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Thomas Sowell thinks an Israel that depends on an Obama promise is in trouble.

What are we to make of President Barack Obama’s latest pronouncements about Iran’s movement toward nuclear bombs? His tough talk might have had some influence on Iran a couple of years ago, when he was instead being kinder and gentler with the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring nation. Now his tough talk may only influence this year’s election — which may be enough for Obama.

The track record of Barack Obama’s pronouncements on a wide range of issues suggests that anything he says is a message written in sand, and easily blown away by the next political winds. Remember the “shovel-ready projects” that would spring into action and jump-start the economy, once the “stimulus” money was available? Obama himself laughed at this idea a year or so later, when it was clear to all that these projects were going nowhere.

Remember how his administration was going to be one with “transparency”? Yet massive spending bills were passed too fast for the Congress itself to have read them. Remember the higher ethics his administration would practice — and yet how his own Secretary of the Treasury was appointed despite his failure to pay his taxes?

If you were an Israeli, how willing would you be to risk your national survival on Obama’s promise to stand by your country? If you were a leader of Iran, what would you make of what Obama said, except that an election year might not be the best time to attack Israel? …

Roger Simon went to AIPAC this year and files his impressions.

  Before Sunday morning, I had never seen Barack Obama in person. Of course, I had seen him on television roughly as often as Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse combined, but the man himself had eluded my eyes.

Not that seeing him with approximately 13,000 other AIPAC attendees and press (not sure exactly how many were there, but most) in the Washington Convention Center constitutes anybody’s version of “up close and personal.” But I am forced to admit — and you can put this down to the power of preconceptions, if you wish — that catching our president in the flesh only confirmed what I had long thought of him from afar.

This is one strange dude — part narcissist, part Chicago ward heeler, part neo-Alinskyite marxist, part talk show host smoothie, part nowhere man. The ideas might be there, traceable back to Ayers, Dohrn, and Reverend Wright, but he has pushed them far away, almost as if he were trying to forget them. They were no longer functional and had to go, but he is left with… what?

It’s hard to tell what he really thinks now because I suspect even he doesn’t know what that is. He is a kind of moving target, not just to us, but to himself. …

Good post from James Pethokoukis on the meaning of economic freedom and the will to prosper.

You think the Great Recession is the biggest economic story of our time? Nope. Not even close. This is:

“A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. … Much of the story was about China, which moved nearly 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13 percent from 84 percent during that period. The country’s annual pace of economic growth never dipped below 9 percent, even in 2009, when the world’s economy contracted.”

What happened in China? Well, although there’s a debate over whether or not Deng Xiaoping actually said it, his alleged axiom, “To get rich is glorious” is certainly the message Beijing started sending in 1978. And what people hear and believe matters. Really matters. Economist Deirdre McCloskey on how “bourgeois dignity” created the modern world:

“We need to explain the astonishing enrichment in bourgeois countries from 1800 to the present, such as Norway’s move from $3 a day in 1800 to $137 in 2006. But the explanation cannot be economic. If it were so — trade, investment, incentives — it would have happened earlier, or in other places. Economics determines how the tide of growth expressed itself down this inlet or beside that quay. Good. But the tide itself had “rhetorical” causes. …

What changed were habits of the lip. It’s not a “rise of the bourgeoisie,” but a rise in other people’s opinion of the bourgeoisie that makes for economic growth — as it is now doing in China and India. When people treat the marketeers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold. It was so to speak a shift in “constitutional political economy,” as James Buchanan puts the point. People agreed on the meta-rule of letting the economy go where it will. This contrasted with the earlier mentality, still admired on the left, that treats each act of innovation as an occasion to go looking for its victims. Victims there were, but they were greatly outnumbered by winners. It was ideas, not matter, that made the winners, and brought our ancestors from $3 to over $100 a day.”

Nick Schulz explains how the denial of T-Mobile purchase forces more players to play politics.

When the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission weighed the merits of AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile, they focused almost exclusively on the post-merger competition landscape. As a result, they failed to take into account a key rationale for the proposed deal: T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom (DTE), badly needed to get out of the U.S. market. Why? It concluded it could not compete effectively, and it needed to deploy its capital elsewhere.

Ignoring Deutsche Telekom’s needs, the DOJ and FCC blocked the merger. As a result, an uncompetitive firm is now trapped in a market it wanted to leave.

It didn’t take long, but we are now starting to see some of the unfortunate knock-on effects of the Obama administration’s effort to manage competition in telecommunications.

Deutsche Telekom is evaluating operations elsewhere around the globe as a result of the blocked deal. Recent press reports have the company looking to exit the UK market in an effort to raise much needed cash. According to one news account, “The former German phone monopoly had planned to use the proceeds [from the sale of T-Mobile to AT&T] to cut debt by 13 billion euros … Deutsche Telekom also needs funds to upgrade fiber and wireless networks in Germany and other European markets.”

Instead of Deustsche Telekom shareholders being free to allocate capital as they see fit, American regulators have forced them to prop up a wounded subsidiary, needlessly penalizing DTE shareholders.

Not only that, but Deutsche Telekom’s experience in the U.S. is a warning to other large companies to think twice before taking big risks in the American market, a consequence that will ultimately hurt U.S. consumers.

Unable to compete effectively in the U.S. private market, T-Mobile now has no choice but to compete in America’s political market. And this is where new troubles begin for American consumers. …

Hugh Hewitt writes a prequel for an 2012 election book for The Corner.

… “No one realized it at the time, but the paces Rick Santorum put Mitt Romney through in March planted the seeds of the president-elect’s sweeping win Tuesday night.  Even as Newt Gingrich had forced Romney to raise his rhetorical and debating game earlier in the cycle, Rick Santorum’s late winter surge pushed Romney to create the organizations and mine the data in Michigan and Ohio that helped deliver those crucial states on Tuesday night. 

“‘It felt like Hell at the time,’ a jubilant Matt Rhoades mused on Wednesday morning after a late night of celebrations over a landslide most observers thought impossible even weeks ago, ‘but what we learned then, the people we turned out, the volunteer and donor base we developed, well, it made all the difference in the swing states.’”

“’We couldn’t have created a better primary map for building a general election campaign, even though none of us would have picked that particular training regime,’ Rhoades added.”

“The unrelenting hostility of ‘Obama’s hand puppets in the MSM,’ as one Romney senior advisor put it, helped push Team Romney into an aggressiveness that might never have surfaced had the president-elect not been pushed from Iowa forward, and even a despondent David Axelrod had to admit last night that his plan to bleed Romney in the spring had, in fact, backfired.” …

Peter Schiff says there are reasons for Warren Buffet to knock gold.

… In the early stages of the financial crisis, when I was writing and promoting my first book Crash Proof to warn private investors about trouble ahead, Buffett was accumulating shares in companies such as Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and General Electric. I knew these companies were insolvent, so I wouldn’t touch them with gardening gloves on. When the credit markets seized up, Buffett worked behind the scenes and in public to make sure each of his pet companies were bailed out. This was not by coincidence. Buffett actually stated in September 2008 that he would not have invested in Goldman Sachs if not for the implicit guarantee of federal assistance. As a result, he profited at the expense of taxpayers at the very time when they were losing their savings in the markets. Meanwhile, many “in the know” politicians bought Berkshire stock during the height of the crisis, making a profit from their votes, and giving them incentive to revere Buffett all the more. Buffett once said if that if the government didn’t bailout failed companies, he would be “having my Thanksgiving dinner at McDonald’s instead of having a big dinner at my daughter’s.” Seems like there were two bloated turkeys at that meal.

If Buffett were a true capitalist, he would be in favor of gold. He has noted that the value of the dollar has fallen 86% since he took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and even said in his latest shareholder letter that investors are “right to be fearful of paper money.” But he continues to harp on gold. It seems the only unit of account Mr. Buffett approves are shares of his own company!

The adoption of an independent measure of value like gold presents two problems to Buffett. First, it would reduce the nominal returns of his dollar-based investing strategy. Second, it would restrict Washington’s ability to goose the financial system in his favor. …

According to Jon Entine at AEI, even the NY Times is coming to see the value of fracking for natural gas.

There are new twists in the ever-entertaining shale gas saga. The New York Times, which turned obscure Cornell University marine ecologist Robert Howarth into an anti-fracking rock star on the way to getting hammered by its own public editor—I take some of the credit—for its biased reporting on the subject, is finally getting on the science bandwagon.

Last April, the Times ran two articles in a week promoting Howarth’s claim that shale gas generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the production and use of coal. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this paper, which ricocheted through the media echo chamber and was even debated in the British parliament.

What the Times didn’t report then, and until now has been systematically ignored, is that almost every independent researcher—at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Energy Department, and numerous independent university teams, including a Carnegie Mellon study partly financed by the Sierra Club—has slammed Howarth’s conclusions. Within the field, Howarth is considered an activist, not an independent scientist. Many commentators, including independent lefty columnist Joe Nocera, think the gas is too valuable to be left in the ground, as the hard Left is urging.

Maybe a little fresh air is finally leaking into the Times’ insular chambers. …

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We devote a lot of space today to a profile of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh by James Kirchick in Commentary. Hersh is an example of the mendacity and partisanship of that magazine. Another example of the New Yorker’s bias is a list of pieces published in the last six months;

February 3, 2012          Jobs Report Makes It a “Super Friday” for WH – John Cassidy, New Yorker    (This was writen the day of the report.)

October 21, 2011          Will Stunning Success in Libya Help Obama? – David Remnick, New Yorker

October 12, 2011          Can Obama Win? Not This Way – John Cassidy, The New Yorker

October 3, 2011            A Hysterical Overreaction to Solyndra – James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

September 27, 2011     GOP Is Dedicated to Destroying Obama – Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker

September 12, 2011     President’s New Plan Will Boost Economy, Jobs – John Cassidy, New Yorker

September 10, 2011     President Obama vs. the Nihilists – George Packer, The New Yorker

September 9, 2011       Barry Gives ‘Em Hell – Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker

August 30, 2011            Obama’s Quiet Victory in Libya – David Remnick, The New Yorker

August 26, 2011            Leading From Behind to Victory – David Remnick, The New Yorker
 

Here are some excerpts from Kirchick’s piece;

Last June, the distinguished American journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real Is the Nuclear Threat?” His answer: not very. There exists no “irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” Hersh asserted, relying upon the words of anonymous “intelligence and diplomatic officials.” Hersh concluded with a quote from Mohamed ElBaradei, who had retired as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) two years earlier: “During my time at the agency,” ElBaradei said, “we haven’t seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing, in terms of building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”

A week before Hersh’s piece hit newsstands, news came of a letter sent by Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei’s successor, to the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The IAEA had received “further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear-related activities.” Amano wished to “reiterate the concern about the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Iran, as it has always done, dismissed the evidence collected by the IAEA as forgeries. 

In September, the IAEA revealed it had received information about Iranian “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Two months later, the agency released yet another report confirming what everyone already knew: The regime is pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. Among other information, the agency revealed tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” “the acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear-supply network,” and “work on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components.” The IAEA cited more than 1,000 document pages of “credible” information related to Iranian weaponization, accumulated by “more than 10 member states.”

The damning IAEA report was a long time coming. In September 2009, at a joint press conference on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the declassification of intelligence that revealed a secret, underground uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom—a highly inconvenient place to produce fuel rods for medical isotopes. Obama said that he delayed releasing the information for months, as it “is very important in these kind of high-stakes situations to make sure the intelligence is right,” and that the revelation of the plant “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.”

Hersh—the man described by the Financial Times as “the last great American reporter”—was unfazed. There remains “no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” he wrote in a November 18 blog post. To account for the IAEA’s increasingly harsh tone toward Tehran, he suggested that the agency’s new head, unlike ElBaradei, was a lackey of Washington, telling a radio interviewer that “Amano has pledged his fealty to America.”

Indeed, the IAEA report was nothing more than “a political document,” Hersh said, before revealing a hint as to why he was so adamant in denying the obvious about Iran’s nuclear intentions:

‘I wish we could separate our feelings about Iran and the mullahs and what happened with the students from 1979, into the reality, which is that I think there’s a very serious chance the Iranians would certainly give us the kind of inspections we want, in return for a little love—an end to sanctions and a respect that they insist that they want to get from us.’

As for the Obama administration’s posture toward Iran, it was little better than that of its predecessor. “The new report, therefore, leaves us where we’ve been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil,” Hersh wrote, “with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.” 

What could explain the positions of Obama and Clinton—liberal Democrats who, in Hersh’s eyes, have made the cardinal sin of expressing such distress about a nuclear-weapons program that doesn’t even exist? “Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it,” Hersh said in a 2007 interview on the far-left Democracy Now! radio show, in a discussion about the Democratic presidential primary. “A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat,” he continued. “And I think it’s as simple as that.” …

… For his reporting on My Lai, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize, and the story made him, in the words of then-New York Times managing editor A.M. Rosenthal, “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” The Times promptly hired Hersh to work in its Washington bureau, where the sloppiness that would come to define his journalism career soon became evident. In 1974, he claimed that the former U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, was involved in a coup d’état the previous year. It wasn’t until 1981 that Hersh would write a 3,000-word, front-page retraction exonerating Korry that Time referred to as “the longest correction ever published.”  …

… When not accusing Republicans and Israelis of warmongering, Hersh downplays or ignores the actual warlike behavior of rogue states. In this role, he has been a literal court stenographer to tyrants. In February 2008, Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that a Syrian facility bombed by Israel the previous September “apparently had little to do with…nuclear reactors.” Three months later, the Bush administration released a series of images of the facility before it had been destroyed, revealing nuclear fuel rods similar to ones used in North Korea, as well as a photograph of the head of North Korean’s Yongbyon nuclear plant meeting with Syria’s nuclear agency director. Last April, IAEA’s Yukiya Amano unequivocally stated that the site was “a nuclear reactor under construction.” And in November, UN investigators found evidence that Syria was working with rogue Pakistani nuclear-weapons scientist A.Q. Khan on its facility. 

The following year, Hersh authored a piece suggesting that Bashar al-Assad—inserted into power in 2000 after his father, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades, died—was eager for a peace deal with Israel. Communicating with Hersh by e-mail, the dictator wrote that, while Jerusalem was “doing everything possible to undermine the prospects for peace…we still believe that we need to conclude a serious dialogue to lead us to peace.” Hersh met with Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, who assured the New Yorker correspondent that “Syria is eager to engage with the West”—a genuine desire for peace that, of course, “was never perceived by the Bush White House.” …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: 82-year-old Christopher Plummer is the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award. Of course, when the show started, he was only 79.

Conan:  ‘The Artist’ won five Oscars. That works out to one Oscar for every person who saw the movie.

Fallon: Feb. 29 was Leap Day, something that only happens once every four years — or as Newt Gingrich calls that, ‘a sit-up.’

Fallon: Today marks the 158th anniversary of the Republican Party. While tomorrow marks the 158th Republican debate.

If you hang around Colorado folks, you’ll hear about 14ers – mountains over 14,000 feet high. We found a breathtaking picture of Mt. Everest taken from a Napal hut located at 14,000 feet. Only three more miles to go.

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Ron Christie, Pickings reader, says the GOP will do fine in November.

While gleeful reports abound that the G.O.P. is disorganized, dispirited and headed to defeat in November, facts have a way of ruining this rosy narrative for the Democrats. Observing Democrats and their supporters in the media (like the author of the New York magazine article), one would think President Obama has already been re-elected – and the actual voting is nothing more than a formality.

Despite such cheerleading, Democrats, not Republicans, should be worried about their prospects this election cycle. One need not look any further than the 2010 midterm election as a barometer as to why Democrats shouldn’t be planning their redecorations of the Oval Office, Congress or the state house following the 2012 contest.

Notwithstanding claims by the president and Democratic leaders, the “stimulus package” and the Affordable Care Act remain deeply unpopular with a majority of the American people. Whether the left believes it or not, voters chose the 2010 midterm elections to rebuke both President Obama and Congressional Democrats for their overreach in dramatically expanding the size and scope of the federal government. …

Andrew Malcolm spots the irony of the president kicking a woman out to the way so he can make an election year commencement address at Barnard College.

… we are now privy to how President Obama approaches commencement addresses: He invites himself. For strategic communications purposes.

Any president gets scores of speech invitations every graduation season. This president has followed a usual policy of doing four a year, usually a public school, a private school, a black school and a service academy.

This year, we now know, one of his speeches will be at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University. Obama’s aides invited him to speak at Barnard, according to the school’s president, Debora Spar, because they said, ”As the father of two daughters, President Obama wanted to speak to some of America’s next generation of women leaders.”

Of course, Obama has been the father of two daughters for a decade now. So, what makes this leap year so daughtery-special? Well, mainly Nov. 6. The women’s vote is a very important sector in presidential politics.

And Obama’s policy people have been driving a variety of issues this year designed to place him in the most sympathetic light of female eyes. Can you say Health and Human Services’ contraception insurance coverage decision? And having the president insert himself into the Sandra Fluke controversy over a 30-year-old student seeking government support for her $3,000 birth control needs. …

The president gave a speech last week to the UAW. David Harsanyi comments.

… the United Auto Workers union is a special interest. Like other unions, the UWA regularly lobbies Congress, funds Democratic candidates across the country with millions, and advocates public policy that undercuts competition and free trade. And, as The New York Times recently reported, the UAW and other unions will “put their vast political organizations into motion behind Mr. Obama.” (Nothing like a few strategic taxpayer “investments” to get labor inspired.)

And if by “be beaten down” the president means “compete in the marketplace like every other sucker in America,” well, he’s right. If by “be beaten down” he means “go to bankruptcy court — even if you’ve ‘played by the rules’ — and honor contracts you’ve signed rather than have a friendly administration rip them up and rewrite them in favorable terms for others, then heck yeah.

Yet Obama claims, “I” — “I” — “placed my bet on American workers.”

Now, it’s your bet, technically, of course, Mr. President. And let’s be honest; all my favorite bets are made with other people’s money. But you didn’t bet on the American people. That would mean betting that the marketplace and those in it have the capacity and the smarts to find increasingly productive and innovative ways to produce the things that consumers demand. You bet on a politically convenient corporation that believes it’s entitled to eternal state-sponsored protection. Too bad Woolworth’s and Pan Am couldn’t hold out until you came along. …

Politico has a story that adds emphasis to Ron Christie’s post above. Pelosi and Reid have asked the White House for campaign cash this year and have been told to take a hike. Obama is all out for himself and the hell with the rest of the Dems. Oh the humanity!

… The tightfistedness by the Obama campaign toward Hill Democrats reflects the harsh realities of the 2012 White House fight. Obama, who broke all fundraising records in his historic 2008 run, isn’t going to be the overwhelming financial juggernaut that he was four years ago. Obama still has a big edge in money raised and cash on hand — OFA and the DNC reported nearly $92 million in cash at the end of January after hauling in a combined $250 million last year, according to campaign records — over any Republican challenger.

But that still leaves Obama far short of the $1 billion that many pundits had predicted he would raise this cycle. Messina has railed against such claims for months, as it became a problem for Obama because some donors didn’t think he needed their support. Obama could still raise $700 million to $800 million, Democrats predict, a total that could be eclipsed by the GOP nominee, the Republican National Committee and shadowy pro-GOP super PACs.

The financial caution for the Obama team also reflects the growing power of super PACs, especially for Republicans. The groups — technically unaffiliated with any candidate yet already a huge factor in the GOP presidential contest — are prepared to dump tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, into the White House race. So far, Democrats, including Obama’s own super PAC allies, have been unable to match that flood of pro-Republican cash.

For instance, Crossroads, the Karl Rove-linked super PAC and nonprofit, will spend as much as $300 million bolstering the GOP presidential nominee and Republican congressional candidates and incumbents, POLITICO and other news organizations have reported. …

Bill McGurn reminds us that in 1980 Reagan was not Reagan.  

… Then as now, the Republican primaries opened with a bang, when George H.W. Bush upset Ronald Reagan in the Iowa caucuses. By late February, this loss would lead to Reagan’s firing of his campaign manager, John Sears, in a disagreement over strategy.

Then, as now, Republicans feared that an unhappy contender might bolt the party to mount an independent campaign. In 1980, that was liberal John Anderson, not libertarian Ron Paul. Mr. Anderson did end up running as an independent, whereas Mr. Paul will likely be constrained by the effect a third-party run would have on the future prospects for his Republican son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Then as now, the chattering classes wondered aloud whether a candidate who could win the Republican nomination could prevail against President Carter in November. On March 1, former President Gerald Ford amplified that view when he told a New York Times reporter, “Every place I go and everything I hear, there is the growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election.”

Then as now, some put their hopes on a late entry, in the same way that some now pine for Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie to enter the race. In the same interview where Mr. Ford predicted that Reagan’s nomination would mean a repeat of 1964, he also declared himself open to a draft if there were a genuine “urging” by the party. …

Rasmussen Reports shows the Obama weakness.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 25% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18 …

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Today’s efforts focus on James Q. Wilson who just passed. PowerLIne starts it off.

There’s a persistently legend that deaths of similarly situated famous people—actors, writers, political figures, etc.—come in threes.  One of the persons who would have gone to the statistics to debunk this notion, social scientist James Q. Wilson, died today, just a day after Andrew Breitbart, and shortly after Christopher Hitchens.  Like Hitchens and Breitbart, Wilson was utterly unique and irreplaceable.

I knew him slightly better than Breitbart, in his capacity as the chair of the board of academic advisers to AEI.  We feted him at our chairman’s dinner back in December, during which George Will reminisced:

In his exasperation one day [Pat Moynihan] encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said, “Mr. president, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.”

Nixon did. Not enough, the Lord knows, but he did pay some attention. James Q. Wilson’s name became sufficiently well-known to the Nixon reelection campaign that they solicited Jim’s name to be included on an ad—Democrats, I believe, for Nixon. I may be wrong; I take this from Moynihan’s letters. At this point, Jim Wilson was being considered for membership on a presidential commission on drug abuse, which he cared much about, and the president cared much about, and he wanted to have this.

But Jim said to this Nixon campaign apparatchik, he says, well, I might allow my name to be on that. In which case, of course, you would have to withdraw my name as a nominee to the drug panel and not consider me for any other position lest it seemed that my name is for sale. It was a kind of nicety not normally seen in Washington and probably unexpected on the part of the Nixon people, who were that not used to dealing with professors. . .

But wherever Republicans go, and certainly I feel the same way, we feel sooner or later we have a Robinson Crusoe experience. We look down and we see footprints in the sand of someone who’s there ahead of us, and it’s always James Q. Wilson. It’s very discouraging, frankly. The prescience of the man is astonishing, partly because, as I say, everything we’re arguing about today, he has argued already.

In his own remarks, Wilson struck a modest pose:

Let me turn to my own field, political science. In 2008, despite up-to-date polling, despite the results of countless debates, political scientists were persuaded that the candidates for the presidency would be Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani. There were two other people whom nobody spent any time talking about. Now, this is the background for people who try to guess about the future. It reinforces my view that the main role of a social scientist is not to predict the future but to explain what happened in the past.

My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right.

You can read the whole tribute to him here.

And here is that tribute from AEI’s dinner for James Wilson. First is Arthur Brooks.

… Jim is the author of more than a dozen books. One reviewer has described his 1993 seminal book The Moral Sense as “the most significant reflection on this matter since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Book reviews just don’t get better than that. He’s had an enormously distinguished academic career. Currently, he’s a professor at Boston College’s Department of Political Science, but before that he has served as the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine, the James Collins Professor of Management at UCLA, and the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation, and a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association. Jim has been an intellectual hero and mentor to me and to many people of AEI for many years. At one point in my academic career, I was citing Jim so much that my colleagues said I should change my name to Arthur Q. Brooks.

I met Jim because he sat in on my Ph.D. dissertation defense lo these many years ago. Several years after that, I got an email from Jim. He knew that I was doing work on charitable giving at that time. I was an untenured assistant professor, and he asked me a research question about charitable giving, saying that he was thinking of writing a book on the subject.

I took the opportunity to send the great man an outline of a book that I was working on, on charitable giving. It was a pretty audacious thing to do, but I did it anyway. Quickly, within a few minutes, I got an email back from him saying, “I enjoyed your outline. I don’t think I need to write my book now, but I’d be delighted to help you with yours.” He carefully reviewed each one of the chapters in that book. He wrote the book’s foreword. He made the book immeasurably better, and that project quite literally changed the trajectory of my career. That’s a little bit of insight into the man and to the character of the man. A giant intellect with the convictions of a patriot and with a servant’s heart, that’s why he’s a hero to so many of us in this room tonight. …

Here’s more from Charles Murray.

… Back in 1975 when I was a newly minted Ph.D., I picked up the New York Times magazine and therein found an article entitled, “Lock Them Up and Other Thoughts on Crime.” In the first place, I just loved the title because in 1975 no academic said lock them up. Imprisonment was barbarous and we ought to be rehabilitating people. That you would entitle an article like that struck me as something audacious.

But then I read the article and I fell in love even more because, as all of you who have read Jim Wilson know, you have this mastery of the literature. You have this calm, wry voice, and you have this person who is speaking to you as an adult, who expects you to understand nuanced arguments, and respects you for your ability to do so. He became my hero.

Four or five years later, I wrote an evaluation of a program in Cook County, Chicago, for chronic juvenile delinquents, so obscure that no one could possibly have found it except, somehow, James Q. Wilson did. He called me up on the phone and said, I’m going to be in Washington, let’s have lunch. It was as if a parish priest in some village in Galway had gotten a call from the pope: I’m in the neighborhood, let’s have a drink.

So Jim came to Washington and I, quivering, went to the lunch where he quizzed me on the article and treated me as if he were chatting with Harvey Mansfield in the Harvard faculty club. It was an immensely gratifying experience for me, but that’s not why I’m telling the story. It’s because of what it says about Jim Wilson. First as a scholar, because if he knew about that evaluation of that program in Chicago, he knew everything there was to know about his topic, which has been characteristic of all of his work. The second is the person—unassuming, treating people not according to their status but simply as colleagues, a man who warrants the term gentleman in a way that is seldom used anymore. …

And here are some of Wilson’s remarks at that dinner. Find the ever so subtle slap at the man Don Imus calls, “skunk vomit,” That would be Newt.

… My old thesis adviser, Edward C. Banfield of the University of Chicago, looked at me once and said, Wilson, stop trying to predict the future. You’re having enough difficulty predicting the past. He was quite right. But as I look at AEI, I’ve discovered one thing that is quite remarkable. By and large, AEI scholars have done better at predicting the future than the people interviewed by Philip Tetlock or these brokerage accounts analyzed by Terry Odeon.

Fred Kagan and his wife predicted that the surge would work in Iraq and described how to make it work, and they were absolutely correct. Peter Wallison, in an early piece published in The New York Times on September 30, 1999, explained that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were disastrous and would become bankrupt. Within a few years, they proved to be disasters and became bankrupt, meanwhile having spent many millions of dollars on persons who, though not lobbyists, were busy advising them. In 2010, Des Lachman explained that Greece was going to (heading for) a crisis that would make it threaten to leave the European Union.

Now, why did these scholars do better than the ones interviewed by Tetlock? I think part of it is good management. Chris DeMuth and Arthur Brooks have been extraordinarily good at picking people who, despite the odds against them, do better than the averages and make statements that, though they may not value predicting the future, do better at predicting the future than anyone else. …

Turns out this is Neanderthal week. The New Scientist says they were sea-going. 

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago – though not everyone is convinced they weren’t just good swimmers.

Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren’t islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. …

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The president is spinning about what a good friend he is to Israel. Anne Bayefsky begs to differ.

On the eve of a meeting between President Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president has orchestrated the publication of his most revealing interview yet on the state of relations between the two countries. Instead of bolstering his pro-Israel image, however, the interview is proof-positive of his dangerous animus towards the Jewish state and its elected leaders.

The interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg took place earlier this week but was released only today. In it, the president exasperatedly asked:

“Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they’ve had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?”

To which Goldberg solicitously responded: “That’s a good way to phrase it.” The president replied: “There is no good reason to doubt me on these issues.”

Let me count the ways.

During the interview the president claimed to “have Israel’s back” at the United Nations, among other places. The administration’s actions at the UN allegedly corroborate that his “relationship [with Israel] is very functional and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

What digestible meal might that be? The president specified:

“When you look at what I’ve done with respect to … fighting back against delegitimization of Israel, whether at the [UN] Human Rights Council, or in front of the General Assembly, or during the Goldstone Report, or after the flare-up involving the flotilla — the truth of the matter is that the relationship has functioned very well.”

Actually, the truth is that President Obama has done more to legitimize the delegitimizers of Israel than any other president in the history of the Jewish state.

For instance, …

And domestically there are the anti-growth policies of this administration. Jim Powell was in Forbes.

For several hundred years, a consensus developed in Western nations that economic growth – human progress – is a good thing. But now economic growth is under attack.

Economic growth has meant more jobs, higher incomes, more wealth and all the good things that become possible — a more comfortable life, better nutrition, better health care, more education, a cleaner environment, a secure retirement, a higher life expectancy and confidence that our children will be living even better.

In addition, when there is sustained progress, people gain greater peace of mind. They tend to become optimistic, more generous and tolerant. There’s more political stability, and democracies are more likely to flourish when, as John F. Kennedy famously remarked, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Yet President Obama has backed one anti-growth policy after another. His relentless class warfare rhetoric suggests he thinks growth is bad because some people have a lot more money than others. He might deny that he’s anti?growth, but his actions speak louder than words.

During 2008 election campaign, he acknowledged that he favored capital gains tax hikes, even though the results would be less investment, less job creation and less capital gains tax revenue.

He had to have known that by draining hundreds of billions of dollars away from the private sector, then channeling the bulk of the money to government bureaucracies and government employee unions, his stimulus bill would mainly “save or create” government jobs, not private sector jobs.

He had to have known that the following policies would increase cost of operating a business, making it harder to create private sector growth and jobs: …

WSJ OpEd on the end of life choices made by doctors for themselves.

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life. 

What’s unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little.

Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with his family. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently. …

Sweden’s Uppsala University published some new ideas about the demise of Neandertals.

New findings from an international team of researchers show that most neandertals in Europe died off around 50,000 years ago. The previously held view of a Europe populated by a stable neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years up until modern humans arrived must therefore be revised.

This new perspective on the neandertals comes from a study of ancient DNA published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The results indicate that most neandertals in Europe died off as early as 50,000 years ago. After that, a small group of neandertals recolonised central and western Europe, where they survived for another 10,000 years before modern humans entered the picture. The study is the result of an international project led by Swedish and Spanish researchers in Uppsala, Stockholm and Madrid. …

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Craig Pirrong, Streetwise Professor says energy is scarce, but stupidity is abundant.

It is difficult to figure out which commodity induces more mass stupidity-gold or oil. Upon reflection, it seems that the stupidity is price dependent, and given the rise in gasoline prices the oil-related stupidity is taking the lead.

Glibfinder wrote a comment and friend R told me about a particularly distilled example of oil induced insanity-the Bill O’Reilly-Lou Dobbs discussion last Friday.  I am well familiar with O’Reilly’s cluelessness on energy.  Whenever prices are high, he asserts that oil companies can charge whatever they want for oil, and are overcharging: which always raises the question of why they would let prices fall to around $30/bbl (2008-2009) or $10/bbl (1998).

Being a glutton for punishment, I watched.  Or tried to, anyways.  I could take it for only about 3 minutes. O’Reilly spewed his usual story, this time with a bit of a new spin: Prices are “subjective” so companies can charge whatever they want. Believe me: he wasn’t making a subtle, Austrian-economics based point.  Then he and Dobbs went on crude Mercantilist rants that would have been an embarrassment in 1775.

O’Reilly, while denying he was a socialist, claimed that the government has a legitimate right to control oil prices because it is “our oil.”  I was waiting for him to channel Woody Guthrie, and break out singing “This oil is your oil, this oil is my oil.”

But O’Reilly and Dobbs are just talking (empty) heads. Barack Obama is president of the United States, but he is as idiotic about energy (and economics generally) as they are.  He’s just idiotic in a different way.

He has repeatedly ridiculed increased production of hydrocarbons, saying that it is impossible to drill our way out of dependence.  In Saturday’s radio address, he said that drilling isn’t a plan, “it’s a bumper sticker.” …

Andrew Malcolm comments on Obama’s algae alchemy.

Speaking, perhaps. But political optics have never been Barack Obama’s strong suit.

He talks, by golly, about ending special tax breaks so that every American pays their fair share, while 36 of his own aides owe the IRS more than $833,000 in back taxes.

He urges Americans to vacation on the beleaguered Gulf Coast while his wife flies with pals to a luxury hotel in Spain. He promises the most open government in history and VP Joe Biden meets with the chief of administration transparency — in a closed meeting. Twice.

To underline his commitment to green energy and conservation, Obama travels to an electric car photo op – in a 17-vehicle motorcade of SUVs.

So, Thursday the president of the United States climbed into his government jet and flew two hours down to Florida to talk at University of Miami student engineers about energy conservation and innovation.

It was, of course, a phony event, an early afternoon official presidential visit tacked on to cover three political fundraisers that evening, two in Miami and one in Orlando, raking in around $4 million. (At the same time Michelle Obama collected more money from two Midwestern fundraisers and Biden did another in New England.)

If the president can claim he’s doing some “official” work on these trips, then his campaign need reimburse less for travel on a government plane. (And don’t worry, Obama did get to watch the Knicks-Heat game on satellite TV in flight.) …

Wait a minute, says David Harsanyi, haven’t the Dems wanted gas prices to rise?

… So why aren’t Democrats making the case that the spike in prices is a good thing? Isn’t this basically our energy policy these days? How we “win the future”? If high energy prices were to damage President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects, it would be ironic, considering the left has been telling us to set aside our “dependency” — or, as our most recent Republican president put it, “addiction” — for a long time.

If Democrats had their way, after all, we would be enjoying the economic results of cap-and-trade policy these days — a program designed to increase the cost of energy by creating false demand in a fabricated market. As the theory goes, if you inflate the price of fossil fuels, the barbarians might finally start putting thought into how peat moss might be able to power a toaster.

In 2008, Steven Chu, Obama’s (and, sadly, our own) future secretary of energy (sic) lamented, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” The president, when asked whether he thought $4-a-gallon gas prices were good for the American economy, said, “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”

How gradual? Like, what, four years? Or is it eight? …

Arthur Brooks says the president’s budget appeals to the lowest common denominator.

The president’s proposed new budget has three noteworthy characteristics: continuing unfunded entitlements to the middle class, runaway deficits to be repaid in the undefined future, and immense tax increases on the entrepreneurial class. Many commentators have complained about the damage this budget would do to our national prosperity. Less has been said about the effect it will have on something far more important: our national character.

There is a tremendous amount of research on the links among success, character and the ability to sacrifice. It all reaches the same conclusion: People who cannot defer current gratification tend to fail, and sacrifice itself is part of entrepreneurial success.

In one famous study from 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel concocted an ingenious experiment involving young children and a bag of marshmallows. He put a marshmallow on the table and told each child that if he (or she) could wait 15 minutes to eat it, he would get a second one as a reward.

About two-thirds of the kids failed the experiment. Some gave in immediately and gobbled up the marshmallow; videotape shows others in agony, trying to discipline themselves—some even banging their little heads on the table.

But the most interesting results from that study came years later. …   (The marshmallow eaters vote for democrats. – Pckrhd)

Speaking of instant gratification, scientists managed to teach monkeys the value of money. Soon after, one of the females started to turn tricks. The story comes from ZME Science.

You may have thought things like currency or money are concepts known solely to man. Some might have a sense of ownership, besides of course territory, but trading and the likes haven’t been observed in any other species besides homo sapiens. An economist/psychologist duo from Yale back in 2005, however, managed to train seven capuchin monkeys how to use money, and I’m pretty sure from here on some of you might be able to guess what happened from there on.

‘The capuchin has a small brain, and it’s pretty much focused on food and sex,” said Keith Chen, a Yale economist who along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, are the two researchers who have had made the study. ”You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,” Chen says. ”You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.”

It’s exactly this selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success after teaching capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. The economist wanted to study the incentives that motivated specimens to behave in a way, while the psychologist analyzed the behavior itself. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Letterman: The North Korean news agency reports that birds and pandas are sobbing and moaning over beloved leader Kim Jong Il’s death. Wait! Is it possible they’re sobbing and moaning because they live in North Korea?

Fallon: Did you see last week a North Carolina couple got married in the layaway section of a Walmart? Then for their honeymoon they went to Target.

Letterman: Baseball spring training opens. Pitchers and catchers reported today. Infielders tomorrow. And Hollywood girlfriends on Wednesday.

Fallon: Last week was the 20th Republican debate. Which explains the new campaign slogan, ‘Vote Mitt Romney — or else we’ll keep doing this.’

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Toby Harnden leads off our picks on Obama’s war on religion.

At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday, President Barack Obama suggested that his desire to raise taxes on higher-income Americans was rooted in the Bible. ‘For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required’,’ he said.

Which prompted Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (and a Mormon) to comment acidly: ‘Someone needs to remind the President that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office. I think most Americans would agree that the Gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.’

It was just the latest example of Obama’s tin ear on matters religious. Remember, this is the man who was a member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago, where sermons about ‘God Damn America’ and the US being responsible for 9/11 were preached but which remained, in Obama’s eyes, a place that was not ‘actually particularly controversial’.

Far more serious, however, than Obama’s crude attempt to state that the rich should pay higher taxes because Jesus wanted them to (in addition to this being, in VP Joe Biden’s view, a patriotic obligation) are his recent actions which amount to a declaration of war on the Roman Catholic church.

On January 20th, as much of the American political class was preoccupied with the impending GOP South Carolina primary, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was a requirement for contraceptive services to be offered by insurance policies supported under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

While there were exceptions for places of worship, there was no conscience protections for church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These organisations will be required by law to provide free contraception to employees, even thought that is in violation of church teachings.

The move has been condemned by figures on both the Left and Right. The liberal Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne lit into Obama. So too did his colleague Michael Gerson, formerly President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter. …

Peggy Noonan says the president may have just lost the election.

… But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church’s charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. …

One of the congresspersons who voted for ObamaCare recants. Weekly Standard Blog has the story.

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.

“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,” Dahlkemper said in a press release …

Daniel Henninger says the church is complicit because of the acceptance of federal funds. Fans of Hillsdale College, please note.

… So here we are, with the government demanding that the church hold up its end of a Faustian bargain that was supposed to permit it to perform limitless acts of virtue. Instead, what the government believes the deal is about, more than anything else, is compliance.

Politically bloodless liberals would respond that, net-net, government forcings do much social good despite breaking a few eggs, such as the Catholic Church’s First Amendment sensibilities. That is one view. But the depth of anger among Catholics over this suggests they recognize more is at stake here than political results. They are right. The question raised by the Catholic Church’s battle with ObamaCare is whether anyone can remain free of a U.S. government determined to do what it wants to do, at whatever cost.

Older Americans have sought for years to drop out of Medicare and contract for their own health insurance. They cannot without forfeiting their Social Security payments. They effectively are locked in. Nor can the poor escape Medicaid, even as the care it gives them degrades. Farmers, ranchers and loggers struggled for years to protect their livelihoods beneath uncompromising interpretations of federal environmental laws. They, too, had to comply. University athletic programs were ground up by the U.S. Education Department’s rote, forced gender balancing of every sport offered.

With the transformers, it never stops. In September, the Obama Labor Department proposed rules to govern what work children can do on farms. After an outcry from rural communities over the realities of farm traditions, the department is now reconsidering a “parental exemption.” Good luck to the farmers. …

Michael Barone thinks the president’s isolation leads to bad decisions.

… As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.

His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.

Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements.

Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.

The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths.

Catholic bishops responded predictably by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.

Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.

David Brooks, comments on what he called an “underreported story.”

… Brooks made the traditional conservative argument against the administration, suggesting it was a form of “bureaucratic greed”.

“When you have the government saying one size fits all … you are going to do it our way, or not, well, then that insults a lot of people,” he continued. “And so I think this is having resonance across the country. It was — statements were issued in a lot of masses, a lot of pulpits this past Sunday. And, you know, I think it’s going to have a significant lingering effect for a long time.”

This controversary comes concurrent with Obama’s speech at the national prayer breakfast where a critic delivered a devasting prequel. Corner post fills us in.

If the organizers of the national prayer breakfast ever want a sitting president to attend their event again, they need to expect that any leader in his right mind is going to ask — no, demand — that he be allowed to see a copy of the keynote address that is traditionally given immediately before the president’s.

That’s how devastating was the speech given by a little known historical biographer named Eric Metaxas, whose clever wit and punchy humor barely disguised a series of heat-seeking missiles that were sent, intentionally or not, in the commander-in-chief’s direction.

Although Obama began his address directly after Metaxas by saying, “I’m not going to be as funny as Eric but I’m grateful that he shared his message with us,” both his tone and speech itself were flat, and he looked as though he wished he could either crawl into a hole or have a different speech in front of him.

In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that somehow Metaxas had been given an advance copy of Obama’s talk, then tailored his own to rebut the president’s.

Metaxas, a Yale grad and humor writer who once wrote for the children’s series Veggie Tales, began his speech with several jokes and stole the show early on when he noted that George W. Bush, often accused by his critics of being incurious, had read Metaxas’s weighty tome on the German theologian Bonhoeffer; he then proceeded to hand a copy to the president while intoning: “No pressure.”

Obama has been under pressure for some time now to somehow prove his Christian bonafides, for it’s no secret that millions of Americans doubt his Christian faith. A Pew Poll taken in 2010 found that only one third of Americans identified him as a Christian, and even among African-Americans, 46 percent said they were unsure of what religion he practiced.

Obama came to the prayer breakfast with a tidy speech that was clearly designed to lay those doubts to rest. He spoke of his daily habit of prayer and Bible reading, his regular conversations with preachers like T. D. Jakes and Joel Hunter, and even told a story of the time he prayed over Billy Graham.

But before the president could utter a word, it was Metaxas who delivered a devastating, albeit apparently unintentional critique of such God-talk, recounting his own religious upbringing which he described as culturally Christian yet simultaneously full of “phony religiosity.”

“I thought I was a Christian. I guess I was lost,” he matter-of-factly stated.

Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:

“When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.”

“Keep in mind that when someone says ‘I am a Christian’ it may mean absolutely nothing,” Metaxas added for good measure, in case anybody missed his point. 

The eerie feeling that Metaxas was answering Obama on a speech he had yet to give continued …

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Time for a good look at Charles Murray’s latest effort. First a review in the Wall Street Journal.

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. …

Here’s a review from Real Clear Books.

Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.

One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up. …

WSJ Live Chat featured Mr. Murray.

Question from reader Alan: I read and reviewed your book on Amazon. Most reviewers believe your book is important because it accurately portrays the shrinking middle class. However, many disagree with your perception of the CAUSE. You seem to believe that the middle class is shrinking because of a decline in MORALITY — of middle class people being less willing to marry, go to church, and find work today than before. Most of the reviewers believe the middle class is shrinking because of ECONOMICS, because it is less easy to obtain work that pays an income that allows one to support a family. In other words, many believe that lack of MONEY, not lack of MORALITY, is what is shrinking the middle class.

Charles Murray: Actually, I don’t say the middle class is shrinking. But the economics question is the big one. Short story: working class wages didn’t rise over the last 50 years, but neither did they fall. And the bad things regarding labor force participation increased during the boom. When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren’t telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can’t find it. An amazing number of them aren’t interested in working.

Question from reader Florida Bob: Stimulus only works if it encourages Americans to purchase-American made goods. We seem to be creating more jobs in China than America. Most of the jobs being created here are service jobs, jobs that create nothing that is trade-able for the imported manufactured goods and energy that they consume.

Charles Murray: This book isn’t about life in the Great Recession. It’s about what happened to work in the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s, and part of the 2000s when jobs were plentiful, including low-skill jobs paying good wages.

Reader Doug81: Can Mr. Murray comment on how there is a cultural divide between “classes” on how we treat money? In my opinion, the people of “Belmont” take advantage of excellent mortgage offers and credit card rebates while the people of “Fishtown” pay high interest on bad loans or loan-like transactions.

Clarification from Ryan Sager: Fishtown – for those who haven’t read the excerpt – is a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that Mr. Murray uses as a stand-in for the white working class.

Charles Murray: We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.

Reader Oscar Looez-Guerra: Are we encouraging a divided society by delaying the assimilation of immigrants?

Charles Murray: Absolutely. But I have to say that all the immigrants I run across, and there are lots in my region, seem to act more like real Americans than a lot of the people already here.

Reader Randall Ward: What do you believe has been the root cause of the degeneration of the people on the bottom?

Charles Murray: The 60s have a heavy load of blame to bear, both in the political reforms of that era and the films/television cultural shifts. But that doesn’t tell us much about where we go from here. …

Just before we get to the humor section, we have a story from the Sun-Times where the joke of a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets dishonorable mention. You see, over the past five years Chicago Public Schools has passed out a quarter of a billion dollars of unused vacation and sick pay to retirees. Duncan got $50,000.

The cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools system spends tens of millions of dollars annually on a perk that few other employers offer: cash to departing employees for unused time off.

Since 2006, the district paid a total $265 million to employees for unused sick and vacation days, according to an analysis of payroll and benefit data obtained by the Better Government Association under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

By far the largest share — $227 million — went to longtime employees for sick days accumulated over two or three decades.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently ordered a halt on paying unused sick time to non-union employees at City Colleges of Chicago after the BGA found at least $3 million in such payouts to former employees over the last decade. Among the biggest beneficiaries was former Chancellor Wayne Watson, who has received $300,000 of a promised $500,000 payout for 500 unused sick days.

“This policy is unacceptable to the mayor and not consistent with the city’s sick day policies for its own employees,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Emanuel. The mayor also directed other city agencies, including CPS, to halt such payments, review their policies and devise plans to end the practice permanently.

At CPS, the top payouts went to top brass, including more than 300 longtime principals and administrators, who received more than $100,000 during the six-year period from 2006 to 2011, the BGA found. The highest payment topped $250,000.

Beneficiaries included former schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. Secretary of Education, who received $50,297 for unused vacation time when he left in January 2009, according to the data. Duncan now believes the policy should be re-evaluated. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: Starbucks closes its very first East Coast store after 19 years. It just couldn’t keep up with its main competition, a Starbucks across the street.

Conan: Now word that the government may be required to release the Osama bin Laden killing video. Obama says this is, “Unhelpful, inflammatory and please release it two days before the election?”

Leno: President Obama is working on a new tourism plan to make it easier for foreigners to get into the U.S. We have that already. It’s called Mexico.

Letterman: Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.

Letterman: Wow, Super Bowl. Let’s break it down: $184 million for potato chips, $250 million for pretzels, $500 million for beer, $4 for celery.

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Bill Kristol says it is not just about the economy.

… focusing a campaign only on the economy is risky. The economy is unpredictable, and may end up doing well enough in 2012 that it doesn’t automatically help the Republicans—even if the nominee is someone who can boast of his success in the private sector and knowledge of how business works. …

… Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how Obama-care threatens freedom of religion (see Jonathan V. Last’s piece in this issue). We’ve been reminded of Eric Holder’s pathetic and ideological mismanagement of the Department of Justice (see Mark Hemingway’s editorial). We’ve seen several instances of this president’s weakness in foreign policy (see Elliott Abrams’s editorial). We’ve had reminders from the Congressional Budget Office of the looming entitlement and budget disaster and of the Obama administration’s gross irresponsibility on that front.

So there’s plenty besides the economy for the GOP to call attention to, to shout about, to use to illustrate the short and long-term dangers of Obama administration policies. A successful Republican presidential candidate will have to be about far more than the economy, narrowly understood, in order to win the election and to lay the groundwork for successful governance. Ronald Reagan famously asked at the end of the 1980 campaign whether we were better off than we had been four years before. But he had spent his whole campaign laying the predicate for that question by explaining why the Carter administration’s foreign and domestic policies had failed, not just economically but socially, and not just at home but in the world. He was also able to explain why liberal policies would continue us on a downward path. Reagan never left any doubt that the fundamental problem wasn’t just a few quarters of subpar economic performance. The problem was the arrogant destructiveness and wrongheaded fecklessness of modern liberalism. It still is.

Mark Steyn says Komen didn’t have it coming.

As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness-raising” ribbon for breast cancer – as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness-raising” ribbons: my current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.

Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The Foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.

But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Sen. Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: …

Jennifer Rubin has Komen comments too.

… You might agree or not but the presumptuousness of liberal members of Congress who believe it is within their purview to bully private charities suggests that the left really does not understand the important distinction between public policy and private, voluntary civil institutions. (See my colleague Greg Sargent’s piece on the letter that two dozen members sent to the Komen Foundation.) … 

… Pardon me, but this is nuts. Planned Parenthood can raise its own money (which it did in spades in the wake of the flap). Those who want to give to a breast cancer charity can donate with the peace of mind that their money will be used to fight breast cancer. (Donors did so generously as a result of the controversy.) Now Planned Parenthood’s bosses have every right under current law to do what they do and raise money to fund their organization. But shame on them for intimidating other groups that might contemplate the same move as the Susan G. Komen Foundation made.

And to members of Congress, let me say: Butt out. Don’t you have enough to handle not doing your own jobs without hectoring charities to do your bidding?

Ross Douthat wonders why the media is so blind about abortion.

IN the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances.” These results do not vary appreciably by gender: in the first Gallup poll to show a slight pro-life majority, conducted in May 2009, half of American women described themselves as pro-life.

But if you’ve followed the media frenzy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision — which it backpedaled from, with an apology, after a wave of frankly brutal coverage — to discontinue about $700,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, you would think all these millions of anti-abortion Americans simply do not exist.

From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had “politicized” the cause of women’s health.

Steven Malanga writes in the Journal about the court that has broken New Jersey. 

When he decided against running for president last fall, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he had lots more to do to fix his “broken” state. Certainly true on spending and taxes, where Mr. Christie has made significant progress. But there’s another issue he’s only begun to take on: the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Last month Mr. Christie nominated two new members to the court, easily one of the most activist in the nation. His appointments could reshape the seven-member panel, which over the past half-century has transformed the Garden State, seizing control of school funding and hijacking the zoning powers of towns and cities, among other moves.

“I don’t think the supreme court has any business being involved in setting the budget of the state government,” the governor complained last year. Yet it is, extensively.

New Jersey’s supreme court is the product of the state’s 1947 constitution, which jettisoned the unwieldy 16-member Court of Errors and Appeals. The new court established in its place was shaped by Arthur Vanderbilt, a former dean of New York University’s law school who served as the court’s first chief justice. Vanderbilt is best remembered for persuading President Dwight Eisenhower to appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court William Brennan, who then led that court’s liberal activist wing for more than three decades.

The New Jersey court was power-hungry from its inception, but its ambition began bearing serous fruit, especially regarding education policy, in the 1970s. …

Politico has the story of Dick Armey dispensing with Newt.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), head of FreedomWorks, said Sunday presidential candidate Newt Gingrich won’t have another comeback.

“I don’t think Newt will be able to replicate that magic moment,” Armey said, adding he believes Gingrich’s peak in South Carolina was a momentary surge and he has “played that string out.”

“I feel bad for him. I think he’s digressed; taking a second-rate campaign into a first-rate vendetta,” Armey said of Gingrich’s attacks on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.