Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn has troubling news from Great Britain. You’ll have to read the article to see what Big Brother is up to.

The British election campaign didn’t do much to catch the attention of Americans, but one little item feels pertinent — although it attracted remarkably little attention even across the pond. In Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, a lady called Phyllis Delik received a postcard from Gordon Brown’s Labour party. On one side, there was a photograph of a woman suffering from breast cancer saying “It’s the sort of thing you think will never happen to you.” On the reverse, there was a question: “Are the Tories a change you can afford?” — followed by a warning that the Conservatives would scrap a Labour guarantee that any woman diagnosed with breast cancer is entitled to see a specialist within two weeks.

(Yes, yes, I know that lingo still sounds a little strange to Americans: Government bureaucrats announce “targets” for the length of time between seeing your family doctor and seeing your specialist, or between getting your MRI and getting your operation. But don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it.) …

John Podhoretz wants public servants to tell us the truth.

…Instead of acknowledging this truth, government officials believe it is their role to provide reassurance even when they cannot do so. And they’re simply wrong about that. The American people are far more sophisticated about these things than those officials appear to believe, and they can be talked to like adults. That was the lesson, in part, of the immediate aftermath of September 11, when Rudy Giuliani simply said that the “number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.” He sugar-coated nothing. And that is the truth of crises and crisis management. When it is done well, there should be no sugar-coating. The impulse to sugar-coat is a mark of the conviction among politicians that they are in the same relation to the body politic as a parent is to a child. In our system, a politician is an employee, not a parent. For a rational employer, an employee who gives it to you straight will always be someone you take more seriously than an employee who pretends that everything is fine when everything isn’t.

Jonah Goldberg posts an email from a reader who did not like Mayor Bloomberg’s assumption about the latest would-be bomber.

…Bloomberg later told CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric that the suspect behind the bombing attempt could be a domestic terrorist angry at the government who acted alone. “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything,” he said.

A mentally deranged person or someone who did not like the healthcare bill?

Why is he so damned anxious to blame this on white conservative America?  …

Mark Steyn also discusses how public servants look for answers everywhere except in the most obvious direction.

Whenever something goofy happens — bomb in Times Square, mass shootings at a US military base, etc. — there seem to be two kinds of reactions:

a) Some people go, “Hmm. I wonder if this involves some guy with a name like Mohammed who has e-mails from Yemen.”

b) Other people go, “Don’t worry, there’s no connection to terrorism, and anyway, even if there is, it’s all very amateurish, and besides he’s most likely an isolated extremist or lone wolf.”

Unfortunately, everyone in category (b) seems to work for the government. …

David Harsanyi lends some sarcasm to the commentary.

…If I had to guess 25 cents, I’d bet the administration makes no mention of fundamentalist Islam even when it reluctantly admits we’re dealing with “terror.” …

…After all, the administration has never been scared to call out despots and extremists, such as insurance companies, Wall Street executives, Tea Party activists and the Israeli government. This is the Department of Homeland Security that issued a report alerting us to potential violence from “right- wing extremists” who are ginned up about “illegal immigration,” “federal power,” and the Second Amendment. (So at least half of you qualify.) …

In the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell reviews a fascinating new book about who really has the power in the United States. It may surprise you.

…What does it mean, the inability or unwillingness of either party to change or discipline the big banks in any way, even after all the havoc they have lately caused? In the year and a half since the implosion of Lehman Brothers, Simon Johnson, who was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, is the only person to have come up with a plausible explanation. He has done so by examining the United States as an IMF analyst would examine some bankrupt basket-case of a country in what used to be called the Third World. Johnson believes that the leaders of the American finance industry have turned into the sort of oligarchy more typical of the developing world, and that they have “captured” the government and its regulatory functions. Johnson laid out this bombshell thesis in the Atlantic a year ago.

There are many ways for countries to blunder their way into big economic trouble: Kleptocracy, capital flight, or a commodity-price crash can all spark a panic or collapse. Nevertheless, Johnson wrote, “to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work.” In a gripping new book, 13 Bankers (Pantheon, 304 pages, $26.95), written with his brother-in-law James Kwak, Johnson explains why those changes aren’t happening in the United States.

Most countries rescued by the IMF are marked by tight links between the business elite and the political elite. They are oligarchies. Johnson defines oligarchy as a system whereby economic power can be translated into political power (and vice versa). When you try to fix a country dominated by an oligarchy, you immediately hit a frustrating paradox: Rescue plans make the oligarchy more powerful. An IMF loan is a lifeline. Somebody has to decide which banks and industries get to use it, and which ones are set adrift. In this process, the cement company owned by the finance minister’s cousin does better than the cement company run by some schmuck in the hinterland. And it is not just that politically favored companies get the original infusion of IMF cash. Private investors can see what is going on and realize that it is “best to invest in the firms with the most political power (and hence the most assurance of being bailed out in a crisis).” So if the politically connected rich don’t pay, who does? “Most emerging-market governments,” according to Johnson, “look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.”

This is a terrifying truth, if you think about it. It means that you cannot take for granted that “once burned, twice shy” will describe the aftermath of an oligarchy-driven financial crisis. Serious reform is not inevitable. On the contrary: The “reforms” that follow a bubble-binge-bailout cycle tend to consolidate the privileges of the oligarchs who caused it. That is why the IMF tends to judge the good faith of a country seeking debt relief by whether it is willing to “squeeze at least some of its oligarchs,” in Johnson’s words. Back in the day when the United States was on its moral high horse, our bankers and government officials derided the fledgling market economies of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe as havens of “crony capitalism.” We demanded not just the squeezing of oligarchs but the squeezing of government. Freewheeling monetary policy and write-downs were anathema. Discipline was the order of the day. …

What Johnson thinks we should have done is take those banks over—“nationalize” them, if you like—and put the banks’ overvalued assets on the government’s books, where we could wait patiently to sell them, making depositors whole but letting shareholders take the loss. Then we should have broken them up, on grounds similar to the ones Theodore Roosevelt used for breaking up big industrial trusts, to ensure that none of them was too big to fail. “A central pillar of??…??reform must be breaking up the megabanks,” Johnson and Kwak write. They would limit assets to 2 percent of GDP (about $285 million) for investment banks and 4 percent for all banks (roughly what Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and NationsBank each had in the mid-1990s). Some people think that large banks provide economies of scale. Johnson and Kwak think the evidence is mixed. The evidence of the problems that big banks can cause, however, is now unambiguous. …

Peter Wehner shares his thoughts on an Obama speech about civility in public discourse.

…So President Obama lacerates his critics for engaging in the very activity he denounces. And he does so in the haughtiest way imaginable, always attempting to portray himself as hovering above us mere mortals, exasperated at the childish and petty quality of the political debate, weary of the name-calling. How hard it must be to be the embodiment of Socratic discourse, Solomonic wisdom, and Niebuhrian nuance in this fallen and broken world.

Here is the rather unpleasant reality, though: our president fancies himself a public intellectual of the highest order — think Walter Lippmann as chief executive — even as he and his team are accomplished practitioners of the Chicago Way. They relish targeting those on their enemies list. The president himself pretends to engage his critics’ arguments even as his words are used like a flamethrower in a field of straw men. It’s hard to tell if we’re watching a man engaged in an elaborate political shell game or a victim of an extraordinary, and nearly clinical, case of self-delusion. Perhaps there is some of both at play. Regardless, President Obama’s act became tiresome long ago. …

In WSJ Blogs, Dan Neil reports on the most expensive car ever sold.

Some time last week, the estate of Dr. Peter D. Williamson sold the late car collector’s prized 1936 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic to the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Ca., for between $30 million and $40 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. Any figure in that range would make the Williamson Atlantic – a heartbreaking piece of European automotive sculpture, considered the epitome of French Deco styling – the most valuable car known to have changed hands. …

…The Atlantic’s price is, of course, staggering, even to automotive historians and experts. …

Scott Ott makes a good point.

Although Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had initially said she had no evidence to indicate the attempted Times Square bombing was anything other than a “one-off” event, an unnamed Homeland official today contradicted that assessment based on “one compelling piece of evidence.”

“We knew that we were dealing with a coordinated attack, involving perhaps dozens of co-conspirators and robust technological capabilities,” the anonymous source said, “And we knew he wasn’t a lone wolf based on a single fact: the driver of the bomb-filled SUV actually found a parking space in Times Square.”

While officials called the bomb itself “crude” and “amateurish”, they now privately acknowledge that the preparation, advanced espionage and meticulous orchestration of events required to insert a Sport Utility Vehicle into a curbside parking space anywhere in New York City reflects a high-level of intellectual and technical sophistication.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Robert Samuelson discusses global market shifts as developing countries increase consumption.

…China, India, Brazil and many “emerging-market” countries escaped the worst consequences of the Great Recession. Their economies are generally growing much faster than ours (6.4 percent annually in 2010 and 2011, compared with a 2.9 percent rate for the United States, reckons the International Monetary Fund). This boosts their demand for the advanced equipment, instruments and basic industrial supplies (chemicals, coal) that constitute two-thirds of U.S. exports. Of Boeing’s 3,350-jet backlog, 77 percent will go to foreign customers.

Domestic spending is strengthening in emerging markets, as incomes and tastes — for cars, clothes, computers, cellphones — expand. In 2002, the consumption spending of these countries (including Brazil, China and India) was 23 percent of the world total and the U.S. share was 36 percent, estimate economists David Hensley and Joseph Lupton of J.P. Morgan Chase. By 2008, developing countries were 32 percent, the United States 28 percent. …

Radio Free New Jersey has a message for the Greek protestors.

Morons,

There is no money. There is no one else’s pocket left to pick. You can’t borrow anymore, you can’t print anymore, and you can’t steal anymore from anyone else. The people who will be paying the bill to keep you from reentering the 15th century are, unlike you, working very hard. They deserve better than you spoiled pampered children are giving them.

You object to the bond market, but the bond market is just the voice of reality calling. It’s telling you that 2 plus 2 is still 4, no matter what your union bosses would have you believe. Your bosses tell you that ‘the people’ didn’t spend the money, but it’s not true. That’s exactly who has wasted the money, and now the bill is coming due. Right now the Bond Market is actually your very best friend. It’s telling you what a horrible mistake you’ve made, and giving you a chance to undo it, before it’s too late. …

Christopher Hitchens surveys Britain’s political landscape.

…There’s a whole sector of the British professional class that probably knows Tuscany and Provence better than it knows large areas of post-industrial Britain. But this “Europeanized” layer is not large enough to swing an election, especially at a time when the stupendous size of Britain’s debt puts it at risk from the same continentwide factors that have ruined the Greek economy. This, in turn, is why some of those who rate bonds have been warning that a so-called hung Parliament, unable to arrive at swift or difficult decisions, would endanger the stability of sterling and cause a crisis of confidence in Britain’s decisive financial system. And a hung Parliament is precisely the contingency that Nick Clegg’s sudden emergence makes many times more likely. …

In Forbes, John Tamny explains why we won’t become Euro-Weenies.

…To understand why the U.S. will be fine over the long run, we have to remember that we’re a “nation of immigrants.” This is an important distinction, because as Johns Hopkins professor John D. Gartner says in his 2005 book, The Hypomanic Edge, “a ‘nation of immigrants’ represents a highly skewed and unusual ‘self selected’ population.”

We’re for the most part descended from the kind of individuals who possessed what historian John Steele Gordon referred to as the “get up and go” that drove them to leave the comforts of home in order to make their highly uncertain way in the new world that was the United States. We’re different because we’re descended from those who had the courage and drive to leave feudal, excessive taxing, warmongering governments. Simple as that.

…This American restlessness, the unrelenting drive for something better, reveals itself most notably in the entrepreneurial nature of the average American. Driven to work hard by our restless minds, Americans elevate starting a business far more than individuals in most countries do. According to a poll cited by Gartner, when asked “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?”, 91% of Americans polled said yes vs. 28% of British and 8% of Japanese respondents. …

In the Corner, Kevin Williamson wants to hear Mark Steyn’s response to John Tamny’s opinion.

…Americans love Big Government. But it’s not a blind love — it all depends on the direction the arrow is pointing on the cashflow chart. Ask George W. Bush, who got himself crucified for trying to reform Social Security. Ask anybody who has touched Medicare,  or even idly thought aloud about doing so. Ask a farmer or anybody marching in the Small Business Administration pork parade.

Steyn’s fear, which I share, is that Americans, like the British before us, will become used to  government-run health care, will consequently come to fear the uncertainties of a market-based system and — above all — will come to dread the need for be personally responsible for their own health care. Tamny’s take does not account for how a giant new entitlement can change the character of the American people. He is correct, I think, that today’s Americans are very different from today’s Europeans. But today’s Europeans are very different from their recent forebears. …

Thomas Sowell looks at resentment in the context of race and achievement.

Recent stories out of both Philadelphia and San Francisco tell of black students beating up Asian American students. This is especially painful for those who expected that the election of Barack Obama would mark the beginning of a post-racial America. …

…Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements are more deadly than envy of wealth. …

…These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype about differences that are translated into “disparities” and “inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under their more prettied-up name of “social justice.” …

… People who call differences “inequities” and achievements “privilege” leave social havoc in their wake, while feeling noble about siding with the less fortunate. It would never occur to them that they have any responsibility for the harm done to both blacks and Asian Americans.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady gives a current example of how top-down governing of markets doesn’t work. The buffoon Hugo Chávez provides the example.

The late Milton Friedman once quipped that “if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Friedman was using hyperbole to make a point about central planning. Or so I thought until Hugo Chávez put himself in charge of Venezuela’s coffee sector. Last year, for the first extended period of time in the country’s history, Venezuela did not produce enough of the little red berry to satisfy domestic demand. It has now become a coffee importer and is facing serious shortages. …

In the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti wonders why the Dems have become such thugs.

…There’s a word for this sort of overbearing, priggish intimidation: bullying. And like a lot of bullying, the Democrats’ behavior seems to stem from deep-seated insecurities. Maybe the Democrats are not as confident in government as they appear. Maybe they worry about the massive deficits and the hemorrhaging public debt. Maybe they read the same polls we do, the ones showing the public shifting right, Republicans leading the generic ballot, Republican-leaning independents returning to the GOP, congressional approval and support for incumbents at record lows, and the conservative base in a state of wild enthusiasm. Maybe the bully party, in other words, is simply acting out.

The Economist relates stories about jade auctions that will interest Antiques Roadshow types.

… Mr Axford is head of the Asia department in a small provincial English auction house called Woolley & Wallis, in the southern town of Salisbury. A year ago, he offered for auction a Qianlong-period green jade buffalo that belonged to Lady Diana Miller, daughter of the 5th Earl of Yarborough. The buffalo had lain in a bank vault since the Battle of Britain in 1940 and was still wrapped in wartime newspaper when Mr Axford saw it for the first time.

The internet has done much to change the auction business. No longer do small country auction houses have to languish in obscurity. Good photographs posted on the web now reach potential buyers all over the world.

On the day of the sale last May, Woolley’s auction room was full of bidders who had made the journey from London, and even from as far afield as Hong Kong and mainland China. Bidding for the buffalo opened at £150,000 ($230,000) and rose to £3.4m (£4.2m including commission and taxes). The buyer was Daniel Eskenazi, the son of London’s pre-eminent dealer in Chinese treasures, who was bidding on behalf of Bruno Eberli, a Swiss foreign-exchange specialist based in New York. The sale brought Mr Axford considerable publicity. The 88-year-old Lady Diana was delighted, and resolved to buy herself a racehorse. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund warns about the coming VAT war.

Expect the coming debate over an American VAT to be especially nasty. Soaring spending and deficits have prompted Democrats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker to suggest creating a European-style Value Added Tax. President Obama himself recently declined in an interview to rule out a VAT despite his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $200,000.

The debate is already becoming bitter. …

Mort Zuckerman points out the role congress had in the financial crisis explains mortgage-backed securities.

Corn and hogs in the Midwest seem a long way from condos in Florida. There is, in fact, a direct link and it’s one worth contemplating in light of the pursuit of Goldman Sachs by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. //

Derivatives—the new bad word—used to be called “futures.” They’ve existed since the Civil War, invented basically to protect farmers, traders, and merchandisers from ruin when they could not sell a crop to cover their costs because a bumper harvest created a glut, or, conversely, to protect buyers when a bad harvest led to price inflation. Hence the creation of contracts with third parties who agreed to buy or sell at a certain price, whatever the future might bring. This stabilized the market and freed farmers from looking around for a buyer in what might be a frantic market. …

…But we also need to understand how the housing market got as hot as it did. Why did it keep rising, generating more and more derivatives geared to a rising market? It turns out that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration had financed a lot more subprime and Alt-A (alternative documentation) loans than anyone realized, mostly as a result of congressional mandates. Indeed, of their total outstanding mortgage portfolios of $10.6 trillion, roughly half turned out to be of low quality. Had this been known, it would have been clear that the American public’s capacity to assume this amount of housing debt was at great risk.

That is at the heart of the now-famous Goldman-Paulson saga. Hedge fund manager John Paulson judged that the housing market was a bubble, so he shorted the securities through Goldman Sachs and an insurer called ACA, which sold the package to a German bank. The buyers judged that it was safe to count on housing prices continuing to rise. They chose which mortgage securities would be bundled by Goldman. And they have paid a heavy price for their judgment.

The American public has hereby had a peek into the bewildering complexities of the world of finance. The natural instinct is for the public to blame the housing decline on those who shorted. But it is the other way around. They should be blaming those who let the market get pumped up, inviting a dramatic and painful correction that took most people by surprise. …

Jennifer Rubin looks for information on one possible Supreme Court nominee.

Elena Kagan is the prohibitive favorite for the Supreme Court. She has made it through one confirmation hearing for her current post as solicitor general and possesses academic credentials, a reputation for collegiality with conservatives, and a limited paper trail. Moreover, she is the closest we have to a stealth candidate among the front-runners. As Tom Goldstein notes, “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.”

Casual observers assume that a dean of Harvard Law School and a domestic-policy aide in the Clinton administration must have a sizable body of work reflecting her legal views. But not so. Paul Campos has read all there is to read — and it’s not much:

“Yesterday, I read everything Elena Kagan has ever published. It didn’t take long: in the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she’s published very little academic scholarship—three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. …”

There are lots of interesting Shorts from National Review. Here are three:

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 to work for the freedom of political prisoners. Over the years, it has expanded its activities to oppose capital punishment, torture, and detention without trial. Recently, however, AI has latched onto Moazzam Begg, a hard-core Taliban jihadist who peddles cockamamie tales of being tortured at Guantanamo. That decision was too much for one AI officer, who protested the incongruity of embracing as a human-rights defender a man who committed violent acts of terror in support of an ideology that subjugates millions of women. In return, she was suspended. AI’s secretary general, Claudio Cordone, explained that “jihad in self defence” is not “antithetical to human rights,” and that in any case, Begg is innocent until proven guilty (a principle Cordone does not apply to the U.S. military). While AI’s condemnations have often been questionable, it was always scrupulous about playing no favorites among the regimes it called oppressive. Now the organization seems to feel that some human-rights violators are more equal than others.

Andy Stern is leaving his $306,388-a-year position fighting against the nation’s fat cats on behalf of the working stiffs at the Service Employees International Union, an organization that shook enough change out of its sofa cushions to throw down $60 million to put Barack Obama in the White House. Among the candidates vying to replace Stern are Change to Win president Anna Burger ($252,724/year) and SEIU executive Mary Kay Henry ($231,348 per annum). SEIU executive and Democratic Socialists of America leader Eliseo Medina ($242,286) is strangely absent from the running. Maybe he is weary of the endless self-sacrifice that being a modern labor leader entails.

Jaime Escalante was the ultimate hero teacher. At Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, he taught calculus to poor Mexican Americans and achieved astonishing results: Scores of his students, written off by other educators, passed Advanced Placement exams. They were so successful that test administrators wrongly accused them of cheating. The Bolivian-born Escalante became the subject of Stand and Deliver, an inspirational film starring Edward James Olmos. Hollywood did not make a sequel, which is unfortunate — because what happened next is instructive. Escalante clashed with education-blob bureaucrats who resented his success. The teachers’ union cracked its whip because Escalante had violated a contract rule that restricted classes to 35 students — a rule that Escalante did not want to break, except when it meant putting his students in classrooms with teachers he considered inadequate. The frustration eventually overwhelmed him. Escalante left Garfield, and the program he had spent years to build, and moved to Sacramento, where he tried to replicate his earlier success with mixed results. He generated further controversy for his outspoken opposition to bilingual education. Dead at 79. R.I.P.

In the WSJ, Timothy Aeppel reports on the inroads being made by plastic corks.

…Cork was first adapted to close bottles of sparkling wine by a French Benedictine monk named Dom Perignon in the late 1600s. For the next four centuries, cork was considered the ultimate wine stopper: Its cellular structure makes it easy to compress into the neck of a bottle, where it expands to form a tight seal. Wine also benefits from “breathing,” which is facilitated by cork’s cell structure. An air-tight seal on a wine bottle can cause another set of problems and is one factor that limited the use of plastics and screw caps in the past. …

…Although it was long known that cork could sometimes ruin the taste of wine, the problem wasn’t well understood until the early 1980s. Then, chemists finally pinpointed the main cause of cork taint: The powerful chemical 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole or TCA. It can get into wine through contaminated cork, tainted barrels or pallets and render bottles undrinkable.

By the 1990s, retailers and wineries were clamoring for a solution to wine taint but the cork industry didn’t respond. “No industry with 95% to 97% market share is going to see its propensity to listen increase—and that’s what happened to us,” says Mr. de Jesus from Amorim. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Harsanyi looks at the encroachment of federal power on states’ rights. There are significant merits to state power: more fiscal responsibility, legislation tailored to regional issues, and less encroachment on individuals’ liberty.

…The most tangible policy issue that highlights this loss of control is education. When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to shut down the Department of Education, arguing that the issue was the bailiwick of locals. But by 2001, a Republican president, George W. Bush, was championing a hyper-centralized Washington role in local education — increasing the Department’s budget 70 percent between 2002 and 2004. Today, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition hands out an additional $4.35 billion in “incentive” money (funded by the Recovery Act) to states that most closely adhere to the reforms favored by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the president. …

…More significantly, states are for the most part organic. They are geographically, culturally, socially and economically unique. Road rules in Nevada don’t make sense in New York City. Gun laws in Portland aren’t made for Muskogee. New Englanders won’t want the high school textbooks of Texans and Coloradans won’t want the energy policy of West Virginia. Power changes hands, and so does the focus of Washington.

So the continued growth of central power should be concerning to all. Because each time we are mandated or cajoled to cede to the wishes of Washington, we are surrendering our rights today, and tomorrow.

There is more criticism for the Bush and Obama administrations. Peggy Noonan discusses society’s growing distrust of government.

…In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law—say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces—and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.

Instead, our national establishments deliberately allow the crisis to grow and fester, ignoring public unrest and amusing themselves by damning anyone’s attempt to deal with the problem they fear to address. …

…If the federal government and our political parties were imaginative, they would understand that it is actually in their interests to restore peace and order to the border. It would be a way of demonstrating that our government is still capable of functioning, that it is still to some degree connected to the people’s will, that it has the broader interests of the country in mind. …

Many on the right wish to pillory the Obama administration for a slow response to the BP oil spill. This is no doubt “tit for tat” after the abuse W took for Katrina. John Hinderaker of Power Line has a more grown up look at the issue. Perhaps one of the problems here is that we have pushed these rigs into deeper and deeper water rather than allow drilling on the Continental Shelf where there would be easier access to drill sites. Good thing Obama allowed more drilling a month ago. Now he will defend that because he is never wrong.

A reader who works “on the inside,” as he put it, in dealing with disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill, writes to defend the government’s actions so far:

“I am also no fan of the Obama Administration, and while I normally enjoy it when he catches grief, in this instance the criticism is undeserved.

The federal and industry response to this disaster was appropriate and timely. What you heard on FNS from the senior officials was completely accurate. We (BP and the CG and MMS and NOAA) knew from the first day the disastrous potential of this thing and began to respond immediately with an appropriately huge amount of resources. As the
problem unfolded, we threw more and more resources at it.

Most people cannot appreciate the technical challenges and daily miracles of deepwater drilling and production. It is in many respects more difficult than manned spaceflight or planetary exploration. It’s an endeavor on the very leading edge of human capability, and when things go wrong, our capabilities are severely tested.

I wish the collective psyche of America would frame this as an Apollo 13 moment instead of an Exxon Valdez moment, but I know that will never happen.

Sadly, the ignorance about drilling is matched by an ignorance about oil spill response and cleanup. The average American does not understand oil spill response and the oil spill liability and compensation regime in this country.

Unlike the rest of the world, the US system is based on polluters cleaning up their own messes, with government oversight. This system has worked well in the years since the Exxon Valdez spill. OPA 90 is one of the best pieces of legislation ever passed by our hapless Congress. The number, frequency, and gallons of oil spilled in the US has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years because of this law.

I also note with some dismay that there appears to be a nationwide misconception that DOD always has a silver bullet for every sort of contingency. That is simply not true in the world of oil spills. The nation’s expertise for managing oil spill response lies (in order) with the CG, industry experts like the Obrien’s Group and MSRC, the EPA, and NOAA. … “

In the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone asks where the center-left has gone.

…The left parties have reacted to their unpopularity by playing the race card. Democrats have tried to portray Tea Partiers as racist and Brown called a lifelong Labor voter who questioned his policies a “bigoted woman.”

Blaming the voters is the last resort of a party in trouble. Old Labor and the Obama Democrats may not yet be finished. But they’re not doing as well as their “third way” predecessors.

Roger Simon says Al Gore may have decided to take the money and run.

Al Gore’s purchase of a near nine million dollar Montecito mansion with an almost comical carbon footprint  (nine bathrooms!) probably means that he has given up on the global warming movement and decided to become a Hollywood producer (not that he ever made much of a distinction between two). …

…Well, maybe not quite that much, but Al is not alone and we could go down a long list of rich enviro-phonies who, added up, would easily reverse AGW, assuming you believe  it.  But I have a different suspicion. Most of them don’t believe it anymore.  They won’t admit that, of course.  But Lindsey Graham’s withdrawal from the latest iteration of cap-and-trade is just a signal of what’s ahead.  Get out while the getting is good.  And make sure you get out the side door, if possible. …

In the Corner, Ralph Reed comments on Charlie Christ’s exit from the Republican party.

…Second, voters across the board — from tea-party activists to party rank-and-file to anxious independents — are hungering for authenticity. Crist’s political calculation and chameleon-like shifts on the issues (and now party affiliation) repel far more voters than they attract. Voters would rather support a politician with convictions, like Marco Rubio, even as they may disagree with him on some issues, because they know where he stands and they trust him to tell them what he really believes. This is the essence of leadership, especially in a moment of crisis.

Finally, Crist still does not grasp that the country wants a check on Obama, not an enabler in Republican or independent skin. The backlash over spending, soaring debt, government take-over of major industries, and Obamacare calls for a new breed of GOP leaders who are unafraid to stand in the gap and stop the Obama agenda. Crist’s failure to understand that is what sunk his candidacy in the GOP and will likely do so in the general election. It also explains why John McCain is moving to the right so swiftly in his primary with J.D. Hayworth in Arizona — causing whip-lash for his former base, the media. …

Heather Mac Donald, in the City Journal, dissects a NY Times editorial criticizing the Arizona immigration legislation.

…The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.

There is reason for caution in municipal bond investments, says Nicole Gelinas in Investor’s Business Daily.

…To get a glimpse of the possible future of Muniworld, look to Vallejo, Calif., about 30 miles north of San Francisco. Like many municipalities, this city of 120,000 residents found itself hard hit by the housing bust, with property-tax revenues falling by more than a quarter. …

…Vallejo violated the first principle of municipal-finance conventional wisdom: that cities and towns will do anything to avoid default. …

…Throughout its bankruptcy, Vallejo has not paid the full amount it owes on its municipal bonds. …What’s more, it has proposed, in its exit plan, to defer payments on its bonds, investing in infrastructure before paying lenders in full. …

The Economist reports on the new direction in electric car technology.

There are many innovations turning up in the latest experimental and production electric cars, affecting everything from batteries to motors to control systems. The need to make them all work together is prompting a complete rethink about the way cars should be designed and manufactured, and it is unclear which technologies will dominate as the constraints imposed by internal combustion engines give way to the new limits and possibilities associated with electric propulsion. But one group of engineers have stuck their necks out and declared that a particular technology, the electric hub motor, is likely to become the most widely used drive system.

A hub motor, as its name suggests, is built into the hub of a wheel and drives it directly, rather than having a single motor driving the wheels via a mechanical transmission. It is an idea pioneered by Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the carmaker of the same name, more than 100 years ago. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Caroline Glick analyzes whether Obama is the reason for the loss of Democrat support for Israel, in the Jerusalem Post.

Bipartisan support for Israel has been one of the greatest casualties of US President Barack Obama’s assault on the Jewish state. Today, as Republican support for Israel reaches new heights, support for Israel has become a minority position among Democrats.

Consider the numbers. During Operation Cast Lead – 11 days before Obama’s inauguration – the House of Representatives passed Resolution 34 siding with Israel against Hamas. The resolution received 390 yea votes, five nay votes and 37 abstentions. Democrats cast four of the nay votes and 29 of the abstentions.

In November 2009, Congress passed House Resolution 867 condemning the Goldstone Report. The resolution urged Obama to disregard its findings, which falsely accused Israel of committing war crimes in Cast Lead. A total of 344 congressman voted for the resolution. Thirty-six voted against it. Fifty-two abstained. Among those voting against, Thirty-three were Democrats. Forty-four Democrats abstained.

In February 2010, Fifty-four congressmen sent a letter to Obama urging him to pressure Israel to open Hamas-ruled Gaza’s international borders and accusing Israel of engaging in collective punishment. All of them were Democrats.

In the midst of the Obama administration’s assault on Israel over construction for Jews in Jerusalem, 327 congressmen signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for an end to the public attacks on the Israeli government. Of the 102 members who refused to sign the letter, 94 were Democrats.

These numbers show two things. First, since Obama entered office there has been a 13-point decline in the number of congressmen willing to support Israel. Second, the decrease comes entirely from the Democratic side of the aisle. There the number of members willing to attack Israel has tripled. …

…To date, both the Israeli government and AIPAC have denied the existence of a partisan divide. This has been due in part to their unwillingness to contend with the new situation. One of Israel’s greatest assets in the US has been the fact that support for the Jewish state has always been bipartisan. It is hard to accept that the Democrats are jumping ship. …

… Like the Israeli government itself, Republican House members express deep concern that blowing the lid off the Democrats will weaken Israel. As one member put it, “I don’t want to encourage the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attack Israel by exposing that the Democrats don’t support Israel.” …

We have a couple of blog posts on Gordon Brown’s faux pas.

In the Corner, John O’Sullivan gives an update on British election campaigning.

… Then, with eight days to go before the election, the second game-changer occurred. Yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown — unaware that he was speaking on a still-open neck-microphone, described a Labour-voting woman who had ventured mild criticism of high immigration levels in an otherwise friendly chat as “bigoted.” This was played out in full on television — even the horribly embarrassing moment when Brown buried his head in his hands as he heard his own words played back to him. Brown apologized, but to little avail. Today’s headlines run as follows: “She went out to get bread and came back with BROWN TOAST!” …

In Contentions, Ted Bromund discusses the British immigration issue and the British election.

Shades of Frank Drebin: Gordon Brown may have sunk his chances in Britain’s general election with an unguarded comment into a microphone he didn’t realize he was still wearing. After campaigning in Rochdale in northern England, he muttered, amid a stream of invective directed at his aides, that 61-year-old Labour supporter Gillian Duffy was a “bigoted woman” for questioning him about the impact on the British job market of immigration from Eastern Europe.

Brown’s since made an in-person apology and e-mailed a fulsome “personal” letter to all Labour activists, but the damage seems to have been done. As one commentator put it, showing a nice grasp of British understatement, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to call voters bigots.”

On one level, of course, it’s possible to have some sympathy for Brown. This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re around microphones so much: few of us would want our every comment recorded and aired in prime time. On another level, as Andrew Rawnsley points out, this is just another example of one of Brown’s more unattractive attributes: his volcanic temper and his eagerness to pour vitriol on his aides and anyone else who gets in his way. …

Three of our favorites write on immigration.

Mark Steyn writes about some of the ironies that the governing class have created.

…The same day … I saw a phalanx of police officers doing the full Robocop – black body armor, helmets and visors – as they marched down the street. Naturally I assumed they were Arizona State Troopers performing a routine traffic stop. In fact, they were the police department of Quincy, Ill, facing down a group of genial Tea Party grandmas in sun hats and American-flag T-shirts.

If I were a member of the Quincy PD I’d wear a full-face visor, too, because I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.

And yet the coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best, apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and embarrassing sight of peaceful protesters being menaced by camp storm troopers …

David Harsanyi believes that immigration isn’t the issue.

…Very few Americans, on the other hand, are inherently opposed to immigration. For the most part, the controversy we face isn’t about immigration at all. It’s about the systematic failure of federal government to enforce the law or offer rational policy. There’s a difference.

…The uplifting tale of the hard-boiled immigrant, dipping his or her sweaty hands into the well of the American Dream, is one thing. Today, we find ourselves is an unsustainable and rapidly growing welfare state. Can we afford to allow millions more to partake?

When the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman was asked about unlimited immigration in 1999, he stated that “it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. …

Debra Saunders looks at several immigration issues, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

…It’s easy for San Franciscans, from 700 miles away, to sneer at Arizonans. Folks here don’t live in a state where cross-border drug violence has led to highway gun battles.

The Arizona Republic editorialized Wednesday that the bill was “ugly and indefensible.” The paper also noted, “The feds did nothing while Phoenix became the kidnapping capital of the country. The feds did nothing as rancher Robert Krentz was murdered on his border-area ranch.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Thomas Sowell thinks it distorts history to treat slavery as America’s original sin.

… today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

Nile Gardiner compiles a list of Obama’s top ten insults towards Israel.

Last week Israel celebrated its 62nd year as a nation, but there was major cause for concern amid the festivities as the Israeli people faced the looming menace of a nuclear-armed Iran, as well as the prospect of a rapidly deteriorating relationship with Washington. The Israel-bashing of the Obama administration has become so bad that even leading Democrats are now speaking out against the White House. New York Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Barack Obama’s stance towards Israel in a radio interview last week, stating his “counter-productive” Israel policy “has to stop”.

At the same time a poll was released by Quinnipiac University which showed that US voters disapproved of the president’s Israel policy by a margin of 44 to 35 percent. According to the poll, “American voters say 57 – 13 percent that their sympathies lie with Israel and say 66 – 19 percent that the president of the United States should be a strong supporter of Israel.”

I recently compiled a list of Barack Obama’s top ten insults against Britain, America’s closest ally in the world. This is a sequel of sorts, a list of major insults by the Obama administration against America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. …

Abe Greenwald does a nice job on Obama’s ”let’s pretend” summits.

Yesterday’s kick-off of the “Entrepreneurship Summit” in Washington DC, intended, according to Jake Tapper, “to help deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world” is the fourth hollow and stage-managed “summit” organized by Barack Obama.

First there was the Beer Summit, during which we watched the president, the professor, and the policeman pretend to resolve what the president and the professor pretended was a problem. Next up, the Health-Care Summit, during which we watched the president and his Democratic friends pretend to listen to hours of suggested solutions to a real problem. This was followed by the Nuclear Security Summit, during which participants pretended that the real problem of nuclear security could be tackled without even mentioning the problem’s main source, Iran.

These make-believe endeavors have all the effective heft of Model-UN confabs.

Yet for Barack Obama, there is no issue – be it as insignificant as a localized grievance or as towering as nuclear war – that cannot be addressed with a pantomime summit.

Noemie Emery says not to expect the willfully ignorant media to understand the tea parties.

… The Tea Party is a popular, not a populist, movement, a grass-roots uprising against the cost and expansion of government power. It fears that the debt has become unsustainable. Do not expect Dionne or Beinart to recognize this.

Don’t expect from New York magazine’s John Heilemann either, who told a panel on Chris Matthews’ program that the protesters’ motives were all Greek to him. “What is the focus, what is the cause of this? You think back to 1994, there was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. There were triggering incidents. There’s been nothing like that.

“The only thing that’s changed in the past 15 months is the election of Barack Obama. As far as I can see, in terms of the policies that Obama has implemented, there’s nothing,” he said.

Under the heading of “nothing” would be debt in the trillions, Greece going bankrupt, California tanking under the weight of public service unions and their extravagant benefits, other states foundering, and massive entitlements being added on in the midst of a recession.

Other than that, of course, there’s nothing to see here. Nothing. Nothing at all.

The UN’s IPCC gets caught with more global warming fraud. IBD editors have the latest.

Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.

It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment.

After fraudulent claims about Himalayan glaciers, African crop harvests and Amazon rain forests, plus a 2007 assessment report based on anecdotal evidence, student term papers and nonpeer-reviewed magazine articles, the panel’s doomsday forecast for Bangladesh has been exposed as its latest hoax. …

Barron’s Op-Ed warns of a second leg down if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.

… Among Milton Friedman’s greatest contributions to economics was his Permanent Income Hypothesis, which found that people, by and large, weren’t drunken sailors. Their spending depends on their long-term income prospects, so a one-shot boost has little impact on the economy.

Conversely, the coming tax hikes are permanent and are likely to have lasting effects. Even if the hikes are confined to couples making over $250,000, who comprise just 5% of the population, this cohort accounts for 30% of personal income, Wieting and D’Antonio point out.

“Also note that the highest income brackets represent a preponderance of small businesses, and account for a disproportionably large share of spending. So, sharply raising tax rates in the top brackets should have a quite measurable, large effect on the economy, far in excess of the population share. This then affects employment and income more broadly,” they write.

As for the impact from the increases on taxes on capital, the question is how negative they will be. There’s no telling, given that nobody knows what future taxes on dividends and capital gains are likely to be.

That uncertainty alone has a cost, the Citi economists say. The worst case — dividends taxed as high as 39.6% and a 3.8% additional Medicare tax on top earners starting in 2012 — would reduce the present value of the U.S. stock market by 10%-15%, they estimate.

None of this takes into account the impact of monetary policy. …

Democracy in America, written in the early 1800′s by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, is part of the American Canon. Slate recently had a snarky review of one of the many books about the book. Jillian Melchior reviews the review for Contentions. Jillian happened to graduate last year from one of the few schools that provide a course on de Tocqueville’s classic. I allude to Hillsdale College.

… Furstenberg’s criticism centers on class and race, both of which Tocqueville treats at length. He repeatedly takes out of context Tocqueville’s writings on race relations. “[Tocqueville] bumped into Native Americans being expelled from the eastern states on the infamous Trail of Tears. But he didn’t make much of it, failing to connect that experience to his own reflections on the danger of the tyranny of the majority,” writes Furstenberg.

He must have somehow missed Tocqueville’s lengthy analysis of the injustices committed against the Native Americans, to be found in Volume 1, where he describes how, through trickery and coercion, American settlers “obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase. … These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.” In fact, Tocqueville portrays the Native Americans as the last remnants of the noble warrior-aristocracy, and he bemoans their degradation and the loss of their civilization.

Yet Furstenberg continues with his race-based criticism. He wrongly implies that slavery was not a big issue for Tocqueville:

“Clearly Tocqueville, unlike Beaumont, believed that slavery and racism did not touch on “the essential nature of democracy,” as Damrosch puts it. … When he did turn his mind to the subjects [of race and slavery], moreover, Tocqueville was exceedingly gloomy, convinced that a multiracial democracy was impossible. If slaves ever gained their freedom, he predicted a genocidal war: ‘the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps the destruction of one of the two races.’ … One of the most striking features of emancipation, as it actually happened a generation later, was the lack of violence foreseen by Tocqueville and many others.”

But Democracy in America clearly outlines Tocqueville’s strong concern about slavery and its consequences for the future of American democracy. He describes slavery as a “permanent evil,” a “calamity,” and a “wound thus inflicted on humanity.” The consequences of slavery would be even more far-reaching and disastrous, Tocqueville supposes, because “the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” He expects that “the moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude, — the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.”  …

Now that the Cape Wind project has been approved by the Feds, there’ll be more interest in windmills. Slate had a piece on windmill design.

The federal government has green-lighted the nation’s first offshore wind farm, to be built off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass. Opponents claim that 130 white, three-bladed turbines will detract from the natural beauty of Nantucket Sound. Why do all modern windmills look the same?

So they’re unobtrusive. A windmill’s noise is directly proportional to the speed of its rotor tips. Two-bladed turbines have to spin faster than their three-bladed competitors to generate the same amount of energy. As a result, the whooshing sound they emit is somewhat louder. Two-bladed windmills would be a sensible choice for a remote, offshore wind farm like the one in Cape Cod, since they’re just as efficient as the three-bladed models and cheaper to produce. But manufacturers—who cater to the densely populated and wind-power-oriented countries of Europe—have switched almost exclusively to producing the latter. …

The approval of Cape Wind reminds of a Instapundit post from two years ago.

Okay, we’ve heard a lot about the greenhouse effect, etc., but I’m reading Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb’s Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound and I’m beginning to doubt the political class’s serious commitment to this cause. The book’s a treasure trove, but here’s a description of how what was supposed to be a wide-open democratic town meeting on the Nantucket Sound wind power project was taken over by the astroturf brigades of the project’s well-heeled opponents: …

The Economist has the story of a Persian carpet that measures 5 feet by 11 and 1/2 feet. It sold at auction for $9,500,000.

THERE is nothing that excites a professional art dealer more than the thought that he may have found a lost work that has slipped through the auction-house system, misidentified, misattributed or simply misunderstood.

Second to that is buying a work on a hunch that it might be much rarer and more special than the vendor realises—and making a killing once a little additional research proves it to be a piece of exceptional importance.

At the beginning of this year Christie’s received a call from a European dealer. He had a suspicion that a carpet he had recently bought was no ordinary Persian rug, but one of the famed “vase” carpets from Kirman. Made in the city that dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries, “vase” carpets are easily identifiable by a pattern of swirling branches, foliage and flowers arranged in vases.

This particular carpet, though, had no vase on it; only a continuing pattern of intricately joined leaves that gave the design an unusual energy and charm. But it was the weaving technique that alerted the dealer to the fact that it might be a “vase” carpet all the same. …

New Scientist says whale poop is important. Really!

Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.

So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found “huge amounts of iron in whale poo”. He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.

Previous studies have shown that iron is crucial to ocean health because plankton need it to grow. “If you add soluble iron to the ocean, you get instant phytoplankton growth,” says Nicol. The amount of iron in whale faeces means that protecting Antarctic whales could swell populations of phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide.

As further proof Pickerhead will read anything, we have some information from Wikipedia on coprolites – fossilized animal dung. We’re doing this for the cartoon we snagged.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mort Zuckerman shows how radical Obama’s policy is towards Israel.

Thanks to a deadlock engineered by the U.S. government, the Middle East peace process is stalled. President Obama began this stalemate last year when he called for a settlement freeze, and he escalates it now with a major change of American policy regarding Jerusalem.

The president seeks to prohibit Israel from any construction in its capital, in particular in a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem called Ramat Shlomo. This, despite the fact that all former administrations have unequivocally understood that the area in question would remain part of Israel under any final peace agreement. Objecting to any building in this East Jerusalem neighborhood is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem before final status talks with the Palestinians even begin.

From the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support. He uses the same term—”settlements”—to describe massive neighborhoods that are home to tens of thousands of Jews and illegal outposts of a few families. His ambiguous use of this loaded word raises the question for Israelis about whether this administration really understands the issue.

It certainly sends signals to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority followed the president’s lead and refused to proceed with planned talks until Israel stops all so-called settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem.

President Obama’s attitude toward Jerusalem betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the city. …

David Harsanyi does a great send-up of the Dems financial regulation package.

… How many voters are aware that the pending Senate reform bill includes a payback to unions in the form of a “proxy access” that would allow labor to manipulate company boards? How many are aware that the bill may give the Treasury Department the right to seize private property and businesses without any significant judicial review?

How many Americans are aware that the reform bill might create a so-called “consumer protection board” that would slather another needless layer of federal red tape on a wide range of businesses — businesses, incidentally, with far less culpability in creating the housing bubble than members of the Senate Banking Committee?

At the same time, the board may also ban private, voluntary arbitration agreements between consumers and financial firms. Why?

How many voters are aware that the Senate reform bill clamps down on “angel investors” — wealthy individuals who invest in startups with few regulatory guidelines. From Google to Facebook, it was angel investors who undertook the initial risk. …

… No crisis is ever wasted. And for those reflexively averse to risk, profit and markets, this is an opportunity like no other.

We need financial reform. What we’re being offered, it seems, is another piece of command-and-control legislation fast-tracked to avoid the midterm elections — and honest discussion.

IBD editors on the Dem’s legislative frenzy.

… But like Thelma and Louise when they knew the jig was up, the Democratic Congress has decided it might as well put the pedal to the metal and go over the precipice with a crash and a bang. Unfortunately, they’ve got an already pummeled economy in the back seat with them.

No one should misinterpret the rearranging of the cap-and-trade and immigration deck chairs on the Democrats’ Titanic. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid want both — bullying industry in the name of saving the planet and buying Hispanic votes with amnesty for illegal aliens. …

Reihan Salam says our economy is not out of the woods yet.

… We are propping up the most rotten sectors of the economy and diverting talent that would otherwise shift into the new interrelated systems that are slowly emerging—and this emergence will prove very slow indeed once the inevitable tax burden required to prop up aging yet politically powerful sectors hits. One can hope, like Gross, that those new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that propel growth will take shape here at home. They could just as easily emerge in China or India or, for that matter, Canada, a country that has pursued more sustainable fiscal policies.

Mike Dorning of Bloomberg BusinessWeek focused more narrowly on the success of the president’s stimulus package. But it’s hardly surprising that a massive debt-financed stimulus has led to an uptick in economic activity. The question is whether or not it will enhance long-term growth in light of the impact of a heavy public debt burden going forward. Has it moved the economy in the right direction by facilitating the liquidation of bad bets made during the housing boom, a process that might dampen GDP expansion in the short term while enhancing long-term growth? That is an entirely different question. As Jeffrey Sachs has argued, the United States has been engaging in extreme policy swings throughout the Greenspan era, veering from recession to bubble and back again. By running a double-digit budget deficit, we’ve severely limited our options in the face of the next economic crisis, all without making the painful adjustments—to tax rates, to spending, to the bloated financial sector—that would make another crisis less likely.

That’s my case for economic pessimism. I sure hope I’m wrong. But I get the distinct impression that we’re walking into a decade-long buzzsaw.

Clive Crook in the Financial Times on how Obama might salvage his administration after he gets whumped in the November vote.

… Beyond this lies the fundamental question: can Mr Obama reconcile the US to permanently higher public spending and permanently higher taxes? He has yet to come clean about that choice, but voters can see where things are heading. He set out to nudge the country to the left. In the end, this is what nudging the country to the left means.

He has his work cut out. Democrats mock the Tea Party movement, but this is a mistake. The preferences it expresses are widely held. According to one recent poll, more Americans agree with the Tea Party movement on taxes and spending than with Mr Obama. Among independent voters, support for those positions is even stronger. A large part of the country sees the Democratic party as fundamentally at odds with its idea of good government.

Must it therefore end badly for Mr Obama? Not necessarily. Opinion can shift – if it does not, the president can. Suppose the Democrats are crushed in November. Mr Obama would be forced to moderate his policies, like Bill Clinton after the rout of 1994. Healthcare reform would stand as his historic achievement; then, focused on 2012, he could turn fiscal conservative and govern with the grain of the country. Economic recovery might do the rest.

Mr Obama would have allowed voters to tame his own party – a task he shirked. Democrats get thumped in 2010; he wins in 2012. As seen from the White House, not such a bad result.

George Will reminds us of one of America’s sins, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans.

Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito’s parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas. …

Ross Douthat covers the South Park Muhammad episode.

Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of “South Park” entitled “Super Best Friends,” in which the cartoon show’s foul-mouthed urchins sought assistance from an unusual team of superheroes. These particular superfriends were all religious figures: Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Taoism’s Lao-tse — and the Prophet Muhammad, depicted with a turban and a 5 o’clock shadow, and introduced as “the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame.”

That was a more permissive time. You can’t portray Muhammad on American television anymore, as South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, discovered in 2006, when they tried to parody the Danish cartoon controversy — in which unflattering caricatures of the prophet prompted worldwide riots — by scripting another animated appearance for Muhammad. The episode aired, but the cameo itself was blacked out, replaced by an announcement that Comedy Central had refused to show an image of the prophet.

For Parker and Stone, the obvious next step was to make fun of the fact that you can’t broadcast an image of Muhammad. Two weeks ago, “South Park” brought back the “super best friends,” but this time Muhammad never showed his face. He “appeared” from inside a U-Haul trailer, and then from inside a mascot’s costume. …

The city of San Francisco has 27,000 employees. One third make more than $100,000 per year. The story from the Chronicle.

More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco’s nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year – a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.

The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn’t include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.

The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and “other pay,” a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.

Leading 2009′s $100,000 Club was the Police Department’s Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.

His total payout was $516,118, …

A trip to New York is not complete without perusing the offerings at sidewalk booksellers. The Economist had a piece on the most popular offerings at these stands.

High in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building at the New York Public Library–a sprawling Beaux-Arts pile on Fifth Avenue—is a series of murals that tell the story of the recorded word. Painted by Edward Laning and unveiled in 1940, the four panels begin with Moses carrying the tablets down Mount Sinai and end with Ottmar Mergenthaler inventing the lino-type machine in 1884. But one scene is notably absent. Nowhere in Laning’s paintings is there anyone selling a book on a street corner.

Sidewalk booksellers are an essential part of New York street culture, the intellectual wing of an alfresco economy that includes coffee carts, peanut roasters and break-dancing buskers. In a number of locations across the city, determined men—and the odd woman—endure the periodic atrocities of the climate and set up trestle tables laden with secondhand books.

Arriving in New York from Britain to study for a master’s, I spent a lot of time hanging around these stalls and soon saw the same titles cropping up time and time again—in particular literary American fiction by writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. And so last autumn I set out to discover the most common title on secondhand bookstalls in New York, as a way to gauge literary tastes and trends. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark’s column is on the new front in the war on terror – the tea parties.

I suppose the thinking runs something like this. All things considered, the polls on Obamacare aren’t totally disastrous, and the president’s approval numbers seem to have bottomed out in the low forties, and when you look at what that means in terms of the electoral map this November, you’ve only got to scare a relatively small percentage of squishy suburban moderate centrists back into the Democratic fold, and how difficult can that be?

Hence, Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing Tea Partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the Tea Partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both “Tim” and “Tea” are three-letter words beginning with “T”: Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you’re for him and he’s for thee, completely interchangeable.

To lend the point more gravitas, President Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he’s trying to determine whether that’s his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.

Will it work? For a long time, Tea Partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending” that that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson. …

Tunku Varadarajan takes a dim view of the helter skelter push for financial reform.

… But Obama’s invitation to debate, here, is akin to his conversation on health-care reform: It is a call to all to come to him, and to drink deeply of his wisdom. Of a piece with this method is Harry Reid’s assertion Thursday that he will move ahead with a vote on financial reform as early as Monday: “I’m not going to waste any more time of the American people while they come up with some agreement,” Reid said, of the Republicans. “The games of stalling are over.”

Yet ill-conceived reform would be just as bad as no reform at all, and the Republicans have every reason to resist knee-jerk legislation fueled largely by a populist consternation with the way Wall Street does business. As the sage Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times Wednesday, “halting the financial doomsday machine is going to involve fundamental changes in policy towards—and the structure of—the financial system.” …

O’Rourke nails it. Why it’s so annoying to be governed by a bunch of A students.

… America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students—A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Now there’s health care reform—just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? …

David Malpass in Forbes says Washington is possessed.

My Nov. 10, 2008 column warned that big government was walking away as the knockout winner over the private sector in the financial crisis. But it’s going much further than I’d feared. The federal government has accelerated its takeover of the economy, adding a mega-trillion-dollar health care entitlement, despite the damage to health care and the national debt this will cause. Washington is frenetically cutting unfunded checks. Capital is being channeled away from small businesses toward big government. Looming on the horizon is the bailout of state and local governments, which will concentrate more and more of the nation’s debt onto the diminishing base of federal taxpayers.

Washington’s excess spending is now running $1.5 trillion annually, and both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are relying heavily on short-term credits for funding. The marketable national debt has ballooned to more than $8 trillion, but wait … the Obama Administration has budgeted an increase to $20 trillion over the next few years, bringing it to more than 90% of GDP. Even that huge sum–$100,000 for every working-age American–doesn’t include the rapidly escalating debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the government’s unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare. And to keep the debt estimate down the budgeteers are making wishful assumptions that millions of high-paying jobs will reappear and health care reform will pay for itself.

Every month Congress adds more federal powers and debt, voting as if its allegiance were to Washington, city of cranes, instead of to the voters and taxpayers. …

And Bill Gross from the bond-dealer Pimco knows who has possessed Washington; people who cannot stop spending and borrowing. Joel Achenbach from WaPo has the story.

Bill Gross is used to buying bonds in multibillion-dollar batches. But when it comes to U.S. Treasury bills, he’s getting nervous. Gross, a founder of the investment giant Pimco, is so concerned about America’s national debt that he has started unloading some of his holdings of U.S. government bonds in favor of bonds from such countries as Germany, Canada and France.

Gross is a bottom-line kind of guy; he doesn’t seem to care if the debt is the fault of Republicans or Democrats, the Bush tax cuts or the Obama stimulus. He’s simply worried that Washington’s habit of spending today the money it hopes to collect tomorrow is getting worse and worse. It even has elements of a Ponzi scheme, Gross told me.

“In order to pay the interest and the bill when it comes due, we’ll simply have to issue more IOUs. That, to me, is Ponzi-like,” Gross said. “It’s a game that can never be finished.”

The national debt — which totaled $8,370,635,856,604.98 as of a few days ago, not even counting the trillions owed by the government to Social Security and other pilfered trust funds — is rapidly becoming a dominant political issue in Washington and across the country, and not just among the “tea party” crowd. President Obama is feeling the pressure, and on Tuesday he will open the first session of a high-level bipartisan commission that will look for ways to reduce deficits and put the country on a sustainable fiscal path. …

Remember last week GM’s CEO trumpeted the payback of debt? Would you be surprised to learn that was a lie? Shikha Dalmia has the details for Forbes.

… But when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion–the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

But wait! Even that’s not the full story given that GM, which has not yet broken even, much less turned a profit, can’t pay even this puny amount from its own earnings.

So how is it paying it?

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

GM claims that the fact that it is even using the escrow money to pay back the loan instead of using it all to shore itself up shows that it is on the road to recovery. That actually would be a positive development–although hardly one worth hyping in ads and columns–if it were not for a further plot twist. …

More on Iceland’s volcanoes. This time from the Economist.

… And Katla is not the only game in town. Iceland has others capable of even greater nastiness. The eruption of Oraefajokull in 1362 may have been almost as large as that of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which was the largest eruption of the 20th century. The Laki eruption of 1783 sent poisonous gases far and wide across Europe. And there is evidence that some of the island’s volcanoes, especially those under the central ice cap, (which, other things being equal, will produce more dusty and explosive plumes if they break through) may be in cahoots, their average activity rising and falling in a cycle of about 130 years. On this analysis, the past few decades have been one of the quiet patches. It seems likely that the first 50 years of jet travel across the North Atlantic enjoyed, in historical terms, particularly clear skies.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin has news that some Dems are tired of the Obami’s treatment of Israel.

Wow. Yes, Chuck Schumer – who’s angling for Senate majority leader if/when Harry Reid loses in November — has had enough with the president’s Israel-bashing. …

…one suspects that Schumer has gotten nowhere in private and is now forced to unload in public. It seems that while Schumer cares what American Jews think, Obama is unmoved by quiet persuasion. …

Kimberley Strassel knows what the real Republican divide is.  And Pickerhead says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ T party to take us back to the Trent Lott and Tom Delay show”.

Marco Rubio appeared on a Sunday talk show this month to say something remarkable. The Republican running for Florida’s Senate seat suggested we reform Social Security by raising the retirement age for younger workers. Florida is home to 2.4 million senior citizens who like to vote. The blogs declared Mr. Rubio politically suicidal.

The response from Mr. Rubio’s primary competitor, Gov. Charlie Crist, was not remarkable. His campaign slammed Mr. Rubio’s idea as “cruel, unusual and unfair to seniors living on a fixed income.” Mr. Crist’s plan for $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities? Easy! He’ll root out “fraud” and “waste.”

Let’s talk Republican “civil war.” Not the one the media is hawking, that pits supposed tea party fanatics like Mr. Rubio against supposed “moderates” like Mr. Crist. The Republican Party is split. But the real divide is between reformers like Mr. Rubio and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who are running on principles and tough issues, and a GOP old guard that still finds it politically expedient to duck or demagogue issues. As Republicans look for a way out of the wilderness, this is the rift that matters. …

In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger has been looking forward to an article on baseball from Charles Krauthammer.

I see that Charles Krauthammer has at last written his baseball column — and it is a real beauty. Lyrical, smile-making, and sharp. Last fall, I interviewed him and wrote a piece for NR. Toward the end, it said,

Every columnist writes a “soft” column now and then — a column about sports, or fashion, or maybe a beloved former teacher. All summer long, Krauthammer was wanting to write a column about the Washington Nationals, the baseball team. But he never had the opportunity, because “Obama keeps coming at me like a fire hose.” The president is always giving a conservative columnist something to warn about, correct, or condemn.

Obama hasn’t taken a break, unfortunately. The Swedenization of America is a full-time job. (Is that hate speech? An incitement to violence?) …

And here is Charles Krauthammer’s column on the Washington Nationals.

Among my various idiosyncrasies, such as (twice) driving from Washington to New York to watch a world championship chess match, the most baffling to my friends is my steadfast devotion to the Washington Nationals. When I wax lyrical about having discovered my own private paradise at Nationals Park, eyes begin to roll and it is patiently explained to me that my Nats have been not just bad, but prodigiously — epically — bad.

As if I don’t know. They lost 102 games in 2008; 103 in 2009. That’s no easy feat. Only three other teams in the last quarter-century have achieved back-to-back 100-loss seasons. …

…And for a losing baseball team, the calm is even more profound. I’ve never been to a park where the people are more relaxed, tolerant and appreciative of any small, even moral, victory. Sure, you root, root, root for the home team, but if they don’t win “it’s a shame” — not a calamity. Can you imagine arm-linked fans swaying to such a sweetly corny song of early-20th-century innocence — as hard to find today as a manual typewriter or a 20-game winner — at the two-minute warning. …

John Fund looks at voter irregularities in Wisconsin.

…Democratic leaders also worried that a popular amendment to require photo ID at the polls would have been attached to their measure. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has vetoed three previous photo ID laws, even though Democrats such as state Sen. Tim Carpenter of Milwaukee supported them saying he’s seen “eye opening” public support for the idea.

That backing is based on real evidence. In 2004, John Kerry won Wisconsin over George W. Bush by 11,380 votes out of 2.5 million cast. After allegations of fraud surfaced, the Milwaukee police department’s Special Investigative Unit conducted a probe. Its February 2008 report found that from 4,600 to 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots. Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once.

Much of the problem resulted from Wisconsin’s same-day voter law, which allows anyone to show up at the polls, register and then cast a ballot. ID requirements are minimal. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 “same day” voters were invalid. …

In the Hit and Run Blog from Reason, Radley Balko blogs on government failure. Read the post for Balko’s twists on the topic.

…I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.

I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government. …

It appears that Obama is not going to help the Democratic candidate who wants to fill Obama’s Senate seat. Jennifer Rubin explains.

…There are good reasons for Obama’s reticence. For starters, Obama has enough sticky connections to the Illinois corruption racket, so he’s wise to stay away from his former hometown. It seems he might, in fact, have had a conversation with the former governor about that Senate seat and another with a union official to relay his preferences to Blago. (If true, this is at odds with what Obama and his “internal review” related to the public when the Blago story first broke.) Blago’s lawyers are now trying to drag the president in to testify in Blago’s case — which will be going to trial this fall. Yikes!

Moreover, Giannoulias is in deep trouble, and it’s far from certain that Obama can help him. After all, he didn’t help Martha Coakley, Creigh Deeds, or Jon Corzine. Coming up short in his own state would prove embarrassing and tend to confirm that he lacks political mojo. Sometimes it’s better to just stay home. …

John Stossel discusses why capitalism is good.

…I was glad to see the publication of “The 5 Big Lies About American Business” by Michael Medved.

“You can only make a profit in this country by giving people a product or a service that they want,” Medved recently told me. “It’s the golden rule in action.” …

…”This is the suspicion of the profit motive — the idea that if somebody is selflessly serving me, they’re going to treat me better than somebody who wants to make a buck,” Medved said. But “(i)f you think about it in your own life, if somebody is benefiting from his interaction with you … it’s a far more reliable kind of interaction than someone who comes and says I’m in this only for you. …

Speaking of the good of free markets, today is an anniversary of Adam Smith’s first book; The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His namesake blog has the story.

On this day, in 1759, Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was an instant sensation. Since the Greeks, philosophers had tried to work out the basis of human ethics: what it was that made some actions good and others bad. Many, in the age of Enlightenment, thought there must be some rational, logical explanation, and perhaps even some way of measuring the goodness or badness of an action, almost mathematically. Such efforts did not lack ingenuity, but never met with great success.

Smith’s breakthrough was to see ethics as an issue of social psychology. …

David Harsanyi comments on South Park creators stirring up more controversy.

…There is nothing inherently wrong with self-censorship, per se. If slighted groups have the ability to mobilize crowds of people, generate enough negative press and economic pressure to induce a show to rethink its content, hey, that’s the way it works.

We’re only talking about an animated show. But if those who bankroll satirists can be so easily intimidated, shouldn’t we all be troubled about the lesson that sends religious fanatics elsewhere? And what does it say about us?…

Generally it’s good to ignore Chris Matthews, but sometimes he’s partisan to the point of parody. When he is it’s good to use him to kick off the humor section. Lately he has decided to say the GOP voter’s apparent decision to rid the party of RINO’s (Republican’s In Name Only) like Arlen Spector or Charlie Crist is “Stalin-esque” suggesting the party is involved in a purge. A couple of Corner posts deal with this. Jonah Goldberg polishes it off.

… But even here, as Matthews dilutes the meaning of Stalin-esque to nine parts water and one part 2% milk, Matthews still comes out a buffoon. Because if you take out the murder, butchery, and genocide from Stalin-esque, you’re still left with a purge from above. And that is the opposite of what is happening. Arlen Specter is a careerist hack who switched parties because — as he pretty much explicitly explained — he thinks his career is more important than the will of the Republican party. Crist, too, is afraid not of some metaphorical  Commissar with a gun in his desk arbitrarily purging him, but of the voters in his own party, voters he’s counted on, voters he’s raised money from, voters he’s lied to.

It would be Stalin-esque (again in the very watered down sense) if Michael Steele unilaterally booted Crist, et al., from the party over the objections of the rank and file. Instead, the rank and file are turning on the long-anointed establishment candidates. This “purge” is a lot closer to what some romantics call “democracy” than what super-geniuses like Matthews call “Stalin-esque.”

Earlier in the month Matthews had complained about Rush Limbaugh describing the administration as a “regime.” Byron York disposes of that bit of Matthews hypocrisy.

… Perhaps Matthews missed all of those references. If he did, he still might have heard the phrase the many times it was uttered on his own network, MSNBC. For example, on January 8 of this year, Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak said that, “In George Bush’s regime, only one million jobs had been created…” On August 21, 2009, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz referred to something that happened in 2006, when “the Bush regime was still in power.” On October 8, 2007, Democratic strategist Steve McMahon said that “the middle class has not fared quite as well under Bush regime as…” On August 10, 2007, MSNBC played a clip of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan referring to “the people of Iraq and Afghanistan that have been tragically harmed by the Bush regime.” On September 21, 2006, a guest referred to liberals “expressing their dissatisfaction with the Bush regime.” On July 7, 2004, Ralph Nader — appearing with Matthews on “Hardball” — discussed how he would “take apart the Bush regime.” On May 26, 2003, Joe Scarborough noted a left-wing website that “has published a deck of Bush regime playing cards.” A September 26, 2002 program featured a viewer email that said, “The Bush regime rhetoric gets goofier and more desperate every day.”

Finally — you knew this was coming — on June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror. “Let’s go to the Reverend Al Sharpton,” Matthews said. “Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Michael Barone knows what a gangster government looks like.

Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration’s decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.

This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folks got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,” I wrote. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, when the Securities Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, alleging that the firm violated the law when it sold a collaterized debt obligation based on mortgage-backed securities without disclosing that the CDO was assembled with the help of hedge fund investor John Paulson.

On its face the complaint seems flimsy. Paulson has since become famous because his firm made billions by betting against mortgage-backed securities. But he wasn’t a big name then, and the sophisticated firm buying the CDO must have assumed the seller believed its value would go down. …

We have a few items on New Jersey’s new Guv, Chris Christie. First is by George Will.

The bridge spanning the Delaware River connects New Jersey’s capital with this town where the nation’s most interesting governor occasionally eats lunch at Cafe Antonio. It also connects New Jersey’s government with reality.

The bridge is a tutorial on a subject this government has flunked — economics, which is mostly about incentives. At the Pennsylvania end of the bridge, cigarette shops cluster: New Jersey’s per-pack tax is double Pennsylvania’s. In late afternoon, Gov. Chris Christie says, the bridge is congested with New Jersey government employees heading home to Pennsylvania, where the income tax rate is 3 percent, compared with New Jersey’s top rate of 9 percent.

There are 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey, but in November Christie flattened the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. Christie is built like a burly baseball catcher, and since his inauguration just 13 weeks ago, he has earned the name of the local minor-league team — the Trenton Thunder. …

John Fund, noting school funding election results, says the people are with Christie for now.

Overtaxed New Jersey voters sent a clear message in yesterday’s voting on 479 public school budgets: Enough is enough. A stunning 54% of the budgets went down to defeat, the most since the recession year of 1976. The results have clear implications for a bitter power struggle between New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie and the state’s powerful 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs on Christie.

… No wonder labor leaders are going berserk. If Christie wins, Big Labor will get its comeuppance, New Jersey will prosper, and once again liberal governance will be replaced by something better — responsible fiscal conservatism.

Daniel Foster in National Review says you haven’t made it in New Jersey until the unions want you dead.

You haven’t made it in New Jersey until organized labor wants you dead. By that measure, Chris Christie is already one of the most influential governors in the Garden State’s — shall we say, colorful history. Just a few months into his term, Christie has taken the fight to the blood-engorged leech of a public sector so quickly and so hard that one teacher-union apparatchik sent an e-mail to thousands praying for his untimely demise.

But Chris Christie lives. And nearly two-thirds of the state’s bloated school budgets are not so lucky, having perished at the polls — the local tax levy proposed by each school district in New Jersey is subject to voter approval — in greater proportion than in any year since 1976. This is undoubtedly a win for New Jersey taxpayers, who recognize the necessity, if not the palatability, of Christie’s strong fiscal medicine in a state that teeters on the brink of bankruptcy even as it pays the highest tax burden in the nation.

Faced with an $11 billion hole in a $30 billion budget, Christie used his broad constitutional discretion (New Jersey’s is arguably the most powerful governorship in the Union) to wield not a scalpel or an axe, but a scalpel the size of an axe against a Trenton machine rivaled only by Chicago and Albany in sheer size and scope. …

Governor Christie was on the Don Imus show Friday morning. Whatever you think of the iMan, he can do a good interview. Click here to see the two parts of the interview.

Stuart Taylor continues his series on the upcoming Scotus pick. This time he gushes over Merrick Garland.

I recently asserted that any of the four people on the list initially leaked by the White House would be an excellent nominee to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. (See “An Excellent Supreme Court Shortlist,” 4/10/10, p. 15.) Now I’d like to argue that the wisest choice would be Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

I hasten to add that the consensus that Garland would be the least controversial, most easily confirmed nominee is the least of my reasons for praising him.

Nor is my personal relationship with Garland a substantial factor, although full disclosure is in order: We became friendly in law school, working together on the law review in the mid-1970s. We had dinner at each other’s homes years ago and, more recently, have met for lunch once or twice a year. He invited my wife and me, among many others, to his chambers to watch President Obama’s inauguration. Garland has been guarded about his views, and I know nothing about them beyond the public record. But I can testify — as can many others — that he is about as fair-minded, judicious, and straight as a straight-arrow can be.

To be sure, ranking Garland and the three other shortlisters — all people of outstanding integrity and intellect — is a close call. …

Rush Limbaugh has on op-ed in WSJ following along on the Clinton/Obama slander of tea party people.

The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the halls of Congress, from the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq to the anticapitalist protests during International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, we’re used to seeing leftist malcontents take to the streets. Sometimes they’re violent, breaking shop windows with bricks and throwing rocks at police. Sometimes there are arrests. Not all leftists are violent, of course. But most are angry. It’s in their DNA. They view the culture as corrupt and capitalism as unjust.

Now the liberals run the government and they’re using their power to implement their radical agenda. Mr. Obama and his party believe that the election of November 2008 entitled them to make permanent, “transformational” changes to our society. In just 16 months they’ve added more than $2 trillion to the national debt, essentially nationalized the health-care system, the student-loan industry, and have their sights set on draconian cap-and-trade regulations on carbon emissions and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Had President Obama campaigned on this agenda, he wouldn’t have garnered 30% of the popular vote. …

Instapundit tells us how our leaders celebrated Earth Day. They took separate jet entourages to NY.

… On a day when many Americans will be reflecting upon how they can reduce their impact on the environment, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden boarded separate jets in Washington on Earth Day morning to fly 250 miles up the east coast to New York, where they will land at separate airports to attend separate events within a few miles of each other. …

Writing in the Journal, Richard Lindzen says when it comes to global warming, the political class doesn’t get it. Actually, they do. They’re in it for power.

In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the Internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a view into the world of climate research that was revealing and even startling.

In what has come to be known as “climategate,” one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation. The Climatic Research Unit is hardly an obscure outpost; it supplies many of the authors for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Moreover, the emails showed ample collusion with other prominent researchers in the United States and elsewhere.

One might have thought the revelations would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small. …

In the Daily Beast, Mark McKinnon compares the media’s treatment of golfing presidents.

… And here’s how ABC reported an outing after Obama had just returned from a trip to Germany visiting the horror of the Holocaust camps: “Nobody would fault Obama for taking Sunday to catch up on sleep and unwind after the breakneck travel schedule. But instead of vegging out on the couch, Obama returned to the White House for only about 90 minutes, then hopped in his motorcade and went right back to Andrews to get in nine holes of golf at one of the three courses on the base.”

And how about this headline from The Washington Post: “Just the Sport for a Leader Most Driven.” Richard Leiby reports, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.” The article then quotes a sports psychologist who said Obama seemed able to play golf despite the grim reports by the media about the wars and the economy.

That bears repeating. Here is a journalist remarking about Obama that he is “able” to play golf despite war casualties and economic disaster. For Bush, the press couldn’t believe that he would dare golf at such a time, but for Obama they marvel that he can.

Now that’s a double standard that unfortunately we’ve come to expect. When it comes to press coverage of Bush vs. Obama, it’s become par for the course.