Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Debra Saunders writes on “extortion in the skies.”

This week, the Obama administration furloughed 14,500 air traffic controllers — staffers will lose two days of work per month — ostensibly to comply with the 2011 Budget Control Act’s $85 billion in sequester cuts this year. The Federal Aviation Administration’s share is $637 million. So expect delays at the airport. That’s the idea, but it didn’t have to be.

The Obama administration has chosen to hold airline travel hostage in its never-ending effort to extort further tax increases from the GOP.

The administration argues that its hands are tied. By law, the FAA must cut spending across the board. Many lawmakers and industry leaders disagree, as air traffic controllers are “essential employees.” But to make absolutely sure, GOP senators have proposed legislation to allow the administration to prioritize cuts. For weeks, the White House has wanted no part of that. …

Jennifer Rubin has “10 reasons why it is a no good rotten second term.”

It’s been a rough year so far for the president, and it could get worse:

1. President Obama wound up ratifying all but a sliver of the Bush tax cuts.

2. He exaggerated, got caught exaggerating and lost on the sequestration implementation.

3. Now he’s backing down from the latest punish-the-public gambit. (The Associated Press reports: “Under pressure, the White House signaled Wednesday it might accept legislation eliminating Federal Aviation Administration furloughs blamed for lengthy flight delays for airline passengers, while leaving the rest of $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts in place. The disclosure came as sentiment grew among Senate Democrats as well as Republicans for legislation to ease the impact of the cuts on the FAA, possibly by loosening restrictions on agency spending.”)

4. He lost on gun control. …

Jim Geraghty writes in National Review about the high costs of the education of a president.

… Time and again, we hear anecdotes of the president angered, befuddled, and frustrated that the policies implemented in the beginning of his presidency, with a compliant Congress, haven’t generated the results he promised. But very little seems to change, other than a bit of fuming at aides behind closed doors.

President Obama was surprised to learn, in discussions with economic adviser Christina Romer, that large-scale investment in infrastructure and clean-energy projects wouldn’t create enormous numbers of new jobs.

In a December 2010 meeting with economic advisors, he “boiled over” with frustration that his housing policies hadn’t helped struggling homeowners like he promised.

When federal program after federal program fails to generate the desired result, it’s not crazy talk to become at least a little skeptical of the latest pledges and promises and idealistic visions.

But Democrats often speak as if the Right’s skepticism of the government’s problem-solving ability is driven by some sort of abstract ideological theory. It’s not. It’s usually built upon hard experiences. Human behavior isn’t predictable, particularly their interactions with the government. Unintended consequences pile up like a car crash.

That pattern is depressingly predictable: Someone in government comes up with some laudable goal, and announces some new program. After the press conference, when the cameras and microphones are away, implementing the idea proves more complicated than the press-conference announcement made it seem. Deadlines get missed. Costs turn out much higher than expected.  Bureaucratic inertia begins to exert the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Perhaps it is the nature of the modern presidency that the Oval Office’s occupant glides from photo-op to photo-op, and never spend too much time getting entangled in the messy work of actually making his policies live up to his promises. Certainly that’s the pattern for this president; even in this non-campaign year, the schedule is heavy with campaign-style rallies on gun-control initiatives here, a DCCC fundraiser there, then off to a tour of a national laboratory. He flits from issue to issue; to judge from his remarks and his schedule, the health-care issue is resolved and our system’s problems are fixed. Maybe White House press secretary Jay Carney will get a question about the exchanges or the electronic records system, which he’ll defuse with another defensive, meandering word salad.

Implementing Obamacare? That’s for somebody else to worry about.

Andrew Malcolm kicks off a section on the rehabilitation of George W.

Fifty-one months of an Obama presidency seem like an eternity of speeches, photo ops, fundraisers, soaring debt, stagnant job growth, blame games and did we mention speeches?

In historical context, however, it’s the snap of a finger. Which makes it somewhat surprising that already Americans are quietly rehabilitating President George W. Bush’s image in their own minds. This despite Bush’s virtual disappearance from the political scene since Jan. 20, 2009, save for a brief promotion tour for his book, “Decision Points.”

You’re about to hear a whole lot more about Bush, at least briefly, with Thursday’s dedication of his presidential library at Laura Bush’s alma mater, Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By custom, all former presidents will attend.

President Obama will also be there, although he’s blamed Republican Bush for just about everything that’s gone wrong during these long 1,554 days, except Obama’s miserable NCAA tournament brackets. First, of course, to make the trip worthwhile, Democrat Obama will do another political fundraiser in Dallas.

Remember those iconic billboards that went up during the great ObamaCare legislative con? A smiling Bush waving with the caption, “Miss Me Yet?” Well, apparently more people do. ABC News and the Washington Post came out early this morning with a new poll timed to the library dedication. …

Peter Wehner has more on W.

… In fact, over the last 40 years and eight presidencies, only two presidents have kept spending below 20 percent of GDP in even a single year: George W. Bush did it in six of his eight fiscal years; Bill Clinton in four. Barack Obama has averaged 24 percent of GDP spending so far; and even his optimistic budget projections don’t have the U.S. getting close to 20 percent again. Ever. As another reference point: during fiscal years 1981-88, the Reagan years, federal spending averaged over 22 percent of GDP. Just in case anyone is interested in it.

But I wanted to focus on one other comment that former Prime Minister Blair made, which is that Bush continues to believe that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power and added: “When you see what is happening in Syria today, the sense of that argument is evident. . . . What it does is just make clear that these decisions are very difficult. If you intervene, it can be very tough. If you don’t intervene, it can also be very tough.”

There is in Blair’s comments both wisdom and nuance, which is often lacking in those who comment on presidents and public officials and who themselves have never been in positions of influence in government. Having been on both sides of things, let me just say it’s easier to tweet about policy than it is to implement policy; and it’s more effortless to comment on unfolding events from the comfort of a television studio or from behind a microphone than to make decisions in the Oval Office.

George W. Bush, over the course of eight eventful years, made literally thousands of decisions. Under enormous pressure and facing tremendous challenges–during his years as president, Bush faced the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, two wars, the worst natural disaster in our history, and a financial collapse unlike any since the Great Depression–he got the vast majority of them right. And every day he was president–even when he got decisions wrong–he dignified the office. …

Karl Rove on his old boss.

… Mr. Bush ran in 2000 promising to restore honor and dignity to the presidency. He took seriously the example of John Adams, whose words to his wife Abigail are etched over the fireplace in the State Dining Room in the White House: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!”

In his biography of Harry Truman, David McCullough wrote that CBS newscaster Eric Sevareid “would say nearly forty years later of Truman, ‘I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.’ “

Character is what is being celebrated in Dallas this week.

Abby Thernstrom reviews a book on Manhattan’s Little Red School and affiliated high school – Elizabeth Irwin.

… Author Dina Hampton does not deny the schools’ dedication to political indoctrination. The students, she writes, “grew up in a counter-culture hothouse steeped in progressive pedagogy and radical politics.” At assemblies, everyone would stand to sing the “Negro National Anthem” (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) instead of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Social studies, taught by “a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist,” formed the core of the curriculum, “with emphasis placed on the exploration of oppressed cultures.” The school took students on field trips searching for the downtrodden proletariat (my description, not Hampton’s). They stayed away from ordinary workers—most of whom would have been violently anti-Communist, of course—but met instead with those on strike or laboring as migrant workers; they toured Pennsylvania steel mills and coal mines. 

I was an Elisabeth Irwin student in the early 1950s, and I remember clearly the curriculum and those politically heavy-handed trips. But neither made the intended impression on me, for reasons I don’t entirely know—except that I was always terrible at listening to my elders.

Hampton provides little information about the school itself. But Little Red’s subtitle, Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond, offers those lives as her subject. They are Tom Hurwitz, Angela Davis, and Elliott Abrams. Hurwitz and Davis were both in the class of 1961; Abrams graduated in 1965. Hampton views all three as “radicals,” a term of endearment, but only when speaking of those on the left. Amazingly, she equates the radicalism of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and the CPUSA with the views of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol—members of what she calls the “radical neoconservative movement that came to power with the Reagan administration.” 

Elliott Abrams was clearly included to make the story ostensibly fair and balanced; but Davis and Hurwitz are heroes, while Abrams is conservative and, thus, a villain. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Andrew Malcolm calls our attention to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. Follow his link and you can hear the sermon by Rev. Richard Chartres.

Britain staged the funeral of former British Prime Minister and staunch American ally Margaret Thatcher the other day. It contained almost all the pomp and circumstance you’d expect from the Brits.

They skipped the RAF flyover at the request of Thatcher, a conservative thrift even in death. We wrote here about that impressive day, including its regrettably classless dismissal by America’s highest-ranking South Sider. It’s as if Obama already knows and resents how much more she accomplished as a leader from the front than he can ever dream of from his chosen position behind.

You can watch the entire Thatcher funeral video here. And we have another one below too. As the baroness’ remains were being cremated Wednesday, the Marathon Finish Line bombings in Boston were completely distracting this country.

Now that the threat of these lethal culprits is over, we wanted to devote a few quiet minutes on this Sunday to ruminate over something that struck us about the Thatcher funeral. British pageantry aside, we were quite taken by the language in general of the service–the music, hymns and gospel–in the exquisite 17th-century St. Paul’s Cathedral of Sir Christopher Wren.

And more specifically by the sermon of Bishop Richard Chartres. He has a richly-deserved reputation for elocution, diction and simplicity/clarity of presentation. …

Nile Gardiner has more on Lady Thatcher’s funeral.

I have just returned to Washington from London where I attended the funeral of Lady Thatcher. Many Telegraph writers have described the deeply moving and truly beautiful service held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a fitting farewell to a great leader who dedicated her life to serving her country and fighting for freedom, both at home and abroad.

On a personal note, it was a final farewell to my former boss and mentor, for whom I worked in her private office in Belgravia. I was with Lady Thatcher for some of the final years of her public life, and owe her an immense debt of gratitude. She was extraordinarily kind and compassionate towards her staff, and looked after those who worked for her as though they were part of her own family. She was a leader of great principle and integrity, selfless in her dedication to the British people, and remarkably humble for someone who had achieved so much in her life. She will be missed beyond words by those who knew her, and her death leaves a huge void in Britain and on the world stage. …

James Pethokoukis posts a chart everyone should understand.

It’s sad that the case for economic growth needs to be made. But it seems that too many people have lost sight of why growth is good as they fret about issues such as the environment and inequality (both of which growth actually helps).

In response, AEI’s Values & Capitalism series has published a little book, Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing, that explores the benefits of growth and addresses common concerns regarding how growth impacts the poor, the environment, and culture.

Think about it: In real terms, the average income of Americans over the past two centuries went from $2,000 per person to $50,000. Here is the book’s formula for growth: …

Matthew Continetti on the president’s worst week yet.

… The combination of policy success and coddling by the media was sure to affect the president’s judgment. His ego never has been what one could call petite. “Phil, what’s my name,” the president is said to have asked his legislative director one day in the first term. “President Obama,” the aide replied. And Obama said, “Of course I’m feeling lucky.”

Such words are usually delivered at the moment in the play when Nemesis appears onstage, ready to correct the hubris of a tragic hero. And though Obama is neither a tragic figure nor a heroic one, he definitely suffers from a case of misplaced confidence. He clearly assumed that the power of his oratory, his charisma, and national shock at the horror in Newtown, Conn., would allow him to sign the first significant gun legislation in a quarter of a century. He was wrong.

The president entered the gunfight with three priorities: reinstating the assault weapons ban, banning high-capacity magazines,and universal background checks. By the beginning of this week it was clear that the assault weapons and high-capacity magazine amendments could not pass the Senate and that the background check language would have to be riddled with loopholes and concessions to have any chance. The amendment cobbled together by Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) was a misshapen shadow of the original proposal.The president hoped it would earn the requisite 60 votes. It did not.

Hence the genuine frustration and anger the president displayed Wednesday evening during his statement on the failure of his gun initiatives. Obama’s words may have been a futile protest directed at the Senate and the NRA, but they also carried the weight of shock at his own inability to convince four Democratic senators to support Manchin-Toomey. Once more, in Obama’s view, “politics” had conspired to frustrate his will. But even he would have to acknowledge that this happened only because he chose to fight over gun control.

The public did not want a fight. It has consistently prioritized the economy and the deficit over gun control. Nor had Obama campaigned on gun regulations in 2012. If there was any substance to his reelection, it was the promise he made in the Des Moines Register interview to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. But the president went ahead anyway, deluded by the polls and by the misperception that the politics of the gun issue had changed.

And so any objective spectator would have to ask: What exactly has the president accomplished in the first 100 days of his second term? And here the only answer can be that Obama won Chuck Hagel confirmation as secretary of defense despite only four Republican senators voting for him and having Hagel recant all of the positions that endeared him to the antiwar left and right. Some accomplishment. …

Boston Herald tells us the Tsarnaev’s were funded by Massachusetts welfare. We live in a country that not only cannot defend itself, but goes one step further and finances those who attack it. 

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money.

And ABC News notes Mom Tsarnaev has outstanding warrants for shoplifting $1,600 of clothing from Lord and Taylor. By all means, lets make sure we ease up on immigration. It is working so well for us.  However this helps us enjoy the irony that it was security video recorded by the Lord & Taylor store that provided the information that led to the capture of the bombers.  

The mother of accused Boston Marathon bombers has continued to defend her two sons from her home in Dagestan, Russia, but if she attempts to return to the United States to bury her older son, or care for the boy that remains hospitalized, she could face arrest on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting.

The clerk of the Natick District Court confirmed to ABC News that Zubeidat Tsarnaev, failed to appear at a court hearing on October 25, 2012 to resolve charges that she stole $1,600 worth of garments from a nearby Lord & Taylor department store. …

The NY Times reports on Denmark’s struggle to rein in welfare costs.

It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.

It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

In past years, Danes might have shrugged off the case, finding Carina more pitiable than anything else. But even before her story was in the headlines 16 months ago, they were deeply engaged in a debate about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europe’s most generous, had become too rich, undermining the country’s work ethic. Carina helped tip the scales.

With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating.

But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.

Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all — be they dawdling university students, young pensioners or welfare recipients like Carina who lean on hefty government support. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn on last week’s events.

This has been a strange and deadly week in America. On Monday, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, the first successful terrorist attack on a civilian target on American soil since 9/11. And yet a mere two days later,

Boston’s death toll was surpassed by a freak fertilizer accident at a small town in Texas.

In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, …

… The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the BostonMarathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition. “The thinking, as we have been reporting, is that this is a domestic extremist attack,” declared Dina Temple-Raston, NPR’s “counterterrorism correspondent.” “Officials are leaning that way largely because of the timing of the attack. April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.” Miss Temple-Raston was born in my mother’s homeland of Belgium, where, alas, there were more than a few fellows willing to wish the Führer happy birthday back when he was still around to thank you for it. But it was news to me it was such a red-letter day in the BayState. Who knew? At NPR, “counterterrorism” seems to mean countering any suggestion that this might be terrorism from you know, the usual suspects. …

Ed Morrissey reports on the shocking fact that neither of the Tsarnaev brothers had a gun permit.

Take some comfort in the fact that this will almost certainly be the last dumb meme in the gun-rights debate for a long time to come.  After the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, shot a cop to death in an ambush, and then wounded several more in a gun battle, the fact that the two didn’t have Massachusetts handgun permits has apparently made national news:

“The two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, who police say engaged in a gun battle with officers early Friday after a frenzied manhunt, were not licensed to own guns in the towns where they lived, authorities said on Sunday.

In the confrontation with police on the streets of a Boston suburb, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were armed with handguns, at least one rifle and several explosive devices, authorities say.

But neither brother appears to have been legally entitled to own or carry firearms where they lived, a fact that may add to the national debate over current gun laws. Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a bill to expand background checks on gun purchases, legislation that opponents argued would do nothing to stop criminals from buying guns illegally.”

And which last week proved. Criminals rarely go to the trouble of applying for gun permits because (a) previous convictions would keep them from getting one anyway, and/or (b) they don’t want to establish paper trails to themselves for police to find.  Criminals, especially those who want to commit high-profile crimes, usually steal their weapons (or buy them illegally, as Reuters notes) and discard them after the crimes so that investigators can’t tie them to the weapons. …

Jay Nordlinger posts that David Axelrod believes the president thinks the bombing was related to Tax Day.

David Axelrod said something interesting after the terror in Boston. (He is the president’s chief political strategist.) He said the president was connecting the bombing to Tax Day.

Friday night, I was sitting in a concert hall. The critic sitting behind me was saying to his friend, “I assumed this was right-wing domestic terror. It happened on Tax Day.”

The other week, a U.S. Army instructor issued a list of threats — a list headed “Religious Extremism.” At the top of the list was “Evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian).”

Two years ago, Mayor Bloomberg in New York guessed that the Times Square terrorist was opposed to Obamacare.

I thought of something last week (and if you heard me say it on my podcast with Mona Charen, forgive the repetition). When Kennedy was assassinated, the speculation was that this was right-wingers. JohnTower’s family had to be evacuated. He was leading the Goldwater operation, I believe, and there were death threats against his family.

Then it transpired that the killer was a Communist. And a prominent liberal said, “Now our grief can be pure.”

In my view, American education — the weight of the culture — has done something sick to many American minds. If the country cannot recognize the threats against it — specifically Muslim extremism — it probably can’t defend itself. …

Roger Simon posts on the Salon expectations about the bombers. 

When you write about titanic events in progress, you risk appearing a fool. Nevertheless I have some strong feelings this morning with Dzhokar Tsarnaev still at large that I cannot resist spelling out.

Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him:  the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.

The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah — do or die, apparently.

Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric “progressive.” It’s laughable, but it’s also sad and dangerous. …

… The Islamic people of the world need a reformation in the most extraordinary way. Ignoring that, as do the Sirotas of our culture, will not help it happen.

Interesting Chechen background by Stephen Green at VodkaPundit.

Starting back in the early ’60s, Colin McEvedy wrote a remarkable series of historical atlases for Penguin Books. Each covered a particular era and a particular area, usually Europe. And each map was exactly alike — except the borders. And every two-page spread was set up the same way: a map on the right-hand page, and explanatory text on the left. McEvedy’s writing style was that of an avuncular Oxford dean: friendly, warm, and knowing.

Later revisions of his work have more maps, but McEvedy’s words — those wonderful words! — had been tramped down by the boot of political correctness. But used copies of the original editions aren’t too hard to find. I highly recommend them, and still read the whole series every few years.

All of this comes to mind because of the craziness in Boston today, straight outta Caucasus.

To understand why, here’s one of McEvedy’s maps from The Penguin Atlas of Recent History, with “recent history” in his estimation being everything in Europe since Napoleon:

Look closely at the right hand side of the map in Tsarist Russia. There, in the northern Caucasus in the Krasnodar-Maykop region, you’ll see a bit of “Russian” territory indicated by a dotted line. If you can’t read it at this scale, it’s labeled “Unsubdued Circassians.” The territory is within the Russia Empire, but the Tsar’s writ did not run there. “Unsubdued” was how the Russians found the area when they took it from the Turks in the 1820s. And that’s how it stayed until the Soviets really clamped the lid down a century later.

It’s no coincidence that as the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the mid-to-late ’80s, the first violence to erupt was in the Caucasus. It’s a crazy patchwork of ethnicities and religions, everybody with legitimate grievances against everybody else.

We need two more maps to really see it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Before items about “public service” miscreants, how about some good news? WSJ had an article this weekend on Boeing’s 787 battery fix.

… By the end of the first week on the ground, Boeing “had 500 engineers dedicated to understanding” the complex technical issues, Mike Sinnett, the 787′s chief engineer, said last month.

Their next focus was to try to pinpoint the specific cause of internal battery short circuits, and develop a targeted engineering solution. Boeing teamed up with government investigators from the U.S. and Japan, but the goal remained elusive.

With both batteries from the incidents badly burned, frustrated experts acknowledged that a bevy of sophisticated tests produced inconclusive results. Mr. Sinnett and his bosses changed course again.

Boeing and its Japanese battery supplier, GS Yuasa Corp. shifted to crafting wide-ranging internal battery fixes aimed at combating a variety of potential causes. They included placing additional insulation around individual power cells within the battery, while more closely monitoring voltage fluctuations. Inspections at the factory, before batteries are assembled and shipped, also were tightened substantially.

The FAA and Mr. LaHood demanded additional safeguards, according to people familiar with the government’s deliberations. That is when Boeing engineers ratcheted up efforts to fine-tune the concept of a containment box, which they asserted amounted to a virtually foolproof solution.

The box serves several purposes: withstanding higher temperatures than the old design, and keeping dangerous chemicals from leaking. It also vents smoke outside the plane, and in the event of overheating automatically sucks oxygen from the battery. That is intended to snuff out any fire in a fraction of a second.

Boeing invested some “200,000 hours of engineering, design, analysis and testing” in the ultimate package of fixes, Ray Conner, head of Boeing’s commercial airplane unit, said last month. But even with its much-publicized battery woes, Mr. Conner called the 787 “far safer than anything that has been produced” by aircraft makers. …

Craig Pirrong says this president is no LBJ.

Obama threw a grand mal temper tantrum yesterday in the Rose Garden, lashing out at those he holds responsible for the defeat of the lame, completely symbolic, and utterly ineffectual gun legislation in the Senate.  Such a paradox.   According to Obama, the proposals are wildly popular, not to mention the epitome of “common sense.” (Note: whenever anyone asserts something is “common sense” it’s because they can’t muster a rational argument in its favor.)  Nonetheless, they went down in flames in the Senate.  And they would have had zero chance in the House.  How can that circle be squared?  According to Obama-the malign influence of the gun lobby.

In essence, Obama was admitting that he is no match for Wayne LaPierre.  How pathetic is that?

Obama can’t even get his own party completely on board, let alone Republicans.

Somewhere, probably in hell, LBJ is shaking his head in disbelief. …

Ann Althouse says the second term is not starting out well.

1. It’s been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there’s more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.

2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation’s emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn’t even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and “a scowling Vice President Biden” and pronounce it “all in all…  a pretty shameful day for Washington.” …

 

… 9. What’s happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama’s first term. If there’s one thing he ought to do with this second term, it’s make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what’s been in the works for so long —  we don’t freak out entirely. But: “A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a ‘train wreck’ because of bumbling implementation.’”

Speaking of obamacare, John Fund caught HHS spending millions on PR in an effort to “put lipstick on the obamacare pig.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has just handed out a $3.1 million PR contract to improve the public image of Obamacare. Advertising Age reports that the firm Weber Shandwick will help “roll out a campaign to convince skeptical — or simply confused — Americans the Affordable Care Act is good for them and convince them to enroll in a health plan.”

Obama officials insist the ads won’t be political, but critics recall that just before the 2010 midterm election, HHS spent $3.2 million on “educational” TV ads praising Obamacare. The spots featured the late actor Andy Griffith, a favorite of seniors, who told his fellow retirees that “more good things are coming” from Medicare. But FactCheck, a nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, noted that the ads made no mention of the dramatic cuts to 10 million Medicare Advantage recipients, who are likely to see their privately managed care scaled back. “The words in this ad ring hollow, and the promise that ‘benefits will remain the same’ is just as fictional as the town of Mayberry was when Griffith played the local sheriff,” FactCheck concluded in July 2010.

Indeed, the facts today are that Obamacare remains as unpopular now as when it was passed in 2010, and Democrats are increasingly worried it will return to haunt them in the midterm election next year, the first to take place after the stepped-up implementation of the law. …

Karl Rove has more. 

In congressional testimony last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed Republican governors for her department’s failure to create a “model exchange” where consumers could shop for health-insurance coverage in states that don’t set up their own exchange.

Nice try, but GOP governors aren’t the problem. Team Obama’s tendency to blame someone else for its shortcomings is tiresome. The Affordable Care Act requires HHS to operate exchanges in states that won’t operate their own. Since the act became law in March 2010, it has been abundantly clear that the agency would have to deploy a model exchange. It is Ms. Sebelius’s fault there isn’t one.

There is more to this failure. Even exchanges organized by Democratic and Republican governors may not be functioning by the health-law’s Oct. 1 deadline, because HHS has been slow with guidance and approvals.

Last month Gary Cohen, an official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who oversees technology for the exchanges, told members of America’s Health Insurance Plans (a trade association) that he was “pretty nervous” about implementation. He hoped enrollment is “not a third world experience.” …

Now we learn from Hot Air, a union official has called for repeal.

Labor unions largely came out swinging in favor of ObamaCare’s passage in 2010, but many have been growing increasingly wary of ObamaCare’s incoming provisions, fearing that the law’s requirements will raise the costs of health plans for unions members and make them less competitive compared to non-unionized workers. On Tuesday, one such labor union that initially backed the health care overhaul became the first union to officially revoke their support for the law. Ouch. …

Yuval Levin makes some suggestions as to how the GOP should proceed as the train wreck becomes more obvious.

As the calamity that is Obamacare unfolds upon the country, champions of genuine, market-based health-care reform will need to manage a careful balance: As Ramesh and I suggested in NR earlier this month, the conceptual and practical foundations of the law mean that it cannot be tinkered into harmlessness (let alone into a good system) but must be replaced with a different approach built on different foundations. Yet the fact that President Obama will be in office through 2016 means that no wholesale reform is likely to become law during that time. So Republicans need to find ways to highlight the law’s failures and put before the public their alternative vision and the policies that vision implies. Reforming Obamacare isn’t a workable option, but replacing it will have to begin with small steps where such steps are possible.

I think House Republicans have provided a modest but useful example of what that can look like with their bill to take money out of Obamacare’s “Prevention and Public Health Fund” (which is basically a slush fund used to pay for propaganda efforts on behalf of the law and to fill assorted implementation funding gaps created by the law’s haphazard design) and use it instead to allow more people with pre-existing conditions to make use of a high-risk pool to buy private insurance. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Murtagh, a victim of Kathy Boudin’s 1960′s bombing spree, asks if the Marathon bomber will get a teaching job at Columbia.

Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.

His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at ColumbiaUniversity.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled. …

Peter Wehner provides a petulant president post.

In a Rose Garden statement in the aftermath of his failure to persuade the Senate to move on any of his gun control proposals, the president raged, Lear-like, against his opponents. It was a rather unpleasant mix–one part petulance and two parts anger.

In the course of his outburst, the president said this:

“I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced.  “A prop,” somebody called them.  “Emotional blackmail,” some outlet said.  Are they serious?  Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue?  Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.” 

The unidentified “outlet” who used the phrase “emotional blackmail” was Charles Krauthammer, who on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier said this about the background checks:

“The question is: Would it have had any effect on Newtown? If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals – you’re saying you’re betraying the families — you’ve got to show how if this had been law it would’ve stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. 
I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s a kind of emotional blackmail as a way of saying, “You have to do it for the children.” Not if there’s no logic in this. And that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we heard out of the president on this issue.”

Krauthammer is once again right and the president is once again wrong. (At some point the president and his White House will discover that it’s not in their interest to get into a debate with Krauthammer. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer can explain why.)

What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. …

Jennifer Rubin has more.

Had a Republican president lashed out as petulantly as President Obama did yesterday after the defeat of the background check amendment, calling his opponents liars and stooges of special interests (“shameful” is a really harsh thing to say about the red-state Dems who jumped ship), the mainstream press would have been all over him. (Out of control! Lost his cool! Unpresidential!) But, because most of the press also was incensed at the defeat of anti-gun legislation, his performance was barely criticized.

The refusal to take on entitlement reform doesn’t earn Democrats the “coward” label from the press. “Cowardly,” for example might apply when Democratic supporters of Israel believe that Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel but vote for him anyway for fear of offending the White House. Those obvious examples of political timidity don’t earn the media’s ire because that cowardice leads to results they like. Refusing to rebuke one’s own constituents to vote for a feel-good measure for the opposition is many things (“survival instinct,” “politics as usual,” etc.), but it hardly is as despicable as the media chorus would have you believe.

It’s rich, really, that the fellow who rammed through Obamacare in the face of public opposition with a load of malarkey (Keep your insurance. Won’t add a dime to the deficit. No taxes on the middle class.) would lash out in this fashion.

For this outburst, Obama was surrounded by the Newtown parents, which was telling. He put his muscle behind background checks, which even anti-gun crusader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) admits had nothing to do with Newtown. (To those lefties who retort “So what?” the response is, “Then stop hiding behind the Newtown parents.”) …

IBD Editors think congress reflected the people’s will in the gun control debate.

… Turns out that our republic is working the way it’s supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what’s the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a “heavy lift” — only 4% in both April and March cited “guns/gun control,” down from 6% in February.

The “economy in general” at 24%, “unemployment/jobs” at 18%, “dissatisfaction with government” at 16% and “federal budget deficit/federal debt” at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of “health care,” three years after ObamaCare was passed, and “ethical/moral/family decline” are both more worrisome to the public than gun control. …

Toby Harnden writes on the president in thrall to the CIA killing machine.

ONE balmy evening, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.

Two miles above, a Predator drone trained an infrared camera on him as he lay on his back and was joined by his wife and uncle. The images were so clear that it could be seen that the ailing Mehsud was receiving an intravenous drip.

Moments later two Hellfire missiles were launched from the Predator. Once the dust had cleared, all that was left of Mehsud was a bloody torso. Eleven others, including his wife and mother-in-law, had also died.

Mehsud’s death, in August 2009, caused barely a ripple in Washington, but it was extraordinary because he was an enemy of Pakistan, not America.

CIA lawyers had struggled to get approval to kill him but, under pressure from Pakistan, had made the case that he could be added to the “kill list” because the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda operatives. In the US capital some described the strike as a “goodwill kill”.

The incident is recounted in a new book, The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti. It details how the CIA has got back into the killing business over the past dozen years and how President Barack Obama fell under the spell of the spy agency.

The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: “The CIA gets what the CIA wants!” …

Amity Shlaes warns about the “tax grope.”

First comes Tax Day, then comes the Tax Grope.

That is the attitude of Americans toward tax authorities. Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game.

The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise.

The grope image goes back to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the Greedy Hand of government.” Back in the 1960s the business writer John Brooks sketched out the grope concept further, writing of the intruding taxing authority approaching as an unwanted suitor, with a “ghastly expression of benignity.”

The most obvious recent grope has been overseas: the garnishment of bank accounts in Cyprus. The depositors simply didn’t expect to pay for the euro’s failings from this part of their fiscal selves. Another Cyprus-related tax grab is a levy just proposed by the German government’s senior economics advisers on those who own valuable houses in countries that ask for bailouts. When, say, an Englishman bought his villa in Portugal, he probably expected to pay taxes on the vacation home, but not this extra surcharge.

Budget Portents

Portents of possible impingements on Americans are evident, too, in President Barack Obama’s budget.

Steve Hayward asks how many ways CA can be stupid.

Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid.  But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun?  And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc. So what are the main problems facing California right now? 

 

If you’re the ex-Governator, it’s—wait for it now—climate change!  Ah-nold calls it California’s “silent disaster,” and it is nice of him to help us distinguish it from the very noisy and visible disaster that was his governorship.  Can’t he just stick with making saggy superhero movies?  (I mean, have you seen those surreptitious National Enquirer photos of what he looks like these days with his shirt off?  He needs more chest prosthetics these days than Riccardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.) …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Wall Street Journal divines the backstory of the selection of the Pope.

On Feb. 27, a mild, dewy morning, Alitalia Flight 681 landed at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome after 13 hours in the air. A balding man with gray-white wisps of thin hair stepped out of coach class. He wore thick-rimmed brown glasses, black orthopedic shoes and a dark overcoat. He had a slight limp, and his back was stiff from the long flight. His belly was a bit swollen, due to many decades of cortisone treatments to help him breathe after he had lost part of a lung as a young man. No one could see the silver pectoral cross he wore under his coat, though it was the symbol of his authority.

Back home in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a prominent figure, the highest-ranking Catholic prelate in his country and to many a beloved figure known especially for his work in the city’s teeming slums. Here he was one of 115 cardinals converging on Vatican City for important business: the election of a new leader for the Catholic Church. …

 

… Some princes of the church believed Cardinal Bergoglio, at 76, was probably too old to become pope, especially after Benedict XVI had specifically cited his age and frailty as reasons for his resignation. “We came into this whole process thinking: The next pope has to be vigorous and therefore probably younger,” said Cardinal George. “So there you have a man who isn’t young. He’s 76 years old. The question is: Does he still have vigor?”

Two days after the dinner, however, something clicked. And it happened in the span of four minutes—the length of Cardinal Bergoglio’s speech when it was his turn to address the General Congregation. On March 7, the Argentine took out a sheet of white paper bearing notes written in tiny tight script. They were bullet-pointed.

Many cardinals had focused their speeches on specific issues, whether it was strategies for evangelization or progress reports on Vatican finances. Cardinal Bergoglio, however, wanted to talk about the elephant in the room: the long-term future of the church and its recent history of failure. From its start, Pope Benedict’s papacy had been focused on reinforcing Catholicism’s identity, particularly in Europe, its historic home. Amid a collapse of the church’s influence and following in Europe, the German pontiff had called on Catholics to hunker down and cultivate a “creative minority” whose embrace of doctrine was sound enough to resist the pull of secular trends across the continent. That message, however, had been overshadowed by the explosion of sexual-abuse allegations across Europe and rampant infighting in the Vatican ranks.

The notes on Cardinal Bergoglio’s sheet were written in his native Spanish. And he could easily have delivered the remarks in Spanish—19 of the cardinals voting in the conclave came from Spanish-speaking countries and a team of Vatican translators was on hand to provide simultaneous translations in at least four other languages.

But he spoke in Italian, the language cardinals most commonly use inside Vatican City and the native tongue of Italy’s 28 voting-age cardinals, the most of any single nation. He wanted to be understood, loud and clear. The leaders of the Catholic Church, our very selves, Cardinal Bergoglio warned, had become too focused on its inner life. The church was navel-gazing. The church was too self-referential.

“When the church is self-referential,” he said, “inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness.”

Roman Catholicism, he said, needed to shift its focus outward, to the world beyond Vatican City walls, to the outside. The new pope “must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”

The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into “the periphery” or “the edge.” But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn’t self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice. …

Thomas Sowell would like some facts to intrude into the gun control debate.

Amid all the heated, emotional advocacy of gun control, have you ever heard even one person present convincing hard evidence that tighter gun control laws have in fact reduced murders?

Think about all the states, communities within states, as well as foreign countries, that have either tight gun control laws or loose or non-existent gun control laws. With so many variations and so many sources of evidence available, surely there would be some compelling evidence somewhere if tighter gun control laws actually reduced the murder rate.

And if tighter gun control laws don’t actually reduce the murder rate, then why are we being stampeded toward such laws after every shooting that gets media attention?

Have the media outlets that you follow ever even mentioned that some studies have produced evidence that murder rates tend to be higher in places with tight gun control laws?

The dirty little secret is that gun control laws do not actually control guns. They disarm law-abiding citizens, making them more vulnerable to criminals, who remain armed in disregard of such laws.

In England, armed crimes skyrocketed as legal gun ownership almost vanished under increasingly severe gun control laws in the late 20th century. (See the book “Guns and Violence” by Joyce Lee Malcolm). But gun control has become one of those fact-free crusades, based on assumptions, emotions and rhetoric. …

Streetwise Professor catches John Kerry trying to be part of the gun debate.

There have been some embarrassing Secretaries of State.  Warren Christopher comes to mind.  But I am hard pressed to name one more embarrassing than John Kerry.  They say he looks French, and damned if he isn’t trying to act the part, with his current World Wide Surrender Tour and all.  He has basically begged the NoKos and the Iranians to play nice, despite threats of launching thermonuclear war, and he and Obama make me cringe with their attempts to pacify Putin over the Magnitsky List.  John “Kick Me” Kerry seems an apt sobriquet.

But he totally topped himself when he blamed dropping numbers of Japanese students in the US on . . . guns.  No.  Seriously:

“Students in other countries assessing where to study abroad are increasingly scared of coming to the United States because of gun violence, the nation’s top diplomat said Monday.

Speaking with CNN foreign affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty in Tokyo, Secretary of State John Kerry said he’d discussed the situation with officials there who said students felt unsafe in the United States.

“We had an interesting discussion about why fewer students are coming to, particularly from Japan, to study in the United States, and one of the responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents here is that they’re actually scared. They think they’re not safe in the United States and so they don’t come,” Kerry said.”

So the statement about “other countries” is based on one: Japan.  And that is based on “responses I got from our officials from conversations with parents” rather than actual, you know, data.

But note: fewer Japanese are studying abroad overall.  The drop is not confined to the US.  Because, well, there are fewer college-aged Japanese.  Go to Japan-it’s an old, old society.  And because the Japanese economy stinks. …

American Spectator with more on the problems implementing the health-care law. 

As a rule, I avoid the weekly news magazines. They are filled with bad fiction disguised as “reporting,” and if I really feel the need to read mediocre prose I can always rely on the work of America’s growing horde of creative-writing professors. Nonetheless, I recently stumbled across a post in Time’s Swampland blog titled, “Obamacare Incompetence,” and succumbed to morbid curiosity. It seems that Joe Klein, a usually reliable Democrat hack, is deeply unhappy with the slow and clumsy implementation of the “Affordable Care Act.”

Klein’s post focuses primarily on the implosion of Obamacare’s exchanges. Pointing out that the President’s apparatchiks squandered three full years during which they should have been hard at work preparing for the advent of these insurance “marketplaces,” Klein laments their failure to do so with the following piece of Solomonic wisdom: “This is a really bad sign.” Indeed it is. And Klein isn’t the only advocate of Obamacare to finally notice that this hopelessly Byzantine health care “reform” law is an implementation nightmare.

Even the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) has admitted as much. But, whereas Klein correctly assigns responsibility to the President, Commissar Sebelius places the blame on evil Republicans: “It is very difficult when people live in a state where there is a daily declaration, ‘We will not participate in the law.’” Other Democrats have been more candid. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who played an important role in getting the law passed, called Obamacare “so complicated that if it isn’t done right the first time, it will just simply get worse.”

And it most emphatically isn’t getting done right the first time. …

Obama continues his ignorant animus towards Great Britain. Power Line posts on Thatcher’s funeral.

We mourn the passing of Margaret Thatcher, but President Obama is not exactly choked up. Like us, he puts her in the same category as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, but in Obama’s scheme of things, that’s a bad place to be. Over at NRO Charles Cooke observes:

“The news that the Obama administration will sit out Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral, sending from the current crop only the charge d’affaires from the U.S. embassy in London, is disappointing. It seems that a seminal figure in Western history will be allocated the same level of functionary that was sent to mourn Hugo Chávez.

This is peculiar in and of itself, but especially so when one considers that senior officals have been readily dispatched by the administration for funerals past. The prime minister of Ethiopia was judged sufficiently important to deserve Susan Rice’s attendance, among others. The president sent Hillary to Vaclav Havel’s farewell, and also to send off the president of Ghana. Joe Biden led the delegation to a Saudi royal funeral. And Obama personally attended Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s. While she was first lady, Hillary Clinton attended the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. …”

More from Jason Riley of WSJ.

Eleven serving heads of state attended the ceremonial funeral in London Wednesday for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And despite the fact the Britain has long been America’s closest European ally, President Obama was not among them. Nor were any senior members of his administration.

Instead, the White House sent two former secretaries of state, George Schultz and James Baker. Democrats in Congress also did their part to play down the significance of Thatcher’s achievements. A Senate resolution honoring the Iron Lady passed this week only after the removal of several paragraphs that New Jersey’s Robert Menendez—the chairman Foreign Relations Committee—found objectionable.

According to the Daily Caller, one of the nixed passages read: “Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1984 survived an assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army in Brighton, United Kingdom, and declared that ‘all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’”

Other language removed read: “Whereas Baroness Margaret Thatcher in 1982 led United Kingdom efforts to liberate the Falkland Islands after they had been illegally invaded and occupied by the Government of Argentina.”

The British have taken note of the snubs. “This is poor show, as a quick history lesson will prove,” wrote the Spectator of London, a British magazine. “US senators were slow to authorise President Reagan’s attack on the late and unlamented ‘Mad Dog’ of the Middle East [Libya's Moammar Gadhafi]. But the Gipper wasn’t worried because the Iron Lady allowed the assault to be launched from these shores. That’s friendship, honourable senators.”

And it’s a friendship that Thatcher apparently respected more than does our president and his party. She was among the 36 current and former heads of state who attended a service for Ronald Reagan after his death in 2004.

Paul Greenberg enjoyed being compared to H. L. Mencken.

A friend and critic here in Little Rock — well, definitely a critic and I hope he’s still a friend — submitted a guest column not long ago reciting my many sins. (Whose sins are few?) And we were happy to run it on the op-ed page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which we like to think of Arkansas’ Newspaper. It says so right on the front page. To cap off his encyclopedic review of my faults as an editor, columnist, gadfly and sorry excuse for a human being in general, our guest writer ended his philippic by comparing me to . . . H. L Mencken.

For that alone I am much indebted to my friend/critic, The Hon. Robert L. Brown, a now-retired justice of the state’s Supreme Court. Modesty should forbid, but I can’t help quoting from his climactic peroration:

“It will come as no surprise to anyone that Greenberg wants to stir the pot and sell newspapers. But in this fashion, he becomes a major purveyor of the rancor that afflicts this country, from Washington, D.C., to Little Rock. . . . In short, it is Paul Greenberg who is a major part of the problem, just as his mentor, H.L. Mencken, was when he reveled in describing Arkansas as a hillbilly backwater and did what he could to make Arkansas a laughingstock. He, too, sold newspapers.”

My first impulse on reading that comparison was to clip it out, have it framed, and hang it on my office wall next to my Mencken Award from the Baltimore Sun back in the long-ago year 1987. …

… Ever since I learned that our legislators here in Arkansas had once passed a formal resolution denouncing H.L. Mencken, my not-so-secret ambition has been to win an official, certified, duly passed and recorded resolution of censure from the legislature. Instead, I get only a denunciation from a former justice of the state Supreme Court. Ah, well, a man has to settle for what he can get in this life.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Matthew Continetti figures out we are in the middle of the Bloomberg Presidency.

… Rather than pursue his American Jobs Act with anything approaching vigor, or authorize a no-brainer such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, or try new approaches that might conceivably attract Republican support, Obama chose the social issues, with an eye to changing control of the House in 2014. His current agenda embodies perfectly the concerns and worldview of the wealthy men and women who fund his party. Republicans are not the only ones affected by “donor-ism.” Guns and immigration are perennial favorites of the Bloomberg set—the class of liberal rich that fatuously believes it is somehow “above politics.” This isn’t the beginning of Obama’s second term. It’s the beginning of Bloomberg’s first one.

The Bloomberg style has several distinctive features. The first is a complete indifference to or dismissal of middle class concerns. In this view, it matters less that the middle class is enjoying full employment or economic independence or a modicum of social mobility or even action on issues it finds important, and more that it has access to government benefits generous enough to shut it up.

Recall that in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg was far more interested in seeing the Yuppie-filled New York City Marathon take place, and in linking the storm to apocalyptic climate change, than in mobilizing the combined forces of municipal and state and federal government to take care of the white working class on Staten Island and in the Rockaways. Similarly, Barack Obama has nothing new to say on the economy or deficit, but delivers speech after speech on gun regulations that would not have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre, while his allies in the Senate work to import low-wage labor on the one hand and high-end Silicon Valley labor on the other. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the nation hopes for better days.

Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.

Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.

What makes the Bloomberg method so insidious is its hold over the media. The vast majority of “content producers” for print and digital and television subscribe to the agenda of rich liberals because they are either part of that class, or wish to be part of it one day, or are directly employed by the companies controlled or likely to be controlled by its members, including the billionaire mayor, who spends much of his time at his $10 million Bermuda mansion.

Kim Strassel devotes a column to the slimy Terry McAuliffe and his run for VA governor. 

Turn over any green-energy rock, and wiggling underneath will be the usual creepy mix of political favoritism and taxpayer-funded handouts. Add to this the Clintons, Mississippi and a murky visa program, and you’ve got a particularly ripe political embarrassment for Terry McAuliffe.

Everyone remember The Macker? Best Friend of Bill. Chairman of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Famed money-tree shaker. Former Democratic Party chief. Failed 2009 contender for the Virginia governorship but now back as the party’s nominee for that position in this fall’s election. Oh—and in Mr. McAuliffe’s words—”a Virginia businessman” intent on “creating jobs.”

Or at least that was the image Mr. McAuliffe sought to portray in 2009, when he became chairman of a car company called GreenTech Automotive, with plans to produce golf-cart sized electric vehicles. The former DNC chief is no stranger to moneymaking, having once used a friendly union pension fund to spin a $100 investment in a Florida land deal into $2.45 million. GreenTech, however, was designed to shed the moneyman image and to reposition Mr. McAuliffe as a (clean) job creator the way Mark Warner and Bob McDonnell used their pro-business credentials to win office in Virginia.

To this end, Mr. McAuliffe got out the political Rolodex and went on the money hunt. …

More from the editors at the Examiner. 

How did Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party’s choice to run for governor in Virginia in 2013, get so rich? His first job out of college was with President Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign where he rose to be national finance director at the age of 22. Then, after graduating from law school, McAuliffe helped found the Federal City National Bank in 1985. Three short years later, the bank’s board elected McAuliffe chairman, making him the youngest elected chairman of a federally chartered bank in the history of the United States.

Now why would a tiny young bank elect a campaign-worker-turned-law student with no banking experience president of the operation? Maybe it was because McAuliffe immediately roped in big business from politicians like then-presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and then-Speaker of the House Jim Wright.

By 1992, McAuliffe was inducing Democratic-friendly union pension funds into investing millions of union member dollars in his Florida real estate company. Not all those loans got repaid, however. After McAuliffe’s real estate company failed to pay one $6 million loan from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Department of Labor sued. It claimed the pension trustees improperly invested with McAuliffe since they should have known the loan would never be repaid. In 2001, those trustees were forced to pay the union $4.95 million in restitution. McAuliffe got off scot-free. …

The Atlantic has an interesting piece on the job search problems of the “long-term unemployed.” The article needs better focus and a good editor, but the methodology of the research is good and the results are discouraging.

… But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they’d been out of work, how often they’d switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks. 

 

It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine. 

 

The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven’t been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven’t moved between jobs that much. But how long you’ve been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad’s paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who’d been out of work shorter. 
Look at that again. As long as you’ve been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don’t have experience. But after you’ve been out of work for six months, it doesn’t matter what experience you have. Quite literally. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

More on Maggie. This time from Janet Daley in Telegraph, UK.

Everybody has his own candidate for the most important legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s time in office. Was it the reform of trade union power, the rescue of the economy from apparently terminal decline, or the release of industry from state ownership? Well, no, actually. I would make the case that while all of those things were tumultuous in their significance, they could all (God help us) be reversed. Some future government that was sufficiently benighted might legislate to remove the right of trade union members to vote on strike action. It might even seize the levers of economic activity and return vast areas of commercial life to the state.

But it would be humanly impossible to overturn the revolution in social attitudes that she brought about. And by social attitudes I mean, of course, attitudes to class. It is very difficult to explain to people under the age of 40 what this change has meant. The best way to encapsulate it is with a startling quote from the estimable Sir Jonathan Miller that has risen over this past week – like a grotesque apparition from the historic past – to remind us of what we once were like. The good doctor (as he then was) said that he hated Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) for her “odious gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy”.

The greatest and most irreversible testimony to Thatcherism is that no one in public life (perhaps no one in his right mind) would today utter a statement of such shameless snobbery – such egregious, unvarnished hatred for that vast swath of the population who are now the object of every political leader’s admiration. …

Charles Krauthammer celebrates the return to a normal budget process.

Well, at least we’re starting to get the procedure right. Washington has rediscovered the beauty of the boring. It’s called “regular order,” using the normal, routine, constitutional process to arrive at, for example, a budget.

Normal had disappeared during the Obama years. Republicans duly submitted annual budgets, which the president then used for target practice, most famously demagoguing Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget as un-American. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Senate simply stopped producing budgets for four years. And the ones the White House put out were so preposterous that, for example, the 2011 version was rejected by the Senate 97 to 0.

What little progress that was made came by way of crisis backroom deals orchestrated by Gangs of This or That. One gave us a sequester that everyone purports to deplore. Another gave us the naked tax hike of the “fiscal cliff.” And none produced a written record of actual, written offers that could serve as the basis for serious, open negotiations.

Ad hoc, person-to-person negotiations generally require a high level of trust. The great virtue of regular order is that procedure can substitute for trust. And now we see its first fruit: Each side has finally had to show its cards.

Now the bad news. The cards laid down by the White House are quite unimpressive. The 2014 budget is tax-and-spend as usual. The actual deficit reduction over a decade is a minuscule $0.6 trillion — out of a total spending of $46.5 trillion. And every penny of this tiny reduction comes from tax hikes. Nothing from spending cuts, which all end up getting spent elsewhere. …

David Harsanyi writes about the myth of the president’s centrism. 

Barack Obama’s quest for a “balanced approach” is the lifeblood of his political success — and also its biggest myth. Witness the coverage of the purportedly centrist president’s 2014 budget proposal.

“Obama sends Congress $3.77T spending plan, riles both sides,” says one prominent headline; “President Obama’s risky ‘goodwill’ gambit,” begins another fairy tale. “Obama Budget Is Meant to Draw GOP to the Table,” claims The New York Times.

Nearly every story stresses that the budget has drawn critics from both the left and the right. Obama, you see, is so moderate he’s willing to wrangle with the socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont (and his petition signed by a couple of million folks who wouldn’t know the difference between a “chained consumer price index” and a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich) and Republicans. So, balance.

President Obama’s budget would spend $160 billion more in 2014 than the Congressional Budget Office’s base line had even imagined. No tax reform. No genuine entitlement reform. His 10-year, $1.8 trillion “deficit reduction plan” is predicated on doing away with $1.2 trillion in sequester cuts and making it up by taxing us directly or allowing tax hikes to pass through various industries. It is a massive zero-sum fallacy masquerading as a budget. …

WSJ’s Political Diary reminds us why Tom Perez should be filibustered.

The Senate will consider Department of Justice civil-rights chief Thomas Perez’s nomination for labor secretary later this month, and questions are starting to mount. Among them is why Mr. Perez used his personal email account for federal business, in contravention of the Federal Records Act—and evaded House investigators’ questions about the matter.

Mr. Perez was the driving force behind a quid pro quo that last year saw the City of St. Paul, Minnesota withdraw a Supreme Court case, Magner v. Gallagher, in exchange for the feds not joining two False Claims Act cases against the city. Mr. Perez benefited personally from this trade because he was using a loose interpretation of antidiscrimination law to extract millions of dollars in settlements from banks, which helped further his political career. Mr. Perez feared that the Justices, via Magner, might invalidate his legal interpretation and prevent future settlements.

Congress launched an investigation, and House oversight investigators asked Mr. Perez whether he used personal email to communicate about the quid pro quo. He answered in a March 22 interview, “I don’t recall whether I did or didn’t.” He later amended that response, claiming “I don’t have any recollection of having communicated via personal email—on this matter.” …

Great piece from National Review on government fools trying to build an airplane.

It was the early 20th century. America was in a race with the powers of the world to invent the first airplane. Much was at stake. Our leaders feared that the Germans, the British, and, if you can suspend your disbelief, the French might beat us to the punch, giving the winning country a huge advantage militarily and economically.

Who better to win the race for us, thought our leaders, than the best and brightest minds the government could buy? They chose Samuel Langley. You don’t know him, but in his day, Langley was a big deal. He had a big brain and lots of credentials. A renowned scientist and a professor of astronomy, he wrote books about aviation and was the head of the Smithsonian.

It was the kind of decision that well-intentioned bureaucrats would make throughout the century — and still make today. Give taxpayer money to the smartest guys in the room, the ones with lots of degrees. They’ll innovate and do good for us.

Langley did have some success with unmanned flight, using a catapult-like system to propel his machines into the air. On the basis of that limited success, the Department of War gave him $50,000 for two experiments, and he extracted a decent sum from the Smithsonian, too. That was real money back then. Today, bureaucrats wouldn’t stop to pick up $50,000 if it were lying on the street.

What did the citizens of the United States get for that “investment,” the kind we are making today in green energy? It was the Great Aerodrome, and on October 7, 1903, the aircraft developed by Langley’s team of experts was launched from a catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River.

The crowds lined up, as did the press. As the aircraft accelerated and reached full speed, it was hurtled along a catapult toward a launch. A few scant seconds of sudden acceleration were followed by a sudden and shocking plunge into river. “It fell like a ton of mortar,” a reporter wrote.

The plane that couldn’t fly and the man flying it were somehow salvaged, and preparations were made for another flight. The project needed some tweaks, the experts told the world. On December 8, Langley and his team of brainiacs tried it again. This time, the airplane got caught up in the launching mechanism and dropped into the river.

Langley’s machine should have been called the Not So Great Aerodrome; it never got airborne. The media had a field day. “The Boston Herald suggested that Professor Langley ought to give up airplanes and try submarines,” Burt Folsom notes in a lecture in HillsdaleCollege’s series of online courses, “American Heritage.” The Brooklyn Eagle led its story with this quote from a now-forgotten congressman: “You tell Langley for me that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.” …

Andrew Malcolm says North Korean warriors are going to sneak up on the sun.

North Korea’s latest little Kim has proudly announced that his hermit kingdom will soon launch a manned mission to the Sun. …

… And Kim added that he has carefully calculated the North Korean space capsule’s launch, arrival and descent to the Sun’s surface for a night-time landing.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn gets his turn with Margaret Thatcher.

… In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.

Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.

Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable?

And, even when Mrs. Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational cringe of the West was so strong that all the experts immediately urged her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression. “We were prepared to negotiate before” she responded, “but not now. We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then they must be worth keeping.”

Mrs. Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. …

Roger Simon posts on Alan Dershowitz’s slam of America’s second to the worst prez and worst ex-prez.

Alan Dershowitz can be a frustrating man, but when he is good, he is very, very good.

I witnessed his courage personally a few years back when I was part of delegation with him at the Durban II Conference in Geneva. Dershowitz was a one-man resistance band then, protesting the speech of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at that UN-sponsored festival of anti-Semitism. (Well, he did have a few of us in support, but Dersh definitely led the way.)

I will skip past some of his iffier moments of Obama-induced backsliding to the present day when the Harvard professor has again stepped forward, this time to protest the decision of YeshivaUniversity’s Cardozo School of Law to give its annual “International Advocate for Peace” award to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Dershowitz told The Algemeiner in an interview: “I can’t imagine a worse person to honor for conflict resolution. Here’s a man who has engendered conflict wherever he goes. He has encouraged terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah. He was partly responsible for Yasser Arafat turning down the Clinton-Barak peace offer.”

“He is significantly responsible for the second Intifada,” Dershowitz went on. “If he had told Yasser Arafat to accept that deal we might be celebrating Palestinian statehood today. He just prefers terrorists to Israelis.”

Okay, Dersh, how do you really feel? …

Jonathan Tobin gets to slam Fareed Zakaria. If Israel did not exist, we would have to invent a country that would allow us to spot all the leftist creeps.

Last summer television personality and columnist Fareed Zakaria was suspended by both TIME magazine and CNN for committing plagiarism in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post. Yet the ubiquitous voice of conventional wisdom about foreign policy was soon back in his familiar haunts undaunted by his humiliation and allowed to pretend as if nothing had happened. But the problem with Zakaria wasn’t his lack of acknowledgement of the work of others so much as it is his penchant for ignoring inconvenient facts when advocating the policies that he urges the country to adopt as if they were self-evident.

A particularly egregious example of this trait was made clear last month when Zakaria was writing about President Obama’s trip to Israel. Zakaria wrote a column that endorsed the president’s speech to Israeli youth to pressure their government to make peace with the Palestinians. While, as we pointed out at the time, this appeal was directed to the wrong side of the dispute, Zakaria was entitled to his opinion about Israelis ought to do. What he was not entitled to was his own facts about the situation.

Zakaria wrote the following in support of his belief that the Israelis should go the extra mile and start making concessions:

“After all, Israel has ruled millions of Palestinians without offering them citizenship or a state for 40 years.”

As anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the conflict in the last generation, this is patently false. …

Andrew Malcolm posts on a special election in Chicago.

Despite the endorsement of President Obama, Robin Kelly easily won election Tuesday night in a special House election to represent Illinois’ troubled Second Congressional District.

The sprawling urban-suburban district, containing Chicago’s ugly South Side, was formerly represented by Jesse Jackson Jr., who like a number of Illinois politicians will be residing in a federal penitentiary for a while.

In fact, the last three incumbents of the Second District’s seat have moved on to prison cells, as have some recent governors. But that could just be coincidence.

(The Second District is not to be confused with the Fifth District, which is on the North Side. The Fifth was formerly held by the late Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a powerful House committee chairman who went on to prison. He was succeeded by Rod Blagojevich, who went on to prison, but not before becoming governor with the campaign help of Obama and his Fifth District successor Rahm Emanuel, who is now the mayor and has not been convicted of anything yet.) …

If Malcolm doesn’t get you thinking Chicago is a pretty gross place, try this from the Sun Times’ Southtown Star. It is about the indictment of Jeremiah Wright’s daughter.

The daughter of President Barack Obama’s former pastor was indicted Wednesday on charges of money laundering and lying to federal investigators in an expanding 2009 state grant-fraud case.

Jeri L. Wright, daughter of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was accused of participating in a fraud scheme allegedly orchestrated by former Country Club Hills Police Chief Regina Evans and her husband involving a $1.25 million state job-training grant geared toward minorities.

Jeri Wright, 47, of Hazel Crest, was charged with two counts of money laundering, two counts of making false statements to federal law enforcement officers and seven counts of giving false testimony before a grand jury.

A federal grand jury handed down the multi-pronged indictments Wednesday that accused Jeri Wright of engaging in a series of bank transactions in November 2009 in which she cashed more than $27,800 in checks drawn from the bank account of a non-profit the Evans controlled and from which the state funds had been deposited. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

British historian Paul Johnson gets the honors on Margaret Thatcher Day. 

Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around—decisively—the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries. “Thatcherism” was the most popular and successful way of running a country in the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st.

 

Her origins were humble. Born Oct. 13, 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham. Alfred Roberts was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was prominent in local government and a man of decided economic and political views. Thatcher later claimed her views had been shaped by gurus like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, but these were clearly the icing on a cake baked in her childhood by Councillor Roberts. This was a blend of Adam Smith and the Ten Commandments, the three most important elements being hard work, telling the truth, and paying bills on time.

Hard work took Miss Roberts, via a series of scholarships, to Grantham Girls’ School, SomervilleCollege, Oxford, and two degrees, in chemistry and law. She practiced in both professions, first as a research chemist, then as a barrister from 1954. …

… Thatcher’s long ministry of nearly a dozen years is often mistakenly described as ideological in tone. In fact Thatcherism was (and is) essentially pragmatic and empirical. She tackled the unions not by producing, like Heath, a single comprehensive statute but by a series of measures, each dealing with a particular abuse, such as aggressive picketing. At the same time she, and the police, prepared for trouble by a number of ingenious administrative changes allowing the country’s different police forces to concentrate large and mobile columns wherever needed. Then she calmly waited, relying on the stupidity of the union leaders to fall into the trap, which they duly did.

She fought and won two pitched battles with the two strongest unions, the miners and the printers. In both cases, victory came at the cost of weeks of fighting and some loss of life. After the hard men had been vanquished, the other unions surrendered, and the new legislation was meekly accepted, no attempt being made to repeal or change it when Labour eventually returned to power. Britain was transformed from the most strike-ridden country in Europe to a place where industrial action is a rarity. The effect on the freedom of managers to run their businesses and introduce innovations was almost miraculous and has continued. …

… She also reduced Britain’s huge and loss-making state-owned industries, nearly a third of the economy, to less than one-tenth, by her new policy of privatization—inviting the public to buy from the state industries, such as coal, steel, utilities and transport by bargain share offers. Hence loss-makers, funded from taxes, became themselves profit-making and so massive tax contributors.

This transformation was soon imitated all over the world. More important than all these specific changes, however, was the feeling Thatcher engendered that Britain was again a country where enterprise was welcomed and rewarded, where businesses small and large had the benign blessing of government, and where investors would make money.

As a result Britain was soon absorbing more than 50% of all inward investment in Europe, the British economy rose from the sixth to the fourth largest in the world, and its production per capita, having been half that of Germany’s in the 1970s, became, by the early years of the 21st century, one-third higher. …

… She was not a feminist, despising the genre as “fashionable rot,” though she once made a feminist remark. At a dreary public dinner of 500 male economists, having had to listen to nine speeches before being called herself, she began, with understandable irritation: “As the 10th speaker, and the only woman, I wish to say this: the cock may crow but it’s the hen who lays the eggs.”

Her political success once again demonstrates the importance of holding two or three simple ideas with fervor and tenacity, a virtue she shared with Ronald Reagan. One of these ideas was that the “evil empire” of communism could be and would be destroyed, and together with Reagan and Pope John Paul II she must be given the credit for doing it.

Among the British public she aroused fervent admiration and intense dislike in almost equal proportions, but in the world beyond she was recognized for what she was: a great, creative stateswoman who left the world a better and more prosperous place, and whose influence will reverberate well into the 21st century.

Jennifer Rubin.

… She was for me, and no doubt many women of the 20th century, a towering figure who attained real power by virtue of her own hard work and excellence. She did not derive her power from men or from victimology. In contrast to the 20th century feminists, she was painfully aware of sexism but did not obsess about it. She simply got the job done. No excuses, no whining and no personal drama. (Her 41 years of devoted marriage to Denis was evocative of the love match between Ronald and Nancy Reagan.)

In an era in which posers, celebrities, self-made victims and the simply mediocre have a lock on political power in the U.S., conservatives can’t help but regard her passing with a great deal of melancholy. She was a tower of strength because of her ideas and she challenged the post-war socialist consensus, eventually proving it pathetically unsuccessful. Her declaration that “first you win the argument, then you win the vote” is a favorite aphorism on the right because it speaks to their greatest aspiration: that the power of their ideas will carry the day.

She was quite simply the finest female political leader and conservative of the 20th century, and among the best of either gender in both categories. To say she will be missed falsely infers that her absence on the world stage has not already been keenly felt by those who had the privilege to be on the planet when the Iron Lady inspired Brits and non-Brits and when she not only ruled but transformed Britain as few had.

The gnomes at the Hoover Institution have provided a treat – two columns by Milton Friedman on Margaret Thatcher from Newsweek (1979 & 1983).

We have become so accustomed to politicians making extravagant campaign promises and then forgetting about them once elected that the first major act of Margaret Thatcher’s government— the budget unveiled on June 12—was a surprise. It did precisely what she had promised to do.

Margaret Thatcher campaigned on a platform of reversing the trend toward an ever more intrusive government—a trend that had carried government spending in Great Britain to somewhere between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the nation’s income. Ever since the end of World War II, both Labor and Tory governments have added to government-provided social services as well as to government-owned and -operated industry. Foreign-exchange transactions have been rigidly controlled. Taxes have been punitive, yet have not yielded enough to meet costs. Excessive money created to finance deficits sparked an inflation that hit a rate of over 30 per cent a year in mid-1975. Only recently was inflation brought down to the neighborhood of 10 per cent, and it is once again on the rise.

Most important of all, the persistent move to a centralized and collectivist economy produced economic stagnation. Before World War II, the British citizen enjoyed a real income that averaged close to twice that of the Frenchman or German. Today, the ratio is nearly reversed. The Frenchman or German enjoys a real income close to twice that of the ordinary Briton.

Margaret Thatcher declared in no uncertain terms that the long British experiment was a failure. She urged greater reliance on private enterprise and on market incentives. …

Michael Barone posts on the ‘divisive’ Margaret Thatcher. 

“Divisive.” That’s a word that appeared, often prominently, in many news stories reporting the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

One senses the writers’ disapproval. You’re not likely to find “divisive” in stories reporting the deaths of liberal leaders, although every electoral politician divides voters.

“Divisive” here refers to something specific. It was Thatcher’s special genius that she systematically rejected the conventional wisdom, almost always well-intentioned, of the political establishment.

Instead she insisted on hard, uncomfortable truths.

British Conservatives like Harold Macmillan accepted the tyranny of trade unionism because they had guilty memories of the slaughter of the working-class men who served under them in the trenches in World War I.

Thatcher, who as an adolescent before World War II saved money to pay for a Jewish girl to escape from Austria to England, felt no such guilt. …

Another Brit historian, Andrew Roberts, is next. 

Seldom does the emergence of a single individual undeniably change the course of history. It was true of Winston Churchill becoming prime minister in May 1940, of course, but normally one person’s efforts cannot significantly alter the tide of human events. Yet undoubtedly such a person was Margaret Thatcher, for it is no exaggeration to say that she saved Great Britain from bankruptcy, made it great again, won a war and with Ronald Reagan helped sound the death knell of Soviet communism.

Yet her obituaries on both the left and the right hint that her battles were all in the past, that she was solely a figure from an earlier era, whose struggles bear no relation to today’s politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The principles that she established—which together form the coherent political program called Thatcherism—have perhaps more relevance now than at any time since the 1980s. To write her off as a historical figure is to discard the timelessness, and thus the most important aspect, of her political thought.

With the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (the so-called P5+1) nowadays adopting what she once described in another context as “the politics of the pre-emptive cringe” toward Iran’s development of a nuclear bomb, we could do with the late Lady Thatcher’s clear-sighted and full-throated denunciation of pusillanimity in international affairs. When she was in power, her attitude toward dictatorships’ threats and bullying—be it the Argentine junta over the Falkland Islands or Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War—was precisely the tough and uncompromising stance from which the P5+1 group constantly shrinks. The advice she gave to President George H.W. Bush in 1990—”This is no time to go wobbly, George”—is desperately needed today. …

James Pethokoukis posts on one of the left’s ugly comments about Lady Thatcher.

What a strange column on Thatcherism by Paul Krugman.

1) Krugman acknowledges that 1970s Britain was a country with “huge economic problems.”

2) Krugman also acknowledges that there was a “huge turnaround.”

3) But Krugman is hesitant to credit Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies because “the big improvement in British performance doesn’t really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?”

Again, let’s compare UK economic performance to that of France. In 1961, UK real per capita GDP was 104% of France’s. By 1978, UK real per capita GDP had fallen to just 81% of France’s.

Quite a two-decade decline.

Then Thatcher arrives in May 1979 as the UK decides to embrace free-market economics. France stays the statist course.

As the above chart shows, the UK almost immediately begins gaining ground on France. By 1990, UK real per capita GDP is 87% of France’s. Then we have another seven years of Conservative government, and by 1997 UK real per capita GDP is 94% of France’s. But here is Krugman’s conclusion:

“Anyway, I guess there is a case that the Thatcher changes in taxes, labor regulation, etc. created a more flexible economy, which made the good years under Blair possible. But it’s an awfully long lag.”

Tony Blair didn’t become prime minister until May 1997! By that time, the UK had already reversed most of its two-decade decline vs. more statist France.

I think as that last quote reveals, Krugman is fully aware that 1970s Britain was overtaxed and overregulated and overunionized — and that Thatcherism was a necessary if imperfect remedy. But in today’s hyperpartisan world, an explicit admission would hurt his brand. (It might also mean conceding Reaganomics was successful.) Too bad for Krugman and the liberal readers of The New York Times.