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John Tierney reviews Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist. Ridley posits that markets have created the wealth, technology, health, and standard of living we currently enjoy. Market forces will continue to improve living standards, if unfettered by the dead hand of government.

… “At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”

The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.

“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”

As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.

The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process. …

…Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

…“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”

In Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein laughs at nanny-state assumptions.

Jack Conway, Kentucky’s attorney general and one of the two leading candidates for the Senate seat on the Democratic side [said about Rand Paul, who has won the Republican nomination for Kentucky Senator]: “He wants to do away with the Department of Agriculture. He wants to do away with the Department of Education.”

Lt. Gov Dan Mongiardo, the other major Democratic candidate said, “Rand Paul says here’s your gun, here’s your land, God bless you, good luck. That’s his form of government.”

But surely his Democratic opponents have something bad to say about Dr. Paul?

So, why the loss in PA-12? Weekly Standard Blog post suggests some answers.

… The only competitive statewide primary Tuesday was on the Democratic side, and that helped boost Democratic turnout (Dems outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 at the polls in PA-12). That advantage will be gone in the fall. Critz ran as a conservative Democrat–his ads portrayed him as a pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-cap & trade candidate, who would have voted against Obamacare. That’s an advantage many Democratic incumbents in GOP-leaning districts won’t have in November. Their voting records will tell a different story.

And for that matter, PA-12 didn’t lean that much in the GOP’s favor. Yes, as Democrats and MSNBC reporters are enthusiastically pointing out, it is the only district that flipped from voting for John Kerry in ’04 to John McCain in ’08. But McCain only carried it by 900 votes. And that was after Obama had personally insulted western Pennsylvanians as bitter xenophobes who cling to their guns and God because of economic alienation. Fifty-eight percent of voters in the district were still willing to vote for Democrat John Murtha in 2008. …

Christopher Hitchens reviews some Iranian current events, including one Ayatollah’s threats to other Muslim countries. With Obama literally bowing out of world leadership, the West may no longer be the biggest concern for Iran’s neighbors.

…On May 15, we were subjected to a tirade by Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, leader of Iran’s Hezbollah party and proprietor of the newspaper of the same name, which carried his incendiary article. The need of the hour, intoned the ayatollah, was for a “Greater Iran” that would assume hegemonic control over much of the Middle East and Central Asia (stretching from Afghanistan to Palestine, according to the broad-brush ambitions disclosed by his polemic). This new imperialism would, he urged, possess two very attractive attributes. It would abolish the Jewish state, and it would assist in the arrival of the long-awaited Mahdi, or hidden imam, whose promised reign of perfection has been on hold since his abrupt disappearance in the ninth century. …

…It seems to me obvious that the Iranian mullahs do not desire to immolate their profitable system of corruption and exploitation in a last-ditch fight with states that can actually obliterate them. There may be some Mahdi-fanciers who dream of this apocalypse, and they should not be completely discounted. But what could be clearer in the medium run than that Tehran wants the bomb in order to exert nuclear blackmail against other Muslims? …

David Warren gives us an interesting inside look into the unrest in Thailand.

…The same thing happens in the East, faster through the absence of constitutional inertia. Bangkok and Thailand offer an especially vivid example: one country has become two worlds. We have watched the emergence of a conflict between Yellow Shirts (essentially urban) and Red Shirts (essentially not), which may be progressing toward civil war. …

…This is backed with some marketing savvy, as the Red Shirt slogans have shifted from supporting Thaksin Shinawatra, the freely-elected demagogue who was “Toxin” to Bangkok voters. He was deposed and exiled after urban Yellow Shirt demonstrations. They also deposed his party after it won the election, and then a compliant Supreme Court banned Thaksin’s party, lest it embarrass Bangkok by winning yet again.

Now the Red Shirts demand “democracy” in the abstract. There have been shows of loyalty to the king, to defeat the charge of “republicanism.” And, for the most part, the crowds from upcountry have remained edifyingly peaceful. But stubborn; more stubborn than Bangkok can understand. …

In Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg follows Mark Steyn’s lead last week in discussing the cultural decline in Great Britain.

…A country can rebound from economic difficulties and even political demoralization — see the New Deal, or the Reagan Years — but how restore the social fabric, the very culture of a country, once it’s been allowed to deteriorate? The collapse of educational standards may be only the most pervasive and influential symptom of what ails us.

…It is such visions of the American future that may explain the rise of the latest political phenomenon on this side of the pond–the Tea Party, a variegated collection of Americans who have only this much in common: Like Howard Beale in Network, they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take this anymore! They’re opening the nearest window and shouting their rage. Yes, they’re reactionaries — but they have much to react against. What intelligent observer wouldn’t?

No, the Tea Partiers may not know what to do about the problem, but at least they know we’ve got one. And they’re not going to be all nice and quiet about it.

Mark Steyn writes a cautionary tale: how big government in England and Canada is eroding Western culture and values, increasing the power of the governing over the governed.

…in December Tohseef Shah sprayed the words “KILL GORDON BROWN,” “OSAMA IS ON HIS WAY” and “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” on the war memorial at Burton-upon-Trent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided his words were not “religiously motivated.” Phew! Thank goodness for that, eh? So a week or so back he walked out of court a free man, except for £500 in compensation to the municipal council for cleaning off his non-religiously motivated “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” graffito. …

…in today’s advanced Western society, there are no absolute rights—for all individual freedoms must be “balanced” against the state’s commitment to “multiculturalism” or “equality” or whatever other modish conceit tickles its fancy. … Real “rights” are restraints upon the state—“negative” rights, as constitutionalists have it; they delineate the limits of the sovereign’s power. But in the modern era “rights” are baubles in the state’s gift, and the sovereign confers them at the expense of individual liberty. Truly, this is an Orwellian assault on the very foundations of freedom. …

David Goldman offers an odd juxtaposition of stories and commentary on some cultural crossroads. We highlight the most positive aspect.

…The strictures of traditional society are a flimsy defense against modernity. The moment that members of traditional society cease to live under a regime of compulsion, they tend to adopt the habits of the ambient culture. The most dramatic expression of this trend is the collapse of Muslim birth rates, especially among Muslims who have emigrated to the West. As Martin Walker wrote in the Woodrow Wilson Center Quarterly in 1999, “the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for ­Turkish-­born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, ­Turkish-­born women in Germany had on average two children more than ­German-­born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.”

There is a straight-line correlation between literacy and birth rates in the Muslim world, as I documented here, which suggests that the moment that Muslims enter modernity, for example, through reading, the habits of traditional society die quickly. Islam is fragile, and that helps explain why radical Islam is so aggressive.

Thomas Sowell brings the truth into sharp focus.

One of the many shallow statements that sound good — if you don’t stop and think about it — is that “at some point, you have made enough money.”

The key word in this statement, made by President Barack Obama recently, is “you.” There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.

Politicians with the power to determine each citizen’s income are no longer public servants. They are public masters. …

David Harsanyi comments on the blatant authoritarian condescension of the intelligentsia.

…”One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” according to Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”

Of course, some form or another of Friedman’s rationale has been used in nearly every embryonic dictatorship. Now, if only Venezuela and Sudan funded more solar farms, Friedman could embrace their progressive forms of governance, as well.

Friedman isn’t alone. The lure of enlightened autocracy is why MSNBC’s Chris Matthews can casually ask, as he did on his show this week, why the oil industry hasn’t been nationalized yet. It is why Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan can stand in front of the Supreme Court, as she did last year, and defend book banning (for the administration, via bipartisan legislation). …

…It seems that the negative externalities of our freewheeeling ways have become too much for some of the enlightened to bear. Progressivism is the belief that we have too much freedom with which to make too many stupid choices. …

In the WSJ, Julia Martin reviews Samuel Zipp’s new book about a previous generation’s intelligentsia wreaking havoc on city neighborhoods and economies.

The disaster that befell many American cities in the post-World War II era is drearily familiar. We know that the building of interstate highways, combined with the Federal Housing Authority’s red-lining of inner-city neighborhoods, encouraged the flight of the urban middle class to the suburbs. We also know that the federal government then ensured the ruin of much of what was left by pursuing “urban renewal”—that is, by demolishing working-class neighborhoods, destroying the traditional street grid and gouging the classic urban fabric with fortress-like public-housing projects.

In “Manhattan Projects,” Samuel Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities—and who thought they were making a “benevolent intervention.” …

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In Canada’s National Post, Conrad Black comments on various struggling economies in the West, while Canada has avoided these fiscal issues.

…Here is the most chronic problem in Europe: Barely 30% of Europeans work to sustain the rest. Working hours have been steadily reduced in most countries; holidays have multiplied, and perhaps even more than elsewhere, Europe has fled to service industry and public-sector employment, which is often not really productive work, or may be just disguised welfare, or at least workfare.

…For decades, Europe has played Turkey as a 50-pound fish on a 20-pound line, reeling it in when Turkey was needed and rejecting the Turks as a Muslim rabble at other times. The predictable has happened, as Turkey is now enjoying greater economic growth than any other country in (or partly in) Europe. It is an Islamic regime that is casting aside Kemal Ataturk’s guardians of secularism, the army and the judiciary, who became thoroughly corrupt in the 70 years that they have held the clergy at bay. Turkey has virtually turned its back on Europe and on its former allies, Israel and the United States, and is now asserting influence over its former Arab satrapies. How far it will vanish into the Islamic world, where no matter what happens it will be a force for comparative moderation, is an open question. …

…Canada has the highest economic growth rate of any advanced economy, with the possible exceptions of Australia and Israel, and relatively modest debt (for which everyone should be grateful to Jean Chretien and Paul Martin). The country’s financial and political institutions are working as well as any in the world and Canada is finally getting some recognition for what it has achieved. Let’s get used to it.

Joel Kotkin, in the Daily Beast, looks at the model for many liberal dreams.

…Although the financial crisis may have originated on Wall Street, it’s been Europe and the Euro that now represent the big threat to drive world markets back into recession. …

…You can blame the spendthrift Greeks for this trouble, or even the lack of geeks in Europe (anyone found a continental Google or Apple lately?). But Euro-stagnation is nothing new. It’s deeply rooted and longstanding. Indeed, since 1970 it has not been the U.S. that has faded before the onslaught from the East, but the core 15 nations of the European Union. Over that 40-year period the EU-15’s share of world GDP has plummeted from roughly 37 percent to under 28 percent; the American chunk, roughly 27 percent, has stayed remarkably even. Basically Asia, and particularly China and India’s gain, largely has been at Europe’s expense, not our’s.

In stating the case for European superiority, much has been made by boosters of Europe’s different institutional framework, tax or regulatory structure. No question these have advantages and disadvantages compared with those of the United States, but there’s little case for arguing that the “Euro-model” has been a rip-roaring economic success. It’s imploding on its weak periphery, and the collapse is threatening even bigger players, including the United Kingdom.

Europe’s problems extend well beyond policy, into the realm of culture and demographics. Even in France, people and what they do actually matter more than abstract ideas. A culture that believes in itself, not only to have children, but also start businesses and innovate will overcome one, however theoretically well managed, that does not. This is the fundamental problem of Europe as whole, although it does not apply equally to every individual country in the union. …

David Harsanyi looks at the cap-and-trade scam.

…Praising the legislation, President Barack Obama made his customary case, twinning the fictitious economic benefits of statism with freshman-class utopianism, claiming that “we will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced — jobs building solar panels and wind turbines; constructing fuel-efficient cars and buildings; and developing the new energy technologies that will lead to even more jobs, more savings, and a cleaner, safer planet in the bargain.”

Like most parents, I too hope my children one day toil in a non-productive factory assembling taxpayer-subsidized wind turbines rather than turning to imported Canadian fossil fuels and constructive high-income professions. Unlike profits, you see, dreams can never be outsourced.

…The fabricated cap-and-trade “market” is a well-documented concoction of rent-seeking corporations who will work diligently with Washington to ensure taxpayers always foot the bill. As the legislation stands now, oil companies will also have to pay emissions allowances — outside the cap-and-trade market — which is nothing more than another gas tax. …

Mort Zuckerman discusses how the public sector unions, and the politicians they back, have destroyed state budgets. Government workers receive salaries, benefits, and pensions that taxpayers pay for, but taxpayers themselves don’t receive in the private sector.

…A Citizens Budget Commission report in 2005 showed that for most job categories in the greater New York City region, public sector workers received higher hourly wages than private sector workers. And according to a 2009 survey by the same group, this doesn’t even count the money that New York City pays in full premiums for comprehensive health insurance policies for workers and their families. Only 8 percent of workers in private firms enjoy that subsidy. Moreover, in virtually all cases, the city also pays the full healthcare premium costs for retirees and their spouses. And the city pensions are “defined benefit” plans, which are more expensive since they guarantee specific benefits on retirement.

On the other hand, private sector workers in the survey were mostly in “defined contribution” plans, which means that, unlike their cushioned brethren in the public sector, they do not have a pre-determined benefit at retirement. If New York City were to require its current workers to pay contributions toward health insurance equal to the amounts paid by the employees of local private sector firms, the taxpayer savings would approximate $628 million a year. In New Jersey, Christie says government employee health benefits are 41 percent more expensive than those of the average Fortune 500 company.

What we suffer is a ruinously expensive collaboration between elected officials and unionized state and local workers, purchased with taxpayer money. …

California is a horrible warning for the nation of how dreams can turn to dust. In most states, politicians face a contracting local economy and shortfalls in tax receipts. Naturally, they look to cut expenses but run into obstruction from politically powerful unions that represent state and local government employees, teachers, and healthcare workers who have themselves caused pension and healthcare insurance costs to soar. It is not an accident that in framing the national stimulus program, Congress directed a stunning percentage of the $787 billion to support public service employees. …

Jennifer Rubin criticizes the president for refusing to say that Islamic fundamentalists killed Daniel Pearl.

At a signing ceremony for the Freedom of Press Act, it is ironic and shameful that Obama could not bring himself to identify the killers who beheaded the man who fearlessly reported on the jihadist terrorists. Obama had this to say:

All around the world there are enormously courageous journalists and bloggers who, at great risk to themselves, are trying to shine a light on the critical issues that the people of their country face; who are the frontlines against tyranny and oppression. And obviously the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is, and it reminded us that there are those who would go to any length in order to silence journalists around the world.

If you didn’t know already, you’d never figure out that he was talking about the Islamic fundamentalists who butchered Pearl. …

John Steele Gordon also comments on issues surrounding the signing of the Freedom of the Press Act.

…He might also have taken questions from the press. As Chip Reid of CBS points out, the reporters were herded out of the room after the ceremony. “There was some rich irony at the White House today — President Obama signed the Press Freedom Act,” he wrote, “and then promptly refused to take any questions.” This is nothing new: as his presidency has evolved, Obama has become more and more remote from the press, except when he is in total control. …

In Reason, Peter Suderman looks at some of what’s ahead, thanks to the politicians who brought us Obamacare.

… And, perhaps more importantly, a planned investigation into the write-downs revealed that many big corporations are considering dropping their health care coverage and dumping employees onto the public dole.

When Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) heard about the write-downs, he called a hearing with AT&T and other companies claiming big hits. But soon after the subpoenaed corporate documents were turned in, the hearing was canceled. Why? Likely because, as Fortune magazine reported, the documents showed that the companies were considering dropping coverage for many employees—directly contradicting one of the president’s key promises, that, under ObamaCare, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Even with penalties in place for employers who decline to provide health insurance, documents showed that Caterpillar could reduce its health care costs by as much as 70 percent and AT&T could save as much as $1.8 billion by shifting their employees into public programs.

Small businesses, meanwhile, have discovered that their tax preparation costs just went way up. The PPACA will require small business owners and the self-employed to fill out 1099s for every company they do more than $600 worth of business with. That means any freelancer who buys a mid-range laptop from Best Buy will technically be required to fill out a 1099, no matter if the retailer is an indifferent chain giant. As with the drug subsidy modification, the idea is to beef up compliance and raise additional revenue—about $17 billion worth.

At the same time, cost projections continue to spiral upwards. The Congressional Budget Office now reports that the law will require an additional $115 billion in previously unreported (and yet unpaid-for) discretionary spending. Medicare’s actuary has reported that total medical spending in the U.S. will actually go up and that crucial cuts to Medicare—cuts being used to pay for the law’s new entitlement spending—aren’t likely to happen, but that Medicare benefits are likely to be reduced. And in Massachusetts, the state whose 2006 health care overhaul served as the model for ObamaCare, insurers have gone to war with the governor, and the state treasurer is warning that the program could drive the state into bankruptcy. …

In the WSJ, Melinda Beck reports that some germs may be good for you.

…According to the “hygiene hypothesis,” first proposed in 1989, exposure to a variety of bacteria, viruses and parasitic worms early in life helps prime a child’s immune system, much like sensory experiences program his brain. Without such early instruction, the immune system may go haywire and overreact with allergies to foods, pollen and pet dander or turn on the body’s own tissue, setting off autoimmune disorders.

Many of these microorganisms evolved symbiotically with humans over millions of years—the so-called “old friends” theory. But where they’ve been eradicated, a key part of human development has been thrown off. …

…Some scientists are searching for ways to harness the immune-priming effects of microorganisms without the fatal diseases. Parasitic worms known as helminthes are leading the way.

Clinical trials are under way in the U.S. and Europe testing Trichuris Suis Ova (TSO)—-a species of pig whipworm—as a treatment for peanut allergies, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and MS. A study is being designed to test it with asthma. It’s also being tested with adults who have autism, which some researchers believe could be related to immunological function. …

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Jay Nordlinger blogs that the Obama administration is still apologizing to the world.

We, the United States, have been having human-rights talks with China. Our side is apparently led by Michael Posner, an assistant secretary of state. I will quote from an Associated Press report:

“Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.

He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its [their?] own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.”

I hope I have read that incorrectly, or am interpreting it incorrectly. Did we, the United States, talking to a government that maintains a gulag, that denies people their basic rights, that in all probability harvests organs, apologize for the new immigration law in Arizona? Really, really? …

If anyone was questioning whether Hollywood is in touch with the rest of America, read Jim Hoft’s post in Gateway Pundit.

Woody Allen wants Barack Obama to be dictator for a few years so that he can completely socialize America. The article published today, May 15, 2010, did not make it into any English-language paper. …

And, the money quote:

“…sería bueno…si pudiera ser un dictador durante algunos años, porque podría hacer un montón de cosas buenas rápidamente.”

The translated quote:

“…it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

Of course, this comes as a complete shock.

What is it with these leftist loons and their passion for socialist dictators?

Michael Barone asks why our government can’t state the obvious. Barone’s answer leaves us wanting, but his review is interesting.

If you want to watch someone squirm, take a look at the two-minute videotape of Attorney General Eric Holder dodging Republican Rep. Lamar Smith’s question whether “radical Islam” motivated the Times Square bomber.

Holder, who last year called America “a nation of cowards” for refusing to talk frankly about race, plainly didn’t want to say what is plain to everyone else, that Faisal Shahzad, back from five months in Waziristan, launched his terror attack because of his Islamist beliefs.

…Why the reluctance to state the obvious truth, that we are under attack from terrorists motivated by a radical form of Islam?

My theory is that these well-intentioned folk see the American people as a howling mob. They think that if Americans find out that Islamists are attacking us, they will go out and slaughter innocent Muslims. They think that Americans are incapable of understanding the simple truth that while most terrorists are Islamists, the large majority of Muslims are not terrorists. …

Investor’s Business Daily Editors say it’s time for a new Attorney General.

…Just this week, Steve Emerson’s respected Investigative Project on Terrorism noted with concern that terrorist experts have detected a shift in terrorists’ attention — from weak spots overseas to the U.S. homeland. It’s only a matter of time.

Even so, there was Holder, in congressional testimony last week, virtually unable to make his mouth form the words “radical Islam” when queried if that was behind the recent upswing in terrorism. It is, of course, but the White House refuses to say so.

Anyone with a normal ration of common sense and intelligence can see that radical Islam is a serious problem. Why can’t Holder?

…By his own admission, Holder’s decision making is driven by politics — not by concerns for the Constitution or public safety. Rule of law depends on a nonpolitical attorney general. Holder must go.

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes on a glimmer of hope in Philadelphia. Some people who otherwise are certifiable liberals are backing school vouchers.

…Three months ago, the executive committee of ADL’s Philadelphia chapter voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution endorsing vouchers. Now it is urging the entire organization to follow suit.

“We believe school choice to be an urgent civil rights issue,’’ the committee argued in a brief being circulated among ADL’s 30 regional offices. Despite decades of increased spending on K-12 education, “the evidence that our public education system is failing to educate our children is staggering.’’ ADL should reverse its longtime position “as a moral imperative,’’ the Philadelphia leadership urges, and “issue a resolution in favor of school choice.’’

As it happens, the ADL regional board isn’t the only liberal voice in Philadelphia calling for expanded school choice. State Senator Anthony Williams, a black Democrat and a candidate in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial primary this week, is the founder of a charter school, a champion of vouchers, and an ardent believer in the power of competition to improve the quality of education. His position puts him sharply at odds with the state’s largest teachers’ union, which opposes choice and has endorsed his main opponent. But Williams — like the local ADL leadership — sees school choice as the great civil rights battle of the day.

“Anybody who was for Brown v. Board of Education — it baffles me that they would be against vouchers,’’ he told me last week. “Brown condemned schools that were separate and unequal. Well, that’s exactly what we’re back to now — schools that are segregated by income, by ZIP code, by race.’’ …

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has an amazing article on how the NY Times reports crime in New York City. We highlight the positive part of the article. How liberals are trying to mess this up constitutes the rest of the story.

…The proactive policing revolution that began under NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994 declared that the police would actually lower crime—an unheard-of idea in the annals of policing. To accomplish that feat, the department began rigorously scrutinizing crime data on a daily basis and deploying officers to crime hot spots. Once there, officers were expected to be on the look-out for suspicious behavior. If there had been a string of robberies at ATMs in East Flatbush, for example, and an officer saw two guys apparently casing an ATM user from across the street, who then walked quickly away when they spotted the uniform, the officer was expected to stop and question the two men. If thieves had been preying on senior citizens in Harlem, someone walking closely behind a retiree in the 28th precinct and looking furtively over his shoulder would likely be stopped by an officer deployed there in response to the crime spike. Those stops may not have resulted in an arrest, if no evidence of a crime were found, but they may have disrupted a crime in the making.

This data-driven, proactive style of policing, which came to be known as Compstat, led to the largest crime drop in recent memory. The biggest returns were in New York’s minority neighborhoods, because that’s where crime was and still is the highest. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79 percent of the 78 percent decline in homicide victims since 1990. Over 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at early 1990s levels. …

Robert Samuelson discusses how to deal with US budget issues, from the political center.

…In a classroom, limiting government debt in relation to GDP can be defended. The idea is to reassure investors (a.k.a. “financial markets”) that the debt burden isn’t becoming heavier so they will continue lending at low interest rates. But in real life, the logic doesn’t work. Governments inevitably face deep recessions, wars or other emergencies that require heavy borrowing. To stabilize debt to GDP, you have to aim much lower than the target in good times, meaning that you should balance the budget (or run modest surpluses) after the economy has recovered from recessions. …

…The virtue of balancing the budget is that it forces people to weigh the benefits of government against the costs. It’s a common-sense standard that people intuitively grasp. If the Deficit Commission is serious, it will set a balanced budget in 2020 as a goal, allowing time to phase in benefit cuts and tax increases. It will then invite think tanks (from the Heritage Foundation on the right to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the left) and interest groups (from the Chamber of Commerce to AARP) to present plans to reach that goal. Their competing visions could jump-start a long-overdue debate on government’s role. …

Historian H.W. Brands, in Forbes, writes about a time when America rebounded from bleak economic conditions.

Amid the current uncertainty about America’s future, it might be useful to recall a time when the country really was in trouble. At the end of the Civil War the nation was a wreck. The economy of the South had capsized, with billions of dollars of “property” erased upon the freeing of the slaves. Towns and cities had been burned and wide swaths of countryside ravaged. A large part of the labor force of the North had been drawn into the military, depriving shops and farms of their workers. The federal debt had quadrupled in just four years, reaching the unprecedented level of nearly a third of GDP. The financial crisis had forced the federal government off the gold standard; fiat greenbacks drove gold dollars into hiding. The country was deeply in debt to foreign lenders, who held the nation’s economic fate in their hands.

Things got worse. Speculators warred for control of railroads, deranging share prices and rail traffic. A cabal of financiers in 1869 tried to corner the gold market and nearly succeeded, panicking Wall Street in the process. In 1873 Jay Cooke & Co., the firm that had sold the bonds that kept the Union afloat during the war, went bust, triggering the worst panic yet and plunging the nation into its first full-blown industrial depression.

The country had nowhere to go but up.

And it did, during the final quarter of the 19th century, thanks to a revolutionary amalgam of technique, technology, geography and demography. …

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The Economist reviews and critiques a new book by Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was sceptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity, Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.

Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness. …

…The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously. …

Mark Steyn discusses how our government and other western governments try to avoid addressing the pathological aspects of Islam. We leave the frightening examples for you to read in the article.

…At Fort Hood, Maj. Hasan jumped on a table and gunned down his comrades while screaming, “Allahu Akbar!”, which is Arabic for “Nothing to see here” and an early indicator of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Times Square Bomber, we are assured by The Washington Post, CNN and Newsweek, was upset by foreclosure proceedings on his house. Mortgage-related issues. Nothing to do with months of training at a Taliban camp in Waziristan. …

…You may not be interested in Islam but Islam is interested in you. Islam smells weakness at the heart of the West. The post-World War II order is dying: The European Union’s decision to toss a trillion dollars to prop up a Greek economic model that guarantees terminal insolvency is merely the latest manifestation of the chronic combination of fiscal profligacy and demographic decline in the West at twilight. Islam is already the biggest supplier of new Europeans and new Canadians, and the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.

Therefore, it thinks it not unreasonable to shape the character of those societies – not by blowing up buildings and airplanes, but by determining the nature of their relationship to Islam. …

John Fund reviews the election news in Massachusetts.

…This week saw a special election for the state senate seat that Mr. Brown gave up when he became a U.S. Senator. The suburban Boston district has been competitive, with Mr. Brown first winning it in a 2003 special election with only 51%.

This time it wasn’t even close. GOP State Representative Richard Ross defeated Democrat Peter Smulowitz, an emergency-room physician, with 62% of the vote. Mr. Ross even won Needham, a liberal bastion in the district, by over 200 votes. “The Democratic machine is striking out in Massachusetts,” claimed Jennifer Nassour, the state’s GOP chairwoman.

Not quite. The highly competitive race for governor has seen Democratic Governor Deval Patrick rebound somewhat from his recent dismal poll numbers. He now leads Republican Charlie Baker, a protégé of former GOP Governor Bill Weld, and state Treasurer Tim Cahill, who left the Democratic Party to run as an independent last year. In a new Rasmussen poll, Mr. Patrick scores 45% support against 31% for his GOP opponent Mr. Baker. …

Michael Barone thinks Utah Senator Bob Bennett’s loss may be only the start of the election year upsets.

…While incumbents of both parties may be in trouble this year, it is significant that both Mr. Bennett and Mr. Mollohan lost to opponents on their political right. Utah Republican convention delegates were in no mood to accept even a thoughtful backer of bipartisan proposals. West Virginia Democratic primary voters were ready to oust an incumbent who backed Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And polling suggests that Republicans will run much better against Democrats in November than they did in 2006 or 2008. …

Peter Wehner looks at how quickly politics can change.

On ABC’s Good Morning America yesterday, the Democratic political strategist James Carville — in commenting on this devastating (for the Democrats) Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll — said that it is “absolutely possible” that the Democrats could lose control of Congress, and, if the election were held today, they almost certainly would. That is by now a commonplace belief.

Carville’s admission is quite a contrast to what he was saying just last year. “Today,” he proclaimed, “a Democratic majority is emerging, and it’s my hypothesis, one I share with a great many others, that this majority will guarantee the Democrats remain in power for the next 40 years.” Carville even wrote a book on the topic: 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. …

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery responds to arguments that conservatives want big government because some want the government to help with the oil spill cleanup.

…Government is a big and blunt instrument, while markets are smaller and flexible tools. Government acts for the whole, and gives things one direction; markets react to and serve individuals, respond to a great many small discrete interests, and facilitate the pursuit of happiness by creating demands for a great many diverse and various skills. …

…Government does well when it opens doors and lets people go through them; less well when it tries to micromanage or fix destinations. It did well when it outlawed segregation, but affirmative action became a disaster; welfare was a boon at the start, but became counterproductive.

One can applaud the state when it wins wars, stops terrorists, and rushes aid to flood- or to drought-stricken areas, and still feel a national health care reform bill will be courting disaster if it tries to take over one-sixth of the economy and directs the employment decisions of millions of doctors and hospitals, the research decisions of hundreds of companies, and the personal health care decisions of 300 million-plus people. …

…In a misapplied quote, President Reagan once said that government itself was not the problem; it became the problem when it went beyond its legitimate sphere of endeavor. …

John Stossel explains how the US will match Greece’s financial crisis. He uses economist Paul Krugman’s stats to reach this conclusion.

…But it’s Krugman who is confused. All his graph shows is that Greece is worse off than the US now, and in the near future. That should be obvious to anyone following the news of riots in Greece.

His graph hides the fact that, while our annual deficits may shrink — some forecasters expect the economy to get better and stimulus funding to phase out — every year the government will still spend more than it takes in, so total U.S. debt will keep rising. And Krugman’s graph doesn’t get at the important question: are we on track to become what Greece is like now? This graph, which uses the same data set as Krugman’s chart, helps answer that…

…In short: In 10 years, under Obama’s budget plan, the USA will likely be in same debt position as Greece is now.

John Hinderaker has Edmund Conway in the UK Telegraph with an IMF report on how quickly the US debt will grow if liberals continue the current course.

Is the United States Greece? The short answer is: not yet, but it will be if the Democrats remain in control in Washington for two more election cycles.

In the Telegraph, Edmund Conway summarizes a lengthy report by the International Monetary Fund on sovereign debt that came out today:

[T]he really interesting stuff is the detail, and what leaps out again and again is how much of a hill the US has to climb. Exhibit a is the fact that under the Obama administration’s current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015 – a far steeper increase than almost any other country. …

…The Democrats in Washington are both too stupid and too ideologically committed to read the writing on the wall. They are leading the United States over a financial cliff, and they have no intention of turning back. On the contrary: if they can, they will hobble our economy further by enacting a carbon tax. There is only one way to stop them, and to save our children–from whom greedy, selfish Washington liberals are borrowing trillions of dollars–from a lifetime of debt. The Democrats must be voted out in 2010, and Barack Obama must be denied a second opportunity to deconstruct the country that he doesn’t much like.

The Streetwise Professor has some damning statistics for liberals who claim that low tax rates are the reason that the US debt is so high.

…There is no doubt that Greece is doomed.  We’re not doomed, but we are in very deep trouble.  From this I’m supposed to take comfort?

Of course, Krugman beckons his standard villain to explain the US’s budget troubles: conservatives who have starved the government of revenue:

“And bear in mind, also, that taxes have lagged behind spending partly thanks to a deliberate political strategy, that of “starve the beast”: conservatives have deliberately deprived the government of revenue in an attempt to force the spending cuts they now insist are necessary.”

As if.  Krugman is, how do you say it?  A liar.  That’s it.  In 1970, federal revenues as a fraction of GDP: 19 percent.  1980: 18.9 percent.  1990: 18 percent.  2000: 20.8 percent.  2010: 19.2 percent.   Some starvation. …

The Streetwise Professor also comments on Edmund Conway’s article on the IMF report.

This article from the Telegraph summarizes the dreary conclusions of an IMF report which says, contrary to Alfred E. Krugman, the United States faces one of the most daunting fiscal crunches in the years ahead. …

…However, the flip side of this is that because it has yet to feel the market strain, the US also has yet to face up properly to the public finance disaster that could befall it if it does not do anything about the problem. America is not Greece, but if it does not start making efforts to cut the deficit within a few years, it will head in that direction. The upshot wouldn’t be an IMF bail-out, but a collapse in the dollar and possible hyperinflation in the US, but it would be horrific all the same. America has time, but not forever.

In The Hill, A.B. Stoddard has an excellent article on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

…Christie is tackling the nation’s worst state deficit — $10.7 billion of a $29.3 billion budget. In doing so, Christie has become the politician so many Americans crave, one willing to lose his job. Indeed, Christie is doing something unheard of: governing as a Republican in a blue state, just as he campaigned, making good on promises, acting like his last election is behind him.

Upon taking office Christie declared a state of emergency, signing an executive order that froze spending, and then, in eight weeks, cutting $13 billion in spending. In March he presented to the Legislature his first budget, which cuts 9 percent of spending, including more than $800 million in education funding; seeks to privatize numerous government functions; projects 1,300 layoffs; and caps tax increases.

…Can Christie succeed? We will find out on June 30, when the Legislature must pass a budget . But no matter the political price, Christie is determined. “You just have to stand and grit your teeth and know your poll numbers are going to go down — and mine have — but you gotta grit through it because the alternative is unacceptable,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The alternative is unacceptable — words a growing majority of Americans desperately want to hear from their elected officials.

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David Harsanyi believes in separation of sports and state. Or, to paraphrase Laura Ingraham, “Shut up and play.”

…Take the recent immigration flap in Arizona. Leftist intellectual and El Sol all-star point guard Steve Nash — slumming it in Arizona at $13 million per year — is certainly free to lecture the proletariat. But like Jack Kemp, Jim Bunning, Heath Shuler or Bill Bradley, it would probably be better if he saved it for the post-game.

Those boycotting the Arizona Diamondbacks are equally grating. Obviously, I oppose any sort of discrimination by my childhood teams — unless the Yanks are exclusively signing Dominican stars; then they can call themselves Los Gringos for all I care. But I don’t take out my exasperations over New Yorkers consistently voting for Chuck Schumer on the New York Knicks.

Sports happens to be one of the most meritocratic institutions in this nation. It divides us into regional and traditional clusters. To inject corrosive political grandstanding into this thing that so many of us love can only undermine the camaraderie of fans, who are able to put aside their ideological differences, financial situations and often their worries to partake in a communal gratification that politicians and “activists” only pretend to understand and foster.

And, after all, is nothing sacred?

Charles Krauthammer discusses his proposed public safety exception to Miranda warnings.

…The fact that the Times Square bomber did talk after he was Mirandized is blind luck. Holder is undoubtedly aware of just how much information about the Pakistani Taliban, which he now tells us funded and directed Shahzad’s attack, would have been lost to us had Shahzad stopped talking — and therefore how important it is to make sure the next guy we nab trying to blow something up is not Mirandized until a full interrogation regarding that plot and others is completed. …

…Nonetheless, this administration seems intent upon using the civilian legal system rather than designating caught-in-the-act terrorists as enemy combatants. I think it’s a mistake, but they will be in power for almost three more years, possibly seven. In the interim, therefore, we have to think about how to adapt this administration’s preferred domestic-judicial model to the real world.

The way to do it, as Holder has come to understand, is by modifying Miranda. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, John Browne writes that European leaders have merely delayed solving the current fiscal problems.

As the health of much of the global economy weakens on a daily basis, political leadership increasingly ignores the source of the malady and instead focuses on short term “band-aid” remedies. These measures which may buy a few months, or years, of relative well being, will convince the public that problems have been solved and will thereby take pressure off governments to make the needed structural changes.

The recently announced $1 trillion EU bailout is a perfect example of this “band-aid” approach. The just concluded general election in the United Kingdom is another. The inconclusive UK result, which creates a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, will be an unhappy, unquestionably temporary arrangement. Similarly, the EU bailout will continue to infuriate Northern Europeans, who may ultimately push for a breakup of the Union. …

Tunku Varadarajan offers bullet points on the new British government. Here are two:

2. A governors’ coalition is a very un-British thing. The Brits have historically been much better at constructing coalitions of the governed: Witness colonial India, or Nigeria, or Ireland. India, for instance, was administered by parceling out privileges to different groups, never to one alone, and this division of spoils—or of access to power—rendered the subjects governable. But the British government, whether at home or abroad, was always deeply, satisfyingly monolithic. Not anymore, and we shall watch this new political experiment with a sense of wonderment.

10. The Labour Party should ready itself for introspective opposition. Brown has resigned as leader, so the party has rid itself of its greatest electoral liability. But if Cameron governs decently and flexibly (and why should he not, given his need to take into account the views of his coalition partners?), and if the return to a more paternalistic conservatism can be achieved without sacrificing overly on fiscal rigor, Labour could well find itself shut out of power for more than one full parliamentary term. Deputy Prime Minister Clegg, now committed to a historic coalition, will not be able to pull out of government for anything other than irrefutable reasons. And Cameron hardly seems like the sort of chap to furnish those at the risk of bringing down his own, hard-earned government.

George Will exposes some of the lies and hypocrisy surrounding the bailouts of GM and Greece. He starts out by giving the real story on the latest GM ad suggesting it as a metaphor for Greece.

To understand the pertinence to America of events in Greece, notice General Motors’ most recent misbehavior. A television commercial featuring CEO Ed Whitacre demonstrates the institutional murkiness and intellectual dishonesty that result when the line between public and private sectors disappears.

In the commercial, Whitacre says GM has “repaid our government loan in full.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) noted that GM used government funds to pay back the government: It “simply transferred $6.7 billion from one taxpayer-funded TARP account to another.” The government still owns 60.8 percent of GM’s common equity, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that the government will lose about $34 billion of the $82 billion of TARP funds disbursed to the automotive industry.

When Ryan and two colleagues asked the Treasury Department for clarification, they got this careful reply: “Treasury has never suggested that the loan repayment represented a full return of all government assistance.” A Treasury news release did say “GM Repays Treasury Loan in Full.” The loan is, however, a small part of taxpayer exposure. Under crony capitalism, when government and corporate America merge, both dissemble. …

Michael Barone looks at the Kagan nomination and sees government by faculty lounge.

… As dean at Harvard Law, Kagan signed a brief that sought to overturn the law denying federal funds to universities that barred military recruiters. Yet that brief, written by one of the ablest Supreme Court advocates, Walter Dellinger, was nonetheless rejected by the justices by a vote of 8-0.

In nominating Kagan, Obama said he wanted a justice who understood “the real world.” But it seems that he nominated someone who, on one important occasion, utterly misjudged the real world beyond the campus.

Of course one might say the same of Obama himself, who has pushed big government policies that seem like no-brainers to most professors but have aroused passionate and principled opposition from the public at large. We are seeing what government by the faculty lounge looks like.

Roger Simon was surprised to find out who supports same-sex marriage.

…So it is with some gratification that I found tonight that the person in public life I have admired tremendously for some time is also a supporter of same-sex marriage – Laura Bush. She proclaimed that support in her characteristic well-mannered, low-keyed fashion on the Larry King Show. (Okay, nobody’s perfect.) I even had the suspicion that her husband agreed with her, but for political considerations didn’t say so.

What does this mean?  Traditionally a woman like Bush would oppose gay marriage, but she has stepped outside that “tradition,” seen the situation objectively and come to a different conclusion.  I think it’s interesting that the supposedly liberal Barack Obama has not been able to reach this conclusion or to perform any action that would indicate that he had.  Meanwhile, the supposedly antediluvian Dick Cheney has expressed his support for same-sex marriage.

So what are we to think?  Who is the “progressive” and who is the “conservative”?  And what do these words mean?  Well, not much to me, as I have said. …

Tony Blankley thinks it was good thing the Utah GOP threw Bennett out of the primary.

…We need determined men and women who share the view of us shocked and appalled Americans that we are in crisis – and that we cannot wait until 2013 to stop the madness and start the rollback. Winning a majority of Republicans in November without electing a majority for radical, immediate rollback will be essentially as good as losing. As a Republican Party man for 46 years, I have, until now, always thought it was better to win a majority any way we can.

But not this year. This year it really doesn’t matter that good men such as Mr. Bennett get thrown out on their ear. I became radicalized on the matter of the national deficit and debt upon the administration’s release of its 10-year budget – the most irresponsible federal document ever released – which plans for unsustainable debt and does not even propose a path out. …

…In the face of financial ruin of the nation, it was unconscionable to pass a new health entitlement that almost all Americans know will add trillions to the debt. Next year, as Mr. Obama almost certainly will call for a new value-added tax to do the “responsible thing” to reduce the deficits he and Congress have created, it will be equally unconscionable to support such a tax. The only solution to the debt and deficit that will not kill economic growth is to cut spending, not raise taxes. We cannot afford to elect Republicans or Democrats who would be “responsible,” and raise taxes. …

The Economist reports on new technology in dirigibles.

…Although helium-filled weather balloons regularly launch instruments high into the stratosphere, at altitudes of 20km (65,000 feet) the air is 15 times less dense, causing the balloons to expand and ultimately burst.

This problem has long vexed the American military, which would like to use lighter-than-air dirigibles as atmospheric satellites, or stratellites. From 20km a blimp would be able to continuously survey an area the size of Texas for months at a time, but in greater detail and at much lower cost than geostationary satellites or those moving in low Earth orbit. …

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In Division of Labour, Frank Stephenson has a good quip.

“The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings Wednesday on the “Potty Parity Act,” a bill that seeks to address the unequal number of restroom facilities for women in federal buildings.”

This is a much better way for the honorables to spend their time rather than mucking around in health care or passing cap and tax.

In WSJ, Amy Jaffe writes about the new technology in natural gas that will have positive effects on many nations’ economies.

Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation’s natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.

We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.

I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy. …

…Russia made no secret about its desire to leverage its position and create a cartel of gas producers—a kind of latter-day OPEC. That seemed to set the stage for a repeat of the oil issues that have worried the world over the past 40 years.

As far as I’m concerned, you can now forget all that. Shale gas will breed competition among energy companies and exporting countries—which in turn will help economic stability in industrial countries, and thwart petro-suppliers that try to empower themselves at our expense. Market competition is the best kryptonite for cartel power. …

…The trade deficit has crippled our economy and shows no signs of abating as long as we remain tethered to imported energy. Why ship dollars abroad where they can destabilize global financial markets—and then hit us back in lost jobs and savings—when we can develop the resources we have here in our own country? Shall we pay Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to develop our natural gas—or the citizens of Pennsylvania and Louisiana?

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments on the Kagan nomination.

If you look at this on an ideological scale, it’s Obama going [from] left to center. He starts with Sotomayor at a time — in ’09 — when he’s strong, he’s riding high, he has control of the Senate. She’s pretty left, [as in] the “wise Latina” comment. He’s in a position where he can risk it [with Sotomayor].

Now he’s a lot weaker — 41 Republicans in the Senate. So he goes with a more mainline liberal. He knows that after next year, if he gets another pick, he’s going to get really weakened in this [election], especially in the Senate. He could even lose the Senate — unlikely, but possible. But he’ll certainly have a much smaller majority. He’s going to have to [then] go to a fairly centrist liberal like a Merrick Garland whom he overlooked now.

I think he’s planned it politically very well. You go more ideological when you’re strong — and you go to the center when you’re weaker. …

And we have more commentary from Jennifer Rubin on the Kagan nomination.

This report repeats the idea that Elena Kagan was nominated primarily to sway Justice Kennedy to the liberal side of those tricky 5-4 decisions. But if so, does this make any sense? That notion assumes that the Court operates like the Harvard Law School faculty, where nice words, dinner parties, back-slapping, and not revealing her own views served Kagan well. But that’s not how the Court operates:

Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court lawyer at Akin Gump and author of the widely read SCOTUS Blog, says she has exhibited an “extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful” avoidance of public positions on any matters she might face as a Justice. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” Goldstein wrote.

And even if she did have well-established positions, they’d be nothing compared to Kennedy’s. “Justice Kennedy has been on the bench for 40-some years now, including his time on the Ninth Circuit,” says the former clerk. “It’s particularly unlikely that he’s going to fall under the sway of a new judge who’s never been on the court.” …

Jennifer Rubin follows up from her last post.

…Well, she did some things on her own:

[Charles Fried] also credits her with arranging a faculty lounge so it offered free lunch and large tables, where faculty could sit and get to know one another. “It was an absolute stroke of genius,” Mr. Fried said.

Genius? I think most employers have figured out that free food usually is a winner with employees. But maybe Justice Kennedy can be swayed by sandwiches and soda. …

…This is all very commendable for a dean but utterly irrelevant to the job of being a Supreme Court justice. More revealing will be what she accomplished as solicitor general, and we should begin to focus on that — the number and quality of her arguments. Then we might learn whether she is really up for the job. …

Spengler discusses what he sees on the global economic landscape.

…Paul Samuelson’s most gifted doctoral student is the Canadian Robert Mundell, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in economics. Mundell’s theory is not as simple as Keynes, for it is a global model that casts a weather eye on the long run. The trouble, Mundell observed in a 1965 essay in the Journal of Political Economy, is that markets are not very good at seeing into the future.  …

…Reality has a way of impinging. The Greeks know very well that their situation cannot be fixed by a dose of austerity, and have staged a national tantrum that Aristophanes would have enjoyed staging. The Germans know that they need every penny of their own tax revenues to pay for their own elderly dependents, who will comprise 61% of all Germans in 2040 (again assuming constant fertility). The vehemence of the political response in both countries is a signal to the market that something is very, very wrong. So is the British inability to elect a government.

Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked – shocked – to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.

That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom’s aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn’t, everything will go pear-shaped.

And that becomes a self-referential question: if you believe in the bubble, it will continue, and if you don’t, it won’t. That, I surmise, explains a 10% price drop in US stock market indices in a matter of minutes last Thursday. A slight change in attitude can dry up the vast reserves of liquidity of the US stock market. …

Yesterday we had the dismal projection of $85 billion for an April deficit at treasury. Reuters has the actual number.

The United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.

It was more than twice the $40-billion deficit that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast and was striking since April marks the filing deadline for individual income taxes that are the main source of government revenue. …

In the Weekly Standard Blog, John McCormack posts on an Obamacare congressman who just lost the Democrat Party primary.

Of course, if he were a Republican, I would write that West Virginia congressman Alan Mollohan was “purged” instead of “defeated.” Per the Wall Street Journal: “With 82% of precincts reporting, Democratic state Sen. Mike Oliverio was already leading by 12 points, 56%-44%.”

Oliviero opposed Mollohan’s vote for Obamacare, and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes that this was a key factor in the race: “it’s important to remember two factors unique to this race: Mollohan had been damaged by ethics allegations over the last few years and Oliverio actually ran to the incumbent’s ideological right — castigating him for his vote in favor of President Obama’s health care bill.”

If a vote for Obamacare can help sink a “Blue Dog” in the Democratic primary, what does this portend for the general election? …

Walter Williams sets the record straight on free markets.

Listening to America’s liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth. First, let’s first say what free markets are. Free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, refer to an economic system where there is no government interference except to outlaw and prosecute fraud and coercion. It ought to be apparent that our economy cannot be described as free market because there is extensive government interference. We have what might be called a mixed economy, one with both free market and socialistic attributes. If one is poor or of modest means, where does he fare better: in the freer and more open sector of our economy or in the controlled and highly regulated sector? Let’s look at it.

Did Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller and Guggenheim start out rich? Andrew Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, six days a week, earning $1.20 a week. A young John D. Rockefeller worked as a clerk. Meyer Guggenheim started out as a peddler. Andrew Mellon did have a leg up; his father was a lawyer and banker. Sam Walton milked the family’s cows, bottled the milk and delivered it and newspapers to customers. Richard Sears was a railroad station agent. Alvah Roebuck began work as a watchmaker. Together, they founded Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1893. John Cash Penney (founder of JCPenny department stores) worked for a local dry goods merchant.

…The market is a friend in another unappreciated way. In poor black neighborhoods, one might see some nice clothing, some nice food, some nice cars but no nice schools. Why not at least some nice schools? Clothing, food and cars are distributed by the market mechanism while schools are distributed by the political mechanism.

The Economist has an interesting piece on the evolution of gender differences in navigation.

…Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labour, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.

The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants. ..

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Thomas Sowell looks at a disturbing idea.

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly. …

John Fund discusses an interesting point about Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court.

…But Mr. Obama’s choice comes at some short-term cost. Because Ms. Kagan is his solicitor general, she would have to recuse herself as Justice from any cases in which she had been involved as an administration official. Those would likely include lawsuits over ObamaCare and the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Ms. Kagan’s recusals would limit her role in at least her first year on the court. Thurgood Marshall, the last Supreme Court justice she clerked for, was Lyndon Johnson’s solicitor general when he was picked for the court in 1967. In his first year after confirmation, he had to recuse himself from 57% of the cases that were heard. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on various aspects of the nomination, including the recusal issue.

Elena Kagan, as expected, was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her remarks were unexceptional and humble, appropriate to the occasion. Obama was partisan and ludicrous, even by his own standard. Justice John Paul Stevens was many things. But an exemplar of judicial restraint he was not. And Obama’s waxing lyrical on this score struck one as bizarrely insincere. Moreover, his attack on Citizens United and praise for Kagan’s role in it was wholly unnecessary and, frankly, wrong. It’s the law of the land, and his continual invective against it betrays a lack of respect for the Court.

Moreover, come to think of it, is Kagan now recused from cases that evaluate and would seek to modify or reverse that case? It would seem so — particularly because she, according to Obama, made such a big deal of choosing this case as her first to argue before the Court as solicitor general. Now that’s a small bonus for conservatives, if true. And Republican senators should pin her down on that point.

John Steele Gordon comments on Elena Kagan’s stance on military recruitment, given her Supreme Court aspirations.

…As Bill Kristol points out, tracking Ed Whelan’s fifth point, Elena Kagan appears anti-military here, not just pro-gay. She has consistently blamed the military for implementing what was, in fact, an act of Congress (and a Democratic one at that) that had been signed into law by a Democratic president. Does she think the military has a moral obligation to mutiny in this case? …

Jennifer Rubin criticizes Obama’s remarks on Elena Kagan.

…Obama also pronounced, “Elena is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds.” This is preposterous. She’s written little, and what she has written is banal and unexceptional. Her speeches as dean are not analytical or historical discourse but pep talks and generic spiels on ethics and the wonders of Harvard Law School’s reputation.

So she brings neither an abundance of non-elite experience nor an intellectual record of achievement. That doesn’t mean she isn’t qualified or won’t make a capable justice, but it does serve to emphasize — once again — the president’s penchant for exaggeration if not fabrication. …

Jennifer Rubin has more to say on the recusal issue.

Yesterday, I raised the issue of Elena Kagan’s recusal in a case that might try to reverse or modify Citizens United. It seems the White House has already thought this through:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama took the issue into consideration when he looked at Kagan for the nomination. “The president had to make a decision similar to past presidents that have tapped solicitor generals to serve on the high court,” Gibbs said. “Next year, I think we anticipate recusals in about a dozen cases, and then maybe less than half of that in the year after that.”

Really — how did they count? What standard are they using? Kagan should be very clear about what sorts of cases and what issues she believes she will be recused from. This is critical not only in determining her ethical posture but also in figuring out whether Democrats will be “down a vote” for some period of time. Is she going to opine on the constitutionality of ObamaCare? On Guantanamo cases? On this, the Senate should insist on clear and definitive answers. After all, it goes directly to her ability to perform the job for which she has been nominated.

Abby Thernstrom gives some advice to the RNC.

Mr. Steele (and RNC staff), just as a little experiment, you might try thinking before you speak.

In a tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall shortly before his death, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan quoted our first black Justice as having said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.”

“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?” the RNC now asks. A litmus test for Kagan, it implies.

But of course the answer should be, yes. Might the Three-Fifths Clause have been a wee bit of a defect?

The NRO staff posted Krauthammer’s take on the nomination.

On Elena Kagan as a possible Supreme Court nominee:

Kagan is the safer choice. She has friends on the right as a result of how she conducted herself as the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was open to ideological diversity on the faculty — which is rather shocking on an Ivy League campus which is [as] open to ideological diversity as the Supreme Soviet was in the old days. . . .

The one advantage Kagan has is her youth. She’s 50. She could be on for three decades. Long after America goes bankrupt, she’ll still be on the court.

Ralph Reed first notes that Obama looked in the mirror and decided on a nominee. He goes on from there.

…For all the attempts by the liberal fog machine to obfuscate her extremist views, Kagan is a committed liberal. Her attempt to defy federal law — reversed by the Supreme Court — by banning military recruiters from Harvard’s law school during a time of war is only the most well-known example of her radical views. Her belief that political speech is selectively protected by the First Amendment based on the form of media used to express it is more frightening. (One of her few scholarly articles in a thin academic resume defends the right of the government to regulate “hate speech.”) Nor is her belief in strictly constraining constitutional liberty confined to the First Amendment. In response to questions during her confirmation as solicitor general, Kagan argued the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, like freedom of speech, enjoys “strong but not unlimited protection.” This is a dangerous view of the law when it leads to the creeping erosion of the Bill of Rights. …

In Contentions, Rick Richman comments on Trials of the Diaspora by Anthony Julius.

In the New York Times Book Review, Harold Bloom reviews Anthony Julius’s monumental new book, Trials of the Diaspora. It is a cover review — an indication of the book’s importance — and a uniformly favorable one: a “strong, somber book” reflecting “extraordinary moral strength.” But even those complimentary terms, from one of America’s leading literary critics, do not begin to convey the scope and magnitude of Julius’s achievement.

The book’s subtitle is A History of Anti-Semitism in England, which itself understates the significance of the book, since the book covers aspects of the psychology and sociology of anti-Semitism that extend far beyond a single country’s experience. …

…Julius is particularly eloquent on two matters: first, the sheer surreality and incoherence of anti-Semitism:

The Holocaust should have altogether put paid to anti-Semitism. It should have rebutted once and for all the principal anti-Semitic fantasy of malign Jewish power; it should have satiated the appetite of the most murderous anti-Semites for Jewish death. And yet instead it precipitated new anti-Semitic versions or tropes …

In the NY Times, Harold Bloom reviews Trials of the Diaspora.

Anthony Julius has written a strong, somber book on an appalling subject: the long squalor of Jew-hatred in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society. My first, personal, reflection is to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City.

With a training both literary and legal, Julius is well prepared for the immensity of his task. He is a truth-teller, and authentic enough to stand against the English literary and academic establishment, which essentially opposes the right of the state of Israel to exist, while indulging in the humbuggery that its anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Endless boycotts of Israel are urged by this establishment, and might yet have produced a counter­boycott of British universities by many American academics, whether Jewish or not. However, under British law the projected boycotts may be illegal. The fierce relevance of Julius’s book is provoked by this currently prevalent anti-Semitism. …

Christopher Hitchens applauds French legislators standing up for Muslim women’s rights.

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a “ban.” To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another. …

…So it’s really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.

In the WSJ, Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Susan Yager’s new book, The Hundred Year Diet.

…Yet worries over overeating, as Susan Yager interestingly reminds us “The Hundred Year Diet,” preoccupied the public long before Americans en masse became so massive. These days we may track the content of trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup—the staples of processing that make much food so cheap and unhealthful—but in the 1970s we were already measuring out our lives with tablespoons, trying to follow the Atkins or Pritkin or Beverly Hills diets. Indeed, back in 1960 John F. Kennedy was worrying in the pages of Sports Illustrated that the nation’s youth had become flabby and dangerously “soft.” …

…Ms. Yager’s bite-sized chapters are easy and pleasant to digest as she takes us through America’s fat-fighting history, from its now comical-seeming beginnings through the wild pendulum swings of the late 20th century (when carbohydrates and fats alternated as public enemy No. 1) to the promise of the fat-substitute Olestra (with its regrettable intestinal consequences) and today’s gastric bypass surgery for the severely obese. …

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In NewsBusters, Tom Blumer reviews the bad economic news that the media isn’t reporting.

…The government almost always runs an April surplus because it’s the biggest month for tax collections. Individual filers have to settle up what’s left of their previous year’s liabilities with Uncle Sam on April 15, and the first installments of current-year individual and corporate estimated taxes are also due.

But as seen in the chart that follows, April receipts have cratered during the past two years by stunning amounts compared to April 2007 and 2008. The April 2010 plunge continues a nearly unbroken trend of year-over-year declines in monthly receipts going back almost two years…

In Real Clear Markets, John Tamny explains the reason why oil prices haven’t fallen.

…In each instance commentators mistake the symptom of expensive oil for its true cause. Von Mises frequently touched on money values in his brilliant expositions on markets, and it’s because the dollar has no true value or fixed definition that oil is presently expensive. In short, oil is dear because the dollar in which it’s priced is cheap. …

…The good news, however, is that this can be fixed. As evidenced by the dollar’s major decline versus gold this decade, the dollar is very cheap. The dollar’s debased nature explains expensive spot oil prices, high prices at the pump, and most important of all, it helps explain a difficult job outlook. With so much soggy money flowing into commodities least vulnerable to dollar weakness, the entrepreneurial economy where most jobs are created is losing out. …

Peter Wehner comments on a lecture he heard given by General Petraeus about the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.

…It is fashionable in some circles to emphasize the limits of policy when it comes to improving everyday life in a nation, particularly in one as shattered as Iraq was. That is of course sometimes the case. But in other instances, when the intellectual foundation is right and when the correct lessons from history and human experience are drawn, things can unfold much faster and much better than we anticipate.

A second lesson to draw from General Petraeus’s lecture is that we are witnessing one of the most remarkable, far-reaching reforms of an institution in our lifetime. (David Brooks devotes his column to this topic.) All large institutions are difficult to reform. Old habits are hard to uproot. People become settled in their ways, invested in policies they have advocated. Thinking becomes rutted. And there is of course a widespread human reluctance to engage in searching self-examination and to admit mistakes. All of which makes the transformation we are witnessing amazing. The intellectual orientation of the Army is significantly different from what it was less than a half-decade ago. How that occurred, and precisely how the (intellectual) tectonic plates shifted, is something that will be studied for decades to come. …

David Brooks also attended the lecture and writes about the change that occurred within the Army.

…Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas. …

…The process was led by these dual-consciousness people — those who could be practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next. They were neither blinkered by Army mind-set, like some of the back-slapping old guard, nor so removed from it that their ideas were never tested by reality, like pure academic theoreticians.

It’s a wonder that more institutions aren’t set up to encourage this sort of alternating life. Business schools do it, but most institutions are hindered by guild customs, by tenure rules and by the tyranny of people who can only think in one way.

Spengler is not a fan of General Petraeus.

…Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money. Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use them.

Petraeus’ “surge” of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the available Sunni fighters into an American-financed militia, the “Sons of Iraq,” or Sunni Awakening. With American money, weapons and training, the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime have turned into a fighting force far more effective than the defunct dictator’s state police. And now the American military is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and, under General Keith Dayton, in Palestine. America is pouring money – which is to say weapons – into disputed areas of Afghanistan, and building the core of a Palestinian army. The latter’s mission is to impose a pro-Western Palestinian government on a population of whom two-thirds oppose the two-state solution. It more likely will end up fighting Israel. …

…Petraeus made his reputation on the surge, and needs someone to blame for its prospective failure. His choice is Israel. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Petraeus’ March 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which the CENTCOM commander blamed the Israel-Palestine conflict for inflaming Muslim sentiment against the United States. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam discusses the oil spill and energy alternatives.

…We only have one non-terrible option for reducing our reliance on oil, and that’s sharply increasing our reliance on nuclear power. As Peter Huber observes in the latest issue of City Journal, the success of antinuclear activists in killing the 100 nuclear power plants that were in the pipeline as of 30 years ago has led to an increase in coal consumption in the neighborhood of 400 million tons a year. …

David Warren gives his thoughts on the British election.

…The pound took its beating in world currency markets at the prospect of a “hung parliament.” This is because the people holding the debt know that big bold changes are required — deep spending cuts, or vertiginous new taxes, or both — to restore solvency. They know a minority government can’t deliver such goods, and they are now looking hard at lethal violence in response to mere half-measures in Greece. The financiers may not have a very nuanced picture, but they do get the gist. …

Mark Steyn also weighs in.

…And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:

This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected. …

In the Corner, Peter Robinson follows up on a Steyn comment.

“I seem to recall,” Mark Steyn writes below, that when a couple of months ago David Cameron and his Tory Party still commanded an enormous lead over Gordon Brown and Labour, “more than a few Republican ‘reformers’ were recommending the Cameronization of the Republican Party.”  Now that Cameron has blown his lead to produce the first hung Parliament in more than three decades, Mark seems to suppose, no one will ever again hold up the present Tory Party as a model for the GOP.

Silly him.

Herewith David Brooks on the NewsHour, not 24 hours ago, speaking of the “impact” of the British election “on the Republican Party”…

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In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews recent political and strategic events involving the Middle East. Says to get ready for war.

…Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km. range. This week, Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

…From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four-front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country, aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores. …

In the WSJ, Gerard Baker discusses the UK’s election results, and what lies ahead. Remember Baker? He wrote for the London Times until a year ago when the Journal snagged him for some administrative post where, unfortunately he rarely writes. The piece is a good tour de farce.

… But others, like Terry Marsh, hope to make a more serious point.

Angry at the failures of Britain’s political system, Mr. Marsh, a former light-welterweight world boxing champion, wanted to cast a vote by which he could signal his disdain for all the major parties. But under electoral rules it was not possible to formally register a protest vote on a ballot and have it counted. So Mr. Marsh instead paid the 5,000 pounds needed to run as a candidate, changed his name officially to None Of The Above X—the X marking the character the British still use to cast their votes in ink on paper ballots—and registered as a candidate in his local district of Basildon, in Essex, just outside London.

In the event, Mr. X, as he is presumably now known, secured a mere 100 votes out of the 45,000 cast in the district.

But in a larger, much larger, sense, as the results of Thursday’s election trickled and flowed in through the early hours of Friday, it became clear that the cause represented by the Man Formerly Known as Marsh was the real victor in Britain’s most unpredictable election in a generation.

None of the Above won Britain’s election this week. …

…You don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that this historic election result marked something much more than the usual seductive appeal of the Time for a Change message. In fact it has been known for a while now that what is going on in the old country is not just some spasm of reaction to bad economic data, but the flowering of a deep-rooted popular disgust with the entire political class.

Last year’s toe-curling exposure of corruption in high and low places (and everywhere in between) in the political system damned almost all politicians in the eyes of the electorate. The spectacle of members of parliament enriching themselves by exploiting taxpayer-paid expense loopholes in a magnificently English, class-based farce—from the Labour MP’s 88 pence ($1.30) bath plug, to the Conservative who claimed for a moat for his country castle—enraged the recession-weary voters. …

…The U.K. has, according to data from the European Commission published last week, the largest fiscal deficit in the European Union, at 13% of national income, even larger than the U.S. deficit. The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s. …

David Harsanyi makes some important points about giving the government more power when the government isn’t using the current laws appropriately to protect us against terrorists.

…McCain must be aware that the FBI can invoke, as it did in Times Square, the “public safety exception,” which allows officials to postpone Miranda warnings to suspects while they investigate clear and present danger to the public at large. They have the tool. …

…We often misunderstand Miranda. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (who would likely disagree with this column) explained, “Miranda and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause are strictly about whether confession evidence gets admitted at trial . . . they just mean that you can’t use against the person any non-Mirandized statements he gives.” …

Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on the government’s response to the most recent terrorist.

…Let us hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call to those who have nothing better to do than predict violence from critics of ObamaCare. There are forces in this country that really do want to kill and intimidate dissenters – and they are not shy about their jihad. Witness a prominent death threat against Comedy Central because of its “South Park” cartoon portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. …

David Goldman (Spengler) comments on the Great Euro-Bail Out.

Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.

The banking system really was about to come down. The reason is that sovereign debt is a bigger problem than subprime mortgages ever were. ..

… Now the government are going to bail out the banks again, with money raised–from the banks. I’m holding my gold positions. This is truly ludicrous and may lead to a decline in confidence in all major currencies.

Why Greece matters by Robert Samuelson.

What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” Vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only to a point. …

Jennifer Rubin has Elena Kagan thoughts.

Although records from her years in the Clinton administration may raise other concerns, at this stage the most significant vulnerability for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is her position in opposing giving military recruiters access to Harvard Law School because of the armed services’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This is problematic in two respects.

First, as Bill Kristol observes, the level of invective directed at the military is noteworthy: …

More on Kagan from Daniel Foster in The Corner.

Roger Simon comments on the demise of Newsweek.

…The Washington Post would have to pay me to take Newsweek off its hands – and a substantial sum, in the neighborhood of sixty million.  You figure it out. In 2008, the magazine lost $16.1 million; in 2009, that went to $29.3 million.  Not a promising proposition.

And what is Newsweek anyway?  In recent years it’s been nothing more than a semi-leftwing propaganda rag for Upper West Side dentists – chock full of the kind of opinion you can get for nothing on the Huffington Post or even the Daily Kos. …

No one’s interested in paying to read liberal opinions, writes John Podhoretz.

…For years, Newsweek was a liberal journal of opinion masquerading as a news publication that attempted to sell itself to a mass readership with a lot of health-care, entertainment, and lifestyle fluff. As a vehicle for news analysis, it was entirely conventional; as a purveyor of sociological fluff, it was kind of fun, though often enragingly so; as a journal of opinion, it was to actual journals of opinion as tofutti is to gelato, flavorless and bland and mock. Last year, Meacham and Co. ditched much of the news analysis and sociological fluff in favor of more and more opinion.

It will not surprise you to know that much of the opinion dealt with the ways in which Barack Obama was right and noble and good and strong and tough and resourceful and a good symbol and an agent of change and so is his wife, by the way — and when it was not about that, it was primarily about how the right is at war with itself and torn and in conflict and dominated by anger and full of rage and presumptively racist and anti-gay and anti-women and anti-media. That was to be expected. But there was really almost nothing else in there, and what was there as a matter of ideological coloration wasn’t especially tough or good or interesting or novel. …

Scott Johnson has some good Newsweek quips in Powerline.

Linking to this story regarding the Washington Post’s efforts to unload Newsweek, NRO’s Jim Geraghty tweets: “Newsweek’s latest promo: With a 12-month subscription, they’ll throw in the entire organization for free.” More Geraghty tweets (and laughs) here.

UPDATE: This just in: A Dartmouth reader reports:

Just read your brief post this morning about the declining fortunes of Newsweek magazine. As it happens, this is pledge week at Vermont Public Radio (the Hanover area’s main NPR affiliate). VPR is now offering free Newsweek subscriptions as a giveaway for contributions made to VPR — something I do not recall ever occurring during our 22 years living in the Upper Valley and listening to public radio here.

Newsweek: The perfect companion to Democrat State Radio.

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Mark Steyn pokes fun at the government’s and the media’s assertions about American society and Islam.

…As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the past nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Barack Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” – rather than the rights of the ever-lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized and murdered for not wanting to be covered. …

…And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg, a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN and The Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Maj. Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in –slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit? …

Pickings first took note of Obama’s nastiness on February 3, 2010 when a Corner post noted the proposed budget eliminated a one million dollar scholarship program named in memory of Bart Stupak’s son. This was when Stupak was one of the holdouts on Obamacare. We have the summary from that day. Following that a number of our favorites note Obama’s talk about ”civility” and then contrasts that to his actual behavior.

February 3, 2010;

Robert Costa blogs in the Corner about one of the few budget cuts that the White House has proposed. It is in education, no less. It is not much, only one million dollars. But, what it does show is what a nasty piece of work Barack Obama is. The program to be cut is a scholarship program named after the deceased son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich). Rep Stupak did not toe the ObamaCare line.

With tax hikes dominating today’s budget debate, you will not hear much about the smaller federal grants that President Obama is hoping to slash. One proposed cut sticks out: Obama’s budget eliminates a $1 million scholarship program for aspiring Olympic athletes at Northern Michigan University. Here’s why it matters: In 1998, the program was renamed to honor B. J. Stupak, the late son of Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who committed suicide in 2000. Is the cut related to Stupak’s playing hardball on health care last year?

Stupak won’t speculate on the politics of the decision, but he does tell National Review Online that he is “disappointed” to hear about the cut. He says he found out about it through the media, not the president or the Democratic leadership. He notes, however, “that in the 18 years I’ve been in Congress, never has a presidential staff called me to tell they are cutting something. Usually everyone around here scrambles after a budget is released.”

Stupak pledges to fight for the grant to be reinstated into the budget. “I’ll do my appropriations request and put in testimony. I want it to be funded on its own merit. President Bush did the same thing, and we always restored it. We need to do a better job explaining the program.” Stupak adds that with the Winter Olympics approaching, it is “time to remind Congress why it is important to provide educational assistance to aspiring young Olympic athletes. We’ll all be cheering our athletes next month, but we should remember that programs like this give a major boost to those training for the games. Shani Davis, the first black speed skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, credits the scholarship with keeping in him school. There are hundreds of stories like that. This program has become a small farm team for Olympic education.”

John Fund gives an example of incivility from the president.

…In his new book on President Obama’s first year in office, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter reports on the president’s frustration with united GOP opposition to many of his programs. Mr. Alter quotes Mr. Obama as saying the unanimous House Republican vote against his stimulus bill “helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

“Tea bagger,” the term used by Mr. Obama, is an extremely crude sexual term that has been used by many liberals as a derogatory description of Tea Party protestors. Anderson Cooper of CNN was compelled to apologize for using it on-air back in April 2009. “It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means.”

A decade or so ago, Democrats and many others were outraged when Indiana Rep. Dan Burton referred to President Clinton as a “scumbag” for his behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Perhaps President Obama would do well to more carefully follow his own calls for civility.

Karl Rove suggests that the president take his own advice.

…For example, last week Mr. Obama suggested that Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell was “cynical and deceptive” in arguing that the administration’s financial regulation bill would allow more bailouts “when he knows that it would do just the opposite.” Does implying the Senate GOP leader is a hypocrite and a liar make reaching compromise easier?

Mr. Obama even draws on the Bible for political attacks. In a teleconference with religious groups supporting health-care reform, he accused opponents of the legislation of “bearing false witness.” Or take last September when, in a health-care speech to Congress, the president—in a single paragraph—accused his critics of spreading “bogus claims” and “lies” and of being “cynical” and “irresponsible.” …

…If Mr. Obama wants his Ann Arbor words to be taken seriously, then he needs to rein in his party, his staff and himself. Presidential leadership matters as much as presidential words, perhaps more. Mr. Obama should back up his inspiring call to civility with action.

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery writes Obama an open letter.

…You say insufficient regulation of banks caused the crash, but you ought to say also it was bad government policy, if well-intended, and that when the president asked for more government oversight, you were one of those voting against. If you want to be civil, you might try telling the truth, and the whole truth, not what makes you look better. Only a thought.

You say “listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship,” and we agree. But we wonder what you had in mind last year when you tried to attack, marginalize and possibly silence a number of commentators, along with the network Fox News. …

…Wasn’t it just weeks ago that you sneered at the rallies on Tax Day, and dared the people who want health care repealed to “Go for it!” to a howling, partisan crowd? …

The Streetwise Professor thinks we are seeing the president’s true temperament.

…FDR was a SOB in private, but a charmer in public.  Obama is an SOB in public.  And people are noticing.

But Obama doesn’t.  Jennifer Rubin hits the nail square and true:

“Frankly, this gets back to a lack of self-awareness. This is a president who derides political opponents, fails to engage them on the merits, and has perfected the straw-man and ad hominem attacks. It was his White House that declared war on Fox News. So it is the height of hypocrisy for him to now tell the rest of us to up the tolerance and intellectual diversity quotient in our lives. It’s sort of like Tom Friedman telling us to consume less and reduce our carbon footprint.” [A Twofer!  Slamming Obama and Tom Tool Time Friedman in the same paragraph.  Way to go, Jennifer.] …

In Roll Call, Morton Kondracke thinks that Obama is merely a misguided ignorant liberal.

…But blasting business is not confined to insurance. Last weekend, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar twice said the administration intended to keep its “boot on the neck” of BP over the Gulf oil spill.

But then what do we make of Obama at the University of Michigan last week, saying that “vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise”?

My own hunch is that Obama, at heart, is not a socialist but a liberal without the slightest idea of how private enterprises create wealth — and deeply suspicious of their practitioners. …

Michael Barone continues his series on the DemocRats Leaving the Sinking Ship. This time it is David Obey.

The Associated Press is reporting that Congressman David Obey, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, will not run for reelection.

This is pretty shocking news.

Obey is one of the most senior members of the House; he was first elected in a special election in 1969 to replace Republican Mel Laird, who had been appointed Press (Defense) Secretary by Richard Nixon. Obey had served in the Wisconsin legislature before that. He is known for his angry temper, particularly at House colleagues or members of the public he considers ill-informed. I see him as something of a “happy warrior” in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, a true believer in expanding government to serve the little guy, rough hewn perhaps but also a hard worker and a master of detail.

In the WSJ, William McGurn looks at some interesting First Amendment issues.

…Because Mr. Chen reported on the new iPhone for his website, Gizmodo.com, the seizure of his computers has renewed a heated debate about whether bloggers are real journalists. Traditionally, many in the mainstream press have disparaged bloggers, though in this case at least some press organizations—including the parent company that runs Mr. Chen’s blog—argue that he is a full-time journalist whose home is his newsroom. The irony is how few connect Mr. Chen’s First Amendment freedoms to those for corporations that were recently upheld in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. …

…The classic view of the First Amendment holds all Americans are entitled to its rights by virtue of citizenship. These days, alas, too many journalists and politicians assume that a free press should mean special privileges for a designated class. The further we travel in this direction, the more the government will end up deciding which Americans qualify and which do not. …

Peter Schiff says that the problems facing Greece and the US are more similar than we would like.

…Of course, the negative effects on the economy of run-a-way inflation and skyrocketing interest rates are worse than what otherwise might result from an honest restructuring or even out right default. It is just amazing how few economists understand this simple fact.

Just because we can inflate does not mean we can escape the consequences of our actions. One way or another the piper must be paid. Either benefits will be cut or the real value of those benefits will be reduced. In fact, it is precisely because we can inflate our problems away that they now loom so large. With no one forcing us to make the hard choices, we constantly take the easy way out.

When creditors ultimately decide to curtail loans to America, U.S. interest rates will finally spike, and we will be confronted with even more difficult choices than those now facing Greece. Given the short maturity of our national debt, a jump in short-term rates would either result in default or massive austerity. If we choose neither, and opt to print money instead, the run-a-way inflation that will ensue will produce an even greater austerity than the one our leaders lacked the courage to impose. Those who believe rates will never rise as long as the Fed remains accommodative, or that inflation will not flare up as long as unemployment remains high, are just as foolish as those who assured us that the mortgage market was sound because national real estate prices could never fall.

Illinois legislators vote against the kids and for the unions. Then they tried to hide the record. But the ChiTrib found them out. The New Editor has the story.

The Illinois House Wednesday voted down a measure to allow as many as 30,000 kids in Chicago’s worst public schools get tuition vouchers. …

…From a Chicago Tribune editorial:

“Twenty-two Democrats and 26 Republicans in the Illinois House voted Wednesday to let up to 30,000 children escape Chicago’s worst schools. But 44 Democrats and 22 Republicans voted against tuition vouchers for those kids. One opponent, Rep. Monique Davis, D-Chicago, said she was standing with teachers unions and principals. Sponsor Kevin Joyce, D-Chicago, told The Capitol Fax Blog: “It’s job protection for the union leadership.” He’s right. …”