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In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld posts on the choices in facing the Iranian nuclear threat.

Iran is pressing forward with its nuclear program. The Obama administration is dithering. Bent upon getting a Security Council resolution rather than assembling a coalition of the willing, the White House and American policy is being held hostage by Russia and most of all by China. Here’s an informed prediction: if Beijing does come around and support a new round of sanctions, it will be hailed by the White House as a major breakthrough: peace in our time. But the actual sanctions will be weak to worthless. China has too much at stake in Iran as a source of energy. It also sees an opportunity to poke us in the eye. …

In Newsweek, Sumit Ganguly thinks India should be treated with more respect.

…India won’t wait indefinitely for the White House to put the relationship back on track. Instead, it is cutting deals with nations that respect its significance. Russia, which had let old Soviet ties to India wither, is now dramatically renewing the connection. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently visited India and went home with multiple agreements, including deals on civilian nuclear energy and more than $1.5 billion worth of advanced naval aircraft. Obama’s inattention is what makes Russia’s advance possible.

It’s hard to understand why Washington would continue to neglect such a valuable ally. India is a vast and growing market, a significant military player in South Asia, a growing force in global talks on climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. So instead of ignoring or publicly upbraiding India, Washington needs to find a way to avoid the acutely sensitive issue of Kashmir, while enhancing counterterrorism cooperation and actively seeking India’s input into the larger discussion on Afghanistan. Doing so will help secure Washington’s relationship with a nation that is too important to keep on the sidelines.

Roger Simon gives another reason why he calls Obama - President Weirdo.

…The President of the United States — whose most important duty is to protect the citizens of this country — is publicly abjuring the use of nuclear weapons if we are attacked by chemical or biological weapons — both of which are known to all of us as Weapons of Mass Destruction, the dreaded WMDs.

…Now I detest nuclear weapons as much as the next person, but this approach seems — I hate to repeat myself, but I will — deranged. It also has very little to do with actually reducing nuclear weapons in the world. Again, it seems like the act of an extreme narcissist, someone who wants to parade himself as anti-nuke while ignoring the checks and balances that have, in fact, kept nuclear weapons in their silos for decades. …

Tunku Varadarajan discusses the president’s stubborn anti-Bush stance as misguided and unprincipled foreign policy.

…There is also an unseemly side to the pragmatism that is Obama’s international leitmotif. Paradoxically for a man who incarnates the progress of civil liberties in his own country, the president has literally banished human rights (that quintessentially liberal and Democratic concern) from U.S. foreign policy—just because Bush took up the cause. Of rights in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, the Obama administration has spoken only with an excessive, and dispiriting, circumspection.

So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…

…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.

John Hinderaker comments on the president’s anti-nuclear policy. Amateur, thy name is Obama.

…On its face, that is unbelievably stupid. A country attacks us with biological weapons, and we stay our hand because they are “in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty”? That is too dumb even for Barack Obama. The administration hedged its commitment with qualifications suggesting that if there actually were a successful biological or chemical attack, it would rethink its position. The Times puts its finger on what is wrong with the administration’s announcement:

“It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war.”

That’s exactly right. The cardinal rule, when it comes to nuclear weapons, is keep ‘em guessing. We want our enemies to believe that we may well be crazy enough to vaporize them, given sufficient provocation; one just can’t tell. There is a reason why that ambiguity has been the American government’s policy for more than 50 years. Obama cheerfully tosses overboard the strategic consensus of two generations.

Peter Wehner says that history will not judge Obama kindly.

…Why Mr. Obama made this fateful decision is hard to tell. He is a person of unusual ideological rigidity. The president is undeniably committed to expanding the size, scope, and reach of government. …

….This is what this moment demanded of this president and this Congress. Instead, we got the opposite. Rather than tapping the fiscal brakes and eventually nudging us into reverse, they have hit the accelerator and are leading us over a cliff. …

…The majority of the Obama presidency is still before us. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to say that on this vital front, Barack Obama has been, and will eventually be judged to be, a significant failure. He not only missed history’s calling, he mocked it. He placed his own statist ambitions above the needs of the nation he was elected to serve. Soon enough, and perhaps on a scale he cannot now imagine, Obama and his party will be held accountable for having done so.

The Streetwise Professor comments on the most recent attack on free markets from the Left, brought to you by Senator Christopher Dodd.

…And just what are the apparatchiks in the SEC going to do in that 120 days?  Just what knowledge and expertise can they bring to bear in evaluating the funding plans?  The question answers itself; this adds costs and delay, for no perceivable benefit.  And what reason is there to restrict the free flow of capital from consenting adults with over $1mm to startups?

The American system of financing entrepreneurial startups is one of the world’s wonders.  It has played a central role in stimulating amazing technological innovation that has brought us amazing new products and contributed to substantial productivity growth in the ’90s and ’00s.  It is in no way implicated in the financial crisis. …

Nile Gardiner has more on the Obami’s destruction of the US economy.

The relentless drive by the Obama administration to undercut economic freedom in the United States continued yesterday with Paul Volcker’s call for the possible introduction of European-style value-added taxes as well as energy or carbon taxes. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chief, is currently the most powerful economic adviser to the president after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and sits as the chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

This is not empty, throw away rhetoric, but a call to arms by an aggressively interventionist and uncompromisingly left-wing US administration that is actively seeking to refashion the United States in the image of the European Union, both in terms of foreign and economic policies. …

Jennifer Rubin’s commentary is on the money.

James Klein of the American Benefits Council writes in opposition to the attacks by the administration and Rep. Henry Waxman that corporations’ write-downs of losses due to ObamaCare are some sort of political scare tactics …

…As Klein notes, it is the frenzied ObamaCare defenders who are playing politics with the tax code, and worse — berating corporations to defraud shareholders. (”As for the government’s assertion that companies are failing to adequately account for all the savings they will enjoy from health-care reform, isn’t that exactly the kind of “creative” accounting that got Enron in trouble?”)

This is the administration that promised to take the politics out of science and the ideology out of foreign policy. But in fact everything — including the tax code — is merely part of the Chicago machine, which threatens to mow down any rule, any entity, and any critic standing in its way. Lacking internal restraint and humility, this administration and the country would surely benefit from some robust legislative scrutiny and oversight. The voters in November will have an opportunity to check the voracious power of an administration of bullies.

Charles Krauthammer helps the president answer Doris the factory worker in much less than 17 minutes.

On President Obama’s 17-minute answer to a question at the town-hall meeting in Charlotte about Obamacare raising taxes:

I don’t know why you’re so surprised. It’s only nine times the length of the Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln was answering an easier question: the higher purpose of the Union and [of the death of] soldiers who fell in battle.

The president had an easy answer. He could have said: I wanted to make history with health care and to do it, I have to raise your taxes. Sure, it’s not a good time economically in the middle of a recession, but politically, I had to, because I have a majority in Congress and I’m going to lose it in November. End of answer.

Debra Saunders gives us her take on the president and Doris.

In June, comedian Bill Maher complained of President Obama, “You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day – you’re the president, not a rerun of ‘Law & Order.’ ”

I get paid to listen to politicians tell the same old jokes, repeat the same canned sound bites and – as often occurs – not answer questions. But I do not think it too much to ask that, now that Obama has signed legislation to overhaul the health-care system, he ditch the health-care spiel.

To watch Obama nine months after Maher’s quip is to live in rerun hell. …

David Harsanyi says the food fascists are coming. Actually, now that Obamacare has passed, you’re not allowed to be fat. To help citizens lose weight, the government will impose a VAT tax that will make food much more expensive, so people won’t be able to afford to eat as much.

…And if Washington can’t dictate calorie counts in school vending machines, or tax soda pops, or force elementary schools in Topeka to stock their cupboards with USDA-approved nutritional fare, then, really, why do we have a federal government in the first place?

As we speak, legislation is wiggling through Congress that would ban candy and sugary beverages in local schools — bake sales, a la carte lunches, Halloween goodies, birthday cupcakes — and stipulate that suitable chow be offered. It’s legislation that can’t be stopped. It’s for the children. …

John Stossel explains how libertarianism is compassionate.

…Besides, says Wendy McElroy, the founder of ifeminists.com, “government aid doesn’t enrich the poor. Government makes them dependent. And the biggest hindrance to the poor … right now is the government. Government should get out of the way. It should allow people to open cottage industries without making them jump through hoops and licenses and taxing them to death. It should open up public lands and do a 20th-century equivalent of 40 acres and a mule. It should get out of the way of people and let them achieve and rise.” …

The Economist has a piece on the ethical problems with drone warfare.

…Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself—or, rather, the software that is used to operate it—in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience.

The software conscience that Dr Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called the Ethical Architecture. Its judgment may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And—like a human but unlike most machines—it can learn.

The drone would initially be programmed to understand the effects of the blast of the weapon it is armed with. It would also be linked to both the Global Positioning System (which tells it where on the Earth’s surface the target is) and the Pentagon’s Global Information Grid, a vast database that contains, among many other things, the locations of buildings in military theatres and what is known about their current use. …

And we have a link to the world’s most beautiful waterfountains.

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Mark Steyn writes about the ominous restraint of free speech in two countries.

You’ve probably heard of Geert Wilders, the “far right” Dutch politician currently on trial in Amsterdam for offending Islam. But have you heard of Guy Earle? He’s a Canadian stand-up comedian currently on trial in Vancouver for offending lesbians. Two lesbians in particular. They came to a late-night comedy show he was hosting and got a table near the stage. They were drunk, and began disrupting the act, and so he did the old Don Rickles thing and put down the hecklers. So, naturally, the aggrieved party went to the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, and Mr. Earle has now been hauled into the dock for the “homophobic” nature of his putdowns.

Between them, these two trials symbolize where most of the Western world is headed, and very fast. Geert Wilders is an elected member of parliament and the leader of what is, since last month’s local elections, the second-biggest political party in The Hague and, according to recent national polls, tied for first place as the most popular party in the country. So, although he’s invariably labeled “far right” in European and U.S. news reports, how far he is depends on where you’re standing: When the “extreme right” “fringe” is more popular than the “mainstream,” maybe the mainstream isn’t that mainstream, and the center isn’t exactly where the European establishment would like it to be. …

Christopher Hitchens comments on the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Turks against Armenians, and the continuing denials and repercussions.

…The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of the city’s remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the language of the country’s enormous Kurdish population and to create an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus, a democratic member of the European Union.

So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey’s unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament that should be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.

Bill McGurn of the WSJ defends the Pope and the Church against the attacks by the NY Times. Readers are reminded it was seven years ago the Times ran a campaign against the Augusta National Golf Club. It became such a NY Times obsession, the editor, since fired, spiked columns by Times’ sports writers that criticized their own paper.  McGurn reveals the same unbalanced coverage in the case of the Church.

…It’s accurate to say Murphy was never convicted by a church tribunal. It’s also reasonable to argue (as I would) that Murphy should have been disciplined more. It is untrue, however, to suggest he was “never” disciplined. When asked if she knew of these letters, Ms. Goodstein did not directly answer, saying her focus was on what was “new,” i.e., “the attempts by those same bishops to have Father Murphy laicized.” …

…A few years later, when the CDF assumed authority over all abuse cases, Cardinal Ratzinger implemented changes that allowed for direct administrative action instead of trials that often took years. Roughly 60% of priests accused of sexual abuse were handled this way. The man who is now pope reopened cases that had been closed; did more than anyone to process cases and hold abusers accountable; and became the first pope to meet with victims. Isn’t the more reasonable interpretation of all these events that Cardinal Ratzinger’s experience with cases like Murphy’s helped lead him to promote reforms that gave the church more effective tools for handling priestly abuse?

That’s not to say that the press should be shy, even about Pope Benedict XVI’s decisions as archbishop and cardinal. The Murphy case raises hard questions: why it took the archbishops of Milwaukee nearly two decades to suspend Murphy from his ministry; why innocent people whose lives had been shattered by men they are supposed to view as icons of Christ found so little justice; how bishops should deal with an accused clergyman when criminal investigations are inconclusive… Oh, yes, maybe some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiffs attorney making millions off these cases. …

It is always a pleasure to read the products of writers who can turn outrage into well-reasoned and well-worded commentary. We have two such writers commenting on the fake hate-crimes scandal. First up is Peter Kirsanow, in the Corner.

As Mark Steyn noted this past weekend, the smearing of tea-party members by elected representatives and their media acolytes demonstrates the desperation and bankruptcy of many of today’s arguments in support of the liberal agenda — in this case, health-care reform. The claim that black Democratic congressmen courageously defied being spat upon and being called the n-word reflects a pathetic attempt to equate their support for the cynical, corrupt process by which the health-care bill was passed with the heroic efforts of the civil-rights movement.

Unable to marshal coherent arguments in favor of the bill’s merits, Obamacare supporters resort to a most reliable standby: accusing their opponents of racism. But time has passed these liberals by. The ubiquity of new media exposes the calumny as a fraud. Despite the presence of dozens of reporters, recorders, and cameras, no evidence has been produced in support of the accusations. …

And next is Abby Thernstrom. Read her full post to get her thoughts on the Tea Party.

Like Mark Steyn, I regard Rep. John Lewis as a true American hero. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, to face Alabama state and local troopers willing to use electric cattle prods, nightsticks, and tear gas to suppress a peaceful voting-rights march. Not for the first time, Lewis ended up bloodied, with scars that have never entirely faded.

Undoubtedly, the psychological scars have not faded either; those were the formative years for Lewis, and he has clearly not been able to move past them entirely.

And thus I partially forgive him — but only him — when he is quick to see racism in an angry white crowd. Not a single one of his Congressional Black Caucus colleagues has the same excuse, and it was disgraceful (needless to say) for Nancy Pelosi to equate that brutal struggle to make good on basic constitutional rights with the sordid effort to pass a mess of a health-care law whose moral force did not even remotely resemble that of the great mid-1960s civil rights acts. …

Ward Connerly also comments on various aspects of the scandal.

…If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives. In the courtrooms, on college campuses, and, most especially, in our politics, race is a central theme. Where it does not naturally rise to the surface, there are those who will manufacture and amplify it. …

…In a video that has been played repeatedly showing CBC members as they walked past the tea partiers, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is seen using his telephone to tape the event. If he had any evidence to corroborate the racial claims, why hasn’t he come forward with his phone by now to settle this matter? I believe we all know the answer. …

More on the subject in The Corner. This from Hans A von Spakovsky.

For another good example of how civil rights “icons” like John Lewis use racial scare-tactics for political purposes, listen to this audio recording sent to me by a friend in Atlanta in reaction to Mark Steyn’s note in The Corner. This political ad was run in a county commission race in Fulton County, Georgia in 2006 the day before the election.

Thomas Sowell criticizes race-baiting politicians and reminds us where this can end.

… The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don’t need to repeat in the United States of America.

Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country– now called Sri Lanka– that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.

The world has been shocked by the mass slaughters of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda but, half a century ago, there had been no such systematic slaughters there. Political demagoguery whipped up ethnic polarization, among people who had co-existed, who spoke the same language and had even intermarried.

We know– or should know– what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A “race card” is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.

In the LA Times, David Crane discusses the Government Employees’ Republic of California, and their pension debt disaster.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported. …

…What can we do about this? For the promises already made, nothing. They are contractual, and because that $500 billion of debt must be paid, retirement costs will rise dramatically no matter what we do. But we can reduce the sizes of promises made to new employees and require full and truthful disclosure so that pension debt can never again be hidden.

Last summer Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed exactly that. Since then? Silence. State legislators are afraid even to utter the words “pension reform” for fear of alienating what has become — since passage of the Dills Act in 1978, which endowed state public employees with collective bargaining rights on top of their civil service protections — the single most politically influential constituency in our state: government employees.

Because legislators are unwilling to raise issues that might offend that constituency, they have effectively turned the peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on its head: Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees. …

In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses some kerfuffle regarding California’s last-place credit rating.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the sale was the nation’s largest ever long-term general-obligation deal, and the third-largest tax-exempt offering in U.S. history. The Journal cited the office of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer for that proposition, while noting that California’s credit rating is the lowest among 50 states. I’m pretty sure the latter observation did not derive from Lockyer. …

…The Financial Times asks where Borat is when you really need him: “Maybe Bill Lockyer ‘not make benefit glorious state California’? Taking a page out of Greece’s playbook, the peeved treasurer of America’s largest state fired off letters this week to the chiefs of Goldman Sachs and other banks questioning their marketing of credit default swaps on California’s debt.”

Addressing the gist of Lockyer’s complaint, the FT rises to the defense of Kazakhstan’s financial standing compared to that of California: “The real Kazakhstan, although not problem-free, looks fairly solid compared to California and many other states – a fact that should spook investors in America’s $2,800bn municipal bond market.” A letter from Lockyer to the FT is undoubtedly in the mail. …

In the WSJ, John Pancake reports on an interesting piece of architecture in Ukraine. Pickerhead added photos so you can see for yourself.

Eastern Europe is not awash in whimsical extravagance.

Which is why Vladislav Gorodetsky’s House of Chimeras in Kiev is so wonderful. Its skin bulges with frogs, elephants, catfish, stags, lizards, rhinos. A snake hangs down one corner like a scaly drain pipe. Mermaids straddle thrashing fish on the roof. It couldn’t be more over the top. …

…When I look at the House of Chimeras, I think about the idea of inequality and about Gorodetsky. Here was a man committed to the idea that some people were going to live a lot better than other people, or so it seems to me. It’s such a clear statement that I sometimes wonder how his building survived. …

The Economist has an article about the benefits of straw houses.

…It is, for one thing, a great insulator. That keeps down the heating bills in houses made from it. It is also a waste product that would otherwise be burned, and is therefore cheap. And—very much to the point in a place like California—it is earthquake-resistant. A year ago, a test conducted at the University of Nevada’s large-scale structures laboratory showed that straw-bale constructions could withstand twice the amount of ground motion recorded in the Northridge earthquake that hit Los Angeles in 1994. Mr Brush’s ranch is a mere 18km (11 miles) from the San Andreas Fault. …

… But straw buildings of this sort might do well in seismically active places that are less wealthy. Spurred by the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, Darcey Donovan, a structural engineer from Truckee, California, set up a not-for-profit straw-bale-construction operation that has since built 17 houses there. …

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Interesting day here because Pickings is totally composed of blog posts.

Mark Steyn blogs about having confidence in America.

Ever since this health care “debate” got going, I’ve worried that American conservatives underestimate the ability of Big Government to transform the character of a people. After all, the Euro-weenies weren’t always Euro-weenies – else how would they have conquered the entire planet? Readers who think I’m just a mopey downer loser (as not a few do) might prefer this alternative take from Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe. While “agreeing with almost every word” of mine, he has an entirely different conclusion:

We are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. …

…In my view, [Barack Obama] and today’s Democratic Party represent the last gasp of the Progressive impulse. The tyrannical ambition hidden at the heart of Progressivism’s quest… has made manifest …the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century … What is required in what he calls “this defining moment” is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a new birth of freedom.” The period we just entered could be our finest hour.

The Streetwise Professor explains that Obamacare steals the standard of living from the upcoming generation.

Here, the government uses its coercive powers to force the young to consume a service at an above market rate (in order to subsidize consumption by others).  We again hear the high-sounding rhetoric to cover this outright theft from one cohort of the population. … The indirect effects will also affect the young disproportionately; the inevitable tax burden will slow economic growth, dramatically reducing the lifetime incomes of those just entering the labor force. …

In the Weekly Standard blogs, Gabriel Schoenfeld delivers a devastating and well-deserved critique of the national intelligence community. We quote his review of the 2007 NIE and its consequences. The full post includes the latest comment that calls the word “intelligence” into question.

Back in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) released a declassified summary of an authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declaring with “high confidence” that four years earlier “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Buried in a footnote was the fact that the summary was only referring to one—and far from the most important—component of Iran’s nuclear project.  The other portions of the Iranian bomb effort—most significantly, uranium enrichment—were continuing apace.

The damage caused by the misleading document was immense, and traveled in two directions. On one side, it had the political effect of removing any possibility of public support for a Bush administration military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. It also undermined the case for economic sanctions. What would be the point, after all, of targeting a weapons project that our intelligence agencies were declaring had already been halted?

On the other side, there was a boomerang effect on the Intelligence Community itself. By issuing an NIE that, at least in its publicly released form, was transparently flawed and also blatantly political in its construction, the NIC inflicted severe damage to its own reputation for integrity. …

In the Corner, Robert Costa posts excerpts of a speech given by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.

Earlier this week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) traveled to the Sooner State to address the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Much of his speech focused on progressivism…

…Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage. But Progressivism turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson would have scorned the self-proclaimed “Progressives” of our day for handing out bailout checks to giant corporations, corrupting the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care, and funneling billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for make-work patronage. That’s not “Progressivism,” that’s what real Progressives fought against!

Since America began, the timid have feared the Founding Fathers’ ideas of individual freedom, so they yearn for Old World class models. Our Progressivists are the latest iteration of that same fear of the people. In unprecedented numbers, Americans are speaking out against the intolerable Health Care bill and irresponsible debt-ridden spending.

Does anyone recall Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom of Speech” painting of an average working Joe standing and speaking his mind at a town hall meeting? Today’s Progressivists ridicule average Americans speaking out at tea parties across the nation and denounce their criticisms as “un-American.” Millions of average Americans reject their big government solutions, and that scares them. …

John Fund relates a recent exchange between President Obama and Doris the factory worker. We don’t know whether the president ever looked Doris in the eye.

President Obama prefers to interact with questioners on his own terms. That means almost no prime-time news conferences — he hasn’t given one for more than nine months. Instead, he obviously favors any forum that allows him to give long, discursive answers without being subjected to follow-up questions.

A prime example came last Friday during his appearance at a North Carolina battery manufacturer. A woman named Doris asked the president during a Q&A session whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package. “We are overtaxed as it is,” she concluded.

That set President Obama off on a 17-minute and 12-second riff that must have put the crowd into a stupor. …

…As was apparent to all who listened, his filibuster had only served to avoid addressing her concern. He never explained why his health care bill ended up raising taxes on those making under $200,000 a year — a violation of his explicit 2008 campaign pledge. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the same exchange.

The mainstream media is slowly waking up to the fact that Obama is a bore. No, really. He’s long since stopped saying anything new or interesting, and he talks constantly, at great length. So when he went into a mind-numbing filibuster to a perfectly reasonable question from a woman at a Q&A session in Charlotte as to whether it was smart to throw a load of new taxes into health-care “reform,” not even the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut could conceal her — and the audience’s — disdain for the Condescender in Chief…

…And, of course, he never answered the lady’s question. Why is it we are raising taxes for those making less than $200,000? Why are we raising $52.3 billion in new taxes over 10 years? Obama has no response, or no effective one, to these queries; so he vamps and bloviates, as he did in the health-care summit when confronted with troublesome facts to which he had no adequate response (e.g., Rep.Paul Ryan’s list of fiscal tricks). Just as he failed to keep the attention of the Charlotte crowd, he’s long since lost the American people who now tune him out. Eloquent? Hardly. Persuasive? Not in the least, as evidenced by multiple polls showing that a large majority of Americans aren’t buying his health-care arguments. (And he’s eroding his party’s credibility on issues over which they previously held a commanding advantage. Rasmussen reports, for example: “Following the passage of the health care bill, 53% now say they trust Republicans on the issue of health care. Thirty-seven percent (37%) place their trust in Democrats.”) …

In Contentions, Max Boot highlights good news in Iraq.

Terrible violence continues to upset Iraq — at least 35 dead from suicide bombings in Baghdad, 25 Sunni family members slain south of Baghdad. But this Rod Nordland article buried deep in the New York Times presents a glowing account of the last election — and appropriately so. He notes that voters made discerning decisions. The outcome reveals some notable trends …

…A lot of bad things can — and probably will — still happen in Iraq but the election outcome, at least so far, hardly validates overblown fears that Iraq is “falling apart.” If anything it shows that, in one place at least, Arabs are taking to the democratic process with heartening enthusiasm.

Jennifer Rubin discusses the consequences of the Obami not having principles guiding their foreign policy.

The Obami are promising another round of sanctions aimed at Iran. This will be the fourth round, and we should not, judging from press reports, expect them to be “crippling.” As Bill Kristol noted on Fox News Sunday:

The only things that can stop the Iranian nuclear program are — would be the success of the green movement in Iran, which the Obama administration has done nothing to help and remains incredibly indifferent to and standoffish to on the one hand, or military action on the other, which the Obama administration seems uninterested in doing and I’m afraid is setting up a situation where Israel will feel it has to act.

The abject lack of seriousness from the Obama administration — its disinclination to even suggest the use of force or to aid the Green Movement in any meaningful way — has not gone unnoticed either here or in Israel. …

In Reason’s blog, Nick Gillespie relates some of the analysis of stimulus distribution by Veronique De Rugy.

…But more to the point, I think it’s worth focusing on something else that de Rugy has written about for Reason: Stimulus spending has been done without any consideration of unemployment or other economic factors. If the government seriously believes it can create jobs via public spending, she wrote last fall, then

We should expect the government to invest relatively more money in the states that have the highest unemployment rates and less money in the states with lower unemployment rates….

Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states. …

… if you’re spending money that’s supposed to get the economy going again without any thought for what spots need it most, you’re thoroughly incompetent on top of misguided. …

Some people only know how to play the victims. Mark Steyn explains the fake hate crimes. The upside of the story is the demonstration of integrity by the Tea Partiers.

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He’s either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he’s a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. …

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points …

But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to – faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. …

In WSJ, James Taranto laughs at a liberal blog trying to play gotcha. Maybe they should stick to playing the victims.

It’s been a grimly serious few weeks, so we thought we’d open today’s column with a bit of levity, courtesy of the folks at the liberal Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com. They think they have caught a Republican politician in an embarrassing goof:

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (R) sent a letter to her supporters [Monday] in honor of the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which she described as a time where [sic] “we break bread and spend time with our families and friends.” …

…Have any of the editors at TPM, or Smith and Frum for that matter, ever actually had matzoh? It is a flat bread that is rigid and brittle like a cracker. It is usually produced in sheets several inches square, considerably bigger than bite size. So whereas one obtains an individual serving of, say, challah by cutting or ripping a piece from the loaf, it is pretty much impossible to eat matzoh without breaking it first. A Passover Seder is one of the few occasions on which people literally, not just figuratively, break bread.

Claudia Rosett will miss Jack Bauer.

After eight seasons, the Fox series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, America’s one-man do-or-die counterterrorism force–is due to go off the air when the current season wraps up on May 24.

I’ll miss Jack. It’s only television, but I think he’s summed up something important about the American spirit: a will to defend his country, against all attackers, no matter what the odds. That fighting spirit is still evident among American troops on the battlefield. But in Washington’s political quagmires, over the nine years since Sept. 11, it’s been substantially snuffed out. Instead, policy revolves endlessly around denial of real threats and the impulse to Mirandize enemies on foreign fields of war and bestow upon them the rights of U.S. citizens at home–even if that means releasing them to kill Americans again. …

…He is the only man who can stop the next attack. Except after May he will be gone. It seems there are plans for a Jack Bauer movie to follow, also starring Sutherland. But that won’t be the same as that weekly hour of escape that since Sept. 11 has allowed us to forget the endless absurdities of real-world politics and watch a guy whose mission in life is to protect us, no matter what obstacles the bureaucrats and politicians–not to mention the terrorists–throw in his way. That might just be the definition of a modern hero.

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The global climate conspiracists can’t catch a break. Roger Simon comments.

…And speaking of repeating farces, the anthropogenic global warming movement is reaching maybe its hundredth sold-out, standing room only comedic spectacular with the latest news that the purportedly disappearing arctic sea ice is back to “normal” levels after less than a decade. Next the over-breeding polar bears will be invading our cities. …

…If there’s one thing that the AGW debate has shown us it is that our politicians are about as qualified to rule on matters scientific as I am to compete in the pole vault in the 2012 Olympics. …

…But this too is of little importance because the cap-and-trade legislation isn’t about science; it’s about money and control. Anyone the slightest bit interested in science would laugh the whole thing off in twelve seconds. Indeed, the entire environmental movement is verging on becoming an enemy of science itself. But before I go further, let me make clear WE ARE ALL ENVIRONMENTALISTS. And, yes, I’ve broken the unwritten Internet rule and put that in caps because, ironically, it’s very obviousness tells me it has to be emphasized. We all like clean air and water, okay? …

Jonathan Tobin has some amusing commentary on another aspect of the global warming conspiracy.

The supposedly rock-solid consensus among all thinking human beings about the impending catastrophe of global warming has taken another hit from an unlikely villain: your friendly local TV weather forecaster. According to a front-page feature in Monday’s New York Times, some of the biggest global-warming skeptics are precisely those people whom many Americans look to for insight about the weather. The Times reports that a study released this week by George Mason University and the University of Texas reveals that “only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was caused mostly by human activities.” This is very bad news for environmental extremists, since the public seems to trust the weather guys more than Al Gore. …

…For the Times, the problem is primarily one of academic achievement. The climatologists who are promoting fear of global warming—and profiting handsomely from it—are generally affiliated with universities and tend to have advanced degrees whereas many meteorologists do not. For Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who works to promote global-warming hysteria at something called Climate Central, the problem is that the weathermen are just not smart enough to understand her field. Indeed, she says the claim that it will be hotter 50 years from now is as open and shut a case as asserting that August will be warmer than January. But if you think about it, it makes sense that those who work on a day-to-day basis with weather forecasts would have their doubts about computer models about the weather we will get 50 years from now. They know all too well how variable the climate can be and that efforts to project forecasts with certainty, especially those promising apocalyptic disasters, should be taken with a shovel-full of salt. …

In Contentions, Jillian Melchior discusses how the government is responsible for the housing crisis.

Earlier this week, Peter Wallison presented a contrarian speech at the Hudson Institute, New York, detailing how the financial crisis was caused by government policy — not Wall Street greed, or the interconnectedness of financial institutions, or insufficient regulation, or any of the other political scapegoats blamed promiscuously throughout the collapse. (You can find a more detailed, albeit older, version of Wallison’s argument here.) …

…If Wallison is right, the Community Reinvestment Act is a smoking gun, and the hand holding it belongs to Uncle Sam. …

…especially after ObamaCare, angry citizens want specific talking points. And overreaching politicians are as provocative and sinister as any Wall Street demon. Wallison also noted that if the government really wanted to subsidize housing, it should have done so honestly — by putting the funds to do so on the budget. Instead, it chose to coerce financial institutions to do its dirty work. Conservatives need to point to the regulatory causes — the Community Reinvestment Act being one of many examples — and make their case. …

…Wallison’s argument is timely because, as part of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked with exploring the origins of the crisis, he’ll be fighting to present his explanation to Congress on Dec. 15, 2010. He’s outnumbered by Democrats on the commission, who might dominate the written report, in which case his ideas will be presented in dissent. …

Surprise! Peter Schiff has a dim view of things. He says the Fed is creating a government bubble.

… Of course, there will be winners in the government bubble, at least for a while. As was the case with the stock and real estate bubbles, plenty of money will be made by the well-connected and parasitic classes. Government employees will continue to enjoy pay raises at our expense, as will anyone benefiting from the new wave of subsidies, such as Wall Street investment bankers, financial speculators, and those working in health care or education.

These gains will come at the expense of the taxpayers who foot the bill and the consumers who face higher prices. As government grows, it deprives the private sector of the resources it needs to survive and grow. The result is a lower overall standard of living. Not only are government jobs less productive than private sector jobs, but bureaucratic interference actually makes the remaining private sector jobs less efficient as well. …

Mark Steyn writes more about the Obami’s treatment of friends.

…One of the oddest features of the scene is attributed to the president’s “cool,” which seems to be the euphemism of choice for what, in less-stellar executives, would be regarded as an unappealing combination of coldness and self-absorption. I forget which long-ago foreign minister responded to an invitation to lunch with an adversary by saying “I’m not hungry,” but Obama seems to reserve the line for his “friends.” Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk’n'talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone anytime anywhere. Instead, he recoils from all but the most minimal contact with the world.

…One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed “multiculturalist” who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.

Peter Wehner has thoughts on foreign policy after Hillary’s latest.

…Secretary Clinton’s comments were made in the context of the Canadian government’s G8 maternal and child health initiative. According to Clinton: “You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”

So here’s a question: can you imagine Henry Kissinger or Dean Acheson ever saying such a thing? Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State; she’s not the president of Planned Parenthood. And for an administration that insists it shouldn’t meddle in the internal affairs of other nations — unless it means making life considerably more difficult for our allies like Honduras and Israel — this is quite remarkable. …

David Harsanyi opines on Congressman Henry Waxman’s intimidating tactics towards corporations who have reported to the SEC that Obamacare will increase their expenses.

…Some may wonder if Waxman has any lawful grounds to bully anyone into accepting his view of Obamacare. Even if corporations, typically snuggling up to Washington for crony capitalistic favors, had joined in a twisted political conspiracy to make Barack Obama’s legislative masterpiece look as terrible as it is . . . so what? Since when is making a law look bad a criminal act?

The ironic part of Waxman’s abuse of power is that he also demands that CEOs show up with “any documents including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform.”

Would it not be helpful for Congress to first provide taxpayers with any documents — including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by elected officials — regarding this historic health care reform bill? …

In Contentions, Kejda Gjermani is outraged by the next bill that will hurt the economy. Politicians simply have no concept of the damage that they are doing to the economy and the standard of living for normal Americans.

Congress has passed or contemplated so many blunders of late that I, for one, am finding it harder and harder to muster fresh outrage toward every new one. But this latest being cooked up by Chris Dodd deserves a special shout out:

First, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.

All the prerogatives over private businesses; all the power over health care, now near absolute; all the dabbling in the inner workings of financial institutions; in short, all the regulation in the world, cannot seem to satisfy this government. Are the Democrat legislators ever going to have enough? …

Jonah Goldberg thinks there are a couple of political reasons for the flip-flop on drilling.

…Obama justified his decision to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the southern Atlantic and some coastal regions of northern Alaska on the grounds that it would create jobs and serve as a “bridge” to the carbon-free Brigadoon we’ve long been promised. The reality is that his decision was entirely political. Aiming to win vital Republican support in the Senate for some kind of bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation, he lifted the ban where the polling was in favor of doing so. Sound science, energy policy and economics were the last things on his mind. On that, there’s widespread consensus.

Back when oil cost $140 per barrel, President George W. Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling. Once elected, Obama quietly reinstated it. Since then, Obama’s Interior Department has been doing just about everything it can to slow, hamper and prevent oil and gas exploration in the U.S. and offshore. There’s no reason to believe the administration won’t keep doing that. Besides, Obama’s announcement actually bans more promising oil and gas reserves from exploration than it opens up: nothing in the Pacific, nothing in the western Gulf of Mexico, nothing in southern Alaska. …

…And that’s the irony. Obama and his Democratic successors will keep trying to squeeze the rich to pay for their schemes. But that won’t raise anything close to the revenue they need. They’ll try for a value-added tax, which will raise lots of money but also stifle growth. Eventually, if they want to avoid bankruptcy and keep the welfare state afloat, never mind pay for all of these environmental white elephants, they’ll need more revenue, and that’s where oil comes in. …

The Economist explores the coming of wireless power.

…The idea of transmitting power wirelessly has been around since the 1830s when Michael Faraday introduced his celebrated law of induction. Loosely stated, this says that an electrical current in one conductor will induce a current in a second, wholly separate, conductor that shares the same magnetic field. The concept of transmitting power across an air gap between one coil of wire and another led to electrical transformers, generators and motors—and ushered in the era of electrical engineering.

By the 1890s, Nikola Tesla had demonstrated that not just magnetic fields but also electromagnetic waves themselves could transmit power—and over far greater distances. In one experiment, Tesla powered lights in his laboratory grounds remotely from a transmitter coil many metres away. More recently, a government laboratory in Canada built an unmanned aircraft to act as a communications relay station circling 21km up in the sky for months on end. Power was supplied by a microwave transmitter on the ground. A large disc-shaped rectifying antenna attached to the fuselage harvested the microwave energy, turning it into direct current to power an electric motor attached to the plane’s propeller. …

…More down to Earth, several companies have started offering mats and work-surfaces capable of simultaneously recharging a number of portable devices. One of the simplest comes from a firm called WildCharge, based in Colorado. An adaptor is attached to each gadget (often as a specially designed replacement for its back cover) with three lugs on its back for making contact with the charging mat’s conductive surface. Because of the way the mat is configured, at least one lug always makes contact with a positive region of the conductive surface and one with a negative part. Power is transferred to each device by direct contact rather than via a magnetic field and induction. …

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According to Abe Greenwald the freed Lockerbie bomber was twice lucky.

… Megrahi may have been freed twice: first from prison, then from U.K. healthcare. It’s entirely likely that Libyan medical treatment given to a close friend of Muammar Qaddafi could have raised Megrahi out of the 51% survivability ghetto of the United Kingdom. My question is, who’s springing us when America adopts prison-like healthcare?

David Warren discusses the polarization of politics.

…That is why it is interesting to me that Noonan has been writing lately about the egotistical madness of politicians; about their blindness to what is at stake in their actions. She is one of several commentators beginning to discern apocalyptic developments in U.S. politics: the division of America not into supporters of two established political parties, with a common patriotism, but rather into two violently angry and mutually antagonistic camps, with little middle ground, and what there is disappearing.

The writer named David P. Goldman, who often signs himself “Spengler,” is another such “prophetic pundit,” and incidentally another New Yorker. He is superficially as different from Noonan as another person can be, yet he writes of parallel things in parallel ways. Where Noonan looks almost exclusively at American politics and society, “Spengler” is a globalist; with an uncanny understanding of both high finance and high diplomatic strategy. (Read him in Asia Times and First Things websites.) …

…Both see catastrophe coming in the present overreaching of the Obama presidency and the attendant triumphalism that this is spreading through the forces of the Left, internationally. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on the Obami’s poor judgment in foreign policy in the Middle East.

By seizing upon and escalating an issue on which no Israeli government could relent, the Obami have made clear that the “game” here is not compromise or resolution but rather high-pressure tactics directed against the Israeli government. The Obami holler while the PA throws stones. The aim of  both is to squeeze the Netanyahu government to the breaking point and shift the focus away from the Palestinians’ inability to enter into any meaningful peace deal … The Palestinians now are certain that they can have both violence and a “peace process” in which the administration can be counted on to browbeat the Israelis into providing more concessions:

Shaath, a former PA foreign minister, said that peaceful protests were now a popular demand to confront Israel’s policies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

“We need to strengthen and back this option in the face of the Israeli occupation’s policies,” he said. “We can’t return to the negotiations unless Israel halts all settlement construction in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem.”

The results of the Obami’s handiwork once again suggest that “realism” is not the animating rationale behind their Middle East policy. In their animosity toward Israel and obsession with aligning themselves with the Palestinian bargaining position, the Obami have reinforced the Palestinians’ worst tendencies and convinced Israel (not to mention other nervous allies) that this administration is not to be trusted. …

Charles Krauthammer reviews Obama’s sorry record with America’s friends.

… But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most disoriented. “We British not only speak the same language. We tend to think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide tea, sympathy and troops,” writes Bruce Anderson in London’s Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis of the U.S.-British special relationship.

Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the United States, to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: “[Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there.”

I’m not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning’s guess is as good as anyone’s. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.

More on this in The American Interest as Walter Russell Mead reviews the Obami foreign policy missteps. Although some of his analysis is questionable and his perspective is center-left, Mead agrees that the Obami have left much to be desired.

…None of this has worked particularly well.  The EU powers are not exactly leaping to Washington’s support on Afghanistan.  A British parliamentary committee has just pronounced the US-UK special relationship over.  Brazil’s President Lula da Silva publicly rejected Secretary Clinton’s public request for support for a sanctions resolution at the UN.  Turkey is flirting with Iran and hanging out with Russia.  For now, at least, the Israelis are resisting Washington’s pressure for a freeze on new construction in Jerusalem.

The policy of slapping friends seems not to be working very well; the policy of kissing up to the bad guys has been even less of a success.  North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have blown off the administration’s efforts to put bilateral relationships on a friendlier basis.  Not only is President Obama back to Bush’s old policy of trying to get the UN to adopt tougher sanctions on Iran, he’s denouncing human rights crackdowns in Cuba.  The biggest success to date, getting a new missile treaty with Russia, is at lot less impressive than it looks.  Russia needs to reduce the costs of its nuclear arsenal and wants the prestige that comes from arms talks with the US just like the Soviet Union used to have.  I support the treaty and hope it gets ratified, but on the whole it’s more a favor from us to Russia than the other way round. …

…Part of the problem may be that the administration’s dislike of Bush administration policies may extend to countries that cooperated with the last administration.  That’s a mistake.  Many of the countries who supported the United States in Iraq (especially the ones in Central and Eastern Europe) didn’t do it because they loved war, loved neoconservatism or loved Bush.  They did it because they believe that good relations with a strong United States are the foundation of their own security.  These countries are potentially President Obama’s good friends as well.  Many of them don’t care who the president is or what he wants; they will work with Washington and give it what help they can no matter whether we have a Blue State or Red State leader.  It’s more important than one might think to treat these countries with consideration and to bring them along when our policy changes.  Countries around the world should know that if you stand by the United States we will stand by you, and our new president won’t blame you for working with our last one. …

John Fund notes some changes at GE and with Michael Steele at the GOP national office.

Michael Steele, the embattled chairman of the Republican National Committee, was plagued with negative media stories long before this week’s revelation that the head of his young donors program had reimbursed a GOP consultant for a nearly $2,000 bill at a Los Angeles lesbian bondage club.

Back in January, Mr. Steele lashed out at his Republican critics on ABC News: “I’m telling them and I’m looking them in the eye and say I’ve had enough of it. If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.” The next month, Mr. Steele followed up that salvo by complaining to Washingtonian magazine: “I don’t see stories about the internal operations of the DNC that I see about this operation. Why? Is it because Michael Steele is the chairman, or is it because a black man is chairman?” …

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin says that people are moving to Texas. The most recent article in Pickings featuring Texas was on March 9th. Michael Barone discussed Texas’ low taxes, conservative fiscal policies, and minimalist approach to governing. Makes sense that Texas is one of the states that is weathering the recession better than most.

…According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009–the most of any region in the country–a healthy 2.3% increase. …

…According to Moody’s Economy.com, Texas’ big cities are entering economic recovery mode well ahead of almost all the major centers along the East or West Coasts. This represents a continuation of longer-term trends, both before and after the economic crisis. Between 2000 and 2009 New York gained 95,000 jobs while Chicago lost 257,000, Los Angeles over 167,000 and San Francisco some 216,000. Meanwhile, Dallas added nearly 150,000 positions and Houston a hefty 250,000. …

WaPo’s Anne Kornblut slams Obama’s bulls**t. Only she calls it loquacious.

Even by President Obama’s loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.

“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, …

The Economist reports on a surprising turn of events in gene patenting.

…On March 29th a federal district court in New York made a ruling that, taken at face value, turns America’s approach to the patent protection of genes on its head. A coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the very basis of Myriad’s patents. The nub of the case was this question: “Are isolated human genes and the comparison of their sequences patentable things?”

Until now, the answer had been “Yes”. But Robert Sweet, the presiding judge, disagreed, at least as far as the BRCA genes are concerned. After weighing up Myriad’s arguments, he ruled: “It is concluded that DNA’s existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issues directed to ‘isolated DNA’ containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.” Mr Sweet reasoned that DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, and that such biological information is a natural phenomenon. …

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Jonathan Tobin notes the hypocrisy of an anti-Israel president participating in a Jewish religious event.

…After a week spent beating up on Israel, blowing a minor gaffe into an international incident, subjecting Israel’s prime minister to unprecedented insults that Obama would never think of trying on even the most humble Third World leader, and establishing the principle that the Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem — even in existing Jewish neighborhoods — is illegal and an affront to American interests — after all that, Obama plans on spending Monday night mouthing a few lines from the Passover Haggadah at a Seder held in the White House. …

…Can any Jew with a smidgeon of self-respect or affection for Israel think that having a president say “Next year in Jerusalem!” while sitting at a table with matzo and macaroons makes up for policies that treat the 200,000 Jews living in the post-1967 Jewish neighborhoods of their own ancient capital as illegal settlers on stolen land?

Perhaps Obama and his coterie of Jewish advisers think they are entitled to expropriate the symbols of Judaism to lend legitimacy to their anti-Israel policies. Of course, if Obama had any real sympathy for the people of Israel or the Jewish people, he might instead spend Monday night reevaluating a policy that appears to concede nuclear weapons to the rabid Jew-haters of Islamist Iran and reinforces the intransigence of the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority and its allies across the Muslim world. …

Yesterday we heard about Paul Krugman marching in lockstep with the Dem complaints about GOP rhetoric. In Townhall, John Hawkins gives us a sample of violent rantings from liberals aimed at conservatives. You can go to the article to read the quotes.

In an effort to distract people from the destructive, illegitimate power-grab-of-a-bill masquerading as health care reform that the Democrats just passed over the objections of the American people, liberal members of Congress have spent days over-hyping threats against them. ….

Meanwhile, if conservatives truthfully refer to Barack Obama as a socialist or encourage people to fight back against the takeover of 1/6 of our economy, we’re hysterically accused of inciting violence, while liberals who actually call for violence and publicly wish death upon conservatives are given a free pass.

Well today, that free pass has run out because people are going to get just a taste of the violent rhetoric that has been coming from the Left for years in this country. Conservatives have long since been willing to stand up and say that they oppose political violence and threats coming from our side – as well we should. So, when will Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama finally stand up and condemn the ocean of violence and hatred being spewed by their friends, supporters and ideological allies? …

David Harsanyi tells Mitt Romney to come clean about the healthcare disaster he helped create in Massachusetts.

…Here’s what he should have said years ago:

“Everyone makes mistakes. Heck, I made a huge one. My plan, first hijacked by state liberals and now copied by Barack Obama, has created a fiscal nightmare in my state — one, which according to the former Democratic treasurer, has forced us to cut back on other basic services.

“Though we promised an individual mandate would mean everyone chipping in, nearly 70 percent of the newly insured are subsidized by taxpayers — with many paying nothing. Meanwhile, health care spending in our state is 27 percent higher than the national average and we have a shortage of doctors to boot. And that’s just for starters . . .

Thomas Sowell turns his attention to global warming.

…The recent statement that the earth was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, made by the climate scientist who is at the heart of the recent scandal about “global warming” statistics, ought to at least give pause to those who are determined to believe that human beings must be the reason for “climate change.”

Other climate scientists have pointed out before now that the earth has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries. Contrary to the impression created in much of the media and in politics, no one has denied that temperatures change, sometimes more than they are changing today. …

Three of the mainstream’s finest provide their reservations about the health care bill. They’re reading the polls and getting nervous about November.

In USA Today, Susan Page gives poll numbers on Obamacare.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government’s role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats.

Those surveyed are inclined to fear that the massive legislation will increase their costs and hurt the quality of health care their families receive, although they are more positive about its impact on the nation’s health care system overall. …

…There was a strong reaction against the tactics Democratic leaders used to pass the bill. A 53% majority call Democratic methods “an abuse of power;” 40% say they are appropriate. …

In Politico, Josh Gerstein reviews poll numbers as well.

…But Obama’s approval in the Gallup daily tracking poll stands at 48 percent — near his all-time low of 46 percent in the three-day rolling average. Near the time of passage, Obama ticked up to 50 percent in the poll. …

…At least one survey showed hints that Obama is still enjoying a bit of a boost from the passage of the landmark health legislation. The CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll showed Obama’s approval rating up to 51 percent from 46 percent before the health bill passed. There were also signs of increased support for Obama from lower-income households and union members — key Democratic voting groups. …

…“It’s pretty clear to me that public opinion is arrayed against the plan. And among swing voters, opinion is even more against the plan,” said Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster who raised hackles at the White House recently by making dire predictions about the impact of health care reform’s passage. “I don’t think there’s any evidence it will be good politically, except for maybe some marginal impact firing up the base. …

In Newsweek, Howard Fineman has even more surprising poll numbers. It appears that some of the center commentators are more comfortable talking about Obamacare by looking at poll numbers.

…In Gallup’s new poll, Americans by narrow margins agree that the new health-care law will improve coverage (44–40 percent) and the “overall health of Americans” (40–35 percent).  In a way, it’s astonishing that sizable minorities could disagree with those two statements, since everyone agrees the law will provide medical coverage to 32 million more Americans.

But that’s where support, however ambivalent, ends. Americans think the law will harm the U.S. economy (44–34 percent), the overall quality of health care in the U.S. (55–29 percent), and the federal balance sheet (61–23 percent). …

March 24th Pickings had an Economist piece on studies of fairness by folks at the U of British Columbia. Same study, but John Tierney has a different take.

… But a second factor seemed even more important. In explaining attitudes toward fairness, Dr. Henrich and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor was the community’s level of “market integration,” which was measured by the percentage of the diet that was purchased. The people who got all or most of their food by hunting, fishing, foraging or growing it themselves were less inclined to share a prize equally.

Grocery shopping may seem an unlikely form of moral education, but the researchers argue in Science that the development of “market norms” promotes general levels of “trust, fairness and cooperation” with strangers. (You can debate that point at nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

“Markets don’t work very efficiently if everyone acts selfishly and believes everyone else will do the same,” Dr. Henrich says. “You end up with high transaction costs because you have to have all these protections to cover every loophole. But if you develop norms to be fair and trusting with people beyond your social sphere, that provides enormous economic advantages and allows a society to grow.” …

The Economist has an article on an interesting new technology to spot terrorists in airports.

…WeCU’s approach relies on displaying stimuli, such as photographs of individuals who might be known to terrorists but not to ordinary people, or code words that intelligence has discovered are associated with particular operations, and observing what happens. …

…When confronted with such stimuli, someone who is unfamiliar with them will merely be bemused and ignore them. Someone who knows what they are, and is feeling guilty about it, will undergo an increase in body temperature, heart rate and breathing rate. WeCU’s apparatus is able to monitor the first two of these using an infra-red camera. This captures the heat pattern of blood vessels near the skin, betraying both changes in overall temperature and in heart rate. The system first establishes a baseline for an approaching individual, then flashes the potentially stimulating image on a screen or wall in the subject’s eyeline. If the baseline changes in a way that is suspicious, the individual can be ushered away for further questioning. …

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In honor of April Fool’s Day, we have the top April 1st 10 hoaxes from Museum of Hoaxes.com. Plus there’s a link to the top 100. Here’s number 10;

1976: The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

Continuing with the theme, Kimberley Strassel tells us about the items GOP senators made the fool Dems vote for.

…reconciliation allowed Republicans to bring up unlimited amendments. Because Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could not allow the reconciliation bill to be changed in any way—which would send it back to the House—his party was obliged to vote down every one of those amendments. And every one had been designed to make even hardened pols whimper.

Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) offered language to bar the government from subsidizing erectile dysfunction drugs for convicted pedophiles and rapists. Democrats voted . . . No! Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) proposed exempting wounded soldiers from the new tax on medical devices. Democrats: No way! Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) wanted to exempt critical access rural hospitals from funding cuts. Senate Democrats: Forget it! This was Republicans’ opportunity to lay out every ugly provision and consequence of ObamaCare, and Democrats—because of the process they’d chosen—had to defend it all.

And so it went, into the wee Thursday hours. All Democrats in favor of taxing pacemakers? Aye! All Democrats in favor of keeping those seedy vote buyoffs? Aye! All Democrats in favor of raising taxes on middle-income families? Aye! All Democrats in favor of exempting themselves from elements of ObamaCare? Aye! All Democrats in favor of roasting small children in Aga ovens? (Okay, I made that one up, but you get the point.) Aye! …

John Hinderaker, of Power Line says that Paul Krugman always qualifies as a fool.

One thing about Paul Krugman, he always gets the memo. You can count on his column in the New York Times to echo the Democratic Party’s talking points of the moment, whatever they are. Thus, his current column accuses Republicans of threatening violence against those poor little Democrats. It’s a dumb claim, so it suits Krugman perfectly. His “evidence” is lame beyond belief. After referring to “the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers”–no mention of Eric Cantor’s office being shot at, death threats against Sarah Palin, etc. …

‘…The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.”‘

This is downright funny. Krugman, in his usual dishonest-but-ineffective way, forgets to mention the whole point of the RNC fund-raising appeal, i.e., “Fire Pelosi.” …

…Now, Paul, let’s take this slowly, and try to follow along: “Fire Nancy Pelosi” means to cause her to lose her job as Speaker of the House. That will happen if the Republicans take the majority of the House in November, see? So the flames aren’t an incitement to burn Ms. Pelosi alive, they are a pun on the word “fire.” Get it? And Steele’s reference to putting Pelosi on “the firing line,” while perhaps infelicitous, obviously referred to the theme of the campaign: Fire Pelosi, not to assassinating the Speaker of the House. …

Continuing with the NY Times, the Gloria Center publishes a piece on just one Times article on the Mid-East. Barry Rubin finds four major errors. If you depend on the Gray Lady, you’re a fool.

In my entire life I have rarely read an article which simultaneously showed the need to be well-informed before reading a newspaper and the shocking shortcomings of mass media coverage of the Middle East than this minor piece about the reopening of the Cairo synagogue. I’ve never said this before but will now: If you want to understand the Middle East’s reality and how it is distorted in the media, read the following analysis. …

…I am not focusing on an individual reporter here, especially because I don’t know how his original piece was edited. But what is important is the product. In this one article, the Times deserves an “F” for journalistic competence and it has failed to inform readers of some of the most important aspects of the contemporary Middle East.

In these respects, I cannot imagine a better example of what’s wrong with media coverage of the region-and much more.

To quote George Orwell on a similar situation in 1945 (when the correspondent of a left-wing newspaper was criticized by readers for revealing how badly Soviet troops behaved toward civilians), once you accept the idea that the media should support “good causes” rather than just report accurately: “It is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.”

Now we have a look at people who are hard to fool. In Air and Space Magazine, Stephen Joiner gives us a fascinating look at serious repo guys. That would be the men (and women) who repossess large jet airplanes; like 747′s, etc.

…Jennifer Barlow, the company’s project planner, masterminds a repossession’s complex logistics. There are conference calls with banks and insurers and opinions from lawyers. Then, Barlow says firmly, “We decide what needs to be done.” She does not mean putting a strongly worded reminder in the mail.

She begins compiling a three-ring binder called the Repo Book. It includes affidavits of default, power of attorney, and all the legalese required to satisfy international treaties governing the process: everything that will give the crew the rights of a lawful owner.

Sage-Popovich also makes a determination whether the repo will be “friendly” or “non-friendly.” (Barlow estimates that defaulting airlines cooperate in the repossession of their airplanes less than 20 percent of the time.) In a non-friendly repo, “they’re probably going to try to hide the aircraft from us,” she says. As the airline continues to use the aircraft to make money, it may juggle routes and schedules to frustrate recovery. Charter aircraft, which don’t fly set routes or on timetables, can be particularly elusive. One outfit (Popovich wouldn’t identify carriers presently operating) repeatedly gave the repo men the slip by exploiting Egypt’s loose enforcement of financial covenants. Sage-Popovich arranged for a go-between to charter the desired airplane under the guise of a lucrative U.K. tour-group contract. The eager operator flew the airliner out of its Egyptian haven and landed in repo-friendly Britain. “We just watched and waited until the crew checked into their hotel,” Popovich says, “then we grabbed their plane and flew away.” …

…During a repo in the mid-1980s, both sides got physical. A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, “I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane.”…

And we close with information on another hoax. That would be man-made global warming. In American.com, Stephen Hayward says that we owe this latest discovery to a meteorologist and the volunteers he recruited.

…The Marysville temperature station is located at the city’s fire department, next to an asphalt parking lot and a cell phone tower, and only a few feet away from two air conditioning compressors that spew out considerable heat. These sources of heat amplification mean that the temperature readings from the Marysville station are useless for determining accurate temperatures for the Marysville area.

Indeed, the Marysville station violates the quality control standards of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA admits that stations like Marysville, sited close to artificial heat sources such as parking lots, can produce errors as large as 5 degrees Celsius. …

…To the contrary, 89 percent of the 860 temperature stations surveyed fail to meet the National Weather Service’s site requirements that stations must be located at least 30 feet away from any artificial heat source. …

…Who performed this revealing audit of these important data-generating instruments? NASA? NOAA? The Government Accountability Office? The National Academy of Sciences? A congressional committee perhaps? No to all of the above. Meteorologist Anthony Watts used the Internet to recruit an army of 650 volunteers to photograph weather stations around the country and send him the results. Watts posted photos of dozens of the worst offenders on his website, surfacestations.org, and is adding more all the time.

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David Harsanyi writes about the Dems attempts to blame Republicans for the threats that Democratic politicians are receiving. Because the Dems certainly didn’t do anything to anger anyone; like force Obamacare down our throats.

…Democrats insist Republicans must condemn — over and over — this imaginary rise of widespread radicalism. In doing so, they are implicitly accusing Republicans of controlling the aforementioned radicals.

Other Democrats, like Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, went as far as to claim that Republicans were “aiding and abetting terrorism” against Democrats. …

…”I’ve received threats since I assumed elected office, not only because of my position, but also because I’m Jewish,” said Republican Whip Eric Cantor, who had a bullet shot through his office Monday. “I’ve never blamed anyone in this body for that. Period.” …

Jonah Goldberg posts on some incidents of vandalism.

Disturbing! Troubling! I demand the Democratic Party disavow their hate-filled rhetoric! This is America:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Police are investigating vandalism at the Albemarle County Republican headquarters.

The Daily Progress of Charlottesville reports that someone threw bricks through the headquarter’s windows, breaking three of them.  The vandalism was discovered Friday morning. …

…In November, someone glued the county GOP headquarters’ doors shut on Election Day.

In the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin looks at the various problems with Obamacare, and why it must be repealed.

…But in order to gain 60 votes in the Senate last winter, the Democrats were forced to give up on that public insurer, while leaving the other components of their scheme in place. The result is not even a liberal approach to escalating costs but a ticking time bomb: a scheme that will build up pressure in our private insurance system while offering no escape. Rather than reform a system that everyone agrees is unsustainable, it will subsidize that system and compel participation in it—requiring all Americans to pay ever-growing premiums to insurance companies while doing essentially nothing about the underlying causes of those rising costs. …

…In other words, Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster—for our health care system, for our fiscal future, and for any notion of limited government. But it is a disaster that will not truly get underway for four years, and therefore a disaster we can avert.

This is the core of the case the program’s opponents must make to voters this year and beyond. If opponents succeed in gaining a firmer foothold in Congress in the fall, they should work to begin dismantling and delaying the program where they can: denying funding to key provisions and pushing back implementation at every opportunity. But a true repeal will almost certainly require yet another election cycle, and another president.

The American public is clearly open to the kind of case Obamacare’s opponents will need to make. But keeping voters focused on the problems with the program, and with the reckless growth of government beyond it, will require a concerted, informed, impassioned, and empirical case. This is the kind of case opponents of Obamacare have made over the past year, of course, and it persuaded much of the public—but the Democrats acted before the public could have its say at the polls. The case must therefore be sustained until that happens. The health care debate is far from over. …

David Warren has more thoughts on free speech in Canada.

…The Coulter crew were met in Calgary, Thursday night, by a sampling of exactly the same sort of thugs they encountered at Ottawa U. But there, the police did not hesitate. It wasn’t even necessary to make arrests: at the first provocation, the young thugs were simply confronted and told to leave.

Several black holes have developed in the enforcement of law in Canada — stare hard, for instance, at Caledonia, Ont. — and there have been numerous campus events involving physical intimidation about which nothing was done. Each capitulation makes the next more likely.

Free speech is very nice “in theory.” But to exist in practice, it must be enforced.

In the WSJ, David Propson reviews a number of books on Mark Twain, published this year, the centennial of his death.

Mark Twain died at age 74 on April 21, 1910. The ­centennial of that sad event is ­being observed with yearlong festivities in the cities he called home—Hannibal, Mo., and Hartford, Conn.—as well as with a raft of Twain-related books. …

…Twain won his readers’ ­affection, in that book, by ­traveling the world and ­bringing it back to his fellow countrymen—bringing it down to size, too, by exposing Old World ways to New World wit. In later books he revealed to Americans the less familiar parts of their own nation—its trackless Western frontier and its endless mother-river. Not for nothing did William Dean Howells call Twain “The ­Lincoln of Our Literature.”

By the end of his life, Mark Twain’s opinion on countless topics was sought and treasured. For readers around the world, he was America. …

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Abe Greenwald liked Obama’s speech in front of troops in Afghanistan.

… The line that earned the biggest spontaneous show of enthusiasm was about commitment: “The United States of America does not quit once is starts on something. You don’t quit, the American armed services does not quit. We keep at it and we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.” After the long, uncertain policy-decision period last fall, it’s important that he hammer that message home as frequently as possible.

Obama talked about “bringing hope and opportunity to a people who have known a lot of pain and a lot of suffering.” It would have been nice to hear him mention freedom or consensual governance, but it’s important to remember that this was not a policy speech. It was a morale booster for the men and women fighting abroad. …

Jonathan Tobin on what makes this president different.

As the dispute between the Israel and the United States enters its third week, President Obama’s anger at Israel and his determination to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give in on the question of building in the eastern sector of Israel’s capital is apparently unabated.

Yet this is hardly the first dispute between the two countries. Every administration since 1967 has proposed peace plans and negotiating strategies that Israel disliked or actively resisted. Genuine friends such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as less friendly presidents such as Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, all pushed hard at times for Israeli acceptance of unpalatable concessions. But in spite of these precedents, Barack Obama has managed to go where no American president has gone before. …

Elliott Abrams offers a wide range of insights into Middle East relations. We have pulled out only a few.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration. …

…George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers—all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them. …

…Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the “uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry” argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in “1967 issues” related to Israel’s size, but in “1948 issues” related to Israel’s existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel’s existence—not its settlement policy—comes into play. …

… we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow “proximity talks” Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel’s capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals. …

Instapundit has a theory about Obama’s rudeness to Israel.

… But it’s also possible — I’d say likely — that there’s something else going on. I think Obama expects Israel to strike Iran, and wants to put distance between the United States and Israel in advance of that happening. …

Some of our favorites think the criminal class in Washington has a VAT for our future. That would be a “value added tax.” Mark Steyn is first.

May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual?

Bear with me. There’s some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.

In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.

Fast forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Congressman Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol’ American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the OECD is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the doughnut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “In order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” – a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction. …

And Charles Krauthammer is next.

… Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.

Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.

It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.

Paul Greenberg catches the spirit.

Have you ever seen a more gleeful bunch of politicians than the Democratic leadership of the House as they prepared to ram the health-care bill or bills into law? Nancy Pelosi, Speaker and Precinct Captain of the House, led all the rest, swinging an outsized gavel as if it were an ax. A picture is worth a thousand words — no, make that 400,000 — words. Which is roughly the size of the health bill and encyclopedia just enacted into confusing law.

The smiling faces brought to mind a group of Roman solons marching triumphantly toward Vesuvius. Because this debate in Congress, which finally closed in the midnight hours Sunday, has just begun out in the country. Can you hear the rumbling underneath the political surface? And the electoral tsunami waiting to be unleashed? …

Robert Samuelson reports on the coming budget crisis.

When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health-care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.

Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape historians. For two years, Obama and members of Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for causing the recent financial crisis. The president and his supporters, historians will note, were equally shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest was for political glory, not financial gain.

Let’s be clear. A “budget crisis” is not some minor accounting exercise. It’s a wrenching political, social and economic upheaval. Large deficits and rising debt — the accumulation of past deficits — spook investors, leading to higher interest rates on government loans. The higher rates expand the budget deficit and further unnerve investors. To reverse this calamitous cycle, the government has to cut spending deeply or raise taxes sharply. Lower spending and higher taxes in turn depress the economy and lead to higher unemployment. Not pretty. …

Pickings of March 3rd had a story from Chicago Business.com about inroads made in the minds of ministers in South Side neighborhoods by Wal-Mart. More on this today from WSJ.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has won the support of dozens of church ministers in its long-running battle to expand in Chicago, a sign of how the recession has softened skepticism of the retailer in a community desperate for jobs.

The ministers, most of them African-Americans together representing thousands of congregants, are pressuring the city council to grant approval for a Wal-Mart “supercenter”—a store with a full grocery that also sells general merchandise—on the city’s South Side.

Some of the same ministers as recently as last year opposed bringing the discount giant to the South Side, concerned that the company’s pay was inadequate and that the store would hurt nearby businesses. But the need for jobs and tax dollars in the recession—along with a big push by Wal-Mart—has changed their minds.

The shift sets up a showdown between the ministers and another community group, largely financed by unions, that opposes the proposal, which remains stalled in the city council. …

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Just when you think this administration had done it all. Nile Gardiner has the post.

I wrote recently about Barack Obama’s sneering contempt for both Israel and Great Britain. Further confirmation of this was provided today with new details emerging regarding the President’s appalling reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. As Adrian Blomfield reports for The Telegraph:

“Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem. …

WSJ editors say the health care returns are starting to arrive.

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

Jonathan Adler explains in Volokh Conspiracy why these write-down’s are happening so quickly.

… Why are the companies announcing these changes?  And why now if the tax change does not take effect until 2013?  Because failure to do so could get the companies in trouble with the SEC.  Under standard accounting rules, companies are supposed to take the charge in the quarter in which the tax law change is enacted, not when it takes effect.  Because the first quarter ends Wednesday, more writedown announcements may be forthcoming.

David Harsanyi discusses the implications of Obamacare.

…When House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was recently asked to identify where the Constitution granted Congress the authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance, he replied, “Under several clauses; the good and welfare clause and a couple others.” …

…Attorneys general from 14 states and other state legislatures disagree with Conyers, and have already mounted legal challenges to the constitutionality of individual mandates. Few people believe they will be successful in their admirable cause. …

Richard M. Esenberg, professor of law at Marquette, explained the consequences of Obamacare like this: “If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do any old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what — save some other constitutional restriction — it cannot require you to do or prohibit you from doing.”

Representative Paul Ryan from Wisconsin gave a brilliant speech about government and healthcare in January at the DC Kirby Center of Hillsdale College. His points are still relevant; the Obamacare passage does not mark the end of the process. This was published in February’s Imprimis.

…Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

Government’s constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice. …

In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger has some great thoughts on Obamacare and the Dems. Repeal!

…Spring renewal and baseball’s new season are upon us, so let’s quote the optimism of Yogi: It isn’t over until it’s over. I thought 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday night in Washington was the Republican Party’s finest hour in a long time. When the voting stopped, the screen said the number of Republicans voting for Mr. Obama’s bill was zero. Not one. Nobody.

Pristine opposition is being spun as a Republican liability. It looks to me like a Republican resurrection. The party hasn’t yet discovered what it should be, but this clearly was a party discovering what it cannot be. …

…The GOP is being counseled to abandon its morning-after impulse to “repeal the bill.” Why do that? This is the first honest emotion the party has had in years. Yes, technical repeal isn’t remotely possible until after 2012. But “Repeal!” is a terrific bumper sticker and campaign slogan for our times. Repeal! ObamaCare is just a start. Can’t repeal the bill yet? Drive people to November’s polls to repeal the Democratic Party and what it has turned into. …

Stuart Taylor discusses the John Adams project with the ACLU that showed photos of CIA agents to Gitmo terrorists. No surprise that Taylor thinks no one should be prosecuted. It is a pleasant surprise that the Attorney General appears to be taking this seriously.

…The August 21 Post article reported that FBI agents had questioned military defense lawyers about whether they had shown their clients photos of covert CIA officials that had been “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.” The Justice Department cleared the military lawyers of any wrongdoing months ago, according to the March 19 Newsweek report by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. (I am an occasional contributor to Newsweek.)

But the investigation of the John Adams Project lawyers “was given new urgency after the discovery last month of additional photographs of interrogators at Guantanamo,” Bill Gertz reported in The Washington Times on March 15. …

…This concern might seem far-fetched if — as the ACLU has suggested — the 9/11 defendants were shown the photos but were given no other information that could lead to exposure of the agents’ names or whereabouts. But Romero’s statement that the 9/11 conspirators were not told the agents’ names “to our knowledge” is not entirely reassuring. Nor is the fact that some of the photos were apparently left with — rather than just shown to — a detainee. …

Mark Steyn blogs about Ann Coulter’s reception in Canada.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she’d even set foot on Canadian soil.

M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred“. As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North:

This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university… Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada! …

In the Corner, John J. Miller has some good news about another politician, and a Dem, no less.

Rep. Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, is black. He also voted against the health-care bill, both last year and this year. The Washington Post seems to think that a black congressman shouldn’t commit the apostasy of “distancing himself from the biggest legislative achievement of the first black president.” Forget the merits of the issue: It’s a black thing and Davis should get with the program.

“I vigorously reject the insinuation that there is a uniquely ‘black’ way of understanding an issue, and I strongly suspect that most Alabamians will as well,” says Davis, who is running for governor.

Good for him. Shame on the Washington Post for thinking this is some kind of controversy.

NRO staff posted a few of Charles Krauthammer’s takes. Here’s one:

On Vice President Biden’s profane utterance at the signing ceremony for Obamacare ["This is a big f**n deal"]:

I think he is the man who, perhaps without intending, has given historical context to this presidency. After all, Obama sees himself as a successor to FDR and Truman, so now we have the historical procession: the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the “Big F**n Deal.” …

Daniel Foster has an interesting post in the Corner. The California part of this equation is not an astonishing fact to Pickings readers.

This is probably bad news for California, but it is certainly good news for Iraq:

Traditional Wall Street investors have taken note. Iraq is now considered a safer bet than Argentina, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Dubai — and is nearly on par with the State of California, according to Bloomberg statistics on credit default swaps, which are considered a raw indicator of default risk.

“Compared to California, I’d rather bet on Iraq,’’ Daher said. “Iraq is a country where there are still bombs going off and people getting murdered, but they are less indebted than the United States. California is likely to have more demands on its resources, and there is no miracle where California is going to have more revenue coming out of the sky. Iraq has prospects for tremendously higher revenues, if they can manage to get their act halfway together, which they seem to be doing.’’ …