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Since he took office, Obama has tried to undermine Bibi Netanyahu’s hold on the leadership of Israel. But in fact, he has only undermined himself. Today we will explore the latest in a long line of the president’s MidEast foolishness. Toby Harnden starts it off.

… Some Israelis believe that Mr Obama hoped his words would destabilise Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government and bring in Tzipi Livni, the Kadima leader and head of the Israeli opposition, who is viewed in Washington as more flexible and realistic.

The result of the past few days, however, may well be that real Israeli-Palestinian talks have been made more elusive. Mr Netanyahu took a considerable risk in speaking so bluntly to an American head of state. The response from the staunchly pro-Israel American commentator Jeffrey Goldberg was a blog post headlined: “Dear Mr Netanyahu, Please Don’t Speak to My President That Way”.

But Mr Netanyahu’s coalition appears to be solid at the moment and he could emerge stronger from his spat with Mr Obama. …

… In 2008, 78 per cent of Jewish voters chose Mr Obama over Senator John McCain. That level of support could well ebb between now and 2012. More seriously, there are signs that donations from wealthy Jews, which played a key role in Mr Obama’s stratospheric fundraising totals in 2008, will fall off.

Ed Koch, the former New York mayor and a prominent Democrat and Obama donor in 2008, condemned the President for having “sought to reduce Israel’s negotiation power”, echoing what many other prominent Jewish Democrats have said.

Mr Obama has always made clear that he wants to be not merely an ordinary American president but one to rival Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F Kennedy.

In spelling out to Israel, as he did at Aipac, what he sees as “the facts we all must confront”, no one could accuse him of timidity. He may well, however, have made his own aim of being the great American peacemaker in the Middle East much more difficult to achieve.

Jennifer Rubin on the AIPAC speeches.

More so than the speech (which was vintage Barack Obama — self-pitying, defensive and internally inconsistent), the reaction of those inside the AIPAC conference and from those not in attendance reflected the extraordinary degree to which the president has fragmented the Jewish community. The story of the day was: Friends of Israel are divided over Obama’s motives, goals and feelings about the Jewish state.

The first reaction preceded the speech. Before the president spoke, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) delivered a rock-solid, pro-Israel speech that was in effect a poke in the eye of Obama. Hoyer went thorough nearly all of the problematic issues raised by Obama in his Thursday speech and — boom, boom, boom — then one by one, to the delight of the crowd, took positions contrary to or more clearly pro-Israel than Obama’s. It was a cathartic scene in which attendees reluctant to boo or hiss the president let it be known where they stood with loud and frequent standing ovations. Hoyer said that the United States should confirm the “memorandum of understanding” (the 2004 letters exchanged between President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). Obama did not, although he borrowed one phrase referring to defensible borders. Hoyer announced that the parties should return to the bargaining table with no preconditions. Obama let it be known he’s certain where the border negotiations must start from. Hoyer was emphatic that the U.S. government will not fund a unity government with Hamas. Obama was silent on funding. Hoyer was the un-Obama — clear, unequivocally supportive of Israel and entirely within the mainstream, bipartisan pro-Israel tradition. No one I spoke to had a negative word to say of his address, and many attendees including Republicans were effusive in praise. …

Alana Goodman says the administration asked for this.

… But if Obama’s position was taken out of context, he’s the one to blame. It was his staffers who were telling the New York Times and other media outlets that there was going to be a major “surprise” in his Thursday address, and suggested that it was related to Israel. With literally nothing else newsworthy in the speech besides his 1967 border comments, obviously reporters were going to run with that story. …

Jonathan Tobin notes WaPo’s editorial criticizing the president’s efforts.

President Obama and his staff thought they were being very clever by throwing in the declaration that the 1967 borders were the baseline for future Middle East peace talks into his speech on the Arab Spring protests on the eve of a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They calculated Netanyahu would have no choice but to accept this last-minute slap across the face from his country’s only ally. And if he did talk back, they figured he would find himself isolated without the backing of Israel’s allies in Congress and with most of the American media lined up solidly against him.

But Obama appears to have misread the situation. Netanyahu’s strong reply rightly declaring that the 1967 borders were indefensible may have infuriated the White House, but, contrary to their plan, not everybody is jeering his defiance.

The Washington Post editorial page took the president to school on Friday for injecting a counter-productive irritant into Middle East policy. As the Post wrote:

“Mr. Obama’s decision to confront [Netanyahu] with a formal U.S. embrace of the idea, with only a few hours’ warning, ensured a blowup. Israeli bad feeling was exacerbated by Mr. Obama’s failure to repeat past U.S. positions — in particular, an explicit stance against the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.

Mr. Obama should have learned from his past diplomatic failures — including his attempt to force a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank — that initiating a conflict with Israel will thwart rather than advance peace negotiations. He may also be giving short shrift to what Mr. Netanyahu called “some basic realities.” The president appears to assume that Mr. Abbas is open to a peace deal despite growing evidence to the contrary.” …

More on this from Omri Ceren. Also in Contentions.

… The Wiesenthal Center’s statement makes it clear that it’s not a case of people just not getting what Obama is suggesting. The widely recognized problem with Obama’s speech is that he adopted the final Palestinian negotiating position as the starting position for talks. That would leave Israel—now deprived of bargaining chips—in the position of trying to negotiate out of that position with nothing to trade. In the process the president abrogated any number of previous security guarantees to Israel, while asking them to have faith in future security guarantees. No wonder friends of Israel from across the political spectrum are labeling the President’s gambit a non-starter.

For completion’s sake, the Washington Times also just published a disbelieving editorial about Obama’s almost willfully created rift with Israel. Of the various permutations (was it a new policy? was it an existing stance? is it a coherent policy?) they settle basically on the combination suggested earlier on Contentions: it’s a break with previous administrations, but a culmination of this administration’s failed approaches. The question is why the White House would continue pushing failed initiatives based on flawed assumptions, and the editorial takes a detour through how the President has mishandled the issue of Jerusalem.

If its goal was to turn U.S. media outlets against Netanyahu and Israel, the administration’s lack of judgment went far beyond the speech itself.

Eric Cantor went to AIPAC too. Ron Radosh tells the story of his huge ovation from the conference.

… Undoubtedly, his most well-received moment was when he addressed the president’s own illusions. Cantor first noted that Palestinian culture — which Obama omitted criticizing — is laced with “resentment and hatred.” Cantor then shrewdly rebuked Obama:

[Palestinian culture is] the root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It is not about the ’67 lines. And until Israel’s enemies come to terms with this reality, a true peace will be impossible … If the Palestinians want to live in peace in a state of their own, they must demonstrate that they are worthy of a state.

He boldly laid out a challenge to Abbas, noting that his media and schools regularly preach hatred of Israel as well as Jews as a people. His following remarks received an ovation:

Stop naming public squares and athletic teams after suicide bombers. And come to the negotiating table when you have prepared your people to forego hatred and renounce terrorism — and Israel will embrace you. Until that day, there can be no peace with Hamas. Peace at any price isn’t peace; it’s surrender.

Clearly alluding to the president, Cantor then said that friendship between Israel and the U.S. has to be based on reality, “not just on rhetoric.” While words come and go, “only deeds count.”

And with another slap at the president, he remarked: “Now is the time to lead … from the front.”

Following up on the post yesterday about the disaster that is QE2, we have more from Market Watch.

It‘s cost $600 billion of your money. And it was supposed to rescue the economy. But has Ben Bernanke’s huge financial stimulus package, known as “Quantitative Easing 2,” actually worked as planned?

QE2 is being wound down in the next few weeks. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said it has left the economy “moving in the right direction.”

But an analysis of the real numbers tells a very different story.

Turns out the program has created maybe 700,000 full-time jobs — at a cost of around $850,000 each.

House prices are lower than before QE2 was launched. Economic growth is slower. Inflation is higher. …

Need a break from bad news, Here’s Andrew Malcolm on the best of late-night humor.

Letterman: On Monday no more smoking in New York City public places. So after today if you’re holding something smoking in New York City, it better be a gun.

Leno: President Obama wants Israel to go back to pre-1967 borders. Now, Native Americans are demanding Obama go back to pre-1492 borders.

Leno: You heard about that whole world-coming-to-an-end thing, right? Look, I love Oprah too. But it was just a TV show.

Leno: President Obama’s approval rating went up after the SEALs got Osama Bin Laden. But now it’s back down. That’s bad news, not for Obama, for Kadafi. … 

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Mark Steyn is concerned about the type of people who manage the world’s economy.

… A man is innocent until proven guilty, and it will be for a New York court to determine what happened in M Strauss-Kahn’s suite at the Sofitel. It may well be that’s he the hapless victim of a black Muslim widowed penniless refugee maid – although, if that’s the defense my lawyer were proposing to put before a Manhattan jury, I’d be inclined to suggest he’s the one who needs to plead insanity. Whatever the head of the IMF did or didn’t do, the reaction of the French elites is most instructive. “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization,” sniffed Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, insisting that the police should have known that Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men” and wondering why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the open-shirted, hairy-chested Gallic intellectual who talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into launching the Libyan war, is furious at the lèse-majesté of this impertinent serving girl and the jackanapes of America’s “absurd” justice system, not to mention this ghastly “American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

Well, OK. Why shouldn’t DSK (as he’s known in France) be treated as “a subject of justice like any other”? Because, says BHL (as he’s known in France), of everything that Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” In particular, he has made the IMF “more favorable to proletarian nations and, among the latter, to the most fragile and vulnerable.” What is one fragile and vulnerable West African maid when weighed in the scales of history against entire fragile and vulnerable proletarian nations? Yes, he Kahn!

Before you scoff at Euro-lefties willing to argue for 21st century droit de seigneur, recall the grisly eulogies for the late Edward Kennedy. “At the end of the day,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” The standard line of his obituarists was that this was Ted’s penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne – or, as the Aussie columnist Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” Great men who are prone to Big Government invariably have Big Appetites, and you comely serving wenches who catch the benign sovereign’s eye or anything else he’s shooting your way should keep in mind the Big Picture. Yes, Ted Ken!

Nor are such dispensations confined to Great Men’s trousers. Timothy Geithner failed to pay the taxes he owed the United States Treasury but that’s no reason not to make him head of the United States Treasury. His official explanation for this lapse was that, unlike losers like you, he was unable to follow the simple yes/no prompts of Turbo Tax: In that sense, unlike the Frenchman and the maid, Geithner’s defense is that she wasn’t asking for it – or, if she was, he couldn’t understand the question. Nevertheless, just as only Dominique could save the European economy, so only Timmy could save the U.S. economy. Yes, they Kahn!

How’s that working out? In the U.S., Geithner is currently running around bleating that we need to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling another couple of trillion. On the Continent, the IMF, an institution most Westerners vaguely assume is there as a last resort for Third World basket cases, is intimately involved in the ever more frantic efforts to save the Euro from collapse. Good thing we had these two indispensable men on the case, or who knows how bad things would be. …

Christopher Caldwell writing for the Weekly Standard gives us a French view of the DSK affair.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was not just rich and powerful. He was also, until last Saturday, the likely next president of France. So commanding was his lead that rumors had been flying since April that Martine Aubry, his chief rival for the Socialist nomination, would soon drop out of the race. 

Even if the idea of Strauss-Kahn as their head of state is something the French were only trying on for size, no people can be comfortable seeing their potential leader marched around as an accused rapist, particularly under the customs of an alien legal system. The French are indignant at the “perp walk,” the tradition of marching an arrestee before the video cameras that is former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s contribution to American show business. The French see it as an act of vanity by publicity-seeking prosecutors and a potential harm to the presumption of innocence. On both counts, they are correct. 

There are two ways to look at the anger that rose up in the French press after Strauss-Kahn, disheveled and humiliated, was photographed after his arrest. The first is to see an understandable discomfort with an act of lèse-majesté. The other is to see a public grown servile and sycophantic. The French press may have been worried about seeing Strauss-Kahn’s name dragged through the mud, but it was quite content to print the name of his alleged victim. …

John Hinderaker at PowerLine has a great post on the broken promise of the “stimulus.” 

I have been puzzled by the extent of the media coverage of some crank’s prediction that the world would come to an end today. People are always predicting the end of the world. So far they have always been wrong. Was there something about this particular prediction that was newsworthy? Did any significant number of people expect to wake up this morning and see graves opening and people ascending into Heaven? This morning, there were news stories to the effect that the world still exists. Really! Did reporters expect their readers to be surprised? Why, in short, was this silliness a major media event?

I wish reporters would pay as much attention to a more important failed prediction: the Obama administration’s assurance that its policies, including the “stimulus,” would foster job creation and prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent.  …

… The Obama administration’s failed prediction of job growth has significant public policy implications. The most basic division between our political parties is their relative faith, or lack thereof, in the efficacy of federal spending. We are embarking on an election cycle in which Republicans will argue for reduced government spending, and Democrats will claim, against all the evidence, that cutting back on out-of-control spending will somehow be bad for the economy. But the Democrats’ theory has been tested. It flunked. It would be nice if reporters and editors would find that failed prediction as newsworthy as the latest end of the world calculation.

Houston Chronicle op-ed on the attack on Boeing and the implications for Texas. 

The Obama administration has launched a battle in South Carolina that is both a strike at Texas and an attack upon America’s free enterprise system.

Airplane manufacturer Boeing would like to expand its operations and create jobs with a new facility in North Charleston, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken legal action against the company because South Carolina, like Texas, is a right-to-work state. The NLRB says Boeing can’t expand into South Carolina. It must instead keep all its workers in Washington, where it already has facilities and faces a toxic business climate. Washington is a state with forced unionization, and Boeing has regularly confronted work stoppages by the unions.

If the Obama administration succeeds in this attempt to tell businesses where they’re allowed to set up shop and decide where workers can be employed, then it is not just South Carolina jobs that are in danger. Texas jobs are at stake as well, and the NLRB could soon be issuing rulings that companies cannot create jobs here in Texas. And, even further, this will have the unintended consequence of encouraging companies to locate facilities overseas just to be competitive in today’s global economy. …

George Will explains why California is singing the blues.

In 1967, five years after California became the most populous state, novelist Wallace Stegner said that California — energetic, innovative, hedonistic — was America, “only more so.” Today, this state’s budget crisis is like the nation’s, only more so. …

… “Californians already labor under sales-tax rates usually reserved for states without income taxes (at 8.25 percent, the nation’s highest) and sharply progressive income-tax rates usually reserved for states without sales taxes (the state’s top rate is 10.55 percent, and it doesn’t allow you to deduct your federal taxes, as some states with income taxes do).”

Those tax levels are surely related to these demographic facts: Between 2000 and 2010, Los Angeles gained fewer people than in any decade since the 1890s, and Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have the slowest growth rates since the end of Spanish rule. For the first time since 1920, the Census did not award California even one additional congressional seat. …

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Marty Peretz is aghast at the president’s Mid-East advisors. 

Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria.

These pathetic tidings about the inner Barack Obama, who puts his very own twist on all things, particularly Arab and Muslim matters, and the other Barack Obama, who needs counsel from two political therapists, famous and even clever but not especially deep, come from the subtle and highly reliable journalist Mark Landler in The New York Times. These tidbits are not contradictory. Zakaria’s diagnosis, at least for the last few years, is that America is over, just plumb over. Or, to use the ill-omened word from his The Post-American World, “enfeebled,” which implies continuous decline. Enfeebled nations do not, after all, usually rise again. Zakaria was, however, more than a bit mortified by being called a presidential adviser, although it was he who labeled himself. He posted a statement on Saturday saying, well, that he didn’t really advise but spoke to Obama several times in face-to-face meeting about the Arab Spring (which, by the way, in my view is fast becoming Arab winter, like the east coast winter last season.) Anyway, if he is trying to establish a difference, it’s not a distinction. …

… In contrast to Zakaria, Friedman is not embarrassed by being seen as the president’s counselor. … Anyway, Tom’s lens for seeing contemporary America is through contemporary China. He wishes America were China, almost the way some native fascists like Charles Lindbergh wanted America to be like Germany and the way ignorant but “idealistic” oodles of American intellectuals and radical Jewish immigrants wanted the country to be like Soviet Russia. The Chinese can do everything. America can do nothing. Except push the peace process. Yet even Obama must grasp that there is no peace process to push. Mahmoud Abbas has dispatched those killed trying to invade Israel on Nakba Day to the heavens as “martyrs,” moral exemplars, indeed. …

… I wonder what Obama can really learn from Zakaria and Friedman, neither of whom know Arabic, neither of whom know the sources (arcane or simply erudite), both of whom jump from one fashionable topic to another. Today, it’s energy. No, that was yesterday. Wouldn’t the president have been better off and the country better off, too, if he had sat down with, say, Fouad Ajami, who doesn’t agree with him but has the learning to explain why. Maybe Obama should also sit down with Paul Berman, who has explored the ties between radical Arab politics and radical Muslim theology, a generally forbidden topic, especially in this White House. (Berman has done much of his essay writing in this magazine.) Or is it the president’s habit to talk only with people who agree with him? …

… And here’s one more suggestion for whom the president ought to meet: I don’t know Timur Kuran, a Turkish economic historian at Duke. But I did read his book, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. It will clarify why Obama is so wrong in insisting that Muslim religious principles are unrelated to the regressive politics and economics of countries under their sway. Obama should at least have a conversation with this man, especially since he can’t possibly have time to read a serious scholarly book.

Of course, it is not exactly the president’s lack of knowledge about the Arabs (and the Jews, for that matter) that has left his Middle East policy in shambles. It is the continuous Arab sandstorm of sanctimony and duplicity which has blinded him to the precise underlying realities the sandstorm was meant to conceal. He is a victim of their deceit and his own credulity. But it is even more than that: He believes in his own powers to discern and to persuade as a function of that discernment. Now that virtually every society in the region has upended Obama’s benign take of their reality, it remains to be seen whether he himself can adjust his inner lens to accommodate the brute bedrock. …

… Syria is where the new paradigms of Arab history will be made. The brutality of the Assad dictatorship is legendary, and it has gone over 40 years from father to son. No one is willing to predict whether the family will survive or be taken out. If it survives, it will be more dictatorial than anyone imagined possible. If it is overthrown, it will be replaced by a regime equally cruel but more pious, much more pious. It is not easy for outsiders to decide what they want.

But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already more than indicated that they prefer the continued dominion of Bashar Assad. You have to be pretty cold-blooded to make a choice like that. There are other consequences to this decision. Syrian dominion over Lebanon will continue. The Syrian alliance with Iran will continue. Syrian influence over Turkey will continue, perhaps intensify. Syrian intrusion in Iraq will continue. Syria might even get its chance to be on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Hey, and here’s a good thing: The Golan will remain a part of Israel.

Charles Krauthammer find’s Obama’s inner Bush.

Herewith President Obama’s Middle East speech , annotated:

“It will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”

With this Barack Obama openly, unreservedly and without a trace of irony or self-reflection adopts the Bush Doctrine, which made the spread of democracy the key U.S. objective in the Middle East.

“Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills.”

Note how even Obama’s rationale matches Bush’s. Bush argued that because the roots of 9/11 were to be found in the deflected anger of repressed Middle Eastern peoples, our response would require a democratic transformation of the region. …

Stephen Colbert decided to make fun of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a spoof. The tables were turned on Colbert when he ran afoul of the very laws the Court was attempting to control. The story comes from two Institute for Justice attorneys writing in the WSJ.

Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert, like most of his friends and allies on the left, thinks that last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is, literally, ridiculous. To make his case that the ruling invites “unlimited corporate money” to dominate politics, Mr. Colbert decided to set up a political action committee (PAC) of his own. So far, though, the joke’s been on him.

The hilarity began last month, when Mr. Colbert began to have difficulty setting up his PAC, which is a group that can raise money to run political ads or make contributions to candidates. So he called in Trevor Potter, a former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) chairman who is now a high-powered Washington lawyer.

Mr. Potter delivered some unfunny news: Mr. Colbert couldn’t set up his PAC because his show airs on Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom, and corporations like Viacom cannot make contributions to PACs that give money to candidates. As Mr. Potter pointed out, Mr. Colbert’s on-air discussions of the candidates he supports might count as an illegal “in-kind” contribution from Viacom to Mr. Colbert’s PAC. ..

Ed Morrissey picks up the thought.

Satire is notoriously difficult to do well.  If anyone doubts that, just ask Esquire, which might face a lawsuit for libel over its clumsy attempt to skewer WND this week on the birth-certificate controversy, although I share James Taranto’s skepticism that the case will succeed.  Even those who make a successful career out of satire, like Stephen Colbert, they eventually miss badly as well when their stunts backfire.  The Wall Street Journal explains how Colbert started off trying to skewer the Supreme Court over the Citizens United v FEC ruling, and ended up getting a lesson in its necessity: …

Richard Epstein too. 

The recent masterstroke by Steve Simpson and Paul Sherman in the Wall Street Journal offers yet another explanation as to the weird absurdity of the current campaign finance laws, whose complexity defies description, especially by folks like myself who think that the FEC has better things to do with its time.

Simpson and Sherman take the occasion to lampoon that master lampooner, Stephen Colbert, who makes his living by making other people look like fools when they crave center stage. But in this instance, he broke his own rules and decided to go solo, at which point his own actions became a delicious point of self-parody. …

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The Arab spring has brought tremendous upheavals in the Middle East, and the exciting possibility of freedom for many oppressed nations. Instead of addressing these changes and advocating for peaceful transitions and democratic governing, the president falls back on the same boring liberal position. David Harsanyi writes on Obama’s speech today.

…According to a Bloomberg report, Obama will urge Israel to halt West Bank settlement expansion and return to the 1967 “borders.” (There were never any 1967 borders, but that’s another story.) If this is true, the president of the United States will be asking an ally — though he probably bristles at such a narrow-minded concept — to accept a Judenfrei West Bank, washed of all aggressive settlers, prosperity and progress. The president, if the report is true, will be asking the Jews to surrender the old city of Jerusalem and place it under new management. Hamas-Fatah management.

…History moves on. The Arab world refuses. On al-Nakba day (belated greetings!) last week — a day on which Arabs mourn not the loss of West Bank or Gaza but the existence of a Jewish state in any configuration — the Syrian regime encouraged a few thousand Palestinian “refugees” to bum rush the border to deflect attention away from the ongoing brutalization of its own people. What’s another 12 lives?…

Caroline Glick gives us a thorough rundown of today’s White House attack on Israel.

…the Netanyahu government and Congress are calling for a US aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, now partnering with Fatah in governing the PA, it is illegal for the US government to continue to have anything to do with the PA. Both the Netanyahu government and senior members of the House and Senate are arguing forcefully that there is no way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians now, and that the US must abandon its efforts to force the sides to sign an agreement.

The Israeli and congressional arguments are certainly compelling. But the signals emanating from the White House and its allied media indicate that Obama is ready to plough forward in spite of them. With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah. …

…Unlike his predecessors, Obama’s interest in the Palestinians is not opportunistic. He is a true believer. And because of his deep-seated commitment to the Palestinians, his policies are even more radically anti-Israel than the PLO-Fatah’s. It was Obama, not Abbas, who demanded that Jews be barred from building anything in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. It is the Obama administration, not the PLO-Fatah, that is leading the charge to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood.

…But Netanyahu doesn’t have to give in. He can stick to his guns and defend the country. He can continue on the correct path he has forged of repeating the truth about Hamas. He can warn about the growing threat of Egypt. He can describe the Iranian-supported butchery Assad is carrying out against his own people and note that a regime that murders its own will not make peace with the Jewish state. And he can point out the fact that as a capitalist, liberal democracy which protects the lives and property of its citizens, Israel is the only stable country in the region and the US’s only reliable regional ally. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin hears that some small measure of common sense may have gained a foothold at the White House.

President Obama’s speech about the Middle East, scheduled for Thursday at the State Department, has been the subject of constant speculation fueled by leaks from administration sources. Most of the speculation is over whether he will take the opportunity to spell out his ideas for a revival of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, improbably linking it to the Arab Spring protests that have inflamed the region. There have been leaks intended to make us think he was sensibly dropping the idea of promoting some sort of U.S. dictat and others that made it appear as if he would squeeze Israel.

…While Obama pledged America’s undying support for Israel’s existence yesterday while hosting a “Jewish Heritage” day at the White House at which the Marine Band played klezmer music, the debate over whether or not to heighten pressure on the Jewish state illustrates the double game the administration is playing on the Middle East. With the Palestinian Authority having embraced an alliance with Hamas and making it clearer than ever that their goal of an independent state is merely a way station on the road to future conflict with Israel (as PA head Mahmoud Abbas’s op-ed article in yesterday’s New York Times illustrated), the notion that more U.S. pressure will pave the way to peace makes no sense.

What Obama seems most interested in is a statement that will buttress his attempts at outreach to the Arab world. But what the president fails to understand is that his attempt to link the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians to the Arab Spring won’t increase his influence in the region. Israel and the United States are both irrelevant to the protests. And nothing Barack Obama does will change that.

Switching gears, but staying with the general foolishness of this administration, Steve Chapman, in the Chicago Tribune, has more on the NLRB.

…If the NLRB succeeds, a federal official will command a private corporation it may not produce in one place and must produce in another. Never mind what makes business sense.

This is a radical departure for the agency. “It is highly unusual,” noted The New York Times, “for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of a plant.”

Boeing adamantly denies moving production because of strikes or unions. But even if it was doing something so vicious as to protect itself against recurring labor disruptions, it ought to have that right.

William Gould, a Stanford University law professor who was appointed to head the NLRB by President Bill Clinton, has his doubts about this complaint. “It’s perfectly reasonable for a company to want to avoid strikes,” he told me. …

Jennifer Rubin reports more stalling from the union owned president, on free-trade agreements that would help the economy.

The White House, to the dismay of members of both parties in Congress, has been foot-dragging on submission of the South Korea, Colombia and Panama free-trade deals. Yesterday, as the Daily Caller reported, the president came up with a new excuse:

White House officials announced . . . .they won’t send three pending trade pacts to Congress until they get a new package of aid-funding approved by Capitol Hill. …

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) was not pleased, issuing this statement:

The Obama Administration has found every possible excuse to delay implementation of these trade deals despite agreement that they would help boost economic growth and make America more competitive. .?.?. At a time when our economy could use all the help it can get, these agreements would expand U.S. exports and grow jobs and investments here in America. Inaction only results in the U.S. losing market share and exports to competitors. It is irresponsible for the White House to be throwing up yet another barrier to stall movement. If the president believes trade is an important part of getting our country’s economy moving again, his administration should reassure our trade partners and the American people that our nation will uphold its commitment to these agreements and not continue to find reason to delay or dismantle them.”

Matthew Boyle, in the Daily Caller, looks at government by the Democrats, for their political friends.

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

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers. …

…Pelosi’s office did not respond to TheDC’s requests for comment either.

In Powerline, John Hinderaker posts on a study that the stimulus saved government jobs only. It figures that government would save itself, not the people it is supposed to serve.

Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the purported stimulus bill) with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported their findings in a paper titled “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled.” The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study. Here, however, is the bottom line:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that “spending equals stimulus,” he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.

Andrew Malcolm looks at Obama’s poll numbers.

…Most obviously gasoline prices, which Americans always use as a key to how they feel about any White House administration. And a kind of general, pervasive unease and uncertainty that prompts pessimism and a hesitancy to spend or invest, reflected now in lowered estimates for this year’s economic growth.

The next big Washington fight will be over raising the national debt ceiling. Maybe you heard the thunk earlier Monday when the United States reached that limit. As a helpful reminder, Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner released a statement, including;

Americans understand we simply can’t keep spending money we don’t have. Spending-driven deficits, record debt, and the threat of tax hikes are smothering our economy with uncertainty and making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers. 

Recent polls indicate Americans are unhappy about raising the limit without significant spending cuts, despite the dire credit warnings.

Frank Donatelli, in Politico, thinks that Obama will have to campaign against difficult economic statistics.

…Four represents gasoline prices rising to $4 and beyond. Energy prices affect all economic activity and threaten to put a crimp in our stilted recovery.

The administration’s policies of rationing scarcity are largely to blame. We are not drilling offshore for new oil. We are only now taking advantage of new oil and gas deposits in the U.S., and the Environmental Protection Agency is hardly leading the way. We are not exploiting our vast reserves of coal and natural gas.

…Ten represents $10 trillion of additional debt that we will accumulate by the end of a second Obama administration. This is a national crisis that the president has chosen to ignore.

…He believes the public is so insistent on maintaining entitlement programs that began in the 1930s and 1960s, and remain unchanged, that people will overlook this systematic looting of our children’s future. …

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George Will adds his thoughts, and some excellent arguing points, to the discussion of the NLRB v. Boeing.

…The NLRB’s complaint is not a conscientious administration of the law; it is intimidation of business leaders who contemplate locating operations in right-to-work states. Labor loathes Section 14(b) of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allows states to pass right-to-work laws that forbid compulsory unionization. But 11 Democratic senators represent 10 of the right-to-work states: Mark Pryor (Arkansas), Bill Nelson (Florida), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Harry Reid (Nevada), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), Tim Johnson (South Dakota), and Jim Webb and Mark Warner (Virginia). Do they support the Obama administration’s attempt to cripple their states’ economic attractiveness?

The NLRB’s attack on Boeing illustrates the Obama administration’s penchant for lawlessness displayed when, disregarding bankruptcy law, it traduced the rights of Chrysler’s secured creditors. Now the NLRB is suing Arizona and South Dakota because they recently, and by large majorities, passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to secret ballots in unionization elections — ballots that complicate coercion by union organizers.

Just as uncompetitive companies try to become wards of the government (beneficiaries of subsidies, tariffs, import quotas), unions unable to compete for workers’ allegiance solicit government compulsion to fill their ranks. The NLRB’s reckless attempt to break a great corporation, and by extension all businesses, to government’s saddle — never mind the collateral damage to the economy — is emblematic of the Obama administration’s willingness to sacrifice the economy on the altar of politics.

In Pajamas Media, Christian Adams fills us in on the senate committee hearing the GOP hijacked to cover the NLRB/Boeing flap.

…But Senator Mike Enzi outfoxed Harkin. He called — as his sole witness — Michael Luttig, general counsel for the Boeing Company and former justice of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

…Luttig emphasized that a union strike in 2008 in Washington shut down production of the 787, costing Boeing more than a billion dollars and “damaging Boeing’s reputation for reliability with its airline customers, suppliers, and investors.” Boeing took into account many different factors in making a major assembly investment decision, and the recurring strikes in Washington was just one of them.

…Harkin was clearly annoyed at the turn that the hearing took. He muttered about his coal mining father and the unfair attacks on unions and the NLRB.  But the political danger of the NLRB action was demonstrated by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who given his background in suing corporations, is not generally seen as “pro-business.”

Blumenthal went out of his way to be nice to Luttig and Boeing, the biggest American export company with $29 billion in overseas sales in 2009. That might also be due to the fact that Boeing suppliers spend more than a billion dollars in Connecticut. …

The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on how the priorities of the Obama administration are creating a hostile atmosphere for businesses.

…what sane company would invest at a time when it’s in the government’s greedy cross hairs? Or when both the White House and Congress repeatedly criticize “millionaires and billionaires,” and threaten to crush small businesses — the engines of job growth — with higher taxes and new regulations?

As Obama spoke about jobs Thursday, oil CEOs were being grilled by Senate Democrats at a hostile hearing. Their crime? They’re making fat profits. Time was, profits were a sign of success. Today, far-left Democrats think “profit” is a dirty word.

For the record, oil companies’ profits are up because oil prices have soared. This isn’t due to “speculators,” but to the White House’s foolish policy of keeping hundreds of millions of barrels of offshore oil off-limits — driving up prices and boosting foreign dependence.

Instead, the White House subsidizes money-losing alternative energy sources, none of which is ready to replace our current energy supply. Prices can only go up. …

David Harsanyi looks at oil profits from several angles.

…Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of the sponsors of the “Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act” in the Senate, says: “We’re going to face a lot of resistance when we try to take a few billion dollars in free taxpayer money away from them.” As is typical of the Left, McCaskill seems to believe that giving a company tax breaks is tantamount to giving that company taxpayer money. But who exactly does she believe is going to pay for a tax increase, anyway, if not consumers?

Granted, Republicans would do well to support removing — across the board — tax incentives that skew competition. Eliminating these subsidies is the consistent free-market position. And $18 billion is $18 billion — if it’s used to alleviate the debt crisis.

But it won’t be. Obama would rather divert “those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” In other words, Obama plans to reroute the money to a clean-energy market that not only is already massively subsidized, but has increased the cost of power.

So, in the end, this ruse has nothing to do with savings, nothing to do with bringing down the price of gas, and everything to do with casting government as moral arbiter of energy.

John Steele Gordon comments on increasing federal power.

…What’s wrong with our current street signs? They’re in all capital letters and the geniuses at the Department of Transportation have determined that street signs in upper- and lower-case letters (and a particular typeface—“Clearview”) are fractionally easier to read and thus a driver’s attention is diverted by a few milliseconds less than with the older signs. Multiply that by the billions of miles American drive every day and there should be fewer accidents.

I’ll presume that that is true. My objection is with the fact that the Constitution does not give the federal government authority over highway signage. But because the federal government hands out money to the states for highway construction and maintenance, it can—and does—attach conditions, such as mandating the typeface of street signs and requiring a drinking age of 21.  These federal payments to states have been the royal road to ever-increasing federal control of American life and have gone a long way to reducing the once sovereign states to mere federal administrative districts. …

State politicians find federal money irresistible. After all, they get credit for building the new bridge or repaving the highway and Uncle Sam gets the bill. But every dollar of federal money is paid for in lost power and sovereignty. In the long run that makes the “free” federal money very expensive indeed.

The Economist Blogs – Schumpeter looks at how licensing cartels hurt entrepreneurs. And who fights for them? Our heroes at The Institute for Justice.

…Some occupations clearly need to be licensed. Nobody wants to unleash amateur doctors and dentists on the public, or untrained tattoo artists for that matter. But, as the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pointed out, America’s Licence Raj has extended its tentacles into occupations that pose no plausible threat to health or safety—occupations, moreover, that are governed by considerations of taste rather than anything that can be objectively measured by licensing authorities. The list of jobs that require licences in some states already sounds like something from Monty Python—florists, handymen, wrestlers, tour guides, frozen-dessert sellers, firework operatives, second-hand booksellers and, of course, interior designers—but it will become sillier still if ambitious cat-groomers and dog-walkers get their way.

Getting a licence can be time-consuming. Want to become a barber in California? That will require studying the art of cutting and blow-drying for almost a year. Want to work in the wig trade in Texas? You will need to take 300 hours of classes and pass both written and practical exams. Alabama obliges manicurists to sit through 750 hours of instruction before taking a practical exam. Florida will not let you work as an interior designer unless you complete a four-year university degree and a two-year apprenticeship and pass a two-day examination.

…You might imagine that Americans would be up in arms about all this. After all, the Licence Raj embodies the two things that Americans are supposed to be furious about: the rise of big government and the stalling of America’s job-creating machine. You would be wrong. Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay.

In Popular Mechanics, Christopher Cox discusses the logistics of handling the Mississippi flood waters.

The devastation wrought by an epic Mississippi River flood nearly a century ago—more than 500 people dead, another 700,000 displaced and 26,000 square miles underwater…now, as the Mississippi River flirts with levels and flow rates not seen in decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will try to avoid any kind of encore of that long-ago flood as they rely on an enormous infrastructure system unknown to most Americans outside of southern Louisiana.

The Corps is pulling out the stops of its Mississippi River & Tributaries Project, a sprawling set of levees, revetments, spillways and floodways devised to control a restless river fed by the third-largest watershed in the world. Robert A. Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans, says this federal flood-control plan was enacted after the 1927 catastrophe to protect the river and its communities. “It’s all pretty monumental,” he says. “It was foresight on their part, to look that far down the road. All it took was the 1927 flood.”

Now, though, the system is facing its toughest test in decades. Earlier this week, as the Mississippi was cresting in Memphis, Tenn., engineers opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway 30 miles above New Orleans for only the 10th time in its 80-year history.

Andrew Malcolm compiles some recent jokes, in the LA Times.

… Letterman: Osama bin Laden’s Diary: ‘April 12 – Dear Diary, Awful TV reception. Death to Time Warner!’ April 20 – Dear Diary, three wives and one bathroom. You do the math.’

…Conan: President Obama says the Bin Laden raid was the longest 40 minutes of his life. With the possible exception of every time he asks Joe Biden, ‘Hey, what’s up?’

…Letterman: We’re learning more about Osama Bin Laden’s plans. He wanted to create chaos in Washington. Well, thank God that didn’t happen! …

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We have a real treat today. In the past we have noted the restless mind of the playwright, David Mamet.  It seems it has settled down – on the side of those who believe in freedom, for people and markets.

Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard tells us the story. It is a long piece and we devote much of today’s post to it. Previous Pickings with Mamet posts can be found March 19, 2008 and August 3, 2010.

Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “‘F— you’ —David Mamet.” 

Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.

His fame was enough to fill the stalls of Memorial Hall at Stanford University when he came to give a talk one evening a couple of years ago. About half the audience were students. The rest were aging faculty out on a cheap date with their wives or husbands. You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-’n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’.

Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .. view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it.

It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd. Two couples in front of me shot looks to one another as Mamet went on—first the tight little smiles, then quick shakes of the head, after a few more minutes the eye-rolls, and finally a hitchhiking gesture that was the signal to walk out. Several others followed, with grim faces. 

It was too much, really. It’s one thing to titillate progressive theatergoers with scenes of physical abuse and psychological torture and lines like “You’re f—ing f—ed.” But David Mamet had at last gone too far. He’d turned into a f—ing Republican.

Next month a much larger number of liberals and leftists will have the opportunity to be appalled by Mamet’s Stanford speech. Passages from it form the bulk of a chapter in his new book of brief, punchy essays, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The book marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed. It’s part conversion memoir, part anthropology, part rant, part steel-trap argument—the testimony of a highly intelligent man who has wrenched himself from one sphere and is now declaring his citizenship in another, very loudly. 

Mamet himself has never been a political playwright or a dramatist of ideas, being concerned with earthier themes—how it is, for example, that everyday conflicts compound into catastrophe. His plays were heavy with a tragic view of human interaction. They depicted, as he put it, people doing despicable things to each other, moved by greed or power lust or some nameless craving. Still, politically minded critics were pleased to divine a political intent: American Buffalo, set in a junk shop, or Glengarry Glen Ross, set in a real estate office, were allegories of the heartlessness of a country (ours) ruled by markets and capital. Their invariably unhappy or unresolved endings drove the point home. And the critics had a point. The world Mamet created was one-half of the leftist view of life, anyway: the Hobbesian jungle that Utopians would rescue us from, liberal idealism with the sunny side down.  

The Secret Knowledge begins with a parricide—a verbal throat-slitting of the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht, father to three generations of dramatists, especially those who, like Tony Kushner or Anna Deavere Smith or Christopher Durang, make agitprop the primary purpose of their art. For most of his career Mamet revered Brecht too: It was the thing to do. The reverence came to an end when he finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. . The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system . support and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.”

As the accelerating sequence of that last sentence suggests—from Brecht to Marx to the entire system of American higher education—one wispy aha! leads the convert to a larger revelation and then to one even broader and more comprehensive. That’s the way it is with conversion experiences: The scales fall in a cascade. One light bulb tends to set off another, until it’s pop-pop-pop like paparazzi on Oscar night. 

And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror. 

“I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.”

He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period. …

… “I wondered, How did the system function so well? Because it does—the system functions beautifully.” How did the happiest, freest, and most prosperous country in history sprout from the Hobbesian jungle? 

“I realized it was because of this thing, this miracle, this U.S. Constitution.” The separation of powers, the guarantee of property, the freedoms of speech and religion meant that self-interested citizens had a system in which they could hammer out their differences without killing each other. Everyone who wanted to could get ahead. The Founders had accepted the tragic view of life and, as it were, made it pay. It’s a happy paradox: The gloomier one’s view of human nature—and Mamet’s was gloomy—the deeper one’s appreciation of the American miracle. …

Ed Morrissey notes the new crop of ObamaCare waivers. 200 of them. This is apropos since yesterday we had Richard Epstein on the continuing growth of executive power.

… Who gets waivers?  Who doesn’t?  What are the prerequisites for waivers?  Which conditions would require approval, and which would require rejection?  No one knows, and HHS isn’t saying.  And the rather strong tilt in waivers granted towards unions strongly suggests that politics and the Rule of Whim are very much part of the decision process.

That’s a lot of things, but transparent it isn’t.

Mark Hemingway in Weekly Standard says half of the waivers have been granted to unions. 

In what is fast becoming a weekly event, the Obama administration granted 200 more companies waivers from the Democrats’ sweeping health care law in the Friday night news dump. That brings the number of companies receiving waivers to 1,372. (You can get a full list of the companies exempted here.)

Not surprisingly, it helps to be a Democratic ally when seeking a waiver. The Republican Policy Committee reports that over half of the workers that have been exempted so far belong to unions: …

Speaking of unions, Megan McArdle in the Atlantic tells us how we are faring with our stake in GM.

… About $40 billion of the money that the government gave GM was converted to GM common stock. In the November IPO, the government made about $20 billion selling 478 million shares, leaving us with around $20 billion more to recoup on our remaining 26.5% stake in the company.  That means we need to sell the approximately 365 million shares we have left at about $55 per share, net of underwriting and legal costs.  At the current share price of $31, we’d be left with a loss somewhere north of $9 billion–plus the $1 billion we gave the “old GM” to wind things up, and the $2.1 billion worth of GM preferred stock we own.  Since I don’t know the details of the preferred transaction, I’ll leave that out, which gives us a loss after expenses of $10 to $11 billion on our investment in GM.  

But of course, that assumes that the current share price holds.  It could well fall over the next few months–or when the government dumps an enormous new supply of GM stock on a market that isn’t showing all that much enthusiasm for the product.  

It also leaves out a very important extra:  the $14 billion gift that the government seems to have handed the company, in the form of a special tax break: …What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to learn from this “success”?  What question did it answer? “Can the government keep companies operating if it is willing to give them a virtually interest free loan of $50 billion, and a tax-free gift of $20 billion or so?”  I don’t think that this was really in dispute. When all is said and done, we will probably have given them a sum equal to its 2007 market cap and roughly four times GM’s 2008 market capitalization.

… No, the question was not whether GM could make a profit after a bankruptcy that stiffed most of its creditors and shed the most grotesque burdens of its legacy costs, nor whether giving companies money will make them more profitable. The question is whether it was worth it to the taxpayer to burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy.  We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks–and over $100,000 a piece if we just wanted to break even against our losses on the common stock.  

And if we’d done that, we’d have saved ourselves in other ways.  We would have reduced some of the overcapacity that plagues the global industry.  We would not have seen the government throwing its weight into a bankruptcy proceeding in order to redistribute money from creditors to pensioners, which isn’t a good precedent.

But even if you still think that the bailout was a good idea, there’s something you should consider before we start celebrating the administration’s Solomonic wisdom: the Obama administration’s rush to dispose of its GM stake before the 2012 election is probably costing us billions.  No one I interviewed for my piece on GM was exactly enthusiastic about an early IPO; doing it so quickly meant that the company had very little to show in the way of earnings and stability.  Now the government may rush to sell all its remaining shares this summer even though this means locking in a substantial loss. …

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John Fund reviews an interesting new Reagan book.

Ronald Reagan was known as “The Great Communicator.” What isn’t well-known is just how hard he worked to earn that title. One of his secrets was a stack of 3 x 5 inch note cards that he compiled throughout his public life. Consisting of quotes, economic statistics, jokes and anecdotes, they became the core of Ronald Reagan’s traveling research files.

An annotated selection of those cards has just been published as a book. “The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom” is edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, and the book’s release is being accompanied by a display of some of the note cards at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

…While Reagan was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me — a 15-year-old high school student — how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches. …

Mark Steyn has strong words about the train wreck called Romneycare, and other government interventions that have made Americans worse off. If Republicans actually select Romney as their 2012 candidate, the silver lining will be the Tea Party transformation that follows. Mark also has some sobering words about the debt ceiling.

… In the real world, debt ceilings are determined by the lenders, not the borrowers. In March, Pimco (which manages the world’s largest mutual fund) calculated that 70 percent of U.S. Treasury debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve.

So under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the United States government spends $188 million it doesn’t have, $130 million of which is “borrowed” from itself. There’s nobody else out there.

In other words, however Congress votes, we’re rubbing up against the real debt ceiling – the willingness of the world to continue bankrolling American debauchery.

Barack Obama is offering us a Latin American future – that’s to say, a United States in which a corrupt governing class rules a dysfunctional morass. He’s confident that, when the moat with alligators is put in, he’ll be on the secure side. If you figure you’ll be, too, you can afford to vote for him. …

…The problems with RomneyCare are well known: Mitt argued that Massachusetts needed to reform its health care system because the uninsured were placing huge strains on the state’s emergency rooms, and the rest of the population had to pick up the tab for the free-riders, and that was driving up Massachusetts health costs. So, as a famous can-do technocrat, he looked at the problem and came up with a can-do technocratic solution. Three years later, everyone was insured, but emergency room use was higher than ever, and 70 percent of those newly insured were all but entirely subsidized by the state, and Massachusetts residents were paying 30 percent more for their health care than the U.S. average, and Boston had the longest wait time in the nation to see a new doctor. …

American conservatives’ problem with RomneyCare is the same as with ObamaCare – that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the Constitution is dead. …

The inflationary factor in Massachusetts health care was not caused by deadbeats using emergency rooms as their family doctor but by the metastasizing cost distortions of government intervention in health care: Mitt should have known that. As he should know that government intervention in college loans has absurdly inflated the cost of ludicrously overvalued credentials and, in a broader sense, helped debauch America’s human capital. As he should know that government intervention in the mortgage market is why, every day, more and more American homeowners are drowning in negative equity.

So RomneyCare is not just an argument about health care. It exemplifies what’s wrong with American political structures: It suggests that our institutions are incapable of course correction; it reminds us…that Republicans are either easily suckered or too eager to be bipartisan fig leaves in embarrassing kindergarten kabuki; it confirms that “technocracy” in politics is a synonym for “more” – more government, more spending, more laws, more bureaucrats, more regulations, more paperwork, more of what’s killing this once-great republic every hour of every day. In defense of Romney, one might argue that politics is the art of the possible. But in Massachusetts what was possible made things worse. …

Richard Epstein writes a well-measured explanation of the problems with executive overreach.

…One of my constant concerns with the Obama administration is that its vision of executive power means that it has not recognized the need to rein in its discretion. Quite the contrary, in a variety of areas it seems only too eager to use its discretion to maximum advantage, often to support its own political agenda. That is the chief charge against the way Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has instituted litigation against The Boeing Company [3] for imagined unfair labor practices when the company decided to open up its new assembly plants in management-friendly South Carolina.

That same tendency toward mischief has been revealed in two of its other recent actions, each of which sheds light on the risks of the abuse of discretion. I speak here of criminal punishment for off-label drug uses and mandatory disclosures of campaign contributions by prospective government contractors.

…The dangers of executive discretion are, if anything, greater in the Obama administration’s proposal to require key federal contractors to disclose political contributions that they have made to various parties. As reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel, [8] the Obama administration is about to sign an executive order requiring all contractors that do business with the government to disclose contributions that they and their chief officers have made to political parties during the past two years as a condition of getting government business. Needless to say, this restriction does not apply to the president’s favored clientele, including unions and environmental groups.

…When a government official knows that a business bidder or its top officials have supported the opposition candidate, that information can be used to steer lucrative contracts toward those organizations whose political contributions line up with the Obama administration’s own political agenda. The point here is not that Democrats are inevitably corrupt while Republicans are undyingly noble. Rather, it is that sensitive information often can do harm when it is put in the hands of government officials who use it in pursuit of their own political ambitions. …

2012 can’t come too soon, with the damage that this administration is inflicting. The Investor’s Business Daily editors explain.

…Before the mortgage crisis, Attorney General Janet Reno accused banks of racism for failing to market mortgages to poor minorities with weak credit. Fear of prosecution set off a stampede of risky inner-city lending that led, in part, to today’s record home foreclosures.

Now Reno’s deputy — current Attorney General Eric Holder — is prosecuting banks for doing too well what he and Reno ordered them to do before the crisis: “targeting of minority communities” for subprime and other high-cost loans. He calls this “reverse redlining,” or the opposite of what banks were accused of doing in the past — drawing red lines around inner-city areas deemed too risky for lending. Only, Holder’s also suing lenders for tightening credit in now-devastated urban areas to guard against future defaults.

…He’s also appointed a special lending cop to run the new crusade — Special Counsel for Fair Lending Eric Halperin, who also happens to have worked for Reno. Featured in the anti-bank film “Inside Job,” Halperin answers to Civil Rights Division chief Tom Perez.

Another Reno-era retread, Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference, he says, is bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print.” He says this kind of racism — though more subtle — is “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.” …

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm has a story about Beltway ethics for us.

…July 2009 — President Obama appoints Meredith Attwell Baker as one of two Republican members among the five on the Federal Communications Commission.

January 2011 — Baker joins three other commission members in approving the mega-takeover of NBCUniversal by Comcast Corp.

May 11, 2011, early — Baker announces her FCC resignation effective June 3.

May 11, 2011, later — Comcast announces Baker will become senior vice president of government affairs for the same NBCUniversal unit that she recently agreed could be swallowed by Comcast.

That’s how smoothly it works.

Bill McGurn gives a cogent review of the interrogation debate. 

In scarcely a week, we have seen two of the most important advances in the war on terror since the 9/11 attacks. And President Obama deserves full credit.

The first was his go-ahead for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The second was more inadvertent, but arguably more important. This is the opening his spin has given to Republicans to force what we should have had in 2008: an honest debate on America’s antiterror policies.

The opening began Sunday night, when Mr. Obama rushed a national address on the bin Laden killing. Notwithstanding his later comment to “60 Minutes” that Americans do not “spike the football,” the president appears incapable of doing what would serve him best here: Letting the action speak for itself, and heaping praise on his predecessors (Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush) for their contributions. Instead we got the implication that no one was trying to get bin Laden until Barack Obama arrived in town.

At the same time, all the president’s men were put in the position of denying something the Navy SEALs had made obvious: They owed much of their success to information resulting from policies authorized by President Bush but opposed by Mr. Obama. Thus Leon Panetta found himself bobbing and weaving when NBC’s Brian Williams kept asking the CIA chief whether waterboarding had anything to do with finding bin Laden. When you’ve lost Brian Williams, you’re really lost. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff talks gold.

…In a remarkably under-reported story, the University of Texas’ endowment fund-the second largest in the country, after Harvard’s-added about half of a billion dollars worth of gold to its portfolio just this month, on top of the half-billion it purchased several months prior.

The university’s endowment now owns a staggering 6,643 bars of bullion (664,300 ounces) – which have already appreciated by nearly $40 million since mid-April , when the bars were delivered to a dedicated HSBC-owned vault in New York City. Not a bad start.

Kyle Bass, the well-known Hayman Capital hedge fund manager and UT endowment board member, advised the university on the purchase. He stated his reasoning plainly: “Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services? I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.” …

If you read last Thursday’s post, you might remember this prediction: Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Guess what showed up Saturday night? 

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-situation-room-cold-open/1327352/

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In the Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg has an excellent article on the Arab Spring, and some of Natan Sharansky’s thoughts on the matter. We highlight Greenberg’s stirring commentary.

…Freedom is no simple thing. It can be a slow, tricky, unpredictable process. It can percolate through a society slowly — or hit like a flash flood. As if out of nowhere. Americans should have learned as much by now, the 150th anniversary of the great war that made us a nation. O, Freedom! It can be long in coming, but it will come. Something in man will stir, and when it does … all deals are off.

Keeping faith with freedom will require strong nerves and constancy of purpose. Just as it does now in Egypt, where a new regime is flirting with the mullahs in Iran and trying to cloak one of the world’s more notorious terrorist outfits — Hamas, in the Gaza Strip — in respectability. It is at such times that Washington should do even more to support Egypt’s democratic parties against the Muslim Brotherhood — just as, after World War II, when the Communists threatened to overwhelm Western Europe’s political system, this country did everything it could to support the democratic parties that eventually prevailed.

Cynics will scurry about looking for complicated explanations for these latest revolutions in the Middle East when the simplest is staring them in the face: Freedom will not be denied forever. No more than it can be turned back in this Arab Spring. It may have to go underground for a time, like a fresh-water spring. Or it may recede like a river returning to its banks. But it will flow on somewhere, and one day break through to the surface, an undeniable fact. Even if it can be diverted for a time, it will come back stronger than ever, like the sea overwhelming Pharaoh’s chariots. …

Spengler explains the magnitude of the crisis looming over Egypt.

Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running out of money with which to buy it. The most populous country in the Arab world shows all the symptoms of national bankruptcy – the kind that produced hyperinflation in several Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s – with a deadly difference: Egypt imports half its wheat, and the collapse of its external credit means starvation.

The civil violence we have seen over the past few days foreshadows far worse to come.

…The collapse of Egypt’s credit standing, meanwhile, has shut down trade financing for food imports, according to the chairman of the country’s Food Industry Holding Company, Dr Ahmed al-Rakaibi, chairman of the Holding Company for Food Industries. Rakaibi warned of “an acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally, as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meats and oils”. According to the country’s statistics agency, only a month’s supply of rice is on hand, and four months’ supply of wheat. …

Charles Krauthammer decimates the “facts” and “logic” in the president’s latest speech.

…Accordingly, the El Paso speech featured two other staples: the breathtaking invention and the statistical sleight of hand.

“The [border] fence is now basically complete,” asserted the president. Complete? There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles — 15 percent — are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk right through.

Obama then boasted that on his watch 31 percent more drugs have been seized, 64 percent more weapons — proof of how he has secured the border. And for more proof: Apprehension of illegal immigrants is down 40 percent. Down? Indeed, says Obama, this means that fewer people are trying to cross the border.

Interesting logic. Seizures of drugs and guns go up — proof of effective border control. Seizures of people go down — yet more proof of effective border control. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs about the latest White House attempt to practice Chicago thuggery in DC.

President Obama, as I noted previously, has an executive order ready to go that would require government contractors (well, not professors and labor unions) to disclose political contributions. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) already has come out in opposition, and now it’s a flood of lawmakers who won’t buy the plan to bring Chicago-style favoritism to federal contracting. Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have sent a letter to the president telling him to forget it.

As the Hill notes, these are all the key players on the issue. (“Lieberman is chairman, and Collins is ranking member, of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. McCaskill leads the panel’s Contracting Oversight subcommittee; Portman is the ranking member.”) It now seems unlikely with a chorus of bipartisan criticism that the Obama executive order will ever see the light of day. …

And Jennifer Rubin reminds us how lucky we were to dodge the President Kerry bullet.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), if he had some capacity for self-reflection, would be humiliated. The foreign policy gambit with which he has been most identified — the courting of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — is now over, universally regarded as a dismal and embarrassing failure. You see, even Kerry has discovered Assad is “no reformer.” Hundreds of dead Syrians and thousands more imprisoned have convinced him that the time for reform “was lost.” But that assumes there was a time when such a hope was realistic; you can’t “lose” what was never there. … 

…Rogin, who can barely disguise his amazement, reports:

Kerry, who has served as Congress’s point man on engaging the Syrian regime, told an audience…as recently as March 16 — shortly after the current uprising had begun — that he still expected Assad to embrace political reform and move toward more engagement with America and its allies.

“[M]y judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it,” said Kerry, who has met with Assad six times over the past two years. …

Debra Saunders comments on the hypocrisy of being pro-murder but anti-waterboarding.

…Obama and Dowd long have claimed that it was morally reprehensible for the CIA to waterboard 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Candidate Obama said that waterboarding was “never acceptable” because it “contradicts our values.” Obama even criticized his now-Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for having said in 2006 that she would authorize brutal interrogation measures to prevent a terrorist attack.

Apparently it fits with Obama’s and Dowd’s values to kill an unarmed bin Laden – as long as you don’t waterboard him first to learn possible intelligence that might prevent a terrorist attack.

It’s amazing how partisan politics can make the medicine go down. …

In the WSJ, Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, discusses the company’s decision to build in South Carolina, and points out a number of negative effects from the NLRB’s overreach.

…The NLRB is wrong and has far overreached its authority. Its action is a fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago. We’ve made a rational, legal business decision about the allocation of our capital and the placement of new work within the U.S. We’re confident the federal courts will reject the claim, but only after a significant and unnecessary expense to taxpayers. …

…The world the NLRB wants to create with its complaint would effectively prevent all companies from placing new plants in right-to-work states if they have existing plants in unionized states. But as an unintended consequence, forward-thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new plants in unionized states—lest they be forever restricted from placing future plants elsewhere across the country.

U.S. tax and regulatory policies already make it more attractive for many companies to build new manufacturing capacity overseas. That’s something the administration has said it wants to change and is taking steps to address. It appears that message hasn’t made it to the front offices of the NLRB.

Brian Calle, in the Orange County Register, has a mind-blowing story for us, on the exorbitant pay of Newport Beach lifeguards. Would you believe over $200,000?

High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.

…It might be time for a career change.

…In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.” And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents. …

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Soon there will be a SNL (Saturday Night Live) skit with Obama patting himself on the back. Jonathan Tobin takes note.

As we recalled a couple of days ago, Vice President Joe Biden’s one example of genuine wit that I’m aware of was his line that a Rudy Giuliani sentence consisted of a noun, a verb and 9/11.  Those who listen to Biden’s boss are probably thinking about that painfully accurate quip every time he takes to the stump.

As Jackie Calmes of the New York Times notes in the paper’s Caucus blog today, President Obama’s standard speech about his administration has been revised in the last week. Every address, from commemorations to fundraisers in the last week has included a section where he takes credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to Calmes, this will “be a staple of his political message into the 2012 election.” …

Tony Blankley writes on dead Osama portion of the Obama campaign.

There is a particular media conceit that, in the garb of purported impeccable disclosure, is in fact a license for news sources to market talking points. A hilarious example of the breed can be found in an article by Anne E. Kornblut in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. The article is about the White House’s intended use of the killing of Osama bin Laden and is titled “Bin Laden raid fits into Obama’s ‘big things’ message.”

The phrase in question comprises the italicized words in the following quote: “A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about internal thinking, said the White House is not developing a strategy to leverage the raid in other difficult arenas, such as the budget or debt-ceiling negotiations with the Republicans. The official insisted it would not change the overall message or approach of the 2012 campaign, which has long been described as a campaign focused on the economy. Still, it almost certainly will help a president elected on ‘hope’ and ‘change’ to shift his next campaign in a new direction.”

Of course, the entire point of the article was the opposite of what the unnamed official said: The White House staff is, in fact, itching to take political advantage of the bin Laden killing. Indeed, the constant quotes of clumsy denials of political calculations by senior White House officials are the artful leitmotif of the entire article. …

David Harsanyi says immigration reform is a Dem trick.

Immigration reform, huh? Well, President Obama did recently consult with Eva Longoria on this formidable policy conundrum. As goes Longoria, so goes the nation.

Then again, it certainly seems like a peculiar time to spring this divisive topic on the American people. Especially when we know full well that reform has a stimulus’s chance of success.

And weren’t we just talking about the $14 trillion debt? The budget you didn’t pass? Thuggery against Boeing? Debt ceilings? Medicare? According to a new NBC News poll, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy — an all-time high. So perhaps the discussion wasn’t helpful to the most vital imperative: electing Obama.

Remember that Obama promised to fight for reform legislation in his first year in office. Instead, Democrats used historic supremacy to cram through a number of legislative items that divided the nation — but no immigration policy. Latinos are imperative to presidents when running for office, less so when in it. Now, in the middle of the most consequential fiscal debate the nation has faced in memory, the administration shifts to immigration reform? We can guess why. …

Peter Wehner maintains the president will be vunerable in 2012. To make his point, we follow his post with articles on jobs from people who are in Obama Love; David Brooks (NY Times), Arianna Huffington (HuffPo), and Andy Kroll (Mother Jones). All of these efforts complain about the weakness in the jobs picture. These are Obama’s friends.

… We are now in the fifth month of Barack Obama’s third year in office. Unemployment is at 9.0 percent. We’re about 7 million jobs short of where things stood when Obama took office. Economic growth in the first quarter was 1.8 percent. Housing prices have fallen for 57 consecutive months. Only one in three Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the economy, the lowest point since he took office, and nearly eight in 10 American are less optimistic about the economy than they were a few months ago.

David Axelrod is anxious, and he’s right to be. His friend, the president, is caught in a political tractor beam from which few, if any, public officials escape. The only way to likely to overcome it is if the economy shows signs of a strong recovery. That has yet to happen, and one cannot help but think it may never happen, in the Obama presidency. If that ends up being the case—if a year from now the economy is more or less in the same condition as it was two years ago, last year, and what it is now—Obama will be the easiest incumbent to beat since 1980. It’s not impossible for Republicans to lose such an election, but it would be mighty hard.

Here’s David Brooks writing about the missing fifth of the male work force.

In 1910, Henry Van Dyke wrote a book called “The Spirit of America,” which opened with this sentence: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”

This has always been true. Americans have always been known for their manic dynamism. Some condemned this ambition as a grubby scrambling after money. Others saw it in loftier terms. But energy has always been the country’s saving feature.

So Americans should be especially alert to signs that the country is becoming less vital and industrious. One of those signs comes to us from the labor market. As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work.

According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. …

A. Huffington gives a go at describing the economy.

… April’s numbers were equally disconcerting: even though the economy added 244,000 jobs, the unemployment rate rose from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. Even worse, the unemployment rate for African-Americans jumped to 16.1 percent. And for those over the age of 55, the average length of time spent looking for a job is now over a year.

Add to that an anemic GDP growth rate of 1.8 percent for January through March, down from 3.1 percent for the last quarter of 2010, and the fact that, according to U.S. Census numbers released last week, the percentage of young adults living with their parents has jumped to a staggering 34 percent, largely because of their limited job possibilities.

Then there is the chilling reality that more than 28 percent of U.S. homes were underwater in the first quarter of the year, and foreclosures are expected to rise 20 percent this year. “We get tired of telling such a grim story,” Zillow economist Stan Humphries told Bloomberg News, “but unfortunately this is the story that needs to be told.”

Told, but apparently not listened to. At least not in Washington.

It’s no wonder then that, according to a recent Gallup poll, over half the country currently believes we’re in a recession or a depression. Or that a New York Times/CBS poll shows that 80 percent say the economy is in fairly bad or very bad shape.

How are these not hair on fire numbers? …

And here’s Andy Kroll from Mother Jones on the “McJobs recovery.” All of this from Obama’s fans

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald’s launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that’s more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire US economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald’s franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective [4] than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald’s hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million [5] more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages [6] around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald’s appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “McJob” as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward [7], from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward [8] in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs [9]), beating economists’ expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery? …

IBD editors note the 40th anniversary of Amtrak.

This week, Amtrak marks its 40th anniversary, which means that for decades it’s wasted tens of billions of tax dollars. Naturally, Washington wants to reward this with billions more under the guise of “high-speed” rail.

To say that Amtrak is a failed business is to be unkind to failure. Consider: ..

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As we were about to publish we discovered a great post from Ed Morrissey about the ridiculous AP poll showing the president with 60% approval. It is now plain the news organizations do not poll for information, they poll to help Obama.

… Oddly — or perhaps not — the AP report doesn’t include a link back to the survey’s raw data.  In order to find it, one has to go to GfK’s site for its AP polls.  The partisan breakdown in the sample is found about halfway through the PDF, and it explains a great deal about how Obama managed to get such a high boost in this poll while others showed shallow bumps that had already started to subside.

The Dem/Rep/Ind breakdown in this poll is 46/29/4, as AP assigned most of the leaners to the parties.  That is a 17-point gap, more than twice what was seen in the 2008 actual popular vote that elected Obama.  It only gets worse when independents are assigned properly.  When taking out the leaners, the split becomes — I’m not kidding — 35/18/27.  Oh, and another 20% “don’t know.”  That’s significantly worse than the March poll, in which the proper D/R/I was 29/20/34, and far beyond their post-midterm sample of 31/28/26.  It’s pretty easy to get Obama to 60% when Republicans are undersampled by almost half.

Frankly, this sample is so bad that no real insights can be gleaned from it.

In the Jewish World Review, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains that Al Qaeda is not as dangerous as the Muslim Brotherhood.

…Unlike Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved and learned the hard way that the use of violence will be met with superior violence by state actors. The clever thing to do, it now turns out, was to be patient and invest in a bottom-up movement rather than a commando structure that risked being wiped out by stronger forces. Besides, the gradualist approach is far more likely to win the prize of state power. All that Khomeini did before he came to power in Iran was to preach the merits of a society based on Islamic law. He did not engage in terrorism. Yet he and his followers took over Iran — a feat far greater than bin Laden ever achieved. In Iran the violence came later.

The point is that fighting violent extremists is only part of the battle; perhaps the easier part. The bigger challenge may be to deal with those Islamists who are willing to play a longer game.

In the West, bin Laden’s ignominious death in a Pakistani hideaway has frequently been contrasted with the mass protests that have swept the Middle East in recent months. Policymakers and commentators have drawn the conclusion that the Arab Spring has triumphed over jihadism, setting the region on a high road to democracy. This is too hasty a conclusion. Let’s take Egypt as an example. …

In the WSJ, James Taranto discusses some of Bin Laden’s lesser-known political positions. He was a big fan of Jimmy Carter’s views on Israel.

The New York Times, reporting on the intelligence haul from Osama bin Laden’s house, paints a picture of the mass murderer’s politics:

In October, . . . Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.

So he was a global warmist who opposed the Iraq war, hated big corporations, was a fan of Noam Chomsky and thought Jimmy Carter was right on Israel. On the other hand, we understand he was more conservative on social issues. …

Also in the WSJ, Bret Stephens talks more about Noam Chomsky’s poisonous thoughts.

…Yet when it comes to making excuses for monsters…Among the subjects of Mr. Chomsky’s solicitude have been Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (whom he described as a “relatively apolitical liberal”), the Khmer Rouge (at the height of the killing fields), and Hezbollah (whose military-style cap he cheerfully donned on a visit to Lebanon last year).

As for bin Laden, Mr. Chomsky asks, rhetorically, “how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”

…So it is that Mr. Chomsky can be the recipient of over 20 honorary degrees, including from Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Chicago. None of these degrees, as far as I know, was conferred for Mr. Chomsky’s political musings, but neither did those musings provoke any apparent misgivings about the fitness of granting the award. So Mr. Chomsky is the purveyor of some controversial ideas about this or that aspect of American power. So what?…

The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on the latest maneuver by the government to limit drilling, this time, natural gas.

The Energy Department wants to find ways to make hydraulic fracturing, a fast-growing method of extracting natural gas, safer and cleaner. Say, isn’t that how the administration justified its offshore drilling ban?

…The safety mantra was raised once again last Thursday when Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the appointment of a seven-member panel to study hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” and come up with new safety standards that address concerns raised by environmentalists.

…We believe the safety issue is a cover for the Obama administration’s ideologically driven animus toward fossil fuels and its deliberate campaign to raise energy prices — and thereby to make its favored “green” alternatives look more competitive and attractive.

James Delingpole, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, blogs about the exciting possibilities for natural gas. Remember what he says about watermelons – green on the outside and red inside.

Imagine if we were to discover a new form of cheap, clean energy so abundant that it will provide our needs at least for the next two centuries, freeing us from the pervasive early 21st century neurosis of having to worry about “peak oil” or “conserving scarce resources”, causing a worldwide economic boom and with the added side-benefit of creating more fertiliser so that we can not only heat our homes more cheaply than ever before but also eat more cheaply than ever before.

…Actually we don’t need to imagine for the miracle is already here. It’s called Shale Gas and is the subject of a thrilling new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Matt Ridley with a foreword by Professor Freeman Dyson. Neither Ridley nor Dyson is in much doubt that shale gas is the answer to our prayers. …

…the economic arguments in its favour are too powerful for it to be ignored (especially in countries like Poland, which has massive shale gas reserves and, like most of the former Eastern Bloc really has no desire to be blackmailed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia any longer than is necessary). But what we are going to see in the next few months and years are very concerted efforts by green campaigners and their sympathisers in the EU to besmirch the name of shale gas in favour of their preferred (and – of course – disastrously expensive and environmentally destructive) power source, renewable energy. …

Steve Daniels, in Crane’s Chicago Business, reports on efforts to keep big businesses in Illinois.

Gov. Pat Quinn says the state’s Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity is looking at ways to keep Sears Holdings Corp. from leaving Illinois.

…Mr. Quinn has been showering incentive money on companies that promise to keep their companies in Illinois, including Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. in Libertyville, truck maker Navistar International Corp. of Warrenville and Chicago-based wireless carrier U.S. Cellular Corp.

Motorola announced Friday it will keep its headquarters in Libertyville after the state promised the company $100 million in tax breaks over the next decade. Also Friday, a bill signed by Mr. Quinn will provide a $19-million tax break to Continental Tire, which operates a facility in Downstate Mount Vernon. …

Today we have more of the Top of the Ticket’s Late Night One-Liners.

SNL: a number of new conspiracy theories are surfacing claiming that Osama Bin Laden is not really dead. Which means Barack Obama will go down in history as the first black person ever to have to prove that he killed someone. …

… Leno: Exxon Mobil claims only 6% of its profits come from gas sales. Right, so apparently 94% comes from the sale of Slim Jims and Dr Pepper. …

… Fallon: For the second year, Jacob and Isabella are the most popular baby names in the U.S. The least popular baby name? Donald Sheen Bin Laden.