Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin interviews Ed Gillespie who recently signed on with the Romney team.

I caught up with the newest addition to the Mitt Romney campaign, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. He was on the road, but in a series of e-mail exchanges he gave Right Turn his take on the race. He is joining the campaign as a senior adviser, although he’s volunteering his time.

His experience in helping Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell win in a landslide may be more useful than he ever imagined. He tells me, “Bob McDonnell showed that a principled conservative can win big in a swing state, and he did it by talking about not only the features of conservative policies but the benefits. In other words, he didn’t just talk about keeping taxes low, he said that would help create jobs and enable people to decide for themselves how best to spend their hard earned money. We called it ‘finishing the sentence,’ and there is a valuable lesson in Gov. McDonnell’s success.”

Although Gillespie didn’t mention it, McDonnell also avoided getting bogged down in social issues in a race in which Democrats strained to raise wedge issues. That’s a wise pattern for Romney to follow as well.

Unlike President Obama, who seems determined to veer left, Gillespie has his eye on critical independent voters. …

Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost looks carefully at polls and sees Obama on thin ice.

Yesterday, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll seemed to confirm the meme that Barack Obama is pummeling Mitt Romney among women, helping the former open up a 7-point lead in the general election horse race.

What to make of this?

Well, for starters, the poll has an inexplicably large Democratic advantage – the party breakdown in the poll is 34 percent Democratic, 23 percent Republican, and 34 percent independent. As a point of historical comparison, the party spread in four of the last five elections since 2002 has basically been an even split between the two sides. In 2008, a “perfect storm” of bad news for the GOP, the party ID advantage was “only” +7. So, a Democratic advantage of +11 is an unjustifiable number, at least in terms of what the electorate is thinking.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey did a solid job of dressing down the pollsters for such an absurd Democratic skew, and I encourage you to read his response carefully. I’ll just add that I am always amused when pollsters find an advantage for Democratic candidates that is less than their Democratic oversample. In this case, ABC News/WaPo finds Obama’s job approval at +5 (50 percent approve to 45 percent disapprove), but that is not nearly so impressive in a D+11 sample!

Polls like this are useful, however, in a kind of “Nixon goes to China” sense. Put another way, if Democrats look weak in polls that are so ridiculously pro-Democratic, you know they are in trouble. …

How’s things in Wisconsin? This vote will be in a few months and might be a harbinger of things to come in November. Neal Boortz says Scott Walker can relax.  

Well, I think he can relax.  Pretty sure, actually.  

Governor Scott Walker is facing a recall election in Wisconsin as a result of a pretty impressive union petition drive.  Unions aren’t happy about losing some of their collective bargaining rights and actually having to pony up almost as much as private sector workers for their health insurance.  Oh! The humanity!  But I’m going on record here (oh yeah, Boortz on the record; now THAT’S news) saying that Scott Walker will win, as will the people of Wisconsin.

You’re right in wanting a little analysis here to go along with my prediction, and I’m only happy to oblige.  The problem the Wisconsin unions have in bringing about a successful recall election is rooted in the very way they managed to get enough petitions signed to bring about the election in the first place.  It’s also the reason unions want their unionization-by-intimidation (card check) law so badly.  Fact is, the union activists collected a good number of those signatures on those petitions through intimidation — and those who were intimidated can’t wait to express their true feelings on election day. 

To expand on the reason Walker has nothing to worry about, let’s focus on the methodology behind union elections and labor leaders’ dreams of card check …

Pickerhead was hoping Santorum would hang around long enough to get beat in Pennsylvania. Then we would be spared anymore of him. Toby Harnden notes his graceless departure.

Rick Santorum has bowed to reality by suspending his long-shot presidential bid. He had no hope of overhauling Mitt Romney’s delegate lead and the general election campaign against President Barack Obama had effectively already begun.

In dropping out, Santorum avoided the very real prospect of losing his home state of Pennsylvania, a loss which, combined with his 18-point Senate re-election loss there in 2006, would have been devastating to his future national prospects. Having won 11 states, Santorum had the opportunity to withdraw graciously, congratulate Mitt Romney – now his party’s presumptive nominee – and call for Republican unity in working to defeat President Barack Obama in November. A full endorsement was not necessary – Hillary Clinton did not immediately back Obama in 2008 – but an acknowledgement that Romney was the victor would have been an important first step towards party healing after a bruising primary battle.

Instead, Santorum blew it. His rambling 14-minute speech in Gettysburg, site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, barely mentioned Obama or the economy. …

We are not used to sensible items coming out of the World Bank, but City Journal has found a Bank report showing how free markets have created wealth in the poorest parts of the world.

The most significant events often escape media attention. How many would know from reading their daily newspaper or watching television that we live in an unprecedented economic period when the number of people living in extreme poverty is declining fast? According to a just-published World Bank report, the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 per day—or its local equivalent—has plummeted from 52 percent of the global population in 1981 to 22 percent in 2008. The World Bank doesn’t provide more recent data, but other indices show that the 2008 financial crisis did not interrupt this trend. For millions of households, crossing the symbolic $1.25 threshold means leaving destitution behind and moving toward a more dignified life—no trivial achievement. Moreover, this escape from poverty happens while the global population continues to grow. Doomsday prophets who warned about a ticking “population bomb” have not been vindicated, to say the least. Global warming messiahs, beware: human ingenuity proves able to cope with the predicaments of Mother Nature.

Thirty years ago, half of the planet lived in utter misery, and many commentators argued that poverty was destiny. At best, most pundits conceded that pockets of poverty could be alleviated through international aid. Only a handful of economists begged to differ: Theodor Schultz, Milton Friedman, and Peter Bauer were the mavericks advocating free-market policies for every nation as the way out of poverty. They have been proven right. China’s economy has been growing since the mid-1980s—when Deng Xiaoping, its de facto leader, abandoned central planning, opened the borders for foreign investment, and promoted entrepreneurship at home.

In 1991, after the Soviet economic model proved bankrupt, India left behind its socialist ideology, opened its borders to foreign competition, and deregulated its economy. The economies of the two most populous countries on earth have grown without interruption ever since. Remember, too, that South Korea and Taiwan understood the virtues of free markets long before China or India discovered them. Many smaller countries, across a huge range of cultures, soon followed suit. African governments, too, converted to free-market economics with significant results— Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, among others. …

Christopher Booker says the magazine Nature is one of the chief propagandists for the fading global warming theories.

Since the fading belief that the world is in the grip of runaway man-made global warming still threatens us with the biggest bill in history, it is rather important to know how far we can trust the science which is said to support that belief. One of the most vociferous cheerleaders in the cause has been the Nature, which calls itself “the world’s most prestigious weekly journal of science”.

Whenever some landmark event in the story is approaching – such as a world climate conference or a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – Nature can be relied on to come up with a new paper purporting to refute one of the more embarrassing objections to the orthodox theory. However thoroughly such a paper is then dismantled by expert critics, it will remain established as a pillar of the orthodoxy.

In 1996, as the Kyoto treaty approached, it was a paper claiming to show how the “fingerprint” of warming – the part of the atmosphere where it was most obvious – confirmed that it must be due to human activity. Two scientists promptly explained how the data showed precisely the opposite – warming that was man-made should be greatest in the upper troposphere and not, as it actually is, on the earth’s surface. The chief author of that bid to defend the orthodoxy was Ben Santer. It was his last-minute rewriting of a key passage in the IPCC’s second report – contradicting the text agreed by all the scientists responsible – that provoked the IPCC’s first real scandal. Frederick Seitz, the eminent US physicist who exposed this flagrant breach of the rules, described it as the most “disturbing corruption of the peer-review process” he had come across in all his 60 years as a scientist. …

Clikc on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We have been hearing about the “radical” Ryan budget. Would you believe it is 46% higher, in real terms, than Clinton’s last budget? Investors.com has the story. Yes, we ran this last week. It is worth repeating.

Even in a city known for hyperbole, the attacks by Democrats on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan stand out.

It’s “bad news in every single direction,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and “extreme and divisive,” according to Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the budget is “not a statement of our national values,” and her second in command, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, claimed the plan “represents a bleak future for America.”

President Obama went furthest, saying in a speech this week that Ryan’s “draconian cuts” would “impose a radical vision on our country” and that it was “antithetical to our entire history.” It is “so far to the right,” he said, “that it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.”

So does Ryan’s budget proposal live up to this radical billing?

Not at all. That is, not unless you’d call Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, an even more extreme radical.

Under Ryan’s plan, the federal government would be 46% bigger in real terms than it was in 2000, which was President Clinton’s last year in office.

Neal Boortz details the instructions given to the media by the president.

Now, is Paul Ryan’s plan perfect?  Absolutely not.  It doesn’t cut spending enough.  It doesn’t call for the elimination of the Department of Education.  It doesn’t call for severely reigning in the EPA.  Ryan’s plan is still, in a sense, a big government plan … but it provides for smaller, big government.  Yet Obama labels this as “radical” and then has the audacity to scold his very own ObamaMedia for not giving him more credit in this battle.  He says …

“I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing that they are equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general.  This is not a situation where there is equivalence.”

Are you hearing this?  Obama is telling the ObamaMedia that they are not understanding that this budget impasse is not his fault.  Nope.  …  In this case, disagreement is because the Republicans are being unreasonable, unlike Dear Ruler.  He continues …

“So, as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember, the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we’d been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions.  What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party. That’s certainly true with the budget.”

Now we get it!  Obama is a reasonable man who is not saying anything different than he has said from the beginning.  The Republicans, however, are the ones who have become more radical over the years.  I, the great and powerful Obama, am a centrist, while the Republicans are the radical extremists.  Got it? 

Debra Saunders puts the lie to the claim Obama is a centrist. 

President Obama chastised the media last week. “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” the president chided those attending the American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon.

Obama also claimed that he holds positions that 20 or 15 years ago “would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party.” Oh, and Ronald Reagan “could not get through a Republican primary today.”

Yet many in the media don’t ask: Where are the moderate Democrats?

When the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in Obamacare, court observers expect all four U.S. Supreme Court justices appointed by Democrats to back Obama. If any justices depart from their ideology, it will be Justice Anthony Kennedy (appointed by Reagan) and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts.

So how did Obama vote on Roberts after President George W. Bush nominated him to the big bench in 2005? The Senate approved Roberts in a 78-22 vote. Good liberals like Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who no longer serve in the Senate, were among the 22 Democrats who supported Roberts. Other yes votes – Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman – probably can’t win and aren’t running for re-election.

Obama voted no on Roberts. Vice President Joe Biden also voted no. In 2006, when the Senate approved Justice Samuel Alito 72-25, Obama and Biden voted against him, too. The Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., voted against Roberts and Alito. …

Karl Rove says we can count on the president taking the low road.

… He will distort beyond recognition his opponent’s arguments. For example, he explained to news executives at the AP that Republicans want to “convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts—especially for the wealthy.” Actually, no one has suggested that.

No honest differences are possible with Mr. Obama. He will impugn the motives of any who disagree with him. As he told the AP, his opponents want to “let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity.” His agenda “isn’t a partisan feeling . . . [it]isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea. It’s patriotism.” To disagree with him is unpatriotic. That’s to be expected from Republicans, whom Mr. Obama says stand for “thinly veiled social Darwinism . . . [that is] antithetical to our entire history.”

Mr. Obama will build entire edifices on top of one fake premise, all dressed up in one big phony assumption. Take the House GOP budget plan. It increases federal outlays from roughly $3.6 trillion this year to nearly $4.9 trillion in 2022. In the AP speech the president called this a “cut” because he wants to increase spending to $5.8 trillion in 2022.

He warned that if the GOP’s “cuts . . . were to be spread out evenly across the budget,” then “Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS” research would be slashed, 10 million college students denied assistance, and “thousands” of researchers and teachers “could lose their jobs.” But Republicans don’t cut across the board. Instead, their focus is on waste, duplication, programs that do not work, and on reform.

As he did Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University, Mr. Obama will attack “these same trickle-down theories” about taxes that almost led to “a second Great Depression.” But if the Bush tax cuts were so evil, why didn’t Mr. Obama repeal them during his first two years, when his party controlled both houses of Congress? Instead, in December 2010 Mr. Obama agreed to extend them for two more years. …

The “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life” kerfuffle gets Jennifer Rubin’s treatment.

Overnight President Obama’s faux “war on women” attack on Mitt Romney blew up in his face. It is fitting that a gimmick should boomerang this quickly and this severely, maybe giving Romney the first big break of the race.

By now you’ve probably heard that Hilary Rosen, a sometime White House adviser and frequent visitor, on CNN attacked the most popular person in the campaign, Ann Romney, with a cartoon version of left-leaning feminism, declaring that the mother of five who has battle multiple sclerosis and cancer “never worked a day in her life.” (Query why the conservative on the panel sat there like a lump on the log. Maybe a few more conservative women on CNN would balance the coverage. He claims to have “missed it.” Indeed.) No, this really happened. Honest. But it didn’t stop. Rosen took to Twitter to dig her hole deeper and deeper, never apologizing. (At this point Republicans should be humming Dayenu.)

But it didn’t end there. Obama political hacks David Axelrod and Jim Messina took to Twitter to condemn the remarks and to call on Rosen to apologize, thereby making Rosen seem closer to the president’s campaign (and the campaign more responsible for her gaffe than might otherwise be the case). And — yup — it didn’t end there. Ann Romney now is on Twitter and got a gazillion followers in just hours. Her first tweet was a keeper: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”

Needless to say, the “war on women” has taken on a whole new tone. Let’s count the ways this is just awful for Obama and/or Democrats more generally. There are a few, so find a comfortable seat.

First, Obama, as a conservative pundit put it, just went a long way toward solidifying Romney’s base, especially among social conservatives who loathe elites who look down on stay-at-home moms.

Second, it feeds into the cliche that liberals love humanity but hate people. In this case they love womanhood but treat their own employees and conservative women like dirt. …

This is ironic. Alana Goodman says Hillary Rosen was hired to get Debbie WasserFace to tone down her combativeness.

On “Anderson Cooper 360? last night, Hilary Rosen slammed Ann Romney for “never actually work[ing] a day in her life.” Within two hours, both David Axelrod and Obama campaign manager Jim Messina were scrambling to distance themselves from Rosen’s comments on Twitter.

Why is the Obama campaign so concerned? Apparently Rosen was enlisted in February to advise Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on public relations (h/t Jim Geraghty’s invaluable Morning Jolt). The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 16 that Rosen was brought on to “tone down” DWS’s image:

Obama advisers have occasionally told [Wasserman Schultz] to “tone it down” and “back off a smidgen,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz says. She agreed with them to enlist two seasoned Democratic female pros, Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen, to begin giving her occasional political advice and media training, advisers say. “I’m glad to get constructive criticism,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz says. …

You know things aren’t going well for Obama, when Dana Milbank thinks the “Buffett Rule” is a gimmick.

President Obama admits it: His proposed “Buffett Rule” tax on millionaires is a gimmick.

“There are others who are saying: ‘Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit,’ ” Obama declared Wednesday. “Well, I agree.”

Actually, the gimmick was apparent even without the president’s acknowledgment. He gave his remarks in a room in the White House complex adorned with campaign-style photos of his factory tours. On stage with him were eight props: four millionaires, each paired with a middle-class assistant. The octet smiled and nodded so much as Obama made his case that it appeared the president was sharing the stage with eight bobbleheads.

And if that’s not enough evidence of gimmickry, after his speech Obama’s reelection campaign unveiled an online tax calculator “to see how your tax rate stacks up against Mitt Romney’s — and then see what the Buffett Rule would do.”

Obama argued that his plan to make sure that those earning north of $1 million a year don’t pay a lower tax rate than average Americans — although gimmicky and insufficient — is an advance. “The notion that it doesn’t solve the entire problem doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it at all,” he explained.

That’s true, to a point. But Obama’s claim that the Buffett Rule “is something that will get us moving in the right direction toward fairness” would be more convincing if he took other steps in that direction, too.

Three years into his presidency, Obama has not introduced a plan for comprehensive tax reform — arguably the most important vehicle for fixing the nation’s finances and boosting long-term economic growth. …

Good News! WSJ says there are twice as many Emperor Penguins as previously thought. The next question is how come we didn’t know this before? If we have just come to our senses on the penguin census, what else don’t we know?

Antarctica has twice as many emperor penguins as scientists had thought, according to a new study using satellite imagery in the first comprehensive survey of one of the world’s most iconic birds.

British and U.S. geospatial mapping experts reported Friday in the journal PLoS One that they had counted 595,000 emperor penguins living in 46 colonies along the coast of Antarctica, compared with previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000 penguins based on surveys of just five colonies. The researchers also discovered four previously unknown emperor-penguin colonies and confirmed the location of three others.

Researchers are using satellite data to track penguins and seals across the coldest region on earth without disturbing them – and without leaving home. WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports.(Originally published 04/2010).

“It is good news from a conservation point of view,” said geographer Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, who led the penguin satellite census. “This is the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.”

Although all of Antarctica’s wildlife is protected by international treaty, the emperor penguins are not an officially endangered species. But they are considered a bellwether of any future climate changes in Antarctica because their icy habitat is so sensitive to rising temperatures. …

The humor section starts with Joe Biden who did not get the memo. This from The Corner.

This week, Hilary Rosen, who is to communications what Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (We know him as Baghdad Bob) was to information, said this:

“Can we just get rid of this word, “war on women”? The Obama campaign does not use it, President Obama does not use it — this is something that the Republicans are accusing people of using, but they’re actually the ones spreading it.”

Although a huge number of Democrats have used the phrase — Jim Geraghty has compiled an excellent list — Rosen was technically correct that the Obama team hadn’t used it.

Until yesterday, that is. Enter Joe Biden, right on cue:

Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday he believes the right’s “war on women is real” and could be particularly salient during the multiple Supreme Court appointments he expects to come during the next president’s term.

“I think the war on women is real,” Biden said in an interview he sat for with MSNBC’s Ed Schultz as part of a campaign trip to New Hampshire to talk up the Buffett rule. “And, look, I tell you where it’s going to intensify: The next president of the United States is going to get to name one and possibly two or more members of the Supreme Court.”

As Jonah Goldberg brilliantly chronicles in the latest issue of National Review, Biden can pretty much always be relied upon to ruin everything. Still, the second part of his speech gives an insight into one of the framing tactics the Obama administration is going to employ in the run-up to November, especially if Obamacare is struck down.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We have been hearing about the “radical” Ryan budget. Would you believe it is 46% higher than Clinton’s last budget? Investors.com has the story. 

Even in a city known for hyperbole, the attacks by Democrats on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan stand out.

It’s “bad news in every single direction,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and “extreme and divisive,” according to Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the budget is “not a statement of our national values,” and her second in command, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, claimed the plan “represents a bleak future for America.”

President Obama went furthest, saying in a speech this week that Ryan’s “draconian cuts” would “impose a radical vision on our country” and that it was “antithetical to our entire history.” It is “so far to the right,” he said, “that it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.”

So does Ryan’s budget proposal live up to this radical billing?

Not at all. That is, not unless you’d call Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, an even more extreme radical.

Under Ryan’s plan, the federal government would be 46% bigger in real terms than it was in 2000, which was President Clinton’s last year in office.

Josh Kraushaar says the president’s trash talk could hurt him.

If President Obama loses reelection in November, the seeds of his defeat will have been planted in his fiery, populist campaign kickoff speech at the Associated Press luncheon last week. It was a negative, overly political address at sharp odds with his optimistic 2008 campaign message of hope and change. It seemed petty at times, mocking Mitt Romney for using the word “marvelous” and exaggerating proposed conservative entitlement reforms as “Social Darwinism.” All  of this while giving a supposedly nonpolitical, non-campaign address.

Ideologically, the speech was a throwback to the Democratic rhetoric of decades past. Despite sops to Ronald Reagan, Obama laid out his ideological argument at the outset, stating his “belief that, through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” That’s a far cry from “the era of big government is over” mantra that President Clinton advanced in his reelection campaign.

In one sense, the speech previewed how fiercely the president’s team will be fighting for another term and how nasty the expected contest between Obama and Romney is likely to be. As Obama’s advisers have indicated, the president’s campaign strategy is to portray the opposition as so extreme that voters will hold their noses and vote for the incumbent even if they’re dissatisfied with the country’s direction. To eke out a victory in a slow-growing economy, Obama needs to turn out his base and turn off independents to Romney.

But the president is seriously miscalculating if he believes that the key to winning the hearts and minds of independents is “us-against-them” rhetoric that hails back to a bygone Democratic era. He ably mounted a withering attack on the Republicans’ austerity proposals but offered no alternative vision to deal with the growing debt. When Clinton campaigned for a second term in 1996, he likewise castigated congressional Republicans for proposing entitlement cuts and shutting down the government, but he also championed a just-passed bipartisan welfare-reform law and a balanced budget that reduced the size of government. With Obama’s speech, there was no centrist recalibrating to reassure worried independents that he’s not too ideological; no sugar to sweeten the tough talk.

That’s no trivial concern, according to the results of a poll analyzing the sentiments of the swingiest independents from battleground states, commissioned by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. The survey showed those voters narrowly favoring Obama (44 percent) over Romney (38 percent), and showed the president with respectable overall favorability scores. But it also revealed some red flags that if the campaign continues driving home the “people-versus-the-powerful” message, it could cost the president down the road. While these swing voters still like Obama personally, they are closer to Romney ideologically.

The polling found that a message centered on income inequality was a flop with these swing voters, who said they were much more anxious about rising debt and with regulations and taxes on businesses. …

John Fund details the latest sting by James O’Keefe. This is the one where Eric Holder’s ballot was offered to a John Doe.

Attorney General Eric Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them “unnecessary” and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina, citing the fear they would discriminate against minorities.

I wonder what Holder will think when he learns just how easy it was for someone to be offered his ballot just by mentioning his name in a Washington, D.C., polling place in Tuesday’s primaries.

Holder’s opposition to ID laws comes in spite of the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008, authored by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, that upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s tough ID requirement. When groups sue to block photo-ID laws in court, they can’t seem to produce real-world examples of people who have actually been denied the right to vote. According to opinion polls, over 75 percent of Americans — including majorities of Hispanics and African-Americans — routinely support such laws.

One reason is that people know you can’t function in the modern world without showing ID — you can’t cash a check, travel by plane or even train, or rent a video without being asked for one. In fact, PJ Media recently proved that you can’t even enter the Justice Department in Washington without showing a photo ID. Average voters understand that it’s only common sense to require ID because of how easy it is for people to pretend they are someone else

Filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is on Tuesday when he dispatched an assistant to the Nebraska Avenue polling place in Washington where Attorney General Holder has been registered for the last 29 years. O’Keefe specializes in the same use of hidden cameras that was pioneered by the recently deceased Mike Wallace, who used the technique to devastating effect in exposing fraud in Medicare claims and consumer products on 60 Minutes. O’Keefe’s efforts helped expose the fraud-prone voter-registration group ACORN with his video stings, and has had great success demonstrating this year in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota just how easy it is to obtain a ballot by giving the name of a dead person who is still on the rolls. Indeed, a new study by the Pew Research Center found at least 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote. They aren’t likely to complain if someone votes in their place.

In Washington, it was child’s play for O’Keefe to beat the system. O’Keefe’s assistant used a hidden camera to document his encounter with the election worker at Holder’s polling place: …

As the public safety goobers become more and more adversarial, attempting to cooperate with them comes fraught with more and more risk. Perhaps the safer course is to say nothing. WSJ story on the perils of testifying.

When federal prosecutors can’t muster enough evidence to bring charges against a person suspected of a crime, they can still use a controversial law to get a conviction anyway: They charge the person with lying.

The law against lying—known in legal circles simply as “1001″—makes it a crime to knowingly make a material false statement in matters of federal jurisdiction. Critics across the political spectrum argue that 1001, a widely used statute in the federal criminal code, is open to abuse. It is charged hundreds of times a year, according to court records and interviews with lawyers and legal scholars.

Thanks to a far-reaching federal statute, marine biologist and orca expert Nancy Black is facing a potential 20-year prison sentence for her work. Clare Major reports from Monterey, Calif.

Nancy Black, a marine biologist and operator of whale-watching boats, recently became ensnared by 1001. When one of her boat captains whistled at a humpback whale that approached the boat a few years ago, regulators investigated whether the incident constituted harassment of a whale, which is illegal.

This past January, Ms. Black was charged in the case—not with whale harassment, but with lying about the incident. She also faces a charge of illegally altering a video of the whale encounter, as well as unrelated allegations involving whale blubber. Together, the charges carry up to 20 years in prison.

She denies all wrongdoing, including lying. “I wasn’t charged with anything about the dealings with the humpback,” says Ms. Black, 49 years old. “So why would they charge me with lying about it? It makes no sense.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

The law against lying, officially Title 18, section 1001 of the United States Code, is “a bread-and-butter” statute for Justice Department prosecutors, says Thomas O’Brien, the former U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles. The law’s breadth makes it useful for nabbing wrongdoers, particularly in cases where suspected crimes are complex and tough to prove, he says. …

Click on WORD or PDF of full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn writes about the latest Exodus.

As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens fire on “the other,” his deeply ingrained racism inflamed by the tide of toxic right-wing hate infecting our public discourse. Alas, in Florida, the angry white male turned out to be a registered Democrat and half Hispanic — or, as the New York Times put it, a “white Hispanic,” a descriptor never applied by its editors to, say, Sonia Sotomayor or Gloria Estefan or indeed any other person living or dead. And in Toulouse the angry white male turned out to be yet another Muhammad.

Oh, well. Better luck next time, although the pickings seem likely to get thinner: Pitch the Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.

The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools, synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all that to the side and consider only the situation in France . . . No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran . . . No, put all that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails . . .

Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about avoiding troubled neighborhoods. . . . The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and patrol units for the first time.”

This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st century. …

Now that the Supreme Court’s polls are up, Ross Kaminsky wants to know if the president thinks the attack worked for him.

On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a survey of likely voters showing that in less than one month the percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court’s job performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an all-time low of 28 percent to a two-and-a-half year high of 41 percent. This time frame includes the Court’s hearings on Obamacare as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to strike down his signature law.

In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the Court is there for, they are more positive about its theoretical and actual function.

In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among Republicans has gone from 29 percent favorable to 54 percent favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren’t on board the Supreme Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn’t give the numbers but says that Democrats’ “views of the court are largely unchanged.”

Most important politically, “among voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties, good or excellent ratings for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now.”

Also among the poll results — and more bad news for Democrats — twice as many Americans believe that the Supreme Court “does not limit the government enough” (30 percent) as those who think it “puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do” (15 percent).

How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President? …

Victor Davis Hanson says the president reveals himself in unscripted moments when there is no teleprompter to guide him.

… His lack of judgment is not evident on the teleprompter, but is only fully illustrated when he is off it and his more extreme ideas are candidly expressed.

All presidents reveal glimpses of themselves through gaffes and off-the-cuff candor. Richard Nixon’s various paranoias were most evident on the secret White House audiotapes. Reagan’s anti-Soviet feelings were behind his open-mike joke  “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When George W. Bush blurted out “Dead or alive” or “Bring ’em on,” the impromptu bombast seemed to reflect his cowboy image.

Such revelations are all the more striking in Obama’s case since rarely has a president’s ideology been so at variance with his public persona. His real views have been gleaned mostly from unguarded moments when he talks confidently without prompts — and therefore sounds conniving and shallow.

We learn about Obama’s views toward Israel not from campaign speeches, in which he soars with platitudes to raise money from the Jewish community, but when he is caught on an open mike with French president Sarkozy rudely ridiculing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, or in a leak about snubbing the Israeli leader at the White House, or in a statement by the Palestinian foreign minister to the effect that administration officials had advised the Palestinian leadership to “sit tight” during the present election year — until Obama no longer need face the electorate and thus its displeasure for forcing concessions upon the Israelis.

For all the talk about the need for federal courts to audit errant state immigration legislation or to strike down the Defense of Marriage law, Obama does not believe in either an inactive or an active judiciary, only in one that parrots his own ideology. When jurists do this, they become sober and judicious; when they might not, then we hear an impromptu screed that Supreme Court justices are “an unelected group of people” who should not “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law” — “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Are we worried about Obama’s naïveté in dealing with the Russians on arms control, short-changing the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, and not quickly dropping the failed reset diplomacy? We should be, but we know that only because we have ignored his scripted rhetoric about Russia and listened instead to his embarrassing gaffe when he was caught on another open mike assuring President Medvedev that after the election our president would be more flexible with Putin, in a fashion that most Americans would find disturbing. ….

Three cheers for Debbie WasserFace. She supported an aide who was embarrassed by a six year old Facebook mistake. Jonathan Tobin has the story.

We don’t often have occasion to say anything complimentary about Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In her designated role as President Obama’s attack dog, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has made a specialty of taking cheap shots at her opponents. When not attempting to demonize Republican positions on the deficit and entitlements, she has even stooped to blame conservatives for the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. But as unfair as she has been to those on the other side of the aisle, that doesn’t justify treating Wasserman Schultz or anyone on her staff in a similar manner. And that is exactly what happened to Danielle Gilbert, a DNC staffer who has been pilloried lately for some silly pictures she posted to her personal Facebook account six years ago when she was in college. But despite reports of pressure from the White House, Wasserman Schultz has refused to dump Gilbert. To that we can only say, good for her.

It is true the picture in which Gilbert is seen kissing money and referring to herself and some friends as “Jewbags” was in poor taste. But the posting by Gilbert, who is the daughter of prominent Jewish contributors to the Obama campaign and now works as the DNC’s outreach liaison to the Jewish community, was a joke and nothing more. …

We found an intelligent discussion about gasoline prices in Mining.com.

Gasoline consumption in the United States has been dropping for years. In the last decade, vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 20%, and the combination of that shift and a weak economy of late has pushed gasoline demand to its lowest level in a decade.

At the same time, US oil production is at its highest level in a decade. Deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and horizontal fracs in the Bakken shale have turned America’s domestic oil production scene around. After 20 years of declining production, US crude output rates started to climb in 2008 and have increased every year since.

With production up and demand down, the basics of supply and demand indicate that oil prices should be falling. Americans should be paying less at the pump.

Instead, the average US price at the pump reached US$3.80 per gallon on March 5, after 27 consecutive days of gains. That’s 26.7¢ above the old record for March 5, set last year. The price of gasoline has climbed 32¢ or 9.3% since February 1; analysts expect prices to continue rising, reaching a national average of something like US$4.25 per gallon.

What gives? Is it all about Iran? Are speculators manipulating the market? Do any politicians have good ideas on how to “fix” the high cost of gasoline? And is there relief on the horizon?

What gives is a combination of forces. Rising tensions in the Middle East are part of the problem, but so are deficiencies in North America’s oil infrastructure that are causing price discrepancies across the nation. Some of the refineries being forced to pay premium prices for oil are shutting down, and that limits gasoline supplies in parts of the country. Speculation is also a factor, as it is an ingrained part of the market, but it is not the driving force behind America’s fuel-price problems.

If you’re wondering, there aren’t any politicians with novel, sound ideas on how to reduce fuel prices. Newt Gingrich’s promise to bring prices below $2.50 a gallon is as attainable as Michelle Bachmann’s plucked-out-of-the-air promise of $2 gasoline.

Thankfully though, there is some relief on the horizon. First, we’ll tackle the issues. Then we’ll outline some developments that should ease the pain. …

Interesting background to the WWII story about the Man Who Never Was. 

It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France. Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.

Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Matthew Continetti has an interesting take on the president’s Court attack.

… The strangest moment of the speech was when Obama mocked Romney’s vocabulary. The former Massachusetts governor had correctly called Ryan’s budget “marvelous.” Obama’s brilliant rebuttal: That’s “a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget. (Laughter.) It’s a word you don’t often hear generally. (Laughter.)”

The president’s transparent motive was to suggest that Romney is somehow weird or out of touch for using the m-word. This is an argument likely to thrill the legs of Washington correspondents, who heartily laughed along with the president, but unlikely to provide independent voters with any reason whatsoever to support a second Obama administration.

Are we really to believe that Romney is disqualified from the presidency because of his word choices and support for the only serious plan to restore sustainability to the welfare state while promoting economic growth? What is Obama’s alternative? Never to say “marvelous” in public while raising taxes, foisting an unpopular health plan on a recalcitrant public, empowering an unelected board to set prices for Medicare and Medicaid, and delivering the worst economic recovery in history?

One hopes that when the media inevitably scold Americans for conducting the “most negative campaign ever,” they will acknowledge who, exactly, got the ball rolling. From targeting successful private citizens to claiming falsely that the Ryan plan “ends Medicare” to belittling Romney’s wealth and demeanor, the Obama campaign has signaled that it recognizes the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act of 2009 is not a legislative achievement on which one might base a campaign. Obama’s problem is that with the stimulus a failure, Obamacare on the ropes, Solyndra a national punch line, the national debt exploding, and his only significant proposal an increase in taxes, Lily is all he has.

All these facts will be on display in the fall when Romney debates Obama and (hope springs eternal) Ryan debates Biden. The two sides will spar. One will emerge as serious about the challenges facing the country and the policies necessary to promote freedom and prosperity; the other will be exposed as embittered and clinging to a dilapidated welfare state. The truth will be there for all to see. And it will be marvelous.

Robert Samuelson with a history of social security mission creep.

Would Franklin Roosevelt approve of Social Security? The question seems absurd. After all, Social Security is considered the New Deal’s signature achievement. It distributes nearly $800 billion a year to 56 million retirees, survivors and disabled beneficiaries. On average, retired workers and spouses receive $1,839 a month — money vital to the well-being of millions. Roosevelt would surely be proud of this, and yet he might also have reservations. Social Security has evolved into something he never intended and actively opposed.

It has become what was then called “the dole” and is now known as “welfare.” This forgotten history clarifies why America’s budget problems are so intractable.

When Roosevelt proposed Social Security in 1935, he envisioned a contributory pension plan. Workers’ payroll taxes (“contributions”) would be saved and used to pay their retirement benefits. Initially, before workers had time to pay into the system, there would be temporary subsidies. But Roosevelt rejected Social Security as a “pay-as-you-go” system that channeled the taxes of today’s workers to pay today’s retirees. That, he believed, would saddle future generations with huge debts — or higher taxes — as the number of retirees expanded.

Discovering that the original draft wasn’t a contributory pension, Roosevelt ordered it rewritten and complained to Frances Perkins, his labor secretary: “This is the same old dole under another name. It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress .?.?. to meet.”

But Roosevelt’s vision didn’t prevail. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Congress gradually switched Social Security to a pay-as-you-go system. Interestingly, a coalition of liberals and conservatives pushed the change. Liberals wanted higher benefits, which — with few retirees then — existing taxes could support. Conservatives disliked the huge surpluses the government would accumulate under a contributory plan.

All this is well-told in Sylvester Schieber’s “The Predictable Surprise: The Unraveling of the U.S. Retirement System.”  …

Short item from David Harsanyi on the real victims of deficits and inflation. Of course, it is the very people the bien pensants claim to help.

Why does Paul Krugman, a guy who fashions himself guardian of the working class and poor, feel so comfortable advocating for the devaluing of all our savings and retirement accounts? Why does he want to see a spike in food, clothing and fuel costs? (Now, if we employed his writing style, we could simply accuse him of hating the poor.)  

In the New York Times today, he tells us he fears that Republican might be bullying Ben Bernanke into bad policy. What we need, the Nobel winner explains, is for the Fed to induce more inflation.

The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Hey, central banks have injected almost $7 trillion into the economy. So stingy. But you know the drill: a “modest” increase in inflation would help the nation ease its debt obligations by devaluing tomorrow’s dollar against the one (or 15 trillion) that was borrowed yesterday. There is no other way out of this mess, they say. And if you trust that the Fed can control inflation this all might sound like a brilliant plan to you.

Krugman argues that the Fed will “choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery.” I’ll let economists argue over the upside and downside of inflation. But you’ll note that in today’s world, “We need more inflation” or “Don’t Worry About Deficit That Will Heal Itself” are the positions of serious people, while advocating for spending cuts or a sound dollar is considered deeply radical and/or immoral. For Krugman, Paul Ryan’s budget was a set of “inconceivably cruel priorities” (inconceivably!) and even fans of the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan (as the president pretends to be) are members of a “cult“.

For any economist — considering how often they are spectacularly wrong — to be so dogmatic on something so enigmatic is pretty amazing. Especially when you consider inflation’s potential consequences. Another problem for Krugman is that mere non-wonks (and investors) are increasingly concerned about inflation and debt. Perhaps if there was any evidence that previous rounds of quantitative easing had helped spur any growth the Plebs would be more impressed. Instead, they are all in for decades of exploding debt, and, if the New York Times columnist had his way, higher prices on nearly everything.

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Jay Nordlinger’s book on the Nobel Peace Prize.

What went wrong with the Nobel Peace Prize?

The same is often asked of the United Nations, another godly enterprise that sometimes proves less than human. Certainly, the luster of the “most famous and controversial prize in the world” seems to have been tarnished in recent years. The 2002 winner, Jimmy Carter, opportunistically campaigned for the award. He did that mostly by trying to embarrass sitting U.S. presidents, whether Bill Clinton, by undercutting his efforts to isolate North Korea, or George W. Bush, by venomously attacking him over Iraq. The latter machinations were cited approvingly by the prize’s chief judge, Gunnar Berge, who praised Carter’s back-dealing as a much-needed “kick in the leg” to Bush.

So much for any disinterested evaluation of quantifiable criteria. Indeed, European anger at Bush may also have helped Mohamed ElBaradei, the international nuclear-arms watchdog, to win in 2005, after his fierce criticism of the American effort in Iraq, and his serial assurances that Iran, contrary to the Bush administration’s protestations, was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. Loud animosity toward Bush proved a sort of Nobel talisman in 2007, as well: In the old pre-recessionary and pre-Climategate days, the Nobel judges awarded Al Gore (“Bush lied!”) the prize for his global-warming activism — and perhaps also in recognition that he had unfairly lost the presidency in 2000 to Bush only through the peculiarities of the American Electoral College. Many Americans see these politically driven awards, granted to those who either have done little to further world peace, or a lot to disrupt it, as a sort of betrayal of a noble institution, in contrast to the less controversial and more deserving early-20th-century prize winners.

In this evenhanded, original, and engaging history of the 110 years of Alfred Nobel’s peace prize — the first co-winners were the pacifist Frederic Passy and the humanitarian Henry Dunant in 1901 — Jay Nordlinger demonstrates that such current popular impressions are only in part true. …

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Conan: Tonight is the Jewish holiday of Passover. Or as we call it here in LA, Cinco de Matzo.

Fallon: Connecticut police were called to a sex shop when a customer locked himself in handcuffs. He’d have called his girlfriend, but she wasn’t inflated yet.

Conan: Dartmouth College has named its medical school after Dr. Seuss. Because nothing is better than hearing your doctor say, “You don’t have cancer on your nose, you don’t have cancer on your toes. There’s no cancer in your underwear, There is no cancer anywhere.”

Leno: A lot of people are disappointed with that huge lottery. Your chances of winning were 176 million to one. Same odds as the Supreme Court will uphold ObamaCare.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn comments on the Chicago Thug’s week.

… Headlines in which the executive “warns” the courts are usually the province of places like Balochistan, where powerful Cabinet ministers are currently fuming at the Chief Justice’s determination to stop them kidnapping citizens and holding them for ransom – literally, that is, not merely figuratively, as in America. But, here as there, when Obama “warns” the Supreme Court “over health law,” it’s their health prospects he has in mind. He cautioned the justices – “an unelected group of people” – not to take the “unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: as the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an “unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the Court’s legitimacy.”

All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, “Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

A nation can have formal “checks and balances,” but in the end free societies depend on a certain deference to the proprieties. If you’re willing to disdain those, you can drive a coach and horses through accepted norms very easily. The bit about “a democratically elected Congress” was an especially exquisite touch given Obama’s recently professed respect for the democratic process: as he assured Vladimir Putin’s sock puppet the other day, he’ll have “more flexibility” to accommodate foreign interests after he’s got his “last election” and all that tedious democracy business out of the way. His “last election,” I hasten to add, not America’s.

Aside from his contempt for judicial review and those rube voters, what other checks and balances doesn’t he have time for? Well, he makes “recess appointments” when the Senate isn’t in recess, thus circumventing the dreary business of confirmation by that “democratically elected” legislature he likes so much. But, hey, it’s only members of the National Labor Relations Board and the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so why get hung up on constitutional niceties?

By the way, have you heard of this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No? Don’t worry, no big deal, it’s just a new federal agency. Because we can always use another of those, right? What’s one more acronym jostling in the ever more crowded alphabet soup of federal regulation? CFTC, CPSC, CNPP and now CFPB. Not to be confused with CFPB-FM, the Inuit radio station just south of the Arctic Circle in the Nunavut village of Kugaaruk, where in 1975 the world’s all-time coldest wind chill was recorded: minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the world’s all-time coldest wind chill. That’s what you’re going to be feeling at this point in an Obama second term. If you like his contempt for judicial review, parliamentary scrutiny and representative democracy now, wait’ll you see how “flexible” he’ll get starting in January 2013. …

David Harsanyi makes a point about the courts.

… Democrats have fought hard to undo safeguards against direct democracy, attaching a morality to a process that can do both good and bad. They have created ballot measures to do away with the Electoral College. They’d like Washington, rather than localities, to dictate nearly everything. The mere mention of states’ rights puts you in league with the Ku Klux Klan.

Why not? Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking — so it’s no wonder so many politicians thrive in it. The Supreme Court, however, should rise above democracy, not give in to it. That’s the point.

George Will has some VP ideas for Mitt.

… Faux realists will belabor Romney with unhistorical cleverness, urging him to choose a running mate who supposedly will sway this or that demographic cohort or carry a particular state. But are, for example, Hispanics nationwide such a homogeneous cohort that, say, those who came to Colorado from Mexico will identify with a son of Cuban immigrants to Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio)? Do these realists know that, according to exit polls, Nevada’s Hispanic Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, won only about a third of the Hispanic vote in 2010?

Furthermore, in the 16 elections since World War II, 10 presidential candidates have failed to carry the home state of their vice presidential running mates. Gov. Earl Warren could not carry California for Tom Dewey in 1948; Sen. Estes Kefauver could not carry Tennessee for Adlai Stevenson in 1956; former senator Henry Cabot Lodge could not carry Massachusetts for Richard Nixon in 1960; Rep. Bill Miller could not carry New York for Barry Goldwater in 1964; Gov. Spiro Agnew could not carry Maryland for Nixon in 1968; Sargent Shriver could not carry Maryland for George McGovern in 1972; Rep. Geraldine Ferraro could not carry New York (or women, or even her congressional district) for Walter Mondale in 1984; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen could not carry Texas for Michael Dukakis in 1988; Jack Kemp could not carry New York for Bob Dole in 1996; Sen. John Edwards could not carry North Carolina for John Kerry in 2004.

For the next decade, American politics will turn on this truth: Slowing the growth of the entitlement state is absolutely necessary and intensely unpopular. In this situation, which is ripe for a demagogue such as the Huey Long from Chicago’s Hyde Park, Romney’s choice of running mate should promise something Washington now lacks — adult supervision. 

In NR James Pethokoukis reviews some books that try to figure why Obama has done so poorly.

You are not alone. Some of President Barack Obama’s own crackerjack advisers are surely as surprised and dismayed as anyone by America’s persistently weak economic recovery. Back in the spring of 2010 — just before the White House launched its ill-timed “Recovery Summer” publicity offensive right smack into a summer swoon — I visited a top White House economist. I asked if the nascent recovery had any real momentum. After giving me a lengthy and thorough survey of the major macroeconomic indicators, the economist concluded that “all the lights on the dashboard are flashing green.” Let the Obama boom begin.

A similarly rosy sentiment was expressed to me by another member of the Obama economic team at roughly the same time. This adviser, since returned to academia, had little patience for any suggestion that the anemic rebound evidenced a sluggish, “new normal” economy burdened by too much government debt. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have found that financial crises are usually followed by sharply higher government debt and significantly lower economic growth; but this White House economist was having none of it, arguing that no economy in history is comparable to America’s due to its global dominance and control of the world’s reserve currency. Past poor results do not guarantee future underperformance. And besides, the president’s 2009 stimulus package was really beginning to work its magic. America was going to be okay.

But sitting there, listening to all that West Wing optimism, I was reminded of Richard Nixon’s famous observation that the U.S. economy was so strong “it would take a genius” to wreck it. Indeed, the Obama administration was filled with geniuses, a veritable all-star team, no, dream team of superstar liberal economists: Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Alan Krueger, Jared Bernstein. And don’t forget Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Indispensable Man of the financial crisis, a figure so highly regarded back in the fall of 2008 that he just might have led President John McCain’s Treasury Department had the election gone the other way.

Just how Team Obama’s economic policies went so wrong — and how its optimism was so misplaced — despite such accumulated brainpower and supposed expertise is the subject of two books covering much the same ground and reaching similar conclusions: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, 528 pp., $29.99), by Ron Suskind, which came out last September, and The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $28), by Noam Scheiber, published in February. The liberal-talking-point regurgitators on CNN and MSNBC would no doubt dispute such a negative characterization of Obama’s economic record — as would, of course, the Obama White House. But the Obama Recovery after the Great Recession pales when contrasted against the Reagan Recovery after the Long Recession of 1980–82.

In the first ten quarters of the Obama Recovery, real GDP is up a total of 6 percent, versus 16 percent in the Reagan Recovery. Or to put it another way, after ten quarters of recovery, the Reagan annual GDP-growth rate was 6 percent versus Obama’s 2.4 percent (versus 4.6 percent for the average post–World War II expansion). In the 32 months of the Obama Recovery, the economy has added about 2 million net new jobs, versus 9 million during the first 32 months of the Reagan Recovery. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Steele Gordon says the anger is showing through. 

Is this the week the Obama administration’s remarkable incompetence begins to be the narrative? If so, he’s toast.

The president’s astonishing, not to mention indefensible, lecture to the Supreme Court this week, in which he turned 200 years of American constitutional history on its head, has been the talk of the blogosphere. But it’s not just the fact that he pretends to have not heard of Marbury v. Madison, it’s the anger behind his remarks that he is having trouble concealing. Even his old professor at Harvard felt he had to weigh in.

It is not hard to see why he might be angry. His single major domestic accomplishment, Obamacare, is in mortal peril in the Supreme Court. InTrade has the chances of its being overturned at 63.8 percent this morning. And it remains deeply unpopular with the public at large. His other domestic efforts have been largely a bust. The stimulus did not produce the promised economic boost and recovery from the recession remains stubbornly slow and unemployment stubbornly high. Green energy is failing and failing and failing. The price of gas has nearly doubled since he became president, despite the recession, while domestic production of oil and natural gas has been rising despite his policies, not because of them. …

Charles Krauthammer reacts to the president’s attack on the Court.

“Unprecedented”? Judicial review has been the centerpiece of the American constitutional system since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. “Strong majority”? The House has 435 members. In March 2010, Democrats held a 75-seat majority. Obamacare passed by seven votes.

In his next-day walk back, the president implied that he was merely talking about the normal “restraint and deference” the courts owe the legislative branch. This concern would be touching if it weren’t coming from the leader of a party so deeply devoted to the ultimate judicial usurpation — Roe v. Wade, which struck down the abortion laws of 46 states — that fealty to it is the party’s litmus test for service on the Supreme Court.

With Obamacare remaking one-sixth of the economy, it would be unusual for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation so broad and sweeping. On the other hand, it is far more unusual to pass such a fundamentally transformative law on such a narrow, partisan basis.

Obamacare passed the Congress without a single vote from the opposition party — in contradistinction to Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, similarly grand legislation, all of which enjoyed substantial bipartisan support. In the Senate, moreover, Obamacare squeaked by through a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation that was never intended for anything so sweeping. The fundamental deviation from custom and practice is not the legal challenge to Obamacare but the very manner of its enactment.

The president’s preemptive attack on the court was in direct reaction to Obamacare’s three days of oral argument. It was a shock. After years of contemptuously dismissing the very idea of a legal challenge, Democrats suddenly realized there actually is a serious constitutional argument to be made against Obamacare — and they are losing it. …

John Podhoretz spots something he liked a lot in a Romney speech last week.

Something changed on Tuesday night with Mitt Romney’s three primary state victories, and it wasn’t just the all-but-universal acknowledgment that he’ll be the Republican nominee.

In his speech in Wisconsin, Romney finally found the right argument to use against Barack Obama — indeed, located the very specific dividing line between the president and his opposition that Republicans and conservatives have been trying to draw for four years now.

The president, Romney said, has “spent the last four years laying the foundation for a new government-centered society.”

“Government-centered society” isn’t the most felicitous phrase, nor the most memorable sound-bite. But that may be for the best. What it lacks in mellifluousness, it makes up for in deadly accuracy.

Every major initiative of the Obama presidency has placed the government at the center of the policy the president wishes to effect and the change he wishes to see. Its policies have not necessarily put government in charge, or given government total control; but they have made government a dominating presence.

First came the stimulus package in 2009 — a direct $860 billion infusion into the economy. The lion’s share of those dollars did not go toward lubricating the machinery of job growth but rather directly into the coffers to state and local governments to balance their books.

The $100 billion bailout of two US auto companies led to the president and his team literally choosing which kinds of cars those companies should be making — determining the level of union compensation and unilaterally changing the rules of the private contracts into which the companies had entered with their debtors.

And finally and most directly, ObamaCare uses government power to direct every American to purchase a health-insurance policy. …

The problem with the president, says Peter Schiff, is he does not know how wealth is created.

As this fall’s presidential election takes shape as a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the rhetoric out of both camps is becoming sharper and more ideological. Looking to exploit Governor Romney’s increasingly close association with Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan (who has been mentioned as a potential vice presidential nominee), the President dedicated a lengthy address earlier this week to specifically heap scorn on Ryan’s budget plan (Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee). The attack lines used by the President not only reveal a preview of the fall campaign but also offer a glimpse of Obama’s skewed views of the social and economic history of the United States.

The President laid bare his beliefs that America’s source of economic strength has been her historical embrace of collective action, wealth redistribution, and government policies that have protected workers from the ravages of the wealthy. To reiterate, he was talking about the United States, not Soviet Russia. He asserted that prosperity “grows outward from the middle class” and that it “never trickles down from the success of the wealthy.” Accordingly, he concludes that our recent struggles stem from the Republican-led abandonment of these successful policies. … 

… Obama believes that prosperity came only in the 20th century after the government began redistributing wealth from rich people like Henry Ford to the middle and lower classes. He ignores the fact that America’s greatest growth streak occurred in the 19th rather than the 20th century, and that America had become by far the world’s richest nation before any serious wealth redistribution even began.

The unfortunate part for the President is that wealth must first be produced before it can be redistributed. But redistribution always creates disincentives that result in less wealth being created. All societies that have attempted to create wealth through redistribution have failed miserably. This should be obvious to anyone who spends more than a few minutes studying world economic history. But the President is on a mission to get reelected and his ace in the hole is to fan the flames of class warfare. It’s a tried and true political strategy, and he looks ready to ride that hobby horse until it breaks.

Jennifer Rubin explains how Obama defames his opponents.

David Brooks insists President Obama “is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue” who acted out of character when he excoriated Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. (“[H]e unleashed every 1980s liberal cliché in the book, calling the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinists. Social Darwinism, by the way, was a 19th-century philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples.”)

Let’s be clear about two things. The supposedly erudite Obama labeled Ryan a race supremacist. That’s what his staunchest moderate defender, Brooks, points out. And he’s right. Either the president is ignorant of the term he used or he’s getting an early jump on playing the race card. In either event, it’s uncalled for and repulsive. The liberal crowd that shrieks when some Republicans call Obama a “socialist” should clean up their own house.

David Boaz of the Cato Institute remarked:

“Is “social Darwinist” within some bound of propriety that “socialist” violates? I don’t think so. After all, plenty of people call themselves socialists — not President Obama, to be sure, but estimable figures such as Tony Blair and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Members of the British Labour Party have been known to sing the socialist anthem “The Red Flag” on the floor of Parliament.

But no one calls himself a social Darwinist. Not now, not ever. Not Herbert Spencer. The term is always used to label one’s opponents. In that sense it’s clearly a more abusive term than “socialist,” a term that millions of people have proudly claimed.”

How was the president’s use of the term not a controversy unto itself? Charitably we can say the media don’t have a clue what the term implies; more cynically we can say the media are once again playing interference for Obama. …

Here’s David Brooks trying to insist this is all an aberration.

President Obama is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue. But every once in a while he tries to get politically cute, and he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask.

I suppose it’s to his credit that he’s most inept when he tries to take the low road. He resorts to hoary, brain-dead clichés. He wanders so far from his true nature that he makes Mitt Romney look like Mr. Authenticity.

That’s pretty much what happened this week in Obama’s speech before a group of newspaper editors. Obama’s target in this speech was Representative Paul Ryan’s budget.

It should be said at the outset that the Ryan budget has some disturbing weaknesses, which Democrats are right to identify. The Ryan budget would cut too deeply into discretionary spending. This could lead to self-destructive cuts in scientific research, health care for poor kids and programs that boost social mobility. Moreover, the Ryan tax ideas are too regressive. They make tax cuts for the rich explicit while they hide any painful loophole closings that might hurt Republican donors.

But these legitimate criticisms and Obama’s modest but real deficit-reducing accomplishments got buried under an avalanche of distortion. The Republicans have been embarrassing themselves all primary season. It’s as if Obama wanted to sink to their level in a single hour.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin’s post on her Friday Question reminds of the great week.

Last week was definitely a newsworthy one, thanks to three days of Supreme Court argument, the president’s open mike gaffe, the passage of the House Republicans’ budget and the consolidation of GOP support behind Mitt Romney. Some readers marveled, as Tuscany1 did, at the “historic nature” of the Supreme Courts arguments. Marylandmama put it this way: “Whatever they decide will have major implications for health care in the future and for the Presidential race in the fall.” Jafco wrote of the Supreme Court hearings: “The Court arguments, wherever they lead, exposed our exalted Constitutional Instructor as knowing about as much about the Constitution as he does about ‘shovel ready jobs.’ He’s further exposed as incompetent.”

But Jafco ( “The open mic incident suggests he’s completely untrustworthy”)and many more readers considered the hot mike incident as the one with long-term political ramifications. Timmy84 writes:

“The “hot mic” was the most important development because it gives substance to the conservative fear that the President does have a more unpopular agenda in mind for his second term (else why be concerned about electoral repercussions?). Now when the GOP nominee stumps with the claim that Obama needs to be stopped from another term of failed and unpopular policies, there is an actual event of the President’s own making to hold up as a glimpse into the future.” … 

Breitbart’s Big Government reports on the real power in the White House – Valerie Jarrett. She tells him to attack the Court, and he does.

… Obama was not Valerie Jarrett’s only project. She saw to the appointment of Van Jones as White House “green jobs” czar, noting that “we’ve been watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.” (That activity included an anti-American rally on Sep. 12, 2001.) Her authority in the White House is almost unchallenged, and on visits to Chicago, local Democratic judges, officials and activists flock to see her and curry influence.

Jarrett attended the Supreme Court last week as it heard arguments on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Her presence as the president’s “eyes and ears” was noted by Breitbart.com’s Ken Klukowski. Jarrett had also led the administration’s media charge in advance of the Supreme Court arguments, arguing that Obamacare is necessary because it protects women’s health in particular, shaping the case to fit Democrats’ narrative of a Republican “war on women.”

As more moderate, pragmatic voices have abandoned the White House to attend to the actual business of governing–Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel being only one of many defectors–Jarrett has remained and her influence has grown. 

Jarrett endorses the idea that Obama is still a “community organizer” in the White House, and the administration’s Alinksyite tactics of race and class division bear her fingerprints as much as his own.

Daniel Foster notes Keith Olbermann’s passage from The Current.

… We don’t yet know the details of the dispute that led to Olbermann’s apparent ouster barely more than forty weeks into his five-year, $50 million contract, though the Times says Current cut him loose for failing to honor the terms of his contract. But, seriously, what kind of awful luck does he have that he keeps running into these unreasonable, unprofessional, two-timing, back-stabbing television executives? I mean, network after network after network, the same kind of low-down, no-good greedy fatcats who wouldn’t know a visionary news commentator if it bit them on the ass. Why can’t Keith just meet one nice network head who loves him for him, who understands what a precious little snowflake he is? …

Howard Kurtz airs some of Olbermann’s dirty laundry.

It was a terrible marriage from the beginning.

Just weeks after Keith Olbermann launched his nightly program on Current TV last June, his team was complaining that the network founded by Al Gore and attorney Joel Hyatt wasn’t living up to its promises to support a professional cable news show. 

The arguments escalated for months, with Olbermann directly appealing to the former vice president on three or four occasions, until relations had become so poisoned that, on Friday, Current fired Olbermann for breach of contract. He has vowed to take the matter to court and questioned the ethics of Gore and Hyatt.

Some of the disputes are fundamental—such as missing days of work—and some sound petty, but they add up to a portrait of a dysfunctional alliance that was doomed from the start. Where Current management viewed Olbermann as a chronic complainer who had clashed with the bosses before leaving his previous jobs at MSNBC and ESPN, the liberal commentator came to believe that he had joined a rinky-dink operation, even if the channel was committed to paying him $50 million over five years.

On Aug. 2, 2011, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, Olbermann’s manager, Michael Price, sent Hyatt a list of about 40 “deficiencies” that needed to be corrected. Six days later, Price told Hyatt that the problems required “immediate attention” and that “we are not aware of any demonstrable effort to address the issues.”

One of management’s complaints was that Olbermann would not participate in some press and marketing events, even though he was contractually obligated to promote the network. Executives grew upset when Olbermann balked at touting the programming that followed his 8 p.m. show, Countdown. In the email, Price explained that reluctance by saying the host was being given wrong information about what was to air. It was “inexcusable,” he wrote, to repeatedly have Olbermann “identify incorrect programming following Countdown. If people cannot trust him to correctly identify the programming, his credibility on larger matters comes into question.” …

… No issue was too small to precipitate a fight. A continuous argument over which car service would ferry Olbermann, who doesn’t drive, was emblematic of the deteriorating situation. Olbermann wound up using eight different car services, finding fault with each one, sometimes objecting when drivers talked to him. …

Popular Mechanics on what it’s like to drive an electric car.

Fully charged on a brisk March morning, the all-electric Mitsubishi i’s range meter estimated that the battery pack had enough energy to travel 56 miles. That’s plenty, I thought, for the several-stop route I planned to a neighboring town and back. But as I pulled out into traffic, I flicked on the heat and watched the range meter recalibrate, dropping the estimated range down to 37. I did a quick mental calibration: A few miles to the first stop, 12 miles on the highway, 12 to return, another five to the next location, and so on. I then had a choice to make: Either shiver in the car or risk getting stranded. I chose the former.

Of course I could have made the ride a more comfortable if I’d used the car’s little remote fob to preheat the interior while it was still plugged in. The trouble is that the little receiver, which has a tiny antenna like something from a 1970′s-era sci-fi movie, isn’t at all clear. I thought I had engaged the pre-heat function, but when I got inside, the interior was the same 30 degrees as the ambient air.  …

A peek inside the North Korean GULAG from Readability.com’s review of Escape From Camp 14.

Nine years after watching his mother’s hanging, Shin In Geun squirmed through the electric fence that surrounds Camp 14 and ran off through the snow into the North Korean wilderness. It was January 2, 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do it.

He was 23 years old and knew no one outside the fence.

Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in Southern California.

Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight — five feet six inches, about 120 pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labor. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer’s fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard’s punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

Shin is roughly the same age as Kim Jong Un, the chubby third son of Kim Jong Il who took over as leader after his father’s death in 2011.

Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. His mother beat him, and he viewed her as a competitor for food. His father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His older brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

From The Tablet, the story of another diary contemporaneous to the Holocaust. The description here of Himmler is interesting. 

David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.

Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian at Toronto’s York University and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.

Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis. …

John Fund leads off our look at the, “President Petulant.”

I spoke last night at a symposium on “The Obama Presidency” at the University of California at Berkeley. In a radical city known sometimes for its liberal anger, it won’t surprise you, many of those in the audience were upset at the prospect of the Supreme Court’s overturning part or all of Obamacare. After all, Berkeley voted 88 percent for Obama in 2008. But almost no one present at the symposium was as petulant as President Obama was yesterday, when he incorrectly claimed that if the Court rules against his landmark legislation it would be taking “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” 

The implication of his statement was that he hasn’t heard of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court laid down the doctrine of judicial review in 1803, and by which the Court can strike down unconstitutional laws. Indeed, since 1981, the Court has struck down 57 specific legislative acts of Congress, an average of two per year. 

The president’s statement was so extraordinary that a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the administration indeed respects the right of court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. As CBS’s Jan Crawford reported, Judge Jerry Smith became “very stern,” telling the lawyers arguing a separate case on the constitutionality of Obamacare that it was not clear to “many of us” whether the president believes such a right exists. He also noted Obama’s remarks yesterday in the Rose Garden about judges being an “unelected group of people.” The court was clearly not amused.

There appear to be few limits on how far President Obama will distort facts. In truth, his health-care plan passed the House by only 219 to 212, despite that body’s overwhelming Democratic majority. It was the first major piece of social legislation within memory to pass Congress without a single vote from the opposition party.

Even some liberals believe the president went too far yesterday. Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer who covers the Supreme Court for the Washington Post, said Obama’s assault “stopped me cold . . . for the president to imply that the only explanation for a constitutional conclusion contrary to his own would be out-of-control conservative justices does the court a disservice.” It was a mistake for Obama to “declare war” on the court, says Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of Time magazine. Voters don’t like hearing assaults on the Supreme Court itself, probably because Americans believe “life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.”

So it is surreal for Obama, a former constitutional-law professor and president of the Harvard Law Review, to go after the court as if he were a demagogue seeking reelection. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “Obama’s inner community organizer seems to be winning out over the law professor.” …

Steve Hayward continues the theme.

I’m grateful for the favor Obama did for us yesterday of exposing his extreme constitutional ignorance, with his comments on how it would be “unprecedented” for the Court to strike down a law passed by a “strong majority” in Congress.  (As if a House margin of seven votes is a “strong” majority.)  True, he walked back the comment today, but surely because his statement was not merely indefensible but outright embarrassing to his media defenders.

I’ve been growing weary of hearing people mention that he’s a “constitutional scholar,” since he never published a single thing on the subject either as editor of the Harvard Law Review or as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School.  But hey—he taught constitutional law, didn’t he?

Not really.

His course on constitutional law, one of several constitutional law courses on the U of C curriculum, dealt exclusively with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment—the favorite, all-purpose clause for liberal jurists to use to right wrongs and make us more equal by judicial fiat.  There is no evidence that Obama ever taught courses that considered other aspects of constitutionalism, such as executive power, the separation of powers, the Commerce Clause, or judicial review itself.

I have a copy of one of his final exams.  It is a long hypothetical involving civil rights, which begins thus: …

We stuck a relevant cartoon in the text, perhaps because Bart Simpson stars in it.

John Hinderaker has more.

… Is there any truth to Obama’s claim that the Supreme Court hasn’t invalidated any statutes that are “economic” and relate to “commerce” since Lochner v. New York, which was in 1905? Of course not. To name just a few examples a great deal more recent than 1905, the Court ruled unconstitutional provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that had permitted only “for cause” removal of members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2010; the 1990 Mushroom Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act in 2001 (this case was actually quite similar to Obamacare because the Court held unconstitutional provisions that required mushroom growers to contribute to mushroom promotion programs); provisions of the Patent and Plant Variety Remedy Clarification Act, the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act, and the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act in 1992; the Harbor Maintenance Tax Act in 1998; the Transfer Act which authorized the transfer of operating control of Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport from the Department of Transportation to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in 1991; and many, many more dating back to 1905.

One could be charitable and say that Barack Obama is a bullshitter who makes stuff up whenever he is in a tough spot, or one could say that he is a habitual liar. Take your pick.

Michael Walsh thinks it is all of one piece.

Jonah’s cited this below, but be honest: Tell me you ever expected to read a second-day lede like this on an American news site. From CBS:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president’s bluff — ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

“In the escalating battle…” Even making allowances for normal journalistic hyperbole, this is a remarkable admission that something is seriously amiss in our politics; it’s like we’re suddenly living back in 1937. The president of the United States is actively waging a war of words against the federal judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular. And, right on cue, comes a horde of lefties suddenly concerned about “unelected” justices, whether Marbury v. Madison was properly decided back in 1803, and whether it’s not time to revisit it in the interest of, you know, “social justice.” You don’t have to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows — especially when the hot air is emanating from the White House. Good for the 5th Circuit to call them on it.

Many have commented that last week was the worst week (so far) for the Obama administration, but I don’t think the apparatchiks have quite yet realized how bad things are going to get for them. The decision to insult and attack the Catholic Church was spectacularly stupid, even as a crass political tactic, since there are some 77 million Catholics in the country, representing about a fifth of the population. True, Catholics tend no longer to vote as a bloc (the old FDR coalition has splintered as the Irish and Italians moved out of the cities and up in the world), but a thumb in the eye to one is a thumb in the eye to all, especially when that one is the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund profiles Saul Alinsky and shows Obama’s ties to him.

… What exactly are the connections between Obama and Saul Alinsky’s thought? In 1985, the 24-year-old Obama answered a want ad from the Calumet Community Religious Conference, run by Alinsky’s Chicago disciples. Obama was profoundly influenced by his years as a community organizer in Chicago, even if he ultimately rejected Alinsky’s disdain for electoral politics and, like Hillary Clinton, chose to work within the system. “Obama embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life,” wrote Peter Slevin of the Washington Post in 2007. That same year, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza found Obama still “at home talking Alinskian jargon about ‘agitation’” and fondly recalling organizing workshops where he had learned Alinsky concepts such as “being predisposed to other people’s power.” …

… Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased many Alinsky methods. “Obama learned his lesson well,” David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, wrote in the Boston Globe in 2008. “The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board.” 

In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival: “The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”

You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.

NY Sun editors answer the president’s attack on the Court.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard a presidential demarche as outrageous as President Obama’s warning to the Supreme Court not to overturn Obamacare. The president made the remarks at a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. It was an attack on the court’s standing and even its integrity in a backhanded way that is typically Obamanian. For starters the president expressed confidence that the Court would “not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Reuters’ account noted that conservative leaders say the law was an overreach by Obama and the Congress. It characterized the president as having “sought to turn that argument around, calling a potential rejection by the court an overreach of its own.” Quoth the president: “And I’d just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

It is outrageous enough that the president’s protest was inaccurate. What in the world is he talking about when he asserts the law was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act barely squeaked through the Congress. In the Senate it escaped a filibuster by but a hair. The vote was so tight in the house — 219 to 212 — that the leadership went through byzantine maneuvers to get the measure to the president’s desk. No Republicans voted for it when it came up in the House, and the drive to repeal the measure began the day after Mr. Obama signed the measure.

It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton. …

In American.com, Edward Pinto performs admirable detective work in showing how the sub-prime crisis was a federal government enterprise. He quotes Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee who had this to say in a 2007 NY Times OpEd.  

… [t]he three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans. These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their newfound access to capital.

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” It has allowed them access to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.

And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted. …

Matthew Continetti’s post at the Free Beacon allows us to relive our wonderful time last week.

… As it happened, the hot microphone mess was the least of the president’s troubles. The gaffe was still in the news when oral arguments over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act began at the Supreme Court. The first day of proceedings concerned whether the Court could rule on the law at all since the individual mandate will not be enforced until 2014. But even those arguments went poorly for the administration and its hapless solicitor general, Donald Verrilli Jr., who was unable to explain how the mandate could be a “penalty” one day and a “tax” the next day.

Yet the liberal panic did not truly begin until Mar. 27, when the Court heard arguments over the mandate’s constitutionality and even the president’s most hardened supporters had to acknowledge his signature policy was in trouble. No sooner had the proceedings concluded than a hysterical Jeffrey Toobin fled the courtroom, screaming that Obamacare was in “grave, grave” condition. The flimsiness of the administration’s arguments had transformed Toobin into a Henny Penny in drag, running around Capitol Hill and warning his fellow liberals that the Court could overrule Obamacare in “one big package” and that at the very least the mandate is “doomed.”

The administration and its friends in the media found themselves in a truly helpless position. If Toobin is proven right and the Court overrules Obamacare in part or in whole, Republicans will pounce, the president will look like a loser, and Democrats will be both demoralized and radicalized (not a winning combination). If Toobin is proven wrong, however, he will look like an idiot, Republicans and Tea Party activists will mobilize for the fall, and Democrats still will have to defend an unpopular law whose consequences grow worse with each passing minute.

The liberal reaction to this dilemma has been a predictable combination of spin and scapegoating. The noted legal mind Chuck Todd, who seems to have missed the class on Marbury v. Madison, asked guests on his show whether a Court decision against the health care overhaul might not be an unprecedented intrusion of one branch of government over the elected branches. Meanwhile, James Carville and Harry Reid lamely suggested an anti-Obamacare ruling would be good for the president and his party. The White House was reduced to using Newspeak, referring to the mandate as the “personal responsibility clause.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Charlie Sheen says he cringes watching his crazy rants from last year. Sheen says he’s moved on and is now focused on his new career as a JetBlue pilot.

Conan: Rumors of a secret meeting between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Apparently, Romney asked if Gingrich would consider being his running mate and Gingrich asked Romney, “Are you going to finish those fries?”

Leno: After this week’s arguments it looks like Obama now expects the Supreme Court to throw out his healthcare plan. Today he started calling it Bidencare.