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A Pickings issue with in-depth coverage of Margaret Thatcher will come Sunday morning. For now, Anne Applebaum has some memories.

Margaret Thatcher had no small talk. At a private lunch, which I can’t quite date—Denis was there, drinking whiskey out of a large tumbler, so it must have been more than a decade ago—I was seated across from her and at one point became the object of a tirade about the Russian president. “What are we going to do about Mr. Yeltsin,” she demanded, as if either she or I could do anything at all. She’d been out of power for several years at that point and was already forgetting thoughts in the middle of sentences. But whatever else she was losing, the desire to stick to the big issues and the larger subjects was still with her.

And this is what she was best at: the big issues, the politics of symbolism, the crafting of rhetoric. She was less good at nuance. Inside Britain she was the woman who sparked riots and ignored the advice of colleagues. But outside of Britain—in America, in Eastern Europe, even in the Soviet Union—she made herself into an icon, a symbol of anti-communism and the trans-Atlantic alliance at a time when neither was fashionable. She stood by Ronald Reagan in his battle against the Evil Empire. She used the same language as he did—free markets, free people—and entered into a unique and probably unrepeatable public partnership with him. It was useful to them both: If Reagan wanted to pull away from domestic scandals, he could appear with Thatcher on a podium. If Thatcher wanted to enhance her status, she could pay a visit to Reagan at the White House. ,,,

March 28th Pickings covered the alarming rise in disability payments from SSDI. Today we have an item from the Wall Street Journal on how the rise in disability payments is stunting the recovery.

The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.

The unemployment rate in Friday’s report fell to a four-year low of 7.6%, which most times signals job growth. This time it reflected workers leaving the workforce, a problem that could persist: Economists say relatively few people are likely to trade their disability checks for paychecks, in part because the program doesn’t give much incentive to leave.

Former truck driver James Ottesen, who began receiving monthly payments in 2009, said, “I’m not real happy” about being on disability. “It kind of reminds me of welfare.” He said he would “like to get re-educated to do something” because “my body is broke but my mind is not.”

But even if the 53-year-old Ohio man learned of a job he could do with herniated discs, he said, the government disability program feels like “a blanket covering you, and to walk out from it…at my age, it’s a little intimidating.” …

The Daily Beast has more about the present economy.

For a moment, let’s forget about who is president and just look across the country.

Today, 21 and a half million Americans are unemployed or underemployed—about twice as many as six years ago, according to NPR. Work-force participation, a fancy term for the number of Americans either working or looking for work, has dropped to “the lowest level since the malaise of the late 1970’s,” an era when far fewer women were working, according to MSNBC. 

Yes, the unemployment rate dropped last month—but only because so many people simply gave up looking for work. The dirty little secret is that after only four weeks of not looking for a job, an unemployed worker stops being counted. So far as the jobless numbers are concerned, that person ceases to exist. But, of course, they do exist and continue to be counted in other, troubling statistics:

More than 16 million Americans have been added to the food stamps rolls since Barack Obama was first elected—a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio. More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.

The last president who saw poverty at this level was LBJ, and it moved him to launch the war on poverty. …

What with all the problems with our economy, Andrew Malcolm comments on the traveling gun show charade. 

President Obama was on again Monday about gun laws, not enforcing the existing ones. But getting some new ones, any new ones so he can claim some kind of political victory after all of the promises and vows he made in the emotional days last December.

But Obama wasn’t working on the senators from his own party who will actually determine the fate of these measures. That would be political leadership.

No, Obama was out of town again, up in Hartford for a photo op with Connecticut legislators and some Newtown families. Of course, it wasn’t so much about everyone coming together to agree on new safeguards to protect children anymore, as he talked way back in December. No, as usual, this latest campaign rally was all about him. The usual suspects yelled their love. Obama mentioned himself 40 times.

And Obama told the crowd: “The day Newtown happened was the toughest day of my presidency.” Poor baby. He had to make a statement in the Briefing Room that day, tearing up on cue and promising “meaningful action.” He ordered federal flags to half-staff. Was probably a little tough too that day for the families of the 26 Newtown victims.

But Monday was all about Obama lending his royal presence to Hartford. His statement there means that of all the 1,540 days that he and his mother-in-law have lived in the White House, Dec. 14 was the toughest day. Seriously? …

Jammie Wearing Fools on a fundraising stop next month in New York.

Even the most diehard Obama-bots are suffering Obama fatigue. As yet another big bucks NYC fundraiser is announced for May 13, some donors are getting fed up with the endless campaign.

Now they know how the rest of us feel.

‘But Obama’s visit has annoyed political insiders who want to see results for the dollars they’ve already forked over. “We’ve got a mayoral race he’ll be getting in the way of,” said one. “We should be focusing on that and individual congressional candidates. It’s like ‘Lord of the Flies’ . . . [Obama] is cannibalizing donors.”

And others expressed fund-raiser fatigue: “It is stunning that [Obama] is back here fund-raising. We’d like to see some results for the money we’ve already given. And his impact on the traffic congestion in the city is the perfect example of why we need an infrastructure bill that he’s never put any muscle behind.”’

In case they missed it, there was a trillion-dollar stimulus rammed through four years ago. First prize goes to the Obama donor who can tell us where a single dollar of that went.

Power Line thinks Perez should get a filibuster.

Katrina Trinko wonders whether Tom Perez, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, will face the kind of stiff opposition in the Senate that Chuck Hagel encountered. He certainly should. Indeed, he should be filibustered.

Trinko notes that in 2009, 22 Republicans voted against Perez’s confirmation to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Since then, Perez has done plenty to warrant more robust opposition. Consider:

Perez is under congressional investigation regarding his involvement with an alleged quid pro quo deal between the Justice Department and St. Paul, Minn. Pursuant to that deal, the Justice Department would cease prosecuting a case against St. Paul (which could have net around $180 million for the federal government) if the city dropped a case that could have led to a Supreme Court decision to change the definition of “disparate impact” in housing-discrimination cases.

Perez’s Civil Rights Division appears to have allowed political/racial considerations to affect its handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case from Philadelphia.

A federal district judge found that Perez, when under oath, gave incorrect testimony about the involvement of political appointees in the handling of the New Black Panther Party case. …

WSJ’s Political Diary has a look at one of Perez’s cohorts who has been nominated for the bench.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider Srikanth “Sri” Srinivasan’s nomination to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday. Mr. Srinivasan, currently the Principal Deputy Solicitor General, is an accomplished, high-profile nominee and deserves the hearing. He also deserves to be questioned about his role in a quid pro quo with the City of St. Paul, Minnesota, that his Justice colleague Tom Perez—now Obama’s labor secretary nominee—hatched in 2011.

As these columns have reported, Mr. Perez has, in effect, extorted millions of dollars in settlements from lenders over the past few years by threatening to sue them for discrimination under a loose interpretation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. St. Paul’s case, M agner v. Gallagher , was likely to curb or even prohibit this practice. So Mr. Perez convinced his Justice colleagues and officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to drop two False Claim Act cases against the city, in exchange for St. Paul withdrawing Magner from the nation’s highest court. …

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Michael Barone brings some good news. He says Mexico has become a stable politically diverse good neighbor.

I realize that most of the recent news on Mexico has been about violent drug wars. You get 500,000 hits when you Google “Mexico failed state.”

But that’s a misleading picture. The war on drug lords waged by President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012 has had considerable success and has been re-emphasized by his successor, Enrique Pena Nieto.

The focus on the drug war ignores Mexico’s progress over the last 25 years as an electoral democracy. For 71 years, it had one-party rule of the PRI, or Party of the Institutional Revolution.

Under PRI rule, a president selected by his predecessor selected his successor.

But under PRI Presidents Carlos Salinas (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), Mexico established a clean election system under which the opposition conservative PAN and leftist PRD parties won state and legislative offices.

This was capped when PAN candidate Vicente Fox was elected president in July 2000. When Zedillo came on television and said, “I recognize that Vicente Fox is the next president of Mexico,” thousands of Fox supporters gathered around Mexico City’s Angel of Independence and stomped so strongly in unison that the Earth shook. …

Now for some fun. Sometimes karma is really kool. The Daily Beast on the awful time someone had in DC last week.

… Playing basketball with a bunch of kids got real embarrassing, real fast:     Obama stands at the free-throw line, cameras rolling. He shoots, he… gets the ball to bounce precariously on the rim for a second before it falls, to the jeers of small children and members of the WNBA’s Washington Wizards. The president’s week got off to a rough start at the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, where he decided to shoot some hoops with some lucky kids. But the free-throw contest took a turn for the awkward when, despite the president’s professed love of basketball, it took him 15 tries to land a single shot, ultimately earning a final score of only 2 out of 22 shots. That’s a 9.1 percent success rate. “He couldn’t make one [throw],” said Kahron Campbell, 10. “I had to help him out.”

Michelle Obama forgot he exists?     You know something’s rotten in Denmark when your wife (accidentally?) outs herself as a “busy single mother” during a televised interview. While talking about driving farmers’ market trucks into underserved communities to a reporter from a Vermont-based CBS station on Thursday, the first lady segued into a curious slip of the tongue. “Believe me, as a busy single mother—or, I shouldn’t say ‘single,’” she said, quickly correcting herself. “You know, when you’ve got the husband who’s president, it can feel a little single. But he’s there.” The fact that “he’s there” was the best thing that Michelle could say about Barack in that moment didn’t help. …

Chris Cillizza agrees the president had the “worst week in Washington” and that was based just on the comments on CA’s attorney general.

‘The world is full of guys,” Corey Flood says in the classic 1980s film “Say Anything.” “Be a man. Don’t be a guy.”

President Obama forgot that life lesson during a speech at a fundraiser in the San Francisco suburbs on Thursday. He sang the praises of California Attorney General Kamala Harris calling her “brilliant,” “dedicated” and “tough.” So far, so good. Then he added: “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.” Much less good.

Touting a female politician’s looks is almost never smart — particularly when there’s already a story line out there that the president’s inner circle is a boys’ club that is unwelcoming to women.

For those who insist that Obama meant the looks comment as praise and that any outrage over it is manufactured, we ask this: Would he have mentioned how “handsome” Delaware State Attorney General Beau Biden is if he had been speaking an an event in the First State? Hard to imagine. …

When we saw the president do first pitch honors we learned he throws like a girl. OK, we were told his sport is basketball. 

Well, Here’s a video of the 2 for 22 fail on the basketball court. After the first six misses, he calls for a new ball. Figures.

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor takes a more intellectual approach.

… in a political rally in Colorado, Obama offered us this disquisition in political theory:

“You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.” …

… Where to begin?  This seems to presume that “us” is some monolithic, reified thing.  That there is some “will of the people.”

What about the tyranny of the majority? What about the tyranny of minorities that can occur in any democratic or representative system?

The whole freakin’ reason behind a bill of rights is that even in a democratic (or, more properly, republican) system, individual rights can be trampled and abused by a government responsive to the whims of a majority, or an empowered minority.  That’s why we have a Bill of Rights.

In Obama’s formulation, not only would the 2d Amendment be superfluous, but so would the 1st and 5th (and 3d and 4th etc. etc.) No one need fear the denial of their freedom of speech or worship or assembly or right to a fair trial, because hey, the government is just us, and we would never harm us, would we? …

Glenn Reynolds suggests we need an IQ test for public servants (read public narcissists).

While politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun owners, I’m starting to think that what we really need are IQ tests for political officeholders. The only problem is, that might leave us with a lot of vacancies in Congress and America’s statehouses.

The debacle over New York’s rushed-through gun bill is one example of what happens when enthusiasm meets stupid. But another is to be found in Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who supports a ban on full-capacity magazines without understanding what a magazine actually is.

Last week, DeGette justified her position this way: “I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”

Um, ah . . . no. Completely wrong, in fact.

To make things simple enough that even a member of Congress can understand, it’s like this: …

Using the form of a book review, the NY Times finds some good to say about Texas. 

AS a Texas-raised journalist, I can tell you two things with confidence about my native state. One, its economy has been humming nicely for years. Two, this appears to greatly offend a certain breed of Northern writer, several of whom have descended on the state in an attempt to rebut stories of a “Texas miracle.” Their reports, Erica Grieder writes, have contributed to “a widespread impression that Texas is corrupt, callous, racist, theocratic, stupid, belligerent, and most of all, dangerous.”

This is nothing new, as most any Texan will tell you. But Ms. Grieder, a onetime correspondent for The Economist who now works at Texas Monthly, and a Texan herself, has written a smart little book that counters much of this silliness, and explains why the Texas economy is thriving. It’s called “Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas” (PublicAffairs, $26.99). The sad truth, alas, is that it’s probably a lot easier to understand the successes of Texas than it would be to duplicate them.

What might be copied, Ms. Grieder indicates, is the so-called Texas model — that is, a weak state government with few taxes and fewer regulations and services. It would be far harder to replicate the state’s civic DNA, …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama shot hoops yesterday and went two for 22. Tough times. One minute he asks Congress to raise the debt limit. The next he’s asking to lower the hoop.

Fallon: The president in a little trouble. During a fundraiser yesterday, President Obama raised eyebrows when he called California’s Kamala Harris quote “the best-looking attorney general in the country.” Then Michelle was like, “Well, here’s another joke, what’s black and white and sleeps on the couch?”

Fallon: Obama called Kamala Harris the best looking attorney general while at a California fundraiser. Hopefully, the fundraiser was to buy a really nice necklace for Michelle.

Leno: Obama apologizes to Joe Biden for saying California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris is so pretty. It’s Joe’s job to say the stupid, embarrassing stuff in public.

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Jennifer Rubin wonders if there is any chance there is adult supervision left in the White House. 

It is not clear if anyone in the White House with independent judgment or common sense is left. Judging from the administration’s decision to go all-in for anti-gun legislation you’d have to conclude the answer is no. Not only has President Obama expended capital on something that could have proved successful (e.g. entitlement reform), he’s headed for an embarrassing defeat. It will not go unnoticed that the initiative most likely to succeed (immigration reform) is the one in which he is the least involved (other than to toss spitballs into the Gang of 8 deliberations designed to spook Republicans).

To recap Obama’s year: He began with a hyperpartisan, uber-liberal inaugural address that got rotten reviews. He then got whittled down to spare all but a sliver of the top income earners from expiration of the Bush tax cuts. He dumped Susan Rice from consideration as secretary of state, to his base’s dismay. Then he proceeded to nominate surely the most dull-witted secretary of defense in history, forcing Democrats to defend a gaffe-prone purveyor of noxious sentiments about our only real ally in the Middle East and giving Republicans a rare occasion for agreement. He has failed to put out a budget and has been scrambling to catch up to the Gang of 8. Iran and North Korea are threatening to make his “world without nukes” into a real-life James Bond movie in which every crackpot villain has one or two. But the president is running around the country pleading for gun-control measures — which a good number of Senate Democrats won’t support. …

More on the gun control debacle from Rich Lowry writing in Politico.

… The gun control debate has shown the president again to be hopelessly detached as a legislative mechanic and ineffectual as a shaper of public opinion. Before writing rhetorical checks that his own party’s majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, couldn’t cash, the president might have at least consulted with the wily old son-of-a-gun about what was plausible and adjusted accordingly. He might have taken into consideration Reid’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre at the ClarkCountyShootingPark in Las Vegas in 2010. …

… The gun control debate has subtly shifted away from Newtown even though the president keeps bringing his case back to that atrocity. Nothing that happened in Newtown had anything to do with background checks. No background check law will ever prevent someone like Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza’s mother from buying guns unless the parents of children with Autism-like symptoms are to be banned from owning firearms.

What we are talking about now is trying to keep guns out of the hands of common criminals. This is obviously a worthy and important goal, although the most direct means of doing it — stop-and-frisk policing in areas where gun crime is most likely to occur — is anathema to the same people who say we have to do everything we can to save even one life.

The president’s push for new gun laws looks, at this juncture, like a complete fizzle. He has failed to sway red-state Democrats and failed to maintain the heightened public support for new gun control laws. The most concrete effect of his advocacy has been, if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, to stoke increased gun purchases on fears that the government wants to ban guns. He set out to lead a great crusade for gun control and ended up the best friend the gun industry ever had.

Mark Steyn on the “Vigilance Vigilantes.”

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace “Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.

Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: …

… I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life Hilton Edwards, the founder of Ireland’s Gate Theatre. Hilton and the love of his life, Micháel MacLiammóir, were for many years the most famously gay couple in Dublin. At MacLiammóir’s funeral in 1978, the Taoiseach and half the Irish cabinet attended, and at the end they went up to Edwards, shook hands, and expressed their condolences — in other words, publicly acknowledging him as “the widow.” This in a state where homosexuality was illegal, and where few people suggested that it should be otherwise. The Irish officials at the funeral treated MacLiammóir’s relict humanely and decently, not because they had to but because they wished to. I miss that kind of civilized tolerance of the other, and I wish, a mere four decades on, the victors in the culture wars might consider extending it to the losers.

Instead, the relentless propagandizing grows ever more heavy-handed: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity. Much of the progressive agenda — on marriage, immigration, and much else — involves not winning the argument but ruling any debate out of bounds. Perhaps like Jeremy Irons you don’t have “strong feelings” on this or that, but, if you do, enjoy them while you can.

The Daily Beast lists Roger Ebert’s 10 best movie reviews; and his best pans.

… He loved the movies, and loved writing about them—and he was damned good at writing about them. His reviews were a unique combination of scholarly, witty, occasionally sarcastic, and masterfully entertaining. His ability to craft an exhilarating rave of a film was equally matched by his stinging zingers. As we remember him, here’s a look back at what one lifelong admirer considers his 10 best reviews. Plus, no retrospective on Ebert’s work would be complete without a roundup of his most biting takedowns.

E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial

“This movie made my heart glad. It is filled with innocence, hope, and good cheer. It is also wickedly funny and exciting as hell. E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial is a movie like The Wizard of Oz, that you can grow up with and grow old with, and it won’t let you down. It tells a story about friendship and love. Some people are a little baffled when they hear it described: It’s about a relationship between a little boy and a creature from outer space that becomes his best friend. That makes it sound like a cross between The Thing and National Velvet. It works as science fiction, it’s sometimes as scary as a monster movie, and at the end, when the lights go up, there’s not a dry eye in the house.” …

 

… “Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film and vomited?” —from Last Rites review, November 19, 1988 …

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Mort Zuckerman says our economy is in a phase called the ‘Grand Illusion.’

The present phase of our Great Recession might be called the Grand Illusion, because all the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially on the key indicator of jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify. We are not really advancing. We are, by comparison with earlier recessions, going backward. We have a $1.3 trillion budget deficit. And despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in our history and the most stimulative monetary policy, with a trillion-dollar expansion to our money supply, our economy over the last three years has been declining or stagnant. From growth in annual GDP of 2.4 percent 2010, we bumped down to only 1.8 percent in 2011 and were still down at 2.2 percent in 2012. The cumulative growth for the last 12 quarters was just 6.2 percent, less than half the 15.2 percent average after previous recessions over a similar period of time. It is the slowest growth rate of all the 11 post-World War II recessions.

What has gone wrong? There seems to be a weakness in the investment of private capital. Today, corporate spending on investments is the weakest it has been in six decades. The billions invested in the Internet, spreading its application and comingling the technology with labor, boosted multifactor productivity but, as David Rosenberg of wealth-management firm Gluskin Sheff points out, most of that occurred several years ago. As he has written, a capex-led business recovery that breeds sustained productivity growth and decent job creation is what underscores the best and longest economic expansions since the end of WWII.

Anemic growth looks likely to continue because of various downers implicit in Bernanke’s caution. Sequestration will take $600 billion of government expenditures out of the economy over the next 10 years. Payroll taxes up 2 percent hit about 160 million workers and will drain $110 billion in aggregate demand. The Obama health care tax will be a $30 billion-plus drag. The surge in gasoline prices by some 50 cents recently may be temporary, as Bernanke suggests, but meanwhile represents another $65 billion of consumer cash flow. Conservatively, these nasties add up to roughly a 2 percent hit to baseline GDP growth when we are barely able to muster 2 percent growth.

Then there’s housing. Yes, it is nice to see a surge in some areas. But millions of homes are owned by banks or are in the foreclosure process. The New York Times noted last week that the home where Bernanke was raised, in a small town in South Carolina whose unemployment rate was recently 15 percent, had just been foreclosed upon the last time he visited, and one of his relatives was unemployed. Talk about symbolism. Single-family home sales and starts are barely off their depressed levels, and have only recouped 17 percent of recession losses. The housing market is mostly driven by investor-based, rental-related, multifamily buying activity, reflected in the fact that multiple housing units have reversed more than 70 percent of the damage they sustained from the recession.

Our economy’s most important player, the consumer, offers no relief from this cascade of downers. …

American.com calls the March jobs report an unmitigated disappointment.

… Notably, the sequester, which reduced government demand, passed into law without taking a toll on job growth. Virtually none of the markets affected by the sequester were changed in March. Manufacturing, mining, state government, financial services, transportation, and local government all maintained the status quo. Federal employment fell, but mostly in response to changes at the postal service. Excluding postal workers, federal employment actually rose by 5,000.

Since sequestration was cuts to future growth in government and not to present outlays, this makes sense. While Uncle Sam might hire fewer workers over the coming months than it would have otherwise, we shouldn’t see the U.S. government downsizing.

If Congress wants to get serious about jobs creation, it can start by creating a tax system that increases tax-home pay. Raising taxes is a good way to get people to stop shopping, and the reality is that higher taxes and higher fuel prices are much more to blame for the poor jobs numbers than anything else. To careful observers of the U.S. economy, March’s employment report was not a surprise – it was the natural response to shrinking demand, falling income, and poor decision making in Washington.

Foreign Policy looks at health problems in China and wonders if this is how a pandemic is formed.

Here’s how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. Two would quickly die of severe pneumonia and the third would lay in critical condition in an intensive care unit for many days. Government officials would announce that a previously unknown virus had sickened three people, at least, and killed two of them. And while the world was left to wonder how the pigs, ducks, swans, and people might be connected, the World Health Organization would release deliberately terse statements, offering little insight.

plot — I should know, as I was a consultant for Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. But the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China. The events could, indeed, be unrelated, and the new virus, a form of influenza denoted as H7N9, may have already run its course, infecting just three people and killing two.

Or this could be how pandemics begin.

On March 10, residents of China’s powerhouse metropolis, Shanghai, noticed some dead pigs floating among garbage flotsam in the city’s HuangpuRiver. The vile carcasses appeared in Shanghai’s most important tributary of the mighty Yangtze, a 71-mile river that is edged by the Bund, the city’s main tourist area, and serves as the primary source of drinking water and ferry travel for the 23 million residents of the metropolis and its millions of visitors. The vision of a few dead pigs on the surface of the Huangpu was every bit as jarring for local Chinese as porcine carcasses would be for French strolling the Seine, Londoners along the Thames, or New Yorkers looking from the BrooklynBridge down on the East River.

And the nightmarish sight soon worsened, with more than 900 animal bodies found by sunset on that Sunday evening. The first few pig carcass numbers soon swelled into the thousands, turning Shanghai spring into a horror show that by March 20 would total more than 15,000 dead animals. …

… On Feb. 27, a man identified only as Wu, a 27-year-old butcher or meat processor, fell ill with respiratory distress, was hospitalized, and died on March 10. The day Wu succumbed a third individual, a 35-year-old woman identified as Han, was hospitalized in the city of Nanjing, though she came from distant Chuzhou City, in Anhui province, about 300 miles northwest of Shanghai. Han is reportedly in critical condition, in intensive care. To date, no connection between the three individuals has been found.

The elderly Li may have been part of a family cluster of illness, as his 55-year old son died of pneumonia in March, and another 67-year-old son suffered respiratory distress, but has survived.

On March 31 — Easter in the United States — China’s newly created National Health and Family Planning Commission (which includes the former Ministry of Health) announced that 87-year-old Li, Wu, and Han all were infected with a form of influenza denoted as H7N9 — a type of flu never previously known to infect human beings. The commission insisted that Li’s two sons (one dead, the other a survivor) were not infected with the flu virus — their ailments were reportedly coincidental, though they occurred at the same time as the elder Li’s demise. …

So much for the backstory: What is going on? …

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Jennifer Rubin gets to have the first reaction to the most recent rotten jobs report of this presidency.

The consensus prediction for job growth in March was 200,000. In fact it was 88,000. Even more troubling, about a half-million people left the job market, driving the country’s job-participation rate to the lowest point since 1979.

On CNBC this morning, former Obama administration officials Jared Bernstein and Austan Goolsbee were glum, struggling to find a rationale. The sequester! Well, no. Public-sector jobs were down only 7,000. The payroll tax hike? Could be. While the president was haggling over the top marginal rate, no one in the administration seemed to care about the significant dip in take-home pay that would hit low- and middle-income consumers and, in turn, deal a blow to retail, restaurant and other consumer-based industries. Could it be that tax hikes are bad for the economy?

The president, rightfully so, will take another pummeling for failing to focus on jobs. And the push by the president and Senate Democrats for tax hikes will appear even more ludicrous (as liberal economic gurus bemoan the impact of the payroll tax hike).

There is no substitute for a strong private sector. Right now, employers aren’t hiring. You can attribute that to nervousness over Obamacare or to the payroll tax or to the aggregate burden of taxes and regulations, but the economy remains hobbled. And worst of all, we are approaching the point, as during the Great Depression, when sustained high unemployment will have ripples for years and years to come.

Reaction to the jobs numbers has been swift and brutal. Douglas Holtz-Eakin from the American Action Forum writes, “The March jobs report was awful: jobs weak, labor force down, hours flat, and earnings flat. The jobs report is important not because of any single month, but because it is the leading indicator of a break away from the new normal: bad growth and weak opportunity.  No break to be found today. The Administration has slavishly adhered to the economic doctrines of Jimmy Carter.  They should not be surprised they are getting his results.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put out a statement, which read in part: “The president’s policies continue to make it harder for Americans to find work. Hundreds of thousands fled the workforce last month and unemployment remains far above what the Obama administration promised when it enacted its ‘stimulus’ spending plan.” He urged the president to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, tax reform and a replacement bill for the sequester. Republicans plainly intend to put the spotlight back on the president who spent his time this week hawking gun control and attending a lavish fundraiser.

John Steele Gordon is next.

… What is causing this stagnant job market after so deep a recession? The answer is that the amount of uncertainty in the marketplace is not declining, indeed it is growing, and there is nothing markets hate more than uncertainty. Europe’s deteriorating financial and economic situation is surely not helping, nor is the forthcoming implementation of Obamacare, with a legion of unanswered questions about how it will affect businesses from the Fortune 500 on down. When even two-thirds of Democrats think that Obamacare will either adversely impact them personally or have no effect, there is going to be a strong tendency to wait and see what happens.

If a Republican were in the White House, the mainstream media would be howling in outrage about this continuing terrible job market and demanding action. But since it’s Obama in the White House the MSM will undoubtedly be doing its usual oh-look!-a-squirrel! routine.

Allister Heath in Telegraph, UK on the disaster created by the UK’s push to send millions more to college.

Tragically, as yet more data reveal, the decision to massively increase the number of school-leavers going to university, wrongly assuming that this would transform opportunity in an era of technological revolution, ranks as one of the greatest social and industrial policy blunders of recent decades.

Britain is facing a jobs crisis made in Downing Street and signed off by the leaders of all political parties, starting with Sir John Major, during the past quarter century. The problem is not the number of new jobs – there are lots of those, confounding the sceptics, and could be even more if the labour market doesn’t become over-regulated. The issue is that an obscenely large number of young people with a university education will not be able to find a job that matches their expectations.

Research from the US government, which without doubt applies equally to Britain, suggests that just one out of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade requires a university degree.

The picture is truly dire for the army of university graduates: only five of the top 30 fastest-growing occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require an undergraduate degree (or an additional post-graduate qualification) – nursing, teachers in higher education, primary school teachers, accountants and medical doctors – and 10 of the top 30 don’t require any kind of qualification at all. …

… Many jobs will genuinely require university degrees, especially those with quantitative and mathematical skills, and of course it is essential that children of all backgrounds who have the interest and ability to study for a degree be given the opportunity to do so. But if we really care about social mobility, and ensuring that people are able to live their dreams, we need an urgent shift in policy.

Britain needs more, better, skilled jobs – and that means making the UK more welcoming as a base for firms in areas such as technology, science, finance and high value added business services.

The onslaught against the City, which is crippling it rather than seeking to make it more resilient, will merely reduce the availability of good jobs.

The answer is not more top-down planning of the sort that gave us our higher education crisis, with politicians choosing sectors they guess will create the “right” sort of jobs, but a broad policy to encourage global firms to base their best-paid positions in the UK, and to trade and export from our shores.

That means low tax rates and living costs, a better business climate and enhanced infrastructure and airport links; sadly, we are faring miserably in all areas. …

 

… Apprenticeships and vocational qualifications are essential: had politicians focused on these in recent decades, rather than on boosting university admissions at any cost, the prospects for Britain’s young would be very different today.

Most important of all, however, the political establishment needs to start telling our young people the truth: it doesn’t make sense for everybody to go to university.

This was all explained in 2010 by a post from the blog The View from Alexandria. The post was titled Reynolds’s Law.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental. …

More on misplaced education priorities from FrontPage Mag. (Sarcasm alert)

We need to invest more in college education so that college graduates can get jobs that don’t require college degrees while paying off piles of student debt for an unnecessary college degree.

And that will help our colleges pay off their massive burden of debt. Welcome to the Obama Economy. (via Instapundit)

The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores. Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds.

Underemployment—skilled workers doing jobs that don’t require their level of education—has been one of the hallmarks of the slow recovery. By some measures, nearly half of employed college graduates are in jobs that don’t traditionally require a college degree.

Economists have generally assumed the problem was temporary: As the economy improved, companies would need more highly educated employees. But in a paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Canadian economists argues that the U.S. faces a longer-term problem.

They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech systems—everything from corporate intranets to manufacturing robots—demand for such skills has fallen in recent years, even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught them.

Richard Cohen was not impressed with the salary stunt.

… This president is independently rich. He is rich by dint of his own talent and industry, but rich is rich –- and you probably ain’t. Obama has made a small fortune in book royalties, and last year the president and Michelle Obama reported an adjusted gross income of $789,674. Without having to Google it, I can say that the Obamas made more than your average federal employee –- even including overtime.

So the $20,000 Obama is kicking back to the Treasury is a pittance that will not be missed. (What’s the difference between $789,674 and $769,674? Will the kids not go to camp? Is Hawaii out of the question for next summer? ) But 5 percent for someone making $100,000 is a different story. That’s five grand, and it well could be camp or a vacation. It is not chump change.

Obama was once poor –- although young and poor is not the same as old and poor –-  so I know he can appreciate what that 5 percent can mean. The president was apparently responding to the symbolism of him living like a pasha while asking others to sacrifice. I understand. But his taking a wee haircut on his salary is just a PR stunt from the White House that’s more insulting than it is empathetic.

Theodore Dalrymple on a little disability scam in England.

Earlier this month, British newspapers reported the story of Paul Marshallsea, a Welshman who, while on a two-month Australian holiday with his wife, wrestled a six-foot shark to prevent it from attacking children in the water. Marshallsea happened to be filmed while doing so, and the pictures went around the world. He was proclaimed a hero.

Unfortunately for him, the pictures also reached Wales. He and his wife were supposed to be on sick leave at the time with “work-related stress,” and his heroics didn’t impress his employers: they sacked him, on the not-unreasonable grounds that if he could travel to Australia and wrestle with a shark, he could probably have made it into work. Moreover, photographs of the couple suggested that they were having the holiday of a lifetime, rather than merely recuperating from serious illness. …

… The story illustrates a fundamental truth about contemporary Britain: it is now a sink of corruption, moral, intellectual, and financial, all of it perfectly legal.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says his NCAA bracket is busted, worst picks he ever made. Then he looked at his economic advisers and said, “Ehh, maybe not.”

Leno: President Obama did not take VP Joe Biden to Israel with him. He figured the Jews had suffered enough.

Leno: The U.S. Senate is fighting to keep open its own Senate Barber Shop. It losses $350,000 a year. You know what that makes it? The most successful government program ever! It only loses $350,000 a year.

Leno: The island nation of Cyprus has this new 10% tax on individual savings accounts there. They will take 10% of your money right out of the bank. To which President Obama said, “You can do that?”

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Sunday’s Pickings was devoted to the problems of the “affordable care act.” Now we have Joe Klein of Time Magazine writing about obamacare incompetence.

… Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis—and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat—as someone who believes in activist government—he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.

One thing is clear: Obamacare will fail if he doesn’t start paying more attention to the details of implementation, if he doesn’t start demanding action. And, in a larger sense, the notion of activist government will be in peril—despite the demographics flowing the Democrats’ way—if institutions like the VA and Obamacare don’t deliver the goods. Sooner or later, the Republican party may come to understand that its best argument isn’t about tearing down the government we have, but making it run more efficiently.

Sooner or later, the Democrats may come to understand that making it run efficiently is the prerequisite for maintaining power.

Andrew Malcolm with more disasters from the unaffordable care act.

Remember how since-demoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass the massive ObamaCare health law to find out what’s in it?

Well, now three years later that’s happening and a lot of people are not liking what they see.

Remember how ObamaCare was going to save you money?

Not going to happen. Premiums are going up, some by as much as 100%. And a new study by the nonpartisan Society of Actuaries finds that on average insurers will have to pay 32% more for claims under ObamaCare.

Remember how ObamaCare was going to cover more than 44 million uninsured Americans?

Not going to happen. As the immense law and its 86-inch tall stack of new regulations roll out, millions of Americans will remain uncovered, even if the troubled, challenged law works flawlessly, which it hasn’t. And won’t. The latest Congressional Budget Office estimate is that even with full implementation, more than 30 million Americans will remain uncovered by the so-called Affordable Care Act.

Remember how ObamaCare was not going to add “one single dime” to costs?

Not going to happen. …

Time Magazine, and now Campbell Brown, late of CNN and NBC, takes the president to task for ignoring violence in the entertainment industry. 

There was something missing from President Obama’s Wednesday speech in Denver about gun violence. He focused almost exclusively on passing gun-control laws, and not at all on one of the nation’s biggest promoters of violence: the entertainment industry.

The president’s campaign against gun violence has produced a stale debate marked by lots of speeches with little achieved. A more creative chief executive would have used this moment to widen the discussion by drawing attention to the increasingly graphic violence so pervasive in television shows, movies and videogames. Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media world’s elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.

In January, when announcing his gun-violence task force, headed by Vice President Biden, Mr. Obama paid lip service to the subject of media violence. The president’s gun-control plan, based on Mr. Biden’s recommendations, addressed the matter only by asking the Centers for Disease Control to “conduct research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, including links between videogames, media images, and violence.” He asked Congress to allocate $10 million for the research. In Washington terms, that’s a pittance.

Dr. Victor Strasberger, the leading researcher on media violence for the AmericanAcademy of Pediatrics, could tell the CDC and the president what to expect: “All our studies show portraying violence is extremely dangerous,” Dr. Strasberger recently told me. “Kids become desensitized, numb to suffering around them and aggressive.” He also says that when you add in other factors like poverty, abuse or mental illness, “you have a perfect storm. This can and does lead to violence.”

Dr. Strasberger says he was stunned that the White House seems to have little interest in the available evidence. On the subject of media violence, Mr. Biden met only with representatives of the entertainment and videogame industry and researchers who support the industry. Not a single doctor or researcher critical of media violence met with the vice president.

That’s a shame, since there is a consensus among doctors and mental-health professionals about the danger to children from exposure to the violence depicted by movies, television and videogames. …

You can’t make it up! David Harsanyi says the administration is bugging banks to make risky home loans.

According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration is pushing big banks to make more home loans available to Americans with bad credit – the same kind of  government guidance that helped blow up the housing market:

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Think about this statement. The administration is asking banks – banks that Washington bails out; banks that Washington crafts regulations for — to embrace risky policies that put the institution and its investors (not to mention, all of us) in a  precarious position. So precarious, in fact, that banks have to ask government if they can be freed of any legal or financial consequences. …

 

And, also in Time, John McWorter says Ben Carson should be left alone.

Ben Carson criticized Obamacare, sharply, with Obama listening, at the National Prayer Breakfast in February. And Carson is black.

Yes, Carson is the black – gasp – conservative of the moment, this weekend also speaking out against gay marriage, for which he has been forced to apologize.

Unsurprisingly, Carson, an accomplished neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, has been celebrated by the right, and is considering politics. Enter the usual dogpile from black commenters: Carson as a traitor, a sellout, airing his views not from sincerity but because he wants to please the white establishment and make a buck.

Many wonder why so many black people seem to treat true diversity of opinion as heresy. There is, in fact, a reason which, in itself, makes sense. The idea is that black conservatives, in distracting whites from thinking about racism, impede black progress and even give entrée to a possible racist backlash.

That’s not crazy at all – but the problem is that history has shown it to be invalid. …

WSJ’s Political Diary celebrates another labor loss in Wisconsin.

Remember Big Labor’s throw-down last year over Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector union reforms? The fight ended with a squeak yesterday as conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack handily defeated union-backed candidate and Marquette University law professor Ed Fallone, with some 57% of the vote.

The vote means conservatives retain 4-3 control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The next two justices up for reelection on the court will be from its liberal wing, which means that after yesterday’s win conservatives are likely to maintain or extend their majority for years to come. That’s a blow to unions who were hoping that they could secure a liberal majority that would be more receptive to an upcoming appeal of a Dane County case charging Mr. Walker’s union reforms are unconstitutional because they exempted police and firefighters.

The election also shows that Mr. Walker’s union reforms have had significant political consequences for the left. During a similar state Supreme Court battle last year between conservative incumbent David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, local and national unions poured buckets of money into the fight for control of the court and lost. With their ammo spent, Mr. Fallone’s campaign got only a fraction of the support. …

The Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook notes the Institute for Justice win for Louisiana’s monks. This was noted in March 27th Pickings as we gave tribute to IJ for the win.

Fifteen months ago, The Scrapbook cheered on the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey, in Covington, Louisiana, as they fought in court for their right to earn a living by selling to the public the plain wooden caskets they’d been making for years for their own use. Now we celebrate their triumph in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week, the court voted unanimously to free them from “irrational” regulations.

Here’s what those regulations required—and listen up, you skeptics of Tea Party demands for less government and for economic liberty. We’re talking about a product designed to be buried in the ground forever.

Under the legal regimen secured by the Louisiana Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, according to the 5th Circuit,

a prospective casket retailer must become a licensed funeral establishment. This requires building a layout parlor for thirty people, a display room for six caskets, an arrangement room, and embalming facilities. Second, the establishment must employ a full-time funeral director. A funeral director must have a high school diploma or GED, pass thirty credit hours at an accredited college, and complete a one-time apprenticeship. The apprenticeship must consist of full-time employment and be the apprentice’s “principal occupation.” None of this mandatory training relates to caskets. .  .  . A funeral director must also pass a test administered by the International Conference of Funeral Examining Boards. The exam does not test Louisiana law or burial practices.

The purpose of these Alice in Wonderland requirements was plain: to protect the guild interests and profits of a politically favored industry. So that the funeral directors and licensed embalmers who occupy eight of the nine seats on the state board could comfortably enjoy their monopoly, the upstart monks of Saint Joseph would have to think of some other way to make a buck.

Well, not anymore—at least not in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the jurisdiction covered by the 5th Circuit.

The state board has 90 days to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court, which might or might not take the case. Either way, there is now a “circuit split” on the constitutionality of government protection of a narrow economic interest without public benefit. The 6th Circuit unanimously struck down a similar casket monopoly in 2002, while the 10th Circuit upheld an Oklahoma law in 2004, cynically pronouncing the “dishing out of special economic benefits” to the well connected to be the “national pastime” of governments.

Sooner or later, the High Court seems likely to clear up the conflict. That is the goal of the strategically selected litigation pursued by the valiant Institute for Justice in these and other cases: to have the Supremes strike a blow for individual economic liberty and place limits on legislators’ power to rig the system for their friends. Not to mention burying bad regulations.

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Roger Simon calls attention to The Economist having second thoughts about globalony. Now it will take 50 years for the left, and the idiots in DC to get the message. Of course, for them it was only cover to increase the power of the state.

No subject has convinced me more that modern liberalism is the most primitive religious faith on the planet (possibly excepting Wahhabism) than man-made global warming, aka climate change.

So it was with some amusement that I read the other day that most august of publications The Economist was having second thoughts:

IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.”

The publication elucidates in an extended article from the same edition:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Am I wrong or was the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming based on a correlation between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures?  Oh, well, maybe Al Gore will explain it to me.  (I’m sure his knowledge base has improved since his unfortunate ‘D’ in college geology. After all, he’s a “climate sensitive” guy.)

I especially hope he will since those pesky Russians are predicting something far worse — a new Ice Age: …

Max Boot examines the circumstances surrounding the loss of four great generals.

The quasi-official ideology of the U.S. armed forces holds that generals are virtually interchangeable, that individual personalities don’t matter much, that ordinary grunts are in any case more important than their leaders, and that what really counts are larger systems that make a complex bureaucracy function. There is some truth to all of this. But for all of the bureaucratic heft of the services and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, it is hard to imagine the Civil War having been won without Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—or World War II without Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Arnold, LeMay, Nimitz, Halsey, and all the other senior generals and admirals.

Likewise it is hard to imagine the War on Terror having been waged without four-star commanders such as David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis. They are among the most illustrious generals produced by the last decade of fighting. They are the stars of their generation. From Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, they emerged from anonymity to orchestrate campaigns that, after initial setbacks, have given the United States a chance to salvage a decent outcome from protracted counterinsurgencies; they have also literally rewritten the book on how to wage modern war successfully. Yet aside from the similarities in the challenges they faced and the skills they displayed in rising to the task, these men share another, more troubling resemblance: They are either gone from the military or (in the case of Mattis) about to go as of this writing. And for the most part they are leaving under unhappy circumstances. A strong case can be made that all were shabbily treated to one extent or another. Petraeus was hounded out of the CIA and McChrystal out of high command in Afghanistan under a cloud of scandal; Allen saw his reputation unfairly marred by scandal before deciding to call it quits; and Mattis is said to have been pushed out early after clashes with the White House. Certainly none of them was afforded the respect and honors that successful officers at the pinnacle of their career ought to expect—in part to drive younger officers to follow their example and seize the day when their time comes. The treatment of these four remarkable generals at the hands of President Obama and his aides, whatever the merits of each individual case, is likely to rankle within the armed forces and leave those forces less prepared for future challenges.

Of the four, Petraeus was first among equals, the dominant general of his generation. …

 

… Mattis, indeed, developed a Patton-like reputation for outspokenness with comments such as the one he made at a San Diego conference in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

Mattis’s political incorrectness was thought to bar further promotion. And yet in 2007 he was promoted to four-star rank and appointed to head the now defunct Joint Forces Command. Then in 2010, he was appointed Petraeus’s successor at Centcom. In this post he made few public ripples but worked intently behind the scenes to support the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and to prepare for the possibility of conflict with Iran. He was due to retire from Centcom in March, after just two and a half years. Veteran military correspondent Tom Ricks has reported that Mattis was being forced out early because he displeased some in the Obama administration with his blunt questioning about the lack of preparation for war with Tehran.

Mackubin Thomas Owens, a retired Marine who is now a professor at the NavalWarCollege, recently wrote: “By pushing Gen. Mattis overboard, the administration sent a message that it doesn’t want smart, independent-minded generals who speak candidly to their civilian leaders.” Whatever the truth of that allegation (which has been hotly disputed by administration spokesmen), it is a shame that the nation will lose Mattis’s services—as it has already lost those of Petraeus, McChrystal, and Allen. Mattis is only 62, but he has announced that he will retire to farming in Washington state, where he grew up.

Petraeus, McChrystal, Allen, and Mattis would be the first to deny that they are irreplaceable—the graveyards, they would no doubt remind us, are said to be full of irreplaceable men. And clearly there are a number of capable officers who will strive to fill their combat boots. Some heroes of the last decade of war—including General Ray Odierno, General Martin Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral William McRaven (McChrystal’s successor at JSOC and the man who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid), and Major General H.R. McMaster (a noted military intellectual and counterinsurgency commander)—remain in uniform.

But the experience and savvy of the four will be hard to replace. Certainly they deserve more public appreciation than they have gotten so far and, at the very least, an honored role in helping to teach a new generation of soldiers and Marines how to operate at the pinnacle of command. We do not have such a surplus of brilliant commanders that we can afford to wave away those like Petraeus and McChrystal and Allen and Mattis, who have demonstrated a mastery of the modern battlefield. We can only hope that President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the loss of their institutional knowledge, their leadership abilities, and their complex understanding of a dangerous world does not prove to be a tragedy for the nation.

John Merline in IBD highlights a George Mason study showing how free people vote with their feet.

Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by GeorgeMasonUniversity’s MercatusCenter.

The “Freedom in the 50 States” study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.

It found that the freest states tended to be conservative “red” states, while the least free were liberal “blue” states.

The freest state overall, the researchers concluded, was North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. The least free state by far was New York, followed by California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island.

The study also compared its measures of economic and personal freedom to population shifts and income growth, and found that freer states tend to do better on both scores than those less free.

For example, it found a strong correlation between a state’s freedom ranking and migration, which means that Americans are gravitating toward states that have less-intrusive governments.

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David Stockman, Reagan budget director dropped a stink-bomb in the NY Times OpEd section this weekend. It has been the talk of Monday.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days.  …

 

… These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.

All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

Stockman makes Steve Malanga’s Jeremiad about state debt mild by comparison. 

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois officials with making misleading statements to bond investors about the state’s pension system. The agency detailed a long list of deceptive practices including failure to tell investors that the system was so underfunded that it risked bankruptcy.

Illinois taxpayers, as well as the holders of its debt, will ultimately bear the burden of the officials’ misdeeds. But there is nothing unique about the PrairieState. For years, elected officials in states and municipalities across the country have been imprudently piling up obligations that are imposing serious strains on budgets, prompting higher taxes and cutbacks in services.

In January, city officials in Sacramento, California’s capital, reported the results of a study they had commissioned on all the debt that the municipality had incurred. At a City Council meeting that the Sacramento Bee reported as “sobering,” the city manager explained that Sacramento had racked up some $2 billion in obligations (mostly pensions and retiree health care). All this for a municipality of 477,000 residents with an annual general fund budget of just $366 million.

Sacramento finances are already stretched—the city has cut some 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce, in the past several years. Servicing its debt in years to come will only add more woe, especially given the intractability of public unions. The budget report noted that “While reducing staff is clearly not the preferred method for reducing costs, the city has a very limited ability to reduce the cost of labor absent cooperation from the city’s employee groups.”

According to studies by the PewCenter on the States, states and the biggest cities have made nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in promises to pay for retiree health-care insurance. Yet governments have set aside only about 5% of the money they’ll need to pay for these promises. …

Michael Barone on why railroad freight pays and passenger trains suck.

Forty years ago, American railroads were in trouble. The Penn Central, the largest railroad, had recently gone bankrupt. American freight rail was technologically obsolescent and hamstrung by union rules and government rate regulation. American passenger rail was unprofitable and unreliable. Freight rail was losing business to trucking firms. Passenger rail was losing out to cars on the new interstate highways and airplanes on long routes. The past 40 years have seen a laboratory experiment on how to revive railroads. Government has gotten out of freight rail, while passenger rail has become largely a public-sector function.

We’ve had a chance to see which works better and to understand why. It took a while for the government to get out of the freight rail business. In 1973, Congress created Conrail, which took over the lines of the Penn Central and other Northeast railroads. Despite rosy projections, Conrail racked up big losses, with the federal government picking up the tab. Fortunately, the idea of transportation deregulation — pushed by Ralph Nader as well as market-oriented think tanks — was picking up steam.

In 1980, Congress passed and Jimmy Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act, ending the rigid rate regulation by the 1887-vintage Interstate Commerce Commission. Conrail began making profits and was sold to private investors in 1987. The following quarter-century has seen a renaissance of American freight rail. As a March 27 Wall Street Journal story relates, rail companies have been investing in rail yards, refueling stations and new tracks. They are building new bridges, widening mountain tunnels and “turning their networks into double-lane steel freeways.” The Association of American Railroads says it will invest $14 billion this year, up from $6 billion in 2003.

But doesn’t this mean higher costs? No, freight rail rates are less than half what they were in the early 1980s. That’s because freight rail faces aggressive competition from trucking, which was also deregulated in 1980. …

Baron Hinkle wonders if the GOP will ever come around on legalizing pot.

… In his new book The Last Line of Defense, Cuccinelli contends the states provide protection from federal tyranny. This is an argument many conservatives find as appealing as they find the U.N. objectionable. And if they extend that line of thinking just a bit, they may come around on pot. 

The syllogism is easy enough to follow: The U.N. should not tell Washington what it can do, and Washington should not tell the states what they can do — so why then should the states tell individuals what they can smoke? What sovereignty is more important than the individual kind?

With liberals such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg dictating how much soda you can buy, Tea Party enthusiasts already are primed to declare not just “Don’t tread on me” but also, “Keep your laws off my body.” After all, as Lingamfelter put it in his January memo about Agenda 21: The great threat from the U.N. is that it wants to “tak[e] away individual freedoms from people like you and me.” And that would be, pardon the term, a real drag.

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Megan McArdle catches some supreme ignorance from Kathleen Sebelius.

… you should always have liability insurance, but should think twice about collision damage coverage.  It’s why high deductibles are a good idea–for small expenses, it’s better to self insure.  And it’s why “catastrophic” health plans, which only cover the sort of extremely expensive events that most people would have difficulty financing, are a much better deal than the soup-to-nuts plans that most people get through their employers.  Those plans are expensive, both because they’re paying for a higher percentage of your expenses, and because they drive up utilization–which means that they drive up next year’s premiums even more.  Imagine what your car insurance would cost if it covered gasoline, routine maintenance, and those little air freshener trees you hang from the rearview mirror.  Then stop asking why health insurance costs so much.

But Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of HHS, thinks that catastrophic insurance isn’t really insurance at all.  

At a White House briefing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance today is so skimpy it can’t be compared to the comprehensive coverage available under the law. “Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don’t pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus,” she said. “They’re really mortgage protection, not health insurance.”

She said this in response to a report from the American Society of Actuaries arguing that premiums are going to rise by 32% when Obamacare kicks in, as coverage gets more generous and more sick people join the insurance market. Sebelius’ response is apparently that catastrophic insurance isn’t really insurance at all–which is exactly backwards. Catastrophic coverage is “true insurance”.  Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it’s a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan. …

More from John Steele Gordon. 

If you would like to know what insurance really is, and why Obamacare (and much private “medical insurance”) is not insurance at all, but an economic and humanitarian disaster waiting to happen, you cannot do better than Megan McArdle’s delightfully jargon-free article in The Daily Beast.

Insurance began in the 17th century when merchants wanted to protect themselves against the loss of a ship and its cargo. By paying a small amount upfront, they each protected themselves against the loss of a huge amount. This is called risk pooling, one of the truly great economic ideas. By spreading risk, it made it much easier to assume risk, and assuming risk is one of the prime drivers of an economy.

Thus insurance, properly understood, is meant to protect against a catastrophic loss that would be financially ruinous, such as a lost ship. It didn’t pay for a parted topsail halyard. And that’s why if your grandson throws a baseball through a living room window, you call the guy who fixes windows, not the insurance company. It’s when the roof blows off in a storm that you call the insurance company.

But most medical insurance covers everything from hangnails to heart transplants. Have a sniffle? Your insurance company pays the doctor’s bill. This not insurance at all, it’s a prepayment plan.

Megan McArdle likens it to “grocery insurance”: …

Mark Steyn comments on gay marriage.

Gay marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”

That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either (a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what, say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did – that, when it comes to destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is less effective than hollowing them out from within.

On the other hand, there are those who argue it’s a victory for the powerful undertow of bourgeois values over the surface ripples of sexual transgressiveness: gays will now be as drearily suburban as the rest of us. A couple of years back, I saw a picture in the paper of two chubby old queens tying the knot at City Hall in Vancouver, and the thought occurred that Western liberalism had finally succeeded in boring all the fun out of homosexuality.

Which of these alternative scenarios – the demolition of marriage or the taming of the gay – will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book “Coming Apart,” marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: what a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right.

Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable. One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “nonmarital,” which is significantly higher than in Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s left of the American family, holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while, beyond the perimeter, the vast mounds of human rubble pile up remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because for millions of families across this land the American marriage is hollow. …

Liz Cheney says we have to start fighting back.

… If we don’t defend our freedoms now against the onslaught of President Obama’s policies, we won’t have to wait until our sunset years for American freedom to be a distant memory.

These days Washington careens from crisis to crisis, most of them manufactured. The Obama White House and its allies are engaged in the kind of sky-is-falling melodrama normally reserved for the lives of teenage girls. (As the mother of teenage girls, I speak with authority on this, though the comparison does a disservice to teenagers.) With our attention diverted by each fiscal cliff or sequestration drama, we are at risk of missing the real threats to the republic.

President Obama is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The national debt, which he is intent on increasing, has passed $16 trillion. He believes that more government borrowing and spending are the solution to every problem. He seems unaware that the free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system devised by man.

Perhaps his ignorance of that fact explains his hostility toward the private sector. In one of his autobiographies, the president writes that he felt “like a spy behind enemy lines” during his brief stint working for private industry.

The president has launched a war on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He has launched a war on religious freedom. He has launched a war on fossil fuels. He is working to nationalize one-sixth of the economy with job-killing ObamaCare. He wants to collect a greater portion of every American paycheck, not for the purpose of paying down the national debt but to expand his governing machine. He doesn’t believe in creating a bigger pie with more opportunity for all. He believes in greater redistribution of a much smaller pie. If you’re unsure of what this America would look like, Google”Cyprus” or “Greece.”

The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States. He advocates slashing our nuclear arsenal even as the North Koreans threaten us and the Iranians close in on their own nuclear weapon. He has turned his back on America’s allies around the world and ignored growing threats. …