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Bill McGurn contrasts Jerry Brown and Chris Christie. 

In his January 2011 inaugural address, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared it a “time to honestly assess our financial condition and make the tough choices.” Plainly the choices weren’t tough enough: Mr. Brown has just announced that he faces a state budget deficit of $16 billion—nearly twice the $9.2 billion he predicted in January. In Sacramento Monday, he coupled a new round of spending cuts with a call for some hefty new tax hikes.

In his own inaugural address back in January 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also spoke of making tough choices for the people of his state. For his first full budget, Mr. Christie faced a deficit of $10.7 billion—one-third of projected revenues. Not only did Mr. Christie close that deficit without raising taxes, he is now plumping for a 10% across-the-board tax cut.

It’s not just looks that make Mr. Brown Laurel to Mr. Christie’s Hardy. It’s also their political choices.

When the Obama administration’s Transportation Department called on California to cough up billions for a high-speed bullet train or lose federal dollars, Mr. Brown went along. In sharp contrast, when the feds delivered a similar ultimatum to Mr. Christie over a proposed commuter rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, he nixed the project, saying his state just couldn’t afford it. …

… Our states today are conducting a profound and contentious rethink about the right level of taxes, spending and government. Most obvious is the battle for Wisconsin. There Republican Gov. Scott Walker finds himself pitted against public-sector unions that successfully forced a recall election for June 5 after the legislature adopted the governor’s package of labor reforms last spring.

Amid the turmoil—Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent a vote, while union-backed protesters occupied the Capitol—Mr. Walker looked weakened. Now he has taken the lead in polls. More than that, voters have taken the lesson: A recent Marquette University Law School poll showed only 12% of Wisconsin voters listing “restoring collective bargaining rights for public employees” as their priority. …

Since McGurn brought up Wisconsin, let’s have an extended look at the campaign that will culminate on June 5th. Ed Morrissey reports on recent polls.

Now that Democrats have ended their divisive recall primary in Wisconsin, one would expect the polling to show their nominee to be gaining some traction against sitting Governor Scott Walker.  Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was considered the stronger of the Democrats challenging Walker in the unusual recall election, and polls just after the recall showed him nearly within the margin of error of the incumbent.  This week, however, a new poll from We Ask America of over 1200 likely voters puts Walker on top by nine, 52/43: …

Jonathan Tobin.

The labor movement and its left-wing allies in the Democratic Party thought they were doing something extremely clever when they reacted to their defeats at the hands of Scott Walker in the Wisconsin legislature by starting a recall campaign. The recall enabled the losers of the 2010 election where Walker and the GOP swept to power in the state to, in effect, get a do-over in which they could act as if the previous result didn’t really count. But as the latest polls from Wisconsin show, they are on the eve of a catastrophic loss that will not only leave Walker in power and stronger than ever but also deal the Democrats a crucial loss that may be a harbinger of more setbacks in the fall. …

Walter Russell Mead.

David Weigel has a great piece on the Walker phenomenon over at Slate. As Weigel points out, Walker has built an extraordinary political following in the state, pulling together all the disparate elements in today’s Republican universe from tea party activists to megadonors. The result is a formidable political force that dominates the airwaves and inspires the grassroots.

It’s not clear who will win in June; as Weigel notes, Walker currently leads in the polls, but the race is still unpredictable. However, those who rely on the New York Times for their Wisconsin news won’t have any idea about some of the factors shaping this race; Weigel’s piece provides a healthy reality check for them. …

Here’s Weigel’s piece from Slate which gives a good feel for local attitudes.

If you get bored in Wisconsin, play a game. Drive a few miles through any neighborhood. Count the signs that read “We Stand With Scott Walker,” or “I Stand With Scott Walker,” or “Scott Walker: Believe in Wisconsin.” Try and figure out what the houses have in common.

You won’t. There are pieces of Walkerian flair outside of barns on Highway 41, near working-class ranch homes in Appleton, and in the tony part of Oshkosh that Sen. Ron Johnson calls home. On one stretch of Highway 26, somebody’s propped up an unused toilet with a sign reading, “Deposit recall petitions here.” Next to that, a Walker sign that crosses out half of the phrase “for governor” and adds “president.”

The public displays of affection for Walker can put you in mind of October 2008, when placing a HOPE poster or Shepard Fairey print in your window told neighbors about your politics and taste. The Walker gear is easily attained at one of the 20 “victory centers” promoted by the campaign. I stopped by half a dozen of them—local Republican offices temporarily converted to the cause. In the front of the Winnebago County office, a digital sign counted down the days to the June 5 recall. A cardboard Walker stand-up faced visitors from behind a podium. …

… Walker’s supporters agree with a vehemence you rarely find in state elections. On Tuesday, as Walker—surprisingly—got nearly as many votes as the Democrats running against him, I visited a few polling places and met the people toting the free signs. Scott Perzentka, who runs a pier-building business, voted for Walker in Oshkosh, then headed back to his truck with Walker and biker’s-rights signs. Perzentka survived a horrific motorcycle crash in 2003. The experience made him a kind of activist. As he rebuilt his life, it also reinforced his belief that people had to earn what they had, and that unions existed to puff up the salaries of people who didn’t work.

“Seventy-five years ago they were out for the little guy,” he said, “and now they’re out for themselves.

Shikha Dalmia from Reason.

… what exactly has Walker done to deserve a backlash that, if successful, will make him only the third governor in the history of the nation ever to be recalled?

He confronted a $3.6 billion biennial deficit when he assumed office last year. Raising taxes was not an option: Wisconsin already has the 45th-worst overall business tax climate in the country, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

So Walker did what a responsible bookkeeper would do: tackle the biggest driver of the fiscal crisis, public employee costs. …

Time for humor. Walter Jacobson blogs on the Boston Globe finally getting the story straight on Liz Warren’s lily white ancestors. She’s a red allright, just not an Indian.

… As you know, that Boston Globe story created a legend which lives on in the media despite having been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked at every level, and one from which even NEHGS has walked away.

The Globe finally gets around to correcting the story, but buries it in the “For the Record” correction section today:

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in the May 1 Metro section and the accompanying headline incorrectly described the 1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee. The document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was an application for a marriage license,  not the license itself. Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven.

(Note:  The correction references an article on May 1 which repeated the story; the correction now is appended at the end of the original online version.)

That’s it?  After all the trouble The Globe caused, necessitating countless hours by lowly bloggers to correct the falsehood. …

More fun as Politico finds a piece from Fordham University that describes Warren as a “woman of color.”

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” …

Andrew Malcolm has a “Narcississm Alert.”

It was probably to be expected from a monstrous political ego that considers himself among the top two presidents of the 21st century.

But faced with the apparently frightening possibility of losing his reelection bid, Barack Obama has inserted himself into the online White House bios of almost every president in the last nine decades. To somehow share and compare their achievements. At one point Obama even draws his wife into the biographical additions.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so hilarious. Remember the grandiose but short-lived little party hats that Richard Nixon designed for his special presidential guard unit?

Imagine the emotional insecurities of a grown man who would have henchman find and gratuitously insert even the faintest link between this 44th president and almost every president back to Calvin Coolidge –”On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people…..President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt — “On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama Administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.” …

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Charles Krauthammer thinks a united Israel is more likely to attack Iran.

In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded the Straits of Tiran (Israel’s southern outlet to the world’s oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.

May ’67 was Israel’s most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a Western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced into mass mobilization in order to protect against invasion — and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists — life ground to a halt. The country was dying.

On June 5, Israel launched a preemptive strike on the Egyptian air force, then proceeded to lightning victories on three fronts. The Six-Day War is legend, but less remembered is that, four days earlier, the nationalist opposition (Mena­chem Begin’s Likud precursor) was for the first time ever brought into the government, creating an emergency national-unity coalition.

Everyone understood why. You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus.

Forty-five years later, in the middle of the night of May 7-8, 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by bringing the main opposition party, Kadima, into a national unity government. Shocking because just hours earlier, the Knesset was expediting a bill to call early elections in September.

Why did the high-flying Netanyahu call off elections he was sure to win? …

More on Netanyahu’s moves from Lazar Berman at American.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu continues to confound opponents, surprise experts, and consolidate political power. Through a series of unconventional moves since 2009, Bibi has gone from struggling to form a supposedly weak coalition  to heading one of the largest parliamentary majorities  in Israel’s history. His bold move this week, canceling early elections in favor of a unity deal with opposition leader Shaul Mofaz, is only the latest in a series of maneuvers that attest to his political acumen: …

… This move has implications for America, too. Obama, clearly no Bibi fan, will have to deal with a strengthened PM, and will find it even more difficult to intimidate him. Netanyahu has more political backing for his Iran policy, but Mofaz has been more moderate rhetorically than Netanyahu or Barak. And if the Palestinians are really interested in making progress on peace negotiations, this is exactly the kind of broad coalition, armed with stability and national security credibility, that can hammer out a game changing deal with the Palestinians.

Jeffrey Goldberg, once one of Obama’s fans in the media, jeers at his Syria policy.

… But a crisis is fast approaching: America’s stockpile of vivid adjectives is being depleted rapidly. Some linguists of the realist camp are now arguing for restraint in the use of condemnatory word combinations. They note that the administration, in its effort to shock and awe the Assad regime with the power of its official statements and the stridency of its State Department briefings, has prematurely stripped bare its thesaurus, leaving the U.S. powerless to come to the symbolic aid of the Syrian people.

When the uprising began last year, the Obama administration clearly hoped that softer language would persuade Assad to cease murdering Syrians. It relied on traditional formulations of diplomatic distaste, calling on Syria to “exercise restraint” and “respect the rights of its citizens.”

When it became clear that mild criticism wouldn’t stay Assad’s hand, the administration began carpet-bombing Damascus with powerful sentences and, at times, whole paragraphs.

In April 2011, shortly after Syrian security forces killed more than 80 unarmed demonstrators, President Barack Obama said, “This outrageous use of violence to quell protests must come to an end now.” He accused the Syrian government of using “brutal” tactics against civilians.

Somehow, such combative words still didn’t persuade Assad to change course. Soon, the president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, was forced to remind Assad, and the world, of the president’s rhetorical militancy.

“I’m sure you did see the president’s very strong statement of Friday where he condemned in the strongest possible terms the use of force by the Syrian government against demonstrators, referred to an outrageous use of violence to quell protests,” Carney said. He also mentioned that the White House didn’t merely “oppose” the Syrian government’s treatment of its citizens, but “strongly” opposed it.

Assad insolently ignored Carney’s amplification of the president’s muscular language.

A few months later, shortly after the Syrian government killed more than 30 people in the city of Latakia, Obama reached into the arsenal again and said the people of Syria had “braved ferocious brutality at the hands of their government.” This onslaught, Obama said, was “disgraceful.”

The White House appeared surprised when Assad nevertheless chose not to flee Damascus.

So the administration upped the ante. In the months that followed, Carney said the war waged on the Syrian people was both “heinous” and “unforgivable.” … 

Kimberley Strassel shows how the minions work Obama’s enemies list. 

Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.

Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee. …

John Fund on the censorship of Naomi Riley.

Oslo Freedom Forum is an annual event sponsored by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation, which brings together dissidents and journalists from all over the world to show that people of good will can promote basic freedoms without an overlay of ideology.

Censorship, both official and self-imposed, is an important theme here. We have heard stories from brave journalists such as Ecuador’s Nicolas Perez and Kosovo’s Jeta Xharra of efforts to silence them for expressing views unpopular with officials or special interests. So it was strange to be here and read that one of my friends and former journalistic colleagues back home in the U.S. has been fired merely for speaking her mind.

Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade paper for faculty members and administrators in universities, fired Naomi Schaefer Riley, a paid blogger for its website. Her crime? She had the courage to respond to a Chronicle story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” which stated that “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The article used five Ph.D. candidates as examples of those “rewriting the history of race.” Riley looked at the subject areas of the five proposed dissertations and concluded that they were “obscure at best . . . a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap at worst.” One dissertation dealt with the failure of the natural-childbirth literature to include the experiences of non-white women, another blamed the housing crisis on institutional racism, and still another attacked Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas for leading an “assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.” …

Neal Boortz catches the media telling the truth.

… Time magazine’s Mark Halperin appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday to discuss Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage. Halperin blatantly states the following about the media coverage of this issue.

“[T]he media is as divided on this issue as the Obama family. Which is to say not at all. And so he’s never going to get negative coverage for this,” Halperin argued. Sure, “The Republicans will say this is a flip-flop and it’s wrong public policy. But when you have almost the entire media establishment on your side on an issue in a presidential campaign, it’s very hard to lose politically.”

Wow. 

Ed Morrissey posts on Obama’s Car Czar defending Romney from Obama attacks.

Well, what else is former auto industry czar Steve Rattner supposed to say?  After all, he quarterbacked the layoffs of tens of thousands of auto-dealer employees in the Obama administration-imposed dealership closures. Moreover, he did so for the exact same reasons Bain had in operating their private-equity turnaround business, which is to make companies and industry stronger through greater efficiency.  However, on Morning Joe today, Rattner went a little further, praising Bain’s integrity and  reputation:

“I think the ad is unfair. Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for his investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments and foundations. It did it superbly, acting within the rules and acting very responsibly and was a leading firm,” Rattner said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

“So I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life. And I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about,” he said.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: After just one term French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost his reelection bid because he was unable to fix his nation’s economy. Or as Obama put it, “Wuh oh!”

Letterman: So President Obama has announced his support of gay marriage. He also announced a new Cabinet position, Decorator of the Interior.

Leno: President Obama was in town for more fundraising. He wanted lots and lots of celebrities. So his choice was pretty much George Clooney’s house or that Malibu rehab center.

Letterman: So President Obama favors gay marriage. My question with same-sex couples is: Who drives? Who nags? Who says, ‘Let’s have dessert.’ And who says, ‘I’ll just taste yours?’

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James Pethokoukis posts on an austerity program that worked.

Now, we all all know “austerity” from deep spending cuts (not the tax hikes, of course) is killing Europe’s economy and would do the same here in America, right?

Well, here’s a story about austerity that critics such as President Obama, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein never seem to mention: From 1944 to 1948, Uncle Sam cut spending by a whopping 75% as World War II came to end. Spending as a share of GDP plunged to 9% in 1948 from 44% in 1944.

Superstar economist and devout Keynesian Paul Samuelson—later to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics—predicted such shock austerity would cause “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” That dire, disastrous prediction was widely held by his fellow Keynesians, with one even predicting an “epidemic of violence.”

Except the doomsayers were wrong, even though Washington obviously ignored Samuelson’s call for gradual spending reductions. Despite cuts which dwarfed those seen in the EU today—not to mention those Republicans are calling for here at home—the U.S. economy thrived. There was no mass unemployment despite rapid demobilization of the armed forces. As George Mason University economist David Henderson explains is his 2010 paper, “The U.S. Postwar Miracle” (which this entire post draws upon): …

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Veronique de Rugy says successful austerity programs come primarily from spending cuts.

… In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found fiscal adjustments consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts generally failed to stabilize the debt and were also more likely to cause economic contractions. On the other hand, successful austerity packages resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found this form of austerity is more likely associated with economic expansion rather than with recession.

The Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia provide good examples of successful fiscal adjustments. In the last few years, and contrary to the rest of Europe, the Baltic countries have focused on significantly cutting government spending without equivalent increases in taxes. As a result, the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell reports, between 2008 and 2011, Estonia and Lithuania reduced nominal spending by 5 percent, and Latvia by 11 percent. France and the United Kingdom increased spending more than 8 percent over the same period, and Spain and Italy increased spending by 3 percent. In contrast to these others, the Baltic states have experienced some of the largest economic gains in the world: Between 2009 and 2010, Estonia’s economy rose from an annual GDP growth of minus-13 percent to 3.1 percent.

Sweden is another good example. …

The above two items lead to a piece from Browser on the reasons for studying economic history. This takes the form of an interview with Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist.

In choosing these books, you mentioned you were interested in whether economic history, or books about it, can influence policy and help convince people about the future. Can it?

The problem for economics is that to a lot people it’s kind of boring. Particularly if you write about analytical economics, there’s no narrative that draws you in like a novel or even other social science books can. If you’re talking about big macro themes, it’s hard to write an anecdotal history in a compelling way. I’ve chosen books that are intended to add those dimensions, to talk about historical experiences in such a way that you can say, “Oh yes, I get that, I understand the story.” Then you can think about how to apply that story to the modern predicament and what policy could be in the future. …

Let’s talk about this more as we go through the books. Your first choice is A History of Interest Rates, in which Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla look at interest rate trends and lending practices over four millennia. Tell me why you chose it and what the lessons are for our time.

This is one of my favourite type of books, which are just about data. You can argue all kinds of things about the past, but then you have to go back and look at the actual numbers. The interesting thing about interest rates is that you have these decade-long swings. It’s important to try to situate today in that historical context. We are in the fourth decade of a very long bull market in bonds – meaning rates have gone down and bond prices have gone up – and at some point that will switch. We need to be aware of that. It’s a very simple observation. I don’t know when rates are going to turn against us, but Homer and Sylla’s history shows us that interest rates can go down – and they can go down for a very long time – and then they go the other way, they go up. This means that you can’t build your public finances on the view that, “Oh yes, today’s rates are going to be the rates in two decades.” You can’t bet on the US being able to borrow indefinitely, an infinite amount, at 2% interest. …

Tell me about Why Nations Fail, which looks both at countries around the globe, and at examples from history, to figure out what political and economic institutions make for economic success.

Why Nations Fail is by two of my favourite economists, two very close friends and co-authors of mine, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They’re tackling a subject that I’ve worked on with them, and they do a great job of bringing it to life and making it vivid. Why Nations Fail is like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel – which I didn’t mention because it’s such an obviously famous book – one of those books that stretches your mind and gives you all these examples and connections between them, so that you come away from it saying, “Wow. I didn’t know that.” It’s really, really interesting.

By the way, it turns out their blog is even better than the book, and they’re even better on Twitter than they are on their blog. So there’s no limits to the genres these guys can master.

So one of the questions they’re asking in the book is whether, politically, America has moved from “a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandise power are resisted” to “a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority”.

Yes, I have not exactly a beef, but a constructive dialogue going, particularly with Daron, about whether or not the US is already in a period of having, in their language, more “extractive” institutions and less inclusive ones. I recognise there is a big gap between the US and, say, Sierra Leone or Haiti, or whichever troubled country you want to pick from the book. But – and this is going back to Teddy Roosevelt – I fear that we have let the concentration of economic, financial and political power go too far. This is really bad for democracy and for the opportunities of most people in this country, and it’s exactly the kind of thing they mean by extractive institutions.

I don’t know if you saw it, but Matthew Yglesias gave a wonderful and hilarious review of Why Nations Fail, in which he compared it to The Hunger Games. His point is that the dystopian view of the world, which is rather chillingly and vividly portrayed in The Hunger Games, is not that far from things we’ve seen in history and things we see around the world today. It’s actually a very extreme form of extractive institutions in which a few people live very well and most people live in squalor. You could say, been there, done that – not for the US, but for many countries. So could the US go down that path? Is our democracy forever? Are our institutions so strong that we have republic-long immunity from those problems? I don’t think so. Ben Franklin was accosted by a stranger upon leaving the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. She asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” And Franklin said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

So you’re more of a pessimist than the authors?

I would say I’m more of a realist, but yes, they would say I’m more pessimistic. …

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Josh Kraushaar, National Journal, says the going is getting rough for the president.

This presidential election is coming down to two immutable facts that have become increasingly clear as November draws closer: President Obama will be running for a second term under a stagnant economy, and his two most significant legislative accomplishments—health care reform and a job-goosing stimulus—remain deeply unpopular. It doesn’t take a professional pundit to recognize that’s a very tough ticket for reelection.

But there is a glaring disconnect between the conventional wisdom, which still maintains that Obama has a slight edge in the electoral-map math, and the fundamentals pointing to the possibility of a decisive defeat for the president.

The three most recent national polls—Democracy Corps (D), Gallup/USA Today, and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll—underscore how tough a reelection campaign Obama faces and why it’s fair to call him an underdog at this point. He’s stuck at 47 percent against Mitt Romney in all three surveys, with the small slice of undecided voters tilting against the president. His job approval ranges from 45 percent (Democracy Corps) to 48 percent (Battleground). Those numbers are hardly devastating, but given today’s polarized electorate, they’re not encouraging either.

Obama’s scores on the economy are worsening, even as voters still have mixed feelings on who’s to blame. In the Battleground survey, nearly as many voters now blame Obama for the state of the economy (39 percent) as those who don’t think it’s his fault (40 percent). In both the Battleground and Democracy Corps polls, 33 percent said the country is on the right track, with 59 percent saying it’s on the wrong track—numbers awfully similar to the state of play right before the 2010 Republican landslide. These are several leading indicators that suggest the trajectory could well get worse for the president as the election nears. …

According to Victor Davis Hanson, one of the reasons might be the constant reminders of his malignant narcissism.

Former President Bill Clinton just appeared in a reelection television commercial for President Barack Obama. At one point, Clinton weighs in on the potential consequences of Obama’s decision to go ahead with the planned assassination of Osama bin Laden. He smiles and then pontificates, “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].”

There is a lot that is disturbing about Clinton’s commentary — and about the fact that such an embarrassment was not deleted by the Obama campaign. Clinton offers unintended self-incrimination as to why in the 1990s he did not order the capture of bin Laden when it might well have been in his power to do so — was it fear of something “horrible” that might have happened to his fortunes rather than to our troops? And, of course, such crass politicization of national security and the war on terror is exactly what Barack Obama accused the two Clintons of in the 2008 Democratic primaries. We also remember that Obama on several occasions chastised George W. Bush for supposedly making reference to the war on terror for political advantage, though he never did so in as creepy a fashion as Clinton. And aside from the fact that Barack Obama promised never to “spike the football” by using the SEAL mission to score campaign points, only a narcissistic Bill Clinton could have envisioned the death or capture of Navy SEALs not in terms of those men’s own horrible fates, but only as political “downside” for an equally narcissistic Barack Obama.

In Clinton’s defense, he spoke not just from his own selfish instinct to see presidential survival as more important than the fates of those who actually took the physical risk. Rather, a year ago Obama himself had already hijacked the mission with a flurry of self-referential pronouns: “Tonight, I can report . . . And so, shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken . . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as commander-in-chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed . . .” …

Michael Barone has the most recent example of president narcissist.

Barack Obama certainly made news today with his announcement that he has changed his position and now favors same-sex marriage. But one part of his statement has evidently aroused a firestorm in the conservative blogosphere. “When I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors,” he said, “who are out there fighting on my behalf . . . .” “My behalf”? They are fighting on behalf of the United States of America of which Obama is, like all his predecessors have been and all his successors will be, temporarily president and commander-in-chief. Obama could have accurately said “at my command,” since that is literally true. But that would conflict with his campaign message that he ends wars rather than wages them. And if he were a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth II he could, I suppose, say “on my behalf.” But we’re not a monarchy and he’s not royal.

Others have noted that in his spike-the-ball statements on the dispatch of Osama bin Laden, Obama has used first person pronouns in a way that presidents like George W. Bush, Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were careful to avoid. With Obama, it’s always all about him.

One of the things you can enjoy about this campaign is Romney’s references to Jimmy Carter. Politico has the story.

For President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is an obvious throwback to another era — a stiff Father Knows Best-type who straps the dog to the station wagon and marries his high-school sweetheart.

But Romney is pursuing his own strategy to puncture Obama’s next-generation cool and paint the president as a retread, comparing him to Jimmy Carter and his fuzzy-headed liberal thinking. To the presumptive GOP presidential candidate, Carter is not just a former president, he’s a potent metaphor and political weapon.

“When you mention Jimmy Carter, that lightens up certain regions of the mind and brings to mind ineptness and incompetence,” said Peter Wehner, who worked in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. “That’s going to be one of the things that Romney is going to try and tie to Obama.”

Romney has mentioned Carter periodically on the campaign trail: Twice this month, he has made unflattering references to the 39th president. When asked on the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden whether he would have green-lighted the mission, Romney told reporters on a New Hampshire rope line that “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order” to kill bin Laden.

Two days later at a rally in northern Virginia, he explicitly referred to the Carter era as better for businesspeople than the Obama years have been.

“What the president has done, and I think unknowingly, never having spent any time in the private sector himself … was one item after another make it harder and harder for small business to thrive and to grow and to start up,” Romney said.

“It was the most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter. Who would’ve guessed we’d look back at the Carter years as the good ol’ days, you know? And you just go through the president’s agenda over … the last several years and ask yourself, did this help small business or did it hurt small business?” …

You knew Ann Coulter would have a good column on Elizabeth Warren.

… The universities that employed Warren rushed to claim that her fake Indian ancestry had nothing to do with it. They speak with forked tongue, causing heap-um laughter. (Harvard was so desperate for diversity, it made a half-black dilettante president of the Harvard Law Review!)

To grasp what a sin against political correctness this is, consider the Jesuitical debates about blackness regularly engaged in at our universities. About the time Lies on Race Box was getting a job with Harvard as a fake Indian — valued for her fake hunting and tracking skills — a debate broke out at Northwestern University law school about whether a potential faculty hire was black enough.

One professor wrote a heated three-page letter to the hiring committee complaining that the recruit “should not be considered a black candidate,” explaining, “(n)ot all with dark skins are black,” nor should they be considered “black in the U.S. context.” (Flash to: My exact position on Obama.)

Warren has defended herself, claiming she did it only so she would be invited to powwows, or what the great white father calls “meetings,” saying she hoped “I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.”

What on earth does “people who are like I am” mean? Let’s invite Elizabeth because she’s 1/32nd Cherokee. We really need the 1/32nd Cherokee perspective around here. Maybe she has some old recipes that are 1/32nd Cherokee!

Then, the Warren campaign claimed it was sexist to question Warren about her bald-faced lie: “Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown … It’s outrageous.”

First, Scott Brown has barely mentioned Warren’s stinking lie. …

Weekly Standard piece about government by crucifixion.

Government, and the party of government, have been through something of a rough patch lately. First, there was the GSA’s Las Vegas blowout. Then, the Secret Service debaucheries. And, two weeks ago, the video of an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat preening about his enforcement strategy of “crucifying” five random oil drillers pour encourager les autres.

Then, to provide theme for the pudding, there was a Pew survey revealing that “just one in three [Americans] has a favorable view of the federal government—the lowest level in 15 years.”

Proving, perhaps, that 33 percent of Americans have not flown commercial for some time. …

… For more and more people, their direct experience with government would incline them to believe that the examples of profligacy and arrogance we’ve seen lately are more rule than exception. One day, perhaps, a president will be elected who remembers being crucified by some bureaucrat who wanted to make an example of him. Then he can appoint a cabinet of people who will go out into the bowels of Leviathan and randomly fire five people in their respective agencies just to get the attention of the other bureaucrats who have become accustomed to a life of routine arrogance and perpetual immunity. …

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Michael Barone says the Warren story highlights the corrupt system of affirmative action.

… The important thing is the Warren story illustrates the rottenness of our system of racial quotas and preferences. Although the people in charge of administering them deny this, just about everyone with eyes to see knows that you’re more likely to be hired and promoted if you have checked one of the non-Asian minority boxes: black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.

You don’t hear Republicans criticizing this system, and it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who introduced it in the federal government in 1970. It quickly spread to academia and corporate America.

People who classify themselves as approved minorities get into schools and get jobs that they wouldn’t if they classified themselves as white. Not surprisingly, some people, perhaps including Warren, game this system.

The original justification was that this would overcome the disadvantages that American blacks endured during decades of slavery and segregation. That made sense to many people at the time. Those disadvantages were real, and most Americans wanted to be fair.

But the extension of minority status to other groups and the perpetuation of racial preferences for nearly half a century since the abolition of legal segregation means that there is increasingly little correlation between membership in the favored categories and genuine disadvantage. …

You think the Warren story could not get better? Turns out the great great great grandmother who might have been a Cherokee, was married to a man who helped round up the Cherokees for their displacement from the Southeast to Oklahoma (Trail of Tears). Hot Air has the story.

… But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren’s explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery “the ultimate and cruelest irony” of the Warren Cherokee saga. …

Fred Barnes on the president’s full time job – campaigning

President Obama is breaking new ground in his campaign for reelection. He is going where incumbent presidents have never gone before. He is doing things for which President George W. Bush would have been pilloried. And Obama is doing all this in plain view.

Yet the media have rarely found the new ploys and gambits of Obama’s campaign worth mentioning, much less spotlighting. For instance, in his address at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Obama treated his agenda and Jesus Christ’s as one and the same. Since the media didn’t raise any flags, one might have concluded a comment such as Obama’s was normal for that event. It wasn’t.

Obama offered his own version of the WWJD question—what would Jesus do?—on the issue of raising taxes on the rich. Obama wants to, arguing that seniors, young people, and the middle class shouldn’t be forced to “shoulder the burden alone.” 

Instead, “I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense,” he said. “But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’?”

Linking his tax plan to Jesus was anything but routine. Presidents have been speaking to the prayer breakfast, a Christian-sponsored event, since the 1950s. Their talks have tended to be mildly Christian, not at all political, and never exploited as a vehicle to claim Christ’s endorsement of their policies.

Obama, however, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist from the press. …

David Hansanyi says we can do without the “to do list.”

… But according to White House press secretary Jay Carney, the function of the to-do list is that it ensures that come election time, Republicans will have to explain to their constituents “what they did while they were in Washington these last two years. Did they just say no?”

Correct answer: I didn’t say “no” enough.

The problem is that so-called fiscal conservatives say “yes” too often to populist notions masquerading as policy. With the state of the economy, what’s scarier, that the administration would pretend that these are serious proposals or that the president might actually believe they are?

Jennifer Rubin posts on more stupidity from Joe Biden.

One theory is that Karl Rove has kidnapped the real vice president and is now going around sowing discord and spreading gaffes as fast as the press can record them. That would be the most charitable explanation for why, just a couple days after making a mess on gay marriage, Vice President Biden chose in a speech to the Rabbinical Assembly’s annual conference to deliver Mitt Romney more ammunition.

He declared: “When we took office, let me remind, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem. We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”

The Romney camp pounced, releasing a statement from policy director Lanhee Chen that read: …

Daniel Henninger can’t understand why anyone under 25 would vote for this president. 

Why would anyone under the age of 25 vote for Barack Obama in November?

Mr. Obama resumed his College Tour 2012 last week, visiting campuses in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado for the purpose of replicating his 66% youth-vote total from 2008.

In 2008, he reeled them in with promises of hope and change. In 2012 he’s offering cash, promising to protect 3.4% interest on their college loans. We’re about to find out if it’s true that when you’re young, hope springs eternal.

Put differently, the past three years have been a Peter Pan presidency for Peter Pan voters. If you’re going to college, it’s good to vote for Barack Obama again, so long as you’ll never have to turn 23. But for many young Americans, there will be no Tinker Bell showing them how to land a job with lovely thoughts.

The youth unemployment rate for Americans has hovered around 16%. Anecdotal stories abound of college graduates living in the bedroom they grew up in, jobless. But hey, the president they voted for as freshmen is promising 3.4% interest on the average $25,000 or so of college debt they owe four years later. …

Jeff Jacoby says “income inequality” is not a defining issue of our time. You’ll never guess who says it is.

… But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality — not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street’s significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?

For months President Obama has been calling income inequality “the defining issue of our time,” but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup’s survey, inequality didn’t show up as a major worry. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: So President Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He also had an imaginary economic plan.

Leno: Obama’s new campaign slogan: “Forward.” Good one. It tells voters, ‘Don’t look back at all those promises I made but didn’t keep. Just look Forward.’

Fallon: Joe Biden and New York Mayor Bloomberg play golf together. Biden shot an 89 while Bloomberg shot the guy who arranged a round of golf with Joe Biden.

Leno: President Obama getting around these days. He was in Afghanistan last week as part of his ‘Did I Mention I Killed Osama bin Laden Tour?

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Looking at yesterday’s elections, Polipundit says someone had a very bad day.

It’s hard to see how yesterday’s elections could have possibly gone better for conservatives:

North Carolina added marriage protection to its constitution by a margin of 61-39!

Richard Mourdock defeated Obama’s favorite senator – the longest-serving Republican senator – by 61-39!

Scott Walker got more votes than his two Democrat opponents combined, even though he was “running” unopposed in the Republican primary!

There is no hope for Democrats in these results. None. Not even the smallest glimpse of a silver lining.

For Democrats, these results are worse than 2010. They show a continuation of that year’s tidal wave, with conservatives fired up and ready to punish Democrats and liberal causes.

If conservative passion can hold for another six months, Republicans can be expected to significantly outperform their poll numbers in November.

That should send a chill down the spine of all those Democrats who are merely tied with their Republican opponents right now. Being tied in the polls is no longer good enough. Democrats need a 5-10 point lead now to survive November.

And guess which Democrat presidential candidate is currently tied in the polls with his Republican challenger…

Bill Kristol says let Romney be Romney.

No whining. No nagging. No teeth-gnashing. These are our springtime resolutions here at The Weekly Standard, at the beginning of the six-month general election campaign to select the next president of the United States.

Let’s stipulate once and for all that Mitt Romney isn’t a perfect candidate, that he’ll have trouble connecting with some voters, and that he’ll at times fall short of compellingly articulating a reformist conservative agenda for the 21st century. We’ll further stipulate? once and for all that the Romney campaign will be at times annoyingly ham-handed, at other times exasperatingly short-sighted, and will prove in general only imperfectly capable of presenting Romney to the American people as the right man for the job. And we’ll additionally stipulate that some Romney supporters will say silly things, that some Romney surrogates will make unconvincing arguments, that various elements of the Republican party will sometimes behave stupidly, and that even some conservatives will say embarrassing things as well.

It will all be water off our duck-like back here at The Weekly Standard. We won’t worry about it, and we’ll try not even to notice it, since there’s not much we can do about it. And the good news is that, at the end of the day, it will probably all be water off the voters’ backs too. Mitt Romney will be the kind of candidate he is, he’ll run the kind of campaign he runs—and he’ll probably defeat President Obama.

Indeed, he probably has a better chance to win if he relaxes and runs as .??.??. himself. …

Matthew Continetti is annoyed with Generalissimo Obama.

One of President Obama’s most annoying habits is his tendency to mistake the 300 million people of the United States for soldiers in an army charged with national reconstruction. He, of course, is the general.

The tic is often barely perceptible, revealed subtly in those moments when Obama decries partisan politics for interfering with his plans; when he speaks of coming together for the common purpose of redistributing private income to—sorry, “investing” taxpayer dollars in—Democratic client groups; and during the rare occasions when he feels it necessary to address the nation on matters of national security and war.

Here is the president in August 2010, announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq: “And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.”

The way to “honor” American heroes who serve overseas, Obama said, is “by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for—the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.”

What does “coming together” mean? Why, silly, it means passing Obama’s domestic agenda: …

Finally the media is vetting the president. IBD editors have the story about the lies in his autobiography.

Our president, it seems, is quite the fabulist. A new book reveals he fabricated yet another story in his 1995 memoir, this one about a white girlfriend complaining about black anger.

In his supposedly nonfiction memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama claims he and the girlfriend got into a “big fight” after seeing a New York play by a black writer. He became annoyed when she allegedly asked “why black people were so angry all the time.”

Obama biographer David Maraniss contacted the former girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, who insists the scene never took place. She says they never even saw a show by a black playwright.

Maraniss, who works for the Washington Post, snagged an interview with the president and asked him about the discrepancy. Obama agreed with Cook’s account.

So why did he make up the anecdote? He told Maraniss it was a “useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends.”

How convenient — especially when the overall theme of his bitter memoir is white racism.

Obama told another whopper in his autobiography. He wrote that while thumbing through a copy of Life magazine, he came across a story about a black man who underwent chemical treatments to lighten his skin. He claims he recoiled in horror at the photo of the bleached man, who looked like “an albino.”

Then he says he got so angry that “I felt my face and neck get hot.” He was upset that blackness was so condemned in America that a black man would resort to making himself white.

Only, that story wasn’t true, either. Life never published such an article.

Obama also grossly exaggerates his own battles with racism while attending a mostly white prep school in Honolulu. …

And the Washington Post writes on the shrinking labor force.

If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent. 

That helps explain a seeming contradiction in the unemployment numbers — the rate keeps dropping even though job creation has been soft.

In April, the U.S. economy added a mere 115,000 jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. In a normal month, that would not even be enough to keep up with new entrants into the labor market. But in this economy, it was enough to drive unemployment from 8.2 percent down to 8.1 percent, the lowest point since January 2009.

The explanation is a little-watched measure known as the “labor force participation rate.” That tracks the number of working-age Americans who are holding a job or looking for one. Between March and April, it dropped by 342,000. But because the official unemployment rate counts only those workers who are actively seeking work, that actually made the unemployment rate go down.

Critics of the Obama administration have been quick to seize on this as the real reason for the falling unemployment rate. In February, the Republican National Committee released a research note on “The Missing Worker,” arguing that “over 3 million unemployed workers have called it quits due to Obamanomics.”

Economists say the story is considerably more complicated. For one thing, the trend predates President Obama. And while part of the story is clearly that the labor force is shrinking because the bad economy is driving workers out, another significant factor is that baby boomers are beginning to retire early — a trend that has worrying implications for future growth. …

Same numbers with a hard right spin from Ricochet.

… The Labor Force Participation Rate shows what percentage of people are working, looking for a job and not looking for a job.  It is a better yardstick to measure the workforce in America than is the usually cited “unemployment rate” which doesn’t count people  who are so frustrated they stopped looking for a job.

The graph shows a huge upswing in labor participation through the Reagan years.  George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush kept the numbers up in Reagan territory.   Since Obama has taken over, he has wiped out the entirety of the Reagan gains. …

Walter Russell Mead says there is a war against the young.

An analysis of recent jobs figures at Investor.com reveals a disturbing development: the biggest beneficiaries from the economic recovery are Boomers, while everyone else is getting the shaft.

Since the Obama administration took office, there has been an epochal shift. Young workers have continued to lose jobs and incomes, while older workers have actually gained ground.

In fact, the Obama administration has seen a boom in the prospects of the 55+ crowd; their (I should say ‘our’) employment stands at a 42 year high. Net, there are 3.9 million new jobs for people over 55 since the recession began in December 2007, but there are 8.1 million fewer jobs for the young folks since that time.

Neither group may feel particularly grateful. Many of the older people working are people who decided to defer retirement, perhaps after their portfolios or pensions took a hit. The gains in employment are even higher among the 60+ set than among the 55-and-overs.

Still, it’s ironic to say the least that a president swept into power on a tsunami of young voter support has presided over a boom for the grannies and a bust for the kids. Logically, President Obama should expect to do somewhat better among senior citizens and worse among young people than in his first campaign — but logic often goes one way and politics another.

We shall see.

Another day, another column on government foolishness from Thomas Sowell.

Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions.

Behind all this busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness — whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations — shows a “problem” that has to be “corrected.”

No speck of evidence is considered necessary for this assumption to prevail at any level of government, including the Supreme Court of the United States. No one has to show the existence, much less the prevalence, of an even or random distribution of different segments of the population — in any country, anywhere in the world, or at any period of history.

Nothing is more common than for people to sort themselves out when it comes to residential housing, whether by class, race or other factors.

When there was a large Jewish population living on New York’s lower east side, a century ago, Jews did not live at random among themselves. Polish Jews had their neighborhoods, Rumanian Jews theirs, and so on. Meanwhile German Jews lived uptown. In Chicago, when Eastern European Jews began moving into German Jewish neighborhoods, German Jews began moving out.

It was much the same story in Harlem or in other urban ghettoes, where blacks did not live at random among themselves. Landmark scholarly studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s showed in detail how different neighborhoods within the ghettoes had people of different educational and income levels, with different malefemale ratios and different ways of life living in different places.

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WSJ report on soldiers who were children on September 11, 2001.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Corey Shaffer was in fourth grade at Cutler Ridge Christian Academy in Miami. Because his mother was cafeteria manager, he was at school early and was enjoying a bowl of Lucky Charms when news of the terrorist hijackings flashed on the television screen. He remembers being confused. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” he said.

It wasn’t until he was in middle school that the significance became clear, when he read about the attacks in his history book. Now he’s 19 years old and a Marine infantryman, fighting in the longest war in his nation’s history.

The conflict in Afghanistan has dragged on so long that the young Americans fighting on the front lines today often have little personal memory of the event that sparked it in the first place. Since the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush has completed two terms and retreated to private life. The World Trade Center is again New York’s tallest building and Osama bin Laden has been dead for almost exactly one year.

The newest wave of troops hitting the Afghan battlefields are 19 or 20 years old, meaning they were roughly between 8 and 10 when al Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The fourth- and fifth-graders knew something big had happened but were often unable to understand why it mattered until years later. Such a mismatch hasn’t happened since the country was founded, largely because its greatest wars have tended to be brief interludes, not semipermanent features. …

Peter Wehner calls out attention to last week’s column from George Will.

George Will has a lovely tribute to his son Jon, who is a Washington Nationals fan who also happens to have Down syndrome.

Apart from his evident love and appreciation for his son, Will takes aim at the “full, garish flowering of the baby boomers’ vast sense of entitlement, which encompasses an entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps, and to a perfect baby.” He goes on to write about Jon’s gift of serenity. “With an underdeveloped entitlement mentality,” Will writes, Jon has “been equable about life’s sometimes careless allocation of equity. Perhaps this is partly because, given the nature of Down syndrome, neither he nor his parents have any tormenting sense of what might have been. Down syndrome did not alter the trajectory of his life; Jon was Jon from conception on.” …

Here is Will’s column.

When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago — on May 4, 1972, his father’s 31st birthday — the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable.

The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon’s parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have necessarily bleak futures. Whether warehoused or just allowed to languish from lack of stimulation and attention, people with Down syndrome, not given early and continuing interventions, were generally thought to be incapable of living well, and hence usually did not live as long as they could have.

Down syndrome is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect — an extra 21st chromosome. It causes varying degrees of mental retardation and some physical abnormalities, including small stature, a single crease across the center of the palms, flatness of the back of the head, a configuration of the tongue that impedes articulation, and a slight upward slant of the eyes. In 1972, people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids.

Now they are called American citizens, about 400,000 of them, and their life expectancy is 60. Much has improved. There has, however, been moral regression as well. …

Daniel Gross of the WSJ explores the trend to renting.

… In the American mind, renting has long symbolized striving—striving, that is, well short of achieving. But as we climb our way out of the Great Recession, it seems something has changed. Americans are getting over the idea of owning the American dream; increasingly, they’re OK with renting it. Homeownership is on the decline, and home rentership is on the rise. But the trend isn’t limited to the housing market. Across the board—for goods ranging from cars to books to clothes—Americans are increasingly acclimating to the idea of giving up the stability of being an owner for the flexibility of being a renter. This may sound like a decline in living standards. But the new realities of our increasingly mobile economy make it more likely that this transition from an Ownership Society to what might be called a Rentership Society, far from being a drag, will unleash a wave of economic efficiency that could fuel the next boom.

While downgrading the place of ownership in the American psyche may sound like a traumatic task, the cold, unsentimental fact about the American dream is that Americans never really owned it in the first place. For the past three decades, especially, consumers haven’t so much bought their quality of life as they’ve borrowed it from banks and credit card companies. And since the Great Recession, Americans have been busy rebuilding their balance sheets and avoiding new financial encumbrances. When American consumers can’t—or won’t—borrow to purchase the goods and services they’ve come to consider part of their standard of living, how does the economy get back on its feet?

The answer lies in consumers following the example of corporations—that is, becoming more efficient. The reaction to extended leverage and foolish borrowing isn’t to stop consuming and buying; it is to consume and buy more intelligently. That’s what the Rentership Society is all about. And it starts at home. Literally. Housing is the biggest single component of consumption in the U.S. economy and the source of much of our present misery. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical consumer spends about 32% of his or her budget on shelter. In the last decade, that generally meant borrowing a lot of money to take “ownership” of a home. …

Joel Kotkin writes on how a baby bust will turn Asia’s tigers toothless.

For the last two decades, America’s pundit class has been looking for models to correct our numerous national deficiencies. Some of the more deluded have settled on Europe, which, given its persistent low economic growth over the past 20 years and minuscule birth rates, amounts to something like looking for love in all the wrong places.

More rational and understandable have been those who have looked for role models instead in East Asia. After all, East Asia has been the world’s ascendant power for the better part of past 30 years. It is home to both China and Japan, the world’s second and third largest economies, as well as the dynamic “tiger” economies of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Thomas Friedman, long enamored by authoritarian leviathan China, recently praised the tiger countries as exemplars of forward thinking. He traces their strong emphasis on “highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students” as keys to turning their resource-poor countries into first world successes.

Yet for all their laudably good school test scores, these tigers could turn somewhat toothless in the future. Already Japan, which fashioned the first great Asian model, is beset by a series of massive challenges including a lack of technological competitiveness and disastrously declining demographics. …

Interesting piece from Discover on last year’s efforts by the Army Engineers’ to control the Mississippi floods. Interesting that is, if you can get by the first person pronouns. Maybe he just wants to be president.

We knew it was going to be a challenging flood year. I was working in an operations center aboard the Mississippi, the largest motor vessel on the river: 241 feet long, with five decks

We have a comprehensive flood plan that dictates what to do when water reaches certain levels—where we need to allow controlled flooding to save cities downstream. By April 9 the flood gauges at Cairo, Illinois, which straddles the Missouri and Kentucky borders, exceeded allowable limits. We were supposed to open the nearby Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway when the water reached 61 feet, and on the night of May 1, the forecast level climbed to 63 feet. The decision was clear. If I didn’t open that floodway and relieve the pressure, levees would have broken somewhere else—but the angst level was very high. We planned to submerge 130,000 acres of farmland, and Missouri’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to stop the operation, but the court refused the request. I gave the order and we blew up the floodway on May 2. …

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Mark Steyn compares Julia and Liz Warren.

Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here!

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In “Dreams from My Father,” the world’s all-time most-unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend:

“When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough…”

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend – “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at age 3 through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams From My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself – and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite – a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface makeup and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F—kin’ Chief Dances With Plugs. …

Speaking of Warren, we have another post from Volokh Conspiracy.

Aside from Brian Leiter, whose contention that being Native American provides no affirmative action edge in law school hiring fails the straight-face test, it is obvious to everyone else why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years–which was to get an edge in hiring.  Even less plausible, of course, is her own explanation–that she was looking for people to have lunch with (once she got to Harvard was it that she no longer was interested in having lunch with other Native Americans or that the strategy was so successful that she had just had too many lunches through the years?).  Larry Sabato states the obvious:

“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”

So assume the only reasonable explanation–that contrary to Leiter’s statement she did this to get a leg up in hiring and contrary to her own statement she didn’t do it to find lunch partners. …

Leaving BS in the academic field, we find another area where it reigns supreme. Thomas Sowell explains how unions lie.

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do.

Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric. However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off.”

That mask has been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration, and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very dangerous.

First there was the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” that the administration tried to push through Congress. What it would have destroyed was precisely what it claimed to be promoting — a free choice by workers as to whether or not they wanted to join a labor union. …

More from Thomas Sowell.

A small headline in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.

If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the President of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested in the same thing.

In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places. …

A few years ago Pickerhead went to the Social Security office to sign up. Was it filled with a bunch of old people? Nope, all youngsters. James Pethokoukis explains why.

Now that the labor force participation rate is at its lowest level since 1981, it’s a good time to take another look at how the rising number of disabled Americans affects the official size of the workforce. Here are disturbing facts from Bloomberg:

– The number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance jumped 22 percent to 8.7 million in April from 7.1 million in December 2007, Social Security data show.

– That helps explain as much as one quarter of the decline in the U.S. labor-force participation rate during the period, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

– Disability recipients may account for as much as 0.5 percentage point of the more than 2 point drop since the end of 2007, the economists calculate, and that contribution could grow when some extended unemployment benefits expire at the end of this year.

– More than 99 percent of all SSDI beneficiaries remain in the program until retirement age, David Greenlaw, a managing director in New York at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a March research note, citing government data. The program provides an average of $1,111 in monthly income to eligible workers with a physical or mental impairment that will last at least 12 months or result in death, according to Social Security. …

Der Spiegel takes us on a visit to the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea.

… Visitors who managed to slip into the country past the authorities’ careful scrutiny … can see the results in the capital Pyongyang. The new apartment blocks were built at a breakneck pace, buildings that are 12 to 15 stories high, ranging from structures resembling public housing in the West to avant-garde apartment towers to huge blocks of houses that look almost inviting with their terraced roof decks.

It was a massive undertaking. The government was ruthless as it moved forward with its plans, reports a European Union envoy in Pyongyang. To obtain the necessary land, people were “collectively thrown out” of their old apartments. An entire residential neighborhood of four-story buildings on the banks of the Taedong River, in a prime downtown location, was leveled in a single weekend.

According to the EU envoy, a column of military trucks arrived one Saturday morning. The residents were forced to load up their belongings in next to no time and were then taken away to relatives. Two circular apartment towers painted gray and blue now stand on the site, within full view of the few guests at the Yanggakdo International Hotel across the river.

To visitors, Pyongyang’s modern skyline looks impressive at first glance, seeming to belie descriptions of North Korea as a poverty-stricken realm stuck in the stone age of communism. But there is a catch: These new buildings are off-limits, even to diplomats.

The supposed proof of the success of the “aspiring nation” quickly turns out to be nothing but Potemkin villages. The new residential towers are often uninhabited and little more than empty shells. The country has had problems with its energy supply. There was even less electricity this past winter than in the year previous, and heating systems were not working well. In the cold months, many families burned wood in small, homemade ovens to at least keep one room warm, report foreigners in Pyongyang.

Because of insufficient water pressure, there is often no running water on the upper floors of the apartment towers. To get water, residents carry buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetch their water from the polluted river. …

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Charles Krauthammer says Obama has become the “divider in chief.”

Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.Once again he’s been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his “train wreck” defense of Obamacare’s individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law.

The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn’t a state help the federal government enforce the law? “You can see it’s not selling very well,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Verrilli never had a chance. This was never a serious legal challenge in the first place. It was confected (and timed) purely for political effect, to highlight immigration as a campaign issue with which to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic.

Hispanics, however, are just the beginning. The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone.

What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills and a forest of straw men.

Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6 to 3, the majority including the venerated liberal John Paul Stevens.

Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black? …

Jennifer Rubin lists the president’s five favorite canards.

President Obama would like to talk about anything — Osama bin Laden, women, George Bush, “Forward” — rather than the economy. And when he does, his major themes are built on shaky facts or out-and-out untruths. Let’s look at five of them.

1. Income inequality worsened, leading to a credit boom and bust and now is slowing our recovery. Jim Pethokoukis quotes from the second study in recent months to debunk this:

“Using data from a panel of 14 countries for over 120 years, we find strong evidence linking credit booms to banking crises, but no evidence that rising income concentration was a significant determinant of credit booms.

Narrative evidence on the US experience in the 1920s, and that of other countries in more recent decades, casts further doubt on the role of rising inequality.”

Pethokoukis observes: “A long period of economic moderation made people both richer and overconfident about the economy’s stability in the future. So they took too many risks. Oh, and the Fed may have left interest rates too low for too long. So now we have this study. And we have an earlier blockbuster study from researchers at Cornell University that found median household income — properly measured — rose 36.7% from 1979-2007, not 3.2% like inequality alarmists (and White House faves) Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez argue.”

Obama seeks “fairness” and soaking the rich for ideological reasons. It is not a plan for increasing economic growth. …

Alana Goodman says the White House’s bin Laden bragging has brought out a “swift boat” contingent. 

The group is called Veterans for a Strong America, and they’ve already released one ad blasting President Obama’s handling of the bin Laden death anniversary. BuzzFeed reports there’s more on the way:

‘In the wake of a warm conservative reception for a web video trashing the president for “spiking the football” on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, the conservative group Veterans for a Strong America plans to gather Navy SEALs and Special Forces operators to criticize the White House during the 2012 campaign.

“We’re looking to [put together] a coalition, to field SEALs and operators that want to come out publicly,” executive director of Veterans for a Strong America, Joel Arends, tells BuzzFeed. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with former SEALs and current SEALs. I’ve been talking to operators in the community. There is palatable discontent.” ‘ …

Here’s the video produced by the Veterans for a Strong America.

Kimberley Strassel on the modern day “enemies list.” 

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. His campaign brands you a Romney donor, shames you for “betting against America,” and accuses you of having a “less-than-reputable” record. The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Are you worried?

Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” appalled the country for the simple reason that presidents hold a unique trust. Unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are also so vast as to require restraint. Any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats. This is why presidents since Nixon have carefully avoided the practice.

Save Mr. Obama, who acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled “Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney’s donors.” In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having “less-than-reputable records,” the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that “quite a few” have also been “on the wrong side of the law” and profiting at “the expense of so many Americans.”

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having “outsourced” jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a “lobbyist”) and Thomas O’Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them. …

OK back to Elizabeth Warren a story we cannot leave alone. John Fund says she was just looking for a play date.

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate running against Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, claimed for a decade in law-school directories that she was Native American even though her only evidence for her status was family “lore.”

After days of stonewalling, she now says she claimed minority status only in order to find others with tribal roots. “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off,” she told reporters this week. …

Chris Cillizza says she won WWW – Worst Week in Washington.

… Warren’s campaign, sensing crisis, sought to stamp out the controversy by noting that she is proud of her heritage and that identifying as a Native American had nothing to do with her hiring at any job.

And yet, there was Warren on Wednesday offering an extended — and personal — riff on the role that her Native American ancestry had played in her life. The story involved a picture on her mantel of her grandfather and his “high cheekbones” (really!).

Elizabeth Warren, for turning a small hole into a yawning political ditch, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.

Jim Geraghty says Harvard tried to help. They should have stayed quiet.

Harvard University tries to help Elizabeth Warren, and only hurts themselves in the process:

Harvard Law School lists one lone Native American faculty member on its latest diversity census report — but school officials and campaign aides for Elizabeth Warren refused to say yesterday whether it refers to the Democratic Senate candidate.

Warren — who has been dogged by questions about whether she used her claims of Cherokee lineage to further her career — has insisted she never authorized Harvard Law to count her as a Native American in the mid-1990s, when the school was under fire for not having enough minority professors.

Here’s the current faculty directory. Anyone else stand out as a potential Native American? (Although I suppose that the example of Warren demonstrates that someone who does not look like a Native American, have a Native American name, or have any known work on Native American issues could still be considered a Native American under university criteria.) …

Howie Carr weighs in. 

… Who can forget Elizabeth Warren’s “rise from poverty.” That hasn’t been mentioned much since we found out that by 1965, her family had three cars, one of which was Granny’s white MG, a car that was, the Globe sadly informed us, “beat up.”

And you say Pocahontas Warren hasn’t got a right to sing the blues?

Then there was Granny’s $168,000 gig working for Travelers Insurance when they were trying to fend off lawsuits from victims of asbestos poisoning. Kind of like Deval Patrick being on the board of subprime monster Ameriquest, or Barack’s dealings with convicted racketeer Tony Rezko.

All of them, they’re better than you, because you’re an oppressor. They’re the oppressed — they went to Harvard Law

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One well researched piece by Chris Francescani of Reuters has quelled the lynch mob atmosphere surrounding George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL.  It is long but well worth your time.

A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.

The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law’s dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show.

“Don’t use pepper spray,” he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend. “It’ll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second for the dog to jump you,” he said.

“Get a gun.”

That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December, another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight weapon.

By June 2011, Zimmerman’s attention had shifted from a loose pit bull to a wave of robberies that rattled the community, called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. The homeowners association asked him to launch a neighborhood watch, and Zimmerman would begin to carry the Kel-Tec on his regular, dog-walking patrol – a violation of neighborhood watch guidelines but not a crime.

Few of his closest neighbors knew he carried a gun – until two months ago.

On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns, race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States.

During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because he was black. After Zimmerman was finally arrested on a charge of second-degree murder more than six weeks after the shooting, prosecutors portrayed him as a violent and angry man who disregarded authority by pursuing the 17-year-old.

But a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters investigation into Zimmerman’s past and a series of incidents in the community in the months preceding the Martin shooting.

Based on extensive interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors, schoolmates and co-workers of Zimmerman in two states, law enforcement officials, and reviews of court documents and police reports, the story sheds new light on the man at the center of one of the most controversial homicide cases in America.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. …

The only American publication that did a reasonable job of reporting on George Zimmerman was the Washington Post. Here’s a piece they ran one month before the above item from Reuters.

…In Manassas, where Zimmerman lived in the 1980s and 1990s with his parents and two siblings, neighbors tended to define the family based on their spiritual profile. “Very Catholic .?.?. very religious,” their neighbor Jim Rudzenski recalled Thursday. The children attended All Saints Catholic School on Stonewall Road through the eighth grade before going to Osbourn High School. George became an altar server and evening receptionist at All Saints Catholic Church. The Zimmermans “were known and respected in the community for their dedication and service,” said Robert Cilinski, pastor of All Saints Catholic Church.

The father, Robert Zimmerman Sr., is a retired military man. He could be strict. And the children’s grandmother, who lived with the family, also kept a watchful eye, said Kay Hall, who lived across the street from the Zimmermans in a neighborhood just west of Sudley Road for about 20 years. George and his siblings “didn’t play with the neighborhood kids,” Rudzen­ski said. “They had to stay home and play.” It was always “Yes, ma’am,” “No, ma’am,” Hall said.

Zimmerman’s life was not without difficulties. In 2001 — when he was 17 or 18 — he was the victim of a minor criminal assault, said Manassas police Sgt. Eddie Rivera. The city’s computer records do not provide details of the crime.

In school, Zimmerman hinted at ambitions in the business world. He joined a Future Business Leaders of America club. And in his senior yearbook, he wrote: “I’m going to Florida to work with my godfather who just bought a $1 million business.”…

Telegraph, UK has more on the series we’ve had on the Air France jetliner that fell out of the sky over the Atlantic.

… Mercifully, data recordings and impact damage on debris confirm the Airbus was still more or less level when it hit the sea. Some of the passengers might have dozed throughout the descent; others may have attributed it to violent buffeting. Those in window seats would have seen only darkness. There is reason to hope that there was not too much panic on board, but this is small consolation.

It seems surprising that Airbus has conceived a system preventing one pilot from easily assessing the actions of the colleague beside him. And yet that is how their latest generations of aircraft are designed. The reason is that, for the vast majority of the time, side sticks are superb. “People are aware that they don’t know what is being done on the other side stick, but most of the time the crews fly in full automation; they are not even touching the stick,” says Captain King. “We hand-fly the aeroplane ever less now because automation is reliable and efficient, and because fatigue is an issue. [The side stick] is not an issue that comes up – very rarely does the other pilot’s input cause you concern.”

Boeing has always begged to differ, persisting with conventional controls on its fly-by-wire aircraft, including the new 787 Dreamliner, introduced into service this year. Boeing’s cluttering and old-fashioned levers still have to be pushed and turned like the old mechanical ones, even though they only send electronic impulses to computers. They need to be held in place for a climb or a turn to be accomplished, which some pilots think is archaic and distracting. Some say Boeing is so conservative because most American pilots graduate from flying schools where column-steering is the norm, whereas European airlines train more crew from scratch, allowing a quicker transition to side stick control.

Whatever the cultural differences, there is a perceived safety issue, too. The American manufacturer was concerned about side sticks’ lack of visual and physical feedback. Indeed, it is hard to believe AF447 would have fallen from the sky if it had been a Boeing. Had a traditional yoke been installed on Flight AF447, Robert would surely have realised that his junior colleague had the lever pulled back and mostly kept it there. When Dubois returned to the cockpit he would have seen that Bonin was pulling up the nose.

There is another clever gizmo on the Airbus intended to make life simpler for the pilots but that could confound them if they are distracted and overloaded. Computers can automatically adjust the engine thrust to maintain whatever speed is selected by the crew. This means pilots do not need to keep fine-tuning the throttles on the cockpit’s centre console to control the power. But a curious feature of “autothrust” is that it bypasses the manual levers entirely – they simply do not move. This means pilots cannot sense the power setting by touching or glancing at the throttle levers. Instead, they have to check their computer screens. Again Boeing have adopted a different philosophy. They told the Telegraph: “We have heard again and again from airline pilots that the absence of motion with the Airbus flight deck is rather unsettling to them.” In Boeing’s system the manual handles move, even in automatic mode.

All the indications are that the final crash report will confirm the initial findings and call for better training and procedures. With the exception of Air France, which has a vested interest in avoiding culpability, no one has publicly challenged the Airbus cockpit design. And while Air France has modified the pitots on its fleet, it has said nothing about side sticks.

It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be another disaster quite like AF447. Crews have already had the lessons drummed into them and routine refresher courses on simulators have been upgraded to replicate AF447 high-level stalls. Airbus has an excellent safety record, at least as good as Boeing, and the A330 is an extremely trustworthy aircraft. Flying is easily the least dangerous way to travel, far safer than a car. But while more of us take to the air each year, a single crash is enough to damage confidence.

Critics of side sticks may now argue that Airbus should return to the drawing board. A feature designed to make things better for pilots has unintentionally made it harder for them to monitor colleagues in stressful situations. Yet there is no sign that the inquiry will call for changes to the sticks and Airbus remains confident about the safety of its technology. It will resist what it regards as a retrograde step to return to faux-mechanical controls. The company is unable to speak openly during the investigation, but a source close to the manufacturer says: “The ergonomic systems were absolutely not contrived by engineers and imposed on the pilot community. They were developed by pilots from many airlines, working closely with the engineers. What’s more, it has all been tested and certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency and regulators in the United States, and approved by lots of airlines.”

As Captain King points out, a belief in automation and the elegantly simple side sticks in particular, is integral to the Airbus design philosophy: “You would have to build in artificial feedback – that would be a huge modification.”

A defender of Airbus puts it thus: “When you drive you don’t look at the pedals to judge your speed, you look at the speedometer. It’s the same when flying: you don’t look at the stick, you look at the instruments.”

There is a problem with that analogy. Drivers manoeuvre by looking out of the window, physically steering and sensing pressure on the pedals. The speedometer is usually the only instrument a motorist needs to monitor. An airline pilot flying in zero visibility depends upon instruments for direction, pitch, altitude, angle of climb or descent, turn, yaw and thrust; and has to keep an eye on several dozen settings and lights. Flying a big airliner manually is a demanding task, especially if warnings are blaring and anxiety is growing.

Multimillion-euro lawsuits could follow any admission of liability and it is certainly preferable from Airbus’s point of view that Air France should shoulder the blame for the night when AF447 plunged into the void.

However, no one would suggest that, when it comes to the aircraft we all rely on every day, commercial considerations should come anything but a distant second to safety.