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In his weekly WSJ column, Karl Rove reviews the White House campaign film.

… The film is riddled with other inaccuracies and misleading claims. For example, the United Auto Workers may not have gotten “money” in the bailout, but as an unsecured creditor, the union received a 17.5% ownership interest in General Motors and 55% of Chrysler, while the companies’ bondholders got hosed.

The film asserts that the auto companies “repaid their loans.” But they still owe taxpayers $26.5 billion, and the Treasury Department’s latest report to Congress noted that nearly $24 billion of the bailout money is gone forever.

The film includes Mr. Obama’s 2008 claim that the death of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, from cancer “could have been prevented” if only she “had good, consistent insurance.” But earlier this year, a biography of Dunham by Janny Scott, “A Singular Woman,” revealed that she had health insurance that covered most all her medical bills, leaving only a few hundred dollars a month in deductibles and uncovered costs. For misleading viewers, the Washington Post fact checker awarded this segment of the film “Three Pinocchios.”

The film also offers up numerous straw men. For example, opponents of Mr. Obama’s auto industry bailout, we’re told, just wanted to “let it go,” as if an orderly bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler in the courts rather than by presidential fiat was never an option. It was. …

WSJ has a profile on one of Rove’s big donors.

Few people want to defeat President Barack Obama more than billionaire Harold Clark Simmons, who is willing to spend many millions of dollars in the quest. As it happens, campaign rules now give him the opportunity.

Watching a TV news report that Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum was rising in polls last month, Mr. Simmons wondered about the prospects of the former Pennsylvania senator. He called his personal political muse, Republican strategist Karl Rove.

Harold Simmons, who has donated more than $18 million to conservative super PACs to beat President Obama, aims to double that amount by November. WSJ’s Monica Langley spoke with Jerry Seib about her interview with the press-shy Texas billionaire.

“Is he worth investing into his super PAC?” Mr. Simmons asked. He rose from his leather recliner in the den and stood at a bay window overlooking swans gliding on a lake encircled by 17,000 tulips. “Does he have a chance?”

“Yes, I wouldn’t count him out,” Mr. Rove said. Mr. Simmons’s wife, Annette, who was keen on Mr. Santorum, promptly donated $1 million to his super PAC, cash badly needed for an ad blitz ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.

The 80-year-old Texan, who heads Contran Corp., a chemicals and metals conglomerate, gave hefty donations to the super PACs supporting other GOP candidates during similar moments in the spotlight: Rick Perry’s optimistic entry into the race last summer, and after the debate-driven surge of Newt Gingrich. Mr. Simmons has so far given $800,000—including $500,000 this week—to super PACs backing former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the Illinois primary Tuesday and contends no rival can catch him in the GOP delegate race.

It isn’t particularly important which man wins the nomination, for Mr. Simmons simply wants to defeat the president and reduce the reach of government. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” said Mr. Simmons during two days of rare interviews at his Dallas home and office. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive…because he would eliminate free enterprise in this country.”

The tall, lanky, soft-spoken industrialist has given more than $18 million to conservative super PACs so far, making him the 2012 election’s single largest contributor—ahead of billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Mr. Gingrich’s financial patron, and Foster Friess, Mr. Santorum’s biggest donor.

Sipping lemonade iced tea made with lemons grown on his California estate east of Santa Barbara—next door to Oprah Winfrey’s place in Montecito—Mr. Simmons said he planned to spend $36 million before the November election.

Unlike some big donors—including Mr. Adelson—Mr. Simmons isn’t driven by an attraction to a specific candidate or policy. His motivation is broader: to elect Republicans up and down the line in the hopes they will change the overall U.S. tax and regulatory approach.

That helps explain why the biggest chunk of his political contributions in this election cycle have gone not to individual candidates but to Mr. Rove-advised super PAC American Crossroads—its stated mission to defeat Mr. Obama and elect “majorities in both the House and the Senate that are 100% dedicated to rescuing our economy from the Obama agenda.”

Mr. Simmons has some businesses that are heavily regulated, which helps explains his interest in deregulation. He also pushes for tort reform. One of his companies, NL Industries Inc., has fought lawsuits from school districts and businesses over lead paint that it made before Mr. Simmons acquired it.

More broadly, he said, he and other individuals need to contribute to match the “unlimited amounts from labor unions” that benefit liberal candidates.

“I’ve got the money, so I’m spending it for the good of the country,” …

There’ll be a lot of buzz this weekend about the opening of the movie Hunger Games. John Tamny has a libertarian take.

It’s said about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster novel that will be released in movie form this Friday, that it appeals to a broad demographic ranging from teens to senior citizens. If so, it’s fair to assume that a not insignificant portion of the book’s devotees see a political message within. Cue up the hateful comments, but my libertarian instincts tell me the novel is a boisterous comment about the certain horrors of big government.

To provide background for those who’ve not yet read the book, The Hunger Games takes place in a post-modern North America where society has collapsed thanks to drought, famine and war. The country is Panem, which has a major city called Capitol run by the governing elite. Those in power oversee twelve districts.

Each year at the pleasure of brutal politicians desperate for sadistic entertainment, two representatives from the twelve districts engage in a televised game of survival whereby only one person comes out alive. Though the novel has a variety of characters, most of the story centers on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, Hunger Games representatives from District 12 (presumably West Virginia), and their efforts to emerge from the games alive.

On its face the book reveals the oppressive cruelty that is big government. Indeed, while the global political class and their enablers in the media to this day try to explain away droughts and the resulting famines from an “Act of God” point of view, the simple truth is that economically free countries don’t suffer them.

Though food is surely the most essential, life-enhancing good on the planet, it’s plentiful in the most barren of climates where it’s not grown or farmed owing to the free-trade truth that we trade products for products; all manner of non-perishable items exchanged for food with great regularity. Simply put, visitors to Arizona don’t witness distended bellies among the citizenry due to a lack of farmers, instead Arizona is prosperous and its citizens well fed for the latter pursuing all manner of work the product of which enables them to freely exchange the fruits of their labor for other goods, including groceries.

Joel Kotkin says while it lays waste to the rest of the country, one city is booming – Washington, DC.

… Boom times in the capital — particularly amid a weak recovery elsewhere — are driving this growth. Since 2007, notes Stephen Fuller at George Mason University, the D.C. region’s economy has expanded 14 percent compared with a mere 3 percent for the rest of the country. Washington’s unemployment never scaled over 7 percent, well below the national average, and is now down to around 5.5 percent, about the lowest of any major metropolitan area. Unemployment of course is much higher, reaching 25 percent, in some of the district’s poorer neighborhoods.

This prosperity is rooted largely in the steady growth of the federal workforce, as federal spending accounts for one-third of the region’s economy. Over the past decade 50,000 bureaucratic jobs have been added in the area while local federal spending grew 166 percent. The D.C. region, with 5 percent of the nation’s population, garners more than three times that percentage in payroll and more than four times that percentage in procurement dollars.

This debt-financed gusher has helped expand the economy beyond simply federal workers. You think California is the biggest beneficiary of the current tech boom? Think again. Washington’s tech sector employment , according to an analysis by Economic Modeling Systems Inc., has expanded by more than 5 percent since 2009, more than twice the national and California average of barely 2 percent. California may have Facebook, Google and Apple, but Washington tech has federal agencies, the defense establishment, a growing media sector and the lobbying industry to feed upon.

Washington also ranks fourth in middle-income job growth, with employment in that category expanding at four times the national average over the past two years. The relatively higher salaries — and far better benefits — propel even modestly educated workers into middle incomes. The recession may have been brutal for the middle class, but not those who work for Uncle Sam. Not surprisingly, according to Gallup, Washingtonians are the most optimistic in the country about the improvements in the economy. …

LA Times reports on monster container ship that docked at Long Beach.

The largest cargo container ship to ever dock in the Americas made a fog-shrouded first voyage into the Port of Long Beach on Friday morning, sending a message to competitors that Southern California can handle the giant vessels most others can’t welcome for at least two more years.

Out by the breakwater, it looked as though a man-made island had sprung up overnight, but the dark shape was a vessel called the Fabiola, gliding very slowly toward port.

The Fabiola is one of a new generation of vessels that can carry 11,000 or more containers, favored by ocean cargo lines because packing more freight boxes onto each ship lowers costs.

“She’s way beyond our previous record for size,” said Dick McKenna, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which logs the arrival and departure of all ships calling at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s largest seaport complex. “This is quite a significant jump for us.”

The Fabiola, owned by Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Co., can carry 12,500 containers. The ship is just 30 feet shorter than the Empire State Building is tall, as wide as a 10-lane freeway and big enough to carry the contents of eight 1-million-square-foot warehouses.

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Jonathan Tobin catches White House minions, this time the documentary film makers, repeating one of Obama’s lies. Pickings of July 21 last year carried a story by Byron York on the first discovery the president had not told the truth about his mother’s health insurance.

Last summer, a brief stir was caused when a book published by New York Times Janny Scott uncovered an uncomfortable fact about President Obama: He had been lying about his mother’s health insurance problems. During the 2008 campaign and throughout the subsequent debate over his signature health care legislation, the president used his mother’s experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for treatment for what her insurer said was a pre-existing condition as an emotional argument to sway skeptics. But as Scott discovered during the course of writing her biography of Anne Dunham, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, it turned out that her correspondence showed that “the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.”

At the time the White House chose not to dispute Ms. Scott’s findings. But apparently the Obama campaign thinks the public’s memory is mighty short. As Glenn Kessler writes today in the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, the president’s much ballyhooed campaign biography film “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks repeats the same line that Scott debunked. Though the film’s script tries to avoid repeating the president’s false claims from 2008, as Kessler says, any reasonable person would infer from the movie that the president’s mother died because her insurance was denied.

As Kessler notes, the filmmakers were aware of the fact that the president had been caught in a lie about his mother’s insurance but were determined to get this story into the film without exactly repeating his mendacious statement. …

More on the film from Peter Wehner.

… The main emotion the producers of “The Road We’ve Traveled” are hoping to tap into is pity. We’re told Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression (Ronald Reagan actually inherited a sicker economy than Obama did) and took steps that prevented the ship from hitting the rocks. In fact, though I realize this isn’t supposed to be said in polite company, it was George W. Bush who did the heaviest lifting when it came to taking emergency measures that kept the economy from collapsing and credit from freezing.

What’s most striking, though, is how little Obama has to show for his efforts. The documentary focuses almost exclusively on inputs, not outputs; on legislation passed, not successes attained; on narrative, not empirical progress.

In the film we don’t hear anything about the deficit or the debt, the unemployment rate, economic growth, our standard of living, the housing crisis, bending the health care cost curve down, poverty, America’s credit rating, et cetera. That is because on these crucial measures, Obama has no story to tell, no successes to cite, nothing to look back to with pride or forward to with hope.

Obama’s tenure has been, by any reasonable standard, a failure. Not even a Tom Hanks-narrated documentary can change that.

GE’s Jeff Immelt has figured out he was used by the administration says Charles Gasparino.

Back when he agreed to advise the Obama administration on economics, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told friends that he thought it would be good for GE and good for the country. A life-long Republican, Immelt said he believed he could at the very least moderate the president’s distinctly anti-business instincts.

That was three years ago; these days Immelt is telling friends something quite different.

Sure, GE has managed to feast on federal subsidies, particularly the “green-energy” giveaways that are Obamanomics’ hallmark.

But Immelt doesn’t think he’s had anywhere near as much luck moderating the president’s fat-cat-bashing, left-leaning economic agenda of taxing businesses and entrepreneurs to pay for government bloat.

Friends describe Immelt as privately dismayed that, even after three years on the job, President Obama hasn’t moved to the center, but instead further left. The GE CEO, I’m told, is appalled by everything from the president’s class-warfare rhetoric to his continued belief that big government is the key to economic salvation. …

Andrew Malcolm’s story on the Dem fund-raising troubles suggests there are many like Immelt.

… Except for Warren Buffet, Obama has been bashing rich Americans like himself for months now. And guess what? A lot of them are not writing him the big checks they did back in 2007-08 when he raised $745 million and his unopened promise bag was full of hope and change.

Last summer after 17 months of hope and change, only 7% of Obama’s 2008 supporters were renewing their support for 2012. That’s about one-third the rate George W. Bush had in his 2004 reelection bid.

The Washington Post just reported that around 11,000 donors had contributed at least $2,000 to the Obama campaign or Democratic National Committee since last spring. That’s less than half as many as at this point in 2008 and less than a quarter of Bush’s 2004 turnout, jeopardizing their once assured goal of a billion dollar campaign this time. Obama’s large donor rate is also less than Mitt Romney is collecting from his big supporters.

The reasons, interviews of money bundlers determined, are several: the continuing poor economy, unhappiness with some of Obama’s actions (or inactions) and over-confidence about his success against the still-competing Republican field. And the impact of rising gas prices, now showing up in national polls.

As one result, the Obama camp has had to focus more on smaller donors. Their almost daily e-mail appeals now seek a $3 minimum contribution, instead of the previous $10-$50. And as an incentive, they promise a lottery chance to dine with the president. Three dollars is better than none now and any new donors can count on being tagged again and again.

To be sure, Obama is raising more than any of the four remaining Republican competitors. But the key is how fast he’s spending it.

Turns out, this Democrat president spends campaign cash like it was taxpayer dollars. In January, even with no big TV buys, the Obama campaign burned through 158% of what it raised (vs 60% for Bush eight years before). That left Obama and the DNC with $91.7 million in the bank (vs $122 million in 2008). …

Interesting article from American.com on the health care debate. 

The epic debate over President Obama’s controversial individual health insurance mandate finally reaches the Supreme Court this month. Stripped of legal jargon, the administration’s defense of the mandate — and the broader Affordable Care Act — boils down to this: The U.S. healthcare system was badly broken, so we had to fix it.

Indeed, the fierce battle over reform was based on the perception that Americans did not get good value for their money. Many of the global comparisons that informed this view, however, were flawed, incomplete or misleading. It’s time to set the record straight.

“The U.S. health system is far superior to the statistical caricature critics have presented.” – Christopher J. Conover

The U.S. spends too much compared to other countries.

This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by reformers who sought to argue that other countries, especially those with single-payer systems such as Canada or Britain, outperform the United States. Thus it was feasible to imagine that the U.S. could dramatically expand access to care without spending more money.

But throughout the world, as income rises, so does willingness to pay for healthcare. In fact, differences in income per capita explain about 85% of the variation in health expenditures per capita across industrialized countries.

Conventional models purportedly show that the U.S. spends 60% more on healthcare than it should given its level of per capita income. These models treat all nations the same so that the United States and its 300 million people is compared with very small countries such as Iceland, population 500,000. But a more precise model that compares apples to apples shows that the U.S. spends only 1.5% more than it should. By contrast, France spends about one-fifth too much, while Canada and Britain spend about one-fifth too little. …

John Stossel argues for less rules.

“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total. 

So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

That’s not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to “simplify.” But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It’s just natural. It’s how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, “What laws did you pass?” If they don’t pass new laws, the media whine about the “do-nothing Congress.”

This is also not good. …

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Our favorite Brit contributors were less than impressed with the PM’s speechmaking during the his visit to America. Toby Harnden is first.

… Then comes what must surely be one of the most obsequious things Obama – who is well used to adulation – has ever heard. Obama, says Cameron ‘has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’.

What? Pass the sickbag. Whichever way you look at it, that’s ridiculous. Under Obama, despite his campaign promises and indeed an executive order when he took office, Guantanamo Bay has remained open. Drone strikes have increased exponentially – it being judged easier to kill suspects than capture and interrogate them. Military trials outside the federal system continue, as does indefinite detention without trial.

Certainly, Obama has delivered some ‘beautiful words’ around the world, starting in Berlin before he was even the Democratic nominee and continuing in Cairo. In Strasbourg, he apologised for the times when ‘America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive’ towards its allies.

But Obama has certainly shown arrogance and dismissiveness towards the UK in a way that President George W. Bush never did. Israel considers the US an unreliable ally under Obama. Iran’s green revolutionaries might question Obama’s ‘moral authority’ after he allowed them to be crushed by Tehran’s theocratic regime, as might the Syrian rebels and civilians currently dying at the hands of President Bashar Assad.

Then there was this passage, in which Cameron chucks in the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King for no apparent reason at all – other than, presumably and patronisingly, because Obama is black: ‘Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

‘But in the fight for justice and the struggle for freedom, there is no end, because there is so much more to do to ensure that every human being can fulfill their potential. That is why our generation faces a new civil rights struggle, to seek the prize of the future that is open to every child as never before. Barack has made this one of the goals of his presidency, the goal he’s pursuing with enormous courage.’

What on earth is Cameron talking about? …

Nile Gardiner next.

… The prime minister and his team made a conscious decision this week to do everything they could to curry favour with a Left-wing administration with a track record of sneering at Britain and other key US allies, including Israel. They also chose not to meet with a single conservative leader, even though the Republicans currently control the House of Representatives. In addition, Cameron allowed himself to be used as an Obama campaign prop, cynically wheeled out at a basketball game in the crucial swing state of Ohio, as well as agreeing to a state dinner stuffed by the White House with fundraisers for the Obama re-election team. Even US liberal commentators are now mockingly referring to David Cameron as “Obama’s guard dog”, an undignified image that may haunt him post-November.

David Cameron’s wholehearted support for Barack Obama has significantly harmed the image of the British Conservative Party among US conservatives, who revere its greatest figures Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. This was not an example of British leadership, but a sad exercise in hero-worship before an extremely liberal White House that has taken every opportunity in the past to insult America’s closest friends across the Atlantic, and which continues to knife London in the back over the Falklands. The prime minister has nailed his flag this week to the Obama presidency, a short-sighted and disastrous move that undercuts conservatives in America who are the real friends of Great Britain and the Special Relationship.

The White House has produced a film praising – guess who? Turns out the film makers put the lie to an administration excuse about the economy. Jennifer Rubin has the story.

President Obama and his economic team promised that if the stimulus passed, unemployment would not go above 8 percent and we would now be at 6 percent.

When that didn’t happen, the administration claimed, “Oh, we didn’t know at the time how bad things were.” …

… we now have definitive proof that this excuse is false. And it comes straight from the mouths of Obama advisers in his campaign spin-umentary, “The Road We’ve Traveled.” The New York Times provides a helpful summary:

The story narrated by [actor Tom] Hanks starts with elation on election night in 2008 and quickly segues to despair with the beginning of the Great Recession.

David Axelrod, the president’s senior campaign strategist, likens watching the president’s first major economic briefing to a horror movie. “All I was thinking at that moment was: ‘Can we get a recount?’ ” he says.

Adds Mr. Hanks, “Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.”

Umm. So I guess they did know what they were facing. The stimulus just didn’t perform as advertised.

You see, Obama can’t have it both ways. He either knew the depth of the problem and his policies were not up to the task of reviving job growth, or he was in the dark and made the right decision based on available facts. …

Back in the day of CB radios, a trip to the west coast of the country was a trip to the “shaky side” in reference to earthquake prone California. Oregon and Washington state were just along for the ride. Nobody thought of earthquake dangers there. Turns out folks were wrong - to a fault. Discover Magazine features a piece on the dangers in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

… Cascadia, however, is classified as the quietest subduction zone in the world. Along the Cascadia segment, geologists could find no evidence of major quakes in “all of recorded history”—the 140 years since white settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest and began keeping records. For reasons unknown, it appeared to be a special case. The system was thought to be aseismic—essentially quake free and harmless.

By the 1970s several competing theories emerged to explain Cascadia’s silence. One possibility was that the Juan de Fuca plate had shifted direction, spun slightly by movement of the two larger plates on either side of it. This would reduce the rate of eastward motion underneath North America and thus reduce the buildup of earthquake stress. Another possibility was that the angle of the down-going eastbound plate was too shallow to build up the kind of friction needed to cause major quakes.

But the third possibility was downright scary. In this interpretation, the silence along the fault was merely an ominous pause. It could be that these two great slabs of the Earth’s crust were jammed against each other and had been for a very long time—locked together by friction for hundreds of years, far longer than “all of recorded history.” If that were true, they would be building up the kind of stress and strain that only a monster earthquake could relieve.

In the early 1980s, two Caltech geophysicists, Tom Heaton and Hiroo Kanamori, compared Cascadia to active quake-prone subduction zones along the coasts of Chile and Alaska and to the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. They found more similarities than differences. In fact, they found that the biggest megathrust events in these other zones were directly related to young, buoyant plates’ being strongly coupled to the overlying landmass at shallow angles—which fit the description of Cascadia perfectly. Bottom line: If giant ruptures could happen there—in Chile, Alaska, or Japan—the same would probably happen here, in the Pacific Northwest.

The problem, as Heaton explained it to me, was that there was no direct physical sign of earthquakes. All the comparison studies in the world could not prove unequivocally that Cascadia’s fault had ruptured in the past. What everyone needed and wanted was forensic evidence. In the breach, significant doubt and strong disagreement had separated the scientists into opposing camps. “There was plenty of skepticism out there among geophysicists that the zone really was capable of doing this stuff,” confirms paleogeologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The only thing that could put an end to the back-and-forth debate would be tangible signs of past ruptures along the entire subduction zone. If the two plates were sliding past each other smoothly, at a constant rate, and without getting stuck together, then there should be a slow, continuous, and irreversible rise in land levels along the outer coast. On the other hand, if the two plates were stuck together by friction, strain would build up in the rocks and the upper plate would bend down along the outer edge and thicken inland, humping upward until the rocks along the fault failed. In the violent, shuddering release of strain during an earthquake, the upper plate would snap to the west, toward its original shape. The clear signal—the geodetic fingerprint—of a large subduction earthquake would be the abrupt lowering of land behind the beaches when the upper plate got stretched like taffy, snapped to the west, and then sank below the tide line.

That was something Atwater figured he could probably measure and verify—or disprove. “When they said the Pacific Coast was rising three millimeters a year relative to Puget Sound, I said, ‘Aha! Three meters per thousand!’?” He would go out to the coast and find out whether a 3,000-year-old shoreline was now 30 feet above sea level, simple as that. …

… It turns out that Cascadia is virtually identical to the offshore faults that devastated Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011—almost the same length, the same width, and with the same tectonic forces at work. Cascadia’s fault can and will generate the same kind of earthquake we saw last year: magnitude 9 or higher. It will send a train of deadly tsunami waves across the Pacific and crippling shock waves across a far wider geographic area than all the California quakes you’ve ever heard about.

Based on historical averages, the southern end of the fault—from Cape Mendocino, California, to Newport, Oregon—has a large earthquake every 240 years. For the northern end—from mid-Oregon to mid-?Vancouver Island—the average “recurrence interval” is 480 years, according to a recent Canadian study. And while the north may have only half as many jolts, they tend to be full-size disasters in which the entire fault breaks from end to end.

With a time line of 41 events the science team at OSU has now calculated that the California–Oregon end of Cascadia’s fault has a 37 percent chance of producing a major earthquake in the next 50 years. The odds are 10 percent that an even larger quake will strike the upper end, in a full-margin rupture, within 50 years. Given that the last big quake was 312 years ago, one might argue that a very bad day on the Cascadia Subduction Zone is ominously overdue. It appears that three centuries of silence along the fault has been entirely misleading. The monster is only sleeping.

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Charles Krauthammer looks at the president’s energy ideas.

… Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable.

Mark Steyn has a take on the Rutherford Hays flap.

… Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George’s Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:

“Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail – [Laughter] – they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society [Laughter]. They would not have believed that the world was round [Applause]. We’ve heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, ‘Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan’ [Laughter]. One of Henry Ford’s advisers was quoted as saying, ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad’ [Laughter].”

The crowd loved it. But President Algae Solyndra wasn’t done:

“There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ [Laughter]. That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore – [laughter and applause] – because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards [Applause]. He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.”

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t as “forward-looking” as a 21st century president who believes in Jimmy Carter malaise, 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy, 1940s British health care reforms, 1930s New Deal-size entitlements premised on mid-20th century birth rates and life expectancy, and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody’s seen since the Weimar Republic. ……

… It’s not clear why it (A great nation) needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle “Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies” as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison… How does that song continue? “They laughed at me…”

At Prince George’s Community College they didn’t. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

Jennifer Rubin has more.

For a guy touted as an “intellectual,” President Obama does get a lot of history wrong. In a speech attacking Republicans as “flat-earthers” Obama asserted: “One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards. He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.” The Post’s Glenn Kessler easily nails him with four Pinocchios for his slur on Hayes:

‘ Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.” . . .

Note that Hayes first tried the “wonderful” telephone at the end of June, and then had it installed in the White House just four months later. So, rather than “not looking forwards,” as Obama put it, Hayes quickly embraced the new technology. . . . ‘ …

Thomas Sowell examines another area where the president knows lots of things that are not so.

… As a full professor at the Harvard law school, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either faculty or students at the Harvard law school — or, more important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at the Harvard law school have.

There were no doubt other law schools where he would have been a respected colleague, but these were not Stanford or Harvard. Yet it is worth remembering that millions of people have led happy and fulfilling lives without ever being at Harvard or Stanford.

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Bell even said that he took it as his mission to say things to annoy white people. Perhaps he thought that was better than being insignificant in his academic setting. But it was in fact far worse, because the real damage was to impressionable young blacks who took him seriously, including one who went on to become President of the United States.

Abby Thernstrom says Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may soon get the ax.

Minority-voting-rights activists are all aflutter over the possibility that the Supreme Court will soon hold an important section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional — or at least in need of drastic modification. Section 5 is the provision whose life may be on the line. It gives federal authorities the power to veto proposed new methods of voting in what are called “covered jurisdictions” — almost all of them in the South — if they see them as racially suspect. That constitutionally extraordinary power may not survive a new round of close judicial scrutiny — although the Court’s view of Section 5 may end up being quite irrelevant to the long-run fate of the provision.

When a districting map, newly drawn after a decennial census, does not meet with federal approval (and is thus not “precleared”), state legislators must start again and draw lines that increase the odds that minority voters will have the ability to elect the candidates of their choice. Courts have described the revised, racially gerrymandered districts as resembling a “Rorschach ink-blot test” or a “bug splattered on a windshield.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, among others, has labeled them “segregated.” Their race-conscious contours are designed to separate whites from blacks or Hispanics in an effort to protect minority candidates from white competition in contests for legislative office. The result is that seats are reserved for minority officeholders: De facto racial quotas are created on legislative bodies, on the assumption that only black and Hispanic legislators can authentically speak for minority interests.

Although Hispanics as well as blacks are covered by Section 5, ensuring a political voice for blacks has always been the main concern. Yet what the ACLU has called “max-black” districting is possible only if black voters remain residentially concentrated enough to allow the creation of constituencies in which blacks are a majority. If a significant number of black families escape inner-city Chicago, for example, and move to suburban Oak Park, it’s no longer so easy to draw lines that promise minority voters a safe seat for the candidates of their choice, assumed to be almost always black or Hispanic. And in fact, neither blacks nor Hispanics are staying put. Their residential mobility and resulting residential integration — which civil-rights groups would normally applaud — is a problem for voting-rights activists.

In 1960, just 15.2 percent of blacks lived in a suburb, while today — strikingly — a majority of blacks (51 percent) who live in the 100 largest metropolitan areas reside in the suburbs rather than the central city. Over the 1990s, the total number of blacks declined in eight of the 25 cities with the largest black populations, and between 2000 and 2010, black flight occurred in 16 of the 25. …

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As only he can do, Karl Rove drills into Obama’s fundraising results. This will help you understand why he has stiffed the Senate and House Dems. 

Last July, President Obama’s campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign’s goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I’m even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

It’s not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor’s pace).

The president faces other fund-raising challenges. For one, there are only so many times any candidate can go to New York or Hollywood or San Francisco for a $1 million fund-raiser. Team Obama is running through its easy money venues quickly.

For another, many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again. The Obama campaign itself reported that fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign. That’s about one-quarter to one-third of a typical renewal rate: In the first quarter of the Bush re-election campaign, for example, about 20% of the donors renewed their support. …

Ross Douthat, NY Times columnist, tries to figure why Obama’s polls are so weak.

Why aren’t President Obama’s poll numbers higher? That’s the question unsettling the Washington conventional wisdom this week. Amid improving economic growth, a grim and grinding Republican primary campaign and the White House’s skillful exploitation of Rush Limbaugh’s boorishness, Obama’s reelection was being taken almost for granted in many political circles. But then came a pair of surveys – one from the Washington Post and ABC and one from the New York Times and CBS – that showed the president’s approval ratings sinking this month back toward the lower 40s after a steady winter climb.

Everyone has a theory. Maybe it’s rising gas prices. Maybe it’s anxieties over Iran and Afghanistan. Maybe it’s a backlash against the president’s overconfident selling of a still-weak recovery. Maybe it’s evidence that the White House’s claim that religious resistance to its contraception mandate represents a “war on women” isn’t finding as many takers as the media narrative suggested.

But maybe the specific “why” doesn’t really matter all that much. Whatever tugged the president’s numbers back downward is clearly a small issue (or issues), not something huge and earth-shattering – and it’s precisely that smallness that should have the White House worried.

The message of the latest polls isn’t that springtime gas prices and culture war debates will determine who wins the White House in November. Rather, it’s that Obama’s political position is tenuous enough that it doesn’t take all that much bad news – particularly on the economy — for his approval ratings to go negative. …

Remember the end of last week when we had Ann Coulter who wrote on the White House campaign to keep Romney off the ballot. Of course, the press wants to help their man. Ross Douthat spotted The New Yorker doing it’s best for Obama.

And the beat goes on: Mitt Romney loses a couple of primaries that he was always likely to lose (while winning the majority of the night’s available delegates), and there’s a rush to declare that the race might still be wide open, Rick Santorum might be the nominee, we might have a convention surprise, etc. This time, it’s the New Yorker’s John Cassidy’s turn to set my teeth on edge: …

So how do the Dems deal with the shortages of cash? Andrew Malcolm notes the number of campaign bundlers invited to last week’s state dinner. The pliant press was invited too.

… state dinners are Big Deals in the suck-up social hierarchy of Big Deals in D.C. and beyond. Soldiers are assigned to stand stiffly at attention watching the designer dresses pose and mingle. Music plays. The presidential party and Joe too make grand entrances down the staircase from the private quarters. 

People would bundle a lot of campaign cash to wangle a pair of those invites.

Funny you mention that because dozens of the 360 attendees Wednesday evening were actually current money bundlers for Barack’s reelection campaign that wants a billion bucks this time. Guys like Harvey Weinstein, Barry Karas, Gerald Acker and some of the boys from the Chicago gang, Neil Bluhm, Wally Brewster Jr. and, of course, Fred ‘Count on Me’ Eychaner.

These are not your middle-class Americans that Obama says he sees through his teleprompter. They donate to the max, then collect similar checks from numerous friends who do the same to their friends. Like those junior high chain letters, only this money’s wonderfully real. 

They say raking in millions to enable a politician to buy an office also buys the bundler special access later that ordinary Americans simply don’t have. Well, first, why should un-rich Americans have access to elected representatives simply for donating a vote? How does that help the current system work? Or just because a citizen pays their taxes, unlike three dozen Obama aides, according to the IRS? Makes no sense in 2012.

And anyway that special access stuff is bunk. If being a multi-million-dollar campaign bundler really bought special treatment, then one of them from somewhere such as Oklahoma would have gotten like a $545 million federal loan guarantee for his solar panel company that was going bust. …

Marc Thiessen shows how this works for the crony capitalists.

In a speech this morning to the United Auto Workers Local 12 Hall in Toledo, Ohio, Vice President Joe Biden declared:

“Stated simply, we’re about promoting the private sector. They’re about protecting the privileged sector. We’re a fair shot, and a fair shake.… And ultimately that’s what this election is all about. It’s about a choice. A choice between a system that’s rigged, and one that’s fair.”

This is laughable. If Obama and Biden want to run on the idea that Republicans are defending a “rigged” system while they are “promoting the private sector,” they are going to run into a little problem of their own making called the Obama green energy program. …

Carl Cannon posts on the Rutherford B. Hays misquote.

… Speaking yesterday about energy, the president found it necessary to casually slander Rutherford B. Hayes. In Obama’s telling, Hayes was a Luddite who, when confronted with the invention of the telephone, wondered who would ever want to use one.

“That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore,” Obama intoned. “He’s explaining why we can’t do something instead of why we can do something.”

It’s hard to know where to begin unraveling this, but a good place to start is the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, where resident scholar Nan Card confirmed to any journalist who bothered calling her — which is more than you can say for the White House speechwriting crew — that Hayes never said anything of the kind about the telephone, or any other invention.

According to contemporaneous accounts, what Hayes really said when he first used the phone was, “That is wonderful.”

In fact, Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House, along with the first typewriter, and invited Thomas Edison in for a visit to show off the phonograph — and was no one’s idea of a technophobe. “He really was the opposite,” Card told Benjy Sarlin of Talking Points Memo. “Between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”

This is not first time Obama and his communications team have fallen for a quote they apparently ripped from the Internet. …

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An Irish film maker went to the Middle East and learned something he shares with us in the UK Independent.

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right — as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?

Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel’s incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.

Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions — and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.

I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish — from a country which is one of Israel’s chief critics — and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.

Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn’t a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks — neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.

These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.

But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. …

Ann Coulter gives an update on the Obama campaign to keep Romney off the ballot.

Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media’s take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night.

No matter what happens, Barack Obama’s boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times’ headline will be: “Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race uncertain.”

To explain the widening gulf in delegates won by Romney compared to the others — he now has more delegates than all other candidates combined — the media claim that a vote for any candidate other than Romney is an explicit vote against Romney.

Of course, even the NFM can’t pretend Ron Paul’s supporters would pick Gingrich or Santorum, both big-government, career politicians, as their second choice.

But in what universe would the second choice of Santorum supporters be a two-time adulterer on his third marriage, who lobbied George W. Bush to support embryonic stem cell research?

And are we to presume that voters who have no problem with Gingrich’s $1.6 million payoff from Freddie Mac would be morally offended by Romney’s hard-earned wealth? That voters willing to forgive a man who called Paul Ryan’s Social Security reform plan “right-wing social engineering” could never trust Romney?

Why isn’t it possible that votes for Santorum are votes against Gingrich, and vice versa?

The NFM doesn’t explain. Reporting their hopes and dreams rather than the facts, they simply assert that all votes for Santorum or Gingrich are “anti-Romney” votes.

It’s not Republicans who are looking for the anti-Romney. It’s Democrats.

Obama is already spending millions of dollars on anti-Romney ads. Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod, is desperately tweeting anti-Romney messages all day long. In open primaries in Michigan and Ohio, Obama’s Democratic supporters came out to vote for Santorum or Gingrich. MSNBC hosts openly encourage Democrats to vote for Rick Santorum. …

Charlie Gasparino on why the recovery has taken so long.

… The administration’s policies helped delay the rebound and make it more tepid than it might have been otherwise.

You can begin with Obama’s signature first-term economic “achievement,” the $800 billion stimulus plan that was supposed to create all those shovel-ready jobs and stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

We all know how that turned out, with unemployment hovering between 9 percent and 10 percent until recently and GDP floundering such that even some Obama supporters have attacked the stimulus’ futility. Much of the money went to states to plug their budget deficits and reduce government layoffs; another bunch went for cockamamie green schemes floated by such politically connected companies as Solyndra.

As for all the shovel-ready jobs, the president himself has joked about how they weren’t as shovel-ready as he expected.

But Obama’s biggest economic mistake wasn’t just the wasted stimulus but a war on US businesses that continues today.

Even as evidence mounted that his stimulus plan wasn’t working, the president basically ignored the nation’s economic woes and spent most of 2009 and 2010 pushing for the least business-friendly mandate to come out of Washington in years — his universal health-insurance plan.

Timing matters. Obama wasn’t pushing a new mandate during an economic boom, when employers might shrug off the costs and ignore the uncertainty, but when, as he puts it, the economy was in the ditch. Instead of giving the private sector reason for hope, he gave it more to fear — so businesses retrenched, and the “recovery summer” the administration predicted for 2010 never came.

Nor did it come last year. Again, some problems were clearly out of the president’s control. The tsunami in Japan and the euro crisis both were drags on the global economy. But so were Obama’s policies. …

A lot more detail on this from Peter Ferrara in the American Spectator. It is worthwhile reading this a few times since this is the meat of the campaign against the worst president since Jimmy Carter.

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. The American people are much poorer now because of that, and will remain poorer, falling farther and farther behind, until we change course and restore traditional American prosperity.

The recession started in December, 2007. Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research to see the complete history of America’s recessions. What that history shows is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

Dude, Where’s My Recovery?
Yes, the economy was in recession when President Obama entered office, which he never tires of telling us. But that was not unique to Obama. There have been 12 recessions in America since the Great Depression. The American people have forgotten what that was like because President Reagan and his Reaganite Republicans gave us a 25 year economic boom from 1982 to 2007 with no serious downturn.

President Obama’s responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again. His record in achieving that is not to be measured from the worst of the recession, but to previous recoveries in U.S. history. And, no, President Obama cannot say that his recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad (worse than he thought he now tells us, after spending all of 2008 telling us it was the worst recession since the Great Depression). The American historical record is that the worse the recession the stronger the recovery, as traditional, long-term, American prosperity has always been restored.

Based on that historical record, we should be in the third year of an economic recovery boom right now. That is what we experienced under Reagan, which was the last time we recovered from a recession of similar magnitude.

In the first 2 ½ years of the Reagan recovery, the American economy created 8 million new jobs, the unemployment rate fell by 3.6 percentage points, real wages and incomes were jumping, and poverty had reversed an upsurge started under Carter, beginning a long-term decline. While Obama crows about 227,000 jobs created last month, in September, 1983 the Reagan recovery less than a year after it began created 1.1 million jobs in that one month alone. In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years.

In contrast, under President Obama, unemployment actually rose after June 2009, when NBER counts the recession as officially ending, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December 2010. Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment this high since the Great Depression. Even today, 51 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers is still nearly 15%.

And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression. Under Obama’s supposed recovery, the number of working age Americans not in the labor force rose by 7.14 million. As John Lott and Grover Norquist recently observed, “There is no comparable post-World War II ‘recovery’ where this type of exodus has occurred.” …

Proof that government can work comes from John Steele Gordon writing about Walker’s Wisconsin.

… For the first time in decades, school administrations are now actually able to administer their districts without union interference, and the savings have been huge. The MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin think tank, reports that of the 108 school districts that completed contracts with employees, 74 of them, with 319,000 students, have reported savings of no less than $162 million. If this is extrapolated out to all districts, it would amount to savings of nearly $448 million.

The biggest area of savings have been in health insurance. The teachers union insisted that districts use the union’s own health insurance company to provide coverage. No longer forced to use a monopoly provider, districts have either switched providers or used the threat of switching to force the union health insurance company to dramatically lower premiums. Savings have averaged $730,000 in districts that have switched providers or forced competitive bidding.

As a result of these dramatic savings, districts that have been able to benefit immediately from the reforms (some districts are locked into long-term contracts and cannot) have been able to avoid laying off teachers despite a significant drop in state aid and to avoid raising school taxes. Indeed, school tax bills that went out last December had an average increase of only 0.3 percent.

It is hard to imagine that with results like this, Governor Walker has anything to worry about.

NY Times on India’s changes over the last 20 years.

ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer.

As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be “the final stamp of globalization.”

For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.

I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indian father and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’s austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but also culturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.

All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’s transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety.

I left for boarding school in America in 1991. By the time I graduated from high school, two years later, Indian cities had filled with shopping malls and glass-paneled office buildings. In the countryside, thatch huts had given way to concrete homes, …

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Warren Meyer in Forbes has a great post listing the ten reasons legislation goes bad. It is kind of a road map of unintended consequences. The last two are pure Frederic Bastiat.

Every year I get to teach a day of a high school economics class.   Just as the school’s resident radical progressive does a day on Marx, I get to come in as the token libertarian.    While I am always tempted to go off on a long rant about individual liberty and the role of coercion in both the Republican and Democratic platforms, seeing that it is an economics class I have tried instead to introduce some interesting bits from an array of libertarian favorites, from public choice theory to Austrian economics to Bastiat.   What I have decided to do this year is to discuss why bad things happen to well-intentioned legislation.   Specifically, I offer these 10 economics traps that legislators frequently fall into:

1.  Ignoring incentives     In evaluating how the public will respond to a piece of legislation, one needs entirely to forget the stated purpose or intentions of the law, and look instead at how individuals are likely to respond to the taxes, payments, mandates and rules embodied in the legislation.  Tax a behavior, or make it more time-consuming to pursue via regulation, and you will get less of it.  Make something cheaper or easier, and you will get a lot more of it.

Sometimes this is the whole point of the legislation.  For example, large taxes on cigarettes are meant to deter consumption.  Mortgage interest tax breaks are meant to increase the number of people who own rather than rent their homes.

However, at other times, in the rush to achieve some well-intentioned goal, or even just out of sheer neglect, the incentives built into legislation create significant unintended consequences.  Consider two examples

In GAAP accounting, interest on debt is treated as an expense, whereas dividends are treated as a return of capital to shareholders.  When the corporate income tax system was put in place, it relied on these existing accounting definitions to define taxable income — all perfectly logical.  But the net effect was to make the cost of debt tax deductible, while the cost of equity is not.  Over time, as corporate tax rates have risen, this has induced a substantial bias towards debt over equity financing, arguably making corporate finance more risky.

When AFDC (welfare) was passed, it was a well-intentioned effort to help poor families, particularly single mothers.  Unfortunately, as structured, it created incentives for mothers to remain unmarried, to avoid getting a job, and to even have more children than they might have.  Over the following decades, the number of unemployed single women exploded.

2.  Public Choice Theory     Speaking of incentives, it turns out that they are important for legislators and government officials as well. …

Walter Russell Mead posts on the looming Detroit bankruptcy.

… Leftie intellectuals spend a lot of time analyzing the “false consciousness” that keeps American workers voting for Republicans who (in the view of the intellectuals) support anti-worker policies. We don’t hear nearly as much from these incisive social thinkers about the false urban consciousness that keeps voters supporting policies and politicians that have ruined the cities, but there you are. Many of the policies that are dearest to the hearts of powerful Democratic politicians are responsible for wrecking the lives of many of their most loyal supporters, but the loyal supporters turn out year after year.

When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.

It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. …

Also in Forbes, Joel Kotkin writes on the continuing foreign investment in our country’s economy.

Declinism may be all the rage in intellectual salons from Beijing to Barcelona and Boston, but decisions being made in corporate boardrooms suggest that the United States is emerging the world’s biggest winner. Long the world leader as a destination for overseas investment, the U.S. is extending its lead as the favored land of overseas capital.

Since 2008, foreign direct investment to Germany, France, Japan and South Korea has stagnated; in 2009, overall investment in the E.U. dropped 36%. In contrast, in 2010 foreign investment in the U.S. rose 49%, mostly coming from Canada, Europe and Japan. The total was $194 billion, the fourth highest amount on record.

Foreign investment is already reshaping the American economic landscape, shifting wealth and income from differing regions. The transformative role is nothing new. After all, the country started as a colony of England, and for much of the 19th century remained dependent on European investors for everything from building canals to railroads. Without European capital, the settlement of the West and the rise of cities such as New York would have been far slower.

Today this pattern is re-asserting itself as foreign countries rediscover America’s intrinsic advantages: a huge landmass, vast natural resources, a large, expanding consumer market and a relatively predictable legal system. Our relatively vibrant demographics demographics — at least before the Great Recession depressed birthrates and immigration — marks a strong contrast with such key countries as Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of which are aging far more rapidly than the United States. China’s authoritarian political system leaves many investors reluctant to expose themselves too much to the regime’s often less than tender mercies.

The investment boom is concentrated not so much in the most celebrated sectors, such as tech or trophy real estate, but in the more basic industries that are best suited to our large, resource-rich country. Investment in the burgeoning energy sector more than tripled to $20 billion between 2009 and 2010. Some of this investment has come into the renewable industry, where Europe and China also have heavily subsidized companies, but the vast bulk has been devoted to the country’s expanding production of oil and gas. …

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NY Post OpEd compares two Dem presidents.

There is a lot of luck involved in a presidency; it wasn’t because of Jimmy Carter’s personal incompetence that the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw helicopter mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. Similarly, it’s not mainly President Obama’s fault that the economic recovery is so weak — but he is hardly the one to make this argument after blaming President Bush for the 2008 financial crisis. Presidential decisions aren’t always at the core of everything.

Nevertheless, the comparisons of Obama to Carter have something to them besides the dull gray feeling of each presidency, the four-year wallow in economic quicksand.

Both men were borne into office on a surge of good feeling — a clean slate, renewal, possibility bordering on exhilaration. And both men seemed hurt, embittered and overwhelmed when history fell short of hype. …

Stephen Moore compares the boom in North Dakota with the gloom in California.

In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that “we can’t just drill our way out of” our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.

Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output. This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. And the oil rush is making Dakotans rich in a hurry, with farmers and other landowners becoming overnight millionaires from lucrative royalties and leases. One retired farmer tells me that, thanks to oil rigs churning on his property, he suddenly has a net worth north of $30 million.

When I ask how many people live in Williston, which had a population of 12,000 in 2005, longtime residents shrug and offer different answers: 20,000? 25,000? 30,000? Every night, hundreds of workers sleep in the hulls of their trucks or in temporary housing encampments like soldiers in a war zone. New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald’s is offering workers $18 an hour plus a “signing bonus.” In Williston, certainly, America remains the land of opportunity. …

Matthew Continetti on the president’s shameless campaign.

… Since he lacks a significant and popular domestic achievement, the president seems to have concluded that the way to a second term is through the mobilization of key constituencies rather than a broad-based appeal to middle America. He combines these appeals with cheap gimmicks to generate publicity and deflect attention from the Republican primary. Now that his job is in trouble, the man who enthralled millions during the campaign of 2008 has been reduced to just another transactional political panderer. The gloss is off. Even the liberal Washington Post writer Dana Milbank says White House hiring practices make “a joke of the spirit of reform he promised.”

The new Obama strategy was baldly transparent during the president’s recent address to the United Auto Workers conference in Washington. The inspirational rhetoric and pleas for American unity were replaced with fiery and combative words directed at opponents of the auto bailout. A majority of voters may continue to oppose the government intervention in GM and Chrysler, but you would not know that from listening to the president. GM and Chrysler’s recent good fortune has led the Democrats to pronounce the bailout a stunning success. But, if the bailout worked so well, why does the federal government still own around 30 percent of GM? (Clearly Obama understands that the bailouts are a problem: On Thursday, the government began to reduce its stake in AIG—to the ludicrously high share of 70 percent.)

The timing of Obama’s speech to the UAW could not have been accidental. As the president was delivering his broadside against his political adversaries and rallying labor’s shock troops, Republicans held primaries in Michigan and Arizona. Again and again, the president has demonstrated an eagerness to interfere with the GOP’s moments in the spotlight. Think of the time he hastily scheduled a rebuttal to Vice President Cheney’s 2009 speech on detention and interrogation policy. Or recall his Midwest bus tour, timed to coincide with the kickoff of the Republican campaign at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Or remember this past Tuesday, when Obama decided that the Republicans’ Super Tuesday elections would be a good time to hold his first press conference in months. …

Major Garrett says the re-elect effort is worried about GOP super pacs.

… Obama’s reelection campaign has a split personality when it comes to the general election. One side is confident and growing more so about the turbulent GOP primary, an improving U.S. economy, and better numbers for Obama in swing states. The other side harbors fears bordering on paranoia about massive spending by the GOP and outside super PACs for the party’s nominee.

“There is already unprecedented super-PAC spending going on,” Messina said. “There will be super-PAC spending in key states against us. We have to be prepared for that.”

To prepare for it, Obama’s campaign has put the rest of the Democratic Party on a starvation diet. Messina and senior White House adviser David Plouffe (Obama’s 2008 campaign manager) have told top Democrats that they won’t receive any cash transfers from Obama’s campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sought commitments for $30 million, the amount distributed to them in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Not this time.

Messina said that the campaign fears outside groups will devote upward of $500 million to anti-Obama super-PAC TV ads as soon as the GOP nominee (likely to be Romney) is decided. By comparison, GOP nominee John McCain spent $333 million on his campaign, and outside groups spent $26 million supporting him. Obama spent $730 million in that campaign, and outside groups spent $88 million attacking him.

“We are in a whole new world here,” senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said. “The president has taken on some very powerful interests and the Citizens United ruling allows those interest groups to siphon off unlimited amounts of money. We would be insane not to be worried about that. We believe we have the strongest candidate, but money does matter.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case made it easier for individuals, corporations, and labor unions to donate unlimited amounts of money to independent political action committees, now known as super PACs. Super PACs supporting Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have kept those campaigns afloat, even though federal law prohibits any direct coordination.

Reid and Pelosi, according to Democrats aware of the sit-down with Plouffe and Messina, took their medicine without complaint. Democrats close to the situation said that the leaders emerged feeling that Team Obama was in full-blown panic mode about the need for campaign cash this fall. “They are just freaked out about super-PAC spending,” said one of Pelosi’s top allies. …

Turns out our next president has a sense of humor. Molly Ball has the story in The Atlantic.

When Mitt Romney, campaigning in Mississippi on Friday, said “y’all,” the collective cringe from the political world was practically audible. Another awkward moment from the GOP’s animatronic front-runner! Another terribly off-key pander!

But maybe it was something else: a wry joke.

For all the hype about his woodenness, Romney, I submit, actually has the most sophisticated — and underappreciated — sense of humor of any presidential candidate. It is dry, self-deprecating and a bit dark, a far cry from the safely hokey laugh lines of most politicians on the stump. And it bespeaks a confidence and flair not often attributed to the much-maligned candidate.

This is the man who famously went to Michigan, the state he grew up in and then left for good, and praised it thus: “The trees are the right height.” You pretty much can’t get a better absurdist parody of politicians’ vapid sure-is-nice-to-be-here patter than that.

Romney’s Southern quip was similar — a knowing play on how glaringly out-of-place he seemed. …

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David Warren spots a politician with courage; in Spain.

Telling the truth is, in the best sense, a revolutionary act. It is disturbing, and divisive, and can be exceedingly unpopular – not only among those heavily invested in falsehoods, but also among those who want “peace in the family.” That is how various ridiculous lies acquire the politically-correct aura. It is because there will be no peace if they are contradicted.

And it is why, even though I am what could be called a “deficit hawk,” my hat goes off to the new Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, now disturbing the peace of the European Union by stating the truth about Spain’s budgetary intentions. This Galician gentleman, who commands the conservative People’s Party, came to power just before Christmas after nearly eight years’ opposition to the socialist prime minister, José Luis Zapatero.

It was an interesting election. (All Spanish elections are interesting.) Rajoy was thought, by the chattering classes, to have blown his prospects by hanging fiscally tough, and mentioning “social issues,” when there was a strong voice within his own party for tacking to the centre. By winning his landslide, Rajoy then became the media poster-boy for “meanness” – the man who threatens to break Spain’s unions, generally get a grip, and deliver obedience to the EU’s fiscal demands. (I have never understood how anyone could want to be a conservative politician.)

His country’s problems are not small. Zapatero blew the bank, as socialist premiers are inclined to do, and moreover delivered that most ecological of accomplishments: a shrinking economy. Such politicians walk the road to ruin, by consistently taking the easy way out. Zapatero could be counted on to sign any cheque, and capitulate before any other hard demand emanating from his party’s most “progressive” factions; though reversing course whenever the other side became louder. He kept “peace in a family” that is now tearing each others’ guts out in recriminations.

Rajoy inherits not only the mess, but a public sector now accustomed to getting whatever it wants, promptly. …

David Goldman pauses to consider the incompetence of this administration.

… Compared to the Carter cabinet, though, the Obamoids are a kids’ Purimspiel, a put-on by the peanut gallery masquerading as adults — a clown show, in plain English. Macbeth was never so beguiled by his witches as is McBama by the witches who surround him: Iran-raised Valerie Jarrett, human-rights mavens Susan Rice and Samantha Power, the resentful Michelle, and the Pink Pantsuit at the State Department. What’s her name again? She used to be somebody important.

I stand by my February 2008 profile of Obama as a sociopath dominated by strong women. Obama and his coven suffer from up-close-and-personal identification with the putatively oppressed peoples of the Third World. That goes far beyond the academic prejudices that liberal college students absorb from post-colonial theory. One has to live in the Third World, as Obama did during four of his formative years and Jarrett did in early childhood, to understand the rage and despair of the losers. Many times during visits to Third World countries, I sort of wished that I were a Communist. You see cruelty and indignity that shouldn’t be visited on a cockroach.

To round out the list, we have Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense, a political operator and accountant whose job is to cut the budget. Timothy Geithner? The Stan Laurel half of a duo with the departed Larry Summers. Tom Donilon as national security advisor? His biggest job was six years as chief lobbyist for bankrupt Fannie Mae.

There’s not a single member of the Obama cabinet with grown-up qualifications. …

Michael Barone says it is not just in foreign affairs that Obama kicks the can down the road.

… When the bipartisan commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson presented their recommendations for entitlement reform in December 2010, Obama ignored it. It seemed to end up in the White House’s round file.

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put Medicare reform in his 2011 budget proposal, and all but four Republican House members voted for it, the Obama political operation ginned up attacks on Republicans for killing “Medicare as we know it.”

Last week at a Budget Committee hearing, Ryan chided Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for not having proposed any solution to the looming entitlement problem.

Geithner’s reply: “You’re right when you say we’re not coming before you today to say ‘We have a definitive solution to that long-term problem.’ What we do know is we don’t like yours.”

In other words, campaign 2012 takes precedence over taking us off the trajectory that is heading us toward the fiscal condition of Greece. A Cabinet secretary able to draw on the policymaking expertise at Treasury and on his administration’s own Bowles-Simpson commission is unwilling to do so because his president is following the game plan of David Plouffe and David Axelrod.

The Treasury cannot be bothered even to draft the new alternative minimum tax that Obama keeps demanding Congress pass to make Warren Buffett pay a higher tax rate than his secretary.

The folks who hailed Obama as temperamentally bipartisan have given Ryan and House Republicans little credit for addressing a tough problem and will probably tell us Obama will be bipartisan in a second term. I think it’s more likely he’ll keep kicking the can down the road.

Mark Steyn is in Australia so he’s not sure this isn’t all a fluke. 

I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me – the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law and recently testified before Congress.

Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of “Miss Fluke Goes To Washington,” with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”

Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less-evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She’s a couple of years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked but, if the Dems are to be believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater contribution to humanity.

She’s had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who’ve booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing “Sarah Palin is a c***” routine …)

Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-age schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life.

Well, as noted above, she’s attending Georgetown, a nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas, Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three grand – and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students “struggle financially” because of the heavy burden of maintaining a respectable level of pre-marital sex at a Jesuit institution.

As I said, I’m on the other side of the planet, so maybe I’m not getting this. …

Contentions post tells a Romney story.

I don’t care how many Cadillacs Mitt Romney owns, how many earmarks he requested, or how many individual mandates he approved. This is an extraordinary man.

We first heard about it in the 2008 campaign: how Romney saved the teenaged daughter of a Bain Capital colleague in 1996. Here’s what Mitt did when he learned the girl had gone missing after sneaking from her home in Connecticut to a party in New York City: he shut down the whole office and flew the staff from Boston to New York; he had fliers printed up and got employees at Duane Reade (in which Bain invested) to stuff one into every customer’s bag; he set up a phone hotline; he personally, along with his Bain people and their New York accountants and lawyers, pounded the city’s pavements looking for the girl and asking teenagers if they’d seen her. After a few days of all this – and the publicity it generated – they traced the hotline call of someone asking for a reward and found the girl, who had overdosed on Ecstasy, in the basement of a New Jersey home. …

Corner post by Mario Loyola on the amount of oil production choked off by BO.

The news wires are reporting that President Obama actively lobbied Senate Democrats to defeat the Keystone pipeline yesterday. The effect of blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline is to defer 700,000 barrels of oil per day. And as I reported at The Weekly Standard recently, the president’s policy of choking off oil production under federal leases will prevent another 1 million barrels of oil per day this year, and even more next year. 

Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some 2 million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about 6 million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production. …

Charles Lane says the Dem love affair with alternative power sources is anti-science.

… Democrats and liberals are fond of calling their conservative and Republican adversaries “anti-science.” To the extent that the right espouses “creation science,” or disputes established facts about environmental degradation, it’s an appropriate label.

But progressives’ fascination with electric cars and other alternative-energy schemes reflects their own refusal to face the practical limitations of alternative energy — limitations that themselves reflect stubborn scientific facts.

Stubborn Scientific Fact No. 1: Petroleum packs a lot of energy per unit of volume. (Each liter contains 34 megajoules.) Consequently, gasoline makes a cheap, portable and convenient motor fuel.

By contrast, even state-of-the-art batteries deliver far less energy than gas, in a far bigger package. A Volt can go 35 miles on a single charge of its 435-pound battery. This sounds like a big deal until you realize that a gas-engine Chevy Cruze gets 42 miles per gallon — and costs half as much as a Volt.

It costs a fortune to pump, refine and ship crude oil. Yet even accounting for all that, gas-powered cars are a better value than electric vehicles and will be for some time. Gas savings on the Volt would take nine years at $5 per gallon to offset its higher price over the Cruze, an Edmunds.com analysis found last month.

Gas consumption creates “negative externalities” — instability in the Middle East, carbon emissions — not fully reflected in its price. But another fact about electric vehicles is that their juice comes from the fossil-fuel-burning grid in the first place.

Oh, and how are you supposed to resell your electric vehicle once you’ve driven it five years and the battery is depleted? … 

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Charles Krauthammer says Obama is trying to stall Israel’s strike past the election.

It’s Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced this week to yet another round of talks with the mullahs.

This, 14 months after the last group-of-six negotiations collapsed in Istanbul because of blatant Iranian stalling and unseriousness. Nonetheless, the new negotiations will be both without precondition and preceded by yet more talks to decide such trivialities as venue.

These negotiations don’t just gain time for a nuclear program about whose military intent the International Atomic Energy Agency is issuing alarming warnings. They make it extremely difficult for Israel to do anything about it (while it still can), lest Israel be universally condemned for having aborted a diplomatic solution. …

… Yet beyond these obvious contradictions and walk-backs lies a transcendent logic: As with the Keystone pipeline postponement, as with the debt-ceiling extension, as with the Afghan withdrawal schedule, Obama wants to get past Nov. 6 without any untoward action that might threaten his reelection. …

Omri Ceren posts in Contentions on the intent of the administration.

Most pro-Israel president evuh:

“We’re trying to make the decision to attack as hard as possible for Israel,” said an administration official… he suggested that any Israeli strike on Iran before international oil and gas sanctions take effect this summer would undermine the tenuous unity the United States and its allies have built to oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Privately, White House officials say the coalition would explode with the first Israeli airstrike.

The Europeans have been ahead of Obama on the need to take a hard line against Iran, with French President Sarkozy fuming even during the election that Obama was “utterly immature”  …

More on James Q Wilson. This time from Michael Barone.

Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.

His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the distinctive middle initial.

And I think a case can be made that that Q was a clue to the character of the man. To outward appearances Jim Wilson was an ordinary middle class American with middle class values and middle class tastes as unremarkable as those of thousands of other Jim Wilsons across the land.

But as a scholar, writer and human being he was one of a kind, with a probing mind, a capacity to sift and weigh evidence and an ability to reach conclusions that even the harshest of critics found hard to refute.

And one whose careful prose did not always manage to conceal a puckish sense of humor. A man as distinctive as the Q.

And John Podhoretz.

James Q. Wilson—who was this nation’s foremost political scientist, literally the author of the definitive textbook on the workings of American government, a writer of uncommon grace and clarity, and a man who believed more than anyone I’ve ever known in the power of the human capacity to reason to change things for the better—died this morning at the age of 80.

To my mind, his greatest and most enduring book in his oeuvre is The Moral Sense, in which this very practically-minded man carefully lays out the case for the existence of the title condition as an innate condition of humankind. But his signal contribution to American life over the past 30 years lies in his work as a criminologist, and his delineation (with George Kelling) of the theory of “broken windows,” about how social disorder and crime are in large measure the result of little transgressions in behavior and against the common weal, that, ignored and unchallenged, grow into ever larger ones. The expostulation of the broken windows theory literally inaugurated the revolution in consciousness in American policing and criminal justice that led to the astounding crime drop of the 1990s—a drop that continues to this day. …

More from JoPod.

As I promised earlier in my post about the death of the great James Q. Wilson, Commentary is making available the entirety of his 45 years of contributions to our magazine. You can find the James Q. Wilson Archive here.  There is so much wonderful stuff it’s hard even to know where to begin, so let me start with the last words he published here, in our symposium called “Are You Optimistic or Pessimistic About America’s Future?” It will give you a flavor of the man’s unmatchable perspective:

“Many years ago, I confidently published an essay in which I made a prediction. It was hopelessly, embarrassingly wrong. Since then I have embraced the view that social scientists should never predict; leave that job to pundits. If you doubt me, make a list of the economists who predicted the 2008 recession, political scientists who predicted the Arab Spring, or criminologists who said that this recession would be accompanied by falling crime rates. A few names may make the list, but very few.

“Historians may do a better job than other scholars in making generalizations, but that is because the good ones never predict, they generalize from past experiences. Those experiences suggest that this country has been extraordinarily lucky, and they hint at some reasons for that good fortune: an adaptable government, an optimistic national character—and extraordinary good fortune …

In her She The People blog at WaPo, Melinda Henneberger tries to understand the moral equivalence of the left.

It’s hard to keep score in the still-escalating war on women, especially when the two sides in the fight have different standards of what’s insulting depending on who’s insulted.

The problem is that somehow, a sexist rant is only a sexist rant when it’s an attack on a woman in our own party. Otherwise, we call any comparison a “false equivalence” — and dream up creative ways in which conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut is not at all like liberal TV host Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a slut.

Watch and learn, aspiring parsers, as former Obama aide Bill Burton, founder of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama Super PAC to which HBO’s Bill Maher has donated $1 million, insists that Maher calling Sarah Palin what many women consider the most objectional slur is nothing like Limbaugh’s slurs against womankind.

As Burton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “the notion that there is an equivalence between what a comedian has said over the course of his career and what the de facto leader of the Republican Party said to sexually degrade a woman who led in a political debate of our time, is crazy.”

So Maher is a comedian, and Limbaugh isn’t — because Burton finds the one funny and the other a clown?

Michael Rubin wonders if there are worse places to live than Montgomery County, Maryland?

When I got married a few years back, I had wanted to stay in Virginia—where taxes were lower—but my wife wanted to live in Maryland, and so we compromised and moved to Maryland. Montgomery County, Maryland, is Democrat country. Lawn signs proliferate but, like elections in Cuba, they are all for a single party. Still, despite the high taxes and looming pension crisis, the school system is good and I figured, how much harm could a county government do? A lot, it seems. With little debate and even less coverage, Montgomery County passed a law to discourage disposable bags by imposing a 5 cent charge for each plastic or paper bag used. The charge applies not only in supermarkets, but in all stores: Home Depot? Bag charge. Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Bag Charge. Barnes and Noble? Bag charge. Take-out Chinese food? Bag charge.

While county officials justify the bag tax in kindergarten environmentalism, this is nonsense.