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In the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell takes an interesting look at Tea Partiers and Wal-Mart Moms.
…But the two groups have little in common, to the extent that we can even figure out what it means to “support” an informal movement such as the Tea Party. When The New York Times tried to poll its supporters in April, fewer than a fifth in its sample had even attended a Tea Party event. Some of the Tea Partiers’ stranger-looking views are merely exaggerated versions of ones held by the rest of the country. True, 30 per cent of Tea Partiers believe Mr Obama was born outside of the US (and thus constitutionally disqualified for office). But 20 per cent of Americans in general think that, too. A plurality of Tea Partiers do not think Ms Palin would be a good president. To call them Republicans would be an oversimplification – only 54 per cent approve of the party. Yet they deplore the Democratic party, by a 92-6 margin. Their votes are mostly not winnable by Democrats, at least not now.
Walmart ladies are a different lot. Their political orientation tracks the country’s almost exactly: 34 per cent conservative, 40 per cent moderate, 20 per cent liberal. So does their ethnic profile. They voted for Obama in 2008 by a seven-point margin, as did the country. They are eclectic almost to the point of incoherence. Large majorities of them support both the environmental movement and the National Rifle Association. Smaller majorities support both the gay rights movement and the religious right. They are sitting ducks for Mr Obama’s rhetoric about the irrelevance of old political categories. The main reason they appear to have soured on Mr Obama is his healthcare plan – only 22 per cent think it will “make things better”; the remainder say it will either “make things worse” (42 per cent) or make “no difference” (32 per cent). …
Kimberly Strassel helps connect the dots between the Blagojevich trial and the Obama administration.
…The Balanoff testimony was a hint of what may come. Illinois Democratic Senate nominee Alexi Giannoulias has been subpoenaed over his role in setting up a meeting between Mrs. Jarrett and Mr. Balanoff. The trial thrusts back into the spotlight convicted Chicago felon and Obama booster Tony Rezko. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin was subpoenaed over his own call with Mr. Blagojevich about the seat. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett (a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley) has been subpoenaed. So has White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has become entangled (though not charged) in a separate accusation that Mr. Blagojevich sought to trade favors with him when he was a Chicago congressman. Don’t you just love this city?
One big White House worry is that most subpoenas have come from the defense. Mr. Blagojevich is fighting, and part of his strategy is convincing the jury that his actions did not fall outside the norm, that everybody was in on the Chicago games. His lawyers, unlike federal prosecutors, are only too happy to drag in the president. Mr. Blagojevich in fact attempted to subpoena Mr. Obama. …
…Viewed through the Chicago-Blago-Balanoff lens, after all, the White House’s backroom job offers to Rep. Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) and Andrew Romanoff (D., Colo.) suddenly make more sense. So too does the fact that Mr. Obama’s political director was a top Service Employees International Union official, and that SEIU chief Andy Stern practically lived in the White House. The threats against business, the health-care buyoffs, the extralegal actions against BP, and the attempted political assassinations of promising Republicans also come into clearer focus. This isn’t hope and change. It’s how you do business in Chicago. …
In the Telegraph, UK, Janet Daley writes about the realities of socialized medicine that the Brits know all too well.
…Dr Berwick professes a love (which he describes in ecstatic terms that will have a tragicomic ring to most British ears) of just those evils of a national health system with which we are exasperated: the calculated rationing of treatment, and the ruthless enforcement of uniform cost limits, which often puts the most advanced medication and procedures out of reach of patients whose lives might have been extended or transformed by them. Dr Berwick thinks that our own dear National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) – which is scarcely ever out of the headlines for denying some poor suffering victim a remedy that is available in other countries – is simply wonderful. ….
…Rationing is what happens when you do not have enough of something to go around. And health care that is paid for entirely by taxation creates shortages where they need not exist.
In Britain, we have maintained a perverse ideological insistence on the principle that it is better to have rationed, centrally controlled, uniformly dispensed health care even if it is poorer in every sense – in terms of resources, productivity, and medical outcomes…
The immigration issue has changed. Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes, enlightens us.
…According to a January study by Department of Homeland Security, overall population of unauthorized aliens in the country dropped from 11.8 million in 2007 to 10.8 million in 2009. …
…But America’s sputtering economy is not just turning off low-skilled immigrants. High-skilled immigrants–who face relatively less hostility–are spurning it too. The clearest evidence of this is the number of applications for H1-B visas or work permits that allow them to legally work in this country. Prior to the recession, the entire 85,000 H1-B quota for the year would be filled within days of its becoming available on April 1. … Now these visas are going a begging.
Even this does not fully capture the waning interest of foreign techies in America. It’s not just that they are not coming to the U.S. as much anymore. The ones who are here are increasingly returning home, producing a reverse brain drain, notes Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School …
… Wadhwa polled 1023 returnees and found that 27% of Indians and 34% Chinese actually had green cards. And why are they retuning? Many of them cited personal reasons such as the difficulty of being separated from family and friends. But some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians–a vast majority with advanced degrees in engineering and management–cited better professional opportunities in their own countries, which have been liberalizing their economies. Many of them felt that America’s best days were over whereas in India and China the best was yet to come. …
David Warren comments on the “investigation” into the Climate Research Unit.
…We learned this week a third whitewashing investigation into the behaviour of the settled scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit has dutifully whitewashed everyone. It was conducted by the Scottish civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, a classic “Sir Humphrey Appleby” old boy, who has long specialized in seeing no evil, and who totally ignored the CRU’s critics in this case. Calls for a serious investigation are now being heard in the British House of Commons. …
…From outsized research grants, to carbon trading schemes, there is no end of corrupt, but technically legal, ways to make money from this dubious “settled science” — and continue making money, long after the whole premise has been exposed as buncombe, given the inertia of massive public-funding programs. (And there is still more “cap-and-trade” gunk oozing down the legislative pipeline.) …
It was difficult to understand why Mark Steyn camped out in Chicago for the Conrad Black trial, so we ignored it here in Pickings. Now there is a dénouement in the form of a Supreme Court decision. Seems fair now to let Mark explain what transpired.
… Conrad Black didn’t want a deal. He wanted justice.
He will never get his life back, and he will never get his company back, Richard Breeden’s “cleanup” having destroyed it. And, that being so, he will never get real justice. But through sheer doggedness he has demolished 99 per cent of the case against him. The US$400 million he was accused by Breeden of looting from Hollinger was down to US$60 million by the time the trial began in Chicago. He was found guilty of stealing US$2.9 million, which is less than one per cent of what Breeden accused him of, and indeed about 1.5 per cent of the US$200 million Breeden’s “investigation” had cost the post-Black regime at Hollinger by the start of the trial. Of the 19 original counts against him, Conrad was convicted of just four. The government lost on all the eye-catching tabloid fodder: Barbara’s birthday party, taking the corporate jet to Tahiti. The government won on three counts of “mail fraud.” But winning 80 per cent of the case isn’t enough. No matter how remorselessly it shrivelled from US$400 million to US$79 million to US$60 million to US$2.9 million, what was left was still enough to send Black to jail.
Nevertheless, he pressed on. And last week he won a huge victory. The Supreme Court voted unanimously—nine-zip—that the 28-word vaguely drafted “honest services” statute used by Conrad’s prosecutors had been applied too broadly. …