platforms, seeing that it is an economics class I have tried instead to introduce some interesting bits from an array of libertarian favorites, from public choice theory to Austrian economics to Bastiat.   What I have decided to do this year is to discuss why bad things happen to well-intentioned legislation.   Specifically, I offer these 10 economics traps that legislators frequently fall into:

1.  Ignoring incentives     In evaluating how the public will respond to a piece of legislation, one needs entirely to forget the stated purpose or intentions of the law, and look instead at how individuals are likely to respond to the taxes, payments, mandates and rules embodied in the legislation.  Tax a behavior, or make it more time-consuming to pursue via regulation, and you will get less of it.  Make something cheaper or easier, and you will get a lot more of it.

Sometimes this is the whole point of the legislation.  For example, large taxes on cigarettes are meant to deter consumption.  Mortgage interest tax breaks are meant to increase the number of people who own rather than rent their homes.

However, at other times, in the rush to achieve some well-intentioned goal, or even just out of sheer neglect, the incentives built into legislation create significant unintended consequences.  Consider two examples

In GAAP accounting, interest on debt is treated as an expense, whereas dividends are treated as a return of capital to shareholders.  When the corporate income tax system was put in place, it relied on these existing accounting definitions to define taxable income — all perfectly logical.  But the net effect was to make the cost of debt tax deductible, while the cost of equity is not.  Over time, as corporate tax rates have risen, this has induced a substantial bias towards debt over equity financing, arguably making corporate finance more risky.

When AFDC (welfare) was passed, it was a well-intentioned effort to help poor families, particularly single mothers.  Unfortunately, as structured, it created incentives for mothers to remain unmarried, to avoid getting a job, and to even have more children than they might have.  Over the following decades, the number of unemployed single women exploded.

2.  Public Choice Theory     Speaking of incentives, it turns out that they are important for legislators and government officials as well. …

Walter Russell Mead posts on the looming Detroit bankruptcy.

… Leftie intellectuals spend a lot of time analyzing the “false consciousness” that keeps American workers voting for Republicans who (in the view of the intellectuals) support anti-worker policies. We don’t hear nearly as much from these incisive social thinkers about the false urban consciousness that keeps voters supporting policies and politicians that have ruined the cities, but there you are. Many of the policies that are dearest to the hearts of powerful Democratic politicians are responsible for wrecking the lives of many of their most loyal supporters, but the loyal supporters turn out year after year.

When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.

It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. …

Also in Forbes, Joel Kotkin writes on the continuing foreign investment in our country’s economy.

Declinism may be all the rage in intellectual salons from Beijing to Barcelona and Boston, but decisions being made in corporate boardrooms suggest that the United States is emerging the world’s biggest winner. Long the world leader as a destination for overseas investment, the U.S. is extending its lead as the favored land of overseas capital.

Since 2008, foreign direct investment to Germany, France, Japan and South Korea has stagnated; in 2009, overall investment in the E.U. dropped 36%. In contrast, in 2010 foreign investment in the U.S. rose 49%, mostly coming from Canada, Europe and Japan. The total was $194 billion, the fourth highest amount on record.

Foreign investment is already reshaping the American economic landscape, shifting wealth and income from differing regions. The transformative role is nothing new. After all, the country started as a colony of England, and for much of the 19th century remained dependent on European investors for everything from building canals to railroads. Without European capital, the settlement of the West and the rise of cities such as New York would have been far slower.

Today this pattern is re-asserting itself as foreign countries rediscover America’s intrinsic advantages: a huge landmass, vast natural resources, a large, expanding consumer market and a relatively predictable legal system. Our relatively vibrant demographics demographics — at least before the Great Recession depressed birthrates and immigration — marks a strong contrast with such key countries as Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of which are aging far more rapidly than the United States. China’s authoritarian political system leaves many investors reluctant to expose themselves too much to the regime’s often less than tender mercies.

The investment boom is concentrated not so much in the most celebrated sectors, such as tech or trophy real estate, but in the more basic industries that are best suited to our large, resource-rich country. Investment in the burgeoning energy sector more than tripled to $20 billion between 2009 and 2010. Some of this investment has come into the renewable industry, where Europe and China also have heavily subsidized companies, but the vast bulk has been devoted to the country’s expanding production of oil and gas. …

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NY Post OpEd compares two Dem presidents.

There is a lot of luck involved in a presidency; it wasn’t because of Jimmy Carter’s personal incompetence that the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw helicopter mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. Similarly, it’s not mainly President Obama’s fault that the economic recovery is so weak — but he is hardly the one to make this argument after blaming President Bush for the 2008 financial crisis. Presidential decisions aren’t always at the core of everything.

Nevertheless, the comparisons of Obama to Carter have something to them besides the dull gray feeling of each presidency, the four-year wallow in economic quicksand.

Both men were borne into office on a surge of good feeling — a clean slate, renewal, possibility bordering on exhilaration. And both men seemed hurt, embittered and overwhelmed when history fell short of hype. …

Stephen Moore compares the boom in North Dakota with the gloom in California.

In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that “we can’t just drill our way out of” our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.

Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output. This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. And the oil rush is making Dakotans rich in a hurry, with farmers and other landowners becoming overnight millionaires from lucrative royalties and leases. One retired farmer tells me that, thanks to oil rigs churning on his property, he suddenly has a net worth north of $30 million.

When I ask how many people live in Williston, which had a population of 12,000 in 2005, longtime residents shrug and offer different answers: 20,000? 25,000? 30,000? Every night, hundreds of workers sleep in the hulls of their trucks or in temporary housing encampments like soldiers in a war zone. New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald’s is offering workers $18 an hour plus a “signing bonus.” In Williston, certainly, America remains the land of opportunity. …

Matthew Continetti on the president’s shameless campaign.

… Since he lacks a significant and popular domestic achievement, the president seems to have concluded that the way to a second term is through the mobilization of key constituencies rather than a broad-based appeal to middle America. He combines these appeals with cheap gimmicks to generate publicity and deflect attention from the Republican primary. Now that his job is in trouble, the man who enthralled millions during the campaign of 2008 has been reduced to just another transactional political panderer. The gloss is off. Even the liberal Washington Post writer Dana Milbank says White House hiring practices make “a joke of the spirit of reform he promised.”

The new Obama strategy was baldly transparent during the president’s recent address to the United Auto Workers conference in Washington. The inspirational rhetoric and pleas for American unity were replaced with fiery and combative words directed at opponents of the auto bailout. A majority of voters may continue to oppose the government intervention in GM and Chrysler, but you would not know that from listening to the president. GM and Chrysler’s recent good fortune has led the Democrats to pronounce the bailout a stunning success. But, if the bailout worked so well, why does the federal government still own around 30 percent of GM? (Clearly Obama understands that the bailouts are a problem: On Thursday, the government began to reduce its stake in AIG—to the ludicrously high share of 70 percent.)

The timing of Obama’s speech to the UAW could not have been accidental. As the president was delivering his broadside against his political adversaries and rallying labor’s shock troops, Republicans held primaries in Michigan and Arizona. Again and again, the president has demonstrated an eagerness to interfere with the GOP’s moments in the spotlight. Think of the time he hastily scheduled a rebuttal to Vice President Cheney’s 2009 speech on detention and interrogation policy. Or recall his Midwest bus tour, timed to coincide with the kickoff of the Republican campaign at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Or remember this past Tuesday, when Obama decided that the Republicans’ Super Tuesday elections would be a good time to hold his first press conference in months. …

Major Garrett says the re-elect effort is worried about GOP super pacs.

… Obama’s reelection campaign has a split personality when it comes to the general election. One side is confident and growing more so about the turbulent GOP primary, an improving U.S. economy, and better numbers for Obama in swing states. The other side harbors fears bordering on paranoia about massive spending by the GOP and outside super PACs for the party’s nominee.

“There is already unprecedented super-PAC spending going on,” Messina said. “There will be super-PAC spending in key states against us. We have to be prepared for that.”

To prepare for it, Obama’s campaign has put the rest of the Democratic Party on a starvation diet. Messina and senior White House adviser David Plouffe (Obama’s 2008 campaign manager) have told top Democrats that they won’t receive any cash transfers from Obama’s campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sought commitments for $30 million, the amount distributed to them in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Not this time.

Messina said that the campaign fears outside groups will devote upward of $500 million to anti-Obama super-PAC TV ads as soon as the GOP nominee (likely to be Romney) is decided. By comparison, GOP nominee John McCain spent $333 million on his campaign, and outside groups spent $26 million supporting him. Obama spent $730 million in that campaign, and outside groups spent $88 million attacking him.

“We are in a whole new world here,” senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said. “The president has taken on some very powerful interests and the Citizens United ruling allows those interest groups to siphon off unlimited amounts of money. We would be insane not to be worried about that. We believe we have the strongest candidate, but money does matter.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case made it easier for individuals, corporations, and labor unions to donate unlimited amounts of money to independent political action committees, now known as super PACs. Super PACs supporting Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have kept those campaigns afloat, even though federal law prohibits any direct coordination.

Reid and Pelosi, according to Democrats aware of the sit-down with Plouffe and Messina, took their medicine without complaint. Democrats close to the situation said that the leaders emerged feeling that Team Obama was in full-blown panic mode about the need for campaign cash this fall. “They are just freaked out about super-PAC spending,” said one of Pelosi’s top allies. …

Turns out our next president has a sense of humor. Molly Ball has the story in The Atlantic.

When Mitt Romney, campaigning in Mississippi on Friday, said “y’all,” the collective cringe from the political world was practically audible. Another awkward moment from the GOP’s animatronic front-runner! Another terribly off-key pander!

But maybe it was something else: a wry joke.

For all the hype about his woodenness, Romney, I submit, actually has the most sophisticated — and underappreciated — sense of humor of any presidential candidate. It is dry, self-deprecating and a bit dark, a far cry from the safely hokey laugh lines of most politicians on the stump. And it bespeaks a confidence and flair not often attributed to the much-maligned candidate.

This is the man who famously went to Michigan, the state he grew up in and then left for good, and praised it thus: “The trees are the right height.” You pretty much can’t get a better absurdist parody of politicians’ vapid sure-is-nice-to-be-here patter than that.

Romney’s Southern quip was similar — a knowing play on how glaringly out-of-place he seemed. …

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David Warren spots a politician with courage; in Spain.

Telling the truth is, in the best sense, a revolutionary act. It is disturbing, and divisive, and can be exceedingly unpopular – not only among those heavily invested in falsehoods, but also among those who want “peace in the family.” That is how various ridiculous lies acquire the politically-correct aura. It is because there will be no peace if they are contradicted.

And it is why, even though I am what could be called a “deficit hawk,” my hat goes off to the new Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, now disturbing the peace of the European Union by stating the truth about Spain’s budgetary intentions. This Galician gentleman, who commands the conservative People’s Party, came to power just before Christmas after nearly eight years’ opposition to the socialist prime minister, José Luis Zapatero.

It was an interesting election. (All Spanish elections are interesting.) Rajoy was thought, by the chattering classes, to have blown his prospects by hanging fiscally tough, and mentioning “social issues,” when there was a strong voice within his own party for tacking to the centre. By winning his landslide, Rajoy then became the media poster-boy for “meanness” – the man who threatens to break Spain’s unions, generally get a grip, and deliver obedience to the EU’s fiscal demands. (I have never understood how anyone could want to be a conservative politician.)

His country’s problems are not small. Zapatero blew the bank, as socialist premiers are inclined to do, and moreover delivered that most ecological of accomplishments: a shrinking economy. Such politicians walk the road to ruin, by consistently taking the easy way out. Zapatero could be counted on to sign any cheque, and capitulate before any other hard demand emanating from his party’s most “progressive” factions; though reversing course whenever the other side became louder. He kept “peace in a family” that is now tearing each others’ guts out in recriminations.

Rajoy inherits not only the mess, but a public sector now accustomed to getting whatever it wants, promptly. …

David Goldman pauses to consider the incompetence of this administration.

… Compared to the Carter cabinet, though, the Obamoids are a kids’ Purimspiel, a put-on by the peanut gallery masquerading as adults — a clown show, in plain English. Macbeth was never so beguiled by his witches as is McBama by the witches who surround him: Iran-raised Valerie Jarrett, human-rights mavens Susan Rice and Samantha Power, the resentful Michelle, and the Pink Pantsuit at the State Department. What’s her name again? She used to be somebody important.

I stand by my February 2008 profile of Obama as a sociopath dominated by strong women. Obama and his coven suffer from up-close-and-personal identification with the putatively oppressed peoples of the Third World. That goes far beyond the academic prejudices that liberal college students absorb from post-colonial theory. One has to live in the Third World, as Obama did during four of his formative years and Jarrett did in early childhood, to understand the rage and despair of the losers. Many times during visits to Third World countries, I sort of wished that I were a Communist. You see cruelty and indignity that shouldn’t be visited on a cockroach.

To round out the list, we have Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense, a political operator and accountant whose job is to cut the budget. Timothy Geithner? The Stan Laurel half of a duo with the departed Larry Summers. Tom Donilon as national security advisor? His biggest job was six years as chief lobbyist for bankrupt Fannie Mae.

There’s not a single member of the Obama cabinet with grown-up qualifications. …

Michael Barone says it is not just in foreign affairs that Obama kicks the can down the road.

… When the bipartisan commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson presented their recommendations for entitlement reform in December 2010, Obama ignored it. It seemed to end up in the White House’s round file.

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put Medicare reform in his 2011 budget proposal, and all but four Republican House members voted for it, the Obama political operation ginned up attacks on Republicans for killing “Medicare as we know it.”

Last week at a Budget Committee hearing, Ryan chided Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for not having proposed any solution to the looming entitlement problem.

Geithner’s reply: “You’re right when you say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘We have a definitive solution to that long-term problem.’ What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

In other words, campaign 2012 takes precedence over taking us off the trajectory that is heading us toward the fiscal condition of Greece. A Cabinet secretary able to draw on the policymaking expertise at Treasury and on his administration’s own Bowles-Simpson commission is unwilling to do so because his president is following the game plan of David Plouffe and David Axelrod.

The Treasury cannot be bothered even to draft the new alternative minimum tax that Obama keeps demanding Congress pass to make Warren Buffett pay a higher tax rate than his secretary.

The folks who hailed Obama as temperamentally bipartisan have given Ryan and House Republicans little credit for addressing a tough problem and will probably tell us Obama will be bipartisan in a second term. I think it’s more likely he’ll keep kicking the can down the road.

Mark Steyn is in Australia so he’s not sure this isn’t all a fluke. 

I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me – the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law and recently testified before Congress.

Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of “Miss Fluke Goes To Washington,” with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”

Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less-evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She’s a couple of years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked but, if the Dems are to be believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater contribution to humanity.

She’s had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who’ve booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing “Sarah Palin is a c***” routine …)

Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-age schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life.

Well, as noted above, she’s attending Georgetown, a nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas, Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three grand – and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students “struggle financially” because of the heavy burden of maintaining a respectable level of pre-marital sex at a Jesuit institution.

As I said, I’m on the other side of the planet, so maybe I’m not getting this. …

Contentions post tells a Romney story.

I don’t care how many Cadillacs Mitt Romney owns, how many earmarks he requested, or how many individual mandates he approved. This is an extraordinary man.

We first heard about it in the 2008 campaign: how Romney saved the teenaged daughter of a Bain Capital colleague in 1996. Here’s what Mitt did when he learned the girl had gone missing after sneaking from her home in Connecticut to a party in New York City: he shut down the whole office and flew the staff from Boston to New York; he had fliers printed up and got employees at Duane Reade (in which Bain invested) to stuff one into every customer’s bag; he set up a phone hotline; he personally, along with his Bain people and their New York accountants and lawyers, pounded the city’s pavements looking for the girl and asking teenagers if they’d seen her. After a few days of all this – and the publicity it generated – they traced the hotline call of someone asking for a reward and found the girl, who had overdosed on Ecstasy, in the basement of a New Jersey home. …

Corner post by Mario Loyola on the amount of oil production choked off by BO.

The news wires are reporting that President Obama actively lobbied Senate Democrats to defeat the Keystone pipeline yesterday. The effect of blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline is to defer 700,000 barrels of oil per day. And as I reported at The Weekly Standard recently, the president’s policy of choking off oil production under federal leases will prevent another 1 million barrels of oil per day this year, and even more next year. 

Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some 2 million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about 6 million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production. …

Charles Lane says the Dem love affair with alternative power sources is anti-science.

… Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries “anti-science.” To the extent that the right espouses “creation science,” or disputes established facts about environmental degradation, it’s an appropriate label.

But progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy — limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.

Stubborn Scientific Fact No. 1: Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.

By contrast, even state-of-the-art batteries deliver far less energy than gas, in a far bigger package. A Volt can go 35 miles on a single charge of its 435-pound battery. This sounds like a big deal until you realize that a gas-engine Chevy Cruze gets 42 miles per gallon — and costs half as much as a Volt.

It costs a fortune to pump, refine and ship crude oil. Yet even accounting for all that, gas-powered cars are a better value than electric vehicles and will be for some time. Gas savings on the Volt would take nine years at $5 per gallon to offset its higher price over the Cruze, an Edmunds.com analysis found last month.

Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place.

Oh, and how are you supposed to resell your electric vehicle once you’ve driven it five years and the battery is depleted? … 

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Charles Krauthammer says Obama is trying to stall Israel’s strike past the election.

It’s Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced this week to yet another round of talks with the mullahs.

This, 14 months after the last group-of-six negotiations collapsed in Istanbul because of blatant Iranian stalling and unseriousness. Nonetheless, the new negotiations will be both without precondition and preceded by yet more talks to decide such trivialities as venue.

These negotiations don’t just gain time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the International Atomic Energy Agency is issuing alarming warnings. They make it extremely difficult for Israel to do anything about it (while it still can), lest Israel be universally condemned for having aborted a diplomatic solution. …

… Yet beyond these obvious contradictions and walk-backs lies a transcendent logic: As with the Keystone pipeline postponement, as with the debt-ceiling extension, as with the Afghan withdrawal schedule, Obama wants to get past Nov. 6 without any untoward action that might threaten his reelection. …

Omri Ceren posts in Contentions on the intent of the administration.

Most pro-Israel president evuh:

“We’re trying to make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel,” said an administration official… he suggested that any Israeli strike on Iran before international oil and gas sanctions take effect this summer would undermine the tenuous unity the United States and its allies have built to oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Privately, White House officials say the coalition would explode with the first Israeli airstrike.

The Europeans have been ahead of Obama on the need to take a hard line against Iran, with French President Sarkozy fuming even during the election that Obama was “utterly immature”  …

More on James Q Wilson. This time from Michael Barone.

Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.

His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the distinctive middle initial.

And I think a case can be made that that Q was a clue to the character of the man. To outward appearances Jim Wilson was an ordinary middle class American with middle class values and middle class tastes as unremarkable as those of thousands of other Jim Wilsons across the land.

But as a scholar, writer and human being he was one of a kind, with a probing mind, a capacity to sift and weigh evidence and an ability to reach conclusions that even the harshest of critics found hard to refute.

And one whose careful prose did not always manage to conceal a puckish sense of humor. A man as distinctive as the Q.

And John Podhoretz.

James Q. Wilson—who was this nation’s foremost political scientist, literally the author of the definitive textbook on the workings of American government, a writer of uncommon grace and clarity, and a man who believed more than anyone I’ve ever known in the power of the human capacity to reason to change things for the better—died this morning at the age of 80.

To my mind, his greatest and most enduring book in his oeuvre is The Moral Sense, in which this very practically-minded man carefully lays out the case for the existence of the title condition as an innate condition of humankind. But his signal contribution to American life over the past 30 years lies in his work as a criminologist, and his delineation (with George Kelling) of the theory of “broken windows,” about how social disorder and crime are in large measure the result of little transgressions in behavior and against the common weal, that, ignored and unchallenged, grow into ever larger ones. The expostulation of the broken windows theory literally inaugurated the revolution in consciousness in American policing and criminal justice that led to the astounding crime drop of the 1990s—a drop that continues to this day. …

More from JoPod.

As I promised earlier in my post about the death of the great James Q. Wilson, Commentary is making available the entirety of his 45 years of contributions to our magazine. You can find the James Q. Wilson Archive here.  There is so much wonderful stuff it’s hard even to know where to begin, so let me start with the last words he published here, in our symposium called “Are You Optimistic or Pessimistic About America’s Future?” It will give you a flavor of the man’s unmatchable perspective:

“Many years ago, I confidently published an essay in which I made a prediction. It was hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong. Since then I have embraced the view that social scientists should never predict; leave that job to pundits. If you doubt me, make a list of the economists who predicted the 2008 recession, political scientists who predicted the Arab Spring, or criminologists who said that this recession would be accompanied by falling crime rates. A few names may make the list, but very few.

“Historians may do a better job than other scholars in making generalizations, but that is because the good ones never predict, they generalize from past experiences. Those experiences suggest that this country has been extraordinarily lucky, and they hint at some reasons for that good fortune: an adaptable government, an optimistic national character—and extraordinary good fortune …

In her She The People blog at WaPo, Melinda Henneberger tries to understand the moral equivalence of the left.

It’s hard to keep score in the still-escalating war on women, especially when the two sides in the fight have different standards of what’s insulting depending on who’s insulted.

The problem is that somehow, a sexist rant is only a sexist rant when it’s an attack on a woman in our own party. Otherwise, we call any comparison a “false equivalence” — and dream up creative ways in which conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut is not at all like liberal TV host Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a slut.

Watch and learn, aspiring parsers, as former Obama aide Bill Burton, founder of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama Super PAC to which HBO’s Bill Maher has donated $1 million, insists that Maher calling Sarah Palin what many women consider the most objectional slur is nothing like Limbaugh’s slurs against womankind.

As Burton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “the notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said over the course of his career and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said to sexually degrade a woman who led in a political debate of our time, is crazy.”

So Maher is a comedian, and Limbaugh isn’t — because Burton finds the one funny and the other a clown?

Michael Rubin wonders if there are worse places to live than Montgomery County, Maryland?

When I got married a few years back, I had wanted to stay in Virginia—where taxes were lower—but my wife wanted to live in Maryland, and so we compromised and moved to Maryland. Montgomery County, Maryland, is Democrat country. Lawn signs proliferate but, like elections in Cuba, they are all for a single party. Still, despite the high taxes and looming pension crisis, the school system is good and I figured, how much harm could a county government do? A lot, it seems. With little debate and even less coverage, Montgomery County passed a law to discourage disposable bags by imposing a 5 cent charge for each plastic or paper bag used. The charge applies not only in supermarkets, but in all stores: Home Depot? Bag charge. Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Bag Charge. Barnes and Noble? Bag charge. Take-out Chinese food? Bag charge.

While county officials justify the bag tax in kindergarten environmentalism, this is nonsense.

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Thomas Sowell thinks an Israel that depends on an Obama promise is in trouble.

What are we to make of President Barack Obama’s latest pronouncements about Iran’s movement toward nuclear bombs? His tough talk might have had some influence on Iran a couple of years ago, when he was instead being kinder and gentler with the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring nation. Now his tough talk may only influence this year’s election — which may be enough for Obama.

The track record of Barack Obama’s pronouncements on a wide range of issues suggests that anything he says is a message written in sand, and easily blown away by the next political winds. Remember the “shovel-ready projects” that would spring into action and jump-start the economy, once the “stimulus” money was available? Obama himself laughed at this idea a year or so later, when it was clear to all that these projects were going nowhere.

Remember how his administration was going to be one with “transparency”? Yet massive spending bills were passed too fast for the Congress itself to have read them. Remember the higher ethics his administration would practice — and yet how his own Secretary of the Treasury was appointed despite his failure to pay his taxes?

If you were an Israeli, how willing would you be to risk your national survival on Obama’s promise to stand by your country? If you were a leader of Iran, what would you make of what Obama said, except that an election year might not be the best time to attack Israel? …

Roger Simon went to AIPAC this year and files his impressions.

  Before Sunday morning, I had never seen Barack Obama in person. Of course, I had seen him on television roughly as often as Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse combined, but the man himself had eluded my eyes.

Not that seeing him with approximately 13,000 other AIPAC attendees and press (not sure exactly how many were there, but most) in the Washington Convention Center constitutes anybody’s version of “up close and personal.” But I am forced to admit — and you can put this down to the power of preconceptions, if you wish — that catching our president in the flesh only confirmed what I had long thought of him from afar.

This is one strange dude — part narcissist, part Chicago ward heeler, part neo-Alinskyite marxist, part talk show host smoothie, part nowhere man. The ideas might be there, traceable back to Ayers, Dohrn, and Reverend Wright, but he has pushed them far away, almost as if he were trying to forget them. They were no longer functional and had to go, but he is left with… what?

It’s hard to tell what he really thinks now because I suspect even he doesn’t know what that is. He is a kind of moving target, not just to us, but to himself. …

Good post from James Pethokoukis on the meaning of economic freedom and the will to prosper.

You think the Great Recession is the biggest economic story of our time? Nope. Not even close. This is:

“A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. … Much of the story was about China, which moved nearly 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13 percent from 84 percent during that period. The country’s annual pace of economic growth never dipped below 9 percent, even in 2009, when the world’s economy contracted.”

What happened in China? Well, although there’s a debate over whether or not Deng Xiaoping actually said it, his alleged axiom, “To get rich is glorious” is certainly the message Beijing started sending in 1978. And what people hear and believe matters. Really matters. Economist Deirdre McCloskey on how “bourgeois dignity” created the modern world:

“We need to explain the astonishing enrichment in bourgeois countries from 1800 to the present, such as Norway’s move from $3 a day in 1800 to $137 in 2006. But the explanation cannot be economic. If it were so — trade, investment, incentives — it would have happened earlier, or in other places. Economics determines how the tide of growth expressed itself down this inlet or beside that quay. Good. But the tide itself had “rhetorical” causes. …

What changed were habits of the lip. It’s not a “rise of the bourgeoisie,” but a rise in other people’s opinion of the bourgeoisie that makes for economic growth — as it is now doing in China and India. When people treat the marketeers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold. It was so to speak a shift in “constitutional political economy,” as James Buchanan puts the point. People agreed on the meta-rule of letting the economy go where it will. This contrasted with the earlier mentality, still admired on the left, that treats each act of innovation as an occasion to go looking for its victims. Victims there were, but they were greatly outnumbered by winners. It was ideas, not matter, that made the winners, and brought our ancestors from $3 to over $100 a day.”

Nick Schulz explains how the denial of T-Mobile purchase forces more players to play politics.

When the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission weighed the merits of AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile, they focused almost exclusively on the post-merger competition landscape. As a result, they failed to take into account a key rationale for the proposed deal: T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom (DTE), badly needed to get out of the U.S. market. Why? It concluded it could not compete effectively, and it needed to deploy its capital elsewhere.

Ignoring Deutsche Telekom’s needs, the DOJ and FCC blocked the merger. As a result, an uncompetitive firm is now trapped in a market it wanted to leave.

It didn’t take long, but we are now starting to see some of the unfortunate knock-on effects of the Obama administration’s effort to manage competition in telecommunications.

Deutsche Telekom is evaluating operations elsewhere around the globe as a result of the blocked deal. Recent press reports have the company looking to exit the UK market in an effort to raise much needed cash. According to one news account, “The former German phone monopoly had planned to use the proceeds [from the sale of T-Mobile to AT&T] to cut debt by 13 billion euros … Deutsche Telekom also needs funds to upgrade fiber and wireless networks in Germany and other European markets.”

Instead of Deustsche Telekom shareholders being free to allocate capital as they see fit, American regulators have forced them to prop up a wounded subsidiary, needlessly penalizing DTE shareholders.

Not only that, but Deutsche Telekom’s experience in the U.S. is a warning to other large companies to think twice before taking big risks in the American market, a consequence that will ultimately hurt U.S. consumers.

Unable to compete effectively in the U.S. private market, T-Mobile now has no choice but to compete in America’s political market. And this is where new troubles begin for American consumers. …

Hugh Hewitt writes a prequel for an 2012 election book for The Corner.

… “No one realized it at the time, but the paces Rick Santorum put Mitt Romney through in March planted the seeds of the president-elect’s sweeping win Tuesday night.  Even as Newt Gingrich had forced Romney to raise his rhetorical and debating game earlier in the cycle, Rick Santorum’s late winter surge pushed Romney to create the organizations and mine the data in Michigan and Ohio that helped deliver those crucial states on Tuesday night. 

“‘It felt like Hell at the time,’ a jubilant Matt Rhoades mused on Wednesday morning after a late night of celebrations over a landslide most observers thought impossible even weeks ago, ‘but what we learned then, the people we turned out, the volunteer and donor base we developed, well, it made all the difference in the swing states.’”

“’We couldn’t have created a better primary map for building a general election campaign, even though none of us would have picked that particular training regime,’ Rhoades added.”

“The unrelenting hostility of ‘Obama’s hand puppets in the MSM,’ as one Romney senior advisor put it, helped push Team Romney into an aggressiveness that might never have surfaced had the president-elect not been pushed from Iowa forward, and even a despondent David Axelrod had to admit last night that his plan to bleed Romney in the spring had, in fact, backfired.” …

Peter Schiff says there are reasons for Warren Buffet to knock gold.

… In the early stages of the financial crisis, when I was writing and promoting my first book Crash Proof to warn private investors about trouble ahead, Buffett was accumulating shares in companies such as Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and General Electric. I knew these companies were insolvent, so I wouldn’t touch them with gardening gloves on. When the credit markets seized up, Buffett worked behind the scenes and in public to make sure each of his pet companies were bailed out. This was not by coincidence. Buffett actually stated in September 2008 that he would not have invested in Goldman Sachs if not for the implicit guarantee of federal assistance. As a result, he profited at the expense of taxpayers at the very time when they were losing their savings in the markets. Meanwhile, many “in the know” politicians bought Berkshire stock during the height of the crisis, making a profit from their votes, and giving them incentive to revere Buffett all the more. Buffett once said if that if the government didn’t bailout failed companies, he would be “having my Thanksgiving dinner at McDonald’s instead of having a big dinner at my daughter’s.” Seems like there were two bloated turkeys at that meal.

If Buffett were a true capitalist, he would be in favor of gold. He has noted that the value of the dollar has fallen 86% since he took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and even said in his latest shareholder letter that investors are “right to be fearful of paper money.” But he continues to harp on gold. It seems the only unit of account Mr. Buffett approves are shares of his own company!

The adoption of an independent measure of value like gold presents two problems to Buffett. First, it would reduce the nominal returns of his dollar-based investing strategy. Second, it would restrict Washington’s ability to goose the financial system in his favor. …

According to Jon Entine at AEI, even the NY Times is coming to see the value of fracking for natural gas.

There are new twists in the ever-entertaining shale gas saga. The New York Times, which turned obscure Cornell University marine ecologist Robert Howarth into an anti-fracking rock star on the way to getting hammered by its own public editor—I take some of the credit—for its biased reporting on the subject, is finally getting on the science bandwagon.

Last April, the Times ran two articles in a week promoting Howarth’s claim that shale gas generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the production and use of coal. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this paper, which ricocheted through the media echo chamber and was even debated in the British parliament.

What the Times didn’t report then, and until now has been systematically ignored, is that almost every independent researcher—at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Energy Department, and numerous independent university teams, including a Carnegie Mellon study partly financed by the Sierra Club—has slammed Howarth’s conclusions. Within the field, Howarth is considered an activist, not an independent scientist. Many commentators, including independent lefty columnist Joe Nocera, think the gas is too valuable to be left in the ground, as the hard Left is urging.

Maybe a little fresh air is finally leaking into the Times’ insular chambers. …

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We devote a lot of space today to a profile of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh by James Kirchick in Commentary. Hersh is an example of the mendacity and partisanship of that magazine. Another example of the New Yorker’s bias is a list of pieces published in the last six months;

February 3, 2012          Jobs Report Makes It a “Super Friday” for WH – John Cassidy, New Yorker    (This was writen the day of the report.)

October 21, 2011          Will Stunning Success in Libya Help Obama? – David Remnick, New Yorker

October 12, 2011          Can Obama Win? Not This Way – John Cassidy, The New Yorker

October 3, 2011            A Hysterical Overreaction to Solyndra – James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

September 27, 2011     GOP Is Dedicated to Destroying Obama – Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker

September 12, 2011     President’s New Plan Will Boost Economy, Jobs – John Cassidy, New Yorker

September 10, 2011     President Obama vs. the Nihilists – George Packer, The New Yorker

September 9, 2011       Barry Gives ‘Em Hell – Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

August 30, 2011            Obama’s Quiet Victory in Libya – David Remnick, The New Yorker

August 26, 2011            Leading From Behind to Victory – David Remnick, The New Yorker
 

Here are some excerpts from Kirchick’s piece;

Last June, the distinguished American journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real Is the Nuclear Threat?” His answer: not very. There exists no “irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” Hersh asserted, relying upon the words of anonymous “intelligence and diplomatic officials.” Hersh concluded with a quote from Mohamed ElBaradei, who had retired as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) two years earlier: “During my time at the agency,” ElBaradei said, “we haven’t seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing, in terms of building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”

A week before Hersh’s piece hit newsstands, news came of a letter sent by Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei’s successor, to the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The IAEA had received “further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear-related activities.” Amano wished to “reiterate the concern about the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Iran, as it has always done, dismissed the evidence collected by the IAEA as forgeries. 

In September, the IAEA revealed it had received information about Iranian “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Two months later, the agency released yet another report confirming what everyone already knew: The regime is pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. Among other information, the agency revealed tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” “the acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear-supply network,” and “work on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components.” The IAEA cited more than 1,000 document pages of “credible” information related to Iranian weaponization, accumulated by “more than 10 member states.”

The damning IAEA report was a long time coming. In September 2009, at a joint press conference on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the declassification of intelligence that revealed a secret, underground uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom—a highly inconvenient place to produce fuel rods for medical isotopes. Obama said that he delayed releasing the information for months, as it “is very important in these kind of high-stakes situations to make sure the intelligence is right,” and that the revelation of the plant “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.”

Hersh—the man described by the Financial Times as “the last great American reporter”—was unfazed. There remains “no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” he wrote in a November 18 blog post. To account for the IAEA’s increasingly harsh tone toward Tehran, he suggested that the agency’s new head, unlike ElBaradei, was a lackey of Washington, telling a radio interviewer that “Amano has pledged his fealty to America.”

Indeed, the IAEA report was nothing more than “a political document,” Hersh said, before revealing a hint as to why he was so adamant in denying the obvious about Iran’s nuclear intentions:

‘I wish we could separate our feelings about Iran and the mullahs and what happened with the students from 1979, into the reality, which is that I think there’s a very serious chance the Iranians would certainly give us the kind of inspections we want, in return for a little love—an end to sanctions and a respect that they insist that they want to get from us.’

As for the Obama administration’s posture toward Iran, it was little better than that of its predecessor. “The new report, therefore, leaves us where we’ve been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil,” Hersh wrote, “with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.” 

What could explain the positions of Obama and Clinton—liberal Democrats who, in Hersh’s eyes, have made the cardinal sin of expressing such distress about a nuclear-weapons program that doesn’t even exist? “Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it,” Hersh said in a 2007 interview on the far-left Democracy Now! radio show, in a discussion about the Democratic presidential primary. “A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat,” he continued. “And I think it’s as simple as that.” …

… For his reporting on My Lai, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize, and the story made him, in the words of then-New York Times managing editor A.M. Rosenthal, “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” The Times promptly hired Hersh to work in its Washington bureau, where the sloppiness that would come to define his journalism career soon became evident. In 1974, he claimed that the former U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, was involved in a coup d’état the previous year. It wasn’t until 1981 that Hersh would write a 3,000-word, front-page retraction exonerating Korry that Time referred to as “the longest correction ever published.”  …

… When not accusing Republicans and Israelis of warmongering, Hersh downplays or ignores the actual warlike behavior of rogue states. In this role, he has been a literal court stenographer to tyrants. In February 2008, Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that a Syrian facility bombed by Israel the previous September “apparently had little to do with…nuclear reactors.” Three months later, the Bush administration released a series of images of the facility before it had been destroyed, revealing nuclear fuel rods similar to ones used in North Korea, as well as a photograph of the head of North Korean’s Yongbyon nuclear plant meeting with Syria’s nuclear agency director. Last April, IAEA’s Yukiya Amano unequivocally stated that the site was “a nuclear reactor under construction.” And in November, UN investigators found evidence that Syria was working with rogue Pakistani nuclear-weapons scientist A.Q. Khan on its facility. 

The following year, Hersh authored a piece suggesting that Bashar al-Assad—inserted into power in 2000 after his father, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades, died—was eager for a peace deal with Israel. Communicating with Hersh by e-mail, the dictator wrote that, while Jerusalem was “doing everything possible to undermine the prospects for peace…we still believe that we need to conclude a serious dialogue to lead us to peace.” Hersh met with Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, who assured the New Yorker correspondent that “Syria is eager to engage with the West”—a genuine desire for peace that, of course, “was never perceived by the Bush White House.” …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: 82-year-old Christopher Plummer is the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award. Of course, when the show started, he was only 79.

Conan:  ‘The Artist’ won five Oscars. That works out to one Oscar for every person who saw the movie.

Fallon: Feb. 29 was Leap Day, something that only happens once every four years — or as Newt Gingrich calls that, ‘a sit-up.’

Fallon: Today marks the 158th anniversary of the Republican Party. While tomorrow marks the 158th Republican debate.

If you hang around Colorado folks, you’ll hear about 14ers – mountains over 14,000 feet high. We found a breathtaking picture of Mt. Everest taken from a Napal hut located at 14,000 feet. Only three more miles to go.

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Ron Christie, Pickings reader, says the GOP will do fine in November.

While gleeful reports abound that the G.O.P. is disorganized, dispirited and headed to defeat in November, facts have a way of ruining this rosy narrative for the Democrats. Observing Democrats and their supporters in the media (like the author of the New York magazine article), one would think President Obama has already been re-elected – and the actual voting is nothing more than a formality.

Despite such cheerleading, Democrats, not Republicans, should be worried about their prospects this election cycle. One need not look any further than the 2010 midterm election as a barometer as to why Democrats shouldn’t be planning their redecorations of the Oval Office, Congress or the state house following the 2012 contest.

Notwithstanding claims by the president and Democratic leaders, the “stimulus package” and the Affordable Care Act remain deeply unpopular with a majority of the American people. Whether the left believes it or not, voters chose the 2010 midterm elections to rebuke both President Obama and Congressional Democrats for their overreach in dramatically expanding the size and scope of the federal government. …

Andrew Malcolm spots the irony of the president kicking a woman out to the way so he can make an election year commencement address at Barnard College.

… we are now privy to how President Obama approaches commencement addresses: He invites himself. For strategic communications purposes.

Any president gets scores of speech invitations every graduation season. This president has followed a usual policy of doing four a year, usually a public school, a private school, a black school and a service academy.

This year, we now know, one of his speeches will be at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University. Obama’s aides invited him to speak at Barnard, according to the school’s president, Debora Spar, because they said, ”As the father of two daughters, President Obama wanted to speak to some of America’s next generation of women leaders.”

Of course, Obama has been the father of two daughters for a decade now. So, what makes this leap year so daughtery-special? Well, mainly Nov. 6. The women’s vote is a very important sector in presidential politics.

And Obama’s policy people have been driving a variety of issues this year designed to place him in the most sympathetic light of female eyes. Can you say Health and Human Services’ contraception insurance coverage decision? And having the president insert himself into the Sandra Fluke controversy over a 30-year-old student seeking government support for her $3,000 birth control needs. …

The president gave a speech last week to the UAW. David Harsanyi comments.

… the United Auto Workers union is a special interest. Like other unions, the UWA regularly lobbies Congress, funds Democratic candidates across the country with millions, and advocates public policy that undercuts competition and free trade. And, as The New York Times recently reported, the UAW and other unions will “put their vast political organizations into motion behind Mr. Obama.” (Nothing like a few strategic taxpayer “investments” to get labor inspired.)

And if by “be beaten down” the president means “compete in the marketplace like every other sucker in America,” well, he’s right. If by “be beaten down” he means “go to bankruptcy court — even if you’ve ‘played by the rules’ — and honor contracts you’ve signed rather than have a friendly administration rip them up and rewrite them in favorable terms for others, then heck yeah.

Yet Obama claims, “I” — “I” — “placed my bet on American workers.”

Now, it’s your bet, technically, of course, Mr. President. And let’s be honest; all my favorite bets are made with other people’s money. But you didn’t bet on the American people. That would mean betting that the marketplace and those in it have the capacity and the smarts to find increasingly productive and innovative ways to produce the things that consumers demand. You bet on a politically convenient corporation that believes it’s entitled to eternal state-sponsored protection. Too bad Woolworth’s and Pan Am couldn’t hold out until you came along. …

Politico has a story that adds emphasis to Ron Christie’s post above. Pelosi and Reid have asked the White House for campaign cash this year and have been told to take a hike. Obama is all out for himself and the hell with the rest of the Dems. Oh the humanity!

… The tightfistedness by the Obama campaign toward Hill Democrats reflects the harsh realities of the 2012 White House fight. Obama, who broke all fundraising records in his historic 2008 run, isn’t going to be the overwhelming financial juggernaut that he was four years ago. Obama still has a big edge in money raised and cash on hand — OFA and the DNC reported nearly $92 million in cash at the end of January after hauling in a combined $250 million last year, according to campaign records — over any Republican challenger.

But that still leaves Obama far short of the $1 billion that many pundits had predicted he would raise this cycle. Messina has railed against such claims for months, as it became a problem for Obama because some donors didn’t think he needed their support. Obama could still raise $700 million to $800 million, Democrats predict, a total that could be eclipsed by the GOP nominee, the Republican National Committee and shadowy pro-GOP super PACs.

The financial caution for the Obama team also reflects the growing power of super PACs, especially for Republicans. The groups — technically unaffiliated with any candidate yet already a huge factor in the GOP presidential contest — are prepared to dump tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, into the White House race. So far, Democrats, including Obama’s own super PAC allies, have been unable to match that flood of pro-Republican cash.

For instance, Crossroads, the Karl Rove-linked super PAC and nonprofit, will spend as much as $300 million bolstering the GOP presidential nominee and Republican congressional candidates and incumbents, POLITICO and other news organizations have reported. …

Bill McGurn reminds us that in 1980 Reagan was not Reagan.  

… Then as now, the Republican primaries opened with a bang, when George H.W. Bush upset Ronald Reagan in the Iowa caucuses. By late February, this loss would lead to Reagan’s firing of his campaign manager, John Sears, in a disagreement over strategy.

Then, as now, Republicans feared that an unhappy contender might bolt the party to mount an independent campaign. In 1980, that was liberal John Anderson, not libertarian Ron Paul. Mr. Anderson did end up running as an independent, whereas Mr. Paul will likely be constrained by the effect a third-party run would have on the future prospects for his Republican son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Then as now, the chattering classes wondered aloud whether a candidate who could win the Republican nomination could prevail against President Carter in November. On March 1, former President Gerald Ford amplified that view when he told a New York Times reporter, “Every place I go and everything I hear, there is the growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election.”

Then as now, some put their hopes on a late entry, in the same way that some now pine for Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie to enter the race. In the same interview where Mr. Ford predicted that Reagan’s nomination would mean a repeat of 1964, he also declared himself open to a draft if there were a genuine “urging” by the party. …

Rasmussen Reports shows the Obama weakness.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 25% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18 …

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Today’s efforts focus on James Q. Wilson who just passed. PowerLIne starts it off.

There’s a persistently legend that deaths of similarly situated famous people—actors, writers, political figures, etc.—come in threes.  One of the persons who would have gone to the statistics to debunk this notion, social scientist James Q. Wilson, died today, just a day after Andrew Breitbart, and shortly after Christopher Hitchens.  Like Hitchens and Breitbart, Wilson was utterly unique and irreplaceable.

I knew him slightly better than Breitbart, in his capacity as the chair of the board of academic advisers to AEI.  We feted him at our chairman’s dinner back in December, during which George Will reminisced:

In his exasperation one day [Pat Moynihan] encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said, “Mr. president, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.”

Nixon did. Not enough, the Lord knows, but he did pay some attention. James Q. Wilson’s name became sufficiently well-known to the Nixon reelection campaign that they solicited Jim’s name to be included on an ad—Democrats, I believe, for Nixon. I may be wrong; I take this from Moynihan’s letters. At this point, Jim Wilson was being considered for membership on a presidential commission on drug abuse, which he cared much about, and the president cared much about, and he wanted to have this.

But Jim said to this Nixon campaign apparatchik, he says, well, I might allow my name to be on that. In which case, of course, you would have to withdraw my name as a nominee to the drug panel and not consider me for any other position lest it seemed that my name is for sale. It was a kind of nicety not normally seen in Washington and probably unexpected on the part of the Nixon people, who were that not used to dealing with professors. . .

But wherever Republicans go, and certainly I feel the same way, we feel sooner or later we have a Robinson Crusoe experience. We look down and we see footprints in the sand of someone who’s there ahead of us, and it’s always James Q. Wilson. It’s very discouraging, frankly. The prescience of the man is astonishing, partly because, as I say, everything we’re arguing about today, he has argued already.

In his own remarks, Wilson struck a modest pose:

Let me turn to my own field, political science. In 2008, despite up-to-date polling, despite the results of countless debates, political scientists were persuaded that the candidates for the presidency would be Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani. There were two other people whom nobody spent any time talking about. Now, this is the background for people who try to guess about the future. It reinforces my view that the main role of a social scientist is not to predict the future but to explain what happened in the past.

My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right.

You can read the whole tribute to him here.

And here is that tribute from AEI’s dinner for James Wilson. First is Arthur Brooks.

… Jim is the author of more than a dozen books. One reviewer has described his 1993 seminal book The Moral Sense as “the most significant reflection on this matter since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Book reviews just don’t get better than that. He’s had an enormously distinguished academic career. Currently, he’s a professor at Boston College’s Department of Political Science, but before that he has served as the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine, the James Collins Professor of Management at UCLA, and the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation, and a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association. Jim has been an intellectual hero and mentor to me and to many people of AEI for many years. At one point in my academic career, I was citing Jim so much that my colleagues said I should change my name to Arthur Q. Brooks.

I met Jim because he sat in on my Ph.D. dissertation defense lo these many years ago. Several years after that, I got an email from Jim. He knew that I was doing work on charitable giving at that time. I was an untenured assistant professor, and he asked me a research question about charitable giving, saying that he was thinking of writing a book on the subject.

I took the opportunity to send the great man an outline of a book that I was working on, on charitable giving. It was a pretty audacious thing to do, but I did it anyway. Quickly, within a few minutes, I got an email back from him saying, “I enjoyed your outline. I don’t think I need to write my book now, but I’d be delighted to help you with yours.” He carefully reviewed each one of the chapters in that book. He wrote the book’s foreword. He made the book immeasurably better, and that project quite literally changed the trajectory of my career. That’s a little bit of insight into the man and to the character of the man. A giant intellect with the convictions of a patriot and with a servant’s heart, that’s why he’s a hero to so many of us in this room tonight. …

Here’s more from Charles Murray.

… Back in 1975 when I was a newly minted Ph.D., I picked up the New York Times magazine and therein found an article entitled, “Lock Them Up and Other Thoughts on Crime.” In the first place, I just loved the title because in 1975 no academic said lock them up. Imprisonment was barbarous and we ought to be rehabilitating people. That you would entitle an article like that struck me as something audacious.

But then I read the article and I fell in love even more because, as all of you who have read Jim Wilson know, you have this mastery of the literature. You have this calm, wry voice, and you have this person who is speaking to you as an adult, who expects you to understand nuanced arguments, and respects you for your ability to do so. He became my hero.

Four or five years later, I wrote an evaluation of a program in Cook County, Chicago, for chronic juvenile delinquents, so obscure that no one could possibly have found it except, somehow, James Q. Wilson did. He called me up on the phone and said, I’m going to be in Washington, let’s have lunch. It was as if a parish priest in some village in Galway had gotten a call from the pope: I’m in the neighborhood, let’s have a drink.

So Jim came to Washington and I, quivering, went to the lunch where he quizzed me on the article and treated me as if he were chatting with Harvey Mansfield in the Harvard faculty club. It was an immensely gratifying experience for me, but that’s not why I’m telling the story. It’s because of what it says about Jim Wilson. First as a scholar, because if he knew about that evaluation of that program in Chicago, he knew everything there was to know about his topic, which has been characteristic of all of his work. The second is the person—unassuming, treating people not according to their status but simply as colleagues, a man who warrants the term gentleman in a way that is seldom used anymore. …

And here are some of Wilson’s remarks at that dinner. Find the ever so subtle slap at the man Don Imus calls, “skunk vomit,” That would be Newt.

… My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right. But as I look at AEI, I’ve discovered one thing that is quite remarkable. By and large, AEI scholars have done better at predicting the future than the people interviewed by Philip Tetlock or these brokerage accounts analyzed by Terry Odeon.

Fred Kagan and his wife predicted that the surge would work in Iraq and described how to make it work, and they were absolutely correct. Peter Wallison, in an early piece published in The New York Times on September 30, 1999, explained that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were disastrous and would become bankrupt. Within a few years, they proved to be disasters and became bankrupt, meanwhile having spent many millions of dollars on persons who, though not lobbyists, were busy advising them. In 2010, Des Lachman explained that Greece was going to (heading for) a crisis that would make it threaten to leave the European Union.

Now, why did these scholars do better than the ones interviewed by Tetlock? I think part of it is good management. Chris DeMuth and Arthur Brooks have been extraordinarily good at picking people who, despite the odds against them, do better than the averages and make statements that, though they may not value predicting the future, do better at predicting the future than anyone else. …

Turns out this is Neanderthal week. The New Scientist says they were sea-going. 

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago – though not everyone is convinced they weren’t just good swimmers.

Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren’t islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. …

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The president is spinning about what a good friend he is to Israel. Anne Bayefsky begs to differ.

On the eve of a meeting between President Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president has orchestrated the publication of his most revealing interview yet on the state of relations between the two countries. Instead of bolstering his pro-Israel image, however, the interview is proof-positive of his dangerous animus towards the Jewish state and its elected leaders.

The interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg took place earlier this week but was released only today. In it, the president exasperatedly asked:

“Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they’ve had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?”

To which Goldberg solicitously responded: “That’s a good way to phrase it.” The president replied: “There is no good reason to doubt me on these issues.”

Let me count the ways.

During the interview the president claimed to “have Israel’s back” at the United Nations, among other places. The administration’s actions at the UN allegedly corroborate that his “relationship [with Israel] is very functional and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

What digestible meal might that be? The president specified:

“When you look at what I’ve done with respect to … fighting back against delegitimization of Israel, whether at the [UN] Human Rights Council, or in front of the General Assembly, or during the Goldstone Report, or after the flare-up involving the flotilla — the truth of the matter is that the relationship has functioned very well.”

Actually, the truth is that President Obama has done more to legitimize the delegitimizers of Israel than any other president in the history of the Jewish state.

For instance, …

And domestically there are the anti-growth policies of this administration. Jim Powell was in Forbes.

For several hundred years, a consensus developed in Western nations that economic growth – human progress – is a good thing. But now economic growth is under attack.

Economic growth has meant more jobs, higher incomes, more wealth and all the good things that become possible — a more comfortable life, better nutrition, better health care, more education, a cleaner environment, a secure retirement, a higher life expectancy and confidence that our children will be living even better.

In addition, when there is sustained progress, people gain greater peace of mind. They tend to become optimistic, more generous and tolerant. There’s more political stability, and democracies are more likely to flourish when, as John F. Kennedy famously remarked, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Yet President Obama has backed one anti-growth policy after another. His relentless class warfare rhetoric suggests he thinks growth is bad because some people have a lot more money than others. He might deny that he’s anti?growth, but his actions speak louder than words.

During 2008 election campaign, he acknowledged that he favored capital gains tax hikes, even though the results would be less investment, less job creation and less capital gains tax revenue.

He had to have known that by draining hundreds of billions of dollars away from the private sector, then channeling the bulk of the money to government bureaucracies and government employee unions, his stimulus bill would mainly “save or create” government jobs, not private sector jobs.

He had to have known that the following policies would increase cost of operating a business, making it harder to create private sector growth and jobs: …

WSJ OpEd on the end of life choices made by doctors for themselves.

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life. 

What’s unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little.

Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with his family. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently. …

Sweden’s Uppsala University published some new ideas about the demise of Neandertals.

New findings from an international team of researchers show that most neandertals in Europe died off around 50,000 years ago. The previously held view of a Europe populated by a stable neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years up until modern humans arrived must therefore be revised.

This new perspective on the neandertals comes from a study of ancient DNA published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The results indicate that most neandertals in Europe died off as early as 50,000 years ago. After that, a small group of neandertals recolonised central and western Europe, where they survived for another 10,000 years before modern humans entered the picture. The study is the result of an international project led by Swedish and Spanish researchers in Uppsala, Stockholm and Madrid. …