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Charles Krauthammer writes on the “atrocities board.”

Last year President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing “would have been a betrayal of who we are,” explained the president.

In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.

Obama has said that we cannot stand idly by. And what has he done? Stand idly by.

Yes, we’ve imposed economic sanctions. But as with Iran, the economic squeeze has not altered the regime’s behavior. Monday’s announced travel and financial restrictions on those who use social media to track down dissidents is a pinprick. No Disney World trips for the chiefs of the Iranian and Syrian security agencies. And they might now have to park their money in Dubai instead of New York. That’ll stop ’em.

Obama’s other major announcement — at Washington’s Holocaust Museum, no less — was the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board.

I kid you not. A board. Russia flies planeloads of weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies money, trainers, agents, more weapons. And what does America do? Support a feckless U.N. peace mission that does nothing to stop the killing. (Indeed, some of the civilians who met with the U.N. observers were summarily executed.) And establish an Atrocities Prevention Board.

With multiagency participation, mind you. The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody. …

Fouad Ajami has more.

Little more than a year into their terrible ordeal, the Syrians are a people unillusioned. “We have been forsaken by the world,” a noted figure of the opposition recently told me in Istanbul.

Days later, in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Antakya, in a tent city a stone’s throw from their tormented homeland, ordinary Syrians reiterate the same message. The ongoing Kofi Annan diplomacy and United Nations-brokered “cease-fire” are seen for what they are—an alibi for the abdication of Western powers, and a lifeline for the regime.

Abu Muhammad, a propertied man in his mid-60s from the town of Jisr al-Shughur, now in this camp with his family for more than 10 months, says the world knows all it needs to know about the Damascus regime but prefers to turn a blind eye to its savagery. Two of his sons have been killed in the protests, a third is missing. He is weary of the pronouncement of the mighty.

In the Syria deliberations, deliverance is always around the corner. American diplomacy is always on the verge of making Russia see its way to the proper path. In these tortured discussions, there is no end to finesse and to the parsing of things.

Syria is not Libya, the Obama officials opine. Homs is not Benghazi, they note. The air defenses of Syria are thick when compared with those of Libya, the army of the Damascus regime is mightier. And then there is the mother of all alibis—the borders of Syria are more sensitive, and they preclude a rescue operation akin to the one that delivered the Libyans from the grip of their tyrant.

The truth is that the air defense system of the Syrians can be dismantled with ease. And that mighty army of the House of Assad? The Syrians refer to it as jaysh abu shahatta (the army in slippers). The Sunni recruits are worn out, terrified and underfed, thrown into assignments they abhor and dread—the killing of their fellow Sunnis. …

California is slowly collapsing its economy. Joel Kotkin wonders why the administration would want to follow its lead.

Barack Obama learned the rough sport of politics in Chicago, but his domestic policies have been shaped by California’s progressive creed. As the Golden State crumbles, its troubles point to those America may confront in a second Obama term.

From his first days in office, the president has held up California as a model state. In 2009, he praised its green-tinged energy policies as a blueprint for the nation. He staffed his administration with Californians like Energy Secretary Steve Chu—an open advocate of high energy prices who’s lavished government funding on “green” dodos like solar-panel maker Solyndra, and luxury electric carmaker Fisker—and Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who thrived as CEO of a regulated utility which raised energy costs for millions of consumers, sometimes to finance “green” ideals.

Obama regularly asserts that green jobs will play a crucial role in the future of the American economy, but California, a trend-setter in the field, has yet to reap such benefits. Green jobs, broadly defined, make up only about 2 percent of jobs in the state—about the same proportion as in Texas. In Silicon Valley, the number of green jobs actually declined between 2003 and 2010. Meanwhile, California’s unemployment rate of 10.9 percent is the nation’s third highest, behind only Nevada and Rhode Island.

When Governor Jerry Brown predicted a half-million green jobs by the end of the decade, even The New York Times deemed it “a pipe dream.”

Obama’s push to nationalize many of California’s economy-stifling green policies has been slowed down, first by the Republican resurgence in 2010 and then by his reelection considerations. But California’s politicians, living in what’s become essentially a one-party state, have doubled down on green orthodoxy. As the president at least tries to cover his flank by claiming to support an “all-in” energy policy, California has simply refused to exploit much of its massive oil and gas resources.

Does this matter? Well, Texas has created 200,000 oil and gas jobs over the past decade; California has barely added 20,000. The state’s remaining energy producers have been slowing down as the regulatory environment becomes ever more hostile even as producers elsewhere, including in rustbelt states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, ramp up. The oil and gas jobs the Golden State political class shuns pay around $100,000 a year on average. ….

The dog thing blew up in their faces, so next the Dems tried polygamy. Mark Steyn explains.

… For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democrat governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Gov. Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.

Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Gov. Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democrat hypocrisy but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives. Jeremy Funk and Gov. Schweitzer reflexively believe that their dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy’s dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack being 6 or 10 years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and 10 years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other. …

John Steele Gordon posts on EPA administrators gone wild.

It is often said that the definition of the word gaffe in Washington-speak is when someone accidentally tells the truth. Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator for Texas and surrounding states, certainly made a gaffe when he said in a speech in 2010, that the best way to enforce environmental laws was to crucify a few oil companies so that the rest will fall in line. He noted that the Romans used this technique when they conquered a new town, crucifying the first five people they could get their hands on so that the place would be very easy to manage for the next few years. (I expect that that is actually a slander against the Romans, although they had no scruples against selling whole populations into slavery.)

Armendariz was, let us hope, using a metaphor. But his actions indicate that he is all too willing to act first and get, well, evidence of wrong doing, later. The New York Times reported on December 8th, 2010, that he had signed an emergency order:

Dallas-based EPA Regional Director Al Armendariz issued an emergency order yesterday against Range Resources Corp., charging that its drilling in the Barnett Shale contaminated at least two water wells with methane and benzene. The order gave Range 48 hours to provide clean drinking water to affected residents and begin taking steps to resolve the problem.

Armendariz’s order is not simply an action against the company, but a slap at regulators at the Texas Railroad Commission, whom he accused of not doing enough to help the people living near the drilling operations in the Fort Worth area.

Earlier this month, the EPA finally withdrew the order, having been able to produce no evidence whatever that Range Resources was in any way responsible.  (It might be noted in passing that while the emergency order was a major story in the Times, its withdrawal was not news fit to print. Nor is the news of  Armendariz’s recently revealed remarks.)

The United States, which invented both the petroleum industry, in 1859, and the transportation of natural gas over long distances by pipeline, in 1891, is on the cusp of what could be the greatest boom in energy production in its history, a boom that would not only reduce the price of energy—a major input into the struggling economy–but would greatly improve the country’s trade balance, help the dollar, and improve America’s foreign policy options.

The Obama administration, in thrall to the anti-capitalist environmental lobby, is doing everything possible to prevent it.

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Andrew Malcolm fills us in on the folks who will be the talking heads this morning.

Because the Obama administration is not interested in taking yet another victory lap over the SEALs killing Osama bin Laden almost a year ago, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, will get up early to be on several Sunday morning shows to recount how dramatic the incident was for those folks watching it unfold from the safety of the White House basement.

You remember Brennan as the one rushed out to the White House briefing room the next day to provide the hungry media with their cherished tick-tock account of the commandos’ penetration into Pakistan and the slaying of the instigator of 9/11.

Unfortunately, so eager was the administration to tell its story quickly, that Brennan’s premature enunciation of the event contained numerous details later adjusted or contradicted, detracting from the anticipated accolades.

By now, however, most of the raid confusion is cleared. And everyone knows that the successful killing was mainly the result of Obama’s brave decision, although the SEALs, the stealth helicopter pilots and the Air Force electronic cloaking crews probably helped a little.

Oh, look, it’s an election year!

Anyway, Brennan will tell his boss’ tale on Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union and ABC’s This Week. Perhaps he’ll also be asked about the TSA’s effectiveness in fighting terror and causing ridiculous patdowns. …

Noemie Emery says the Dems are running from the Healthcare bill like it carried the plague. 

Two years and one month after it passed — and two years and three months after it might have proved useful — Democrats are regretting the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now that we know it is nothing if not unaffordable, the act is itself the main danger from which they seek political protection and shelter.

Why now? Perhaps to get a jump on things before the act is ruled unconstitutional, or before it causes even more Democrats to lose in November, or before President Romney repeals it in 2013. “I think that the manner in which the issue was dealt with … cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader,” said Sen. James Webb, D-Va. Webb, who voted for passage and is retiring after one term, added that if Obama had gone for a small, simple measure, he could have won some Republican votes.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who is also retiring, remarked that “[w]e would all have been better off if we had dealt first with the financial system” and said Democrats wasted time and political capital creating problems that dragged the economy down.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., who is also retiring, said the bill should have been done in “digestible pieces,” and they should have ‘figure[d] how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure[d] out what they could afford.”

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., of all people, says the Democrats should have stopped after Scott Brown won his election. …

David Harsanyi outlines the latest Obamacare fraud.

If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we’d probably have a program worth saving.

But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of services against 10 years of taxes, and it has continued with an avalanche of waivers that shield friends of the White House from the cost of the very law they helped pass.

We now have another unsavory example of how government-controlled health means politicized health care.

If the law had been followed as written, Obamacare should have slashed the popular market-oriented Medicare Advantage program this year. The cuts are needed to divert funding to a Medicaid expansion that will provide coverage to millions of uninsured — the central case for the creation of Obamacare.

It’s no surprise that Medicare’s most market-focused program pushes down premiums and enrollment up. So rather than allow millions of enrollees in vital swing states, such as Florida, to experience a major benefit cut right before an election, the administration founded an $8.3 billion pilot program. This year, for example, the program offsets about 70 percent of the cuts in Advantage. The cost will be paid from the Medicare trust fund (which had a $288.3 billion shortfall this year). The consequences will be put off, conveniently, until after the election. …

Steven Hayward takes a shot at explaining the education bubble.

I haven’t had much to say here about the higher education bubble, a favorite topic of Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit.  But with total student loan debt topping $1 trillion (higher than total credit card debt I believe), this is looking like the next major financial disaster.  Among other things, student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many debt-happy students are coming out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage before they get a job.  The consequences of this are easy to see; among other things, it will slow the long-term prospects for the housing market, as millions of young graduates will have to put off home ownership because they won’t be able to qualify for home loans.  Meanwhile, Obama, and the New York Times, say: Let’s do more of this!  (The headline for the New York Times editorial seems written deliberately to make satire more difficult: “Subsidize Students, Not Tax Cuts.”  I mean really, do they have to make my job this easy?)

Student loans, among other factors, have contributed significantly to the outsized increase in college costs, which have risen faster than housing prices during the bubble, or health care costs.  Here’s how I explain it in common sense terms.  When I attended college in the late 1970s, tuition and room and board were a little less than $6,000 a year.  Round up slightly and you have a four-year cost of about $25,000.  If you went to a state university, your price tag was about half of that, and student loans might be, say, $10,000.  That $25,000 cost was in the ballpark for first-year starting professional salaries for a new college graduate in 1980, when I took my diploma; most banks and other businesses I interviewed with in those days had jobs starting around the $18 – $24K range.  In other words, your first year starting professional wage was about equivalent to the total cost of your BA.

Today, a good private college costs between $40 and $50K a year; many state universities will run you over $20K a year.  Total cost for four year now: $150K or more. …

Jonathan Tobin has more on the bad day the administration had last week at the Supreme Court.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. may have been outclassed when he went up against Paul D. Clement arguing the case to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare before the Supreme Court of the United States. But today, when the pair once again matched up in the same forum when the high court met to hear arguments about the state of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, it appears that the result was much the same. As the New York Times reports, even the liberal justices inclined to be on the same side of the administration, which wants the law struck down, gave the impression that they thought the solicitor general was something of a flop.

While Verrilli’s second humiliation — even Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so unimpressed with his presentation that she felt the need to tell him,  “You can see it’s not selling very well” — was noteworthy, even more important was the fact that it appeared that the key provision of the Arizona law would not only be upheld but that most of the justices — even the liberals — seemed to agree that there was nothing unreasonable about it. Given the opprobrium that the mainstream media has heaped on Arizona and the way that most of the chattering classes had spoken of the law and its supporters as racists, the reaction of the court must be a shock to the administration and to its liberal supporters. …

Peter Ferrara has a good piece on how the poor are always the first hurt by the economic fallacies of the left progressives.

Persistent economic fallacies hurt working people and the poor the most.  They are the ones most in need of the new jobs and higher wages that capital investment and economic growth produce.  And they suffer the most from unemployment and declining wages and incomes when the economy falters.  Self-styled Progressives are the source of the economic fallacies that are hurting working people and the poor today.

One common fallacy popular among self-proclaimed Progressives is to reply to the point that America now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40% with the counter that the average effective corporate tax rate is only around 25%.  But it is the marginal tax rate on the next dollar earned, not the average rate, that influences new investment, business expansion, and hiring.

Pro-growth tax reform would involve reducing that top rate in return for closing many of the loopholes that make the average rate so much lower.  The average rate would rise as a result.  But the lower marginal rate would increase incentives for more capital investment, business expansion and job creation.

Another fallacy among Progressives is to argue that America has enjoyed historically low taxes under President Obama with federal revenues around 15% of GDP compared to the long-term, postwar average of 18.3%.  But that is due to the persistent weakness of the economy under Obama, which lowers federal revenues as a percent of  GDP, as bankrupt businesses and unemployed workers pay little or nothing in taxes.

Again, what influences the capital investment, business start ups, and business expansion that creates jobs and bids up wages for working people and the poor are the marginal tax rates, not taxes as a percent of GDP.  Obama has persistently focused on raising those marginal tax rates across the board, the exact opposite of what Reagan did with so much success, which is a main reason Obama is getting the opposite results of Reagan.  Obama has recently taken to citing Reagan for the opposite of what he believed and implemented as President, in claiming his support for the so-called Buffett Rule.  But the real economy will not be fooled, and working people and the poor will not benefit from dishonest rhetoric. …

WSJ OpEd on what we can learn from tax policies of different states. 

Barack Obama is asking Americans to gamble that the U.S. economy can be taxed into prosperity. That’s the message of his campaign for the Buffett Rule, which raises income-tax rates on millionaires to a minimum of 30%, and for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He wants to raise the highest income tax rate by 20%, double the rate on capital gains, add a new 3.8% tax on all capital earnings, and nearly triple the dividend tax rate.

All this will enhance “economic efficiency,” insists a White House economic report. As for those who disagree, says President Obama, they’re just pushing “the same version of trickle-down economics tried for much of the last century. . . . But prosperity sure didn’t trickle down.”

Mr. Obama needs a refresher course on the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and even the 1990s, when government spending and taxes fell and employment and incomes grew rapidly.

But if the president wants to see fresher evidence of how taxes matter, he can look to what’s happening in the 50 states. In our new report “Rich States, Poor States,” prepared for the American Legislative Exchange Council, we compare the economic performance of states with no income tax to that of states with high rates. It’s like comparing Hong Kong with Greece or King Kong with fleas.

Every year for the past 40, the states without income taxes had faster output growth (measured on a decadal basis) than the states with the highest income taxes. In 1980, for example, there were 10 zero-income-tax states. Over the decade leading up to 1980, those states grew 32.3 percentage points faster than the 10 states with the highest tax rates. Job growth was also much higher in the zero-tax states. The states with the nine highest income tax rates had no net job growth at all, and seven of those nine managed to lose jobs. …

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John Hinderaker posts on the administration’s bad day in court yesterday.

Some years ago, I worked on a big case in Alaska and spent a lot of time there. At that time, the local bar was buzzing about a lawyer who had a really bad day in court: he was kicked to death by a moose in the parking lot of the federal courthouse in Anchorage. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli didn’t have that bad a day today in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Arizona’s immigration law is invalid by virtue of federal pre-emption, but he was kicked about a good bit by the justices.

On Twitter, Byron York asked: “Question for legal types: Is Donald Verrilli bad at his job or just burdened by having to defend the indefensible?” You can read the entire argument here and draw your own conclusions, but in my opinion, the problem was not with Verrilli but rather with the quality of the arguments that he was required to make by his client, the Obama administration.

Mort Zuckerman, who voted for Obama, now outlines the president’s economic failures.

America has long been a country where almost everyone, including the poor and unskilled, could get a job. Given the will to do a reasonable day’s work, a job was a passport to economic and social well-being; it was the fount of self-esteem and the foundation of family life. Indeed, work was Life.

More than 15 million Americans no longer have that passport to Life. Think of it as roughly the entire population of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, all standing idle—every man, woman, and child. The traditional breadwinners, namely men between the ages of 25 and 54, are among those hardest hit. According to an Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll, some 25 percent of households include someone who is unemployed and looking for work. As well as laying waste to work, to the equivalent of losing every job created in the last decade, the Great Recession has visited us with reduced incomes, declining home equity, and a growing contraction in credit.

For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession’s start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It’s the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.

Discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force make the unemployment rate look fractionally better, but the 8.2 percent headline masks the misery. It is a reflection of the U-3 statistic, which counts only people who have applied for a job in the last four weeks. Among the jobless army, a staggering 42 percent of them are long-term unemployed, without jobs for six months or longer. Look instead at the more relevant U-6 statistic, which counts the number of people who have applied over the last six months. U-6 also includes those who are involuntarily working on a part-time basis. That U-6 unemployment is now in the range of 15 percent. Since 2008, some 3 million people have dropped out of the job market. If they hadn’t, the unemployment rate would be about 10.8 percent. In March, the unemployment rate seemed to fall a tenth of 1 percent, yet the number of people who are actually employed dropped by 31,000. Why? Because the number of people who looked for a job dropped by 164,000 and they are not considered unemployed. Not to mention that half the new jobs are in temporary help agencies. …

Joel Kotkin and two other dudes write in American.com about some areas in the Midwest that are doing well.

The Midwest’s troubles are well-known. The decline of manufacturing has resulted in job losses and dying industrial towns. The best and brightest have fled the flatlands for more exciting, sunnier, mountainous, or coastal places where the real action is. Even Peyton Manning has left the heartland for the Rockies.

This narrative is so deeply embedded both in and outside of the Midwest that many people overlook the ways in which parts of the region are bouncing back. The Midwest’s story is important because it serves in significant ways as a regional microcosm of how growth and opportunity should look in America today.

In a recent study we look at trends that upend the conventional wisdom about the Midwest. We find that it is neither doomed to a slow and dirty demise like an old house on an eroding slope, nor forced to reinvent itself Dubai-style in order to compete with Silicon Valley or Manhattan. The Midwest’s future is rooted very much in its past—but with some important updates.

What do we mean? For starters, this means capitalizing on Americans’ desire to reside where the cost of living and doing business is favorable. As the last Census showed, Americans move in droves to regions where the cost of living is low, businesses face fewer obstacles, and workers have choices. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin have shown, this goes for 25- to 35-year-olds as well as 55- to 65-year-olds. People want options and a good quality of life at a price they can afford.

In the Midwest, these trends have favored placed like Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana. …

Roger Simon says forget about the Pulitzer, the Walter Duranty Prize is available for the media.

We try not to be sore losers at PJ Media.

So after our first ever attempt at a Pulitzer Prize for Christian Adams & Hans von Spakovsky’s series “Every Single One” – revealing how every single Obama Justice Department appointee has been a liberal — lost this April, you won’t hear a peep out of us.   We will not complain even though a 2007 Pulitzer was awarded to a similar series that detailed how 57 percent of Bush’s Justice Department appointments went to conservatives. (Okay, that’s maybe a peep.

We know the biases of the Pulitzer Prize and did not expect to win.

No, at PJ Media we don’t get mad or complain… we get even

Starting this year, PJ Media, in conjunction with our good friends at The New Criterion, will be awarding the first annual Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity

Walter Duranty – it will be recalled — was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor) and many other aspects of Soviet oppression

Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his efforts

Despite numerous attempts by Ukrainian organizations and others, the prize has never been revoked. Duranty’s photograph remains in its honored place on the New York Times’ wall along with the newspaper’s other Pulitzer winners. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the small minded Santorum.

Just about every name Republican at this point has endorsed Mitt Romney. He is, after all, the only guy in the race who can and will win his party’s nomination. So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) both gave their stamp of approval on Tuesday.

But there is a holdout among household-name Republicans: Rick Santorum. I know, the tension is too much to bear: When, oh when, will he announce he is throwing the legion of his supporters to the man whom 90 percent of Republicans already support? He’s still in self-delusion land, it seems. The National Journal reports: …

John Tamny wants to know what in the world conservatives saw in Santorum.

Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday. Almost to a column, editorial and news account, the analysis centered on Santorum’s somewhat successful capture of conservative voters.

And there lies the mystery. How could a man seemingly so opposite of conservative have entranced so many voters who label themselves just that?

The easy answer is that as someone who made his religion such a prominent part of his campaign strategy (at one point saying “we need a Jesus candidate”), religious types who tend toward conservatism perhaps felt they’d found their man. The answer to this is why?

Figure Jesse Jackson is very religious, as is presumably Rev. Al Sharpton, and then President Obama, though he suffered much grief for the church he attended in Chicago, is presumably another politician who can claim being a man of faith. About all three, self-described conservatives arguably don’t find much to like.

After that, government throughout the centuries has arguably been religion’s greatest enemy, so it seems religious conservatives wouldn’t very much concern themselves with the faith of any candidate; their lone interest in a candidate his or her desire to protect the right of all who are religious to practice their faith without persecution. More to the point, it seems true religionists would correctly fear a “Jesus candidate.”

The truly religious would because just as a nation could elect someone of faith who might incorporate their religion into all aspects of government, that same nation could theoretically elect an atheist who would do the opposite. In short, there’s nothing conservative about a democracy that animates its operations with religion. If Santorum is a believer that may be great for some, but religious conservatives should more realistically prefer freedom of religion over someone eager to foist their values on a nation that at least at inception granted the federal government and executive branch rights limited to protecting individual freedom. …

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Matthew Continetti says the dog wars have been fun, but Romney should not spend all his time trading tweets.

The worst thing Romney could do is step into the net. Let aides trade Tweets with Obama spokesmen now and then, but don’t make it a priority. Let others take the low road.

When David Axelrod mentions the dog, remind the country that this is the worst recovery in history. When David Plouffe mentions the rich, let Americans know that everyone’s taxes should be low, that everyone’s taxes are scheduled to spike on Jan. 1, that Obamacare includes numerous taxes on every American, and that the middle class has fared the worst in the Obama economy. When Debbie Wasserman Schultz sneers that Republicans are coming after women, stress the importance of a culture of life and Obamacare’s threat to religious liberty. Ask every audience Reagan’s question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Unless the audience is filled with TARP recipients and government workers, the answer will be no.

The deeper into the year we get, the more desperate Obama is likely to become. There will be incendiary rhetoric. The smears will be over the top. The hits will be exaggerated; some may draw blood. The Twitter Trap will beckon. But Romney can’t succumb. He can’t flinch.

Because it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And only the Alpha gets the win.

Similar thoughts about focus from Craig Pirrong.

… Welcome to the Five Minutes of Hate Campaign, brought to you by the Great Uniter.

Actually, we would be blessed if there were only five minutes of hate per day.  It is going to be more than that, and the duration and frenzy of the attacks will only  grow in the coming months.

And the campaign will be suitably Orwellian, because it will try to use hate to paint Republicans as haters.

Don’t take the bait folks.  Do the thing that Obama desperately wants you to avoid.  Focus on the record.  The litany of failure.  From spending to Obamacare to Frankendodd.  Do that, and exploit the contrast between the soaring rhetoric of 2008 and the viciousness of 2012.

Jennifer Rubin posts five things we have learned about the Romney campaign.

There were a spate of polls last week, which rudely shook the left from its blissful obliviousness. This will be a close election, and Mitt Romney has a level of credibility on the economy, which happens to be President Obama’s biggest weakness. We also learned five things about the Romney campaign.

Walk and chew gum at the same time. Conservatives fretted that Romney was becoming too “reactive” and getting lured into fights on Twitter-level inanities. But it turns out that Romney could punch back while still advancing his core message: Obama has failed in his most important task, restoring American prosperity. In a campaign stop in Arizona on Friday he told the crowd: “I think Obama is a nice person. I just don’t think we can afford him any longer.” With a blah economy, Romney’s message — Obama’s policies have slowed the recovery — has some resonance.

The campaign knows what it needs. …

Short from The Hill on troubles raising money for The One.

Priorities USA, a super-PAC focused on reelecting President Obama, has asked former President Bill Clinton to help them pick up the pace on fundraising.

Democratic donors have been resistant to giving to the group. This is partly because of liberals’ hesitation about super-PACs in general and partly because Sean Sweeney and Bill Burton, the two former White House staffers heading the group, aren’t as plugged in to the fundraising world as those helping some of the Republican groups, which include heavy-hitters like Karl Rove and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R).

If Clinton decides to help Piorities USA that could go a long way toward wooing some rich donors off the sidelines. According to Businessweek, he’s leaning towards aiding them.

The group, which is headed by former Obama White House staffers, has struggled to keep pace with pro-GOP outside groups. It has raised $8.8 million with $5 million in the bank, according to new reports, while the pro-Romney Restore Our Future has brought in $51.9 million and still has $6.5 million left after an expensive primary.

The pro-Republican American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have raised nearly $100 million and plan to spend a total of $250 million on this election. If Priorities USA and other pro-Democratic super-PACs can’t pick up the fundraising pace Democrats and their allies could be vastly outspent by their opposite groups this year.

John McCormack in the Weekly Standard provides an overview of the contest in Wisconsin.

Governor Scott Walker is facing the fight of his political life. On June 5, in the third gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history, Wisconsin voters will either choose to keep Walker in office or elect a Democrat. Polls show a tight race with Walker hovering at or slightly below 50 percent and holding a small lead over potential opponents. Walker won’t know which Democratic opponent he’ll face until May 8, when the recall primary is held. Meanwhile, he’s letting the state of Illinois serve as a stand-in.

Speaking on April 19 to machinists in blue-collared shirts, jeans, and boots at the Trace-A-Matic Corporation, Walker contrasts Wis-consin’s record with that of its neighbor to the south. “A year ago their unemployment rate was above 9 percent,” he says. “And today, a year later, it’s still above 9 percent because they made some poor choices. They raised taxes on businesses and individuals. On individuals, believe it or not, they raised it by 66 percent.”

And Wisconsin? Unemployment has dropped from 7.7 percent to 6.9 percent since Walker took office. Property taxes are down for the first time in 12 years. A $3.6 billion deficit was eliminated without lots of layoffs. The message resonates with the machinists. Almost all applaud enthusiastically for Walker.

“Unions had a place in history,” says Mike Payne, one of Trace-A-Matic’s machinists. “But I think it went to the other extreme. And I think to diminish them a little bit is to really benefit us because that brings things back to a fairer level.”

Sitting in one of his campaign offices later in the day, Walker considers whether he might have avoided a recall. “If I hadn’t gone so far, would I face a recall? I don’t know,” Walker tells me. “But if I hadn’t gone as far as I did, I wouldn’t have fixed it.” And fixing Wisconsin’s fiscal problems is what matters, he says. “I’m running a campaign to win. And I aim to win. But I’m not afraid to lose.” …

The WSJ Editors celebrate that the EPA had a chance to do more stupid things and didn’t. 

The Environmental Protection Agency once again invited itself to do tangible economic harm—this time to the hydraulic fracturing that is transforming American energy—and somehow . . . it didn’t. In the annals of the unlikely, the EPA’s new fracking rules fall somewhere between a Nobel Peace Prize for George W. Bush and a supply-side tax plan from Warren Buffett.

The first-ever federal fracking rule that the EPA released on Wednesday is also the first time the agency has shown restraint under the Clean Air Act since at least 2005 or 2006, about when the Bush Administration gave up on environmental regulatory reform. Given the agency’s track record, any self-control is notable—though in particular on the unconventional oil and gas extraction that the green lobby would prefer to shut down because those fuels contain demon carbon. …

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Fred Barnes say Obama is clueless about job creation.

… Obama yearns for a hefty increase in hiring by state and local governments. If hiring were “on par to past recoveries, the unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower than it is right now.” Restoring “huge cuts in state and local government” is “part of the challenge we have in terms of growth.”

The lesson here is that Obama has learned no lesson from what Edward Lazear of the Hoover Institution has called the “worst economic recovery in history”—that is, the Obama recovery. The economy has grown at a rate of 2.4 percent since the recession ended in June 2009, a full percentage point below average long-term growth. But the president is sticking with his plan for a government-led economic boom. This is Obamanomics: If it doesn’t work, then double down.

Obama once told a group of investors that the private sector didn’t need incentives to invest because his administration’s massive subsidies of green technology would lead the way. Now the mention of “green jobs” has become a laugh line. The main news from the green sector is another company bankrolled by Obama going belly-up.

In The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Noam Scheiber describes the president’s “obsession” with green jobs. Eco-nomic 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.” …

In order to correct the president’s economic ignorance, James Pethokoukis suggests some time travel.

President Obama disagrees with the past 30 years of U.S. economic policy. As he said during his Osawatomie, Kansas, speech last December:

“… there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. … But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

As I was mulling over this issue, I ran across a great blog post by economist Scott Sumner:

“Suppose you had gotten a room full of economists together in 1980, and made the following predictions:

1. Over the next 28 years the US would grow as fast as Japan, and faster than Europe (in GDP per capita, PPP.)

2. Over the next 28 years Britain would overtake Germany and France in GDP per capita.

And you said you were making these predictions because you thought Thatcher and Reagan’s policies would be a success. Your predictions (and the rationale) would have been met with laughter. Indeed around that time most of the top British economists signed a petition asserting that Thatcher’s policies would fail.

For those of you not old enough to remember 1980, let me explain why. Labour rule of Britain had reduced their economy to a shambles. The government ran the big manufacturing corporations and labor unions were running wild. They had 83% [marginal tax rates, 98% on capital.] There was garbage piling up in the streets of London. Britain had been the sick man of Europe for decades, growing far more slowly than Germany, France and Italy.

The US wasn’t doing as badly, but certainly wasn’t doing that well either. We had also been growing much more slowly than Europe and Japan. Unlike Britain, we were still richer than most other developed countries, so this convergence was viewed as partly inevitable (the catch-up from WWII), and partly reflecting the superior economic model of the Germans and Japanese.”

And here’s what happened over the following decades, as expressed in a chart looking at per capita income in terms of purchasing power parity:…

Bill Kristol posts on what Reagan really said.

… Barack Obama’s appeal to Ronald Reagan is illuminating in a number of ways. It’s illuminating that today’s liberals need to appeal to the example of Reagan to sell their policies. That’s a posthumous victory for Reagan, and an important contemporary victory for Reaganism. Even more, it’s illuminating because it gives us reason to go back and read the Reagan speeches Obama cited and see how compelling they were and how thoroughly the president misrepresented them.

Did Reagan, as Obama claimed, “travel across the country pushing for the same concept” as Obama today? No. Reagan was pushing for comprehensive tax reform, at the center of which was an across-the-board tax rate reduction combined with elimination of tax shelters. The idea was to simplify the system, out of respect for citizens and for the health of the economy. Obama, by contrast, has never risked offering a serious big tax reform proposal. What he does want to do is raise marginal tax rates on many American families.

Obama cited two Reagan speeches from June 1985. Just before that, on May 28, 1985, Reagan had addressed the nation from the Oval Office, kicking off the effort that would produce the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The heart of his argument: “By lowering everyone’s tax rates all the way up the income scale, each of us will have a greater incentive to climb higher, to excel, to help America grow.”

Reagan followed up on June 6, speaking at Northside High School in Atlanta. He did note “the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share” and that “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.” He called them “crazy.” That’s the part of his predecessor’s speech Obama chose to recall.

Here’s what else Reagan had to say: He ascribed the economic comeback of the previous few years, in which “hope has returned, and America’s working again,” to the fact that we “cut tax rates and trimmed federal spending.”

Why didn’t President Obama quote that? And what about Reagan’s explanation for why his administration had cut rates? 

“What’s really important is what inspired us to do these things. What’s really important is the philosophy that guided us. The whole thing could be boiled down to a few words?—?freedom, freedom, and more freedom. It’s a philosophy that isn’t limited to guiding government policy. It’s a philosophy you can live by; in fact, I hope you do.”

Somehow, Obama neglected to quote that. …

“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” That comes to mind when looking at stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. David Harsanyi takes them on.

Whenever a situation appears to be a conspiracy, the explanation is likely to be happenstance. But, looking at how often (and how much) BLS has revised its unemployment numbers, we have a rather strange trend that is certainly worth noting.

More Americans “than forecasted” filed applications for unemployment benefits this week — first we heard that the jobless claims fell by 2,000 but now the revised numbers show 6,000 above the initial forecast. As Ed Morrissey notes, “That number got revised this week, but the real story is in the 4-week rolling average.  Just three or four weeks ago, that number was in the 360K range.  Now it’s close to 375K, roughly the same level as last spring’s stagnant economic conditions.”

Without even taking into account the incredible shrinking job force, this portends bad economic news. Yet, the bad news always seems to be tempered by the Labor Department.

According to Bloomberg:

Revisions to previous data have been larger than normal and the government is trying to determine the cause, a Labor Department spokesman said as the figures were released to the press.

A lot more than normal, actually. According to Dow Jones, the Labor Department had revised its estimate of seasonally adjusted jobless claims upward in 56 of the past 57 weeks. That’s unprecedented.

Fact is, initial estimates draw the most reaction from media, while the revisions are treated less newsworthy, despite their relative significance. …

Blog post from Pope Center suggests the economic value of education is worth questioning. 

The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, for many people, increasing their level of education pays off in higher earnings and lower unemployment rates.

Looking at the chart (which appears on the BLS site) it seems obvious that the path to financial success is to get a college degree—and then an advanced degree. The more education you have, the better off you’ll be. High school graduates, for example, are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as college graduates, and they earn substantially less money per week.

Justin Wolfers, an associate professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School used the BLS data to tweet, “Hey kids, stay in school. What would happen if we put this poster in every classroom?”

Wolfers was reiterating the conventional wisdom, reinforced by the BLS data, that the longer an individual stays in school, the better off he’ll be.

Unfortunately, he missed a crucial detail. All of these statistics are the median—representing the person separating the higher half of a sample from the lower half. It’s a mistake to assume that the median tells us what most people in that group will experience.

Thinking of the median as “typical” masks a lot of important details about educational outcomes. …

LA Times article says meat eaters might have been doing the evolutionary heavy lifting.

If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday.

When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child’s brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. That provided a distinct competitive advantage for early humans when limited resources and a small population made it difficult for them to thrive. “Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,” said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. “This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.” …

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Some thoughts about the Space Shuttle flying over DC from Charles Krauthammer. 

As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again.

It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor.

The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)

China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025.

They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

Who cares, you say? …

Joel Kotkin, who is in these pages frequently, was the WSJ Interviewee of the week by Allysia Finley.

‘California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be.

Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin’” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.

The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax. …

You’ll love what Mark Steyn does to the guys who should know how to be secretly serviced.

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Elliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold, grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars, less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded, public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on its head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of 126 billion. The feds’ half-a-billion to Solyndra would have been a mere 18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope … and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Alas, young Miss Suarez, just 24 and with a nine-year-old son and a ravenous pimp to feed, didn’t care for the cut of her Secret Service man’s jib. He made the fairly basic mistake – for an expensively trained government operative – of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor and Dania caused an altercation, whose fall-out has brought the Secret Service to its knees; which isn’t how these encounters usually go. …

… “Some are saying they were women at the bar.”

Amazing to hear government agents channeling Dudley Moore in Arthur:

“You’re a hooker …? I thought I was doing so well.” It turns out U.S. Secret Service agents are the only men who can walk into a Colombian nightclub and not spot the professionals. Are they really the guys you want protecting the president? …

Now he tells us! VA senator Jim Webb says Obama did the health care thing all wrong. So where was Webb and the other “independent” VA senator when they could have done some good? Webb didn’t have any problem being tough on W. Too bad he declined to run so we won’t have the pleasure of throwing this bum out. Karen Tumulty has the story.

President Obama’s new health-care law will be his greatest liability as he attempts to once again win the critical swing state of Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) warned Wednesday.

“I’ll be real frank here,” Webb said at a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News. “I think that the manner in which the health-care reform issue was put in front of the Congress, the way that the issue was dealt with by the White House, cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader.

Webb voted for the law, but also for more than a dozen GOP-offered amendments to it.

“If you were going to do something of this magnitude, you have to do it with some clarity, with a clear set of objectives from the White House,” added Webb, who opted not to run for a second term this year. “…It should have been done with better direction from the White House.” …

Is there anything it can’t do? More wonderful news about aspirin. Theodore Dalrymple has the story.

… Three recent papers in The Lancet propose the benefits of low-dose aspirin both in the prevention of certain cancers and in their spread once they have developed. Professor Rothwell, of Oxford University, was the main author of all three papers, but this should not affect their validity or otherwise.

The first of the papers compared the rates of cancer deaths in those who took part in randomized controlled trials of daily low-dose aspirin to prevent cerebrovascular events (strokes). The risk of cancer death was reduced by something like 15 percent in those who took long-term aspirin. The longer the aspirin was taken, the stronger the protective effect. …

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Craig Pirrong commented on the supposed crackdown on the supposed gasoline price manipulation.

Yesterday Obama delivered another of his it-must-have-been-some-other-body-it-wasn’t-me (h/t Chuck Berry) speeches on energy.  And, true to form, he delivered another clarion call to round up the usual suspects: evil speculators, whom he confabulates manipulators with speculators.  (And I am being generous, because confabulation is inadvertent, whereas I Obama’s slander is almost certainly deliberate): …

… He used the word “manipulate” or “manipulation” 11 times in his relatively brief remarks.  In typically dishonest fashion, he isn’t responding to specific, credible evidence of manipulation; he provides no evidence that manipulation is rampant or is at all responsible for current price levels.  Hell, he can’t even come up with a current example, having to reach back more than a decade to Enron (itself a dubious example).  He merely insinuates and implies.  But the average listener or reader will conclude from his remarks that manipulation is causing their pain at the pump.  Rather than encouraging a sober and realistic appraisal of the role of speculative trading in energy, he is feeding suspicions and encouraging a witch hunt.

Moreover, note the repeated and casual identification of manipulation and speculation.  This is itself a manipulative use of language.  Manipulation is not even a proper subset of speculation: hedgers can be some of the most dangerous manipulators.  It further encourages the popular suspicion that financial trading in commodity markets is inherently dishonest and crooked. …

Washington Post editors were not impressed either.

President Obama is fond of saying that there is no silver bullet to bringing down gasoline prices. On Tuesday, however, he went into the silver bullet business.

Yet another Obama insult to Great Britain. He doesn’t have the courage to do this directly, so he indulges in the passive aggressive use of the Argentinean word for the Falklands. Andrew Malcolm has the story.

OK, picture this: President George W. Bush, he of the cast-iron Texas tongue, at a news conference concluding an international summit.

He’s asked about a dispute involving Argentina and Great Britain, our closest overseas ally, the one that’s lost 408 soldiers by our side in Afghanistan, where we’ve fought a decade together to prevent a second 9/11.

In his answer, Bush refers to the disputed territory by the wrong name, misplacing the islands by some 8,000 miles. Worse than his geographic ignorance, instead of backing Britain, whose prime minister he just buddy-buddied at an NCAA game and White House state dinner, Bush says, Well, that’s not really something he thinks the United States would take sides on.

Britain?

Or Argentina?

Seriously?

Do you think there might be some prolonged outraged news coverage back home about the latest Bush blunder, this time a two-fer?

Well, Bush never did that. But Barack Obama did last weekend.

We’ve seen ample coverage of the Colombian prostitute situation since. But have you been impressed by the media mockings of this latest international stupidity by the 44th United States president, who’s previously talked about such things as the Austrian language, the president of Canada, E Pluribus Unum the national motto and traveling all 57 states? …

… Apparently in the Colombian news conference Obama was seeking to use the Spanish term Malvinas for the islands, as Argentina prefers. Instead, he said Maldives, which are islands off India. But the attempted use of Argentina’s name over Britain’s and Obama’s support for bilateral negotiations about what London regards as a closed matter is prompting strong feelings across the pond.

Nile Gardiner wrote this week in Britain’s Telegraph:

“A stance of ‘neutrality’ is an act of cowardice by Barack Obama in the face of Latin American pressure, and another slap in the face for Britain.” He refers to widespread suspicions in the U.K. that as the son of a Kenyan socialist, Obama harbors ill feelings toward that country’s former colonial ruler. …

Toby Harnden has fun with the Maldives slip.

President Barack Obama managed to commit two major gaffes in a single sentence by attempting to refer to the Falkland Islands as the Malvinas while instead calling them the Maldives, which are 8,123 miles away.

Mr Obama was speaking at a joint press conference with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, on Sunday when he was asked about ‘Cuba and the Malvinas’.

The American president attempted to use the Spanish word for the Falklands – a snub to Britain – but managed to botch it by instead referring to the Maldives, a group of atolls to the south of India. …

Chris Cillizza with an interesting chart about public perceptions of the Supreme Court.

 …A majority of people don’t know the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. More frightening? Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall, who not only was never the Chief Justice but also died in 1993. And let’s not even talk about the four percent who think Harry Reid, a Senator not a member of the Supreme Court, is the Chief Justice. …

If you are smart and ignore the news, you might have missed the major of chuckle over dogs. You see, years ago the Romney family went on vacation carrying their dog on the roof of the car. Bien pensants have been outraged everywhere. Gail Collins has mentioned the incident in 50 columns over the past four years. Turns out someone actually read one of Obama’s two autobiographies and learned The One dined on dog when he lived in Indonesia. James Taranto gives us all the delectable delicious details.

… In a more serious vein, Lincoln Mitchell of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute writes at the Puffington Host: “For many voters, treating a dog this way is unimaginable and could only be done by somebody who has a problem empathizing with others.”

But then Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller’s resident wag, picked up his dog-eared copy of “Dreams From My Father,” Obama’s 1995 autobiography, and sniffed out this passage from the second chapter. If Axelrod’s tweet was a dog whistle, Treacher’s post is a dinner bell:

“With Lolo [Obama's stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

It reminds us of the conclusion of the sci-fi tale “A Boy and His Dog”: “It’s a cookbook.”

The jokes write themselves. 

#ObamaDogRecipes: Yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread.

“So, Mr. President, where shall we go to eat?” “I know a great Spot.” …

In another more serious vein, why has it taken so long for the main stream media to read Obama’s book? Or, did they read it and were just continuing to cover for him? Tim Stanley asks the question in a London paper.

… But the really big question here is why didn’t we know about this earlier? Like me, I’m sure many journalists just didn’t get far enough in to Dreams from My Father to spot the faux pas. If you could grind that book down and bottle it, you’d have a cure for insomnia. Couple it with a couple of grams of Edward Heath’s autobiography and you’ve got an elephant tranquilizer.

But given the mainstream media’s intense study of Romney’s life and its constant regurgitation of its many errors, it’s odd that this shaggy dog story slipped through – especially given that Dreams from My Father has been gathering dust on the bookshelves since 1995. Where did it come from when it finally broke on Tuesday night? The Romney campaign and the conservative site Daily Caller. That’s right: Republicans have to break and publicise stories themselves if they want to get them heard. The mainstream media either ignores a lot of anti-Obama stuff or dismisses it as inconsequential.

Maybe, as the Romney campaign suggests, this trading of dog anecdotes is just a silly distraction from the serious issues of jobs and healthcare. But while the economy is certainly struggling, all the media wants to talk about is character, character, character. On Monday, Ann Romney sat down to an interview with Diane Sawyer and what did they discuss? Seamus the dog. And what were all the headlines about following the discussion? Seamus the dog. This constant focus on trivialities might be more sufferable if it were at least balanced. But it’s always the conservatives who are repeatedly asked “What would you do if your son was gay?”, “What newspapers do you read?”, or “Why do you hate black people so much?” Yet Barack Obama – who went to the church of an anti-American radical loon, messes just about everything up and eats dogs – gets a free pass.

Or course, there’s a new website named Dogs Against Obama. Instead of the normal cartoons, we have many of their items.

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John Fund explains how Obama got the individual mandate so wrong.

President Obama insists that the public would rise up in anger should the Supreme Court strike down all or part of his health-care law. James Carville, a former strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton, claims a death sentence for Obamacare would benefit Democrats.

Such arguments border on fantasy. The reaction to the closely watched Supreme Court oral arguments on Obamacare shows that the law lost ground with the public the more the public followed the issue. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll pegs support for the overall law at 39 percent, the lowest level of backing since this poll first began tracking the issue in 2009. Only about half of Democrats want the entire law upheld.

In contrast, approval of the Supreme Court has increased following the roughing up it gave Obamacare. A new Rasmussen Reports survey found that the percentage of likely voters who rate the court as good or excellent went up 13 points in a month, to 41 percent. A full 42 percent of independents and unaffiliated voters rank the court highly, up from 26 percent only a month ago.

Even some liberals acknowledge that when it comes to public opinion, the law resembles the dead parrot in that old Monty Python skit. When the Daily Beast asked media and policy experts how the law could be better marketed, the general sense was that it was too late. “Medicare was marketable because it was understandable,” says Lawrence O’Donnell, the liberal MSNBC host who was staff director of the Senate Finance Committee when it debated Hillarycare in the 1990s. “I have never met anyone, outside of the government, who can describe what the new health-care law is. You cannot market something that is indescribable.” …

April 12th Pickings ended with a story about a left coast whale watch tour operator, Nancy Black, who is facing prison for inadvertently “bothering” whales. A Real Clear Markets blogger compares her predicament to Jon Corzine who will most likely get away with being a party to stealing hundreds of millions from his customers.

Justice may be blind, but who works overtime to make it deaf, dumb, and stupid?

Which would you imagine might attract more aggressive enforcement from the Justice Department: the theft of $1.2 billion from supposedly segregated customer brokerage funds, or lying about an alleged incident of whistling to attract the attention of a whale so that whale watchers could get a better peep? If you said the latter, then you appreciate the extent to which federal law enforcement priorities have run off the rails.

We know for a fact that enormous sums of money legally off limits have disappeared into the maw of disgraced Senator John Corzine’s gambling counterparties, all of whom seem to have taken the oath of omerta. We know that Corzine personally asked employees at MF Global, the financial firm he headed until recently, to transfer the funds. We know that his underlings balked at signing false statements attesting the transfers to be legal. So how is it that the man ultimately responsible for this brazen theft and spectacular bankruptcy gets away with performing a perfunctory Sergeant Schultz “I know nothing” routine in front of his old Senate buddies, after which he is left free to walk out the door without handcuffs?

Meanwhile, marine biologist and whale watching ship captain Nancy Black faces 20 years in prison, not for “harassing” whales (which believe it or not is a crime), but because she has been charged with lying to Justice Department prosecutors investing allegations that some of her crew members whistled at a whale to keep it hanging around their boats.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Title 18, Section 1001 of the United States Code is the successor to the False Claims Act of 1863, originally intended to punish crooked Civil War contractors. It has since metastasized into an all-purpose bludgeon that federal prosecutors routinely use to squeeze fines and plea bargains out of anyone unfortunate enough to become ensnared in one of the hundreds of thousands of regulations that govern everything from selling goldfish to the volume of your toilet flush.

As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg characterizes it, Section 1001 has conferred “extraordinary authority” for prosecutors to “manufacture crimes.” …

Reuters says the green jobs have been slow to sprout.

Three weeks ago, President Barack Obama stood in front of a sea of gleaming solar panels in Boulder City, Nevada, to celebrate his administration’s efforts to promote “green energy.”

Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive backdrop for the president.

Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its kind in the United States. Its 1 million solar panels provide enough energy to power 17,000 homes.

And it employs just 10 people. 

Three years after Obama launched a push to build a job-creating “green” economy, the White House can say that more than 1 million drafty homes have been retrofitted to lower heating and cooling costs, while energy generation from renewable sources such as wind and solar has nearly doubled since 2008.

But the millions of “green jobs” Obama promised have been slow to sprout, disappointing many who had hoped that the $90 billion earmarked for clean-energy efforts in the recession-fighting federal stimulus package would ease unemployment – still above 8 percent in March.

Supporters say the administration over-promised on the jobs front and worry that a backlash could undermine support for clean-energy policies in general. …

In April 16th Pickings we had an item by Neal Boortz suggesting Scott Walker was going to do well in Wisconsin. Jonathan Tobin has some polls to the same effect.

The decision by Democrats and their union allies to try and defeat Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker via recall is increasingly looking like a bad bet. The latest poll numbers out of the Badger State show that Walker leads all possible Democratic challengers in the vote that is scheduled for June 5.  The best showing of the four Democrats in the race was from Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who trailed Walker 50-45 percent. Walker bests Kathleen Falk by seven points and both Doug La Follette and Kathleen Vinehout by ten points. The Public Policy Polling survey conducted for the Daily Kos also showed that while Wisconsin voters are nearly evenly split about Walker’s job performance, 51 percent approve of him.

By bowing to the dictates of an angry labor union movement and pushing for a recall, Democrats gambled that they could knock off Walker and set the stage for a reversal of the 2010 Republican tidal wave that swept the governor and a GOP legislative majority into office. But if they fail in June, it will not only encourage Republicans to think they might steal the state from President Obama in November, they will have immeasurably strengthened Walker.

In the last two months, Ford sold exactly none of the electric Focus. None. Story from Detroit News.

Electric vehicle sales have been slow out of the box, despite marketing hype, government incentives and the hopes of green car advocates.

Total sales last year were 17,425, which is less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. car and light truck market.

Nonetheless, automakers show no signs of pulling back their multibillion-dollar bets: They need electric cars to meet tough new fuel-efficiency standards. About a dozen new plug-ins and fully electric cars will go on sale in the next year. …

WSJ article tells the real cost of batteries for electric cars.

One of the auto industry’s most closely guarded secrets—the enormous cost of batteries for electric cars—has spilled out.

Speaking at a forum on green technology on Monday, Ford Motor Co. F -1.01%Chief Executive Alan Mulally indicated battery packs for the company’s Focus electric car costs between $12,000 and $15,000 apiece.

“When you move into an all-electric vehicle, the battery size moves up to around 23 kilowatt hours, [and] it weighs around 600 to 700 pounds,” Mr. Mulally said at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Green conference in California.

“They’re around $12,000 to $15,000 [a battery]” for a type of car that normally sells for about $22,000, he continued, referring to the price of a gasoline-powered Focus. “So, you can see why the economics are what they are.”  …

A good start to the humor section is having David Harsanyi finding Barney Frank quoting Frederick Hayek. It is out of context of course, but it is still The Road to Serfdom in Barney’s hands; wish he would read it and could understand.

… It’s nice, if not a bit odd, that Frank just happens to have a copy of Road to Serfdom within reach and that he just happens to open it to the page that features an out-of-context position that caters so neatly to his imaginary analysis of Tea Party conservatives. Hayek is good for “these purposes” — as in the purpose of reinforcing perceptions that New York readers have about these progress-impeding bible thumpers in far off lands.

Well, here’s a bit more of that Hayek’s quote: “In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjusted legal framework as much as any other.”

One could argue that much of the legislation Frank has backed is neither intelligently designed nor continuously adjusting — as much as it is continually growing and deliberately interfering. I’m no Hayek scholar, of course, but in this quote, the (in)famous Austrian economist seems to be talking about a legal framework that allows for peaceful trade, not an assertive government that creates fabricated marketplaces, restricts trade so environmentalists can feel good about themselves, uses taxation as a tool of “fairness,” etc …

And as Brian Doherty points out, “Yes, F.A. Hayek is not an anarchist.”

But here’s Frank’s (and Obama’s and Krugman’s and …) formulation: cutting a dollar from the federal budget is unfairly enriching the wealthy, deregulation is unfairly enriching the wealthy, opposition to regulation that does not yet even exist means you’re unfairly enriching the wealthy and doing nothing at the same time. …

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Jennifer Rubin posts on how good Romney’s prospects are for 270 electoral votes. Pickerhead thinks if Obama continues to sink in the polls, we can expect him to dump Biden and put Hillary on the ticket.

The electoral map reveals how perilous is President Obama’s grip on the White House. Let’s start, as RealClearPolitics does, with a base of 170 electoral votes for Mitt Romney. It’s hard to imagine that Obama could win any of even the less-red states that comprise that batch (e.g. Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Montana). To get 100 more and seize the presidency, Romney only needs some states that routinely went Republican before the 2008 race (Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia) and needs to hold on to a few that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) managed to win (Arizona, Missouri). This gets Romney to 273.

In other words, Romney doesn’t need to win (but he might) in New Hampshire or New Mexico. He would love to, but isn’t required to, break through in states like Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin or Michigan. (The first and last would seem the most likely.)

It may come as a shock to liberals when you break it down by the only measure that matters (electoral votes), but Romney can do worse that George W. Bush did in 2004 (when he won Iowa and New Mexico) and still win the White House. …

Peter Schiff worked his way to commenting on the president’s legal scholarship.

Last  week, responding to President Obama’s latest populist assault on the wealthy, I issued a commentary in which I explained why his ideas about American economic history were fundamentally flawed. As dangerous and erroneous as those views are, at least I can cut the President some slack for commenting on a subject in which he really has no basis for expertise. Hailing from academia and local community organizing, Barack Obama likely did not spend huge amounts of time boning up on economic history. However, there are other subjects where he should find firmer footing. Constitutional law certainly comes to mind. After all, Obama rose to national prominence based on his status as a legal scholar.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He went on to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, one of the top ranked schools in the country.

Based on these achievements, it is simply stunning that he made so many fundamental errors last week in his analysis of the Supreme Court’s review of his sweeping health care legislation. Not only did he make grossly inaccurate statements with regards to the health care legislation, and the history of Supreme Court decisions that relate to it, but he also showed little understanding of the very purpose that the Court serves within the constitutional framework of the U.S. government.  These remarks either indicate that a Harvard degree isn’t worth the paper it’s written on or that there is nothing Obama won’t say to advance his political agenda.

In his apparently off-the-cuff remarks he stated that “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what will be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” Before even turning to the more nuanced parts of that statement, I would ask the President what he considers to be a “strong majority?” His health care legislation (dubbed “Obamacare” by Republicans), passed the House of Representatives in March 2010 on a nearly party line vote of 220-215 (some would call this result “a squeaker.”) What’s more, just six months later, the slim majority that voted to pass the legislation was voted out of existence. Not only would the law stand no chance of passage in the current Congress, the majority of Americans still show misgivings about the expansion of federal power that the law involves.  So much for a groundswell of national support. But that’s just the appetizer. …

And Peter Ferrara notes the community organizer’s understanding of taxation.

President Obama has a community organizer understanding of America’s taxes. His rhetoric doesn’t recognize that under our tax system the earnings from capital investment are taxed not once, but multiple times.

First, by the corporate income tax, then again by the individual income tax through the tax on dividends, then if you sell the capital investment, through the capital gains tax, then when you die, by the death tax. When he complains that the rich are not paying their fair share, he is just looking at the rate on any one of these taxes, and not considering all of the others. So he wants to raise them all for those making over $1 million per year to what he considers the tax rate paid by the middle class, which he calls the Buffett rule.

As a result, Obama would increase the top capital gains tax rate by 100%, increase the top tax rate on dividends by 100%, increase the top two income tax rates by nearly 20%, and increase the death tax rate by nearly 60%, while the corporate tax rate remains the highest in the industrialized world. The capital gains tax rate under the Buffett Rule would be the fourth highest among OECD nations, as the Wall Street Journal noted on Wednesday.

The Heritage Foundation explained it like this on Wednesday. The taxation of capital is like a trip on a toll road, where you have to pay $3.50 to get on the road, then $3.50 at a toll booth on the road, then a $1.50 toll to get off the road. Obama’s understanding of the tax code is like saying the toll for this trip is $1.50, which is somehow unfair to those who take the bus on the same route for a $3.50 total fare (assume the bus is exempt from the tolls). So he thinks the toll to get off the road should be $3.50 as well.

But Warren Buffett is more than happy with Obama’s proposals. That’s because his Berkshire Hathaway is effectively the largest tax shelter in the nation, partially shielding its investors precisely from the multiple taxation of capital. So raising tax rates sharply to make that multiple taxation far worse will just mean more customers for him. Buffett’s company is like a subway next to the road that only charges $1.50 total fare. …

WaPo OpEd calling for $10 million loans for everyone shows how ridiculous our situation has become.

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.

For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.

So why not let everyone participate?

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

Think of what we can do with all that money. We can pay off our underwater mortgages and replenish our retirement accounts without spending one day schlepping into the office. With a few quick keystrokes, we’ll be golden for the next 10 years.

Of course, we will have to persuade Congress to pass a law authorizing all this Fed lending, but that shouldn’t be hard. Congress is really good at spending money, so long as lawmakers don’t have to come up with a way to pay for it. …

Even the NY Times understands we’re heading for serious problems.

ON Jan. 1 of next year, the federal tax bill for a typical middle-class household — making in the neighborhood of $50,000 — is scheduled to rise by about $1,750. This increase, which would come from the expiration of both the Bush tax cuts and the Obama stimulus, would follow a decade of little to no income growth for many people. As a result, inflation-adjusted, after-tax income for the median household could fall next year to its 1998 level, in spite of the continuing economic recovery.

The middle-class tax increase is just the beginning of budget changes set to take effect at the start of 2013. Poor families would see their taxes rise somewhat, too. Total federal taxes for top-earning families would rise by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Spending cuts would also take effect, squeezing domestic programs — education, transportation, scientific research — and the military.

All in all, the end of 2012 will be unlike any other time in memory for the federal government.

The tax increases and spending cuts are the result of Washington’s having previously kicked the can down the road, to use a phrase that is popular here. Rather than pass a plan to cut the deficit, policy makers have put off tough decisions. With the Bush tax cuts, lawmakers deliberately made them temporary, to avoid running afoul of budget rules intended to hold down the deficit.

Not surprisingly, leaders of both parties now say they are opposed to letting the changes happen on Jan. 1. Economists are also frightened of what such a sharp shift in government policy might do to a still fragile economy. Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has referred to the various expirations as “a massive fiscal cliff.” Congressional aides, quoted in The Washington Post, call it “taxmageddon.”

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Peter Wehner says the administration is running on empty.

Everyone from President Obama to Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to Politico’s Jim VandeHei, agree that the so-called Buffett Rule is a gimmick that has almost no bearing on the budget deficit. And for good reason. The Treasury Department confirms that the tax would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5 percent of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and, over the next decade, 0.1 percent of the $45.43 trillion the federal government will spend (for more, see here). By one estimate, the “Buffett Rule” would cover 17 days of the president’s next decade of deficits. So it’s not, in any sense, a serious or meaningful proposal. And yet it has, as the New York Times reports, become a “centerpiece” of the Obama re-election campaign.

So there you have it. The Obama presidency has reached the point where a policy that virtually everyone (including the president) concedes is a gimmick is now a centerpiece of Obama’s campaign.

There are many ways to measure the intellectual exhaustion of the Obama presidency. This isn’t a bad place to start.

Andrew Malcolm notices the hyper-partisanship of the president.

Has anyone seen Barack Obama recently?

You know, the optimistic hopeful fellow with the charming smile who promised so many positive things four and five years ago, how he was going to change the harsh, partisan tone of our nation’s capital and bring the country together as its first African American president.

Even allowing for political hyperbole, his empty resume and the invisible witnesses from the past, Obama was such a Real Good Talker that even some who didn’t vote for him still had hope that he could change some things for the better in what seemed a sadly-splintered society.

WTH did that Obama go? Have you listened recently to this Chicago Doppelganger who’s replaced him? This 2012 Obama is strident and mean, even deceitful, divisive, telling half-truths after half-truths. He’s using Air Force One as his personal Brinks truck with wings to collect cash all over the country, disguising the trips as official.

He tries to intimidate the Supreme Court, an equal branch of government, when its thinking might stray from his. He distorts history, and if no one calls him, then it’s true. If he’s caught, this Obama says you obviously mis-heard. Because, as everyone knows, he could never mis-speak.

The economy, like everything else adverse, is someone else’s fault. But if only we borrowed and spent a trillion dollars, unemployment would stay beneath 8%, Obama promised. It soared far above. It’s still above. No apology. No acknowledgment. Now, he hails any dip as proof of progress when, in fact, it comes because so many just give up seeking work. …

Charles Krauthammer goes after the “Buffett Rule.”

… As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again this week. “It will help us close our deficit.” Does he really think we’re that stupid?

Hence the fallback: The Buffett Rule is a first step in tax reform. On the contrary. It’s a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn’t touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to. The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with reelection.

As such, it’s clever. It deftly channels the sentiment underlying Occupy Wall Street (original version, before its slovenly, whiny, aggressive weirdness made it politically toxic). It perfectly pits the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Indeed, it is OWS translated into legislation, something the actual occupiers never had the wit to come up with.

Clever politics, but in terms of economics, it’s worse than useless. It’s counterproductive. The reason Buffett and Mitt Romney pay roughly 15 percent in taxes is that their income is principally capital gains. The Buffett Rule is, in fact, a disguised tax hike on capital gains. But Obama prefers to present it as just an alternative minimum tax because 50 years of economic history show that raising the capital gains tax backfires: It reduces federal revenue, while lowering the tax raises revenue.

No matter. Obama had famously said in 2008 that even if that’s the case, he’d still raise the capital gains tax — for the sake of fairness. …

Mark Steyn too.

… Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes. Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden? As the Great Magician would say, pick a number, any number. Sorry, you’re wrong. Whatever you’re willing to bear, he’s got more lined up for you.

Even if you’re absolved from federal income tax, you, too, require enough people willing to keep the racket going, and America is already pushing forward into territory the rest of the developed world is steering well clear of. On April Fools’ Day, Japan and the United Kingdom both cut their corporate tax rates, leaving the United States even more of an outlier, with the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world: The top rate of federal corporate tax in the US is 35 percent. It’s 15 percent in Canada. Which is next door.

Well, who cares about corporations? Only out-of-touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who – hmm, let’s see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat – put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That’s where your gran’ma will be under the Republicans’ plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt, in what’s generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama’s plan to use the Buffett Rule to “close the deficit” this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.

But Mitt’s not wrong. In the end, a corporation doesn’t pay tax. The marble atrium of Global MegaCorp’s corporate HQ is indifferent to the tax rate; the Articles of Incorporation in the bottom drawer of the chairman’s desk couldn’t care less. Every dollar of “corporate” tax has to be fished out the pocket of a real flesh-and-blood human being, whether shareholder, employee or customer.

And that’s the problem. For what Obama’s spending, there aren’t enough of them, or us, or “the rich” – and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third-wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the Government of the United States, they would blow through it within four-and-a-half days. OK, so who’s the fourth-richest guy? He’s French. And the fifth guy’s a Spaniard. No. 6 six is Larry Ellison. He’s American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States Government going for a week. …

Daniel Henninger gives the background for the attacks on Paul Ryan. 

With the presidential battle begun, the Obama campaign has revived the Cold War nuclear strategy of launch on warning. At any suggestion that a conservative idea might be threatening its ideological fortress, the American left now launches ICBMs of rhetorical destruction.

So it was after the Supreme Court’s hearings on the Obama Affordable Care Act, which put in jeopardy the federal command to buy health insurance. After the president green-flagged the assault, the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy” was in play. The Roberts Court, wrote one blogger, is “on trial.”

On current course, House GOP Budget Chairman Paul Ryan himself may exhaust their entire thermonuclear arsenal before November. Once again, the Campaigner in Chief threw the switch himself, calling the Ryan House budget “social Darwinism,” “a Trojan horse” and “antithetical to our entire history.” Rev. Samuel Rodriquez of the Hispanic Evangelical Association said the poor would be “budget-war collateral damage.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Ryan pushed back. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said that in fact the Catholic Church’s “social magisterium” had informed his House budget. One goal of that teaching, he said, is to prevent the poor from staying poor. Nor, he added, should individuals become lifelong dependents of their government.

Just as the left thought the regulating reach of the Commerce Clause was beyond serious challenge, it long ago decided that none dare question the moral case for public spending. That social Darwinism speech Barack Obama is giving now in defense of federal programs isn’t merely a public-policy statement. It’s a Democratic encyclical. Paul Ryan’s ideas are worse than wrong. They are heresy. …

A word for the defense of the slimy sleazy John Edwards. This from Jonathan Tobin.

… John Edwards is an easy man to despise. His treatment of his wife and family and friends was awful. But these are private failings. The willingness of the press to avoid coverage of his personal conduct while he was a viable contender for his party’s presidential nomination was the real public scandal here.

There’s no question that Edwards behaved immorally by arranging for two wealthy friends and supporters to provide money for his mistress so his wife wouldn’t discover his affair. But the money given to Rielle Hunter, the equally sleazy campaign videographer who gave birth to Edwards’ child, was not a crime in the sense of the word that we normally use when discussing the court system. Gift taxes were paid on the money that was not funneled through Edwards’ presidential campaign accounts. The government’s attempt to treat this arrangement as an illegal campaign contribution for which he can be sent to jail for decades is an unprecedented attempt to expand the scope of laws that already require candidates to hire lawyers just to understand.

While the Justice Department will attempt to treat this case as the unraveling of a criminal conspiracy, what they are really doing is capitalizing on a tabloid scandal. The only reason Edwards is on trial is because he is a rich, famous and extremely unpopular person. Ambitious prosecutors believe they can convince a jury that is likely to view Edwards with as much disdain as the rest of the country that because his behavior was wrong and money was involved, that it was somehow a criminal affair.

What they are doing here is a classic case of prosecutorial overreach in which the government attempts to criminalize conduct that is worthy of censure but doesn’t actually constitute a violation of the law. Even worse, by expanding the reach of campaign finance laws, a guilty verdict against Edwards would strengthen the ability of the government to criminalize virtually any aspect of a candidate’s life. In the hands of unscrupulous officials, these laws could become a weapon to use against political enemies in a manner that could place even the most ethical politicians in the dock. Rather than give the government more power over this sphere, we need to pare back the byzantine maze of regulations.

John Edwards may well be the epitome of all that is wrong with American politics. But his prosecution symbolizes everything that is corrupt about the justice system.

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm. 

Fallon: Harvard Law School will soon offer a class called, ‘Understanding Obama.’ While Barnum & Bailey Clown College will offer a class called, ‘Understanding Biden.’

Conan: Rick Santorum has returned to his previous job: Traveling to small towns across America and forcing them to outlaw dancing.

Leno: The New York Daily News says some airline passengers recently found maggots in an in-flight snack mix. How amazing is that? An airline still serving snacks.

Fallon: Joe Biden has a new Twitter account for campaign trail updates. His most recent update: ‘They still won’t let me on the campaign trail.’