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Toby Harnden, in “Wanted; Dead or Dead,” brings up a remarkable irony: Obama’s positions regarding captured terrorists leave Obama with no choice but to kill terrorists rather than take prisoners. It’s a strange moral high ground.

…Under Mr Obama, drone strikes in Pakistan have increased dramatically, resulting in dead suspects, civilian casualties and fewer prisoners to interrogate.

Terrorists who would have been captured under Mr Bush so that every last morsel of information could be wrung out of them have been sent straight to their maker under Mr Obama.

…A US Navy SEAL veteran of operations in Afghanistan told me that the simpler, less risky operation would have been one designed to capture bin Laden. “You could have driven right up to the compound and crept in,” he said.

“Capturing him could have yielded an incredible amount of intelligence. But that’s not the stance of our government. Imagine the headaches: detention, interrogation,legal issues. Does Obama really want that?” …

In the WSJ, Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General, discusses the ineffective, reactionary policies of the current administration.

…The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. …

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation. …

Linda Chavez, in the Washington Examiner, has an excellent article on the Attorney General that Obama can’t control.

…CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.” Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators.

In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama’s acknowledgment of intelligence agencies’ role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed.

“Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome,” Obama said. “The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”…

Victor Davis Hanson paints a portrait of the current culture in central California.

…In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.

…about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.

…But we are experiencing a funny sort of depression, or rather a surreal sort. I grew up with stories from my grandparents of 28 people living in my present house. My grandmother, she used to brag, had a big kettle of ham bones and beans cooking nonstop each day and fed assorted relatives as they came in from the vineyard and orchard. My grandfather made one trip to Fresno (16 miles away) every 10 days for “supplies.” The pictures I have inherited from my mother show an impoverished farm — this house unpainted and in disrepair, ancient cars and implements scattered about, a sort of farm of apparent 1910 vintage, but photographed in the 1930s — one that I could still sense traces of as a little boy here in the late 1950s.

…I’ve been discussing these disconnects with farmers, a professor or two from CSU Fresno, and local business people. All come to the same conclusions. There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection. You can buy everything from a new pressure washer to tropical fruit drinks. For this essay, I stopped at one last week and surveyed their roto-tillers, lawn mowers, and chain saws, new and good brands. …

Howard Nemorov, in PJ Tatler, remarks on Victor Davis Hanson’s article.

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent piece about the disconnect between California “poverty” and economic reality. Highly recommended.

It reminds me of my 18 years in California. We were two middle-class working professionals, self-employed and trying to live like citizens. The problem was, we didn’t have an eight-digit trust fund to pay for the house. When you have 2 people earning $90,000 annually and can’t afford a mortgage, something’s wrong.

We got out before the real estate crash and moved to Texas. …

People in CA chided me about moving to redneck-land. I decided to be polite to most of them and hold my silence. But if you want to live with angry, intolerant, narrow-minded, mean-spirited people who act aggressive if you don’t agree with their views, move to California.

In Carpe Diem, Mark Perry highlights an article about the problems rent control has created in San Francisco.

The Bay Citizen — “In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago.”

The reason? The city’s pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant.  

…MP: As we know from basic economic theory, rent control laws are doomed to fail with many predictable unintended consequences in the long run: fewer new rental units are built or made available, many apartments are removed from the market, a decline in the quality of housing, lower rental rates for long-term tenants but much higher rents for new tenants, inefficient use of housing space, etc.  In other words, rent control laws guarantee that there will be less affordable housing in the long run, not more.

And here’s the article from Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, in the Bay Citizen.

…Increasingly, small-time landlords like Koniuk are just giving up. One of his Divisadero Street neighbors has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.

“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”

Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing. …

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Mark Steyn on the raid.

…The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well – elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed that one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

…A decade later, we’re back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they’ve got the superpower all figured out – that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet but it doesn’t really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching “Dancing With The Stars” when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it’s time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way. …

John Stossel explains how speculators help keep prices stable.

…The evil oil-speculator theory also runs up against the fact that the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies (QE2) and other factors have continued the dollar’s slide against foreign currencies — to a three-year low. As the dollar loses value, oil sellers demand more for their product. “Commodities, along with most traded goods globally, are priced in dollars,” former Federal Reserve official Gerald P. O’Driscoll of the Cato Institute writes. “It is the old story of too much money chasing too few goods.”

If Sanders and other economic illiterates get their way, we’ll have new laws banning “speculation.” That will raise prices further. Don’t believe me? Think back to a previous time when a Senate committee said that “speculative activity causes severe and unwarranted fluctuations in the price. …” That was in 1958, when people got upset about the price of onions. Fools in Congress addressed that problem by banning speculation on onion prices.

The result? A Financial Times analysis found that the ban made prices less stable. This year, the retail price of onions rose more than the price of gasoline — 36 versus 24 percent. Most years, the price of onions fluctuates more than other goods. No mystery there. Speculators help keep prices stable. When they foresee a future oil shortage — that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future — speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there’s relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted. …

Michael Barone surveys the political landscape in Canada after their stunning elections.

…The headline story is that the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has headed minority governments since 2006, won an absolute majority of seats, 167 of 308, in the House of Commons. It was a result practically no Canadian pundit or psephologist predicted.

…In Canada, Harper’s Conservatives have already cut taxes and modified spending programs, but always with the tacit consent of the separatist Bloc Quebecois or the left-wing New Democrats or the long-dominant Liberal party. Now they’re on their own, and we’ll see the results.

…The Conservatives’ triumph offers a couple of lessons that may be relevant to U.S. Republicans. One is that smaller-government policies, far from being political poison, are actually vote winners. …

Karl Rove thinks that 2012 has the potential to be a much tighter race than 2008. He breaks things down for us.

…Since the 2008 election, 18 states have experienced a change in their number of electoral votes because of the decennial census. Some (mostly red ones) have gained electoral votes and some (mostly blue) have lost electoral votes. John McCain would have closed the gap by 14 electoral votes in 2008 if the contest had been run under the 2012 Electoral College distribution.

…The 2012 presidential election is likely to be decided in 14 states. If Mr. Obama loses the three states he narrowly carried in 2008 plus Ohio and Florida, then the GOP would win back the White House by swiping any one of the nine remaining battlegrounds. This is a good place for the party to be right now.

…At this point, the 2012 election is shaping up to be much closer than 2008. Mr. Obama has the considerable benefits of incumbency but also a dismal record. The electoral map has shrunk for him: Key states that went for him last time are unlikely to do so again. This election is within the GOP’s grasp. The quality of the Republican candidate’s campaign and message will decide whether it becomes so.

In Forbes, Merrill Matthews gives a number of reasons why Obama will not win reelection.

…“It’s the Economy, Stupid.” We have former Bill Clinton advisor James Carville—who knows a little something about beating an incumbent president, Bush 41—to thank for that important insight.  Maybe Carville was anticipating Obama.

A new Washington Post poll claims that 57 percent of the public disapproves of Obama’s handling of the economy.  Those kinds of numbers can create electoral landslides—for the opponent.

…The economy will likely pick up over the next 18 months, but very slowly.  And that means millions of struggling families will head to the polls on election day and vindicate Carville’s political insight . …

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, discusses recent polls.

…Significantly, a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll conducted immediately after the bin Laden announcement showed no overall bump in the president’s approval rating, which remained stuck at 48 percent. A striking 92 percent of respondents stated that the killing of Bin Laden will have no effect on the way they will vote in 2012, and just 39 percent felt that Obama was doing his job well enough to deserve re-election.

On the crucial issue of the economy, a mere 27 percent of respondents in the Newsweek/Daily Beast poll agreed that it was heading in the right direction, compared to 60 percent who felt it was not. And with the critically important independent voters, Obama remains in serious trouble. As leading pollster Douglas Schoen notes, independents retain grave doubts over the president’s handling of economic issues…

…The bin Laden raid may have succeeded in temporarily halting a sharp fall in the president’s overall approval rating, which nosedived in April, but it has made no difference to largely negative public perceptions of Obama’s leadership on the top voter issues facing the American people. Barack Obama still looks clueless and in denial on the huge economic problems facing the United States, including the towering debt hanging over the country. He continues to preside over a presidency in long-term decline, while advancing many policies that are making his country weaker, less prosperous and more indebted.

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Charles Krauthammer points out the bin Laden raid was a result of Bush’s war on terror.

…The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.

Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.

…Now, it is one thing to have an argument about whether it’s over. It’s quite another to claim that our reaching this happy day — during which we can even be debating whether victory has been achieved — has nothing to do with the war on terror of the previous decade. Al-Qaeda is not subsiding on its own. It is not retiring from the field, having seen the error of its ways. It is not disappearing because of some inexorable law of history or nature. It is in retreat because of the terrible defeats it suffered once America decided to take up arms against it, a campaign (once) known as the war on terror.

In the NYPost, Michael Walsh wonders if this might be the end of jihad for awhile.

…Millenarian sects tend to falter when their confidently apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize. Now that bin Laden sleeps with the fishes — the perfect end to a jumped-up gangster — it is highly likely that his version of jihad will die with him.

Unlike the British, we’ve never had the slightest desire to occupy Muslim countries. If Muslims want to come here and accept the American way of life (which means, obviously, no jihad and no sharia), fine.

From her earliest days, America — the vision of freedom — has threatened kings and emperors and popes and potentates and pashas and Mahdis. But every one that tried to crush us failed. …

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ points out while Obama is dancing on Osama’s grave, his attorney general is threatening to indict CIA interrogators.

As the whole of America takes a bin Laden victory lap, let us pause to remember some of this celebrated event’s most forgotten men: the Central Intelligence Agency officers who sit under the cloud of a criminal investigation begun in 2009 by Attorney General Eric Holder into their interrogations of captured terrorists.

That’s right, the Americans whose interrogation of al Qaeda operatives may have put in motion the death of this mass murderer may themselves face prosecution by the country they were trying to protect.

…On June 18 last year, Mr. Holder said in a Washington speech that Mr. Durham was “close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making recommendations to me.” But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is “still ongoing.”

Ironically, the CIA’s contribution to bin Laden’s end may ensure that its people will remain under this cloud. With President Obama elated over the success of his call to take down bin Laden, his poll numbers rising and his re-election campaign insulated from charges of Democratic softness on national security, what are the chances that his attorney general would wash away all that by announcing his intention to indict the men whose work may have sent his boss into Abbottabad, guns blazing? It is zero. … 

Victor Davis Hanson looks at Obama’s previous criticisms of Bush policies that Obama has continued.

…In sum, Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.

Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.

Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.

In the Daily Beast, Douglas Schoen thinks that Obama can increase his poll numbers by showing leadership on economic issues.

…President Obama received no immediate approval bump from the bin Laden kill, according to the new Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, though the subsequent days may have produced a smallish increase. The Gallup poll released on Thursday shows a six-point increase in Obama’s job approval, and the Real Clear Politics average shows a four-point bounce in Obama’s job approval rating.

…To be sure, the president garners justifiably high ratings for leadership generally and specifically on the war on terror, as 55 percent say Obama is a strong leader overall and over 60 percent see him as a leader in the War on Terror. But implications of this for the 2012 election are clear. The fact that the president got just a modest bounce in his job approval and saw no fundamental change in his overall ratings, even while six in 10 say they are more likely to vote for him because of bin Laden’s killing, indicates the profound disquiet American voters feel with current economic circumstances.

…The Newsweek/Daily Beast poll shows that the Republicans are largely discredited. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and the GOP leadership in the House are highly unpopular. Given that the GOP field has yet to take shape and Donald Trump is completely discredited, the president has the opportunity to take advantage of the enormous amount of goodwill that has been generated by this event to fill the void that has been left by the Republicans. …

Joel Kotkin reports on cities with the most jobs, for Forbes.

…no place displayed more vibrancy than Texas. The Lone Star State dominated the three size categories, with the No. 1 mid-sized city, El Paso (No. 3 overall, up 22 places from last year) and No.1 large metropolitan area Austin (No. 6 overall), joining Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood (the No. 1 small city) atop their respective lists.

Texas also produced three other of the top 10 smallest regions, including energy-dominated No. 4 Midland, which gained 41 places overall, and No. 10 Odessa, whose economy jumped a remarkable 57 places. It also added two other mid-size cities to its belt: No. 2 Corpus Christi and No. 4 McAllen-Edinburgh-Mission.

Whatever they are drinking in Texas, other states may want to imbibe. California–which boasted zero regions in the top 150–is a prime example. Indeed, a group of California officials, led by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, recently trekked to the Lone Star State to learn possible lessons about what drives job creation. Gov. Jerry Brown and others in California’s hierarchy may not be ready to listen, despite the fact that the city Brown formerly ran, Oakland, ranked absolute last, No. 65, among the big metros in our survey, two places behind perennial also-ran No. 63 Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich. …

In Tech News Daily, we see speculations about the stealth helicopter downed in the bin Laden raid.

…Photos of the tail-end of the aircraft circulated online shortly after the raid suggests it was a secret stealth helicopter — possibly a highly modified version of an H-60 Blackhawk — that was designed to fly quietly and to evade radar, experts say.

…Cenciotti noted that NASA is also known to be using motion-control technology to reduce Blackhawk noise, and the strange tail cover on the downed copter could conceivably have been used to house such technology.

…”The noise made by this helicopter compared to a conventional helicopter probably reduced the reaction time of all the personnel protecting bin Laden.”…

In Ricochet, we learn about war dogs. Rob Long’s piece starts with a wild photo and then tells us why they didn’t send a cat on the mission to Abbottabad.

…On the FP website, Rebecca Frankel does a series called “War Dogs” and each one is an amazing testament to why dogs are awesome and why cats are pointless:

…So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in Operation Neptune Spear that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s killing, there was one dog – the elite of the four-legged variety. And though the dog in question remains an enigma — another mysterious detail of the still-unfolding narrative of that historic mission — there should be little reason to speculate about why there was a dog involved: Man’s best friend is a pretty fearsome warrior.

…in the debate of Dog v. Cat, case closed.  Dogs are fierce warriors, loyal friends, hard chargers, face lickers, snack lovers, and, clearly, patriots. 

They didn’t bring a cat to kill Bin Laden.

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Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on the importance of the Iraq war. You know, the one called a “dumb war” by the president.

If President Bush had not invaded Iraq, President Obama likely would not have found Osama bin Laden. The al-Qaida operative who fingered bin Laden’s courier was caught in Iraq helping terrorists in 2004.

…In January 2004, Kurdish forces near the Iranian border apprehended Hassan Ghul, a top al-Qaida lieutenant once under the direct command of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. After quickly being handed over to U.S. forces, Ghul was sent to one of the CIA’s foreign “black site” prisons. It wasn’t long before this particular terrorist canary started singing.

…This early key puzzle piece, without which other pieces might not have been found, came from an al-Qaida operative whose sole purpose for being in Iraq was to organize armed opposition to the U.S. presence there.

…So we have another reason it was wise to go into Iraq. Not only did the Iraq invasion topple Saddam, who used chemical weapons to commit genocide against his own people, and sought nuclear weapons to slaughter others; not only did it give the Iraqi people their first opportunity for freedom and prosperity, providing a model of liberty for other Mideast Islamic nations. On top of all that, it led to the death of bin Laden. …

In the Corner, Shannen Coffin blogs on enhanced interrogation.

Some reports now claim that KSM gave up the information that led eventually — and with a lot more legwork — to the identification of bin Laden’s courier though more conventional means of interrogation, not as the direct result of enhanced interrogation techniques. … When KSM was captured, he was resistant to any form of interrogation, conventional or otherwise. As our colleague Marc Thiessen learned in writing Courting Disaster, KSM’s resistance was “superhuman.” It was only after being subjected to waterboarding and other enhanced measures that he became compliant, and from that point forward, cooperated with more conventional techniques. As one of the CIA interrogators told Marc, “If we had not had these techniques, we would have gotten zero from him.” So enhanced interrogation methods played an integral role in all of the intelligence collected from him.

As I’ve said before, I still think the debate over the legality and morality of these measures is the subject of fair debate. Marc makes a compelling case in his book, but I respect those who articulate principled opposition. But the question of effectiveness has been answered, if these reports are correct. …

You knew this was coming …. Toby Harnden lists the 10 ways the aftermath of the wonderful strike in Pakistan was botched. 

The past few days have seemed like an extended amateur hour in the White House as unforced error after unforced error has been made in the handling of the US Government’s message about the killing of bin Laden.

We should not forget the bottom line in this: bin Laden was justifiably and legally killed by brave and skilled US Navy SEALs. The operation was audacious and meticulous in its planning and execution. President Barack Obama made the call to carry out the raid and his decision was vindicated in spades.

Having said that, the messiness since then has taken much of the sheen off this success, temporarily at least. Here’s a summary of what went wrong once the most difficult bit had been achieved: …

Andrew McCarthy, in the National Review, has an interesting summation of the war on terror.

…The slaying of this monster, the peerless capability of our armed forces it reaffirms, and the demonstration of national unity it has sparked, make this a great day for our country. They suggest, moreover, something else worth celebrating: the outlines of an effective, practical, and economic counterterrorism.

The criminal-justice system is not a deterrent to foreign terror networks that are bivouacked outside our country and thus outside the jurisdiction of its investigative agencies and courts. Nor are nation-building enterprises the answer: They are prohibitively costly in blood and treasure; they inspire sharia-based attacks against us; and they won’t make us safer — terrorists are expert at exploiting the freedoms available in democratic societies, and there is no reason to believe that country A’s becoming a democracy would make country B safer from jihadist terror. The future will not belong to the law-enforcement approach or the democracy project.

It will belong to small-scale special-forces operations that target top jihadists and their cells. It will entail diplomatic pressure and, when necessary, limited military engagements against terror-sponsoring regimes. It will feature less indulgence of faux allies like Pakistan, which do more to aid than confront the jihad. It will fashion a new legal system for the indefinite detention of al-Qaeda operatives who, for intelligence reasons, cannot or should not be tried in civilian courts. And it will require aggressive prosecution of al-Qaeda imitators inside our country, as well as those who materially support terrorists. …

Abe Greenwald discusses what we have learned from the Osama raid, in Contentions.

…Citizens of every political shape and size flooded the streets to rejoice over the terrorist’s death, but that death came as the end-result of many highly politicized Bush-era policy decisions. We now have to contend with truths that are intolerable but nevertheless have led to the country’s collective jubilation.

…Enhanced interrogation works. Crucial intelligence was extracted from detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, both of whom were subjected to techniques whose very existence spawned self-righteous movements to bring the last administration up on charges. It would be entertaining—if it were possible—to measure the overlap between those who marched in favor of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and those who celebrated publicly the success engendered by their most loathed policies.

…Genuine national security means spending big money on defense. The Wall Street Journal reports, “In December, the Central Intelligence Agency called a secret meeting with lawmakers to line up tens of millions of dollars in funding, kicking off a five-month scramble that climaxed in Sunday’s events.” Tens of millions in five months to nab a single man. Because Sunday’s operation was successful we won’t have to endure that factoid being put in service of fallacious “we need to spend that money at home” arguments. And this is not counting the billions spent prior to December on all the programs and institutions brought to bear on the hunt for bin Laden and other al Qaeda members. …

Craig Pirrong criticizes the administration’s mishandling of the PR surrounding the Osama operation.

…In the aftermath of the Osama raid, the administration is busy shooting itself in its collective foot.  First, Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan spins an elaborate tale of an armed Osama resisting while cowering behind his wife.  Today, Press Secretary Carney reads a statement that says, uhm, it didn’t go down like that at all: yes, a woman was shot, but Osama wasn’t hiding behind her and he wasn’t armed.  Brennan also released the incorrect name of the Osama spawn that was killed in the firefight.

Carney wrote this off as the result of the fog of war.  Which is exactly why Brennan was a fool for shooting off his mouth before the fog cleared.

…Third, and most interesting, is the leaking at the expense of SecDef Robert Gates.  The story is that Gates wanted to flatten the Osama compound and make the rubble bounce with a B-2 strike due to the riskiness of a commando operation, but Obama overruled him.  There’s some merit to Gates’s position–if that was his position.  A commando operation is incredibly risky: if the helicopter that went down had crashed outside the compound the whole thing could have gone very, very wrong.  (I’m very skeptical, BTW, that the helo really suffered a mechanical problem.  More likely a golden BB fired by a lookout in the compound or running into some obstacle designed specifically to thwart a helo landing–which had to have been considered a major risk by those in the compound.)  That said, the counter arguments are strong too–namely, the risk of not being able to determine definitively that Osama was there and had snuffed it.

In other words, there was no compelling right choice; each alternative had its pros and cons.  Gates was doing his job of advising the president according to his best judgment.  So why shiv him on his way out the door?  Is this payback for his mutinous behavior before?  Is this the way to encourage future advisors to give their frank opinions? …

In Newsweek, Niall Ferguson talks inflation.

…Sensing a threat to his hopes of reelection, the president last week called on Congress to eliminate “unwarranted” tax breaks for oil companies and set up a Justice Department task force to investigate price gouging and fraud in the oil markets. Give me a break. The spike in gas prices is the result of Fed policy, which has increased the monetary base threefold in as many years, and a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East that the president and his advisers still haven’t gotten a handle on.

And the reason the CPI is losing credibility is that, as economist John Williams tirelessly points out, it’s a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used, the CPI would actually be 10 percent. Yes, folks, double-digit inflation is back. Pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out the real inflation rate just by moving the decimal point in the core CPI one place to the right.

It’s not only the BLS that speaks with a forked tongue. Members of the Council on Foreign Relations last week heard Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner say: “Our policy has been and will always be…that a strong dollar is in the interest of the country.” Fact: the dollar has depreciated relative to other currencies by 17 percent since 2009. …

Liam Halligan, in the Telegraph, UK, is concerned about quantitative easing.

…America’s currency weakness is based on fundamentals including its vast, and upward-spiralling, $14,000bn debt – and that’s just what’s “on the books”. Nothing material is being done to address this massive problem. The unspoken assumption among politicians on both sides of the aisle is that America can just “monetise” its liabilities by continuing to debase the currency.

…America’s currency depreciation trick could also backfire badly if “the rope slips” and, far from a steady decline, the world’s pivotal currency goes into free fall. That would plunge America back into recession, or worse – as inflation ballooned amid soaring import costs, forcing the Fed to raise rates in the teeth of shuddering slowdown.

A plummeting US currency would also spark broader chaos as central banks sought to protect the value of their reserves. And after the inevitable downward overshoot, the dollar would snap back, causing the carry trade to “unwind” as dollar borrowers suddenly owed more. The danger then would be that major losses at financial institutions posed renewed systemic threats. Financial markets might then go into a tailspin, reigniting concerns of a fully-blown global slump. …

David Harsanyi comments on the debt ceiling charade.

…Some economists — such as Jagadeesh Gokhale, former senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — have argued that “a temporarily frozen debt limit could … signal U.S. lawmakers’ resolve to get our fiscal house in order. It may even reassure investors about long-term U.S. economic prospects.” Immeasurable debt, on the other hand…

This kind of thinking crashes against every sacred progressive ideal the president advocates. But no worries, Republicans have already telegraphed that opposing a hike in the debt limit is nothing more than leverage for a larger deal. It is doubtful, then, that they will have the stomach to hold the line when the moment of truth comes on the debt ceiling.

If it existed. Which, technically, it doesn’t. Not if we raise it every time we hit it.

We start the humor section with a post from Andrew Malcolm’s Top of the Ticket from the LA Times. This is his compilation of late night TV talk show one-liners. 

Fallon: Did you see the royal newlyweds kissing on the balcony? I was like, hey, guys, get a castle.

Conan: Osama bin Laden’s death interrupted Sunday night’s “Celebrity Apprentice” with Donald Trump. Which begs the question: How do we kill Bin Laden again next Sunday?

Letterman: In the Osama bin Laden raid, the SEALs sent his image to a satellite facial-recognition system that said there was a 99.9% chance it was Bin Laden. Still, there’s that .01% chance it was a ZZ Top guy.

Leno: President Obama says he won’t release the Bin Laden death photos. So I guess we’ll just have to wait for Donald Trump to force him to do that too. …

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Jennifer Rubin highlights how Bush policies made the Bin Laden operation possible.

…John Yoo, who underwent years of investigation by inept lawyers and faced the loss of his law license for his work in setting the ground rules in the war on terror, has reason to find solace in an operation that was the anthesis of the criminalization of the war on terror. He writes:

“Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things back in 2002–2008. It would have given Miranda warnings and lawyers to KSM and other al-Qaeda leaders. There would have been no Gitmo, no military commissions — instead civilian trials on U.S. soil with all of the Bill of Rights benefits for terrorist defendants. There would have been no enhanced-interrogation program, no terrorist-surveillance program, and hence no intelligence mosaic that could have given us the information that produced this success. In the War on Terror, it is comparatively easy to pull the trigger — the truly hard task is to figure out where to aim. President Obama can take credit, rightfully, for the success today, but he owes it to the tough decisions taken by the Bush administration.”

It has always been a misnomer that the Bush administration acted ”lawlessly.” To the contrary, George W. Bush, his advisers and lawyers understood there is criminal law and there is the law of war. And they understood we should not confuse the two. The latter allows, as Congress proscribed, for military tribunals and for interrogations that fall short of torture but would not be countenanced in a civilian court. The latter allowed us to operate the Nuremberg trials. The latter was the legal tradition in this country for more than 200 years. Now Obama and his team have figured it out as well, after two years of a misguided experiment in which they castigated critics as legal and moral dunces.

But now there is agreement by both sides in this raging debate. You don’t send cops to arrest Osama. You send SEALs. Perhaps now we can set aside all that poppycock about Bush’s “shredding the Constitution.”

Peter Wehner demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Left on raising the debt ceiling.

…Dionne had particularly harsh words for Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator who said:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Hold on. Wait a minute. I’m sorry; I’ve made a terrible mistake. These aren’t the words of Senator Marco Rubio; they’re the words of then-Senator Barack Obama, from 2006. Which raises this question: Do you recall the column by Dionne excoriating Obama and other Democrats for voting against raising the debt ceiling during the Bush presidency? That’s funny; neither do I. Which tells you much of what you need to know about Dionne these days.

Peter Wehner scores another point against the hypocritical Left.

Here’s Nancy Pelosi from a press conference on September 7, 2006:

[E]ven if [Osama bin Laden] is caught tomorrow, it is five years too late. He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But, in fact, the damage that he has done . . . is done. And even to capture him now I don’t think makes us any safer.

And here’s Nancy Pelosi yesterday:

The death of Osama bin Laden marks the most significant development in our fight against al-Qaida. . . . I salute President Obama, his national security team, Director Panetta, our men and women in the intelligence community and military, and other nations who supported this effort for their leadership in achieving this major accomplishment. . . . [T]he death of Osama bin Laden is historic. . . .

This devastating then-and-now comparison comes to us courtesy of John Hideraker of Power Line. It underscores the degree to which partisanship can ravage people’s fair-mindedness and, in the process, make them look like fools and hacks. Such things aren’t uncommon in politics—but what is rare is to see such intellectual dishonesty proven so conclusively.

Michael Barone weighs on “leading from behind.” He notes how Ryan Lizza’s article shows Obama’s adolescent, reactionary views on foreign policy issues.

…Arriving in the Senate in 2005, when it was clear that things were going sour in Iraq, Obama took the side of “realists” who always advised caution about military involvement abroad rather than the “idealists” who had backed such involvements in the Clinton years and after.

…And Obama’s scornful dismissal of George W. Bush’s “idealist” calls for advancing democracy around the world had something in common with the adolescent discovery that “Dad is wrong about everything!”

Of course when Obama got to college, er, the White House, he found that Dad was right about some things. The surge in Iraq was allowed to continue succeeding and something like a surge was ordered in Afghanistan. Guanatanamo remains open and CIA interrogators are not going to be prosecuted. Robert Gates was kept in the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton installed at State.

…It’s not uncommon for college students to have wildly oscillating views on issues as the months go by. It’s more consequential for a president to do so. As foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead notes, “President Obama likes to hedge. If he puts four chips on black, he almost immediately wants to put three chips on red.”…

The WSJ editors discuss the vindictive and unethical behavior of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius.

…HHS this month sent a letter to 83-year-old Forest Labs CEO Howard Solomon, announcing it would henceforth refuse to do business with him. What earned Mr. Solomon the blackball? Well, nothing that he did—as admitted even by HHS. …

This is a threat to every health CEO in America. If Forest wants to continue to sell its drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration—the biggest buyers of pharmaceuticals—it will have to change management. Losing the federal government as a customer is potentially crippling to a drug company.

…Forest Labs is sticking by Mr. Solomon, saying the exclusion is “unjustified.” But even the company has acknowledged that if Mrs. Sebelius implements her ban, Mr. Solomon would be forced to step down at least temporarily while the company takes her to court. Every CEO in America will get the message that his job is at risk if he quarrels with an Administration’s bureaucratic orders.

…CEOs are accountable for their actions, but it is simply unjust for a powerful regulator like Mrs. Sebelius to threaten a company with ruin if it doesn’t dismiss a CEO who has had no formal charges or proof of wrongdoing brought against him. …

Clive Crook talks about how to raise taxes.

…Misguided as their opponents may be, however, Democrats are wrong to think that “soak the rich” is both good economic policy and a sure-fire electoral winner. It is neither.

…The base needs broadening, so that marginal rates can stay put or even come down while revenues go up. That is what the Bowles-Simpson commission and other fiscal inquiries have suggested. Mr Obama has inched in this direction lately by mentioning the case for reducing “tax expenditures” (ie, limiting the value of tax deductions), but the president has given the idea nothing like the prominence of higher top marginal rates.

…It worsens the problem that the president’s line between the middle class (whose taxes he has promised not to raise) and what one Democratic party spokesman recently called the ultra-rich is a household income of $250,000. The figure is too low. True, less than 3 per cent of households make that much at any one time – but a police officer married to a civil servant could sneak into this category. …

In the Weekly Standard, John McCormack comments on Paul Ryan’s town hall meetings.

…Wielding a laser pointer, Ryan lays out the federal budget, our deficit, and how entitlement programs, plus interest, are on track to consume all federal revenue in over a decade.

There are occasionally audible gasps in the crowd when the he clicks the slide that shows the gusher of red ink that consumes the budget on our current path. He then shows the GOP budget proposal to gradually eliminate the deficit and the debt. “It’s just like a mortgage,” Ryan says. “The alternative is we have a debt crisis. The alternative is everybody gets hurt.”

The final slide compares how he and President Obama would change Medicare. It’s not a debate about whether or not to reform Medicare but how. Ryan asks everyone 55 and older to raise their hands (most do). He then tells them that nothing changes under Medicare for them. Ryan describes the plan to reform Medicare for the under-54 set by subsidizing their premiums and letting them pick among a variety of plans regulated by Medicare. The Medicare prescription drug benefit came in 41 percent below Congressional Budget Office predictions because seniors get to pick among competing plans, Ryan says.

…Ryan is well aware that the debate over his proposed budget has just begun, but it seems that Ryan and the Republicans have the edge so far nationwide.

…Ryan is proof that politics is not an entirely deterministic enterprise. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Yes, structural factors matter. But candidates matter, too. Rational argument and moral suasion matter. There’s a reason why Ryan won 68% of the vote in 2010 and 64% of the vote in 2008, when John McCain only garnered 47.5% of the vote in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. …

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In the Corner, Peter Kirsanow calls attention to the service of the Navy’s SEALs.

…That said, the nation once again owes a debt of gratitude to the SEALs, the elite warriors who have distinguished themselves as the tip of America’s spear. Rarely do we hear about their missions and we probably won’t know the identities of those who participated in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Whether it was Orwell, Kipling, or Churchill who said, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” the quote applies to SEALs. It’s appropriate that the last thing bin Laden saw was a rough man with an MP-5.

Mark Hemingway, in the Weekly Standard Blog, with more on the SEAL team.

It’s been reported that bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DevGru. Marc Ambinder has a good report that fills in some of the particulars:

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story — generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code. …

Alana Goodman points out the intel from GITMO that helped us find bin Laden.

The killing of Osama bin Laden seemed to come out of nowhere, but officials have reportedly been on the terror leader’s trail for over four years…And according to the Washington Examiner, it was intelligence gleaned from a Guantanamo Bay detainee over four years ago that ended up leading to his whereabouts:

“Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for bin Laden, senior administration officials said. The man was described by detainees as a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and “one of the few Al Qaeda couriers trusted by bin laden.” Initially, intelligence officials only had the man’s nickname, but they discovered his real name four years ago. Two years ago, intelligence officials began to identify areas of Pakistan where the courier and his brother operated, and the great security precautions the two men took aroused U.S. suspicions.”

If it wasn’t for Guantanamo Bay, it seems highly unlikely that the government would have been able to uncover this information. We can thank the counterterrorism policies put in place by the Bush administration—and President Obama’s savvy decision to continue them—for leading intelligence officials to bin Laden.

Mark Steyn comments on the president’s speech.

…Personally, I would have liked bin Laden’s death to have been announced by whatever lowest-level official was manning the night desk at the Department of Nondescript Bureaucrats, preferably reading it off the back of an envelope. But, if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.

Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:

“Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.”

Andrew McCarthy discusses the operation in the context of foreign policy and domestic politics.

…President Obama deserves kudos for the vigor with which he has attacked al Qaeda leaders and cells in Pakistan. As I argued during the campaign, his position on the need to do this was far better than that of Sen. McCain — who regarded Pakistan as a valuable ally and portrayed Obama as reckless for threatening to conduct attacks there. Obama is also to be applauded for authorizing yesterday’s daring mission. President Carter’s failed mission to rescue the hostages in Iran is testament to how much can go wrong and how politically devastating it can be when such a mission fails. And all you need to do is read the pertinent section of the 9/11 Commission report about President Clinton’s failure to give clear authorization to kill bin Laden when we had several chances to do so in 1998–99 — i.e., before bin Laden bombed the Cole bombing and ordered 9/11. That it would have been irresponsible to pass up this latest chance to rid the world of this menace does not mean acting responsibly was without risk for Obama. We should commend him for pulling the trigger.

Still, the operation cannot but underscore the mind-bending inconsistencies in Obama’s counterterrorism — gold-plated due process for some 9/11 terrorists but assassination for others; the haste to close Gitmo even as it continues to serve valuable security purposes; the paralysis of interrogation policies that (as Shannen, Steve, and others point out) were key to obtaining intelligence that not only thwarts attacks but enabled us to find bin Laden…

We ought to take this very good news for what it is — very good news. …And we should forget about the politics of this. Whatever bump Obama gets will be about as enduring as tomorrow’s trip to the station to fill ’er up with $5/gallon gas. 

Claudia Rosett thinks the White House could have handled the announcement better.

Bin Laden’s death is great news, but the president, in his rush to claim credit, made a mistake in delivering it himself. Osama bin Laden was a pied piper of mass murder, and every effort should be made to avoid in any way dignifying anything about him. Rather than using the presidential pulpit to break the news, President Obama should have left it to one of the U.S. military commanders or spy chiefs whose men took the real risks in this operation. (Recall how President Bush, rather than grabbing the center stage, and thus dignifying the ex-tyrant of Iraq, left it to Paul Bremer to announce the capture of Saddam Hussein.) Obama should have then followed up by explaining the broader context of this war, and putting terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to Moammar Qaddafi on notice that anyone who attacks or even mortally threatens America, or America’s allies, can expect the same fate.

In the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams comments on the president and what’s ahead.

The spectacular news of Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. forces could not have come at a better time.  Al Qaida’s message that violence, terrorism, and extremism are the only answer for Arabs seeking dignity and hope is being rejected each day in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and throughout the Arab lands.  Al Qaida and its view of the world are being pushed aside in favor of demands for new governments, free elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end to corruption.  Bin Laden’s death weakens al Qaida and Salafi movements further by taking away their most powerful symbol.

…It is therefore unfortunate that Mr. Obama seems to want more than that fair share the American people will naturally and rightly give him.  His remarks last night were far too much laced with words like “I met repeatedly,”  “at my direction,” and “I determined,” trying to take personal credit for the years of painstaking work by our intelligence community.  Mr. Obama might have noted that this work began under President Bush, but as usual he did not.  …

…Al Qaida may redouble efforts to commit acts of terror, but its prestige and power in the Arab world are on the decline.  The Administration should turn back now to the cases of Libya and Syria above all, pushing further to end the vicious and violent regimes that rule those countries.  As the republics of fear fall, al Qaida’s message will fall further into disrepute and the message of freedom that is now spreading in the Middle East will grow stronger.

In Contentions, Michael Rubin makes a good point about the criticism of Israel’s targeted terrorist killings.

The American team that killed Bin Laden should be congratulated. They have served justice and reminded terrorists that even in an age of national security dementia, they may run, they may hide, but that they won’t be forgotten. Americans are right to celebrate the demise of this mass murderer who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and others.

Much is made in the Middle East of double standards. It doesn’t matter whether the terrorist is Al Qaeda targeting Americans, Europeans, and moderate Arabs, PKK targeting Turks, or Mujahedin al-Khalq targeting Iranians. No terrorist deserves diplomatic immunity or legitimacy’s embrace. All terrorists deserve death. Perhaps it is time for Americans, Europeans, and their media elite to reexamine their most glaring double standards: If Americans can kill a master terrorist targeting civilians then Israel too should be able to target Hamas leaders in Gaza, Damascus, Oslo, or Dubai, wherever they may be.

Christopher Hitchens raises the issue of the foreign aid we’ve been giving Pakistan.

There are several pleasant little towns like Abbottabad in Pakistan, strung out along the roads that lead toward the mountains from Rawalpindi (the garrison town of Pakistani’s military brass and, until 2003, a safe-house for Khalid Sheik Muhammed). Muzaffarabad, Abbottabad … cool in summer and winter, with majestic views and discreet amenities. The colonial British—like Maj. James Abbott, who gave his name to this one—called them “hill stations,” designed for the rest and recreation of commissioned officers. The charming idea, like the location itself, survives among the Pakistani officer corps. If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

There’s perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There’s some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.

…The martyr of Abbottabad is no more…Yet the uniformed and anonymous patrons of that sheltered Abbottabad compound are still very much with us, and Obama’s speech will be entirely worthless if he expects us to go on arming and financing the very people who made this trackdown into such a needlessly long, arduous and costly one.

Alana Goodman says “dittos” on Pakistan

At this point it is impossible to say whether the Pakistani military was shockingly clueless to the fact that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living in its midst, or whether there was something more sinister going. But we do know that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, declined to tell the Pakistani government about its raid on bin Laden’s compound until after the mission was accomplished.

“We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” said a senior administration official during a briefing with reporters last night. “That was for one reason and one reason alone:  We believed it was essential to the security of the operation and our personnel.”

The administration’s decision might be less of an issue if we hadn’t been giving Pakistan $1 billion a year since 9/11 for the specific purpose of helping us capture bin Laden. What exactly was the point of that if we couldn’t even trust the Pakistanis not to compromise the operation?

Max Boot has a range of interesting thoughts on the operation.

The death of Osama bin Laden—richly deserved, long delayed—is certainly cause for celebration. But let’s not get carried away. The organization he built, al Qaeda, is likely resilient enough to continue without him. Certainly many of its regional affiliates, from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, operated largely independently of their titular leader and will continue to do so. Then there are the numerous other Islamist terrorist organizations, such as Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Taliban, which did not pledge even formal allegiance to “Emir” Osama. His death is an important symbolic blow against the Islamist terrorist network but not a fatal one; at most it might lead to the decline of Al Qaeda and the rise of other, competing organizations.

Some other thoughts on the Big News:

•  The raid shows the importance of U.S. bases in Afghanistan—not only for keeping that country out of the clutches of the Taliban and other Al Qaeda allies, but also for projecting U.S. power into Pakistan which, despite bin Laden’s death, will remain a hotbed of radical Islamist activity. If it were not for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, how could Seal Team Six have reached bin Laden’s compound deep in the heart of Pakistan? According to news accounts, they were using Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters, presumably the variants specially modified for special operations. But modified or not helicopters are short-range aircraft. Thus having guaranteed access to bases in Afghanistan is crucial to the success of such missions—as they are for Predator strikes and various intelligence-gathering activities which the CIA and other agencies undertake to monitor the situation in Pakistan. …

In the National Journal, George Condon writes that Obama may feel political pressure to exit Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden’s body had barely hit the water before people were predicting the impact his death would have on the war in Afghanistan, U.S. relations with the Islamic world and President Obama’s reelection campaign. The only problem with these immediate statements is that events are unlikely to work out the way anybody expects right now.

…What soured the public on Bush’s handling of the war was the rise in American casualties—and that is a lesson today for Obama. If voters believe the killing of Osama bin Laden means the war in Afghanistan is won and can be ended, their reaction to continued American deaths could be devastating for Obama.

…Far from helping Obama politically, the latest development could increase the pressure on him to get American troops out of Afghanistan. It will, said Cordesman, “raise new questions about whether the Afghan war can really put an end to al-Qaida and other terrorist sanctuaries and lead some of those who oppose the war to state that the U.S. and its allies should now withdraw.”…

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The Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong has an unbelievable story about a former president.

Apparently panicked that Barrack Obama may supplant him as the Worst Foreign Policy President in History, in an effort to show that he gives way to no man when it comes to foreign policy idiocy, Jimmy Carter dashed off to his home-away-from-home–Pyongyang–to accuse the United States and South Korea of human rights violations for refusing to provide food aid to North Korea.

…Any mention of the fact that North Korea is the most brutal, repressive dictatorship on the planet?  Surely you jest.  Any mention of the fact that the starvation in North Korea is the product of the regime’s destructive, inhumane policies full stop?  No: Carter merely “observe[d] the country’s food rationing system.”  A rationing system that is, by the way, a major element of the regime’s mechanism of political control by which the population is brutalized.

In other words, Jimmy Carter played Enabler-in-Chief to the world’s most reprobate regime, and traveled to that country to attack his own nation.  It used to be unpardonable for any prominent American politician, let alone an ex-president, to slander his own country from abroad.  To do so from Pyongyang is beyond unpardonable. …

Toby Harnden lists ten thoughts about bin Laden’s assumption of room temperature.

5. There is likely to be a lot of “Obama got Osama” crowing from Democrats but the intelligence that led to the raid originated in 2007, during the Bush administration. Listening to the account of the long and patient process that followed, this seems like an example of the US military and intelligence community working seamlessly from one administration to the next.

6. I was struck by the way Obama used his address to highlight again and again his personal role. Fair enough – Obama, by any analysis, deserves immense credit – but this perhaps presages a campaign theme. There’s little doubt that Obama will receive a political boost from this, though ultimately the 2012 election will be decided by the economy.

7. There’s a lot of chatter about the likelihood of al-Qaeda striking back immediately. It might happen, but experience tells us that al-Qaeda tends to work on its own timetable.

Mark Steyn on the debt ceiling debate.

…Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaida terrorists. Really.”

Really?

…”They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”…

…Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have. …

In the United Press, Arnold de Borchgrave talks to George Karlweis about financial trends.

…So the man behind Soros’ original success is worth listening to today — unafraid to speak his mind in retirement.

The financial crises that have been blowing up for years are speeding up, Karlweis says, due to expenditure exceeding income, “borrowing hand over fist, even for no good reason, on ever shakier fundamentals.”

“Everyone is realizing we have gone too far,” he wrote, “The coffers are depleted … the excessive spending of the past has created a huge overhang, and no one knows how new borrowing can be financed.”

People who live on their savings, adds Karlweis, “have been fleeced. Their investments yield nothing, chances are they have lost everything.”

“Times ahead do not look pretty,” he warns. …

In the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein discusses the silver lining on the economic cloud.

…Obama’s political fortunes have often been compared to Reagan’s, because both men took office during a bad economy and saw their once high approval ratings nosedive. And if you compare the trajectory of their approval ratings using Gallup’s handy tool, the overall pattern is quite similar up until this point. Yet by this time in 1983, Reagan’s approval rating had bottomed out and had begun its recovery. While we can’t predict where Obama’s will go, economic data suggest he’s much less likely to get as big a political boost as Reagan.

This morning, the Commerce Department reported that first quarter GDP grew at a mere 1.8 percent clip. While the number is an advance estimate and could change, it’s not going to get near the 5.1 percent growth in the comparable quarter during Reagan’s first term (i.e. Q1 1983). And while growth is expected to pick up in the second quarter, it won’t get anywhere near the 9.3 percent rate of 1983′s second quarter.

…Yet it’s also important to note that Reagan was also fighting a battle on multiple fronts. He took office after a year of 13.5 percent inflation in 1980, and by 1984 it dropped to 4.3 percent. On the flip side, Obama took over at a time of low inflation, and we’re now starting to see prices rise, especially on food and gas, which Americans tend to notice. …

Al Neuharth, in USA Today, comments on the end of the space age.

President Obama plans to attend the next-to-the-last space shuttle launch scheduled today. Ironically, he’s saying goodbye to our space program at the Kennedy Space Center, named after the president who said hello to space.

The decision to phase out the shuttle program was made by President George W. Bush. But Obama has made no concrete future space plans of any kind.

Like Bush, Obama is making a mockery of something that excited and united us in the 1960s and for decades to follow. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein reports on the White House struggling with totalitarian instincts: ban a reporter who covered people protesting against Obama, then reverse position and refuse to comment.

…So what’s up with the White House? We can’t say because neither Press Secretary Jay Carney nor anyone from his staff would speak on the record.

Other sources confirmed that Carla was vanquished, including Chronicle editor Ward Bushee, who said he was “informed that Carla was removed as a pool reporter.” Which shouldn’t be a secret in any case because it’s a fact that affects the newsgathering of our largest regional paper (and sfgate)and how local citizens get their information.

What’s worse: more than a few journalists familiar with this story are aware of some implied threats from the White House of additional and wider punishment if Carla’s spanking became public. Really? That’s a heavy hand usually reserved for places other than the land of the free. …

Pickerhead’s first acquaintance with Robert W. Fogel was his 1974 collaboration with Stanley Engerman. The product of that effort was “Time On The Cross” an econometric history of American slavery. Fogel now has turned his data gathering techniques to the developments in the size of humans. NY Times reviewed his new effort; The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700.

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a small clutch of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.

…“The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable,” Mr. Fogel said in an telephone interview from Chicago, where he is the director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago’s business school. “Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.”

This “technophysio evolution,” powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, the authors argue, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.

 “I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said. …

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Charles Krauthammer is also aghast at “leading from behind.” He delivers devastating criticism of Obama’s incoherent foreign policy, and the opinions that lie beneath.

…Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.

It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.

Other presidents have taken anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership. …

Peter Wehner highlights important statistics from a Mark Helprin article.

Mark Helprin is masterful in his use of the English language. But he’s also good with numbers. In his column “The Common Defense” in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books, he writes this:

From 1940 to 2000, average annual American defense expenditure was 8.5% of GDP; in war and mobilization years, 13.3%; under Democratic administrations, 9.4%; under Republican, 7.3%; and, most significantly, in the years of peace, 5.7%. Now we spend 4.6%, but, less purely operational war costs, 3.8% of GDP. That is, 66% of the traditional peacetime outlays. We have been, and we are, steadily disarming even as we are at war.

Those numbers are worth keeping in mind as we debate the federal budget and which programs deserve to be cut and which do not. So is the Number 3—as in Federalist No. 3, in which John Jay writes, “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their safety seems to be the first” (emphasis in original). And having read that, there’s always the preamble to the Constitution, which the Federalist Papers were written to defend and which speaks about the need to “provide for the common defense.” Based on the data supplied by Helprin, the area that has the greatest claim on the federal dollar is the one that has been most neglected. As he writes, “What argument, what savings, what economy can possibly offset the costs and heartbreak of a war undeterred or a war lost?”

In Cato @ Liberty, Michael Cannon points out that the government solution to government-created problems is always more government control.

I’ve been meaning to write about how ObamaCare’s unelected rationing board — innocuously titled the Independent Payment Advisory Board — is yet another example of the Left leading America down the road to serfdom.  (Efforts to limit political speech — innocuously called “campaign finance reform” — are another.)

As Friedrich Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom (1944), when democracies allow government to direct economic activity, the inevitable failures lead to calls for a more authoritarian form of governance:

‘ Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective “talking shops,” unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen. The conviction grows that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be taken “out of politics” and placed in the hands of experts — permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies. …

In the National Review, Rich Lowry comments on the totalitarian instincts of our president. Lowry explains how Obama’s plans will increase government control, and decrease care available to seniors.

…We already have an arbitrary check on Medicare’s spending, and we already have a panel of experts to recommend changes to the program. The arbitrary check is the “sustainable growth rate,” and the panel is the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Congress has repeatedly deferred cuts under the former and ignored the recommendations of the latter. To this, Obama has an elegant solution: Bypass Congress.

Under Obamacare, IPAB is to hit a target for Medicare’s growth that significantly squeezes the program beginning in 2014 (in his budget speech, Obama said he wants to ratchet down the cap even further). Congress has limited options: It can pass the IPAB recommendations, substitute its own version of them, or by a three-fifths majority in the Senate vote to waive these requirements. If it does none of these things, the secretary of Health and Human Services automatically implements the IPAB plan. 

…The fact of the matter is that IPAB won’t make the notoriously inefficient Medicare program any more efficient. Through arbitrary reductions on payments to providers, it will simply reduce the supply of care. Even before the advent of a new, more powerful IPAB and a new, tougher limit on spending, Medicare’s chief actuary warned that Obamacare will drive providers out of the program. …

John Stossel has an interesting article on a Native American tribe that doesn’t have victim status. Of course, they prosper.

…Consider the Lumbees of Robeson County, N.C. — a tribe not recognized as sovereign by the government and therefore ineligible for most of the “help” given other tribes. The Lumbees do much better than those recognized tribes.

Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.

…”We don’t have any casinos. We have 12 banks,” says Ben Chavis, another successful Lumbee businessman. He also points out that Robeson County looks different from most Indian reservations.

“There’s mansions. They look like English manors. I can take you to one neighborhood where my people are from and show you nicer homes than the whole Sioux reservation.” …

Henry Blodget, in the Business Insider, notes a number of gloomy economic indicators.

…We learned this morning that the economy grew at a pathetic 1.8% in Q1. That’s way below the 3%-4% rate that most economists consider normal. And it’s miles below the 5%-7% growth that normally follows a recession as sharp and severe as the one we just had.

Meanwhile, the Fed still has interest rates parked at zero, and is still conducting emergency stimulus measures like QE2. And the government’s huge stimulus package from 2009 is still driving spending. And we’re still spending an absolutely mind-boggling ~$1.5 trillion per year more than we take in (federal deficit)–and piling up humongous debts in the process. And, needless to say, none of this spending–”stimulus” or just normal spending we can’t afford–has produced the desired private-sector growth.

1.8% GDP growth in the face of massive stimulus is the equivalent of your car sputtering down the highway at 45 miles per hour while you have the gas pedal floored. You might be glad that the car hasn’t broken down completely, but you certainly won’t conclude that all is well. And you also might conclude–wisely–that if 45 is the best you can do with the gas pedal floored, things may be about to get a whole lot worse. …

Peter Wehner also comments on the economy and what it means for the president.

…Today we learned that in the first quarter of this year total economic output for the country grew by an anemic 1.8 percent. This was a significant slowdown from the fourth quarter of 2010, when the growth was 3.1 percent, which was itself unimpressive, especially in the aftermath of a recession, when one would expect growth to be much more robust.

In addition, as Alana points out, the number of jobless claims increased by 25,000 to 429,000 last week (the third week in a row unemployment claims surpassed 400,000). Consumer prices were up 3.8 percent from last year (after increasing only 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010). The price of gas is 35 percent higher than a year ago. The dollar continues to decline, with the Dollar Index sliding to an almost three-year low. And real estate experts are predicting that home prices could decrease by between 10 to 25 percent before the market bottoms out.

Not coincidentally, a new McClatchy-Marist poll shows that 57 percent of registered voters disapprove of President Obama’s economic management while only 40 percent approve, the lowest score of his presidency. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say the worst is yet to come for the U.S economy. And 71 percent said the nation is still in a recession (the recession officially ended in June 2009). …

So, how would we compare the Reagan recovery to the present recovery? The Investor’s Business Daily editors talk results.

…Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).

…Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What’s more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.

In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.

The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama’s has produced neither. …

In Top of the Ticket, Andrew Malcolm blogs about Ohio Governor John Kasich’s response to the president’s take on Ohio issues.

…Kasich was asked about the president’s strong opinion. And Kasich offered his own strong response. Kasich said in the 1990s he had been House Budget Committee chairman and chief architect of the last federal budget to be balanced.

He noted that Ohioans’ elected representatives had reached this legislative agreement and, as required by law, balanced the state budget while preserving tax cuts. Then, he added:

“The president of the United States has I think a $13 trillion debt. Why doesn’t he do his job? When he does his job and gets our budget balanced and starts to prepare a future for our children, then maybe he can have an opinion on what’s going on in Ohio.”…

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley wants to know when a grown-up in DC is going to rein in the NLRB.

…This a win-win for South Carolina, for Boeing, and for the global clients who will see Dreamliners rolling off the North Charleston line at the rate of 10 a month, starting with the first one next year. But, as is often the case, a win for people and businesses is a loss for the labor unions, which rely on coercion, bullying and undue political influence to stay afloat.

South Carolina is a right-to-work state, and we’re proud that within our borders workers cannot be required to join a labor union as a condition of employment. We don’t need unions playing middlemen between our companies and our employees. We don’t want them forcefully inserted into our promising business climate. And we will not stand for them intimidating South Carolinians.

…The president has been silent since his hand-selected NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who has not yet been confirmed by the United States Senate as required by law, chose to engage in economic warfare on behalf of the unions last week. … 

Or course Donald Trump has a clothing line. Salon has found out where it is made. Justin Elliott has bad news for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has emerged in recent years as the nation’s foremost China basher, going after the Asian superpower for undervaluing its currency and for taking American manufacturing and jobs. So it’s at least ironic — and at most an example of gross hypocrisy — that Trump’s own line of men’s wear, the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection, is manufactured in China. …

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John Podhoretz blogs about a New Yorker piece from Ryan Lizza that will be getting a lot of attention. In it we learn about the White House strategy of “leading from behind.”

The most-discussed article of the week will surely be Ryan Lizza’s report on the development of the Obama foreign policy in the New Yorker, called “The Consequentialist.” The notable quote in the piece comes at the end:

“One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength.”

The crystallizing phrase “leading from behind” may not be something you’ll see on a sign at the 2012 Democratic convention, but it will almost certainly be in the acceptance speech of the nominee of the Republican party at its 2012 convention, and will be thrown in Obama’s face during the presidential debates by his GOP rival, and will be the centerpiece of the critique of Obamaism going forward. It’s so revealing, in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House goes on a hunt to find the person who said it in order to defenestrate him before he does more colossal damage to his boss’s chances of reelection.

More to come on this unexpectedly revealing article later today. Leading from behind. Hoo boy.

John Steele Gordon comments on the Podhoretz post.

When a presidential adviser is quoted in the New Yorker as using an allusion to a comic figure of fun in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to describe Obama’s foreign policy approach, the White House must know it’s in trouble.

The first person to be described as “leading from behind,” at least as far as I know, was the Duke of Plaza-Toro in  The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan’s last great success. The Duke explains that when he was in the army he occasionally led his regiment into action and “invariably led them out of it.”…

Michael Rubin starts out by having some fun, but then makes some excellent points about what should guide foreign policy.

John makes some astute comments regarding Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article on President Obama’s foreign policy doctrine. It’s just too easy to poke fun at the concept of “Leading from Behind,” so excuse me as my tongue goes fully into cheek.  Just as Barack Obama’s election led to the renaming of a handful of elementary schools, perhaps in the spirit of “Leading from Behind,” it’s time to embrace the Obama enthusiasm and recast other concepts.  …Don’t call Deepwater Horizon an oil spill: It was simply “greasing from below.”  We miss a debt payment? That’s “Financing from Behind.” Back in 1992, I got a D in an organic chemistry test. At the time, I was concerned. Now, I realize I should not have been. I was simply learning “behind the curve.” I’d certainly love to play poker with President Obama one day, because while other players might seek a full house or, at least three-of-a-kind, our president might “gamble from behind” and instead settle for a pair of threes.

More seriously, while President Obama may believe that the U.S. is reviled in much of the world, a lesson I learned from years crisscrossing the Middle East and, more broadly, Africa and Asia, is that when it comes to American policy, other nations will criticize us no matter what we do. We are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” In such circumstances, the best thing to do is to worry less about what people might think, and simply do what we think is right. There is a State Department corollary to this which became apparent during the Cold War, in the run-up to the Operation Iraqi Freedom, and many times since. Perhaps instead of seeking to change American policies to win plaudits in their countries of residence, American diplomats would be better served arguing and defending American policies, leaving no criticism unanswered.

Rick Richman blogs about more instances of “leading from behind.”

In his article “The Consequentialist” in this week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza reported the White House reaction to State Department staffer Jared Cohen, who contacted Twitter during the peak of the Green Revolution in Iran and asked it to delay its planned upgrade. Protesters were using Twitter to provide information to the international media, and the upgrade would have temporarily shut down Twitter. Lizza reported that:

White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. . . . The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.” …

Peter Wehner picks up on another quote from Ryan Lizza’s article.

Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article is every bit as devastating as John says. Among the more damning quotes is this one:

[Zbigniew] Brzezinski, too, has become disillusioned with the President. “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.”

The same people who helped give us the four awful years of the Carter presidency now feel confident enough to stand in judgment of Mr. Obama (and for sermonizing instead of strategizing, no less!).

Things are quickly heading south for the president.

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article about Obama’s intelligence.

…I hate to be prosaic about this, but what is the evidence that Obama is a complex guy? ( None of the three gurus have met or actually diagnosed him, of course, and I’d bet, just a wild guess here, that they are liberal Democrats who just think he is swell.)

After all, Obama has not blazed new political or policy trails as Bill Clinton did. He’s written no scholarly books (sorry, memoirs don’t count). His understanding of the Middle East has been so slight and his strategy so misguided that there are no Israeli -Palestinian peace talks, and we have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping the hegemonic aspirations of Iran. I mean, isn’t it just as likely that Obama’s a garden-variety liberal with poor decision-making skills?

…In Obama’s case we’re told similar lines. He’s so darn smart. He’s such a detailed-oriented guy. He’s really too complex for his own good. Come to think of it, this is what they said about Jimmy Carter. Could it be that it wasn’t too much intellect but not enough smarts (street smarts, people smarts, executive smarts) that’s the problem?

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph, UK, also has criticism.

…As the Libya campaign enters its seventh week, with Britain and France playing the leading roles, US leadership is dramatically absent. On Syria, where the Baathist regime is brutally suppressing democracy protestors, killing large numbers in the process, Washington remains largely paralysed while its dangerous strategy of engagement with the Assad regime continues. On the Middle East as a whole, the Obama administration barely has a coherent big picture strategy, hardly an advertisement for what it calls its “smart power” approach. In reality the Obama doctrine represents little more than the humbling of a superpower, and the stunning abdication of US leadership in an increasingly dangerous world. As I noted previously, America badly needs another Reagan-style revolution, not only to rebuild its economic might, but also to restore its standing in the world.

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm looks at the accumulating public relations stumbles from the White House.

…What the public sees, while it frets over stubborn unemployment and soaring gas prices, is a diffident Democrat who takes a 17-vehicle motorcade of SUVs and limos to be seen looking at clean-energy cars.

A pontificating president who suggests that one worried commuter buy a new car instead of complaining. …

…here’s a selection of other Obama activities scheduled this week: Wednesday he and wife Michelle fly to Chicago on Air Force One. They will be there for three hours. The sole purpose: to tape an Oprah show. Obama will then fly to New York City. The sole purpose: a political fundraiser.

Air Force One costs the government $181,000 an hour to operate. …

David Harsanyi comments that the green bureaucrats are winning, the price of gas is going to European levels.

…The left’s “energy” initiatives of the past decade — the entire purpose of energy policy, in fact — have been aimed at artificially driving fossil fuel prices up to incentivize the bitter clingers to embrace the government’s Utopian energy schemes. No secret has been made of it. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked by CNBC’s John Harwood, “So could the (high) oil prices help us?” Obama: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Sudden spikes are bad (politically speaking), but gradual price spikes? Helpful. That same year, current U.S. “Energy” Secretary (then just a zany professor) Steven Chu clarified that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

Who says this administration doesn’t get things done?

…Let’s not forget the Environmental Protection Agency, which, as we speak, is in the process of rolling out the “the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history,” according to Time magazine. Using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases — so, all useful energy — the EPA is trying to initiate cap and trade by fiat. It has to because even a Democratic monopoly in Washington was unable to muster the courage to launch this kind of assault on prosperity. …

In Pajamas Media, Will Collier says the economics behind increasing gas prices are simple. It’s worth looking at the graph and reading Collier relate how Bush increased drilling and oil prices plummeted.

It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts, and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.

Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.

Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline. …

In the Beltway Confidential – Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott picks up on Will Collier’s piece.

…Check out the chart that accompanies this post. Notice what happened on July 14, 2008? Oil prices suddenly plummeted from their historic high of $145 a barrel. Why?

Because that was the day President George W. Bush signed an executive order lifting the moratorium on off-shore drilling in the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Overnight, the price per barrel of oil plunged, and that plunge was reflected at the pump soon thereafter.

In other words, Obama could with the stroke of a pen sign an executive order telling his appointees at EPA, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy to stop throwing up obstacles to increased U.S. oil and natural gas production and instead work with the energy industry on a crash program to “drill here, drill now.” …

John Fund updates us on 2012.

…Mr. Daniels has told reporters that he is close to a decision and promises that if he does run he will boast an endorsement list and fund-raising contacts that “will blow people’s socks off.”

Mr. Barbour’s departure leaves the race without a clear Southern candidate… The rich treasure trove of Republican delegates in the South will no doubt prompt people to encourage Texas Gov. Rick Perry to enter the GOP race. Mr. Perry, the author of a new book detailing his state’s battles with the federal bureaucracy, has won statewide office six times and presides over a booming local economy. …

Jay Ambrose, in the Detroit News, comments on the travesty of justice facing Boeing.

…Boeing’s lawyers are outraged, one of them telling the New York Times this move is absolute nonsense, but absolute nonsense has been getting its way quite a bit in this country lately. If it does this time around, it’s thought it could be a bad sign for South Carolina and the other right-to-work states that think individual rights should supersede collectivist power plays.

Let’s all agree that there was a time when unions helped us get to justice in this land. But let’s understand, too, that the opposite can be more nearly true today. It’s not an accident that union membership has dropped to little more than 7 percent in the private sector. Federal and state laws prohibit the kinds of worker abuses that sometimes happened in the past.

The real strength of labor is now in the public sector where, in some states and cities, it has taken advantage of weak-kneed politicians. Rather tame attempts to tamp down on these threats have been greeted by angry protests and have been described in endless news stories as incursions on union “rights.” But there is no right of collective bargaining with the government. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa has South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley’s NLRB strategy.

Across the country, from Wisconsin to Ohio, Republican governors are battling Big Labor. Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in an interview with National Review Online, says that her state is the next front. But Haley’s foes are not graybeard professors or drum-banging state workers; she is facing off against bureaucratic activists in Washington, D.C.

…Haley, for her part, is baffled by how the feds think that they can kick around a private company, picking and choosing where it operates. “There is no case; this is ridiculous,” she says. “It is an embarrassment for the NLRB. The unions are losing and this is nothing more than a desperate attempt to see if they can make their voices relevant again.”

But it is, Haley asserts, a “national fight,” with political implications for both parties. “I am going to fight this every step of the way,” she says. “We absolutely will not accept the bullying. This is a direct assault on right-to-work states.” In the coming days, the governor will urge the president — and the Republicans hoping to beat him in 2012 — to take sides.

Haley challenges President Obama to rally behind her. “I want to ask him why he is allowing unelected bureaucrats to come in and do the unions’ dirty work on the backs of our businesses,” she says. “It’s hurting the jobs in South Carolina and every other right-to-work state. He owes us an answer.” …

In the Corner, Katrina Trinko says Newt might be an ethanol flack.

Newt Gingrich, who said he was “not an ethanol lobbyist” in a letter to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, worked as a consultant to an ethanol lobbying group in 2009. From the Center for Public Integrity:

Gingrich was a hired consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group—at more than $300,000 a year.

According to IRS records, the ethanol group Growth Energy paid Gingrich’s consulting firm $312,500 in 2009.The former House Speaker was the organization’s top-paid consultant, according to the records. His pay was one of the group’s largest single expenditures, as it took in and spent about $11 million to promote ethanol and to lobby for federal incentives for its use.

In a Growth Energy publication, Gingrich was listed as a consultant who offered advice on “strategy and communication issues” and who “will speak positively on ethanol related topics to media.”…

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Jennifer Rubin thinks the president is out of his depth.

…He’s articulate and can be (at the Arizona memorial, for example) an inspired speaker. But what does he know? Does anyone aside from his devoted spinners imagine that he grasped the limits of the United Nations and other international bodies, understood the frailty of Middle Eastern despots, correctly analyzed the root of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, appreciated the history of Keynesian failure or perceived the enormity of our looming debt crisis? As the problems become more acute, his limitations become more obvious. At this point it’s hard to imagine that he could hold his own on the same stage with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and debate their respective budget plans.

Obama has relied throughout his career on a mix of glossy rhetoric and clever pop psychology. But ask those who observed him during his brief Senate career if he showed a depth of understanding or interest on major legislation. You’ll find he wasn’t much concerned with the details of legislation or the substance of policy debates. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who had fixed principles and an overarching vision of the major international challenges we faced, Obama perpetually vamps. Each crisis and challenge comes as a surprise and is viewed in isolation from other events. He can’t fathom that there are flaws in his own inch-deep theories (e.g., Israeli settlements are the barrier to Middle East peace) or that there are well-reasoned alternative views (e.g., our Syria engagement policy is a moral and strategic flop).

…Obama and his defenders whine that these are tough times, tougher than any mortal could be expected to manage. But that’s poppycock. Reagan faced a collapse of American confidence, a sky-high “misery index”and an emboldened Soviet Union. George W. Bush faced the worst attack on American soil in 60 years. All presidents face challenges. The question is do they have the character, the depth of knowledge and the skill to manage them. In Obama’s case there is reason to doubt that he does.

In Contentions, Omri Ceren gives us an overview of the president’s failed strategy for renewing Middle East peace talks. Now we are learning, from Hamas, no less, the “settlement freeze” strategy was Obama’s attempt to drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the Israeli people.

The background on Obama’s 2009 and 2010 diplomatic offensives against Israel are now well-known enough that the narrative is inching toward conventional wisdom. The president entered the White House intent on putting daylight between the United States and the Jewish state. He choose settlements as a wedge issue designed to split Netanyahu from the Israeli public and topple the government, in the process changing the widely understood interpretation of “settlement freeze” from “no expansion outside existing blocs” to “no Jewish construction over the Green Line even in Jerusalem.” Either Netanyahu would halt all construction and lose the Israeli right, the thinking went, or he would put himself on the wrong side of the United States president and lose the Israeli center. Satisfyingly clever.

Of course the administration’s reading of Israeli polling data was flat wrong, and even Israeli opposition chairwoman Tzipi Livni insisted that Jerusalem was a consensus issue. The Israeli public rallied behind Netanyahu, while distrust in Obama and his reliability as an ally — a precondition to Israel taking risks for peace — skyrocketed. But having categorically stated that it was simply impossible for the Palestinians to negotiate while Jews built schools and supermarkets in East Jerusalem, the White House couldn’t then admit that a “full freeze” was just a gambit meant to weaken Netanyahu. So that continued to be the official U.S. position through the end of 2010, until the White House had to nuance the counterproductive request. Of course by that time Palestinian negotiators, unable to be less anti-Israel than the U.S. president, had incorporated it as a precondition for talks. They didn’t have the option of abandoning it when the White House did, and the peace process remained moribund.

…The question, as always, isn’t just about the decision but about the decision-making process. Which obviously clumsy advisers convinced the president that the strategy was sound, and are they still prognosticating on Israeli calculations and Palestinian intentions? What obviously inaccurate assumptions were they using, and are those beliefs still guiding our Middle East policymaking? Because generally when someone charts a course that’s flawed in precisely predictable ways, when they dismiss those precise objections with specific justifications, and when they turn out to be precisely wrong — they generally get replaced. …

In the Daily Beast, Eric Alterman compares Obama to Carter.

…• The Times also reports that “Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office,” with well fewer than 50 percent expressing confidence in the president’s leadership or the direction in which he’s taking the country.

• Meanwhile, Obama, like Carter, is reacting to these warning signs not by rallying his own side, or focusing on those aspects of his party’s platforms that remain popular, but by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans. According to recent polls, only 29 percent of Americans questioned believe that this rush to slash the deficit will help create jobs. Seventy-two percent favor Obama’s promise to restore pre-Bush tax rates for those enjoying incomes of $250,000 a year, but of course he caved on that in 2010, and it’s hard to see why he won’t do so again in another election year. When asked specifically about Medicare, those questioned say they are willing to pay higher taxes rather than see its services cut, and a plurality of 45 percent prefer military cuts instead.

So what does Obama propose? Well nothing so simple as his own party’s highly popular political platform for this president. He’s too smart for that. Rather, as Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter. …

In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino explains the only incentive on Wall Street.

…In recent weeks, firms like megabank JPMorgan have been scrambling to issue reports predicting apocalypse unless Congress allows the country to borrow ourselves into oblivion.

…Just recently, Goldman economists told us that if Republicans forced the president to accept a mere $61 billion in budget cuts, the country might slip back into recession.

As one long-time Wall Street economist recently told me, “Goldman is the worst,” but every major firm’s economic department now overtly “supports government spending stimulus and Fed pump-priming” as the path to economic nirvana.

Which gets us closer to the real conflict: The free money the Federal Reserve has printed and the massive government spending under Obama have been very, very good to Wall Street.

…Wall Street surely will give us more doomsday talk as the debt-ceiling debate rages on, but consider the source. After all, some of these same guys not long ago were making huge bets that housing prices would keep rising forever. …

Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph, UK, puts the Donald into perspective.

He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, showered praise on Bill and Hillary Clinton and suggested that Ronald Reagan was a con man with little “beneath that smile”.

A divorcé whose current wife, number three, is a Slovenian former model and jewelry designer, he once favoured Canadian-style single payer healthcare and abortion rights. These days, he is best known as a reality television host.

…So why is brash, egotistical, big mouthed weirdo Donald Trump suddenly being treated as a realistic candidate for the Republican party nomination for the presidency? …

Jennifer Rubin says the Trump boomlet is proof of the embarrassment that is the main-stream media.

…There are plenty of rationales, none convincing, as to why the media establishment that bemoans the prospect of defunding public broadcasting (the end of serious journalism!) simultaneously chases a contrived story. Trump is not and never has been a serious political figure…His schtick is to sell himself — bombastic, obnoxious and aggrandizing — not to lead the country or offer solutions to real problems. At least Ross Perot, the last eccentric billionaire candidate, was promoting an agenda other than himself.

…Trump is not a legitimate candidate, and coverage of him isn’t news. Rather, it’s embarrassing evidence of how easy it is for the media to be employed as the PR team for celebrities. (Is the Lindsay Lohan candidacy next?) …

In Financial Times, Gillian Tett tells us how businesses get started.

…Outside America, for example, most people think that “entrepreneurship” is all about Silicon Valley kids. Not so. Right now, the highest rate of entrepreneurship is actually found in Montana and Oklahoma, where 470 out of every 100,000 adults a year are creating new businesses, according to Kauffman data. And most entrepreneurs are found in the 35-44 age range. That may be because these entrepreneurs lost their jobs (in 2009, the level of start-ups was the highest for 14 years). But another fascinating wrinkle in the data is that new companies are now hiring fewer people than before.

However, for the Kauffman Foundation, these data are just the start: it is now campaigning for a range of policy changes to create more entrepreneurs (such as less business red tape, fewer immigration controls, more supportive tax code and patent law and so on). The foundation is also trying to create entrepreneur “labs”, boost education, and expand its international reach.

So far, so worthy. After all, it is hard to dispute the value of cutting red tape, boosting education or getting better data about the world. And yet, as the Kauffman Foundation rolls on, with its vast cash pile, I cannot help chuckling at the irony of all this. Free-wheeling, dirt-poor entrepreneurs might have made America great. But these days, even the magic of innovation comes with a lobbying price tag. Or perhaps this is the ultimate form of modern entrepreneurship. In a world where money is needed to get a voice, the Kauffman Foundation is a fable for our times.

Speaking of business, Thomas Sowell writes about the business cluelessness of today’s intellectuals. 

…Intellectuals who have never run any business have been remarkably confident that they know when businesses have been run wrongly or when their owners or managers are overpaid.

…Lenin said that running a business involved “extraordinarily simple operations” which “any literate person can perform,” so that those in charge of such enterprises need not be paid more than any ordinary worker.

Just three years after taking power, however, and with his post-capitalist economy facing what Lenin himself later called “ruin, starvation and devastation,” he reversed himself …

…In short, the first time that the theory of how easy it is to run a business was put to a test, it failed that test disastrously.

As the 20th century unfolded, that theory would fail repeatedly in other countries around the world, to the point where even most communist and socialist governments began to free up markets by the end of the 20th century, usually leading to higher economic growth rates, as in China and India. …