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Mark Steyn updates us on the news.

I’m coming out of a week-and-a-half of sub-par health, and playing catch-up on the last few days’ news. Much of it is just new trees in the same old forest: the remorseless retreat of American power in the world – ie, “Yemen Rebels Seize U.S. Embassy Vehicles As Diplomats Flee“.

But some of it is almost too cute. In Paris, the street artist Combo has been beaten up by four “young people” who objected to his “Co-Exist” poster:

‘Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. “It would only add fuel to the fire,” he told the French newspaper…

During a residency in Bayreuth, he grew his beard and started wearing the traditional Muslim dress—not because he was increasingly attracted to a more fundamentalist version of Islam, but, again, to disrupt established codes. To his friends asking him whether he was “going to jihad” in Lebanon, he answered, “I’m going to ji-art.”

“First I thought I was French, but I quickly understood that I was Arab, then beur (French slang for second and third generation North African), now I’m told I’m Muslim,” Combo continued, talking of the French des-integration.

Reclaiming the djellaba, the artist’s inclusive messages have cropped up all over Paris. One asked “did you know that Muslims finish their prayers with ‘Amen,’ like Jews and Christians?” Another read “In France, 50,000 Muslim soldiers protect our country.” ‘

But they beat the crap out of him anyway. They don’t know much about “ji-art”, but they know what they don’t like.

John Fund writes on the economic miracle that is Texas.

While the recent 50 percent drop in oil prices has taken some of the bluster out of Texas’s bragging, the state’s stats are still beyond impressive. Last month, it created 45,700 new jobs. Most of them were in parts of the diversified economy that aren’t related to energy. Texas continues to see solid job growth in trade and professional services as well as in the hospitality industry.

Indeed, between 2007 and 2014 — the period covering the recession and the slow recovery that followed — Texas created 1.4 million net new jobs. During the same period, the rest of the nation wound up losing 400,000 jobs. The falling nationwide unemployment rate is largely the function of people’s exiting the work force entirely.

Small wonder that in December, Canada’s Fraser Institute ranked Texas first of all the states in its level of economic freedom, as measured by the size of government, taxation, regulation, and the rule of law. Texas Public Policy Foundation Director of Policy Chuck DeVore says the study’s findings show that “Texas’s having America’s highest level of economic freedom is a strong confirmation that prosperity and freedom go hand-in-hand.”

Devore notes that critics of Texas often cite the fact that the jobs Texas creates often are entry-level — about 6 percent of the state’s hourly wage earners earned minimum wage in 2013. But that figure has been consistently dropping and obscures the fact that Texas is much more affordable than many states for those on the bottom of the income ladder.

“California has the third-highest cost of living, while Texas has the second-lowest,” says DeVore, a former California GOP state legislator who relocated to the LoneStarState. “A low-wage worker sees his money go a third further in Texas.”

One could even say that the high-tax, high-cost model of California and other states is a form of class warfare against their poorest residents.

Joel Kotkin adds fuel to the Texas fire. 

In the last decade, Texas emerged as America’s new land of opportunity — if you will, America’s America. Since the start of the recession, the LoneStarState has been responsible for the majority of employment growth in the country. Between November  2007 and November 2014, the United States gained  a net 2.1 million jobs, with 1.2 million alone in Texas.

Yet with the recent steep drop in oil prices, the Texas economy faces extreme headwinds that could even spark something of a downturn. A repeat of the 1980s oil bust isn’t likely, says Comerica Bank economist Robert Dye, but he expects much slower growth, particularly for formerly red-hot Houston, an easing of home prices and, likely, a slowdown of in-migration.

Some blue state commentators might view Texas’ prospective decline as good news. Some, like Paul Krugman, have spent years arguing that the state’s success has little to do with its much-touted business-friendly climate of light regulation and low taxes, but rather, simply mass in-migration by people seeking cheaper housing. Schadenfreude is palpable in the writings of progressive journalists like the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, who recently crowed that falling energy prices may finally “snuff out” the detested “Texas miracle.”

Such attitudes are short-sighted. It is unlikely that the American economy can sustain a healthy rate of growth without the kind of production-based strength that has powered Texas, as well as Ohio, North Dakota and Louisiana. …

Kevin Williamson posts what small business can do to fight the costs of obamacare.  

… Sometimes, you have to go full robot.

That’s basically what’s happening with San Francisco’s beloved Borderlands Books, a pilgrimage site of old-school nerdery specializing in science-fiction and fantasy literature. San Francisco is raising its minimum wage from $11.05/hour to $15/hour, and the owners of Borderlands, who already were barely able to make the shop a going concern, announced that they would have to close. The minimum-wage hike meant that the store was going to go from making a princely $3,000 a year to losing $25,000 a year. Of course, you’ll still be able to get your sci-fi and fantasy novels – from Amazon, or from another similar operation without the labor costs involved with running a conventional bookstore. Which is great if you’re Jeff Bezos, but kind of stinks if you’re the sort of sad character (ahem) who likes to lurk around in bookstores. I’m perfectly happy to see every Staples clerk replaced by something sold to Staples CEO Ronald Sargent by Jawas offering a deep corporate discount. But, damn it all, I like bookstores. (And if San Francisco continues raising its minimum wage, the robots are ready.)

In San Francisco, the people who were bemoaning the impending closure of Borderlands admitted sheepishly that they’d voted for the minimum-wage hike. “It’s not something that I thought would affect certain specific small businesses,” one customer said. “I feel sad.”

Yeah, Adam Smith feels sad, too, you dope.

Thick though they may be, you know what those economically illiterate San Francisco book-lovers aren’t? President of the United States of America. But President Obama does precisely the same thing: With Obamacare, he created powerful economic incentives for companies such as Staples to keep part-timers under 25 hours – and to hire part-timers rather than full-time employees – and now he complains when companies respond to those incentives. Naturally, he cites executive pay: “I haven’t looked at Staples stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is,” he says, but affirms that he is confident that they can afford to run their business the way he wants them to run it.

Let’s apply some English-major math to that question. Ronald Sargent made just under $11 million a year at last report. Staples has about 83,000 employees. That means that if it cut its CEO’s pay to $0.00/annum, Staples would be able to fund about $2.61/week in additional wages or health-care benefits for each of its employees, or schedule them for an additional 22 minutes of work at the federal minimum wage. Which is to say, CEO pay represents a trivial sum — but the expenses imposed by Obamacare are not trivial. …

Michael Barone writes about the front page treatment given by the Washington Post to Scott Walker’s college years. Barone also notes the Post had no curiosity about obama’s college career.

Conservative and other commentators are having fun ridiculing the Washington Post for running a story about how Scott Walker dropped out of Marquette University (“questions linger”!) and so never graduated from college — something that has been widely known for many years and which Walker has never sought to conceal. The Post story did add some modestly interesting details, about how Walker was not endorsed by the student paper when he ran for student office, how he was habitually late and unprepared for French class — which, as Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle points out, tell us something about Walker at age 20 or far less than what we can easily learn about his career in public life today. (Confession: I was not a faithful attender of French classes in college, which I currently regret.)

Democrats like Howard Dean are suggesting that Walker’s non-graduate status raises questions as to whether he’s fit for the presidency. …

… In any case, I guess it’s useful for voters to have access to information about how presidential candidates were educated and what they did at school in their younger years. Which leads to a question for the Washington Post, which has told us a bit about how Scott Walker behaved at college before he dropped out: Why weren’t you — why aren’t you — curious about how Obama behaved in college?

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Mark Steyn starts today’s look at the poor excuse for leadership in DC.

On Tuesday the Islamic State released a 22-minute video showing Flight Lieutenant Muath al-Kasasbeh of the Royal Jordanian Air Force being doused in petrol and burned to death. It is an horrific way to die, and Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh showed uncommon bravery, standing stiff and dignified as the flames consumed him. And then he toppled, and the ISIS cameras rolled on, until what was left was charred and shapeless and unrecognizable as human.

King Abdullah’s response to this barbaric act was to execute two ISIS prisoners the following morning, including the evil woman who was part of the cell that blew up the lobby of my favorite hotel in Amman, the Grand Hyatt.

President Obama’s response was to go to the National Prayer Breakfast and condescendingly advise us – as if it’s some dazzlingly original observation rather than the lamest faculty-lounge relativist bromide – to “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition,people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”.

Gee, thanks. If you’re watching on ISIS premium cable, I’m sure that’s a great consolation when they’re reaching for the scimitar and readying you for your close-up. …

… civilization is a fragile and unnatural state of affairs. Droning on about the Crusades and Jim Crow, Obama offers the foreign policy of Oscar Wilde’s cynic: He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. …

Roger Simon posts on obama’s biggest lie. 

Unlike Nixon and Clinton, who lied in self-defense, Obama lies proactively, which is decidedly more dangerous.  He will say practically anything to achieve his goals without regard to the truth.  The repeated assertion about keeping your doctor and your health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is just one famous example.  But only a few days ago on Fareed Zakaria’s show the president made a statement that dwarfed his claims about Obamacare.  When asked if we were in a war with radical Islam, the president replied:

….”I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for — order, peace, prosperity.”

99.9 percent?!  I will bypass for the moment Obama’s rather self-serving definition of Islam and focus on that outrageous number, which is absurd on the face of it and not remotely supported by any of the numerous polls on the subject. …

Jonathan Tobin on the prez’s anti-Semitism blind spot. 

There has been a great deal of justified criticism about President Obama’s unwillingness to respond to terrorist outrages with the sort of moral leadership that can rally the West to fight back. His comments at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast in which he sought to create a false moral equivalency between ISIS’s horrific burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot and the Christian West’s past sins during the Inquisition and even the Crusades have been rightly blasted for his tone-deaf approach to terrorism. The president seems so mired in his deep ambivalence about the West’s role in world history that he is unable to play his part as leader of the free world in what is, like it or not, a life-and-death struggle against truly evil forces. It is also revealed in his administration’s refusal to call Islamist terrorism by that name. But just as troubling is his unwillingness to address one of the primary characteristics of this brand of terror: anti-Semitism. In an interview with Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, he described the terror attack on a Paris kosher market as a “random” event rather than an act of murder motivated by Jew hatred. Though it won’t get the same attention as his outrageous speech last week, it gives us just as much insight into the president’s foreign-policy mindset.

It should be recalled that in the immediate aftermath of the shootings at the Hyper Cacher market by killers associated with those who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo massacre days earlier, President Obama also refused to call it an act of anti-Semitism. That was, in its own way, as shocking as the president’s decision to not send any high-ranking U.S. official to the Paris unity march that took place to protest the murders or to go himself as did many other Western leaders. …

Peter Wehner says someone ought to get off his “high horse.” 

Part of the problem with President Obama’s recent National Prayer Breakfast speech, as Michael Rubin has pointed out, is that it provides a simplistic and incomplete understanding of the Crusades. (You might also read this First Things review, “Inventing the Crusades,” by Thomas F. Madden.)

But the president’s remarks also demonstrate a simplistic and incomplete understanding of Christianity. By that I mean when Mr. Obama, in warning Christians not to get on their “high horse” when talking about the problems in Islam, said, “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

True enough–but it’s also true that slavery and segregation were overthrown by those who justified their actions in the name of Christ. And if the president insists on making comparisons between Christianity and Islam, then it needs to be said that while Christianity has struggled with religious intolerance in its past, it has almost everywhere made its inner peace with religious tolerance and pluralism. On the other hand, true religious freedom has been quite rare in Muslim-majority communities throughout history. …

Jennifer Rubin says we’re left with a president who will not defend western civilization.

The confluence of events is striking. The president is capitulating in slow motion to the demands of Iran at the P5+1 talks. With regard to the Islamic State, which just this week burned alive a Jordanian pilot (a Muslim, remember), the president has empty words. Yemen, which was held up as a great success story, is now being taken over by Iranian-supported rebels with nary a peep from the president. Iran is effectively absorbing Iraq’s army. Iran continues to back terrorist groups throughout the region, including Hezbollah, which is increasingly more aggressive in attacking Israel.

All that is happening while President Obama throws a fit when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets an invite to speak to Congress. And he lectures the country that Christianity is rotten, too — don’t you remember the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition?

His remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast may be the most memorable of his presidency for they so completely express his moral vacuity and personal arrogance: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” Never miss an opportunity to indict the West, to ignore the current threat to Western civilization or to smear Americans who rightly see themselves as the defenders of decency and humanity against the barbarism of Islamic fundamentalists. The egregious comments and the thinking behind them was denounced not only by right-wing critics but also by thinking liberals, a variety of Christian leaders and centrists such as Joe Scarborough. …

… This is not trivial matter. It is the central dilemma of time: How do we defend Western civilization when the leader of the free world won’t, and doesn’t even like it all that much?

Liz Peek at Fiscal Times says the Crusade remarks will bolster ISIS propaganda campaigns.” 

President Obama has given ISIS a propaganda clip of incalculable value, and they don’t even have to edit it. As he stood at the Prayer Breakfast last week and likened the barbarity of current-day Islamic extremists to atrocities committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition, Obama seemingly validated the terrorists’ centuries-old calls for vengeance.

Moreover, his references to slavery and Jim Crow channeled Islamic recruiters who warn of coming Islamophobia in the U.S. by calling out black-white tensions. Given that our battle with ISIS is in large part a war for hearts and minds, Mr. Obama’s comments are symptomatic of profound ignorance, at best and were extremely reckless.  

The al-Qaeda hijackers brought down the World Trade Towers on September 11 because unbeknownst to most in the West, the date is an important one in Islamic history. It was in 1683 “that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” as Christopher Hitchens wrote. This was, he explained, a “hinge” event, in that “the Ottoman Empire never recovered from the defeat. From then on it was more likely that Christian or western powers would dominate the Muslim world than the other way around.”

Hitchens notes, “In the Islamic world, and especially among the extremists, it is remembered as a humiliation in itself and a prelude to later ones,” and thus the perfect date to inflict on the West an equally humiliating injury.

History matters to Islamic terrorists; avenging past defeats suffered by Muslims is central to their cause. …

David Harsanyi posts on Axelrod’s revelations about presidential lying.

… In “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” David Axelrod claims that he knew Obama supported gay marriage back when he first ran for president in 2008. “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” a far-too-modest Barack Obama supposedly told his advisor after a campaign stop. “There’s no doubt that his sympathies were on the side of allowing gay couples to marry,” Axelrod says. “He also recognized that the country wasn’t there yet—that we needed to bring the country along.”

Bullshit, according to unreliable sources across the interwebs, means “nonsense” or a rebuke of something misleading, disingenuous or false. The Urban Dictionary definition of “bullshitting” is “When someone has no f****ng clue what they are talking about, yet insists on trying to get others to believe him/her.” So, contra the president’s self-criticism, he excels at it. …

It is a terrible thing to end the week with lots of items on President Trainwreck. We’ll make up for that a little with late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the Alfalfa Dinner: I can work with the president. We’re honest with each other. I told him once that I thought he was aloof and condescending. He said, ‘I am not condescending. I am just too busy thinking about far more important things than you would understand.’

Gates: Washington is the only place where you can see someone walking down Lovers Lane, holding his own hand.

Conan: An NFL player was arrested in Florida on gun charges. The news was shocking to anyone who knows nothing about the NFL or Florida.

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Streetwise Professor posts on how President Trainwreck wants to spread disaster to the internet.

… If the substance isn’t bad enough, the process is even worse. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was originally leaning towards a less intrusive approach to net neutrality that would avoid dropping the Title II bomb. But Obama orchestrated a campaign behind the scenes to pressure an ostensibly independent agency to go all medieval (or at least all New Deal) on the Internet. Obama added to the backstage pressure with a very public call for intrusive regulation that put Wheeler and the other two Democrats on the Commission in an impossible position. (Another illustration of the consequences of Presidential elections: it’s not just the commander that matters, but the anonymous foot soldiers and the camp followers too.)

Yes, part of Obama’s insistence reflected his beliefs: after all, he is a big government control freak. And yes, part reflects the fact that some of his biggest supporters and donors are rabid NN supporters-primarily because they will benefit if they don’t have to pay the full cost that they impose.

But what convinced Obama to make this a priority was his personal vanity and his determination to engage in political warfare by pursuing initiatives that he can implement unilaterally without Congressional involvement. Read this and weep:

“While Obama administration officials were warming to the idea of calling for tougher rules, it took the November elections to sway Mr. Obama into action.

After Republicans gained their Senate majority, Mr. Obama took a number of actions to go around Congress, including a unilateral move to ease immigration rules. Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.

Soon, Mr. Zients paid his visit to the FCC to let Mr. Wheeler know the president would make a statement on high-speed Internet regulation. Messrs. Zients and Wheeler didn’t discuss the details, according to Mr. Wheeler.

Mr. Obama made them clear in a 1,062-word statement and two-minute video. He told the FCC to regulate mobile and fixed broadband providers more strictly and enact strong rules to prevent those providers from altering download speeds for specific websites or services.

In the video, Mr. Obama said his stance was confirmation of a long-standing commitment to net neutrality. The statement boxed in Mr. Wheeler by giving the FCC’s two other Democratic commissioners cover to vote against anything falling short of Mr. Obama’s position.

That essentially killed the compromise proposed by Mr. Wheeler, leaving him no choice but to follow the path outlined by the president.”

Read this again: “Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.” So to achieve a legacy, the Narcissist in Chief decides to interfere with the most successful, innovative industry of the past half-century, and perhaps ever.

What, screwing up the health care industry isn’t enough of a legacy? …

Kevin Williamson writes on the budget process.

President Obama has submitted a budget proposal to Congress. There are many possible responses that Congress might offer in return. The correct one is this: “Thank you for your input, Mr. President. But we’ll take it from here.”

We have three branches of government for a reason, and the Constitution invests each branch with certain powers and responsibilities, establishing divisions within government that have shown themselves, for more than a couple of centuries now, to be extraordinarily prudent. The president is not a prime minister, nor is he the republican model of government’s ersatz king. He is the chief administrative officer in the federal government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He is given special responsibilities in the matter of foreign relations, notably in the negotiation of treaties and the making of war, though in both cases his authority is limited by that of the legislative branch, which can reject a proposed treaty and has the power to declare (or decline to declare) war.

He does not have any special constitutional role when it comes to budgets. The Constitution invests the House with the power to initiate revenue bills and the Senate the power to propose or concur with amendments to such bills. The president has a relatively large role in external affairs; in internal affairs, particularly matters of taxing and spending, Congress should — should — play the dominant role. Which is not to say that the president shouldn’t propose a budget plan, if he thinks he has some good ideas. (This one doesn’t, though he may think that he does.) But Congress is under no special obligation to act on them, or to give them any special consideration.

One of the problems with our currently lopsided mode of government — in which the president is the central player in government across the board — is that we have come to think of the president as the national actor and Congress as the national reactor. …

John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky on Eric Holder’s politicization of Justice.

Departing attorney general Eric Holder’s claim this week in a press conference that there has “been no politicization” of the Justice Department under him makes it appear as if he is living in a Potemkin-like state of denial in the main Justice building. Holder went so far as to claim that he had been forced to clean up the department he took over from the Bush administration. “You want to look at a Justice Department that’s been politicized, you look at the one I inherited,” he claimed.

When we were researching our recent book on Holder’s six-year tenure at Justice, we talked to numerous career employees who were shocked at how much further Holder had gone than any previous administration in politicizing Justice. One longtime lawyer in the Civil Rights Division told us that Holder had

racialized and radicalized the Division to the point of corruption. They embedded politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically. Their policy is to intimidate and threaten employees who do not agree with their politics, and even moderate Democrats have left the Department because they were treated as enemies by administration officials and their lackeys.

Holder said that the “notion” that DOJ has been politicized is “totally inconsistent with the facts.” But the facts show that the politicization started almost immediately, such as when political appointees at Justice ordered the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case at the beginning of 2009 because they did not want to enforce the Voting Rights Act against black defendants, ending the race-neutral enforcement of the law. …

And Debra Saunders posts on Holder’s ” sorry sense of justice.”

… Holder’s big hurdle to win confirmation as President Barack Obama’s head enforcer in 2009 was rooted in his actions as deputy attorney general to President Bill Clinton. Holder infamously gave Clinton cover to issue his 177 out-the-door presidential pardons Jan. 20, 2001. Holder even gave a “neutral, toward leaning positive” recommendation to a pardon for Marc Rich, who fled the country after the feds indicted him in 1983 for evading $48 million in income taxes and illegally buying oil from Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Ex-wife Denise Rich was a prominent Democratic donor. The pardon wiped clean charges for which the fugitive evaded trial.

As attorney general, Holder has had a chance to atone for his bad pardon recommendations by pushing commutations for low-level federal inmates who don’t have cozy connections with Democratic heavyweights. But he has been slow to use the pardon attorney’s office to champion relief for low-level drug offenders — many of them minorities — sentenced to decades behind bars thanks to the excesses of federal prosecutors. Holder can be brutal when black communities charge racial profiling by beat cops, who don’t work for Washington, but not on overzealous federal law enforcement under his own jurisdiction.

In his first term, Obama issued one commutation. Finally, in December 2013, Obama commuted the sentences of eight crack offenders serving draconian federal mandatory minimum terms. That was great. But then in April, Holder announced a clemency initiative for nonviolent low-level drug offenders who had served at least 10 years and stayed out of trouble. There have been 11 commutations since then — which makes the new initiative a cover for the administration’s paucity on pardons and commutations.

That’s par for the course for Holder. …

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Remember when the Dems were going to own the world forever. Michael Barone says the man who wrote the book on the Dem majority is having second thoughts.

John Judis, co-author of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority, now says in an article in National Journal that the majority has disappeared. His title: “The Emerging Republican Advantage.”

The original book, published in the Republican year of 2002, forecast accurately the groups that would make up the Democratic majority coalition that emerged in the 2006 and 2008 elections: blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals, single women, young voters.

But as Judis writes now, that coalition has come apart. That’s partly because of diminished support from Millennials and Hispanics, but mostly because of additional white working-class defections and erosion among suburbanites unhappy with higher government spending and taxes.

In fact, he now says that the majority he predicted endured for only two elections. President Obama was re-elected with a reduced 51 percent of the vote, but Republicans won the House in 2010, 2012 and 2014, and the Senate in 2014. Democratic strength in governors’ mansions and state legislatures is at its lowest level since the 1920s. …  

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has more.

… Judis’ lengthy essay is a big deal, and well worth reading. He argues that Republicans have managed to bring together middle- and working-class whites, as well as middle-class Hispanics, who don’t see the obvious advantages to the Democratic platform that poor and upper-class voters do. This has allowed Republicans to win expanded majorities in the House and Senate and to compete effectively for the presidency. In short, Judis now sees an emerging Republican advantage.

This is a debate I’ve been involved in since my earliest days at RealClearPolitics. My own book, “The Lost Majority,” started as a rebuttal to Judis and Teixeira’s book, but became more of a companion to it (more on this later). While I don’t see a meaningful Republican advantage emerging long-term, Judis’ views and mine seem to be otherwise more or less in accord. In the end, political coalitions in a large, diverse republic such as our own are, and always have been, inherently unstable. Issues that bind groups together in one election disappear, while new issue cleavages threaten to break groups off. Coalitions are ultimately like water balloons: When you press down on one side, another side pops up. The Democratic coalition of the late aughts proves to be no exception. …

More on the strength of the parties comes from Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard.

… Another interesting observation from Trende and Byler’s data is that, contrary to proponents of the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis, which holds that a coalition of the “ascendant” will drive ever-larger Democratic margins, there has been a trend toward the GOP over the last 30 years. Beyond the ebbs and flows of the cycles, the GOP has been steadily improving its national standing. Its low points in each political cycle are not as low as they used to be, and its high points are higher.

Consider the most recent low, in 2008. Per Trende and Byler, the GOP was still in a slightly stronger position in 2008 than it was after its 1992 rout. And it was substantially improved relative to 1978, 1976, 1964, 1962, and 1960. In fact, the GOP’s net standing in 2008 was similar to 1966, which is remembered as a comeback year for the Republican party.

Meanwhile, the party’s highs are getting higher. Across all subpresidential offices, the GOP today holds a greater share of power than at any time since 1928. And no other cycle in the postwar era comes close to 2014 in terms of Republican subpresidential strength—not in Congress and certainly not in the state capitals. Below the White House, the GOP’s current standing rivals historical blowouts like 1928, 1894, and 1860.

Remember all this next time you read an article about how the Democrats are on the rise. The reality is that the transfer of power in 2008 was entirely predictable, given the economic downturn and the fact that the GOP had already controlled the White House for eight years. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s high-water mark—a seven-point victory over John McCain—was less than the high points for Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Moreover, Obama’s presidential victory has led to a GOP resurgence in lower offices on a scale that only octogenarians have ever seen before. …

Christopher Booker of the Telegraph, UK writes on the global warming fraud. 

Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.

Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.

Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.

But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.

Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world’s scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming. …

Chris Booker has more.

… Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. …

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Larry Arnn gives a send off to Martin Gilbert, historian. 

In summer 1940, as war raged, the British government sent several hundred children, including 3-year-old Martin Gilbert, to safety in Canada. The children berthed aboard the Duchess of Bedford in a 50-ship convoy, and after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was attacked by the Germans and five ships sank.

The Duchess sailed on safely, past the icebergs of Labrador, “marvelous for children to behold [and] among my first memories,” Gilbert wrote. Soon after, another boat with 77 children evacuees was sunk by the Germans, drowning them all, and the scheme was abandoned.

In summer 1944, Winston Churchill —who from the start had disliked the idea of sending British children overseas, calling it a “scuttle”—arranged for many of the young evacuees, including Gilbert, to return aboard an American troopship from New York.

Churchill specifically asked the Admiralty to make sure, amid other responsibilities in the aftermath of the Normandy landings, that there be enough life jackets for the extra children.

So began the life of Sir Martin Gilbert, who died at age 78 on Tuesday in London. He is best known as Churchill’s official biographer. He served as adviser to Prime Minister John Major and was soon after awarded knighthood in 1995. …

Weekly Standard has more on Gilbert.

The passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He also was a prolific writer of Jewish history, an observer of world events, and an author of many atlases. He was an excellent researcher, with a keen eye to detail, who skillfully distilled complex issues into flowing narrative with popular appeal.

Gilbert took on the role of official historian of Churchill in 1968 after Churchill’s son Randolph died. Randolph began the official biography of his father, leading a team of researchers, which included Gilbert beginning in 1962. Randolph and his team wrote two volumes of the biography, and they were disjointed and not very well written. I once asked Gilbert why Randolph’s volumes were so lacking, and he said that Randolph had great ideas but wasn’t disciplined in his execution. Gilbert was, to say the least, more disciplined, and he executed Randolph’s plan very well. …

As does the Washington Post. 

Martin Gilbert, who documented the life of Winston Churchill, the events of World War II and the Holocaust, the founding of the state of Israel and the course of the 20th century in more than 80 volumes that made him known as a preeminent historian of his era, died Feb. 3 in London. He was 78. …

… The grandson of Eastern European Jews, Mr. Gilbert grew up in England during the momentous events that he would later document, meticulously and tirelessly, as one of the most prolific scholars of modern history. “He writes books,” a reviewer once observed, “the way the rest of us write shopping lists.”

“He had a unique way,” said Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, “of absorbing a plethora of details, personalities, facts, figures and weaving them into a coherent whole and making them utterly accessible both to the historian who would learn tremendous detail from his work and to the layperson who . . . would be captivated by his style.”

For a jarring juxtaposition, we move to Matthew Continetti’s post on the problems experienced by Martin Scorsese as he tried to create a Bill Clinton biopic. Written in the style of a Hollywood script we are left to wonder how the same culture created Martin Gilbert and President Pig.

…“I’ve worked with Keitel, De Niro, Pesci, Liza Minelli, with Jerry Lewis—Jerry Lewis—Sharon Stone, Brad Pitt, Willem Defoe and Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz and Nick Cage and DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey—some of the surliest, most Method-obsessed, prickly bat-s—t crazy sons of bitches on the planet. And they have nothing on these people. Nothing. A producer credit for Chelsea, yeah. Maybe I’ll name the frigging granddaughter key grip. That will make grandma glow.”

Scorsese arrives at his destination: A brownstone in the middle of the block. He walks up the front steps and unlocks the door.

The camera pushes in as he speaks so that his face and the phone fill the frame by the end of the monologue.

“Here’s the thing, you know, the thing is, they are terrified about losing. Absolutely terrified. Her book went nowhere, she can’t fill a room unless she’s talking to Goldman Sachs, they are yesterday’s news and they are so obsessed with projecting an aura of inevitability they won’t allow any message to go out that they haven’t already pre-approved and, you know, groped. That’s why they killed the television shows, went after the authors, why they won’t let me make the movie I want to make.”

A pause. We hear him opening the door.

“And you know why they’re terrified? They know this is it. This is the final go-around. End of line.”

He listens for a moment, and then laughs.

“Yeah. Exactly. The Last Waltz.”

Scorsese leaves the frame. We hear the door close.

And we fade to black.

Ed Morrissey posts on yet more history nonsense from President Trainwreck. The Democrat party has a lot to answer for between Pig and Trainwreck.

The Washington Post reports on the blowback, with critics arguing that the President of the United States has more important tasks than finger-wagging about events from 600 or more years ago … like developing a national strategy to fight the threats in this century:

“Obama’s remarks spoke to his unsparing, sometimes controversial, view of the United States — where triumphalism is often overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans must try harder to live up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these shortcomings, he has argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.

“There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith,” he said at the breakfast.

But many critics believe that the president needs to focus more on enemies of the United States.

Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”

What we need more is a “moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for defeating ISIS,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.”

Also at the Post, Aaron Blake notices that Obama refuses to link Islam to present terrorism in the same way he linked Christianity to the Crusades and slavery, and that even Democrats are beginning to tire of it: …

The head of the Gallup organization has just discovered the unemployment figures are lies. This has been plain to see for years.

Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.

Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment. …

… There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie. …

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Seth Mandel posts on Scott Walker’s refusal to allow the Dem/Media coalition to set the terms of the debate.

… The lesson, as I interpret it, is that the press and the Democrats speak the same language. That’s not surprising; the mainstream press, especially during national elections, functions as a messaging office for the Democrats. Because of this, they just assume that in order to be a serious presidential candidate you have to be like them, like the Democrats.

Walker doesn’t agree. And he’s been extraordinarily successful of late by not agreeing.

Part of the media’s terrible coverage of national politics is the reliance on the personal: it matters to them who is saying it more than what is said. Romney got tagged as uncaring because he’s rich. But the classic conservative policies don’t reek of plutocracy when coming from the new crop of Republican stars, many of whom came from modest beginnings or are the children of immigrants, or both. Walker doesn’t even have a college degree, which itself is incomprehensible to modern Democrats, who are elitist and credentialist and genuinely don’t know what life is like in much of the country.

And neither does the media. Which is how someone like Walker could be so successful and still blindside the national press, who would struggle to find Wisconsin on a map. And it’s why Walker is a threat to other high-profile Republicans who have accepted the Democratic/media framing of the issues in order to make a national pitch. Only one of them can be right.

Jonah Goldberg says Walker is the “vanilla candidate.”

Vanilla is the most popular ice-cream flavor in America, not because it is the best (that would be coffee) but because it is the least objectionable. Put another way, vanilla is the most acceptable to the most people; it’s not many people’s favorite, but nobody hates it.

And that’s why Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is the vanilla candidate.

A new Des Moines Register poll hasWalker in first place — narrowly — among likely Republican caucus-goers. With Mitt Romney included in the poll, Walker was the respondents’ first choice with 15 percentage points. Kentucky senator Rand Paul was second with 14 percentage points and Romney third with 13. With Romney out, Walker rose to 16 percentage points and Paul to 15. First place in a tightly packed field is better than any of the alternatives, but it’s not that big a deal this far out.

The big deal is the vanilla factor (which sounds like a terribly boring spy novel). According to the Register story that accompanied the poll, 51 percent of caucus-goers want an “anti-establishment candidate without a lot of ties to Washington or Wall Street who would change the way things are done and challenge conventional thinking.” Meanwhile, 43 percent prefer a more establishment figure “with executive experience who understands business and how to execute ideas.”

Walker is in the golden spot. He can, like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day listening to Andie MacDowell explain the perfect man, reply “that’s me” to almost everything Republicans say they want. Executive experience? Challenge conventional thinking? Anti-establishment fighter? “Me, me, me.”

Respondents looking for an establishment candidate said Romney was their first choice. Those preferring an outsider said Paul was their first choice. But both groups said their second choice was a big scoop of Walker. …

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel provides background of Scott Walker’s upbringing as a pastor’s son.

… Llew Walker had only some 90 people in weekly worship, but he made ambitious plans for his flock, enlarging the building with a renovation and installing the first indoor baptismal tank.

“Rev. Walker has in fact been a shepherd,” reads a history of the church written in 1976 toward the end of his tenure. “…We try to say ‘thank you’ but words are inadequate.”

Since then, the church building has changed little. With the hymn “Amazing Grace” rising from the organ on a recent Sunday, it was easy to imagine what the simple services would have been like in the Walkers’ time here.

“‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved,” the congregation sang.

Scott Walker learned the words of faith here, language that he commands with ease today.

“First off, I want to thank God,” Walker said in his November re-election speech. “I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us.”

Today, Scott Walker’s church, Meadowbrook in Wauwatosa, is large, evangelical and nondenominational.

The American Baptist faith of his youth is traditional but not sharply conservative, treating the Bible as the inspired word of God but also ordaining women and serving communion to other Christian visitors.

The son learned from his pastor father how to be at ease around people and keep them at ease around him. To parishioner Betty Balsley, Llew Walker and his family were as unpretentious and “common as an old shoe.” …

Turning our attention to Netanyahu’s visit, Jonathan Tobin says it is the administration that has politicized the Iran debate.

… Up until Obama entered the White House, opposition to Iran and support for sanctions was a matter of bipartisan consensus. Though his rhetoric about stopping Iran has always been good, the president has opposed virtually every sanctions bill that has been proposed, including some that he now brags about having brought Iran to the table. An overwhelming majority of both Houses of Congress comprising members of both parties have supported increased sanctions on Iran for the past two years. The only consistent opponent has been the president. It is he who has sought to make sanctions a partisan issue by leaning on Democrats to oppose the measure out of loyalty to him. He has also stooped to exploit the resentment many Democrats feel toward Speaker Boehner as a reason to back his stand on Iran. Though Dermer may have erred by not consulting with the White House about Boehner’s invitation, the decision to turn this into a major kerfuffle is purely a product of administration politics, not an understandable desire on the part of the Israelis to aid those backing sanctions.

Let’s also note the hypocrisy of many of his critics. The same people crying foul about Dermer and Netanyahu didn’t protest when British Prime Minister David Cameron lobbied members of the Senate on behalf of Obama’s stand on Iran. Some of those veteran American diplomats who are piling on are also guilty of having very short memories. One of the key witnesses against Dermer in the Times article is former State Department official Daniel Kurtzer who said it was unheard of for a diplomat to go behind the back of a country’s government and work with its domestic opponents. But Kurtzer and the rest of the peace processers who worked for a number of administrations over the last 25 years have been guilty of doing just that whenever a Likud prime minister was in power. Both Presidents Clinton and Obama have worked tirelessly to undermine and defeat Netanyahu throughout his three terms in office in ways that Dermer and his boss would never dream of trying to do to Obama.

Say what you will about the mess that Dermer and Netanyahu find themselves in and for which they bear some responsibility. But the prime minister’s scheduled speech has become a diplomatic cause célèbre due to the partisan political games being played by the White House, not the Israelis. It is Obama that is undermining the U.S.-Israel alliance by seeking to appease Iran, not the efforts of Dermer to rally Americans behind a stand that is in the best interests of both countries.

Peter Wehner calls him the anti-Israel president. 

I wanted to add to Jonathan’s post on President Obama and Israel, but perhaps sharpen some points just a bit.

The Obama administration is unusually petty and sophomoric. The attacks leveled against Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, are part of a troubling pattern in which officials in the Israeli government–including and especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu–are vilified.

No world leader has been treated by President Obama and his administration with the contempt they have shown Prime Minister Netanyahu–from this snub in 2010 to being called a “coward” and “chickens*** prime minister” by senior administration officials.

But the problem goes much deeper than a personality clash. President Obama is, quite simply, anti-Israel. In every conceivable situation and circumstance, the president and his aides give the benefit of the doubt not to Israel but to its enemies. This despite the fact that Israel is among America’s longest and best allies, democratic, lawful, takes exquisite steps to prevent civilian deaths in nations committed to destroying it, and has made extraordinary sacrifices for peace. No matter; the pressure that’s applied is always applied most against Israel–even when, as in last year’s conflict with Hamas, Israel was the victim of lethal attacks.

This is morally shameful. In a world filled with despotic leaders and sadistic and ruthless regimes–North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and on and on–which nation alone does Mr. Obama become “enraged” at? Which is the object of his disdain? Which provokes his white-hot anger?

Answer: Israel. Has it struck you, as it has struck me, that with every other nation, including the most repressive and anti-American on earth, Mr. Obama is careful never to give offense, to always extend the olive branch, and to treat their leaders with unusual deference and respect? Except for the Jewish State of Israel. It always seems to be in the Obama crosshair. …

It’s not just the GOP.  Grown-up Dems are busy rebuking the administration’s foreign follies. Jackson Diehl of WaPo has the story. Mr Diehl is Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the Post

For more than two years, a breach has been opening between President Obama and the foreign policy establishment of the Democratic Party. Last week, as Russia pressed a new offensive in Ukraine and the Senate debated sanctions on Iran, it cracked open a little wider.

First came the introduction in the Senate, and lopsided passage by the Banking Committee, of a bill that would place new sanctions on Iran if no agreement limits its nuclear program by June. Though fiercely opposed by Obama, the measure, co-sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, had won the express support of 13 other Democratic senators by the end of the week. A letter signed by Menendez plus nine of them pledged to delay a final floor vote until March 24, the deadline set by the administration for finalizing the framework of a ­bargain.

While that postponement avoided an immediate confrontation with Obama, the larger message of the senators was clear: They are “deeply skeptical,” said the letter, that Obama will obtain adequate concessions from Tehran — despite what has been an increasingly single-minded diplomatic push.

At week’s end came another de facto vote of no confidence: a report by eight foreign policy luminaries, due to be formally released Monday, saying the president should “immediately change” his policy of refusing to supply Ukraine with weapons to defend its besieged eastern provinces. “Washington,” it said bluntly, has “not devoted sufficient attention to the threat posed by Russia and its implications for Western security. This must change.”

This rebuke was signed by Michèle Flournoy, the deputy defense secretary in Obama’s first term; Ivo Daalder, his first-term NATO ambassador; and Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state who is president of the deep-blue Brookings Institution. …

Andrew Malcolm ends our week with late night humor.

SNL: President Obama has threatened that Israeli Prime Ministers Netanyahu will pay ‘a price’ for agreeing to speak to a joint session of Congress on Iran next month. Which brings the number of countries threatening Israel up to an even all of them.

Fallon: A new helicopter service called Gotham Air now offers cheap trips from Manhattan to JFK or Newark airports for just $99. ‘Cause if there’s two words I trust together in the same sentence, it’s “cheap” and “helicopter.”

Conan: Last week Chris Christie and Mitt Romney met for dinner. Afterwards, Romney said, “It’s the first time I couldn’t afford to pick up the check.” …

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Good Power Line short on President Imperious.

No one has ever accused President Obama of knowing much about American history. He demonstrated his ignorance again during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Savannah Guthrie. Sharing a brew with Guthrie, Obama told her, “We make beer. First president since George Washington to make some booze in the White House.”

George Washington never occupied the White House. John Adams was the first president to do so.

Obama’s ignorance extends beyond the history of White House occupancy. He also, I think, misunderstands George Washington. Even if our first president had lived in the White House, it’s hard to imagine him setting up a brewery there at the public’s expense.

As president, Washington lived in a pre-existing mansion in Philadelphia. He is said to have insisted on paying rent.

The costs of Obama’s White House brewery are, of course, “small beer,” especially compared to the $50 million or so Obama has spent on travel. This reportedly includes more than $7 million in flight expenses for his family vacations to Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard, and a trip to California to appear on the Jay Leno show.

The imperial presidency, which George Washington famously eschewed, has reached its apotheosis with Barack Obama.

Seth Mandel posts on the budget.

… So it might be more accurate to say that the era of pretending to search for a “grand bargain” is officially over. And that, in its own way, is the one honest aspect of the budget. The rest is theater. And theater is, increasingly, what national politics has become.

There’s the State of the Union itself, which is clear pageantry made all the more intolerable by the orchestrated applause and non-applause, standing and sitting, laughing and scowling from the congressional audience. There are the presidential nominating conventions, which are devoid of drama of any kind. (Though the Democrats’ 2012 convention did have that one hectic unscripted moment when the party’s delegates angrily voted down adding pro-Israel language to the party’s platform.)

And now we have Potemkin budgets, constructed to look pretty but act as a façade to cover the ideological ruins behind it. Except by year seven the press gets tired of playing along, even for Obama.

Michael Barone has budget thoughts too.

Word comes that Barack Obama’s budget will, not surprisingly, call for ending the sequester spending limits now in effect. That’s not surprising. White House aides proposed the sequester, but Obama thought it wouldn’t go into effect because Republicans couldn’t accept its sharp limits on defense spending. But with voters recoiling against foreign military involvement, they could and did.

At the time, Keynesian economists predicted that the sequester — “austerity” — would squelch economic growth. And they predicted that Republicans’ failure to continue extending unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks would result in mass misery.

The Keynesian predictions have proven unfounded. The 2009 stimulus, much of it devoted to preserving public employee union jobs, didn’t seem to stimulate much. Growth after the tough early 2014 winter, though still not dazzling, has been stronger than in pre-sequester years. Unemployment fell sharply as an end of benefits prompted workers to find jobs and employers to hire them. 

Obama will argue for more spending on the grounds that the federal budget deficit is now sharply down. It is: The Congressional Budget Office says it declined from 10 percent of gross domestic product in his first year in office — blame George W. Bush and the financial crisis is you like — to around the 50-year average of 2.7 percent.

The sequester contributed to that by holding down spending. But credit also goes to the fact that our tax system is much more progressive than you’d gather from Obama’s rhetoric. CBO reports that the top 20 percent of earners pay 70 percent of all federal taxes, and the top 1 percent pay 24 percent. …

The Editors of USA Today are not impressed with the budget either.

Much of the controversy over the $4 trillion budget President Obama released Monday has focused on what it would do: hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cut taxes for the middle class and spend more on infrastructure.

But more important is what the spending plan would not do. It wouldn’t deal with the government’s long-term financial woes, driven largely by the soaring costs of benefit programs.

Sure, the president’s projected deficits for the next few years would dip below $500 billion, after topping $1 trillion during his first four years. But with 10,000 Baby Boomers turning 65 each day, it’s delusional to view deficit control as mission accomplished. The Congressional Budget Office, which projects further out than the White House, predicts annual deficits back over $1 trillion in 10 years. …

Bjørn Lomborg, has a WSJ OpEd on climate alarmism. 

It is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

We are often being told that we’re seeing more and more droughts, but a study published last March in the journal Nature actually shows a decrease in the world’s surface that has been afflicted by droughts since 1982.

Hurricanes are likewise used as an example of the “ever worse” trope. If we look at the U.S., where we have the best statistics, damage costs from hurricanes are increasing—but only because there are more people, with more-expensive property, living near coastlines. If we adjust for population and wealth, hurricane damage during the period 1900-2013 decreased slightly. …

And Jeff Jacoby says only jerks think 2014 was the hottest year on record. 

Unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in solitary meditation on a remote island, you couldn’t miss the wave of media stories breathlessly proclaiming that 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history. As usual, the coverage was laced with alarm about the menace posed by climate change, and with disapproval of skeptics who decline to join in the general panic.

Among those seizing on the news to make a political point was President Obama, who used his State of the Union address to voice disdain for those who don’t share his view. “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists,” he scoffed. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But. . . I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities.”

Well, I’m also not a scientist. But I do know that what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and NOAA’s NationalClimaticDataCenter actually reported was rather less categorical than what the news accounts — or the White House — might lead you to believe. As both government agencies made clear in their briefing materials, the likelihood that 2014 was the planet’s warmest year is far from a slam-dunk. Indeed, the probability that 2014 set a record is not 99 percent or 95 percent, but less than 50 percent. NOAA’s number-crunchers put the probability at 48 percent; NASA’s analysis came in at 38 percent. The agencies rationalize their attention-getting headline on the grounds that the probabilities were even lower for other candidates for the label of “hottest year in history.” …

Scott Adams in Dilbert’s Blog posts on science’s biggest fail.

What’s is science’s biggest fail of all time?

I nominate everything about diet and fitness.

Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong. 

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin. 

I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. …

… Science is an amazing thing. But it has a credibility issue that it earned. Should we fix the credibility situation by brainwashing skeptical citizens to believe in science despite its spotty track record, or is society’s current level of skepticism healthier than it looks? Maybe science is what needs to improve, not the citizens.

I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what science says it is because the scientific consensus is high. But I realize half of my fellow-citizens disagree, based on pattern recognition. On one hand, the views of my fellow citizens might lead humanity to inaction on climate change and result in the extinction of humans. On the other hand, would I want to live in a world in which people stopped using pattern recognition to make decisions?

Those are two bad choices.

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Heather Mac Donald has a long overview of the NYPD in “The Mayor Who Slandered the Police.” In place of some of today’s cartoons, we have five pictures of NYC subways before the “broken windows” policing that made the City a livable place. The end result of de Blasio’s foolishness, will be subways that again look like they did in the 1970′s.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is “comfortable” with himself. So the city learned during the biggest crisis to hit a New York mayoralty in recent memory. “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ve always tried to tell the truth and stay true to my values,” de Blasio said in mid January, as police officers across New York City continued a work slowdown that had brought discretionary police activity to a virtual standstill. De Blasio’s breezy self-assurance was revealing but unfortunate, since it was his belief in his own mission as social-justice truth-teller that had pushed the police into revolt in the first place.

William Bratton, New York City police commissioner, has now mobilized the considerable management and disciplinary tools at his disposal to force officers to increase their enforcement activity. But the fault lines that led to the slowdown are still there. Law enforcement in New York may be on the rise for now, but in the long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor who sees his base as the anti-police Left.

The New York Police Department slowdown was born of two emotions: fear and anger. And it triggered an outburst of hypocrisy on the part of the political and media elites that was breathtaking to behold.

It began on December 20, 2014, when a thug from Brooklyn assassinated two police officers sitting in their patrol car in a violence-plagued Brooklyn housing project. NYPD cops had been ambushed and assassinated before, but this time felt different, a transit captain observed to me. Those prior assassinations “were carried out by small bands of radicals” who were not operating in a generalized anti-police climate, he said. “Today, the anti-cop atmosphere is at a fever pitch and is fed by elected officials and the media.”

The assassinations of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu was preceded by months of anti-police agitation in New York and nationwide, all dedicated to the absurd proposition that police officers are the biggest threat facing young black men. Riots had twice broken out in Ferguson, Mo.; activists in New York had been allowed by the mayor and police commissioner to shut down major bridges and highways with impunity, to the dismay of the police and vast swaths of the public. Protesters at one Midtown Manhattan march had chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops!” with no word of condemnation from City Hall; at another march commandeering the BrooklynBridge, protesters tried to hurl trash cans at officers on the level below them. Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video extolling cop killings. …

 

… De Blasio’s fawning praise of Al Sharpton as a “blessing for this city [and] a blessing for this nation”; his elevation of Sharpton to City Hall policing adviser; his hiring of Sharpton’s press agent as his wife’s chief of staff, and his stubborn defense of that hire despite her lies on her background check and the “off the pigs” rhetoric spewed by both her convicted-murderer boyfriend and her son — these and other alliances with the anti-police Left convinced officers that the mayor would not support them when they were forced to make controversial split-second decisions on the streets. Better, then, to walk by low-level offenses, especially public-order violations, than to risk their careers and possibly their lives making a discretionary arrest that could be opportunistically turned into a racial flashpoint. …

 

… But the tentative return toward the status quo ante means that the rank and file has compromised in its feud with de Blasio without the mayor’s taking responsibility for his part in that feud. De Blasio has not only refused to apologize for his remarks after the Eric Garner grand-jury decision, he has portrayed himself as the victim in the dispute. He characterized the “blood on many hands” comment of union head Lynch as “totally inappropriate, totally inaccurate, and totally unfair.” Lynch went too far in the heat of the moment, but the idea that de Blasio’s son is at any significant risk from the NYPD is also “totally” false. If Dante de Blasio is at risk, it is from criminals, not the police. In 2013, criminals in New York City committed 1,103 shootings, wounding or killing 1,299 victims. NYPD officers, by contrast, shot 17 people and killed eight, despite having been dispatched 80,000 times to investigate weapons reports and having encountered guns and other weapons in over 30,000 arrests.

Almost all those victims of police shootings had extensive and serious criminal records; most had threatened the officer with deadly force. Whites were far more likely to be shot by the police than blacks when their crime rates are taken into account. Whites were 5 percent of all suspects shot by the police in 2013 though they committed only 2 percent of the city’s shootings — a 250 percent disparity. Blacks were 75 percent of criminal shooters and 79 percent of police-shooting victims — virtual parity. (To put those crime figures in perspective: Blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, and whites 35 percent.) Far from being the main threat faced by minority males, the police have been their savior. Ten thousand more minority males would be dead today had the NYPD not brought New York’s homicide rate down 80 percent since the mid 1990s. The question “Is Dante safe?” has become a bitter joke among officers who would like nothing better than to be dispatched on a gun run and find a white perpetrator. …

Michael Goodwin says de Blasio’s chickens have come home to roost. 

For Mayor de Blasio, last week was one he’d like to forget. It started with brickbats over a botched plan for a blizzard that fizzled, and it was all downhill from there.

By the end, he was battling something more pernicious than either Mother Nature or Gov. Cuomo. That would be political allies whose actions point up once again the dangers of his radical anti-police agenda.

In a decision that earned City Hall and its lawyers a rare but justified outburst from top cop Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s team wrote a check to a machete-wielding thug who was shot by cops after he threatened them.

The payoff to Ruhim Ullah to drop his lawsuit was only $5,000 but the principle it represented — that cops who shot him did something wrong — sent Bratton into orbit.

“It’s outrageous that the city Law Department is continuing to not support the men and women of this department as they go about their duties,” he thundered. “Our cops work very hard trying to keep this city safe, and if they’re not going to be backed up by the city law office, we need to do something about this.”

The commish was still fuming when it emerged that lawyers under contract with the city to represent poor defendants had participated in a video calling for the execution of cops — and lied about it to city ­investigators. …

Good Washington Post article on whether the investment in attending college always pay off. 

Earlier this month, after announcing his plan to make community college free, President Obama lauded a college degree as “the surest ticket to the middle class.”

New research in the prolific field of “Is College Worth It?” suggests it’s not that simple.

“‘Ticket’ implies a college degree is something you can just cash in,” said Alan Benson, assistant business professor at the University of Minnesota. “But it doesn’t work that way. A college degree is more of a stepping stone, one ingredient to consider when you’re cooking up your career. … It’s not always the best investment for everyone.” …

… Benson’s conclusion: The investment of a college education is generally better for those who graduate — and on time — from a school with healthier resources.

“Students have some control over if they graduate and when,” Benson said, so, knowing this, America’s youth is better equipped to weigh the risks before making educational plans after high school.

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We have a couple of subjects today; Netanyahu’s coming visit and some peeks at the GOP 2016 race. First Roger Simon posts on “Big Bad Bibi.” 

Fee fi fo fum.  Big bad Bibi is coming to DC town — and Barack is VERY angry.  Not only that, and possibly worse,  Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic may be equally as angry. The journalist insists Netanyahu making a speech to Congress at the speaker’s invitation is a “disaster” or — in the words of my grandmother — “not good for the Jews.”  And Jeff should know.  He’s an important guy, I am told.  He gets to talk… to Barack.

Goldberg accuses Netanyahu of electioneering (a rare thing indeed for a politician) and not showing the proper “RESPECT” for our president (cue Aretha), who always demonstrates so much respect for the Israeli prime minister.

Excuse me while I rend my clothes.  Meanwhile, lost in Goldberg’s posturing, and the funfkeying by such great State Department intellects as Jen Psaki,  is the subject of Netanyahu’s putative speech. What was it?   Oh, yes… Iran.  Now I remember.  That country that has its hand in nearly every piece of Islamic mayhem from Buenos Aires to Sanaa. …

… And I’m sorry again to be so hostile to Goldberg and his “liberal” ilk, but I’m having echoes these days of 1938. Another Kristallnacht hasn’t quite happened yet, but we’ve come mighty close.  Time’s up for being polite. Protocol-shmotocol.  Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t the problem. Barack Obama is.

William Kristol on the president’s Israel problem.

The Obama administration is angry with Israel. Here’s the administration’s house organ, the New York Times, this morning:

“WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, after days of mounting tension, signaled on Wednesday how angry it is with Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Republican leaders’ invitation to address Congress on Iran without consulting the White House.

The outrage the episode has incited within President Obama’s inner circle became clear in unusually sharp criticism by a senior administration official who said that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, who helped orchestrate the invitation, had repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States.

The official who made the comments to The New York Times would not be named…”

Of course, the official who last summer called Prime Minister Netanyahu a “coward” and a “chickens–t” would not be named either. But there is no reason to think those unnamed angry officials do not speak for an angry president.

The Obama White House usually prides itself on not getting angry. Its self-image is that it’s cool, calm, and collected. And it doesn’t get angry at, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Obama White House understands and appreciates the complexities of the Islamic Republic’s politics and history. It is only with respect to the Jewish state that the Obama White House is impatient, peremptory, and angry. …

… So we have an angry president, increasingly desperate for vindication of his failed foreign policy, accelerating both his appeasement of Iran and his attacks on Israel. The good news is that the Republican party and the conservative movement—and most of the American people—stand with Israel and against President Obama. Of major parts of the American Jewish community, on the other hand, one can say no such thing.

Jennifer Rubin has more

… Other Israel watchers speculate that this is really a ham-handed way of interfering with Israel’s elections by giving fuel to Netanyahu’s opponents, who argue that he cannot get along with the United States. This would be par for the course for an administration that has strained to topple the Israeli government. Its offense? It simply refuses to knuckle under to administration bullying or go quietly as the United States appeases Iran, an existential threat to the Jewish state.

Ironically, the scuffle comes just after Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed two Israeli soldiers, reminding us that Iran is on the march throughout the region and that the Iranian government with which Obama hopes to achieve a grand reconciliation is committed to Israel’s destruction.

To sum up, the administration uses Tehran’s talking points to decry passage of a sanctions bill that would go into effect only if Iran refused to make a deal by June along the lines the administration itself outlined. It attacks the leadership of our democratic ally Israel (which it tried to undermine in cease-fire talks at the end of the Gaza war by adopting the plan of Hamas’s patron Qatar) and refuses to meet with its elected leader when he visits. To boot, the administration throws a fit that Congress invited him to speak — all to give Netanyahu’s opponents back home fodder for their election campaign. At least there is no doubt this is the most anti-Israel and immature White House in history. …

Changing subjects, John Fund reviews last week’s Iowa GOP confab.

… The field this cycle is the most open and competitive I’ve ever seen. Traditionally, Republicans have picked as their nominee the candidate who placed second in the most recent competitive nomination contest (the “it’s your turn” mentality). Think Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1992, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012. This year is different. The number-two candidate in 2012 was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum; even though he might run again, he isn’t accorded first-tier status for 2016.

Clear winners and losers emerged from the marathon ten-hour session of back-to-back speeches that was hosted by Citizens United (the group at the center of the famous Supreme Court case) and Iowa congressman Steve King.

Here’s the rundown.

WINNERS
Scott Walker — The Wisconsin governor proved he can be a dynamic speaker, striding the stage in shirtsleeves and demonstrating Midwest sensibilities that connected him to his Iowa audience. Who knew that he’d lived in Iowa until the third grade or that he was an expert coupon clipper at Kohl’s, a well-known regional department-store chain? Walker made a strong case for electability: “I’ve won the race for governor three times in the last four years — three times, mind you, in a state that hasn’t voted Republican for president since I was in high school 30 years ago.” Everyone knew Walker had triumphed in his hard-fought battles against the state’s public-sector unions. After his speech this weekend, Iowa audiences will clearly now get the rest of the Walker story. …

Matt Lewis says conservatives want someone like Scott Walker who prevails without caving.

… What we really crave is a conservative winner who doesn’t cave. And Scott Walker is very arguably that guy.

He won in 2010. He picked a fight with Big Labor and won. He survived a recall. And he won again in 2014 — by almost the same margin as he did in 2010. That’s three wins in four years for a man who governed as a conservative reformer in a state that the Republican presidential nominee hasn’t carried since 1984. As Taegan said, Walker is a winner who doesn’t cave.

Other conservative ”fighters” may try to frame fighting the good fight (and losing) as the highest virtue, but fighting and winning is vastly superior. And on that count, Scott Walker took on the unions — and won. …

Instapundit posts on a Bloomberg News piece on Walker’s surge in Iowa polls.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is surging, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is an also-ran and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is dominating in a new poll of Iowans likely to vote in the nation’s first presidential nominating contest.

The Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, taken Monday through Thursday, shows Walker leading a wide-open Republican race with 15 percent, up from just 4 percent in the same poll in October. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was at 14 percent and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, stood at 10 percent.

Bush trailed with 8 percent and increasingly is viewed negatively by likely Republican caucus-goers. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is in even worse shape, with support from just 4 percent. More troubling for Christie: He’s viewed unfavorably by 54 percent, among the highest negative ratings in the potential field. At 9 percent, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson pulls more support than either Bush or Christie. …

Interesting dose of humility from Michael Barone about the surprises already in the 2016 race. He closes with this Hillary zinger.

… There’s not much policy guidance either from Hillary Clinton, who currently towers above potential rivals — Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley — for the Democratic nomination.

Mike Allen of Politico has a typically well-sourced preview of the Clinton campaign effort, chock full of names of experienced advisers and the 1970s singer Carole King.

But the tipoff comes in the last sentence: “Now that the architecture of the campaign is clear, the two [advisers] are helping with the next critical task: developing her message.”

Oh, that. My mistake: I thought she’d have developed one by now.

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The cynicism and ham-handedness of the administration is illustrated in Josh Kraushaar’s account of the rise and immediate fall of the idea of taxing college savings accounts. 

To understand the backlash President Obama received after proposing to remove the tax exemption for college savings accounts, it’s essential to recognize how closely it struck at the political heart of his own party.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, Democrats depend nearly as much on upper-class voters as Republicans do. Democrats represent seven of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the country, and Obama also won those districts twice.

In 2008, Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate in decades to win the vote of upper-middle-class Americans (those making a family income of $100,000 or more). Bill Clinton carried just 34 percent of those voters in his successful 1992 campaign; Obama improved on that total by 15 points in 2008.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the Democratic leaders who reportedly lobbied Obama to drop the proposal represent two of the most affluent districts in the country. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco seat is the 37th wealthiest in the country, while Budget Committee ranking Democrat Chris Van Hollen’s suburban Washington district is in the top 10.

Their districts are filled with constituents—both middle- and upper-class—who have utilized the 529 college accounts to save for their children’s tuition. …  

… The decision, and the initial White House response criticizing the tax-free vehicles as tools for the rich, offers a useful peek in the political thinking of the Obama White House. Several Democratic operatives interviewed said that since few of the proposals stood to pass through a Republican Congress, there wasn’t the same degree of scrutiny paid to the political impact of all of the budgetary details. …

… When Pelosi and Van Hollen are the politicians crying foul, it raises the specter of a president badly disconnected from his party’s best interests. …

New York City’s preparation for the snowmegeddon that didn’t happen is cause for some well directed mirth by Kevin Williamson. 

Last autumn, I argued in National Review (“Apocalypse Soonish“) that the real intellectual achievement of the climate-change alarmists has been to improve on the marketing model of the traditional fundamentalist-wacko/UFO-cult/Mayan-calendar-lunatic operation by eliminating its greatest weakness: the expiration date. When your UFO cult predicts that the world will unquestionably come to an end on December 21, 1954, then you start to look sort of silly by Christmas.

The broader environmental movement has had its share of similar problems, as the usual neo-Malthusians make the usual neo-Malthusian predictions — the most famous of which was the Simon-Ehrlich wager, in which environmentalist and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich made a fool of himself by making dire predictions about the scarcity of basic commodities over the decade leading up to 1990. (He also said that he’d be unsurprised if the United Kingdom had ceased to exist by 2000. It’s still there.) …

… The mayor’s response was pretty heavy-handed, though, closing the city’s schools, parks, and streets indefinitely — banning even bicycle traffic, an absolute affront to the city’s storied bicycle delivery men, who go about their business with kamikaze disregard for life and limb and a certain devil-may-care panache that is a credit to their profession. …

… New York’s response was in miniature what the global-warming alarmists would have us do on a planetary scale: adopt invasive, burdensome, and expensive measures against expectations of catastrophe that are rooted in a good deal less certainty than they’d have you believe. …

… If you happen to be a power-hungry politician, a state of emergency is a very useful thing. Which is, of course, why the climate-change panic is so attractive to teapot totalitarians like Bill de Blasio, and why there is neither a warm day nor a cold day — and not a sparrow that falls — that is inconsistent with their theology.

Williamson’s reference to the Simon-Ehrlich wager is cause for a detour. The dénouement of that bet was reported by John Tierney in the December 2, 1990 issue of the NY Times Magazine. We’ve had this in Pickings before, but the whole affair is close to becoming part of the free market canon. So, it is worth repeating. And it is also germane, because an ally of Ehrlich’s was John Holdren, who was picked by President Trainwreck to be his science advisor. Holdren had perfect creds; he is an academic who is usually wrong. Tailor made for this administration, we’d say. 

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more — a view of the planet’s ultimate limits, a vision of humanity’s destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era.

They lead two intellectual schools — sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters — that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain forests being decimated. But in 1980 these opponents managed to agree on one way to chart and test the global future. They promised to abide by the results exactly 10 years later — in October 1990 — and to pay up out of their own pockets.

The bettors, who have never met in all the years they have been excoriating each other, are both 58-year-old professors who grew up in the Newark suburbs. The ecologist, Paul R. Ehrlich, has been one of the world’s better-known scientists since publishing “The Population Bomb” in 1968. More than three million copies were sold, and he became perhaps the only author ever interviewed for an hour on “The Tonight Show.” When he is not teaching at StanfordUniversity or studying butterflies in the Rockies, Ehrlich can generally be found on a plane on his way to give a lecture, collect an award or appear in an occasional spot on the “Today” show. This summer he won a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant for $345,000, and in September he went to Stockholm to share half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize, the ecologist’s version of the Nobel. His many personal successes haven’t changed his position in the debate over humanity’s fate. He is the pessimist.

The economist, Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, often speaks of himself as an outcast, which isn’t quite true. His books carry jacket blurbs from Nobel laureate economists, and his views have helped shape policy in Washington for the past decade. …

 

… Ehrlich decided to put his money where his mouth was by responding to an open challenge issued by Simon to all Malthusians. Simon offered to let anyone pick any natural resource — grain, oil, coal, timber, metals — and any future date. If the resource really were to become scarcer as the world’s population grew, then its price should rise. Simon wanted to bet that the price would instead decline by the appointed date. Ehrlich derisively announced that he would “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.” He then formed a consortium with John Harte and John P. Holdren, colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in energy and resource questions.

In October 1980 the Ehrlich group bet $1,000 on five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — in quantities that each cost $200 in the current market. A futures contract was drawn up obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren these same quantities of the metals 10 years later, but at 1980 prices. If the 1990 combined prices turned out to be higher than $1,000, Simon would pay them the difference in cash. If prices fell, they would pay him. The contract was signed, and Ehrlich and Simon went on attacking each other throughout the 1980′s. During that decade the world’s population grew by more than 800 million, the greatest increase in history, and the store of metals buried in the earth’s crust did not get any larger. ..

 

… Each of the five metals chosen by Ehrlich’s group, when adjusted for inflation since 1980, had declined in price. The drop was so sharp, in fact, that Simon would have come out slightly ahead overall even without the inflation adjustment called for in the bet. Prices fell for the same Cornucopian reasons they had fallen in previous decades — entrepreneurship and continuing technological improvements. Prospectors found new lodes, such as the nickel mines around the world that ended a Canadian company’s near monopoly of the market. Thanks to computers, new machines and new chemical processes, there were more efficient ways to extract and refine the ores for chrome and the other metals.

For many uses, the metals were replaced by cheaper materials, notably plastics, which became less expensive as the price of oil declined (even during this year’s crisis in the Persian Gulf, the real cost of oil remained lower than in 1980). Telephone calls went through satellites and fiber-optic lines instead of copper wires. Ceramics replaced tungsten in cutting tools. Cans were made of aluminum instead of tin, and Vogt’s fears about America going to war over tin remained unrealized. The most newsworthy event in the 1980′s concerning that metal was the collapse of the international tin cartel, which gave up trying to set prices in 1985 when the market became inundated with excess supplies.

Is there a lesson here for the future?

“Absolutely not,” said Ehrlich in an interview. …

Michael Barone reviews a book on the recent financial crisis and suggests DC idiots are making the same mistakes again.

… The real problem was housing finance, argues my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison in his new book Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again. Without changes in housing finance policy, he says, there would have been no financial crisis in 2008.

Government policies encouraged the granting of mortgages to non-creditworthy homebuyers, and government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (GSE’s) funneled securities laced with high-risk mortgages into major financial institutions. When house prices suddenly and unexpectedly dropped in 2007, these mortgage-backed securities became unsellable and the financial crisis quickly followed.

Wallison traces the policy mistake back to 1992, when Congress passed a law requiring the GSEs to purchase a certain percentage of its mortgages granted to low- and moderate-income homebuyers—30 percent originally, later adjusted up to 56 percent by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Previously the GSEs bought only mortgages in which the buyer made 10 to 20 percent down payments. That was revised downward to 3 percent and even zero. Such subprime mortgages proliferated until in 2008 they accounted for more than half of U.S. mortgages, 76 percent of which were on the books of the GSEs or government agencies like the FHA.

This was in line with the policy priorities of the Clinton and Bush administrations. They hailed the increase of homeownership from the 64 percent that prevailed from the mid-1960s up eventually, and temporarily, to 69 percent. They emphasized the importance of increasing homeownership by blacks and Hispanics who did not qualify as creditworthy under traditional credit standards, which were treated as superstitions.

The result was a house price bubble of unprecedented magnitude. Low-down payment mortgages inflated housing prices, because buyers could afford a larger house with the same down payment. Above-average households, though not the intended beneficiaries of lowered mortgage standards, took advantage of them by converting inflated housing values into cash by refinancing their mortgages. …