Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the Weekly Standard blog, Mark Hemingway says the jobs number is even more dismal than you think.

According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent. However, this report from MarketWatch suggests the data is much worse than that:

“McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 — after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted — in which 62,000 jobs were added. That’s not a net number, of course, and seasonal adjustment will reduce the Hamburglar impact on payrolls. (In simpler terms — restaurants always staff up for the summer; the Labor Department makes allowance for this effect.) Morgan Stanley estimates McDonald’s hiring will boost the overall number by 25,000 to 30,000. The Labor Department won’t detail an exact McDonald’s figure — they won’t identify any company they survey — but there will be data in the report to give a rough estimate.”

If Morgan Stanley is correct, about half of last month’s job growth came from the venerable fast-food chain. That is hardly the sign of a healthy economy.

Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor, strikes at the heart of the problem with our current gangster government. Equal treatment under law is replaced with arbitrary rulings based on the political whims of the government class. In the instance Pirrong relates, the DOE warns (threatens) a company that has been given license to export natural gas.

…Greg Meyer of the FT, who wrote a good article on the company’s change in fortune, pointed out to me this language in the Department of Energy’s decision approving Cheniere’s application to export gas:

“We intend to monitor those conditions in the future to ensure that the exports of LNG authorized herein and in any future authorizations of natural gas exports do not subsequently lead to a reduction in the supply of natural gas needed to meet essential domestic needs. The cumulative impact of these export authorizations could pose a threat to the public interest. DOE is authorized, after opportunity for a hearing and for good cause shown, to take action as is necessary or appropriate should circumstances warrant it. Furthermore, DOE/FE will evaluate the cumulative impact of the instant authorization and any future authorizations for export authority when considering any subsequent application for such authority.”

…It is a threat to micromanage trade…through coercion. …

It is also a piece with this administration’s modus operendi–what Richard Epstein calls “government by waiver” in this typically incisive article.  A government agency arrogates to itself the discretion to permit or disallow individuals and firms to engage in voluntary transactions, with only the vaguest statement of the criteria it will use to make these decisions.  …Note that there is not even an assertion–let alone a proof–of a real externality (as opposed to a pecuniary, distributive one) to justify this threat of intervention.  This is purely a threat to use coercion to achieve a politically desirable distribution of wealth between producers and consumers of natural gas.

…All this really means is: we will do what we want when we want for whatever damn reason we want.  It is, as Epstein argues, the antithesis of the rule of law…

…When every regulator at every government agency has the power–and the active encouragement of the political authorities–to say “Nice little business you got here. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it, would you?” one should not be surprised that these businesses are reluctant to invest or hire.  Not in Putin’s Russia.  Not in Obama’s United States. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner posts that listening to Paul Ryan speak reminds him of another great optimist who had faith in the greatness of America.

…Like Reagan, Ryan is driven by a deep-seated belief in free market conservatism, in addition to a powerful sense of American greatness and exceptionalism. He also shares Reagan’s mantra that America’s prosperity and projection of power in the world can only rest upon a sound national defence, with the strong investment in the nation’s military that entails.

…No doubt in response to President Obama’s penchant for apologising for America’s past and his “leading from behind” foreign policy, Ryan also made a Reagan-like tribute to American exceptionalism, and a firm defence of Western civilisation:

“Today, some in this country relish the idea of America’s retreat from our role in the world. …

This view applies moral relativism on a global scale. Western civilization and its founding moral principles might be good for the West, but who are we to suggest that other systems are any worse? – or so the thinking goes.

Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed; and a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today. …”

Jennifer Rubin comments on various topics in Representative Ryan’s recent speech.

…And finally on defense spending, he rejects the sort of penny-pinching isolationism of Jon Huntsman or Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.):

‘A more prosperous economy enables us to afford a modernized military that is properly sized for the breadth of the challenges we face. Such a military must also be an efficient and responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in order to maintain the confidence of the American people. The House-passed budget recognizes this, which is why it includes the $78 billion in defense efficiency savings identified by Secretary Gates.

By contrast, President Obama has announced $400 billion in new defense cuts, saying in effect he’ll figure out what those cuts mean for America’s security later. Indiscriminate cuts that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous to America and America’s interests in the world. Secretary Gates put it well: “That’s math, not strategy.” ‘

This should dispel any doubts as to whether Ryan is simply a “budget guy.” He is, rather, one of the few politicians on the national stage who can weave specific policy themes with particulars and can demonstrate the connection (misunderstood or entirely missed by some of the GOP contenders or former contenders) between conservative economic principles and American foreign policy and values. And who else could get the support of the Hamilton Society and Tea Partyers?

Alana Goodman, in Contentions, highlights quotes from Ryan’s speech.

…On American exceptionalism. “America’s ‘exceptionalism’ is just this—while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America’s foundations are not our own—they belong equally to every person everywhere. The truth that all human beings are created equal in their natural rights is the most “inclusive” social truth ever discovered as a foundation for a free society. ‘All’ means ‘all’! You can’t get more ‘inclusive’ than that!”

…On human rights. “Now, if you believe these rights are universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on foreign policy. It leads you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty, no matter how friendly and accommodating its rulers are to American interests. . . .

On the policy of appeasement. “We have a responsibility to speak boldly for those whose voices are denied by the jackbooted thugs of the tired tyrants of Syria and Iran.” …

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell discusses declining housing values and criticizes the homebuyer’s tax credit.

…You can see why the market for poor people’s homes might be weaker than the market for rich people’s. The less well-off get punished on both the supply side and the demand side. On the supply side there is an overhang of about 4 million homes that have either been foreclosed on or are severely delinquent. Of these about 2 million are foreclosed properties, according to Zillow. (A Wells Fargo expert quoted in the Washington Post puts the figure somewhat higher, at 2.2 million.) On the demand side, almost every month sees a retreat in the percentage of homes that are owner-occupied. It reached close to 70 percent in the middle years of the Bush administration. It now stands at 66.2 percent, roughly where it was midway through the Clinton administration. One can assume that poorer buyers are leaving the market disproportionately.

This is how we know that this recent collapse in house prices was not anticipated, at least not by anyone in a position of authority. Right now, the real estate market is a mighty engine of regressivity. The government, following its familiar model, has used an $8,000 tax credit to lure the poor into the market and saddle them with an asset that is rapidly losing value. 

This is a model that goes beyond real estate. It was also the philosophy of the cash-for-clunkers program. At vast expense, the government creates a tiny bit of consumer demand that fizzes and sparkles for a few months and then disappears without leaving a trace—except in the federal deficit.

We have more commentary on David Mamet’s new book and new views; this time from Kurt Loder, in Reason.

…Now, his migration complete, Mamet says, “I look back upon my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder—as another exercise in self-involvement—rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.”

…it is exhilarating to hear so much common sense expressed with such forceful eloquence: “The honest man might observe…that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.”

Mamet is not a man with a plan. Neither the right nor the left is to be entirely trusted, and a complete national salvation may remain forever beyond our grasp. “We are a democracy,” he writes, “and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.”

Andrew Malcolm rounds up late-night, in the LA Times.

…Fallon: Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, says he’s running for president. And this is cool — if his campaign isn’t over in 30 minutes or less, you get your pizza for free!

…Conan: Over 6 million people attended Cuba’s International Book Fair a while back. As usual, the most popular book sold was “How to Build a Raft Out of This Book.”

…Fallon: Today is National Hug Your Cat Day! Or as cats call it, “Yeah, don’t do that.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The New Editor highlights additional proof that the federal government has taken care of its own while the country has suffered.

According to this list from Forbes magazine, four of the top five richest counties in the US are in the Washington, DC, area. Five of the top ten are in the Washington, DC, suburbs.

Number six on the list is Los Alamos County, NM, where about 60% of those employed work for the federal government.

Here is the list…

…Is there anyone who actually thinks this is healthy for the country?

Mark Steyn enjoys joking about the latest lewd topic.

…”British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.”

True. If MI6 can break into a Yemeni website run by Anwar al-Awlaki and infect it with home-baking favorites from “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” I don’t doubt that the same spooks could easily hack into Anthony Weiner’s computer and Tweet his cupcake to that poor college girl in Seattle.

But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”

It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet …

In the WaPo, Kevin Chavous has an amazing story of the NAACP working against better education opportunities for African Americans, and Harlem parents protesting against the NAACP.

…How did it get to the point that the country’s foremost civil rights organization is the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve? Forty years ago, Harlem was marching alongside NAACP leaders in the fight for justice and education equity for African Americans. So what happened?

Harlem residents gathered last month to urge the NAACP to drop a lawsuit it had filed with the teachers union against the New York City Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 bad schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space. The lawsuit essentially could lead to the closing of several high-performing charter schools that primarily serve black children in Harlem. Seeing this threat, thousands of parents took to the street against those who would deny their child a good education — even if that meant marching against the NAACP.

In response, an NAACP spokesman says that the group supports alternative schools but doesn’t want the city to neglect its public schools. But wait a minute. Charter schools are public schools. What the NAACP seems intent on preserving is the “system” of New York public schools that has failed kids in Harlem for far too many years. System preservation has emerged as the common refrain from those fighting expanding charter schools and quality educational options for parents. Preserving such a system in its current form would ensure that thousands of low-income minority children fail to get the education they deserve. Ironically, the NAACP has become the protector of the status quo it once fought. …

Clive Crook talks about what the government can do to help the economy, including more stimulus.

…Within weeks, federal borrowing will collide with the statutory debt ceiling, raising the possibility of default; talks to prevent this are getting nowhere. The Federal Reserve’s second programme of quantitative easing, or QE2, is at an end. Higher commodity prices have caused a blip in inflation. All these factors should have lowered the price of US government debt, pushing long-term interest rates higher. But such is the concern about the flagging recovery that 10-year rates fell to less than 3 per cent last week, lower than they have been all year.

Even with a government that worked, remedial action would be hard to devise. Fiscal and monetary policy are both stretched, the options for more action limited and risky. But the very notion of optimal policy just now is Utopian because the US does not have a government that works. If it did, the clock would not be ticking down to a congressionally mandated default even as the economy stalls.

Though asking the question is no more than an academic exercise, what ought US fiscal policy to do? It should combine renewed short-term stimulus (in forms that subsidise jobs) with measures to reduce borrowing (revenue increases and entitlement reforms) in the longer term. How could something so obvious be controversial? In a way, in fact, there is no controversy: Democrats and Republicans are agreed in rejecting this out of hand. …

In the Economist, W.W. blogs about the lack of recovery and offers an explanation that will give liberals fresh reason to blame Republicans.

MITT ROMNEY officially threw his hat in the ring yesterday. That “Barack Obama has failed America” by exacerbating and prolonging the recession is emerging as a main theme of Mr Romney’s campaign. Last week I reported on Mr Romney’s speech in Des Moines, in which he pressed hard on the claim that Mr Obama’s policy initiatives have retarded recovery by sowing uncertainty precisely when certainty about “the rules of the game” was most needed. In a Bloomberg column earlier this week Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, offers some anecdotal evidence in favour of the “regime uncertainty” argument collected from a guy he sat next to on an airplane:

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”

He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost. …

The Economist interviews historian Timothy Snyder about his book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

SOME topics are so dark that even scholars feel intimidated. Yet Timothy Snyder is not so easily daunted. A professor of Eastern European history at Yale, his most recent book, “ Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”, examines some of the most devastating collective memories of the modern world. With scholarly rigour and engaging prose, he seeks to explain both the causes and effects of the two most haunting mass murderers of the 20th century. The “bloodlands” of the title describes the area where the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered 14m civilians. The Economist has praised the book for being a “revisionist history of the best kind”, one that “makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history.”

…What are some of the most common misconceptions of the history of the so-called “bloodlands”?

The first is that there’s something that people think they understand and it turns out that they don’t, and that thing is the Holocaust. The reality of it is, if anything, worse than they think, much more face-to-face, much more barbaric, much more unforgettable. People think that the Holocaust is something that happened in Germany, generally to German Jews. They think it’s something that happened only in Auschwitz. They generally don’t know about any of the other death facilities besides Auschwitz; they generally don’t know that half of the Jews who were killed were shot rather than gassed.

Hitler and Stalin killed virtually in the same place, and that is Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states, western Russia. The Holocaust happened in a place where millions and millions of people have just been killed due to the Soviet policies. …

Gerald Traufetter, in Der Spiegel, has an excellent explanation of the information overlooked by the French investigation into the crash of flight Air France 447.

…Lawyers and technical experts for the families of German crash victims suspect that a hidden software error in the automated flight control system — specifically concerning a vital stabilizer flap on the plane’s tail — doomed to failure all pilot efforts to regain control of the plane. They are demanding that the Parisian court investigating the crash take action. “We petition that appropriate action be taken to prevent a catastrophe similar to that which befell AF 447 from happening again,” reads the letter submitted to Judge Sylvie Zimmermann, which SPIEGEL has obtained.

The families’ attorneys are demanding that the court require Airbus to undertake “technical improvements” so that “speed sensors can no longer ice up in the future.” Should that not be possible, then Airbus planes must be “outfitted with software for the electronic flight control system that precludes the sudden occurrence of an uncontrolled flight situation.”

The letter also raises the possibility that the entire fleet of Airbus A330s as well as that of the sister model A340 might have to be temporarily grounded. More than 1,000 planes would be affected by such an order. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Tevi Troy, who worked in W’s White House writes in The Tablet about the Koch Test. No, it’s not about Anthony Weiner, but about Ed Koch who appears in these pages often. Koch is a former mayor of New York who famously refused to back Jimmy Carter for a second term. Guess who might get his “Carter Treatment” this coming election?

Ed Koch had a piece on the political website Real Clear Politics recently that should worry President Barack Obama. Koch, who backed Obama in the 2008 election, wrote that “If President Obama does not change his position [on Israel], I cannot vote for his reelection.”

One might think that the vote of one octogenarian and often cranky former New York City mayor may not be a big deal, but Koch has a long and eventful history of involvement with presidential campaigns. He almost perfectly captures the views of a certain type of older—often but not always Jewish—Democrat who is nonetheless skeptical of his party on national security issues. While Koch usually backs his party’s candidate, he also seems to have an uncanny ability to back a Republican—tacitly or explicitly—when the Democrats are going to lose.

In 1980, during his first term as mayor, Koch tortured Jimmy Carter over Carter’s position on Israel. At one point, Carter’s people reached out to Koch and asked him not to say anything about a particular administration action until the president had had a chance to explain himself. Koch obliged and went down to the White House for a meeting with Carter. Unsatisfied with the explanation Carter gave, Koch then continued criticizing the administration, infuriating Carter. …

More in this vein from Roger Simon.

Rahm Emanuel’s idolatrous and predictable oped in the Washington Post — Obama’s commitment to Israel — would not be worth commenting on were it not that the perpetual love affair between Americans Jews and the Democratic Party… for the first time ever… perhaps, maybe, perhaps… is approaching a break up.

As Alana Goodman aptly put it at Commentary’s Contentions blog: “You know Democrats are getting panicky about President Obama’s alienating the pro-Israel community when they drag out Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to defend the president’s statements.”

Goodman goes on to eviscerate the mayor’s argument:

“Emanuel, unsurprisingly, misses the major point here. The problem with Obama’s speech was that he called for the 1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations, without reaffirming that Israel would absorb the Israeli-majority settlement blocs across the green line. He also didn’t reject the Palestinian right of return. In other words, he implied that the U.S. would take the Palestinian negotiating position on the issue, putting our ally Israel at a significant disadvantage.”

I would say deliberately misses the point, rather than “unsurprisingly,” but no matter. …

Writing before Friday’s dismal jobs report, Nile Gardiner suggests the president is in big trouble next year.

On a recent visit to London I was struck by how much faith many British politicians, journalists and political advisers have in Barack Obama being re-elected in 2012. In the aftermath of the hugely successful Special Forces operation that took out Osama Bin Laden and a modest spike in the polls for the president, the conventional wisdom among political elites in Britain is overwhelmingly that Obama will win another four years in the Oval Office. Add to this a widespread perception of continuing disarray in the Republican race, as well as a State Visit to London that had the chattering classes worshipping at the feet of the US president, and you can easily see why Obama’s prospects look a lot rosier from across the Atlantic.

But back in the United States, the reality looks a lot different. Many political leaders in Britain fail to understand the degree to which the American people are deeply unhappy with their president’s poor handling of the economy. Nor have they grasped the epic scale of the defeat suffered by the president in the November mid-terms, and the emphatic rejection by a clear majority of Americans of the Big Government Obama agenda. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz writes about the Republican who can win.

… The Republican who wins the presidency will have to have more than a command of the reasons the Obama administration must go. He will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in. He can look at the film of the crowds, mostly of young people, who gathered at the White House to wave the flag of the United States when bin Laden was captured and killed. Faces of blacks, whites, Asians—of every ethnic group.

At Louisiana State University not long after that, a student who planned to burn an American flag had to be rushed from the campus for his safety, much to his shock. Students by the hundreds had descended on him in rage, waving their own banners and roaring “USA! USA!” at the top of their lungs. It was a shout that spoke for more than they could say.

After all the years of instruction, all the textbooks on U.S. rapacity and greed, all the college lectures on the evil and injustice the U.S. had supposedly visited on the world, something inside these young rose up to tell them they were Americans. That something lies in the hearts of Americans across the land and it is those hearts to which the candidate will have to speak.

Two years ago an Air France jet fell into the Atlantic on its way to Brazil. Last month the flight data recorder was recovered from two and a half mile deep water. Der Spiegel reports on what has been learned.

… The crash of the A330 had made millions of airline passengers uneasy. How, many wondered, was it possible for a passenger jet to simply be lost as it traversed the ocean? It was reminiscent of ships disappearing without a trace on the high seas in bygone centuries. Would the data recorders finally solve the mystery?

It was only much later, after hours of radio silence and well after the plane was scheduled to have completed its crossing of the Atlantic, that planes were dispatched to search for the missing Airbus.

Even experienced accident investigators were caught completely off guard by the calamity. “This is a mysterious crash,” said Peter Goelz, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington. He said it was in the same category as air disasters such as that on the island of Tenerife in 1977, with 583 deaths, the deadliest in the history of air travel.

On Wednesday of this week, families of the victims — from 32 countries — are set to gather in Paris and Rio de Janeiro to mark the second anniversary of the crash. The meeting is taking place at a time when the veil that has covered the accident in mystery may slowly be lifting. The four-page BEA report provides answers to several of the most pressing questions the crash left behind — and raises just as many additional issues.

The drama began at 2:10 a.m. and 5 seconds GMT: Without warning, the autopilot and the auto-thrust disengaged. The report is silent as to why. But crash investigators have an explanation: The three speed gauges on the outside of the aircraft, known as pitot sensors, had become iced up. …

… But why were all the crew’s efforts in the cockpit in vain? Did the plane no longer react to the cockpit commands as it fell? Or did the horizontal stabilizer, which was still almost fully deflected at 13 degrees, continue to force the nose of the plane up?

Airbus vehemently denies that the plane’s automatic controls could have worked against the pilots’ commands. Were the suspicions proven true, however, then the software would have to be replaced in over a thousand A330s and in its sister model, the A340. The costs would run into hundreds of millions of euros.

In any case, flight engineer Hüttig, who also advises the victims’ families regarding technical issues, is concerned about the description of the horizontal stabilizer as being at 13 degrees. That is consistent with behavior he observed in an Air France A330 simulator in Paris a few months ago, when he replicated the situation together with other pilots. “The phenomenon is startlingly similar,” he says. …

WHO warns; Killer cellphones! USA Today op-ed says don’t believe it.

… This is the same WHO that inflamed and accelerated the swine flu scare in 2009, quickly elevating it to pandemic status and authorizing the production of millions of doses of vaccine that ultimately had to be discarded.

What has changed since last week is not the actual risk associated with cellphones, but simply our perception, which is linked to society’s reasonable fear of cancer. But so far the science doesn’t back up these new concerns.

More than two dozen studies done in Europe, the United States and New Zealand have not established a definitive link between cellphones and brain cancer. Of course the results are limited because they rely on survey data, which is the weakest kind of science. One study showed a possible association between heavy cellphone use and cancer, but the study was severely limited because it questioned people who already had brain cancer and asked them to try to recall how frequently they had used their cellphones. …

 Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Harsanyi blogs about our continuing economic woes. And he has a unique chart illustrating the dimensions of the Obama job fail.

…The housing market still stinks, as does do other foundations of the economy. The answer from the Democrats has been bailout after bailout, antiquated economic schemes, huge expansion of regulation, calls for higher taxes, attacks on the profit motive, roadblocks to energy production, increasing moral hazard in markets, more crony capitalism, food stamps, dependency, massive new entitlement program, sharing of the prosperity but less new prosperity, the same wars (and more!), but no budget, no spending cuts and little economic hope.

Ian Murray at The Corner explains:

“Today’s much weaker than expected employment numbers show that the president’s agenda of more regulation and increased spending has undoubtedly failed. However much money he throws at the problem, entrepreneurs are not going to start adding jobs to the economy while the burden of regulation is so high. Regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion each year. It is regulation that is dragging us back to recession.” …

…Republicans might have the wrong answers. They usually do. But what exactly has this administration done right? What creative ideas have they offered? How many alternative realities (you know, ‘things could have been worse’?) do we have to accept? Fact is, while these condescending technocrats accuse their opponents of being nihilists, ideologues and radicals, they are the ones that refuse to deviate from dogma no matter how much evidence of failure confronts them.

Charles Krauthammer thinks the debt limit fight is a “thing of beauty.”

In this spending-cut tug of war, it is of paramount importance to frame your demands in a way that the public sees as reasonable. The side that can command public opinion will prevail — the other side will ultimately cave for fear of being blamed for whatever dislocation occurs. Republicans should not be asking for, say, repeal of Obamacare as the quid pro quo for raising the debt limit. These are bridges much too far for these negotiations.

Which is why House Speaker John Boehner’s offer of a dollar-for-dollar deal — raise the debt ceiling to match corresponding spending cuts — is a thing of beauty. It is eminently logical and easy to understand. In a country with a 47 percent to 19 percent plurality opposed to raising the debt ceiling, the Boehner offer is difficult for the president to refuse.

After all, it invites Obama to choose how much to cut. For example, $500?billion buys him a $500?billion debt-limit hike — and only a short-term extension. Not wanting to go through this process again, Obama would like a $2 trillion debt-limit hike to get him past Election Day 2012. For that, he’ll have to come up with $2 trillion in spending cuts.

It may be blackmail. But it is progress.

John Fund reports that Lech Walesa doesn’t think much of Obama.

…Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, wasn’t exactly eager to meet President Obama during Mr. Obama’s trip to Warsaw on Saturday. He instead left for a religious festival in Italy, telling Polish reporters: “It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”

Mr. Walesa also made clear his disdain for Mr. Obama when he was in Washington last week, where he received the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation award for services to spreading freedom around the world. Previous recipients of the award have included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Margaret Thatcher.

The dinner, which was attended by about 500 people, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, featured a speech by Mr. Gates along with remarks by Mr. Walesa. The Nobel laureate and former head of the Polish trade union Solidarity recognized the lateness of the hour and kept his remarks brief, but he couldn’t resist relating current conditions in the U.S. to Reagan’s time in office. He noted that back then the U.S. represented a “good empire,” in contrast to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union that Reagan excoriated. “But now I observe you have not a very good leadership,” he told the audience through an interpreter. He said that the U.S. seemed less interested in exercising leadership in the world. …

Tony Blankley looks at the political changes that may be coming to Europe.

…Note that the voters are aroused in both the nations whose debt can no longer be locally paid and those nations that are being asked to pay the debts of foreign countries. That is to say, the European social-welfare-deficit-debt problem has outraged both the debtors and the creditors. It takes a singularly disconnected and arrogant social class to create a set of policies that satisfies neither creditor nor debtor.

Both economic and immigrant policies have been the cause of weakened European governments from Finland to Germany to Spain and beyond in the elections of 2009 and the more recent elections. Caught in the pincers of these two emerging issues seen by many middle-class European voters as existential to their culture, we should expect to see some existing governments fall by vote or, conceivably, by other means.

We are observing a rare process: Stark economic and cultural reality is neutering conventional political methods. Established European political parties and politicians may become extinct quite suddenly. So far, the primary political beneficiaries of this crisis are third, fourth and fifth parties – some of them considered disreputable by the tottering ruling class: in the Netherlands, the heroic Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; in Hungary, the center-right Fidesz Party and the anti-immigrant, hard-right Jobbik Party; in Austria, the right-wing Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO); in Denmark, the hard-right Danish People’s Party; in Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League; in Finland, the anti-illegal-immigrant, Euro-skeptic True Finns party; in Britain, the racist British National Party and the libertarian, anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party; and in France, Jean-Marie (and now his daughter Marine) Le Pens’ patriotic National Front. There are others in almost every European country. …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, comments on the Washington’s out-of-control spending. He highlights a quote from Congressman Paul Ryan.

…It is little wonder that 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will finally run out of their money, and Moody’s Investors Service is threatening to downgrade America’s sterling credit rating unless it gets to grips with the debt crisis. Undoubtedly, the very future of the United States’ position as the word’s only superpower is at stake in the next few years. And as Congressman Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the House Budget Committee warned in a superb speech last night to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington:

The unsustainable trajectory of government spending is accelerating the nation toward the most predictable economic crisis in American history. Years of ignoring the real drivers of our debt have left us with a profound structural problem. In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy.

This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt – and that’s according to optimistic projections… This course is simply unsustainable. If we continue down our current path, then a debt-fueled economic crisis is not a probability. It is a mathematical certainty. …

Thomas Sowell tells it like it is. He discusses a number of insults that the president has leveled at foreign friends.

…Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama’s ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. However complex the ramifications of this ideology, and however clever the means by which Obama has camouflaged it, that is what it has amounted to.

No wonder he was moved to tears when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright summarized that ideology in a thundering phrase— “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”

…at home or abroad, Obama’s ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback. …

…The fate of the United States of America may depend on how savvy we the people are in seeing what he is doing— and how soon, before the situation becomes irretrievable.

In the Education Intelligence Agency, Mike Antonucci has some unbelievable statistics about education spending, and why you will never be taxed enough to satisfy the government’s appetite.

…The latest Census Bureau report provides details of the 2008-09 school year, as the nation was in the midst of the recession. That year, 48,238,962 students were enrolled in the U.S. K-12 public education system. That was a decline of 157,114 students from the previous year. They were taught by 3,231,487 teachers (full-time equivalent). That was an increase of 81,426 teachers from the previous year.

…Twenty-seven states had fewer students in 2009 than in 2008, but 16 of them hired more teachers.

…From 2004 to 2009, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.7 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 6.5 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 26.7 percent (about 12.5% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 27.5 percent. …

More on Buying Union from David Harsanyi.

…Americans — people who can do almost anything, including, but not limited to, electing politicians who keep rotten companies buoyant for political gain — have a patriotic duty to buy poorly conceived automobiles. You have an obligation to insulate Washington’s favorite companies from responsibility. For God and for country, taxpayers must purchase cars from corporations that have not come close — despite the contention of the administration — to paying back what they already owe you.

But hey, the car was assembled in Michigan. If that’s not a sign of American exceptionalism, I don’t know what is.

Even if Wasserman Schultz’s “Buy American” rhetoric were genuine, it would be severely misguided. Every time we overpay for an American-made product (whatever it is), don’t we also spend less on an array of other services and products that create jobs at home? Real jobs. Self-sustaining jobs. If we all mechanically bought American, wouldn’t we allow manufacturers to avoid competition and rely on their locations rather than the excellence of their products? Sounds like the opposite of exceptionalism.

Companies on the dole also have incentive to please their benefactors in Washington — a place that has the power to offer more handouts or to stifle competition. …These companies, though, have less incentive to keep prices low or to innovate or to meet consumer demand. …

Scott Adams thinks paying taxes should be everyone’s responsibility.

Yesterday I went to Walmart and demanded that they give me a cartload of merchandise for free. This demand was not well-received, so I didn’t get to the second part of my plan which would have involved criticizing the job performance of the people who were giving me free stuff.

Okay, I didn’t really go to Walmart and demand free stuff. You probably knew that because it sounded ridiculous on face value. We all understand that no entity can survive for long if it gives away its resources while asking nothing in return. And this leads me to my point: In the United States, 51% of adults pay zero federal income tax, and yet they have the right to vote. That’s the very definition of a system that can’t last.

I’m not sure where the tipping point is. So far, the power of the non-tax-paying majority has been blunted by the influence of political parties and the misdirection of the media. If the majority ever figures out that they can legally confiscate the wealth of the minority, tax rates will double overnight. My best guess is that the United States will go into a death spiral at about the point that 55% of adults pay no federal income taxes. We’ll probably get to that point as baby boomers continue to retire in large numbers. …

The Palin/Trump pizza meeting brought about a great exchange in The Corner about pizza in NY and Northern NJ. First Jonah Goldberg links to Jon Stewart’s riff on Trump’s pizza knowledge and consumption style. 

“Donald Trump disrespects New Yorkers by taking Sarah Palin to a pizza chain and eating his stacked slices with a fork.”

Then, Daniel Foster explains why North Jersey has better pizza than NY; especially Manhattan.

… But while we’re on the topic of New York City street cred and pizza, I think this Famiglia’s atrocity illustrates a point I’ve been making for years and years to anyone who’ll listen. Namely: If you took two blindfolded tourists and dropped one in a random location in New York and the other in a random location in North Jersey and told them to go find a slice of pizza, the one in North Jersey would, on average, find a better slice. What I mean is, when you take away the outliers — the legendary joints like Totonno’s and DiFara and Grimaldi’s, and the biggest of the lowest common denominator national chains — the median slice in Bergen, Passaic, Essex, Hudson and Union counties is better than the median slice in the five boroughs. I bet the disparity would be even greater if you pitted North Jersey against just Manhattan. I say this not just because I’m a Jersey boy from a proud family of pizza-makers (five uncles who tossed dough for beer money at Vinnie’s Pizz-a-rama and Brother Bruno’s in Wayne, NJ!), but because anyone who’s ever seen me can tell you I’ve eaten a lot of pizza in my day. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Robert Samuelson evaluates Europe’s looming debt crisis.

It has come to this. A year after rescuing Greece from default, Europe is staring into the abyss. The bailout has proved insufficient. Greece needs more money, and it can’t borrow from private markets, where it faces interest rates as high as 25 percent. But Europe’s governments are reluctant to advance more funds unless other lenders — banks, bondholders — absorb some losses by writing down their debts. This, however, would constitute a default, risking a broader banking crisis that might torpedo Europe’s fragile recovery in France, Germany and elsewhere. There is no easy escape.

What’s called a “debt crisis” is increasingly a political and social crisis. Looming over the financial complexities is the broader question of the ability — or willingness — of weak debtor nations to endure growing hardship to service their massive government debts. Already, unemployment is 14.1 percent in Greece, 14.7 percent in Ireland, 11.1 percent in Portugal and 20.7 percent in Spain. What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits, but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenue and offsetting some of the deficit improvement.

…The euro helped create the crisis and has made its resolution harder, as a new report from the International Monetary Fund shows. For starters, the euro fostered a credit bubble that led to booms in housing, borrowing and consumer spending. When each country had its own currency, the country’s central bank (its Federal Reserve) regulated local interest rates and credit conditions. With the euro, the European Central Bank (ECB) assumed that job. But one policy didn’t fit all: Interest rates suited to Germany and France were too low for “periphery” countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). …

Michael Barone writes about all the “unexpected” bad economic news that Glenn Reynolds keeps pointing out.

…As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word “unexpectedly” or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

…It’s obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists — the president’s re-election — if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there’s still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover’s phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.

A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration’s policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers. …

In Investor’s Business Daily, Ralph Reiland says “Buyer Beware” when it comes to Obamacare.

…”Pelosi’s district secured almost 20% of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide,” waivers providing a year-long pass from ObamaCare, reported Matthew Boyle in The Daily Caller.

“Of the 204 new ObamaCare waivers the Obama administration approved in April,” Boyle reports, “38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.”

…The question: If these San Francisco hot spots can’t afford to pay for ObamaCare, how is a truck stop in Breezewood selling trucker-sized hot turkey sandwiches at $7.95, a big pile of mashed potatoes included, supposed to survive?

Thomas Sowell illuminates the president’s mistaken beliefs about wealth. It is tragic that the leader of this nation doesn’t understand what has made America great.

One of the painfully revealing episodes in Barack Obama’s book “Dreams From My Father” describes his early experience listening to a sermon by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Among the things said in that sermon was that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Obama was literally moved to tears by that sermon.

…The idea that the rich have gotten rich by making the poor poor has been an ideological theme that has played well in Third World countries, to explain why they lag so far behind the West.

None of this was original with Jeremiah Wright. All he added was his own colorful gutter style of expressing it, which so captivated the man who is now President of the United States. …

David Goldman has insightful analysis on the current economy.

I’ve been on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show arguing that the US will have 2% growth indefinitely–no real recovery, no double dip, no banking crisis, but no bank stock rally. Today’s depressing numbers are in line with my depressing expectations. We’ve got a creative-destruction economy, without the creation: the startups, the venture capital, the entrepreneurship. …

The only thing expanding is the government sector, and that by a spectacular margin.  Nearly a fifth of all personal income receipts by Americans now consist of transfer payments, which is to say that a fifth of all personal income received by Americans is redistribution of tax payments from other Americans.

…Government spending now comprises 40% of American national income, up from 30% in 2000. That’s the same proportion as in Germany; “socialist” Sweden is at 47%. By contrast, ex-communist Russia is at just 34%, and China at 18%. Since America’s victory over Russia in the Cold War, in a sense, America and Russia have switched places. …

…And total loans and leases at US commercial banks continue to plunge. I hate to repeat myself, but this kind of implosion of private credit creation, never, NEVER happened before. We are in uncharted territory. We have had NO recovery in the private credit creation mechanism since the 2008 crisis. The banks keep buying Treasuries, and shedding risk assets. …

Clive Crook looks at NLRB v Sanity.

If officials have their way, “Winning the Future” – Mr Obama’s theme of the moment – will include a larger role for labour policies that looked out of date in Britain 40 years ago.

…If absurdist comedy is to your taste…“The Board has repeatedly held that an employer violates [the National Labor Relations Act of 1935] by threatening that employees will lose their jobs if they join a strike, or by predicting a loss of business and jobs because of unionisation or strike disruptions without any factual basis. In contrast, the Board has found that employers may lawfully relate concerns raised by customers. They may also reference the possibility that unionisation, including strikes, might harm relationships with consumers, as opposed to predicting ‘unavoidable consequences’ [emphasis in original].”

Got that? Employers may “reference the possibility” that strikes will harm the business. But if they declare that this will happen – if they judge it to be unavoidable, and dare to say so – they have broken the law. You may wish to reference the possibility that, if the NLRB is interpreting it correctly, the law in this instance is an ass. …

We thank Bill Kristol for injecting some optimism into the political landscape.

Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the subsequent rapid American recovery at home and abroad, didn’t come out of the blue. There were plenty of signs before Election Day 1980 that such a reversal and triumph were possible:

* The late 1970s featured a broad-based rebellion throughout America against big-government, welfare-state liberalism—in the form of tax revolts at the state and national level, the rise of religious conservatism, and popular resistance to elite acquiescence in a foreign policy of weakness and accommodation. …

Needless to say, history doesn’t repeat itself. We can’t expect a moment like the pope’s visit to Poland in June 1979. We can’t perhaps expect another Reagan here at home. But there is the real possibility that we are today at a big, pre-recovery-of-the-West moment similar to the late 1970s. The Tea Party is of no less importance than the tax revolt, and the widespread sense that America needs finally to deal with her out-of-control spending and debt is no less fundamental than the sense of liberalism’s failure in the late 1970s. The revulsion (not too strong a word) at the cavalier and disdainful treatment of an old and deep ally like Israel is as heartfelt as the sense of disgust at Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. The electoral and governing successes of conservative prime ministers Stephen Harper in Canada and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel are comparable to the achievements of Thatcher and Begin. The Arab Spring in the Greater Middle East, and even the Jasmine Revolution in China, are reminiscent of Solidarity. These developments of 2009-2011 could be precursors of not just a renewal of American conservatism, but a renewal of the West, just as the events of 1977-1979 were harbingers of better days to come. …

In the WSJ, Donald Boudreaux is willing to take on the global warming alarmists.

…Contrary to what many environmentalists would have us believe, Americans are increasingly less likely to be killed by severe weather. Moreover, because of modern industrial and technological advances—radar, stronger yet lighter building materials, more reliable electronic warning devices, and longer-lasting packaged foods—we are better protected from nature’s fury today than at any other time in human history. We do adapt.

…Since 1950 there have been 57 confirmed F5 tornadoes, with winds between 261–318 miles per hour, in the U.S. Of those, five struck in 1953; six in 1974. So far this year there have been four F5 tornadoes in the U.S., including the devastating storm that killed more than 130 people in Joplin on May 22. F5 tornadoes are massive, terrifying and deadly. But they generally touch down in unpopulated areas, thus going unnoticed. The tragedy of Joplin and other tornadoes this year is that they touched down in populated areas, causing great loss of life. Yet if these storms had struck even 20 years ago there would have been far more deaths.

So confident am I that the number of deaths from violent storms will continue to decline that I challenge Mr. McKibben—or Al Gore, Paul Krugman, or any other climate-change doomsayer—to put his wealth where his words are. I’ll bet $10,000 that the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes will fall over the next 20 years. Specifically, I’ll bet that the average annual number of Americans killed by these violent weather events from 2011 through 2030 will be lower than it was from 1991 through 2010. …

Andrew Malcolm wraps up the late-night one-liners, in the LA Times.

…Leno: On his trip to Europe President Obama met with Queen Elizabeth in London and she suggested returning to pre-1776 borders.

…Kimmel: Al Qaeda has released a statement vowing to make America pay for Bin Laden’s death. Which I’m pretty sure we did pay for his death. We paid for the whole thing and even took care of the funeral arrangements. Maybe a thank you would be nice.

Conan: Tough week for that pastor who predicted the Apocalypse. His friends told him, “Hey, c’mon, it’s not the end of the world.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The  NY Times interviewed David Mamet.

… You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most?
All of them gall me the most. Listen, Shelby Steele and I were on a panel, and some white woman asked, “What can we do for the African-American community?” There was a long pause, and he said, in the saddest voice I’ve ever heard, “Leave us alone.” It’s appalling what the government has done to the great African-American community in the last 50 years.

Back to show business for a second. Do you care about reviews?
Of course you care. I don’t read them, but you don’t really have to — you know what they are with the way people respond. There’s nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won’t ring from room service; your mother won’t be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you’re dead.

Once again Spengler alerts us to a surprising trend.

Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, long-term projections help us order our perceptions of what we see in front of us today. Here’s one to think about, fresh from the just-released update of the United Nations’ population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than German, Italy or Spain. …

… The right way to read this projection is backwards: Israelis love children and have lots of them because they are happy, optimistic and prosperous. Most of Israel’s population increase comes from so-called “secular” Israelis, who have 2.6 children on average, more than any other people in the industrial world. The ultra-Orthodox have seven or eight, bringing total fertility to three children.

Europeans, Turks and Iranians, by contrast, have very few children because they are grumpy, alienated and pessimistic. It’s not so much the projection of the demographic future cranked out by the United Nations computers that counts, but rather the implicit vision of the future in the minds of today’s prospective parents. …

A conversation on The Corner about the Dem Demagoguing of Paul Ryan’s budget.

Andrew, the quote you posted from Debbie Wasserman-Shultz on Face the Nation this morning makes for particularly appalling reading and viewing because, as you noted, her shamelessly demagogic answer was to a question that wasn’t even about the Ryan budget but rather about whether the Democrats had a plan of their own. But it’s worth a word about what she actually said, because it’s something a lot of Democrats (including the president and HHS secretary Sebelius) have been spouting about the Ryan budget. She said:

“Like I said, the Republicans have a plan to end Medicare as we know it. What they would do is they would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the healthcare insurance market, we’re going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.”

None of this is true, and it’s especially important to understand that the latter parts are not true.

More on Debbie Wasserface from Ed Morrissey.

Moreover, if Democrats want to push a Buy American political campaign, one would think that they’d check out the parking lot first to find someone who, you know, actually buys American.  For some people who need low cost and decent quality, there are few American options.  But Wasserman-Schultz hardly falls into that category, and the Infiniti is hardly a low-cost vehicle.  She even paid extra for a vanity plate with her initials on it.

I have no issue with people who decide to buy a car based on their specific needs, fiscal status, and perceptions of quality; I drive a Honda CRV, so I’m not going to lecture people on buying American.  Neither should Wasserman-Schultz, and to use “Buy American” as an attack against the sane opposition to government bailouts of private automakers shortly after climbing out of a Japanese luxury vehicle is the height of both demagoguery and hypocrisy.  And she’s the Democrat that the party chose as its chair.

Mark Steyn posts in The Corner about a theme that will close us out today.

My weekend column is about our descent into hyper-regulatory tyranny. Speaking of which, from north of the border:

Martin Reid says he’s been forced to buy a fishing licence to remove carp that are swimming in a metre of water on his flooded-out fields.

He says he bought the permit to avoid the problems he faced the last time he was forced to remove fish from his flooded farmland. In 1993, Reid was fined $1,000 for illegal fishing.

“My father and I … were charged by Fisheries and Oceans Canada,” Reid recalled. “We were jointly responsible for having caused the death of fish for reasons other than sport fishing.”

Reid says the fine will jump to $100,000 if he’s cited a second time. …

Here’s Mark’s column.

… The hyper-regulatory state is unrepublican. It strikes at one of the most basic pillars of free society: equality before the law. When you replace “law” with “regulation,” equality before it is one of the first casualties. In such a world, there is no law, only a hierarchy of privilege more suited to a sultan’s court than a self-governing republic. If you don’t want to be subject to “tooth-level surveillance,” you better know who to call in Washington. Teamsters Local 522 did, and the United Federation of Teachers, and the Chicago Plastering Institute. And as a result they’ve all been “granted” ObamaCare “waivers.” Rule, Obama! Obama, waive the rules! If only for his cronies. Americans are being transferred remorselessly from the rule of law to rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy of micro-regulatory preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives that determine which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-The-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into. …

More from Mark in a Corner post.

I’ve been writing this weekend about a once free people’s descent into hyper-regulatory tyranny. I thought this fishy footnote was the last word in statism’s lack of any sense of proportion, but several readers then alerted me to the federal rabbit police cracking down on magic shows. As they used to say in Nazi Germany, “Your papers, mein hare!” …

Mark Steyn’s efforts are the perfect backdrop for this story from The Charlotte Observer. Seems a church in the city ”excessively pruned”  the crepe myrtles on their property. The response of the city was to fine the church $4,000.

Every two to three years, Eddie Sales trims and prunes the crape myrtles at his church, Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church.

But this year, the city of Charlotte cited the church for improperly pruning its trees.

“We always keep our trees trimmed back because you don’t want to worry about them hanging down in the way,” said Sales, a church member.

The church was fined $100 per branch cut for excessive pruning, bringing the violation to $4,000. …

Click on WORD or PDF or full content

WORD

PDF

Karl Rove explains the special election loss in New York, and tells the Republicans how they can campaign effectively about budget issues.

…An earlier, more aggressive explanation and defense of the Ryan plan would have turned the issue: 55% in the Crossroads survey agreed with GOP arguments for the Ryan reforms while just 36% agreed with the Democrats’ arguments against it.

Next year, Republicans must describe their Medicare reforms plainly, set the record straight vigorously when Democrats demagogue, and go on the attack. Congressional Republicans—especially in the House—need a political war college that schools incumbents and challengers in the best way to explain, defend and attack on the issue of Medicare reform. They have to become as comfortable talking about Medicare in the coming year as they did in talking about health-care reform last year.

…Defense, no matter how robust, well-informed and persistent, is insufficient. Republicans must also go on offense. Democratic nonchalance towards Medicare’s bankruptcy in 2024 and the crushing debt it will leave for our children gives the GOP the chance to depict Democrats as tone deaf, irresponsible and reckless. The country can’t afford Democratic leaders who simply order the orchestra to play louder as the Titanic tilts and begins to slide under.

Michael Barone reviews what commentators are saying about that election, and adds his own thoughts.

…Many writers—both conservatives like my Examiner colleague Phil Klein, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard and Jim Geraghty of National Review and, writing before the election, non-conservatives like Charlie Cook of National Journal and Nate Silver of the New York Times—have been arguing that this race has little precedental value…Cook was more categorical and colorful. “[I]mplying that the outcome of this race portends anything about any conventional race next year amounts to cheap spin and drive-by ‘analysis’ of the most superficial kind, which is sadly becoming all too prevalent in Washington. There are a lot of folks in D.C. who would be well-served switching to decaf.” …

…I agree wholeheartedly with my Examiner colleague Conn Carroll, Republicans need to go on the offensive on Medicare. Or as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote in his analysis: “Republican leaders believe in their agenda and are not likely to back away from it just because they lost one House seat, particularly one that they could very well win back in 2012. But they have not yet won the argument over how best to deal with the country’s fiscal problems. They have accepted the responsibility to propose. Now they will need to learn how to persuade.”

…Under New York law, candidates in special elections are nominated by county party leaders, and in all three recent New York special elections the party leaders chose a member of the New York Assembly. All three lost. …

Jonah Goldberg writes that Republicans will have to fight, if they want to win.

…The simple fact is that the Democrats have their battle plan. It’s going to be Medi-scare every day in every way for the next 17 months. They are on autopilot. They are committed. Their die is cast. They have crossed their Rubicon. They have no desire to defend Obamacare, high gas prices, high unemployment, and a third Middle East war. They want — no, need — to be on offense because they have so much they cannot defend.

…The battle-tested Republicans have the same suite of options. And they are battle-tested. Last November, they won sweeping victories in the midterm elections. How? By focusing first and foremost on the Democrats’ failures.

For instance, the Democrats have a plan too. It’s the Status Quo-Plus. It involves letting Medicare continue to spiral out of control, consuming our budget until it becomes necessary for an unelected chamber of health-care bureaucrats to impose draconian cuts. …

Peter Wehner gives kudos to Tim Pawlenty for being honest and direct.

…there was someone else who recently announced his candidacy with nearly flawless execution: Tim Pawlenty. In his announcement speech, Governor Pawlenty sought to create an appealing narrative: he is a truth teller who’s willing to make difficult but necessary decisions. But what made this storyline particularly effective was that he backed it up.

In Iowa, for example, Pawlenty said we couldn’t afford subsidies for ethanol. In senior-rich Florida earlier this week, he called for fundamental changes in Social Security and other entitlement programs. And when asked about the Paul Ryan budget plan, he gave this pitch-perfect response:

I applaud Congressman Ryan for his courage and his leadership in putting his plan forward. At least he has a plan. President Obama doesn’t have a plan. The Democrats don’t have a plan. And I really applaud his leadership and his courage in putting a plan on the table. Number two, we will have our own plan; it will have many similarities to Congressman Ryan’s plan, but it will have some differences, one of which will be we’ll address Social Security. …as president, I’ll have my own plan [but] if I can’t have that, and the bill came to my desk and I had to choose between signing or not Congressman Ryan’s plan, of course I would sign it. …

In The Hill, Jordan Fabian comments on how Mitt continues to sell his soul in hopes of winning the presidency. Isn’t it a little embarrassing to be more liberal than Al Gore?

…Likely GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Friday voiced his support for ethanol subsidies during his first visit of the year to Iowa.

…Romney’s stance puts him at odds with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), who is looking to cast himself as a Romney alternative.

 …“Conventional wisdom says you can’t talk about ethanol in Iowa or Social Security in Florida or financial reform on Wall Street,” Pawlenty said. “But someone has to say it. Someone has to finally stand up and level with the American people. Someone has to lead.”

Jonathan Tobin also takes Romney to task for his ethanol cave-in.

…The ethanol boondoggle is good for Iowans who grow corn but bad for America. The federal subsidy for the fuel additive is a long-running scandal that even those who benefit from it know must come to an end in an era of budget crises. Yet for decades, it has been an article of faith that those who wish to win the Iowa caucuses must pledge allegiance to ethanol.

Tim Pawlenty is betting that a refusal to play that game will help, not hurt his presidential candidacy. Pawlenty’s statement of opposition to the ethanol subsidy when he formally declared his intention to run earlier this week was a daring step but one that might prove to be good politics. Opposing ethanol allows the former Minnesota governor to establish himself as the mainstream candidate whose concern for the country’s future is such that he won’t go along with business as usual corruption…

Romney’s backing for ethanol calls into question his pose as the guy who can make the tough decisions to balance budgets and eliminate waste and fraud. Though he’d like to be the man he speaks about when he puff his presidential qualifications, he just can’t help being who he is: a weathervane who goes back and forth on the issues depending on where he is and whose votes he wants. Even in Iowa, a state that he may not even actively contest next winter, Romney can’t stop pandering.

Steve Huntley, in the Chicago Sun-Times, is optimistic about the Republican field.

…The spotlight is shifting to former governors with records of coping at the state level with fiscal issues not unlike those threatening the nation’s long-term economic health.

Tim Pawlenty, who declared his candidacy this week, won two terms in blue state Minnesota and earned plaudits for wrestling with a Democratic legislature to cut spending, lower taxes and achieve education and health-care reforms. …Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, is a fresh face in national politics who impresses many voters with his gravitas in discussing the key issues of the day.

And there’s still time for other candidates to jump in if GOP voters continue to register dissatisfaction with their choices. High on the list is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a YouTube sensation thanks to his willingness to confront public employee unions demanding a gold credit card from the taxpayers. The conservative commentariat sees U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as a leader on fiscal issues who can explain in plain language the entitlement iceberg facing the nation while Democrats recklessly steer the Titanic ship of state full steam ahead. Christie and Ryan thus far are firmly resisting a draft, but who knows what may happen in this unpredictable political season? …

In the National Post, Conrad Black comments on various countries’ financial situations.

…When Barack Obama took office, the official normal money supply of the United States was about $1.1-trillion. The $3-trillion in federal budget deficits that have been run up since then have largely, technically, escaped the money supply, though accretions have almost doubled the official total, an unheard of rate of growth (about 40% annualized) in a hard-currency country. About 70% of this debt has been paid by the issuance of bonds to the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, a subsidiary of the United States government. Whatever the balance sheets say, this has produced the effect of a money-supply increase…

…Unless the United States has the most spectacular cognitive awakening since Brunhilda, if not Lazarus, the laws of arithmetic are going to assert themselves in Zeus-like terms.

…If there are signs of hope, the place we might look is Britain. Unlike the United States, the European Union and Japan, the United Kingdom is making a respectable effort to reduce unsustainable debt rather than simply devaluing the currency in which the debt is denominated. Britain’s fiscal deficit is more than 10% of GDP, approximately twice Canada’s rate and slightly higher than that of the United States, but its government does have a somewhat believable plan for reducing it. …

David Harsanyi comments on Colorado giving the finger to the First Amendment.

Shane Boor, a Colorado man with no criminal record, could face up to six months in jail for giving a cop the Digitus Infamis.

“The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has offered free legal aid to a man facing a criminal harassment charge for flipping off a state trooper, the organization announced today.

Shane Boor, 35, was driving to his work site in April when he saw a trooper pull over another car. When Boor drove past, he flipped the trooper the bird.

A second trooper tracked down Boor at his work site and questioned him about the incident, according to the ACLU.”

The ACLU claims that The Finger “quietly expressed Mr. Boor‘s disapproval of what he regarded as unjustified harassment by members of the trooper’s profession.” To be honest, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone was flipping off the police — nor do I think that would happen – but I certainly don’t want to live in a world where a man can face jail time for extending that finger. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

More on David Mamet in the WSJ’s Weekend Interview. He was asked what books he read.

… He starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, “Witness,” documented his turn from Communism. “I read it. It was miraculous. Extraordinary hero-journey of this fellow that had to examine everything he believed in at the great, great cost—which is a cost I’m not subject to—of abandoning his life, his sustenance, his friends, his associations, and his past. And I said, ‘Oh my God. . . . Perhaps it might be incumbent upon me to see if I could get my thought and my actions into line too.”

There were other books. Most were given to him by his rabbi in L.A., Mordecai Finley. Mr. Mamet rattles off the works that affected him most: “White Guilt” by Shelby Steele, “Ethnic America” by Thomas Sowell, “The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” by Wilfred Trotter, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich Hayek, “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman, and “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill.

Before he moved to California, Mr. Mamet had never met a self-described conservative or read one’s writings. He’d never heard of Messrs. Sowell or Steele. “No one on the left has,” he tells me. “I realized I lived in this bubble.”  … 

Charles Krauthammer sums up the president’s latest attack on Israel.

Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.

It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.

For 21 / 2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.

It means nothing of the sort. …

Walter Russell Mead writes on Obama’s lack of success.

… the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time.  He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies.  He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street.  He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.

Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.  His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum.  The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent.  It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.

The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy.  Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds.  Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling.  Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States. …

Jennifer Rubin notes it was Canada that stood by Israel.  

… This is an exquisite statement of support for Israel: “When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand.” Too bad that came from the prime minister of Canada and not the U.S. president.

Marc Thiessen calls him Richard Milhous Obama.

In a television interview last October, President Obama accidentally let slip a key element of his political philosophy: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”

Obama later apologized — not for the underlying sentiment, mind you, but for his word choice. “I probably should have used the word ‘opponents’ instead of enemies,” the president declared.

This incident is worth remembering as the president prepares to issue a far-reaching executive order that would require the government to collect detailed information about the political activities of anyone applying for a federal contract. The proposed order would require businesses to furnish, with each contract proposal, a list not only of their contributions to political candidates and committees, but also their contributions to groups that do not under current law have to reveal their donors. The president’s order would force anyone seeking a federal contract to declare whether they are a friend or an enemy — excuse me, “opponent” — of the Obama White House. Worse still, it would set up a central database listing those contributions at a federal government Web site — creating what amounts to an electronic, searchable “enemies list.” …

James Delingpole welcomes the president to Ireland.

… Tony Blair used to do this trick too, his accent mutating from broad Glaswegian to genteel Edinburgh to Mummerset to Estuary to Richard E Grant to Sarf London Grime – often in the course of one Downing Street reception – the better to persuade his target audience that he was their kind of guy. And it is, of course, the hallmark of an unutterable charlatan.

I’ve argued before that Tony Blair and Barack Obama have an awful lot in common. Both are lawyers; both are snake-oil-salesman; both claim to be post-partisan, and Third Way and consensual; both play the acceptable, moderate-seeming public face of a regime chock full of Communists, class warriors, single issue rabble rousers, malcontents, communitarians and eco-loons hell bent on destroying every last vestige of what once made their country great. And both do (or did) the things dodgy political leaders always do when the going gets tough at home and their domestic audience finally wises up to how totally useless they are: they hop on the plane and pose as international statesman instead. …

Jonathan Tobin says, in regards to John Edwards, we should just let him slither away.

… The spectacle of Edwards’ prosecution may gladden the hearts of some conservatives who have seen similarly flimsy legal attacks on some of their former leaders like Tom DeLay succeed. But that doesn’t make what is happening to Edwards right.

Seeing John Edwards brought into court may satisfy a public that rightly thinks him deserving of some rough justice for the way he treated his wife. But however despicable he may be, putting him through the wringer for campaign finance violations is no triumph for American jurisprudence.

The chair on the Dem party was roasting The GOP a few days ago because they didn’t support the auto bailout. Andrew Malcolm has the story on the Japanese car she drives.

… “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, “we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.” …

Dilbert blogs from Heaven. He went there last week during the rapture.

Heaven is great! I came here unexpectedly at 6 PM on May 21st. One moment I was petting the dog, and the next I was ascending to Heaven without my fillings. As far as I can tell, I was the only person on Earth to qualify for the Rapture. My strategy of remaining a virgin is starting to look pretty smart. And I guess I can admit my other little secret: When you thought I was taking the Lord’s name in vain, I was really saying “gob.”  I know, right? It’s so clever. I totally beat the system.

Anyway, let me tell you what it’s like up here, since apparently you won’t be visiting. For starters, the Internet is blazing fast, and I’m typing this at 1,000 words per minute. No typos, ever! …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It was our intention to leave the Middle East speeching for awhile, but John Podhoretz brings us back. We’ll move on next week. In the meantime, this is too much fun.

The score: Bibi 3, Barack 0.

In a demonstration of political and policy haplessness almost without precedent, the president of the United States decided last week for the third time in three years to go after a beloved ally of the United States with no practical goal and for no practical purpose.

And for the third time, he has had his hat handed to him.

President Obama put conflict with Israel front and center last week by including a new description of the borders of a future Palestinian state in his remarks on Thursday — an endorsement of boundaries for Israel based on the lines that preceded the Six Day War in 1967.

The president did this with deliberate aforethought, we are told by the reporting of New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper — precisely because he wanted to upstage and overshadow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.

Instead, he was upstaged and overshadowed.

It was Netanyahu, not Obama, who electrified Washington. …

If you missed a chance to hear or read Netanyahu’s speech, here it is.

… As the great English writer George Eliot predicted over a century ago, that once established, the Jewish state will “shine like a bright star of freedom amid the despotisms of the East.”  Well, she was right.  We have a free press, independent courts, an open economy, rambunctious parliamentary debates. You think you guys are tough on one another in Congress? Come spend a day in the Knesset. Be my guest.
 
Courageous Arab protesters, are now struggling to secure these very same rights for their peoples, for their societies. We’re proud that over one million Arab citizens of Israel have been enjoying these rights for decades. Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop for a second and think about that.  Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of one-percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel!

This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East. Israel is what is right about the Middle East. …

… I am willing to make painful compromises to achieve this historic peace. As the leader of Israel, it is my responsibility to lead my people to peace.

This is not easy for me. I recognize that in a genuine peace, we will be required to give up parts of the Jewish homeland.  In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India.  We are not the Belgians in the Congo. 

This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace.  No distortion of history can deny the four thousand year old bond, between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.

But there is another truth: The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace in which they will be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens.  They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people in their own state.  They should enjoy a prosperous economy, where their creativity and initiative can flourish. …

Roger Simon reviews Mamet’s book.

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.

For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody. …

Paul Johnson says our debt has become a moral issue.

I wish people everywhere were encouraged by politicians, the media and their places of worship to see indebtedness in moral as well as economic terms.

There is nothing wrong with borrowing money. It’s a natural part of the capitalist system, whereby those who are frugal and have savings are enabled to use them to help those who wish to expand their businesses, receiving reasonable interest on the loans. But if you borrow, three conditions are necessary for your actions to be righteous:

- The money borrowed should be of reasonable size commensurate with your resources and prospects.

- From the outset a program of repayment should be in place.

- The repayment plan should have priority over any other commitment, especially any personal spending plans. …

David Harsanyi defends marriage.

When an actress — no, an artist — the caliber of Cameron Diaz weighs in on the future of social institutions, America has an obligation to listen.

And listen we did. In a widely discussed interview with Maxim magazine, Diaz offered America a peek at her body, her relationship with Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez (which, needless to say, is “awesome”) and her views on the future of matrimony. Does she think marriage is a dying institution? “I do,” she explained. “I think we have to make our own rules. I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off of old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer.”

Let’s for a moment pretend that we share a world with Cameron Diaz. Does marriage suit this domain? …

Shikha Damlia says there is no chance GM will pay back its loans. This inspite of the recent $3.2 billion quarter.

… No doubt, $3.2 billion is a big number. But an even bigger number is $60 billion. That’s what this administration and the last one together sank into GM (not to mention another $20 billion or so they dumped into Chrysler). When President Obama gave GM this money, he insisted that it was not a handout but an “investment” that would cost taxpayers “not a dime.”

But if there was ever any doubt that this wasn’t going to happen, this earning report dispels it.

For starters, included in the $3.2 billion figure is the net $1.5 billion that the company generated from the one-time sale of Delphi, its auto parts supplier, and Ally Financial, its financial arm. Subtract that, and its performance looks much less impressive, especially compared to its rival Ford that really didn’t receive a dime from taxpayers yet made $2.6 billion last quarter—or nearly a billion more than GM. …

The BizJournal tells us about the job engine that is Texas.

Texas added more jobs in the past 10 years than the total jobs of the 19 states, including the District of Columbia, that were positive for job growth.

Texas has enjoyed an unequaled economic boom the past 10 years.

The inventory of private-sector jobs in Texas increased by 732,800 between April 2001 and the same month this year, according to an On Numbers analysis of new federal employment data.

No other state registered an increase of more than 100,000 private-sector jobs during the decade. Only 19 states and the District of Columbia posted any gains at all. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We looked back to Pickings March 28th 2010 to find a post by Nile Gardiner about Obama’s insult to Netanyahu during his last visit to Washington. It is worth remembering this episode now as we watch our president again act in execrable fashion towards the Israeli Prime Minister.

I wrote recently about Barack Obama’s sneering contempt for both Israel and Great Britain. Further confirmation of this was provided today with new details emerging regarding the President’s appalling reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. As Adrian Blomfield reports for The Telegraph:

‘Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem.

… (Mr. Obama) immediately presented Mr Netanyahu with a list of 13 demands designed both to the end the feud with his administration and to build Palestinian confidence ahead of the resumption of peace talks. Key among those demands was a previously-made call to halt all new settlement construction in east Jerusalem.

When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.” As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. “I’m still around,” Mr Obama is quoted by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. “Let me know if there is anything new.” ‘

This is no way to treat America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and a true friend of the United States. I very much doubt that even third world tyrants would be received in such a rude fashion by the president. In fact, they would probably be warmly welcomed by the Obama White House as part of its “engagement” strategy, while the leaders of Britain and Israel are frequently met with arrogant disdain.

The ritual humiliation of the Israelis is an absolute disgrace, and yet another example of how the Obama administration views its allies with indifference, contempt, and at times outright hostility. It is extraordinary how far the Obama team has gone out of its way to grovel to state sponsors of terrorism, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Muammar Gaddafi, while kicking America’s friends in the teeth. …

Bret Stephens thinks all of this is fine as long as we understand the president is anti-Israel.

Say what you will about President Obama’s approach to Israel—or of his relationship with American Jews—he sure has mastered the concept of chutzpah.

On Thursday at the State Department, the president gave his big speech on the Middle East, in which he invoked the claims of friendship to tell Israelis “the truth,” which to his mind was that “the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.” On Friday in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his version of the truth, which was that the 1967 border proposed by Mr. Obama as a basis for negotiating the outlines of a Palestinian state was a nonstarter.

Administration reaction to this reciprocal act of friendly truth-telling? “That was Bibi over the top,” the New York Times quoted one senior U.S. official, using the prime minister’s nickname. “That’s not how you address the president of the United States.”

Maybe so. Then again, it isn’t often that this or any other U.S. president welcomes a foreign leader by sandbagging him with an adversarial policy speech a day before the visit. Remember when the Dalai Lama visited Mr. Obama last year? As a courtesy to Beijing, the president made sure to have the Tibetan spiritual leader exit by the door where the White House trash was piled up. And that was 11 months before Hu Jintao’s state visit to the U.S. …

Jennifer Rubin writes about AIPAC receptions for Harry Reid and Bibi Netanyahu.

Last night at AIPAC Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu delighted and engaged the crowd, while Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) raised some eyebrows. Reid made it perfectly clear, as House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) did on Sunday, that he wanted nothing to do with President Obama’s formulation of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Reid, looking more rickety than usual, isn’t a fabulous public speaker. But what he said pleased the crowd immensely. He was emphatic that any peace deal will be decided “by the parties at the center of the conflict and nowhere else.” If that weren’t direct enough, he continued, “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or anything else.” Roaring ovation. And he assured the crowd, “The United States will not give money to terrorists bent on the destruction of the state of Israel.” Imagine if Obama had said all that — but then he’d have to believe all that and that the peace process is best served when America’s support for Israel is undiluted.

Netanyahu is quite a presence in a room. And the room last night was brimming with affection and enthusiasm. Let there be no doubt: If Obama’s reception was polite, Bibi’s was effusive. …

Even before Bibi’s speech yesterday before a joint session, Jonathan Tobin knew Netanyahu was going to go home a winner in the recent kerfuffle started by the kid president.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress today will illustrate a fact that was largely obscured by the controversy over President Obama’s Middle East policy speech. The Jewish state enjoys overwhelming and bipartisan support in this country.

Cynics will ascribe the support to the “Israel Lobby”—a.k.a. AIPAC—which has been holding its annual conference in the capital the last couple of days — or some other pro-Zionist force. But what conspiracy theorists like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (authors of The Israel Lobby) and their media ilk never seem to understand is that the cabal they believe manipulates U.S. policy is so large it encompasses both major political parties and an overwhelming majority of the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin was at the speech to Congress and says Bibi did not disappoint.

It was simply the most extraordinary and clever speech given by an Israeli prime minister. Bibi Netanyahu did several critical things: demonstrated that he and members of Congress from both parties are entirely in sync; refocused the world on Iran; publicly stated he would give up land considered by Jews to be part of their historic homeland; left no doubt that the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state is the sole reason there is no Palestinian state; and implicitly made a mockery of President Obama’s fixation on settlements. I will take each in order.

The genuine expression of warmth and respect, but more important, agreement from Congress was undeniable. On each key point, whether on Hamas or the right of return or the U.N., there was a full standing ovation from every attendee I could spot. Netanyahu is a uniter — is there ANY issue on which the Congress is so totally united? And Netanyahu made a key point to lawmakers weary about demands form unstable regimes. “No nation building is needed. Israel is already built. There is no need to export democracy.We already are one.” And there’s no need for U.S. troops because “we defend ourselves.”

When a single heckler interrupted, Congress stood in unison to show solidarity. In one of his best lines, Netanyahu said, “You can’t have these protests in the farcical parliaments of Tehran or Tripoli. This is real democracy.”

Jonathan Tobin posts again, after the joint session speech.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu basks in the glory from his triumphant speech to a joint meeting of Congress, it’s a moment to consider that he is the only Israeli leader who could have pulled off such a tour de force. His eloquent summation of Israel’s case was not only to the point, it was delivered in a manner that was singularly insightful in its ability to speak straight to the concerns of Americans.

That is not to say that Netanyahu is the wisest or the most adroit of Israeli politicians. He isn’t. His is a flawed character that has often been rightly described as Nixonesque. He combines a simmering resentment against enemies with deep suspicion of his friends. No happy warrior, Netanyahu is a prickly and often unpleasant man. And yet it must be understood that, for all of his shortcomings, Netanyahu is uniquely equipped to handle what must be considered the most important task of any Israeli prime minister: the alliance with the United States. Having spent much of his childhood in the United States (he’s the second most famous graduate of Cheltenham High School in Pennsylvania after baseball Hall-of-Famer Reggie Jackson), he speaks fluent American English. More than that, unlike most Israelis, including many who have immigrated here, he has an intuitive understanding of American culture. …

Closing today’s coverage of the speech is Toby Harnden.

… It was also notable that Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a liberal Democrat and a Mormon, effectively slapped down Obama in a speech at AIPAC in which he said: “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or anything else.”

As Jennifer Rubin notes, Obama is out of step with his own party on Israel. To talk of his “growing irrelevancy”, as Rubin does, may be overstating things. But he is certainly beginning to look isolated.

Here’s 33 year old video of Netanyahu on a U. S. TV show The Advocate, For this he had anglicized his name to Benjamin Nitay.  

For a change of pace, John Steele Gordon writes on the future of the printed book.

Amazon, by far the largest bookseller in the country, reported on May 19 that it is now selling more books in its electronic Kindle format than in the old paper-and-ink format. That is remarkable, considering that the Kindle has only been around for four years. E-books now account for 14 percent of all book sales in this country and are increasing far faster than overall book sales. E-book sales are up 146 percent over last year, while hardback sales increased 6 percent and paperbacks decreased 8 percent.

Does this spell the doom of the physical book? Certainly not immediately, and perhaps not at all. What it does mean is that the book business will go through a transformation in the next decade or so more profound than any it has seen since Gutenberg introduced printing from moveable type in the 1450s.

Physical books will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, “romance fiction,” etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections either private or public, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.

As for children’s books, who knows? Children’s books are like dog food in that the purchasers are not the consumers, so the market (and the marketing) is inherently strange. …