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Mark Steyn uses incendiary sarcasm to incite liberals.

Actually, there is a lot of incendiary hate out there — here, for example. The voiceover is by U.S. citizen (and spiritual mentor, most recently, to Major Hasan) Ayman al-Awlaki. He is explaining the rationale for killing identified individuals, including the creators of South Park.

Mr. al-Awlaki says things like, “Harming Allah and his messenger is a reason to encourage Muslims to kill whoever does that.”

Maybe he’d get a worse press if he were to stop pussyfooting around and explicitly incite violence by saying something openly hateful like “I’m becoming very concerned about federal spending.”

David Harsanyi takes a positive view of Americans’ skepticism.

…News of the Pew poll triggered much hand-wringing from enlightened scribblers, unable to comprehend how the “paranoid” electorate wasn’t appropriately enchanted by the Department of Commerce. But as Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill put it, “Distrust of government is an all-American activity. It’s something we do as Americans and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Indeed. Actually, with another ideological perspective, you could easily see the Pew poll as positively uplifting. The survey, after all, finds that Americans have an increasingly healthy attitude, embracing limited government over an “activist government” which, according to a majority, “has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system.”

So an alternative national headline for the “trust” story might have read: “More and more, citizens turn to free enterprise over regulation.” …

Bill Clinton has stirred up a hornet’s nest. In Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson reviews events at Waco.

Bill Clinton’s invocation of Timothy McVeigh in connection with the Tea Party movement caused me to recall my review of a book on the Waco massacre that was a motivation for McVeigh.  The book under review was (by) Reavis, The Ashes of Waco, and it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995.  Re-reading it for the first time in many years, I was struck by this section…

…The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them. [Emphasis added.]

…I was shocked to read in Stone’s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

Ilya Somin says that Timothy McVeigh can’t be called a libertarian.

…you might think that Timothy McVeigh and friends were libertarian foes of big government who hoped that their terrorist attacks would somehow lead to tighter constraints on government power.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. In reality, McVeigh was a neo-Nazi and his attack was inspired by the Turner Diaries, a 1978 tract that advocated the use of terrorism to overthrow the US and establish a government explicitly based on Nazi Germany. If you suffer through the experience of actually reading The Turner Diaries, as I did, you will find that author William Pierce did not support anything remotely resembling limited government; indeed, he explicitly repudiated limited government conservatism in the book. …

…The bottom line is that Clinton and others have drawn an unwarranted connection between “anti-government” movements that seek to limit government spending and regulation and a very different set of groups that have no real objection to big government as such. Instead, they seek to use massive state power to enforce racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazi totalitarianism. No one should confuse that with a genuine anti-government ideology motivated by concerns about the fate of “American freedom.” …

Tony Blankley has seen Clinton’s tactic before.

…By chance, I was on CNN’s “Situation Room” on Friday to comment on Mr. Clinton’s latest attempt to smear anti-tax, anti-big-government grass-roots efforts. Unlike in 1995, now I had the advantage of being familiar with subsequent statements by Clinton aides and others. So, on the show, I quoted from Mr. Clinton’s chief speechwriter in a 2000 interview on PBS’ “Frontline.”

Michael Waldman said, describing Mr. Clinton’s words immediately after the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, that “he also very skillfully used the moment to begin the process of making people wonder about the Republican revolution on Capitol Hill. … And very subtly and appropriately, by planting the national flag in opposition to that (GOP rhetoric and the McVeigh bombing) began to turn the political tide as well.”

…I quoted from a 2001 Associated Press article about McVeigh’s execution, which included his own words: “The siege at Waco (ineptly carried out by Mr. Clinton’s Justice Department) was the defining event in his (McVeigh’s) decision to retaliate against the government with the bombing. … ‘If there would not have been a Waco, I would have put down roots somewhere and not been so unsettled with the fact that my government was a threat to me. Everything that Waco implies was on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years.’ ” Ouch. …

Roger Simon looks at some interesting poll numbers.

…According to a poll published this week by McClaughlin & Associates, 46 percent of Jewish voters would prefer someone else than Obama in the presidency, compared to 42 percent who would re-elect him. That’s only a meagre four percent separation, but that number is stunning considering Obama got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in November. That’s a difference of 32 percent between now and then. Has there been another voting block with that large a swing? There may have been, but I doubt it. Something is clearly going on here. …

But in the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone found that the votes went the other way.

Democrat Ted Deutch has won the Florida 19th district special election over Republican Edward Lynch, apparently by a 62%-35% margin. …

…This is one of the most heavily Jewish congressional districts in the nation, and Deutch’s performance suggests that Barack Obama’s harsh criticism of the Israeli government has not hurt Democratic candidates among Jewish voters. Similarly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election January 19, I found that the Democratic percentages held up pretty well in the most heavily Jewish towns (Brookline, Newton, Sharon). …

In the Huffington Post, Sam Stein reports on the latest Republican strategizing on the Finance Reform bill.

Nine months after he penned a memo laying out the arguments for health care legislation’s destruction, Republican message guru Frank Luntz has put together a playbook to help derail financial regulatory reform.

In a 17-page memo titled, “The Language of Financial Reform,” Luntz urged opponents of reform to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes, and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.

“If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated,” Luntz wrote. “This is your critical advantage. Washington’s incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support.”…

From the White House Blog, Deputy Communications Director Jen Psaki gives the administration’s line.

…One false criticism we’re hearing is this: that the Senate bill will allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial firms.  What they won’t tell you is that they are taking their marching orders from a partisan political consultant who has told them that the best way to oppose real reform is to link it to the bank bailouts.  In fact, the polling memo they’re working from explicitly states that “the best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.”  No matter what the bill actually does, they’re going to call it a bailout because that’s what the polls tell them to do. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts Frank Luntz’s response to the White House spin.

… When we presented dial session participants the Financial Reform legislation as it was written in the House, they reacted most negatively to the bailout provisions contained within the bill.  This shouldn’t be surprising.  In the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and other major financial publications — as well as from some of this country’s leading economic experts — they too have highlighted the bailout provisions and called the legislation a “gift to big banks.”

…Unfortunately, the leaders of this Congress are hell-bent on pushing through legislation without reasonable public information, and that has to stop.  Too many mistakes are made when important legislation is rushed.  Even President Obama, who first denied there was a bailout, is now asking that the $50 billion bailout administrative fund be eliminated from the Senate bill.

Why eliminate a bailout fund if it didn’t exist?  Because the legislative process was slowed, people got a chance to read it, review it and comment on it.  Better to do it right than do it fast. …

Also on the Corner, Daniel Foster comments.

You’ll be surprised to hear that the Dodd bill apparently has a loophole or two in it. But don’t worry, one anonymous lobbyist told HuffPo what you’ll need to do to get your financial firm into one of your own:

“Obtaining a carve-out isn’t rocket science,” said a Republican financial services lobbyist. “Just give Chairman Dodd [D-Conn.] and Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] a s***load of money.”

Ah, markets at work: Wall Street has a s***load of money and needs loopholes, Washington has a s***load of loopholes and needs money.

Michio Kaku, in the WSJ, gives possible scenarios for the Iceland volcano. Check out the amazing photos that came from The Boston Globe.

…The worse case scenario, which is unlikely, involves this eruption triggering another, larger eruption. There are 35 active volcanoes in Iceland, and one eruption has been known to set off another. The worse case happened in 1783, with an eruption lasting eight months. That eruption killed off much of the livestock and agriculture in Iceland, which in turn caused the death of about 25% of the island’s population.

The eruption also eventually killed tens of thousands of people on the Continent. Benjamin Franklin was in Paris at the time and was one of the first to connect the rapid change in local weather that collapsed European agriculture with a volcanic explosion. 1783 became known as the horrible “year without summer.” Europe plunged into a period of poverty that lasted for years. Some historians believe that this may have contributed to the French Revolution of 1789. …

Christopher Hitchens paints a portrait of Icelandic culture.

…Until very recently, you had your elemental choice between lamb and cod if you were an Icelander—the near-tundra of the interior (where the Apollo mission trained in the world’s closest approximation to a moonscape) has a few swaths of grass for hardy sheep. The same simplicity on the seashore: “Fish or Die” was the motto until the big shoals began to run out. Such was Iceland’s work ethic that on contact with the European Union, it soon became a dynamo of startups and finance, winning international plaudits until the implosion of its banking system very nearly ripped through the euro two years ago and forced Britain to seize Icelandic assets using anti-terrorist legislation. If Iceland were a mouse, it could be said to have roared, and more than once. …

In Yahoo News, Carlo Piovano discusses the worst-case scenario.

…Scientists fear tremors at the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano could trigger an even more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano — creating a worst-case scenario for the airline industry and travelers around the globe.

A Katla eruption would be 10 times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbor, which has already brought European air travel to a standstill for five days and promises severe travel delays for days more. …

Also in Yahoo News, Andrea Thompson writes about the phenomenon behind the dramatic lightning in the volcanic clouds.

…Scientists don’t know exactly how lightning is created in an ash cloud, however. But they expect it’s a result of particles rubbing together, generating friction and electrical charges.

The volcano lightning may be generated in a similar way to that in normal thunderstorms in a process scientists have dubbed “dirty thunderstorms.” In a normal thunderstorm, ice particles rub together to generate an electrical charge; in the case of a volcano, rock fragments, ash and ice may all rub together to produce this charge. …

In the Corner, Michael Rubin passes along some Icelandic humor.

…Iceland goes bankrupt, then it manages to set itself on fire. This has insurance scam written all over it.

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Using his knowledge of slavery around the world, Thomas Sowell has interesting thoughts about the limits of power.

… Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.

The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.

Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.

Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.

Mark Steyn looks at the decline of British society.

… In the United Kingdom, “civilized society” cedes turf remorselessly: the highest drug use in Europe, highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. Britain’s social disintegration ought to be a major election issue, but the governing class is always the most insulated and thus the last to notice, even when the “underclass” is all over the map. Alan Jay Lerner’s biggest hit concerned a man who took a “creature from the gutter” and transformed her into an English lady. Today, an entire country is downwardly mobile. …

We have four items on the Clinton/Obama attempt to hang the Oklahoma City bombing on the Tea Parties. The NRO staff posted some of Charles Krauthammer’s comments.

…On Bill Clinton’s comparing the rhetoric preceding the Oklahoma City bombing to that of the Tea Party movement:

…When a Republican is in power, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. And when a Democrat is in power, dissent is near treasonous and a call to mutiny and insurrection. This is really disgraceful.

Peter Wehner also criticizes President Clinton for his comments.

…The problem for Mr. Clinton is that his concern about the dangers of incendiary rhetoric seems to have taken flight during the two terms of the Bush presidency, as well as during his own. Regarding the former, there was, for starters, the 2006 film, The Death of a President, on the assassination of President Bush. Mr. Clinton did not, to my knowledge, condemn the movie in a front-page story in the New York Times or in a major speech.

Moreover, George W. Bush was, during his two terms in office, routinely called a war criminal, an international terrorist, and compared to Hitler [see a photo gallery here and here]. Signs with bullet holes in Bush’s forehead, with blood running down his face, were all part of the fun and games. The president was accused of moral cowardice by Al Gore, of being a liar and the anti-Christ, and of being a totalitarian and dictatorial leader. Members of Congress such as Keith Ellison compared the attacks on September 11 to the Reichstag fire.

…And now Mr. Clinton is preaching to us about not demonizing our opponents and about the importance of not crossing rhetorical lines. Can a Clinton sermon on the importance of fidelity and the gift of celibacy be far behind? …

Jennifer Rubin addresses the reason for Clinton’s agitation.

…You don’t see the liberal attack machine getting this bent out of shape over nothing. As Bill [Kristol] remarked, “The Obama administration has given rise to a more powerful conservatism than has existed for 20 years, since Ronald Reagan in this country.” And it’s not the GOP Beltway crowd that has done this — it’s ordinary citizens. I don’t think Bill was exaggerating when he said: “The Republican establishment is the threat to the future of the Republican Party and conservatism. The Tea Party is the best thing that’s happened for conservatives.” (You need look no further than the Florida Senate race, where the insiders picked the hapless Charlie Crist, and the Tea Party amateurs identified Marco Rubio as a rising star.) And so the liberals attack and make ludicrous connections to murders like Timothy McVeigh or concoct racist allegations that do not stand up to scrutiny.

The irony is great, of course. The community organizer has stirred the sleeping beast and is now the object of its ire. The Democrats want to shush them all up. I suspect the more the Democrats shush, the more irate the citizen protesters will become. It is proof of how disconnected the ruling party is from popular sentiment and how scared the Democrats are of their own constituents.

Debra Saunders addresses Clinton’s faulty logic.

…When a former president seizes such a tragedy for partisan purposes, it is no wonder a new Pew Research poll found that a modest 22 percent of voters say they trust Washington to do the right thing most of the time. …

…Think about that for a minute: If anyone were to cast blame for the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 dead, or any other attacks within American military bases on the anti-war movement, then that assertion would be followed by howls of outrage, and deservedly so. It would be absurd to suggest that opposition to the war be misconstrued as promoting violence against U.S. troops. …

Ed Morrissey discusses the economic effects of one insurance mandate in New York.

Perhaps the New York Times needs to change its well-known motto to All the News That’s Fit to Print … Eventually.  In today’s edition, buried in its Regional section, comes an analysis of the health-insurance reforms imposed by the state of New York over fifteen years ago.  Like ObamaCare, the state required insurance carriers to issue policies to people with pre-existing conditions as a means of making the industry more “fair” and imposed community pricing rather than risk-based premiums.  How did that work for New Yorkers?  About the way ObamaCare critics predicted:

“…New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.

Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.” …”

David Broder fills us in on Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker. Says there might be another GOP upset.

Before there was a Scott Brown, amazing the political world by capturing Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, there was a Charles D. Baker Jr., challenging the Democratic grip on Beacon Hill by announcing that he would try to deny Barack Obama’s favorite governor, Deval Patrick, a second term.

Baker, a 53-year-old Harvard grad, was no run-of-the-mill candidate. His GOP credentials were established during the years that he worked as the budget chief for Republican Govs. William Weld and Paul Cellucci, and his business background was augmented by his more recent service as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the second-largest insurer in the commonwealth.

But on the day he entered the race last July, Baker said he supported abortion rights and same-sex marriage. “My brother’s gay, and he’s married, and he lives in Massachusetts, so I’m for it. Is that straight enough?” he told the Boston Globe. …

Roger Simon does a travelogue on his trip to foreign lands – Texas and Nascar.

I was standing in the center of the Texas Motor Speedway Monday morning, staring up at my … now I guess I could say friend … Governor Rick Perry of Texas as he was giving a brief welcome for the annual Sprint Cup, when he boomed out the words with his fist thrust in the air:

“In Texas, we love our guns, religion and NASCAR!”

The crowd went wild and I knew I wasn’t in the Hollywood Hills anymore, Dorothy. I was in reddest of red state America and this blue state boy — born in NY, father from Massachusetts, educated in New Hampshire and Connecticut, most of his life in LA — was lovin’ it. …

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Rick Richman comments on the lack of discussion about one of the most important issues of the day.

Mark Steyn predicts future historians will marvel at the omission of any discussion of Iran at this week’s Nuclear Security Summit:

“For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany. …”

…It was all there: the self-referential view of history, the rhetoric divorced from reality, the disingenuous let-me-be-clear assurance, the implicit denigration of his country for its supposed sins, the celebration of the moral leadership he would bring to the world, the panoply of proposals – all delivered while rockets were fired and centrifuges were spun, with no U.S. response other than a conference at which the rockets and centrifuges were not discussed.

Nile Gardiner says that missing the funeral of Poland’s president should have been handled differently.

…The White House did subsequently announce that the president would attend the funeral ceremony in Krakow this past weekend, but like many world leaders he was unable to do so due to the grounding of flights over much of Europe.

One would have thought that President Obama might have used the time he would have spent in Poland paying his respects to the Polish fallen. For example he could have visited the recently erected Victims of Communism memorial in Washington, or at the very least have signed the condolence book at the Polish Embassy. But what did he choose to do instead? Play yet another round of golf. …

Robert Samuelson discusses government spending and the VAT.

…Europe’s widespread VATs aren’t models of simplicity. Among the European Union’s 27 members, the basic rate varies from 15 percent (Cyprus, Luxembourg) to 25 percent (Denmark, Hungary and Sweden). But there are many preferential rates and exemptions. In Ireland, food is taxed at three rates (zero, 4.8 percent and 13.5 percent). In the Netherlands, hotels are taxed at 6 percent. An American VAT would stimulate ferocious lobbying for favorable treatment. …

…A VAT is no panacea; deficit reduction can’t be painless. We’ll need both spending cuts and tax increases. A VAT might be the least bad tax, though my preference is for energy taxes. But what’s wrong with the simplistic VAT advocacy is that it deemphasizes spending cuts. The consequences would be unnecessarily high taxes that would weaken the economy and discriminate against the young. It would become harder for families to raise children. VAT enthusiasts need to answer two questions: What government spending would you cut? And how high would your VAT rates go?

In City Journal, Steven Malanga gives us an eye-opening look at the state employees’ unions that have brought California to its knees. He reviews how the unions got started and some of the stunts they have pulled. Below he explains some of the legislation and the politics that have created the fiscal crisis.

…Perhaps the most costly was far-reaching 1999 legislation that wildly increased pension benefits for state employees. It included an unprecedented retroactive cost-of-living adjustment for the already retired and a phase-out of a cheaper pension plan that Governor Wilson had instituted in 1991. The deal also granted public-safety workers the right to retire at 50 with 90 percent of their salaries. To justify the incredible enhancements, Davis and the legislature turned to CalPERS, whose board was stocked with members who were either union reps or appointed by state officials who themselves were elected with union help. …

…The second budget-busting deal of the Davis era was the work of the teachers’ union. In 2000, the CTA began lobbying to have a chunk of the state’s budget surplus devoted to education. In a massive rally in Sacramento, thousands of teachers gathered on the steps of the capitol, some chanting for TV cameras, “We want money! We want money!” Behind the scenes, Davis kept up running negotiations with the union over just how big the pot should be. “While you were on your way to Sacramento, I was driving there the evening of May 7, and the governor and I talked three times on my cell phone,” CTA president Wayne Johnson later boasted to members. “The first call was just general conversation. The second call, he had an offer of $1.2 billion. . . . On the third call, he upped the ante to $1.5 billion.” Finally, in meetings, both sides agreed on $1.84 billion. As Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters later observed, that deal didn’t merely help blow the state’s surplus; it also locked in higher baseline spending for education. The result: “When revenues returned to normal, the state faced a deficit that eventually not only cost Davis his governorship in 2003 but has plagued his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Having wielded so much power effortlessly, the unions miscalculated the antitax, anti-Davis sentiment that erupted when, shortly after his autumn 2002 reelection, Davis announced that the state faced a massive deficit. The budget surprise spurred an enormous effort to recall Davis, which the unions worked to defeat, with the SEIU spending $2 million. At the same time, union leaders used their influence in the Democratic Party to try to save Davis, telling other Democrats that they would receive no union support if they abandoned the governor. “If you betray us, we won’t forget it,” the head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor proclaimed to Democrats. Only when it became apparent from polls that the recall would succeed did the unions shift their support to Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who finished a distant second to Schwarzenegger. Taxpayer groups were euphoric.

But as they and Schwarzenegger soon discovered, most of California’s government machinery remained union-controlled—especially the Democratic state legislature, which blocked long-term reform. Frustrated, Schwarzenegger backed a series of 2005 initiatives sponsored by taxpayer groups to curb the unions and restrain government growth, including one that made it harder for public-employee unions to use members’ dues for political purposes. The controversial proposals sparked the most expensive statewide election in American history. Advocacy groups and businesses spent a staggering $300 million (some of it, however, coming from drug companies trying to head off an unrelated initiative). The spending spree included $57 million from the CTA, which mortgaged its Sacramento headquarters for the cause. All of the initiatives went down to defeat. …

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Writing in National Review, John Bolton has thoughts on the treaty with Russia.

On April 8, in Prague, the United States and Russia signed what they call the “New START” bilateral arms-control agreement, important specifics of which, in hallmark Obama-administration fashion (see health care), were still being negotiated. Nonetheless, the president and his acolytes are calling for the treaty’s swift ratification.

The Senate would better protect our country’s future by actually deliberating before rushing over the precipice. A vital constitutional imperative, the Senate’s role in making binding treaty commitments, is at stake. While some consider it passé to insist that legislators read and understand what they vote upon, senators should insist on their constitutional prerogatives, drawing a line in the sand on this national-security issue.

In fact, there is no compelling reason for the Obama-Medvedev treaty, and there are many reasons to fear its impact. Since the still-incomplete text has just become public, continuing careful analysis will be necessary before we can come to definitive understandings and conclusions. Nonetheless, our very uncertainty lights the road ahead for arduous questioning, ranging from the assumptions of the negotiators to the consequences of implementing the treaty’s provisions. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino provides some background to the charges behind “Goldman’s Fall From Grace.”

Before Goldman Sachs was lampooned in the media, famously labeled by Rolling Stone magazine the evil “vampire squid,” and became the symbol on Main Street for all that was wrong on Wall Street, the big firm was already the most hated investment bank among investment bankers.

But now Goldman has even bigger problems, having been accused by the SEC of securities fraud. The SEC claims that Goldman sold a complex type of mortgage bond, known as a collateralized debt obligation, to investors without alerting them that hedge-fund manager John Paulson had selected the same bonds as likely to default.

Paulson made money because he was actually shorting the bonds (a trade that becomes profitable when prices decline), as Goldman was selling the bonds to investors, suggesting they buy them because the housing market would continue to boom.

These allegations only further the case for Goldman’s dismal reputation on the Street. …

Another Goldman has had a fall from grace; sort of. We refer to a kerfuffle between two of our favorites; David Goldman (AKA Spengler) and John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and the Contentions blog. Goldman wrote a particularly harsh post about Obama on April 9th. Most everything Goldman writes finds its way into Pickings. This did not; in part because of the language and because the occasion for the post was a story in the Israeli Daily Maariv which we could not confirm and which later proved to be incorrect in substantive areas. See Roger Simon. There is enough reason to be aghast at the policies of this administration without getting personal. And, in fact, given Obama’s family background, it is proof of some extraordinary strengths of the man to have left that milieu behind and fashioned a good marriage and nurturing home for his children.

Our guide for this will be Michael Ledeen who is, more or less, sympathetic to David Goldman’s point of view.

… David has been saying these things for quite a while, and has offered plenty of evidence to explain why he believes them.  John hasn’t felt obliged to pick a fight before,  and I think he would have done better if had taken a bit of time to study the facts of Obama’s life.  Contrary to John’s dismissal of any Indonesian influence (he was only there for “less than a year”), for example, young Barack spent four important years (from age 6 to 10) there, and attended a Muslim school (which wasn’t “very Muslim” actually, but I digress).  And his characterization of Mrs Obama’s family as “lower middle class from Mercer Island, Washington” is not quite right either:  the parents were from Kansas, and lived briefly on Mercer Island (which is a pretty pricey neighborhood, at least in recent years);  the mother was a bank vice president, and I can’t find an account suggesting that Obama’s mother had an economically challenged childhood.  That came later, as a result of moving to Indonesia.

I totally agree with John–indeed I have written it myself–when he says that Obama’s view of the world is of a piece with the political correctness now rampant in American colleges and universities.  His mother was a trailblazer in this regard, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say it.

I’m baffled when John accuses David of somehow trying to make the president “responsible” for his mother.  It’s surely important to pay attention to biography, as John no doubt agrees in calmer moments.  I don’t understand his complaint about “speculation about…sexual history.”  It’s not speculative to say that she married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, and produced children from both. …

More on this from Jonah Goldberg and Corner readers.

… This strikes me as a not unreasonable conjecture given Obama’s own narrative in Dreams from My Father, and given that it has been a commonplace on the hard left since at least Vietnam to affect—and internalize—an alienated stance against America. Obama’s come out of a more ideologically pure left-wing environment than any major Democratic figure in a while. That he might share its tendency to prefer America as it should be to America as it is isn’t out of left field. It might be wrong, but it’s not loony.

I mean, all of this is kind of silly psychoanalytic speculation, but if we understand Goldman’s clunky phrase “third-world anthropologist” to mean someone’s whose consideration of American society and politics is sort of at a abstracted distance and whose emotive sympathies lie more with the damnés de la terre than the bitter Sky-God, boom-stick clingers…I don’t see where it’s wrong, per se, or where it fails to explain his conduct. …

Christopher Booker says we need to keep exploring climategate.

If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)

Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever. …

Telegraph, UK has comments on our new space program.

A few years ago, on a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, I was surprised to see dozens of vultures perched on fences outside the museum. Apparently, they’re permanent residents. Were I to return today, I suspect those vultures would look very different. What were once ugly birds are now potent symbols. NASA is dying.

Doom has come in the form of President Barack Obama, who yesterday unveiled plans for a stripped-down space agency during a speech at the Kennedy Space Centre. The speech was more like a funeral oration than a new policy announcement, since the president’s intentions have been made abundantly clear over the past two months. Nevertheless, while there was little surprise in what Obama said, the sense of betrayal felt in Florida was no less bitter. …

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Some of our favorites continue to find fault with last week’s faux summit. Mark Steyn first.

In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand …but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.

Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. …

… In a characteristic display of his now-famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, “You would think they should be saying ‘thank you’” – for all he’s done for them. Right now, the fellows saying “thank you” are the mullahs, the Politburo, Czar Putin and others hostile to U.S. interests who’ve figured out they now have the run of the planet. …

Charles Krauthammer next.

… So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium.

What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what might have ensued.

Let us stipulate that sequestering nuclear material is a good thing. But, it is a minor thing, particularly when Iran is off the table and Pakistan is creating new plutonium for every ounce of Canadian uranium shipped to the United States.

Perhaps calculating that removing relatively small amounts of fissile material from stable, friendly countries didn’t quite do the trick, Obama proudly announced that the United States and Russia were disposing of 68 tons of plutonium. Unmentioned was the fact that this agreement was reached 10 years ago — and, under the new protocol, doesn’t begin to dispose of the plutonium until 2018. Feeling safer now?

The appropriate venue for such minor loose-nuke agreements is a meeting of experts in Geneva who, after working out the details, get their foreign ministers to sign off. Which made this parade of world leaders in Washington an exercise in misdirection — distracting attention from the looming threat from Iran, regarding which Obama’s 15 months of terminally naive “engagement” has achieved nothing but the loss of 15 months. …

In Contentions, John Steele Gordon notes the garbage the administration’s house economists must spew. His targets are Krugman and Summers.

If an astronomer were to casually claim that Ptolemy was right and the sun revolves around the earth, or if a paleontologist were to suddenly subscribe to Archbishop Ussher’s idea that the world was created as we know it now in the night preceding October 23, 4004 BCE, they would be laughed out of their disciplines. The evidence for the modern understanding of such matters is, after all, overwhelming. So to make such a claim would require massive and unequivocal data to back it up.

However, if an economist does the equivalent, the entire profession, instead of collapsing in laughter, says, ” . . . . oh, look! A squirrel!” Economists, it seems, suffer no loss of respect by their peers if they utter ex cathedra pronouncements that are in flat contradiction of the most basic tenets of the discipline. All they have to do is to be advancing a political agenda at the time, and all — no matter how ridiculous — is forgiven. …

David Harsanyi looks at Tea Party folks.

Yesterday, I waded into a mass of Tea Party protesters gathered at the front of Colorado’s Capitol and completely forgot to brace myself for a “small-scale mimicry of Kristall- nacht” (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich once characterized these events).

As it turns out, earlier I happened to peruse a new CBS/New York Times poll detailing the attitudes of Tea Party activists, who, it turns out, are more educated than the average American, more reflective of mainstream anxieties than any populist movement in memory and more closely aligned philosophically with the wider electorate than any big city newsroom in America.

What seemed to be the biggest news derived from the poll nationally? A plurality of Tea Party activists do not deem Sarah Palin qualified for the presidency — proving, I suppose, that some people have the ability to be exceptionally fond of a political celebrity without elevating her to sainthood. …

Robert Samuelson says when it comes to taxes, today might be the good old days.

Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.

//

Why? For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren’t paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent. By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don’t pay. (Of course, this doesn’t mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)

The personal exemption and standard deduction, combined with the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, shield many poor and middle-class families from the income tax. In 2009 they got extra protection from President Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit, which was $400 for single workers (phasing out at $75,000 of income) and $800 for a couple (phasing out at $150,000 of income). Without that credit, probably only 40 percent of households or less wouldn’t have paid income taxes. President Obama has proposed that the credit be renewed for 2011. But given the massive federal budget deficits, there’s a good chance that the credit will someday expire.

So that’s one pressure for higher taxes. But it’s peanuts compared to the real threat: an aging America. …

A couple of Corner Posts from Mark Steyn. One on Obama’s latest biography and one on Apartheid practiced by Palestinians.

… Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israel Defense Forces general who now serves as Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic affairs minister, posed the following query in an interview published in the Jerusalem Post: “If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews? Why do those areas have to be Judenrein? …

The next appointment to the Court is critical, right? Stuart Taylor says not so much.

At both ends of the ideological spectrum, politicians, activists, journalists, and academics like to stress how big a change the next Supreme Court justice could make in the course of the law. The appointment will, says the conventional wisdom, be among President Obama’s most important legacies.

Many also stress how far to the right (say liberals) or left (say conservatives) of center the Supreme Court has been in recent years, the better to dramatize the need to correct the perceived imbalance.

And the dominant media image has been of “the conservative Court” (recent articles in The Washington Post), or “the Supreme Court’s conservative majority” (New York Times editorials), or a Court “as conservative as it’s been in nearly a century” (Newsweek commentary by my friend Dahlia Lithwick).

All this brings to mind three contrarian theses.

First, it simply won’t make much difference in the next five or so years — if ever — whom Obama picks from the lists of moderately liberal, extremely liberal, and just plain liberal candidates leaked by the White House.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single case or issue that would foreseeably be decided differently depending on whether the nominee turns out to be the most or the least liberal of those under serious consideration. …

WSJ’s Weekend Interview is with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

‘I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer,” explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal’s editorial board. “And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I’ve done, they figure: ‘He’s just crazy enough to do it.’”

Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall’s campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie’s size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy—that he wasn’t serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.

Listen to Mr. Christie’s take on the state of his state: “We are, I think, the failed experiment in America—the best example of a failed experiment in America—on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times.” New Jersey’s residents now suffer under the nation’s highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven’t come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011. …

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Jake Tapper noticed one of the “accomplishments” of the recent nuclear summit was a retread. This reminds Pickerhead of his first trip to Moscow. It was a trade mission that allowed my visit to pose as a business expense. After one general meeting that accomplished little beyond creating hot air, I remarked to my interpreter, “This is nothing but a circle jerk.” Soon as I said that, I knew I had tasked his English skills too much. But, that’s what we had in Washington this week.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced today that Russia would shut down its final plutonium reactor, the ADE-2 reactor that has producing weapons-grade plutonium for nearly 52 years in Zheleznogorsk, a once-secret city in Siberia.

According to 2008 report from the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the ADE-2 reactor was originally supposed to shut down last year, after construction of a replacement plant in Zheleznogorsk was completed. …

Corner post from Seth Leibsohm is a good summit summary.

… And if you want to know how badly our foreign muscle has weakened, this story in the Brazilian press this morning informs you: “Brazil has joined forces with Turkey in opposition to sanctions against Iran.”

So, in sum: We had a summit that accomplished nothing except a) angering the American and international press corps, b) closing down Washington for two days, and c) misleading everyone for 24 hours that China and others were on board with something to help stop Iran when that just wasn’t true. This just isn’t serious foreign or defense policy. In fact, it’s a dangerous, even Neronian policy — except it won’t be Rome that will burn.

More summit summations from Nile Gardner in Telegraph Blogs, UK. He contrasts the summit to Netanyahu’s speech at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

… Netanyahu’s warning about the dangers of appeasement is exactly the message the world needs to hear. In contrast, the Nuclear Security Summit has largely been a feel-good exercise by a president who consistently projects weakness over strength, and for world leaders who enjoyed an extravagant, two-day foreign junket at US taxpayers’ expense in the capital of the free world. …

… large political summits don’t necessarily make the world safer, but strong American leadership in the face of tyrannical regimes definitely does, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated. Unfortunately that kind of backbone is in short supply at the White House today, with a president more concerned with PR spin than confronting and defeating evil on the world stage.

Marty Peretz has finally seen the light and understands what a foreign policy disaster this administration has become. The occasion for this revelation was knowledge Syria has armed Hezbollah with Scud missiles. They have a range of 430 miles and can strike Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Israel’s nuclear installations at Dimona.

I don’t know whether I should have ended the headline above with a question mark or an exclamation point. The first of my options would suggest that the president might actually learn from his palpable mistakes. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, to tell you the truth, I felt that would be playing with my readers. My alternative would hint—more than hint, I suppose—at my utter exasperation with Obama’s foreign policy. I don’t really want to go there. Still, are you not really exasperated with him and with it? Or are you one of those who care only about domestic affairs? …

… And, thinking about the utter collapse of American policy in so many areas of the world, I wonder why there is so little oversight and even so little questioning of the diplomatic apparatus by the Senate.

Peretz also says that Obama’s opinion on Iranian sanctions is just “blather.”

Sometimes a journalist grasps an intricate situation and explains it in just one simple sentence. Here is what the distinguished Timesman John Vinocur has to say in today’s International Herald Tribune about Obama’s policy of sanctions:

“The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which, although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to give the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep.” …

When it comes to Obama and the Mid-East, no scales were coming off Roger Simon’s eyes.

Barack Obama has an Israel problem. I won’t say a Jewish problem, because that wouldn’t be “politically correct.” As we all know, anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism (or is it?).

Anyway, the President’s Israel problem couldn’t be more obvious and it seems to have increased, or should I say metastasized, in parallel with his popular decline, almost in the way that classic Jew hatred increased during times of economic downturn (Weimar Republic, etc.) Not that anyone who spent two decades in Reverend Wright’s church with its hero worship of Louis Farrakhan and generally racist tinge was likely to be philo-Semitic. But things have gotten worse. Indeed, his very close friends at the New York Times are now reporting that the President, in the wake of the supposedly surprise announcement of new Jewish housing units in Jerusalem, “has seized control of Middle East policy himself.” They go on to note : “Mr. Obama, incensed by that snub, has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a list of demands, and relations between the United States and Israel have fallen into a chilly standoff.”

Incensed by the snub? List of demands. Chilly standoff? In other words, as we say in Hollywood, this time it’s personal. …

… his behavior has certainly not won the hearts and minds of the Israeli public. A gigantic 91% oppose Obama’s possible attempt to impose a deal on Israel, an unheard of number in opposition to an American president – and that from a populace that tends to the liberal, a country where one of the few, if only, socialist successes ever flourished, the kibbutz.

Of course, Obama’s actions are making every Israeli into a dreaded Likudnik. Why wouldn’t they? When a man acts on inchoate impulses tinged with rage, there’s no telling what he will do. If this goes on much longer, he may even change the voting patterns of the American Jewish public. Stranger things have happened. Just wait.

Jonah Goldberg says Sarkozy is not giving up France’s nukes. A reader writes him;

… Sarkozy’s announcement on nukes demonstrates that we’ve crossed some sort of line, and not a good one. This is one of those ‘you know you’re in trouble when…’ moments. You know we’re in trouble when the president of France makes more sense on national security than the president of the United States.

A couple of our favorites look at the Supremes. David Harsanyi is wondering if the American people think like Justice Stevens.

… Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that government should continue to use racial quotas and preferences rather than allow citizens the freedom to succeed or fail on their own merits — or even their own luck — rather than color of their skin?

Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that local government should be permitted to throw American citizens off their own property and out of their homes? Do they concur that government should then be able to hand that property over to other private citizens simply because they can pay more taxes? Because, in Kelo vs. City of New London, Stevens, writing for the majority, radically expanded the idea of property as “public use.”

It’s no mystery why Leahy would want to turn the tables on conservatives and make the confirmation hearing about corporations rather than the Constitution or the reckless manner in which justices like Stevens treat it. I would do the same if my agenda’s success was intricately tied to the pliability of the document.

In a very interesting piece, Stuart Taylor thinks he knows why many GOP appointments turn out to be duds like Stevens, or Souter, or Warren, or O’Conner, or Kennedy, or …….

… Blackmun and O’Connor as well as Stevens, on the other hand, clearly “evolved,” as liberal journalists and academics have said approvingly. Their ideological drift has to some extent mirrored the direction of general public opinion, such as diminishing bias against gay people. But the public has never moved sharply to the left — as has Stevens and as did O’Connor and Blackmun — on abortion rights, racial preferences or church-state issues such as school prayer.

While many liberals see this trend as a case of acquiring wisdom on the job, conservative critics including Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have claimed that their more liberal Republican-appointed colleagues have been moved neither by wisdom, nor by legal principle, nor by general public opinion, but by the leftward march of the intellectual elite, especially in the media and academia.

While I would not dismiss the liberal view, the conservative critique seems more plausible. Indeed, it would be only human, as I wrote in a 2003 column, for justices who arrive without settled ideological convictions to evolve in a liberal direction.

The justices’ reputations are determined in large part by mostly liberal news reporters, commentators and law professors and by liberal feminist, civil rights and professional interest groups such as the American Bar Association. Newly appointed justices who vote conservative are often portrayed as uncompassionate right-wing ideologues. Those who move leftward win praise for enlightenment. (“I ain’t evolving,” the aggressively conservative Thomas has reportedly told clerks.) And the bright young law clerks — the justices’ closest professional collaborators — tend to come from elite law schools where conservative professors are rare birds and general public opinion is widely seen as benighted. …

J. Rubin posts on a Marco Rubio. He might be a modest politician. Is there such a thing?

… Rubio has a bright future that will only get brighter if he proves to be a thoughtful and knowledgable force in the Senate. That he sees himself as not remotely ready for the White House is further evidence of his good character and common sense, qualities in short supply among many pols.

Joel Kotkin says families are not dying out and in fact, are becoming more important.

For over a generation pundits, policymakers and futurists have predicted the decline of the American family. Yet in reality, the family, although changing rapidly, is becoming not less but more important.

This can be traced to demographic shifts, including immigration and extended life spans, as well as to changes of attitudes among our increasingly diverse population. Furthermore, severe economic pressures are transforming the family–as they have throughout much of history–into the ultimate “safety net” for millions of people.

Those who argue the family is less important note that barely one in five households–although more than one-third of the total population–consists of a married couple with children living at home. Yet family relations are more complex than that; people remain tied to one another well after they first move away. My mother, at 87, is still my mother, after all, as well as the grandmother to my daughters. Those ties still dominate her actions and attitudes.

Critically, marriage, the basis of the family, is also far from a dying institution. …

Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics speculates about how good it might be in the November elections. We will see if there are enough people who want to do the work.

Though Election Day is still months away, pundits have already begun to speculate on possible outcomes for this year’s midterms. There’s a general consensus that Democrats will lose seats in November, but beyond that opinions vary widely on how big those losses might be. Some argue that because of the advance notice, passage of health care, and an improving economy (or some combination of all three), Democrats will be able to limit their losses significantly. Others are predicting a repeat of 1994, when Democrats lost 50+ seats and control of the House.

So how bad could 2010 get for the Democrats? Let me say upfront that I tend to agree with analysts who argue that if we move into a “V”-shaped recovery and President Obama’s job approval improves, Democratic losses could be limited to twenty or twenty-five seats.

That said, I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility …

The Economist says people can listen to your keyboard clicks and find out what you’re typing. Yipes!

CLATTERING keyboards may seem the white noise of the modern age, but they betray more information than unwary typists realise. Simply by analysing audio recordings of keyboard clatter, computer scientists can now reconstruct an accurate transcript of what was typed—including passwords. And in contrast to many types of computer espionage, the process is simple, requiring only a cheap microphone and a desktop computer. …

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In Commentary, Michael Totten discusses Iran with a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name “Wally” inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he’s issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.

…A military attack against Iran should be rolled out only if every conceivable peaceful solution fails first. Striking Iran would, in all likelihood, ignite several Middle Eastern wars all at once. Hamas and Hezbollah would bombard Israel with missile attacks. Lebanon and Gaza would both come under massive counterbattery fire. The war could easily spill over into Iraq and put American soldiers at risk.

The above scenario may sound like the worst, short of nuclear war, but it isn’t. The worst-case scenario is a regional war that fails to stop Iran’s nuclear program while keeping the regime in place. If the Israelis decide to use force, the nuclear facilities should not be the target. The government should be the target. And the U.S. should back Israel’s play and even assist it, no matter how enraged American officials might be. The last thing any of us needs is a bloodied Iranian government with delusions of invincibility that later acquires the weapons of genocide and then sets out for revenge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “If you shoot at a king you must kill him.” …

Jennifer Rubin has more on foreign policy, this time on South Korea.

It really doesn’t pay to be an ally of the U.S. these days. That status confers on a nation’s leaders the opportunity to be publicly berated and to see prior agreements evaporate (e.g., the Bush-Sharon settlement deal, the missile-defense arrangement with Eastern Europe). And when it comes to our allies’ security and economic needs, Obama nearly always has some higher priority. A case in point (another one) is South Korea. Fred Hiatt writes:

In a world of dangerously failed states and willful challengers to American leadership, South Korea is an astoundingly successful democracy that wants to be friends. But will America say yes? That seemed to be the question perplexing President Lee Myung-bak when I interviewed him here last Wednesday, though he described relations at the moment as excellent. …  The two nations have signed a free-trade agreement that Lee believes would — in addition to bringing obvious economic benefit to both sides — seal a crucial alliance and promote stability throughout Northeast Asia. But President Obama has yet to submit the agreement to Congress for ratification or say when he might do so…

The Economist has a short on the complexity of the tax code.

…The federal tax code, which was 400 pages long in 1913, has swollen to about 70,000. Americans now spend 7.6 billion hours a year grappling with an incomprehensible tangle of deductions, loopholes and arcane reporting requirements. That is the equivalent of 3.8m skilled workers toiling full-time, year-round, just to handle the paperwork. By this measure, the tax-compliance industry is six times larger than car-making.

Every year, the national taxpayer advocate issues a report begging Congress to simplify the system. In her most recent one, published on December 31st, Ms Olson frets that she is repeating herself. She refers Congress to what she said the previous year. An incredible 82% of taxpayers are so flummoxed that they pay for help. Some 60% hire an accountant or tax preparer, while another 22% use tax software. She might have added that even the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, gets someone else to do his taxes. …

We applaud Thomas Sowell’s view of things.

…If and when the Republicans return to power in Washington, we can only hope that they remember what got them suddenly and unceremoniously dumped out of power the last time. Basically, it was running as Republicans and then governing as if they were Democrats, running up big deficits, with lots of earmarks and interfering with the market.

But their most lasting damage to the country has been putting people like John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Michael Barone says that Obamacare will be a central issue for the upcoming SCOTUS nominee.

…One is the constitutionality of the health care bill’s mandate to purchase private health insurance. The federal government has never before commanded citizens to buy a commercial product. Could the government command you to buy breakfast cereal?

Some 14 state attorneys general are trying to raise the issue in court, and pending state laws outlawing mandates could raise the question as well. Those state laws are obviously invalid under the supremacy clause unless the federal law is unconstitutional. Is it?

…Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.

Jennifer Rubin comments on polling numbers for repealing Obamacare.

Three weeks after Congress passed its new national health care plan, support for repeal of the measure has risen four points to 58%. That includes 50% of U.S. voters who strongly favor repeal.The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters nationwide finds 38% still oppose repeal, including 32% who strongly oppose it.

It’s startling that fifty percent strongly favor its repeal. It is not simply that Obama hasn’t sold his signature health-care legislation; attitudes are hardening even before the tax hikes, premiums increases, and Medicare cuts go into effect. …

…It has, however, reinvigorated and revived the conservative movement. That’s no small accomplishment.

David Goldman says that small business indicators are not optimistic.

Meanwhile the NFIB’s business optimism index fell to 86.8 in March from 88 in February. Bloomberg quoted an NFIB economist as follows:

The measure of earnings expectations showed the biggest decline in March, falling 4 points to minus 43 percent. Thirty- four percent of respondents cited “poor sales” as the top business concern, the same as in February, and the net percent of owners projecting higher sales, adjusting for inflation, fell to minus 3 percent.

How do we square this with what appears to be a big improvement in employment according to the Household Survey for March? For March, the household survey has a seasonally-adjusted total employment number of 138,905 and an unadjusted unemployment number of 137, 983. Unemployed s.a. are 15.008 million vs. 15,678 million before seasonal adjustment. There is something squirrelly in seasonally-adjusting data in the midst of tectonic shifts in the structure of the economy.

In the WSJ, Burton Folsom, Jr. and Anita Folsom explain how the Great Depression ended.

…Instead, Congress reduced taxes. Income tax rates were cut across the board. FDR’s top marginal rate, 94% on all income over $200,000, was cut to 86.45%. The lowest rate was cut to 19% from 23%, and with a change in the amount of income exempt from taxation an estimated 12 million Americans were eliminated from the tax rolls entirely.

Corporate tax rates were trimmed and FDR’s “excess profits” tax was repealed, which meant that top marginal corporate tax rates effectively went to 38% from 90% after 1945. …

…By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the U.S. had received during the war years, when tax rates were higher. Price controls from the war were also eliminated by the end of 1946. The U.S. began running budget surpluses. …

Ralph Kinney Bennett, in the American.com, writes an ode to the Jeep.

…Born of war and now in its 70th year, its brilliant design has propelled it into a new century with an undiminished reputation. It is an engineering landmark, the epitome of functional simplicity, and yet nobody is entirely sure who designed it or gave it its name.

What eventually became the Jeep was originally conceived in the 1930s as a light, rugged “reconnaissance car” to provide speedy movement of key personnel and equipment in the rear and on the battlefield. The U.S. Army vaguely envisioned something bigger than a motorcycle, smaller than a truck, and undaunted by the most difficult terrain. …

…The appeal of the basic Jeep is visceral, profound, beyond explanation. Not even a Volkswagen Beetle is as instantly recognizable. Older Jeeps continue to be recycled through new bodies, new engines, giant wheels and tires, hard tops, soft tops, no tops. They become dune buggies, beach buggies, ball buggies on golf driving ranges, and windshield-down stump jumping go-to-hell cars. They do everything but die. As to the military originals of the Second World War, I have often seen veterans simply break into tears in the presence of a restored one. …

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Tony Blankley continues to advocate exiting Afghanistan.

I concluded in November 2009:

“If the Taliban and al Qaeda retake Afghanistan, the world (and America) will have hell to pay for the consequences. But this president and this White House do not have it in them to lead our troops to victory in Afghanistan. So they shouldn’t try. The price will be high for whatever foreign policy failures we will endure in the next three years. Let’s not add to that price the pointless murder of our finest young troops in a war their leader does not believe in. Bring them home. We’ll need them later.”

…if we need a credible “local partner,” our local partner needs a reliable, supportive “large brother” (to wit: the United States). But by first hesitating to support Mr. Karzai, then saying we will support him – but only for 18 months, then publicly admonishing him to end the endemic corruption, then leaking the fact that his own brother is a major drug smuggler, we have undermined and infuriated him, without whom we cannot succeed in Afghanistan.

Great nations often find themselves in alliance with undesirable local chieftains. Usually in such circumstances, the great nation either tries quietly to strengthen and improve the local boss or it gets rid of him and finds a better puppet. If neither method works – then the great nation eventually gets out. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson writes that Obama’s views on nuclear policy have not changed.

…The Times article reported on Obama’s March 1983 article “Breaking the war mentality.” The Times noted that in the article Obama railed against discussions of “first-versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

…The Times chose to portray Obama’s 1983 article as the early expression of his continuing pursuit of “a nuclear free world.” That’s one way to put it. While others may hope that Obama has outgrown his youthful radicalism, the Times suggested that he is fulfilling it. The Times unfortunately appears to have gotten that right.

George Will summarizes and comments on the current news in state pension reforms.

…A recent debate on “Fox News Sunday” illustrated the differences between the few politicians who are, and the many who are not, willing to face facts. Marco Rubio, the former speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives who is challenging Gov. Charles Crist for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, made news by stating the obvious.

Asked how the nation might address the projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said that we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits: Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system’s unfunded liabilities.

…By the time the baby boomers have retired in 2030, the median age of the American population will be close to that of today’s population of Florida, the retirees’ haven that is Heaven’s antechamber. The 38-year-old Rubio’s responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity — a brave approach to the welfare state’s inevitable politics of gerontocracy.

The New Editor links to a Chicago Tribune editorial on the decline of Illinois.

… Illinois needs a new paradigm.

Illinois needs leaders who unwind the terrible indebtedness that lawmakers past and present have bequeathed to taxpayers and their grandchildren.

Illinois needs an end to the mutual admiration society of public officials and public employees coddling one another.

Illinois needs fewer governments and, in Springfield, one government scared straight by so much lost employment.

Most of all, Illinois needs leaders who see that, across this nation, concerns about the public sector’s size, cost and reach is the domestic issue that most rivets Americans. …

Robert Samuelson feels we should be more optimistic about the economy.

When things were going well, it was said that the United States enjoyed a Goldilocks Economy. Growth was fast enough to produce jobs and higher incomes but not so fast as to generate inflation. In the same vein, it might be said that today we have an Oscar-the-Grouch Economy. Good news is discounted. Pessimism is trendy. Growth is considered too feeble to help real people. But there is some genuine good news — and it deserves attention.

It’s most obvious in the labor market. The increase of 162,000 payroll jobs in March was the largest in three years. Layoffs have subsided to pre-recession levels. Job openings have ended their precipitous decline. Surveys suggest more gains. A poll of the corporate chief executives in the Business Roundtable found that 29 percent expect to increase jobs over the next six months, and only 21 percent expect to cut; not since the fall of 2008 have more CEOs expected to hire than fire. In March, the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group for small firms, found no net job cuts — the first time that’s happened since April 2008. …

Abby Thernstrom shares some of her insights on the census, race, and political culture.

The president has officially declared himself to be black—having checked the “black” box on his census form. Barack Obama rejected the option of identifying himself as biracial, which of course he is. His declaration is hardly a surprise. His search for a black identity was the focus of his autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” and surely that search partly explains his long membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, which described itself as “Afrocentric”—an “instrument of Black self-determination.” …

…At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then-Sen. Obama spoke of “one American family.” He said: “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America.” And yet in filling out the census form as he did, the president unequivocally declared himself part of “black America.” In effect, he disowned his white mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents who acted as surrogate parents for much of his boyhood. Mr. Obama had hardly ever laid eyes on his father, but that absent parent shaped his own sense of identity. …

Christopher Hitchens comments on liberal political satire.

…If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or any straight-faced, eyebrow-raising (and studio-audience-thigh-slap-triggering) mention of, say, The New York Times’s routine practice of captioning Al Sharpton as “the civil rights activist.” Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with. …

…See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence. How might I give an illustration of the laws of unintended consequences? Let us imagine that Senator Franken composed a chapter about government lying and cover-up, which involved the use of the irresistibly hilarious instance of Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s former national security adviser, being caught red-handed as he stuffed his pants with classified papers from the National Archives. In a capital city that witnesses quite frequent alternations of power between the two main parties, what will be the chances that fiasco and corruption occur at the expense of only one of them? Yet meticulous care is taken by the senator to make sure that no such “fair and balanced” laughter is ever evoked, which is quite a sacrifice for a comedian. Consistency of this kind allows no spontaneity, let alone irony. It might even go some way to explaining the howling success of the “Air America” network, the collapsing-scenery rival to the right-wing dictatorship exerted over the rest of the ether. …

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Charles Krauthammer opines on the revision of US nuclear policy.

…This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections. …

…It gets worse. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review declares U.S. determination to “continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks.” The ultimate aim is to get to a blanket doctrine of no first use.

This is deeply worrying to many small nations that for half a century relied on the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella to keep them from being attacked or overrun by far more powerful neighbors. When smaller allies see the United States determined to move inexorably away from that posture — and for them it’s not posture, but existential protection — what are they to think? …

Jonah Goldberg has a good point. If we become Europe, from what country will Europeans get their free ride?

… Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.

The most obvious and most cited illustration of this fact is national defense. Europe’s defense budgets have been miniscule because Europeans can count on Uncle Sam to protect them. Britain, which has the most credible military in NATO after ours, has funded its butter account with its gun account. As Mark Steyn recently noted in National Review, from 1951 to 1997 the share of British government expenditure devoted to defense fell from 24 percent to 7 percent, while the share spent on health and welfare increased from 22 percent to 53 percent. And that was before New Labour started rolling back Thatcherism. If America Europeanizes, who’s going to protect Europe? Who’s going to keep the sea lanes open? Who’s going to contain Iran — China? Okay, maybe. But then who’s going to contain China?

But that’s not the only way in which Europeans are free-riders. America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? …

Peter Wehner reminds us of the importance of civility in political discourse and commentary. He comments on an article from Michael Gerson on the topic.

My former White House colleague Michael Gerson has a very good column in the Washington Post today on civility and public discourse. It makes a very important (and too often overlooked) point:

…The opposite — questioning the legitimacy of a democratic outcome; abusing, demeaning and attempting to silence one’s opponents — is a sign of democratic decline. From the late Roman republic to Weimar Germany, these attitudes have been the prelude to thuggery. Thugs can come with clubs, with bullhorns, with Internet access.

Spirited, passionate debate is fine, and even good at times, for the country. The opposition party should offer sharp, even piercing, criticisms when appropriate. After all, politics ain’t beanbags, as Mr. Dooley said. And it’s not the place for those with delicate sensibilities. But nor should it be an arena for invective or hate. And conservatives should not repeat the tactics used by some Democrats and liberals during the Bush years. …

And here is Michael Gerson’s article from the WaPo.

…We have entered a national debate on the role and size of government, intensified by the passage of health-care-reform legislation. It is not quite Antietam, but many Americans feel that their deepest beliefs about liberty and self-government are being undermined. Passions run high. Activists slip easily into reckless talk of tyranny and revolution. …

…The most basic test of democracy is not what people do when they win; it is what people do when they lose. Citizens bring their deepest passions to a public debate — convictions they regard as morally self-evident. Yet a war goes on. Abortion remains legal. A feared health-reform law passes. Democracy means the possibility of failure. While no democratic judgment is final — and citizens should continue to work to advance their ideals — respecting the temporary outcome of a democratic process is the definition of political maturity. …

Tunku Varadarajan will miss Justice Stevens.

…Our present America is one in which all aspects of life—culture, politics, business, education—are shaped more decisively by the judiciary than by any other branch of government, and one always had the impression that Justice Stevens would have preferred things to be otherwise. He craved a lower-key role for himself and for his court, and this was plain for all to see in his dissent in Bush v. Gore—a case which, for him, was a clear example of the Court stepping onto turf where it didn’t belong—of the Court, in fact, overstepping its bounds.

It is this sense of “bounds” that marks him apart from many of his fellow judges, as does his politics, which are better described as “cultured” or “humane” than “liberal” (which is the label most frequently applied to him): His views, and his inclinations, were marked by an absence of dogma; his rulings usually reflected a private and passionate morality, which led him, more often than not, to rule as he would like the law to be. Law, for him, was a tool by which he sought to effect constant “improvement” of society. Not surprisingly, this put him squarely at odds with Justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia, whose constitutional jurisprudence is less instinctual and arguably less “humane”—while at the same time more faithful to the Framers’ intentions than Stevens’.

American civilization, broadly defined, will benefit from the fact that Stevens will depart under a liberal president. We are a “5-4” society—by which I mean that we are almost evenly divided, ideologically—and the Supreme Court, as presently constituted, reflects faithfully our social clefts and divisions, as well as our swings of mood and indecision. As with our electoral politics, it is better that there be no runaway majority on the Supreme Court (a perpetual 6-3, say) on the central questions of our civitas. It is better that each victory be fought for. That keeps everyone honest. …

Peter Schiff refutes Paul Krugman’s belief that inflation will help us.

…In simple terms, Krugman believes that inflation is the best cure for burdensome debt problems. To prove his arguments, he points to the course followed by the Unites States in the decade after the Second World War. In 1946, due to unprecedented military spending during the war, U.S. public debt as a percentage of GDP came in at a staggering 122 percent – which is even higher than the 113 percent currently weighing on Greece.

Krugman endorses U.S. policy at the time which, he claims, concentrated on fostering growth instead of taking measures to drastically cut the post-war debt. He notes that by the end of 1956, the federal debt had not diminished in nominal terms, but had become much easier to bear because of the decade of GDP growth that inflationary policies had created.

He neglects to mention that during the five years from 1945 to 1949, federal spending dropped by 58% and taxes fell by 12%. Meanwhile, the budget deficit fell by 66% in 1946 and was in surplus from 1947 to 1949. [i] In other words, although we did not pay down our nominal debt in the decade after the war, we did succeed in massively shrinking government and the burden that it places on society. Could it be that this had something to do with the post-war boom, or should we give all the credit to the monetary policy? …

WSJ’s Weekend Interview was with George Will who talks of baseball. Will says its a sport for democracies. Pickerhead thinks it is a sport that employs the important human skills of handling a club and throwing, with which we employed our opposable thumbs, so we can kill from a distance.

…Craft—defined by Mr. Will as the art of excellence—has fascinated the columnist for decades. Twenty springs ago, the Pulitzer Prize winner published “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball,” and it raced up the bestseller lists. HarperCollins will re-release the book with a new introduction on Tuesday. …

…But baseball, he says, has always been the passion of his life. With “Men at Work,” “I wanted to know what was going on out there,” Mr. Will says, clasping his hands like a professor. “My theory— and being a political philosopher I had to have theory—was that more than any other sport, a fan’s enjoyment of baseball is a function of how much he understands the nuances.” Nuance—how a batter moves his hips or where a shortstop stands—makes baseball more than a contest of runs. “You don’t need to understand a thing about football to marvel at the astonishing violence or speed of that game, or in the NBA, the athleticism and grace of giants. The spectacle is its own reward,” Mr. Will tells me. “Baseball is different.” …

More about baseball today we look back at Pickings on November 5, 2008 when we said;  “Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open-minded tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the  American people had already moved on.

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?”

Streetwise Professor posts on opening day in DC with A Poser Who “Throws Like a Girl”*

… those who want to identify themselves as more urban, more hip, will sometimes choose to become Sox fans–or affect being Sox fans.  For such people, wearing Sox gear is an affectation, an advertisement, a statement (“I’m an edgy urbanite, not a gauche suburbanite”). (The Sox have consciously played to this, e.g., the black caps/uniforms.)

Obama is quite clearly such a person, and he all but admits it in what I quoted above.  The whole Obama White Sox thing is just another piece of a persona, deliberately chosen to convey an image, a perception.  It is, in other words, quintessential Obama.

As is his rationalization for his performance:

‘The president suggested his accuracy would have improved with a longer outing.“If I had a whole inning, I’m telling you, I would have cleaned up,” he quipped.’

Would it kill him to admit “Well, I just suck at baseball”?  Is he so invested in his own ego that he has to be great at everything? I know that politicians are narcissists, but this guy is off the charts.

More on baseball from John Kass .

…Dibble: “Who was one of your favorite White Sox players growing up?”

Obama: “You know … uh … I thought that … you know … the truth is, that a lot of the Cubs I liked too.”

Ouch. The silence between the stammers was excruciating. America’s No. 1 Sox fan couldn’t name one Sox player. …

…Don’t worry, Mr. President. This will blow over. Just look how quickly the media stopped twisting the knife into Sarah Palin. …

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The WSJ editors show how the arrogant treatment of President Karzai has come back to haunt us.

… This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK’s orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.

By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals. …

Abe Greenwald, in Contentions, also comments on the disrespect of Karzai.

…The point here is not that Karzai is a paragon of trustworthiness and good governance. He is a very flawed and, in some ways, compromised figure. The issue is how best to keep him from actively obstructing our mission and how to lay the foundation for a genuine tilt toward a stable and accountable representative government in Afghanistan. That’s achieved first by backing up a rock-solid commitment to defeat the Taliban and staying on for institution building. At the same time, Karzai should be intelligently coerced in private, not undermined in public.

For a president who has invested so much in style over substance, and dwelled so incessantly on the virtues of listening over dictating, Obama has achieved a strikingly ill conceived tone on Karzai. What’s more his penchant for the perfect compromise has not served him well on Afghanistan. We cannot at once be committed to fighting and winding down the same war. Nor can we treat a partner as both an ally and an antagonist. For all Obama’s talk of Bush’s failures in Afghanistan, the president could learn a few things from his predecessor.

Fouad Ajami places Karzai and Afghanistan in the context of our feckless policies in the region.

…Forgive Mr. Karzai as he tilts with the wind and courts the Iranian theocrats next door. We can’t chastise him for seeking an accommodation with Iranian power when Washington itself gives every indication that it would like nothing more than a grand bargain with Iran’s rulers. …

…All this plays out under the gaze of an Islamic world that is coming to a consensus that a discernible American retreat in the region is in the works. America’s enemies are increasingly brazen, its friends unnerved. Witness the hapless Lebanese, once wards of U.S. power, now making pilgrimages, one leader at a time, to Damascus. They, too, can read the wind: If Washington is out to “engage” that terrible lot in Syria, they better scurry there to secure reasonable terms of surrender.

The shadow of American power is receding; the rogues are emboldened. The world has a way of calling the bluff of leaders and nations summoned to difficult endeavors. Would that our biggest source of worry in that arc of trouble was the intemperate outburst of our ally in Kabul.

Turning to our upcoming rendezvous with April 15th, David Harsanyi has some interesting statistics, the upshot of which is a message to the GOP on how to win the next elections.

…So taxes it is. If I were running a minority party, I would make tax reform a major plank of my campaign.

Cut capital gains and corporate taxes. Simplify and flatten income taxes. Finally — and this is sure to go over well in suburban and lower income households around the nation — spread the income tax burden more equitably, so that all of us can enjoy “investing” in Washington. …

Mark Steyn is on the subject of taxes also.

… for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes – state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. …

In Forbes, Richard Epstein tells us to watch Maine and Massachusetts to see where Obamacare will take us. The pressure is building.

…As a matter of first principle, however, this two-state meltdown shows the colossal flaw in the modern theory of health insurance rate regulation. Originally, rate regulation operated as a counterweight to the monopoly power of key providers in network industries–railroads, electricity, power transmission, telecommunications and the like. Those price controls forced these monopoly providers to accept a risk-adjusted competitive return for their services. Knowing, however, that these industries had to invest in infrastructure, courts rejected as confiscatory steep rate cuts that would not allow regulated firms to stay in business.

Here is the catch. Health care insurance is a competitive industry, with no monopoly profits for wise regulators to eliminate. Rate regulation thus makes no sense if its only consequence is to drive up administrative costs while denying competitive firms a competitive rate of return on investment. A sensible constitutional regime would knock out these rate reductions automatically without demanding any detailed case-by-case accounting to reveal the obvious: Open entry eliminates persistent excessive returns. This brass knuckles treatment of state regulators is a pipe dream under today’s permissive constitutional environment that sees rate regulation as an economic panacea. So current regulators first starve the insurance carriers and then invite them do battle with the health care providers. …

…There is no mystery here. Maine and Massachusetts have introduced programs that require them to live beyond their means. They give us an early warning system, like canaries exposed to carbon monoxide in the mine. These new entitlement programs can’t breathe without new oxygen. But there is no air in their fiscal oxygen tank. Runaway costs will lead to price controls that will lead to queuing for standard health care services. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives a liberal’s view of the upcoming SCOTUS nomination. Justice Stevens has expanded the government’s power, and federal power over the states. Stevens also authored the Kelo v. New London decision that allows government to steal land from its citizens. Justice Stevens is fond of saying he didn’t change, the court did. Yet, he was first party to a decision to bring back the death penalty and then later ruled against it.

…Stevens, who will still have one of the best minds on the Court when he turns 90 on April 20, has long insisted that he remains the old-fashioned judicial conservative and moderate Republican he was when President Ford appointed him in 1975. But the leftward drift of his opinions over the years has made him the senior member of the four-justice liberal bloc.

The four shortlisters are Solicitor General Elena Kagan; federal Appeals Court Judges Diane Wood of Chicago and Merrick Garland of the District of Columbia; and (though some count her out) Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. President Obama interviewed Kagan, Wood, and Napolitano last spring before choosing Sonia Sotomayor, an Appeals Court judge, to succeed Justice David Souter.

…But Obama knows that a big confirmation battle could deplete his political capital and make it much harder to get his proposed legislation on climate change and other matters through Congress. …

In Future Pundit, Randall Parker tells us about a study that will please some people. Specifically, those who think that mint chocolate chip ice cream is all the green they need in their diet.

“An analysis of dietary data from more than 400,000 men and women found only a weak association between high fruit and vegetable intake and reduced overall cancer risk, according to a study published online April 6, 2010 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”

Other studies have found the same results. But you can still eat fruits and vegetables for your heart and arteries.

Coincidentally, another recent report finds Vitamin K as K1 found in green leafy vegetables does not cut cancer risk but Vitamin K as K2 found in cheese does cut cancer risk.

The Economist reports on the same study.

FOR snivelling children and recalcitrant carnivores, requests that they should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But those who did comply with official advice from charities, governments and even the mighty World Health Organisation (WHO), could remind themselves, rather smugly, that the extra greens they forced down at lunchtime would greatly reduce their chances of getting cancer. Until now, that is. Because a group of researchers led by Paolo Boffetta, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, have conducted a new study into the link between cancer and the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and found it to be far weaker than anyone had thought. …

…Even those who eat virtually no fruit and vegetables, the paper suggests, are only 9% more likely to develop cancer than those who stick to the WHO recommendations.

…More importantly, there is still good evidence that fruit and vegetables protect against heart disease and strokes by reducing blood pressure. A separate investigation of the people involved in Dr Boffetta’s study suggests that those who eat five servings a day of fruit and vegetables have a 30% lower incidence of heart disease and strokes than those who eat less than one and a half servings. It is also possible that some specific foods, such as tomatoes, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, do offer protective effects against particular kinds of cancer. …

Pickerhead’s favorite TV series, ever, was Frank’s Place. The WSJ reviews a new HBO series Treme that gives hope something like it may appear again. Starts tonite on HBO.

The new HBO series “Treme” (Sunday 10-11 p.m. ET) opens in New Orleans just three months after Katrina. Its a gumbo of so many ingredients that it will take a nice, long time to suck the juice out of them. Best of all, the series producers, David Simon and Eric Overmyer, create a world outside the standard Big Easy-Cajun-honky-tonk-voodoo clichés. From the opening credits to the end of each episode, it delivers jolts of what feels like the real thing, or at least an original thing.

“Treme” begins in the old African-American neighborhood of that name with a rousing second-line parade—so called because musicians form the first line, and second come people who join the procession as it spreads good vibes along the way. …