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Victor Davis Hanson posts in The Corner on the “threats” to Dems.

… write a book in which you muse about killing George Bush, and its Knopf imprint proves it is merely sophisticated literary speculation; do a docudrama about killing George Bush, and it will win a Toronto film prize for its artistic value rather than shock from the liberal community about over-the-top discourse.

Socialism and totalitarianism are tough charges from the hard right, but they seem to me about as (or as not) over-the-top as Al Gore screaming “digital brown-shirts” or John Glenn comparing the opposition to Nazis. When 3,000 were murdered in Manhattan, and Michael Moore suggested Bin Laden had wrongly targeted a blue state, I don’t think that repulsive remark prevented liberal politicians from attending his anti-Bush film premiere. Yes, let us have a tough debate over the role of government and the individual, but spare us the melodrama, the bottled piety, and the wounded-fawn hurt. …

Abe Greenwald comments on the sad events of the past few days.

…Additionally, for the media at large and for certain self-consciously moderate political analysts, some things are most dangerous when speculated upon. Once they are actually achieved, they are merely “historic.”

The Democrats are doing a lot of talking about history these days. “It is with great humility and great pride that tonight we will make history for this country,” said Nancy Pelosi, before the House passed the Senate’s tax and entitlement bill. “Tonight we answered the call of history,” said Barack Obama, after the deed was done. Not only does this crew refuse to be constrained by the false choice between great humility and great pride; they also reject the false choice between embracing history and ignoring it. For amid the symbolic fanfare of giant gavels and the tactical gravitas of deployed Lincoln quotes, one important fact is being swept aside: the state’s co-opting of the private sector never ends well. Every learned lesson about free markets and central planning, incentives, the allocation of scarce resources under competing systems, government incompetence, overall quality of life and freedom in socialist vs. capitalist states — in short, the reality of the Cold War — has been unlearned. Sunday night brought us the most ahistoric bit of history-making we’re likely to see in our lifetimes. …

Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post finally understands Obama and Israel.

… U.S. pressure on Netanyahu will be needed if the peace process ever reaches the point where the genuinely contentious issues, like Palestinian refugees or the exact territorial tradeoffs, are on the table. But instead of waiting for that moment and pushing Netanyahu on a point where he might be vulnerable to domestic challenge, Obama picked a fight over something that virtually all Israelis agree on, and before serious discussions have even begun. …

… A new administration can be excused for making such a mistake in the treacherous and complex theater of Middle East diplomacy. That’s why Obama was given a pass by many when he made exactly the same mistake last year. The second time around, the president doesn’t look naive. He appears ideological — and vindictive.

In GQ, Robert Baer has an excellent article about how seven CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan by an Al Qaeda double agent. Baer says it was the tragic result of the destruction of standards at the CIA. This does help explain how the national intelligence community has gotten some major things wrong, like the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. Baer lays a lot of this on the doorstep of John Deutch. Pickerhead always knew he was a Deutch bag.

…It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when the operatives’ sun started to set, but many CIA insiders would point to John Deutch, the former MIT provost and Bill Clinton’s second CIA director. From the moment Deutch set foot in Langley, he made it plain that he hated the operatives, their swagger and arrogance. …

…Deutch’s first shot at the operatives was his appointment of Dave Cohen as deputy director of operations, the CIA’s most senior operative. Cohen was an analyst who had never served overseas or run a foreign informant. Deutch’s message couldn’t be any clearer: Anyone can do an operative’s work.

The first thing Cohen did was order a “scrub” of every informant with dirty hands. Drug dealers, dictators’ minions, arms dealers, terrorists—Cohen ordered the operatives to sever ties with all of them. The only problem was, these were the people who mix well with our enemies—rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea and terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Deutch and Cohen didn’t care; they had a mandate to clean up the CIA, and that’s what they were going to do.

Headquarters officers started taking more and more of the important jobs in the field. For the first time in the CIA’s history, analysts, reports officers, and logistics officers were given stations and bases to run. … Field experience no longer mattered, either for assignments or promotions.

As the CIA purged informants, it leaned on allies to do our dirty work in the field. Friendly Muslim intelligence services, not CIA operatives, were asked to comb jihadi circles. All this only got worse after September 11. …

Mark Steyn posts about the Obamacare power grab and the Constitution.

Richard Esenberg at PointofLaw.com ponders the constitutional challenge to Obamacare and its likely outcome:

Were I to wager on the question (which may turn out to be an exercise in reading the mind of Anthony Kennedy), I would expect the Court to uphold the individual mandate. But the day that it does will be a tragic one for the Republic. . . .

It will be tragic because the notion of a Congress limited by the scope of its enumerated powers will have finally suffered the coup de grace. The Bill of Rights (once famously – and now ironically – thought to be unnecessary given the structural limits on the power of the national government) will become the only limitation on the power of Congress. 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.

Every power grab is the new base camp for the next power grab. That’s another reason why it’s necessary to repeal or otherwise kill Obamacare — because its underlying assumptions about the power of the central government will not be confined to insurance mandates.

Karl Rove has suggestions for what the GOP should do now.

… Republicans have a powerful rallying cry in “repeal, replace and reform.” Few voters will want to keep onerous mandates that hit individuals and taxes that hobble economic growth. Rather than spending a trillion dollars on subsidies for insurance companies and Medicaid expansion, as ObamaCare does, Republicans should push for giving individuals the same health-insurance tax break businesses get, which would cost less.

Republicans must also continue to press for curbing junk lawsuits, enabling people to buy insurance across state lines, increasing the amount of money they can sock away tax free for medical expenses, and permitting small businesses to pool risk.

Opponents of ObamaCare have decisively won the battle for public opinion. As voters start to feel the pain of this new program, Republicans will be in a stronger position if they stay in the fight, make a principled case, and lay out a competing vision.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York looks at one company that makes medical devices. Obamacare taxes are going to increase the cost of the devices, decrease jobs in the US, or stop innovation. Or all three. Most politicians refuse to acknowledge that increasing taxes hurts the economy and our standard of living.

…The company’s first option is to pass the increase on to customers like hospitals and ambulance companies. That might or might not work, given that they are coming under increasing pressure to cut their own costs.

The next option is to cut research and development — a short-term, money-saving move that will surely cost Zoll down the road. And a third option, says Packer, is to “look at trying to shift jobs to lower-cost places around the world.” That would be bad news for Massachusetts and the USA. …

…No matter what happens, the makers of the devices that save our lives are going to take a major hit.

Thomas Sowell points to this November as our last chance. If congress can take power without checks from other branches of the government, or from the American people, freedom will fall.

…The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.

When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.

The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.

Even David Brooks, for all his Obama whorship, can see this will not end well.

… The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem. …

… This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.

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In the New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi gives us an insider’s view of what Obama’s Middle Eastern strategy has wrought.

…Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.

Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama’s demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations. …

…That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he’s ensured that the Palestinians won’t show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy. …

In Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong describes how appeasement is working for the Obami.

Hillary Clinton just visited Moscow.  While there, she was sandbagged by Vladimir Putin.  Putin scammed his way onto her schedule for what was supposed to be a grasp-and-greet photo op, then launched into a six minute diatribe against the United States, in front of the assembled press corps …

…But wait!  There’s more!  Putin/Russia added injury to insult.

The other most contentious moment of Clinton’s trip was also thanks to Putin after he announced yesterday that a nuclear power plant Russia is building in Iran will be completed in the next few months. …

Alan Dershowitz, the usual ally of people who wish to increase the size of the state, warns Obama saying Neville Chamberlain is remembered for appeasing Hitler, not his progressive social programs. Actually, weak thinking in both areas goes hand in hand. Dershowitz also hangs the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on W, when it was part of a long line of problems the intel community created for Bush’s efforts to confront Iran. Not withstanding all these caveats, the piece does explain the risks inherent with nuclear weapons in Iran.

…There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small “sacrifice” of the billion Muslims in the world.

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime. …

Spengler portrays a foreboding financial picture. Those who were elected to serve the American public have brought the nation to a fiscal precipice.

…Governments averted a financial apocalypse in 2009 by bailing out the bankrupt banking system. But who will bail out the governments? The answer for the time being is that they will bail themselves out at the expense of the private economy. In the post-apocalyptic financial world, private banks have turned into flesh-eating zombies that cannibalize the private economy in order to finance government borrowing requirements not seen since World War II. …

…The monetary base is growing at a 40% annual rate. Under normal circumstances, this would lead to double-digit inflation. As long as banks reduce lending to the private sector, and buy government securities that replace lost tax revenues, the result is a so-called liquidity trap. …
…Weaker governments like Greece and Spain, or even the United Kingdom, could snap the chain. A shift out of US dollars in response to monetary inflation could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. An attempt by investors to ease out of the carry trade could provoke a stampede for the exits. Japan has managed to keep its bubble going for 20 years. But Japan did so on the strength of its domestic banking system under the supervision of the Bank of Japan; the United States depends on the reserve status of the dollar, which makes less and less sense when the Treasury is flooding the world with US liabilities.

We have never seen anything quite like this before, and one hesitates to make forecasts about an arrangement so absurd and unstable that the list of potential break-points is endless. Now that the whole world is buying US government debt on borrowed money, it makes no sense to own it. It will end badly – but it is too early to specify just how and when.

In the Corner, John Derbyshire comments on the insatiable appetite of the government.

Dismal news from the mother country today:

State spending now accounts for more than half of Britain’s economy, for the first time since OECD records began. Money from Whitehall and town halls made up 52 per cent of Gross Domestic Product last year, and the proportion is certain to rise.

That’s a growth of 12 percent in just 13 years…

…The U.S. figure for 1997 was 33.77 percent.

What is it today? 44.48 percent and climbing. …

John Hinderaker relates the shocking history of Alcee Hastings.

…Hastings was once a federal judge, but he was impeached…because he solicited bribes from criminal defendants. … That’s a little extreme, even for a Democrat. Hastings’ efforts to make himself rich in this criminal fashion came to light and he was investigated. He responded to the investigation by committing perjury.

As a result of his multiple crimes, Hastings was removed as a federal judge by the United States Senate, one of the few times in history that has happened. Here is the really astonishing thing: instead of going to jail, Alcee Hastings went to Congress! Democratic voters were not in the least concerned that he is a criminal of the most verminous sort. On the contrary, they elected him to represent them in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District! That, really, tells you all you need to know about the depravity to which the Democratic Party has sunk. …

… We are being ruled by people who should be behind bars.

Tunku Varadarajan comments on the passage of Obamacare.

…What Americans saw next was the legislative souk at its most squalid: cajoling, bribing, threatening, wheedling, all designed to bring on board those Democratic congressmen and -women whose votes were needed to attain (or surpass) the number 216, and whose “principles” were getting in the way of a “yes” vote. Hewing to principle is difficult, because it makes party whips angry, spoils dinner parties, and ends careers and friendships. So Kucinich, Stupak & Co. succumbed. To borrow a phrase from Tony Judt, the historian, writing in the latest New York Review of Books: “We… have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications.” …

In American.com, Charles Murray voices concern about the direction of the country.

…Yes, the Democrats will suffer at the polls this fall. But there will be no repeal of health reform. Politicians never withdraw entitlements. The Democrats are right to think that what happened yesterday makes enactment of the rest of the European welfare state easier. But do Obama and Pelosi have any understanding of how profoundly they have violated the sense of the American project? Do they have any idea how hard it is to sustain democracies over long periods of time, and how fragile our democracy has become because of what they did?

I’m sure they don’t. I can see no evidence that we have a president or Democratic congressional leaders who think in terms of “the sense of the American project.” It’s just another political system to them, to be manipulated as all political systems can be manipulated.

This morning, unlike any other day in my life, I feel like I am living in an occupied country.

George Will has a description – Enronesque.

… Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system’s costliest defect — untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the wage system — remains. Obama could not challenge this without adopting measures — e.g., tax credits for individuals, enabling them to shop for their own insurance — that empower individuals and therefore conflict with his party’s agenda of spreading dependency.

On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America’s Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: “More.”

There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable — e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen — is Enronesque. …

In Politico, Robert Zelnick comments on aspects of Obamacare.

…About rising medical bills – often owing to exotic life support systems for the terminally ill, the new law does nothing. Ditto with the rising costs of specialists. The bill would take a mighty chunk out of payments to physicians a few years down the road. But not one in 50 familiar with physician compensation questions believes those sorts of cuts will ever come to pass.

The bill slaps s series of tax boosts on the earnings of those in the quarter million per year bracket and above together with taxes on investment, corporate earnings, other “unearned” (I.e., job-creating investment income) and estates, again nothing remotely linked to the subject of the legislation. …

The Economist reviews a new study on fairness in different societies.

…Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia and his colleagues wanted to test these conflicting hypotheses. They reasoned that if notions of fairness are, indeed, calibrated to the Palaeolithic, then any variation from place to place should be random. If such notions are cultural artefacts, though, they will vary systematically with some aspect of society. In a study just published in Science, Dr Henrich and his team looked at the relationship between notions of fairness and two social phenomena: the degree to which a society is economically integrated and how religious the individuals within it are. …

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Today we must watch these people do their victory laps. While doing so, remember these are the brilliant folks who put the Dems in the position, such that we would laugh at them if they failed, and rail at them if they succeeded. They have weakened our country and added to its divisions. We will find out in November what price they will pay.

The National Review editors say that Obamacare can still be repealed.

…It is quite possible that the majority of America that rejects this legislation will get its way in the next few years — if it is given the right leadership. And it is worth the effort to try. …

…For that matter, the lengthy legislation could turn out to have little time bombs, the nature of which cannot currently be guessed. Nothing about the process that produced the legislation, after all, suggests that it was put together with careful consideration. Conservatives will be able to capitalize on the discrediting of Obamacare, however it takes place, only if they campaign this fall on a pledge to replace this government-heavy system with true reform. Republicans running against Democrats who voted for this legislation will have the easiest task. But even Republicans running against Democrats who voted against it can advance the cause by challenging those Democrats either to advocate repeal and replacement themselves…
The Democrats have abused the system, ignoring both the Founders’ design and public opinion. The first step toward undoing that abuse is to make them pay a political price for it.

In Power Line, John Hinderaker lists his reasons to have hope. Here are two:

* The health care battle is just beginning. Next, the Senate will try to enact the House’s “fixes” to the original Senate bill. Some Senators say that won’t happen. If not, then President Obama has the option of signing the original Senate bill–now passed by the House–Cornhusker Kickback and all. I assume he would do that, but the resulting blowback from House Democrats, not to mention the American people, would be something to behold.

* The health care bill’s taxes will go into effect promptly, but its substantive provisions are, for the most part, deferred for four years. This means that we have plenty of time to repeal the legislation. Sure, it will take a new Congress and new President. But repealing this disaster of a bill will by a rallying cry for the American people for years to come. Moreover, even if the Republicans only take over the House in November, and not the Senate, won’t it be possible to throw roadblocks in the way of the bill’s implementation? Won’t budget appropriations be necessary to sustain the various federal tentacles the bill seeks to establish? What will happen if the House simply refuses to fund them?

Jennifer Rubin says that Obamacare has given the Republicans a big opportunity to win elections. We hope that Republicans reduce and rein in government this time.

…But this much is clear: Obama has handed his opponents a message and a target. The Republican party will put many internal arguments aside and focus on the objective of challenging and repealing ObamaCare. The Left — when not considering that Obama has now herded Americans into the arms of Big Insurance — may be delighted. But no party can win and govern for long without the vast center of the American electorate. Obama has now ceded that to his political opponents.

Investor’s Business Daily editors chronicle a list of lies that President Obama recently said about Obamacare.

• (“This is not a) government takeover of health care.” How is it that government can dictate to private insurance companies what they can offer, to whom, under what circumstances and at what prices, and yet still not own it? Every basic business decision a private company can make has effectively been expropriated.

Even as Obama denied his health care plan was a government takeover, his vice president, Joe Biden, laid out the real deal: “You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.” We’ll take him at his word.

• “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” That’s if your doctor chooses to remain in the profession. Unfortunately, our own IBD/TIPP Poll found that up to 45% would consider quitting if they’re going to be dictated to by unaccountable bureaucrats who couldn’t get into medical school. …

In the Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong discusses Steve Pincus’ book, 1688, about James II and the revolution he sparked. He notes how the beginning of the story could just as easily be Obama’s.

…James ascended the throne with the good wishes of most of the English nation.  His anodyne statements about protecting freedom of conscience convinced most in England that a new era of tolerance was in store.  England, by a large margin, had great and positive expectations for James’s reign.

But it soon became clear that James had a strong ideological agenda that was at odds with the deeply held beliefs of most Englishmen of all political persuasions. James’s rough actions belied his smooth words about tolerance.  He embarked on an aggressive campaign to remake England along continental lines, a campaign that attacked deeply held convictions in England about the relation between government and the governed.  Rather than being an empathetic man in touch with the sentiments of the country, as most had believed, he proved to be a haughty, headstrong, and stubborn one intent on bending the country to his will, and damn quickly. …

…There will be, I trust, no such resolution–or revolution–in the US.  But I do think that it is highly likely that there will be an intense popular reaction that will transform American politics for years to come.  The reaction is already manifest.  The question remains as to whether it will be sufficient to derail Obama’s headlong race to a statist future in 21st century America, as the Glorious Revolution derailed James’s race to an authoritarian, absolutist one in 17th century England. …

Peter Wehner gives us his thoughts.

…The Democratic party is now, more than ever, the party of big government, at a time when trust in government is near historic lows. Democrats engineered a federal takeover of the American health-care system at a moment when confidence in Washington is virtually nonexistent. And at a time when the deficit and debt are white-hot concerns with the public, the Democrats — with the stroke of Barack Obama’s pen — will claim ownership for the fiscal wreckage that awaits us.

5. Some of us have been arguing that passage of ObamaCare would do even more damage to the Democratic party than its failure. This view is predicated on the belief that when you take extremely unpopular legislation, pass it through means that are widely seen are corrupt, and make the health-care system worse rather than better, you will pay a high political price. Democrats already have, simply during the debate about health-care reform. But ObamaCare has now landed. It is what the Obama presidency and the Democratic party now stand for. And I suspect what they have experienced so far, in races in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, will seem like glory days compared to what will happen to them on the first Tuesday of November, and beyond.

In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel describes the actions that Obama and Company took to pass Obamacare.

…President Obama flew to Pennsylvania (home to five wavering House Democrats), Missouri (three wavering), Ohio (eight), and Virginia (four) to hold rallies with small, supportive crowds. In four days, Mr. Obama held 64 meetings or calls with congressmen. The goal was to let undecideds know that the president had them in his crosshairs, that he still had pull with the base, and he’d use it against them. By Saturday the tactic had yielded yes votes from at least half the previously undecided members of those states. …

…Outside heavies were enlisted to warn potential no votes that unions and other Democrats would run them out of Congress. Al Lawson, a Tallahassee liberal challenging Blue Dog Florida Rep. Allen Boyd in a primary, made Mr. Boyd’s previous no vote the centerpiece of his criticism. The SEIU threatened to yank financial support for New York’s Michael McMahon. The liberal Working Families Party said it would deny him a ballot line. Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand vowed to challenge South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin if she voted no. New York’s Scott Murphy was targeted as a part of a $1.3 million union-financed ad campaign to pressure him to flip. Moveon.Org spent another $36,000 on ads in his district and promised a primary. Messrs. Boyd and Murphy caved on Friday. …

George Will exposes Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s hypocrisy.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, like many liberals, seems afflicted by Sixties Nostalgia Syndrome, a longing for the high drama and moral clarity of the civil rights era. …Duncan vowed to unleash on public schools legions of lawyers wielding Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They supposedly will rectify what he considers civil rights violations, such as too many white students in high school Advanced Placement classes. …

…While his lawyers seek evidence of displeasing enrollments in AP courses, he is complicit in strangling the scholarship program that enables 1,300 District of Columbia low-income minority students to escape from the District’s execrable schools. … Sensitive about supposed injustices in distant AP classes, Duncan is worse than merely indifferent to children within sight of his office at the foot of Capitol Hill.

No segregationist politician is blocking schoolhouse doors against D.C. children; congressional Democrats are. Until Duncan and the talkative president he serves speak against the congressional Democrats who are strangling the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, he should spare us the exhibitionism of explaining problems of social class in the ’60s vocabulary of civil rights violations.

Robert Samuelson comments on Alan Greenspan’s recently published defense of his record.

…Greenspan’s complicity in the financial crisis stemmed from succeeding too much, not doing too little. Recessions were infrequent and mild. The 1987 stock market crash, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and the burst “tech bubble” did not lead to deep slumps. The notion spread that the Fed could counteract almost any economic upset. Greenspan, once a critic of “fine-tuning” the business cycle, effectively became a convert. The world seemed less risky. The problem of “moral hazard” — meaning that if people think they’re insulated from risk, they’ll take more chances — applied not just to banks but to all of society: bankers, regulators, economists, ordinary borrowers and consumers.

“We had been lulled into a state of complacency,” Greenspan writes in passing, failing to draw the full implication. Which is: Too much economic success creates the seeds of its undoing. Extended prosperity bred overconfidence that led to self-defeating behavior. Neither Greenspan nor any other major economist has yet wrestled with this daunting contradiction.

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Streetwise Professor reacts to health care.

Whatever happens this afternoon (or this evening) in the healthcare vote, the entire spectacle brings to mind what Mark Twain once wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”  Or perhaps this one: “I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.”  (There are more: all, sadly, fit.)

And this, uttered by lawyer Gideon Tucker: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

As dysfunctional as the American healthcare system is, we will pine for the merely dysfunctional if Obamacare passes.  The procedural chicanery and will to override the clear sense of the American people will make things worse, not better.  If only Congress were subject to the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.  (But then what would they do with their time?) …

Matthew Continetti says when it comes to health care, the process is the substance.

One day historians of the health care debate will puzzle over a curious distinction. Why was so much ink spilled over the difference between “process” and “substance”? The terms seem suited to a discourse on phenomenology, not politics. Nevertheless, future historians will note that early 21st century liberals decried the process of legislating because they felt it blinded their subjects to the beneficial substance of social reform. Look beyond the turbulence, tumult, and messy compromises of democracy, their argument went, and the goodness of the liberal cause is self-evident.

But of course it is not self-evident. And to separate process from substance is to create, as somebody likes to say, a false choice. When you bake a cake, everything depends on the selection of ingredients and the manner of preparation. So, too, with the law. Health care reform’s inputs—the partisanship, the special deals, the procedural tricks, the budgetary gimmicks—will directly affect its outputs, i.e., its consequences. They are part and parcel of a $1 trillion-plus health bill that will raise taxes, cut Medicare, become ridiculously expensive sooner rather than later, and poison politics for a long time to come. Liberals miss the point. The process is the substance. …

The Economist writes about how some cultures are killing their baby girls. Be warned: there is a very disturbing story in the first three paragraphs of this article.

…Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole. …

…Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast preponderance of crime and violence—especially single men in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married and having children, as it does in China and India. A rising population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were connected† concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning that the social problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing. Governments, they say, “must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.” …

…Yet the story of the destruction of baby girls does not end in deepest gloom. At least one country—South Korea—has reversed its cultural preference for sons and cut the distorted sex ratio (see chart 3). There are reasons for thinking China and India might follow suit. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors give us one more reason to reign in government. In the San Joachin Valley, the Department of the Interior turned off the water to save an endangered fish. This action dried up fertile farmland, reduced farming families to poverty, and caused the price of our food to increase. But once Obamacare votes must be bought, the water is turned back on.

…One could chalk it up to good fortune or just good constituent service. But in the middle of a contentious health care debate marked by Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases, we may be forgiven if we find an announcement by the Department of the Interior regarding California’s water supply a tad too coincidental.

On Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it was increasing water allocations for the Central Valley of California, a region that depends on these water allocations for local agriculture and jobs. The timing adds to our suspicions.

According to the Interior announcement, “Typically (the Bureau of) Reclamation would release the March allocation update around March 22nd, but moved up the announcement at the urging of Senators (Diane) Feinstein and (Barbara) Boxer, and Congressmen (Jim) Costa and (Dennis) Cardoza.” …

Michael Kinsley may think that Carter got a bad wrap, but it’s worth taking note when he points to an easy way the government could try to get out from under the national debt without having to make hard decisions.

…There is a way out. It’s called inflation. In 1979, for example, the government ran a deficit of more than $40 billion—about $118 billion in today’s money. The national debt stood at about $830 billion at year’s end. But because of 13.3 percent inflation, that $830 billion was worth what only $732 billion would have been worth at the beginning of the year. In effect, the government ran up $40 billion in new debts but inflated away almost $100 billion and ended up with a national debt smaller in real terms than what it started with. Ten percent inflation for five years (if that were possible) would erode the value of our projected debt nicely—but along with it, the value of non-indexed pensions, people’s savings, and so on. The Federal Reserve is independent, but Congress and the White House have ways to pressure the Fed. Actually, just spending all this money we don’t have is one good way.

Compared with raising taxes or cutting spending, just letting inflation do the dirty work sounds easy. It will be a terrible temptation, and Obama’s historic reputation (not to mention the welfare of the nation) will depend on whether he succumbs. Or so I fear. So who are you going to believe? Me? Or virtually every leading economist across the political spectrum? Even I know the sensible answer to that. …

In the Daily Beast, Charles Gasparino says that Moody’s is concerned about the national debt.

…At issue is a report issued by Moody’s Investors Service that says the triple-A rating on U.S. government debt might someday be a thing of the past. The triple-A rating is, of course, an opinion, but one that carries a lot of weight in the bond markets. …

…Meanwhile, the raters’ track record in predicting a crisis of this magnitude is pretty weak, as well. Many of those esoteric bonds that were held on the books of the banks and later destroyed the financial system in 2008 because they were worth pennies on the dollar were rated triple-A. The raters, for example, gave Orange County, California, high grades before its bankruptcy in 1994, failed to see the bond-market implosion in 1998, and had no idea that the housing market was cratering in 2007, until it cratered, and the bonds backed by risky mortgages were defaulting and spreading a virus that, save for a government bailout, would have destroyed what was left of the financial system.

That said, the current warning shouldn’t be taken lightly, precisely because ratings agencies like Moody’s have been so late in the past. Calling attention to the country’s debt level must mean we are really heading for trouble.

So what would it mean for a downgrade? First, higher borrowing costs. …

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Charles Krauthammer looks at the reason for the Obami anger directed at Israel.

…Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its gross domestic product is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”

What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.

Indeed, long before the Biden incident, Abbas refused even to resume direct negotiations with Israel. That’s why the Obama administration has to resort to “proximity talks” — a procedure that sets us back 35 years to before Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem. …

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews the recent ultimatum that the Obami have made on Israel, and what lies beneath.

…Obama’s new demands follow the months of American pressure that eventually coerced Netanyahu into announcing both his support for a Palestinian state and a 10-month ban on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria. No previous Israeli government had ever been asked to make the latter concession.

Netanyahu was led to believe that in return for these concessions Obama would begin behaving like the credible mediator his predecessors were. But instead of acting like his predecessors, Obama has behaved like the Palestinians. Rather than reward Netanyahu for taking a risk for peace, Obama has, in the model of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, pocketed Netanyahu’s concessions and escalated his demands. This is not the behavior of a mediator. This is the behavior of an adversary. …

Nile Gardiner criticizes Obama’s unbelievably poor judgment in foreign policy.

…Contrast President Obama’s softly, softly treatment of the Iranian theocracy led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – which has threatened to wipe Israel off the map – with that of his distinctly aggressive stance towards Israel. Every effort has been made to engage Tehran, and appease its leaders, from remaining silent over its brutal beating and murder of protestors to turning a blind eye to Tehran’s military and financial support for both the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorist groups in Iraq. At the same time, the Iranians continue to bankroll and arm Hamas and Hizbollah, whose sole aim is the destruction of Israel.

In the space of just over a year, Barack Obama has managed to significantly damage relations with America’s two closest friends, while currying favour with practically every monstrous dictatorship on the face of the earth. … There is nothing clever about this approach – it will ultimately weaken US global power and strengthen the hand of America’s enemies, who have become significantly emboldened and empowered by Barack Obama’s naïve approach since he took office. …

More on-target commentary from Mark Steyn.

…Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you – yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens – are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. …

…Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama’s Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. …

…Obama and Pelosi are strong-arming swing-state congressmen into taking one for the deem. It’s appropriate that it should take banana republic maneuvers to ram this through, because it’s about government so powerful it can make up the rules as it goes along. …

Roger Simon comments on the latest in the efforts to pass Obamacare. It really is fortunate that liberals were greedy in their healthcare grab.

…When you think over the last year, it’s clear Obama has some of the most inept advisers in recent presidential history. Allowing him to risk his entire presidency on a global overhaul of health care – when an incremental overhaul could have been had simply for the asking – seems absurd politics, win or lose. It also isn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things – other than the obvious, increasing the amount of the economy under government control. The nostalgia for marxism inherent in it all this almost pathetic. Don’t these people live in the real world? …

Victor Davis Hanson agrees with the president on one point.

At an outdoor rally today, the president described the health-care debate as a referendum on the “character” of the country, and I do believe he was correct.

The president is pushing legislation that a clear majority of the people dislike, and whose details neither he nor his supporters can explain in simple language. Its ends-justify-the-means passage will require legislative gymnastics that border on the unconstitutional, and in Orwellian fashion are designed to reassure its sheepish supporters that they can appear not to be voting for the bill they vote for. And to achieve a House majority, Obama must offer an array of personal favors, political payoffs, federal stipends, and open threats, which, if done in the private sector, would be actionable acts of felonious bribery or racketeering.

So, yes, this is a reflection about character; and so far the president has throughout this entire shameful process been shown to be utterly wanting on that count…

Peggy Noonan has come to her senses. She writes an excellent article about Obama and the recent strategies to pass Obamacare, including the Fox interview.

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing—really, embarrassing to our country—that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he’s having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he’s been promising for a year will be passed next week. What an air of chaos this signals to the world. And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend. …

…Mr. Baier forced him off his well-worn grooves. He did it by stopping long answers with short questions, by cutting off and redirecting. In this he was like a low-speed bumper car. In the end the interview seemed to me a public service because everyone in America right now wants to see the president forced off his grooves and into candor on an issue that involves 17% of the economy. Again, the stakes are high. So Mr. Baier’s style seemed—this is admittedly subjective—not rude but within the bounds, and not driven by the antic spirit that sometimes overtakes reporters. He seemed to be trying to get new information. He seemed to be attempting to better inform the public.

Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. …The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing. …

In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez liked Peggy Noonan’s article.

I know not everyone was in the “Patriotic Grace” mood when her book came out, but Peggy Noonan makes excellent observations today. And maybe they’re especially powerful when you consider how she did, in fact, have hopes for this president:

…And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn’t worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass. …

Also in the Corner, Andy McCarthy has different thoughts.

Sorry, K-Lo, can’t go with you on this one. First, this bill is entirely worth it to the Obama Left. It is the social revolution they’ve always dreamed of, they get it without firing a shot, and it never gets rolled back without very drastic countermeasures — meaning the likelihood is that it doesn’t get rolled back (and since we live in a dynamic world, what doesn’t get rolled back, rolls on, and rolls over us).

Second, when some of us argued in 2008 that Obama is not a conventional politician, that enacting his radical, transformative agenda remains more important to him than winning elections, and that he would lead us straight to Demon Pass, Peggy Noonan scoffed — when she wasn’t swooning over our vibrant, promising, intellectual giant of a new president. And she still doesn’t get it: Obama hasn’t changed a whit; she was just wrong.

Jonah Goldberg posts comments from David Brooks on the legislative tricks the Dems are trying to pass Obamacare.

…Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane? …

David Harsanyi makes some important points about the corrupt deem-and-pass process.

…Actually, in the case of health care legislation, the ugly substance of the legislation creates the ugly process. The two issues are inseparable. The process is corrupted, as the advocates have no other path for passage.

This particular process, cobbled together in an effort to bypass the will of voters and protect cowardly legislators, then becomes vitally important. …

…Let’s concede that Democrats are correct in calling out duplicitous and hypocritical GOPers. Does dredging up instances of Republican chicanery now validate the use of your own scams to pass “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act” (the president’s own characterization)? …

From The Corner, a schedule of today’s votes.

… 6:15 p.m.: If the reconciliation bill passes, the House will immediately vote on the Senate bill, without debate.

From The Hill, a list of the 20 Dems who will decide the fate of the bill. Here are a few;

* Glenn Nye (Va.) Nye is in a toss-up race. He voted no last time and his vote will go a long way in determining whether Democratic leaders get the votes.

* Zack Space (Ohio) Space is undecided. Other Ohio Democrats, such as Reps. Betty Sutton and Mary Jo Kilroy, have gone from undecided to yes. He supported the House bill in 2009.

* Ciro Rodriguez (Texas) Rodriguez is considered more likely than not to vote yes but he did vote for the Stupak language. Rodriguez voted yes last year.

From Kathryn Jean Lopez, at the Corner, we learn Glenn Nye announced last night he will vote no.

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Roger Simon wonders if American Jews are giving thought to the way Obama is treating Israel.

…The Obama administration has taken the admonition to “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” to a new level. They want to make love with their enemies while taking their friends to the woodshed and beating the living daylights out of them. And take them they did, time after time. First Biden, then Hillary, then some semi anonymous character at the State Department dressing down Ambassador Oren (talk about disrespecting your betters!), then on to the talk show circuit with the droning Gibbs and Obama’s “best Jew” David Axlerod. His other “best Jew” Rahm Emanuel was nowhere in evidence, as far as I know. (Interesting, that).

But back to my lede. Is the Jewish love affair with the Democratic Party about to end? I know many will be skeptical. And they should be. But I suspect something is brewing. This kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed. …

In Jewish World Review, Anne Bayefsky believes the recent vitriol directed at Israel is to intimidate the Israelis from protecting themselves against a nuclear Iran.

…Reading between the lines, the true explanation of the hyperbole of describing the announcement of housing plans as “insulting” – to use Clinton’s word – is something else entirely: Iran. Ironically, when Vice-President Biden went before the Israeli public on March 11 and told them “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period,” only politeness prevented Israelis from laughing out loud. Nobody believed him. Everyone knows that the UN is not going to deliver a Security Council resolution imposing serious sanctions on Iran in time to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. Every time Obama officials claim they are working on sanctions, it just reinforces the conclusion that they have absolutely no intention of doing what is necessary to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

That leaves Israel holding the bag. And Obama – along with European countries and Australia – do not want Israel to use force against Iran’s nuclear facilities regardless of the mortal threat that they pose to Israel’s population. The President’s only way to prevent Israel from acting – without using more overt intimidation that would reveal his having put Israel’s security way down on his list of priorities and risk a backlash in Congress – is to scare Israel fast with threatened isolation on a trumped-up affront like a bunch of new houses in the desert. …

…And we also know that for the Vice President of the United States to stand before Israelis, address the greatest immediate threat to their peace and security and misrepresent the President’s willingness to do what it takes to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb – is what is really insulting.

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin blogs that the Obami are getting in the way of their own peace process by criticizing Israel and stirring up Palestinian unrest.

What prompted this morning’s violence in Jerusalem’s Old City? Though the stone-throwing and disruptions resulted in only eight Israeli security personnel being wounded and a similar number of Palestinian casualties, the context of the American diplomatic offensive against the Jewish state must be seen as an incentive for the Palestinians to do their own part to ratchet up the pressure. While the Obama administration is using its hurt feelings about the announcement of building homes in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to put the screws to the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians have their own game to play here. And since Washington has decided to go all out to falsely portray the Israelis as the primary obstacle to peace, it should be expected that the supposed victims of the new housing — Palestinians who are in no way harmed by the building of new apartments — will seek to keep events churning. …

Also in Contentions, Noah Pollak blogs that the Obami are mastering the art of alienating friends.

Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with White House officials today and posted this report.

“So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni’s centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset…

Obama knows that this sort of stable, centrist coalition is the key to success. He would rather, I understand, not have to deal with Netanyahu at all — people near the President say that, for one thing, Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu is very bright, and there is no chemistry at all between the two men — but he’d rather have a Netanyahu who is being pressured from his left than a Netanyahu who is being pressured from the right.”

So here we have on record the Obama administration saying 1) that it is trying to topple the government of a democratic ally (if only we could try this in Tehran!) 2) that it believes it has such mastery of Israeli politics that publicly bludgeoning Bibi will result in such a shakeup, and that 3) even if the hoped-for new government is formed, the White House thinks it’s a good idea to go on record stating that the Prime Minister they will have to deal with is stupid. …

In Power Line, Paul Mirengoff blogs about the Obami lack of diplomacy and WaPo commentary on the subject.

…But the Post’s perspective is an important one because it purports to reject what Obama is doing even on its own terms (the Post assumes that Obama is trying to advance the cause of peace, not simply letting off steam after a tough year by venting against a country he can’t stand; I’m not so sure). If Obama’s actions fail to garner support even from those who would like Israel to do at least some of what Obama is demanding — and from an institution like the Post that is more than willing to criticize Israel — then the administration has little hope of winning over mainstream Israelis and Americans for its crusade against the Netanyahu government. And without such support, that crusade is likely to be as unsuccessful this year as it was early last year when Obama and Hillary Clinton attempted to browbeat Israel into making concessions. …

David Harsanyi has some criticism for the disproportionate ways in which the Obami are addressing foreign policy issues. In reading about Dalal Mughrabi square, one wonders why the Israelis would consider entering into a peace process with the Palestinians, who celebrate a terrorist who murdered Israelis.

…These days, as Christian farmers are being slaughtered by Muslim machetes in Nigeria, outrage from the White House is difficult to find. But it made sure to instruct our Libyan ambassador to apologize to “Colonel” Moammar Khadafy after he offered some mildly critical comments about the dictator’s call for jihad against Switzerland.

Khadafy can be forgiven, but there are transgressions that can’t. One such sin was perpetrated by Israel after the nation’s decision to allow a new housing project to be built in Jerusalem.

…As the administration was manufacturing this anger, the Palestinian Authority was preparing the newly minted Dalal Mughrabi square. You know, just a place for folks to gather and commemorate the 32nd anniversary of 1978′s Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israelis — 13 of them children — were murdered in a bus hijacking. …

Claudia Rosett reviews Mosab Hassan Yousef’s book, Son of Hamas.

Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef, a genuine Palestinian freedom fighter. He was raised to become a leader of the terrorist group Hamas–strict Muslims dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the horrors he saw them inflicting on their own people led him to become an informant within Hamas for the Israeli security service Shin Bet. Risking death had he been found out, he worked for years to save innocent lives, as he puts it–both Israeli and Palestinian.

Now living in the U.S., Yousef is further risking his neck to tell his tale. He has just published a memoir, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue and Unthinkable Choices. In a phone interview, speaking fluent English, he says it “reads like a novel” but “this is a true story.”

Written with the help of journalist Ron Brackin, Yousef’s 265-page book reads with the page-turning ease of a great thriller. Its bombshell news about his work for the Israelis broke just last week, a few days prior to publication. That comes on top of his disclosure in 2008 that while working with Hamas he had quietly converted from Islam to Christianity. In his multi-faceted telling of what he calls his “unlikely journey,” Yousef challenges layers of conventional wisdom (and the entire weave of State Department and White House thinking), to offer his insider insights into Islam, terrorism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and hopes for peace in the Middle East. Whether you are inclined to agree with him or not, he deserves a wide hearing. …

Jonathan Laing, in Barron’s, takes an in-depth look at the looming fiscal crises to state and local governments due to bloated public pensions.

…Says Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University: “In many ways, some of our states are like General Motors before its bankruptcy, suffering from falling revenue, borrowing money to cover operating expenses and operating under crushing legacy health and pension liabilities. It’s entirely possible, given the gigantic size of the pension liabilities, that some states might do what was once the unthinkable at GM and default.”

Such assessments might be alarmist. A rebound in the U.S. economy and a continued rally in stocks would do a world of good for ailing public pension funds. And only one state — Arkansas in 1934 — has defaulted on its GO bonds in the past century with their holders suffering losses. Arkansas, however, was a special case. In addition to the Great Depression, it was ailing from large local debts it had assumed as a result of catastrophic floods in the 1920s.

But what if the stock-market rally falters, the economy doesn’t return to full health, jobs remain scarce and tax revenues remain depressed?

…some major bond investors are altering their strategies in light of the impending pension crisis. …

…Vallejo, Calif., had no choice but to file a Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2008 …

…the fallout has been brutal. Employee health-care benefits have been decimated. Holders of the city’s municipal bonds are unlikely to get all their money back. And violent crime rates have shot up dramatically as a result of reductions in its police force from 158 to 104 officers.

The only thing that will be left untouched? The very thing that tipped the California city into Chapter 9 — its $84 billion in future pension obligations.

The Economist has more on the new abundance of natural gas first posted here February 7th.

… These techniques have unlocked vast tracts of gas-bearing shale in America (see map). Geologists had always known of it, and Mitchell had been working on exploiting it since the early 1990s. But only as prices surged in recent years did such drilling become commercially viable. Since then, economies of scale and improvements in techniques have halved the production costs of shale gas, making it cheaper even than some conventional sources.

The Barnett Shale alone accounts for 7% of American gas supplies. Shale and other reservoirs once considered unexploitable (coal-bed methane and “tight gas”) now meet half the country’s demand. New shale prospects are sprinkled across North America, from Texas to British Columbia. One authority says supplies will last 100 years; many think that is conservative. In 2008 Russia was the world’s biggest gas producer (see chart 1); last year, with output of more than 600 billion cubic metres, America probably overhauled it. North American gas prices have slumped from more than $13 per million British thermal units in mid-2008 to less than $5. The “unconventional”—tricky and expensive, in the language of the oil industry—has become conventional. …

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In a piece titled ”A vote? We don’t need no stinking vote!,” Orange County Register editorial writer explains why the Dems are attracted to the “deem and pass” rule.

… Give Nancy Pelosi a certain amount of credit for frankness. She says of the three possible ways to come to a vote, at this point she is leaning toward this one because it doesn’t require lawmakers in vulnerable districts to cast a potentially unpopular vote. They can hide behind process. “It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” she said in a roundtable with bloggers on Monday, “But I like it, because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” Give her points for openness in acknowledging that evasion of accountability is a prize greatly to be valued in today’s Congress. Of course it might be unconstitutional, but who pays much attention to that old scrap of parchment anyway? …

Streetwise Professor explores an analogy in “Woodrow Obama.”

The analogy is not exact—historical analogies never are—but there is more than a passing similarity between Obama’s health care battle and Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the League of Nations; there are also striking similarities between the men themselves.  Obama should mark well the lesson—but I doubt he will.

Like Wilson, Obama is a self-styled progressive who is deeply skeptical of the Founders’ creation.  Like Wilson, Obama is firmly convinced of his own rectitude and his moral superiority over his political foes.  As with Wilson, this makes Obama firmly opposed to compromise with these foes; he views compromise as betrayal of a fundamental belief, and as Wilson did, he views his opponents as morally defective.  Obama, like Wilson, is a Nobel Peace Price winner (although Wilson actually did something to merit it). …

In the WSJ, Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn write about the outrageous actions of dishonorable lawyers aiding the Gitmo terrorists, and a shameful Attorney General who doesn’t recognize that he is a public servant.

…Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees. …

…Last August, the Washington Post reported that three lawyers defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 co-conspirators showed their clients photographs of covert CIA officers in an attempt to identify the individuals who interrogated them after they were captured overseas. Lawyers working for the John Adams Project, formed to support the legal team representing KSM and his cohorts, provided the defense attorneys with the photographs, according to the Post. None of the attorneys under investigation were identified in the Post report. …

…It is entirely legitimate to ask who else among Mr. Holder’s hires from the Gitmo bar is shaping or influencing national security policy decisions. Meanwhile, the public can decide whether the lawyers at Paul, Weiss who are volunteering at Guantanamo are an example of the legal profession’s noblest traditions.

…On Feb. 20, 2007, a post on the Paul, Weiss Web site proudly announced “Paul, Weiss achieves more victories for Guantanamo detainees.” Two detainees were released from Gitmo to their home in Saudi Arabia. One was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi…The Web site needs an update. The Pentagon has identified Al Joudi as a “confirmed” recidivist who is “directly involved” with the facilitation of “terrorist activities.”

Yousef Al Shehri, the detainee who led his cell block in the feeding tube rebellion, was also released in November 2007. In early 2009 he was listed on the Saudi Kingdom’s list of 85 “most wanted” extremists. Yousef was killed last October during a shootout with Saudi security forces on his way to a martyrdom operation. He and another jihadist, disguised as women and wearing suicide vests, killed a security officer in the clash. Yousef’s brother-in-law, Said Al Shehri, also released from Gitmo, is currently the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch that launched the Christmas Day airline attack last year.

In the Corner, Andy McCarthy summarizes the disgraceful activities of the Al Qaeda lawyers.

That’s the title of of a mind-blowing op-ed by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Debra and Tom make mince-meat of the hallucination that casts the Gitmo Bar as modern John Adamses. The essay recounts, among other things…

…The Gitmo Bar incited the detainees against the military guards.

The Gtimo Bar posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

The Gitmo Bar facilitated enemy combatants in communicating messages and interviews to their confederates and the outside world. …

…The Gitmo Bar provided the detainees with news accounts about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, including reports that U.S. forces were sustaining devastating casualities from IED attacks. (Again, it was a court-ordered condition of the lawyers’ access to these war prisoners that they not be given information relating to military operations, intelligence, arrests, political news and current events, and the names of U.S. government personnel.)…

In a word, sickening.

Andy McCarthy has more. The Al Qaeda lawyers and the John Adams Project lawyers have endangered the lives of Americans and their families. And this was done merely to further a political agenda. Where are the MSM who were outraged about Valerie Plame, the desk “agent” whose cover was supposedly blown? The thing that is most disgusting about liberals is that politics trumps the safety of Americans.

…Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers (Title 50, United States Code, Section 421), as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act (Title 18, United States Code, Section 793), which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs “of anything connected with the national defense”).

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more on the indefensible Gitmo Bar and its indispensable DOJ protectors. To summarize, a cabal of the enemy’s volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the “John Adams Project,” is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators. The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al-Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.

The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they’ve evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards. The CIA went appropriately ballistic over the patent security breach. But the Justice Department — which, as we’ve been noting, is rife with lawyers who volunteered their services to the detainees during the Bush years — insisted that the security breach was no big deal. …

Thomas Sowell looks at some of the political strategies being used to pass Obamacare.

In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.

Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.

…any budget — is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.

The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world. …

Robert Samuelson debunks some claims by healthcare reform advocates.

…Though it seems compelling, covering the uninsured is not the health-care system’s major problem. The big problem is uncontrolled spending, which prices people out of the market and burdens government budgets. Obama claims his proposal checks spending. Just the opposite. When people get insurance, they use more health services. Spending rises. …

…Unless we change the fee-for-service system, costs will remain hard to control because providers are paid more for doing more. Obama might have attempted that by proposing health-care vouchers (limited amounts to be spent on insurance), which would force a restructuring of delivery systems to compete on quality and cost. Doctors, hospitals and drug companies would have to reorganize care. …

…Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama’s plan evades health care’s major problems and would worsen the budget outlook. It’s a big new spending program when government hasn’t paid for the spending programs it already has.

In AOL News, Joel Kotkin has a fascinating article on projected population growth rates.

…Even more remarkably, America will expand its population in the midst of a global demographic slowdown. Global population growth rates of 2 percent in the 1960s have dropped to less than half that rate today, and this downward trend is likely to continue — falling to less than 0.8 percent by 2025 — largely due to an unanticipated drop in birthrates in developing countries such as Mexico and Iran. … The world’s population, according to some estimates, could peak as early as 2050 and begin to fall by the end of the century.

Population growth has very different effects on wealthy and poor nations. In the developing world, a slowdown of population growth can offer at least short-term economic and environmental benefits. But in advanced countries, a rapidly aging or decreasing population does not bode well for societal or economic health, whereas a growing one offers the hope of expanding markets, new workers and entrepreneurial innovation.

In fact, throughout history, low fertility and socioeconomic decline have been inextricably linked, creating a vicious cycle that affected such once-vibrant civilizations as ancient Rome and 17th-century Venice and that now affects contemporary Europe , Russia and Japan. …

From Slate we learn what it is like to cruise across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.

…But as we unfurled ourselves on deck chairs on the Deck 7 promenade roughly midway through the trip, I realized that the timelessness around us was not entirely of the sort Cunard intended. The ship’s staff was constantly trying to manufacture a certain sense of lost grandeur, but just by virtue of being at sea for six nights and six days, surrounded by nothing but water and existing nowhere other than a specific longitude and latitude, we were literally timeless. We had nowhere to be. None of the many activities, ranging from dance lessons to lectures to sushi demonstrations and art auctions were compulsory, and for the first time in years, we couldn’t call each other on our cell phones to track each other’s progress through the day. We made approximate plans to meet somewhere for lunch at noon or 1 o’clock and knew that we had all the time in the world to stand around and wait if the other person was late.

Even time itself was ever-shifting. On five of our six days at sea, we set our clocks back by one hour each night so that we would arrive in New York on Eastern Standard Time. As a result, we were never quite sure what time it was, and in the rare moments when we did know, it felt like a different time, anyway, since we were structureless—maybe Berlin time, which we had been accustomed to, or U.K. time, in which we had spent three days at a friend’s house before boarding the ship. Every afternoon, a deck officer rang the ship’s bell eight times to mark “the exact time of midday,” but it seemed like a futile effort to connect us to the world on land. We soon learned to ignore it, because eight little rings did nothing to put a dent in the vastness of the ocean all around us and the ceaseless sliding by of the horizon.

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He has cynical views on Iraq and Afghanistan, but despite them we have Spengler‘s thoughts on the Iranian nuclear issue and US foreign policy.

…There is no Obama administration as such; there is only Obama, who appears to run the entire show out of his Blackberry. As David Rothkopf wrote in his Foreign Policy blog March 12, Obama’s is “an administration in which seeking the favor of the president has taken on an importance that is in fact, much more reminiscent of the historical czars than is the role being played by anyone with this now devalued moniker”.

As I wrote on this space February 18: “Israel has a strategic problem broader than the immediate issue of Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons: it is an American ally at a moment when America has effectively withdrawn from strategic leadership. That leaves Israel at a crossroads. It can act like an American client state, or a regional superpower. Either decision would have substantial costs.”(See The case for an Israeli strike against Iran, Asia Times Online, February 18) …

A Corner post by Joel Rosenberg does a good job of summarizing the current Israeli/Obama flap. Yesterday we led with Nile Gardner’s piece on our continuingly crumbling relationship with Great Britain. Now we see how the Obama administration is fanning the flames over the settlement incident which could have settled down without serious repercussions. But, it seems Obama is intent on destroying another key relationship with a close ally.

As Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington this weekend to address the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, relations between the U.S. and Israel appear to be headed for a train wreck. Indeed, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., told Israeli diplomats in a conference call over the weekend that U.S.-Israel relations face their worst crisis in more than three decades.

Here’s what happened and why. …

Abby Thernstrom and Tim Fay alert us to a racial incident in a Philadelphia school. Thernstrom and Fay ask whether the Departments of Education and Justice will address the situation, given that the perpetrators in this instance were black.  They also draw our attention to the problem of violence in public schools.

…Duncan wants to eliminate racial disparities in education in general, including in student discipline in particular. …But what will they do in response to a formal complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School (SPHS)? AALDEF has charged that the district acted with “deliberate indifference” to the harassment of Asian students and with “intentional disregard” of their welfare.

…Even before the SPHS incident, the Philadelphia Office of the Safe Schools Advocate (OSSA) had issued a blistering report about the level of violence in the system and the inability, or unwillingness, of school officials to take meaningful action. Ironically, OSSA was “defunded” this past summer. According to press accounts, “defunded” is Pennsylvania edu-speak for “we didn’t like the fact that OSSA accurately reported on this issue when we told them not to, so we closed the office and let the staff go.”

Urban school systems in general try to keep the truth about violence and chaos well hidden. A revealing 2007 report by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General makes the obvious point that no school wants to be labeled as “persistently dangerous.” And as long as schools can set the criteria by which persistent danger is measured, they can escape the label. …

…Federal data tells a much more chilling story. According to a 2000 survey conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 71 percent of public elementary and secondary schools experienced at least one violent incident during the 1999–2000 school year (including rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attacks or fights with and without a weapon, threats of physical attack with and without a weapon, and robbery with and without a weapon). In 20 percent of public schools, what NCES calls “serious violent incidents” occurred. These data, of course, do not include incidents of bullying and the host of disruptive behaviors that make teaching and learning very difficult. …

In Forbes, Nouriel Roubini says that news on the economy is troubling.

A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery–at best–in 2010. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth which I forecast for H1 (the first half of the year). The U.S. faces continued challenges in H2–particularly as historic levels of fiscal stimulus fade–and appears far too close to the tipping point of a double-dip recession.

This is not the conventional wisdom. Heated debate continues to rage in the U.S. on whether the economic recovery will be V-shaped (with a rapid return to robust growth above potential), U-shaped (slow anemic, subpar, below trend growth for at least the next two years) or W-shaped (a double-dip recession). …

…a slew of new U.S. macro data have come out. They have been almost uniformly poor, if not outright awful. Consumer confidence, based on the Michigan survey, has tanked. On the real estate front, new home sales are collapsing again, existing home sales are also falling sharply and construction activity (both residential and commercial) is sharply down. Durable goods orders are down, and initial claims for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly high (way above the 400,000 mark). Real disposable income for Q4 has been revised downward while real disposable income (before transfers) for January was negative again. …

David Warren responds to a feminist who disparaged him in an article.

…What I found most telling, was another parenthetical assertion, about persons of my ilk. “(Personally, I don’t even know any men like that — not among family, friends or neighbours.)”

That she doesn’t, strikes me as a measure of the bubble in which the “liberal intelligentsia” are living, and with which I am over-familiar from my own dealings within the “mainstream media.” Indeed, it is how Fox came to trounce CNN, MSNBC, and other purveyors of television news; how a specialized business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, came to have such a large circulation; how “talk radio” got started, along with the whole “vast rightwing conspiracy” in the blogosphere. …

In Power Line, John Hinderaker comments on one story that gives big business a bad name.

The failing business would be the New York Times Company, which, like most newspapers, has fallen on hard times and laid off many employees. The greedy executives include Chairman Pinch Sulzberger:

Top executives at the beleaguered New York Times Company reaped hefty rewards last year, with Chairman Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger more than doubling his total compensation to $6 million. CEO Janet Robinson got even more, reaping $6.3 million, a 31.9 percent hike.

The increases come against a backdrop of declining ad revenue, layoffs, frozen pension plans, unpaid vacations and a 5 percent pay cut for most of the rank-and-file workers last year.

Hypocrisy, your name is Pinch. …

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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the Obami’s latest efforts at alienating a key ally.

…And The Times article does not even delve into the latest fallout from the joint Clinton-Kirchner press conference in Buenos Aires last week. Hillary Clinton’s astonishing statement of support for Argentine demands for UN-brokered negotiations with Britain over the Falklands has to be the biggest US diplomatic slap in the face for Great Britain in recent history. I suspect it played a key role in the Foreign Secretary’s decision not to visit Washington during his trip to the United States this week, a highly significant move in light of the pressing transatlantic concerns over the war in Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The rising tensions between Great Britain and the United States over the Falklands is threatening to become a full-blown diplomatic row, with significant long-term damage to the Anglo-American Special Relationship. It is the last thing the alliance needs as US and British forces battle the Taliban and as well as al-Qaeda in a global war against Islamist terrorism.

The Obama administration’s reckless and destructive stance over the Falklands is a major strategic error of judgment by Washington, and yet another demonstration of a poorly conceived foreign policy doctrine that attaches little importance to preserving friendships and alliances, while currying favour with anti-American regimes. It is a monumentally foolish approach that will significantly undercut support for the United States among the British people. It is also a shameful betrayal of a decades-long partnership forged through several wars in the defence of the free world.

Charles Krauthammer gives us an insightful article on how the Dems return to power has tempered liberal thinking in some areas of governance.

As the Afghanistan war intensifies …it has come to be seen as Obama’s war.

Not so. It’s become America’s war. When the former opposition party — habitually antiwar for the past four decades — adopts, reaffirms and escalates a war begun by the habitually hawkish other party, partisanship falls away, and the war becomes nationalized.

And legitimized. Do you think if John McCain, let alone George W. Bush, were president, we would not see growing demonstrations protesting our continued presence in Iraq and the escalation of Afghanistan? That we wouldn’t see a serious push in Congress to cut off funds?

…When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, the party adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born. …

In Forbes, Amity Schlaes has an informative piece on price controls.

…the Obama Administration’s move toward price controls on health insurance and credit cards. The Administration may not be calling its plans “price controls.” It would describe what it’s doing as establishing a Health Insurance Rate Authority and creating new offices and practices to protect consumers from predatory lenders. Still, such entities are laying the ground for price controls when they set premiums or the Visa interest rate. …

…Consider the last time the federal government aggressively controlled the price of something deeply important to consumers. …

…The Administration’s Cost of Living Council–yes, that was its name–ordained, tweaked and exhorted, all at different points. In the summer of 1973, for example, it froze gasoline prices. Many consumers welcomed the break. But their choice was not between high price and low price; it was between gas and no gas.  …

David Warren opines on the fiscal crises of Iceland and Greece.

…Indeed, why should anyone pay off debts? It’s an old-fashioned concept, and from what I can see, the only reason Icelanders are discussing the question at all, is that the other Europeans are withholding aid and the succour of further loans until the “Icesave” issue is dealt with.

But consider: there’s another one born every minute. The Greeks have extricated themselves from their short-term fiscal emergency, even before their government has delivered on promised austerity measures, simply by floating new bonds to private investors at an exceptionally agreeable interest rate — and even while their civil servants demonstrate violently against the whole idea of fiddling with their extravagant bonuses and early retirement plans. I gather the new issue was over-subscribed.

And that would be an argument against letting Iceland default. The very idiots who lent them money in the first place might well turn around and lend them more. Still, that is the lenders’ problem. Stupidity on that scale has to be punished. …

Thomas Sowell discusses aspects of the economic crisis.

…You don’t lend when politicians are making it more doubtful whether you are going to get your money back — either on time or at all. From the White House to Capitol Hill, politicians are coming up with all sorts of bright ideas for borrowers not to have to pay back what they borrowed and for lenders not to be able to foreclose on people who are months behind on their mortgage payments.

…more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job. …

…The theory is that, if one thing doesn’t work, it is just a matter of trying another. But, in an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.

David Harsanyi looks at the Colorado state legislature’s attempt to overburden companies doing business on the internet.

…Actually, if anyone ever needed an obvious illustration of how government overreach can damage an economy, they need look no further than the Colorado legislature’s foolish attempt to wheedle a few extra bucks out of consumers via an Internet sales tax.

After legislation forcing online companies to collect sales tax passed, Amazon.com moved to protect its consumers and long-term interests by severing its ties with Colorado. Unfortunately, this meant closing its associates program, which involved an estimated 5,000 jobs. …

…And as a recent Tax Foundation study on “Amazon laws” concluded, online companies would have to deal with more than 8,000 different tax computations should every state join Colorado’s effort. Amazon would be nuts not to fight. …

In Contentions, Liam Julian comments on the Education Department focusing on affirmative action rather than improving schools that are failing.

…The latest emission comes with Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement this week that his department’s Office of Civil Rights will “reinvigorate civil rights enforcement” in the nation’s schools in an effort “to make Dr. King’s dream of a colorblind society a reality.” There is an obvious contradiction in trying to create a colorblind society through an inherently hyper-color-aware approach. And there’s a panoply of problems with a big, brash federal office opening “equity” investigations into the discipline decisions, course allotments, teacher assignments, etc. of individual schools. Here’s just one:

Duncan said that the country must ensure “that low-income Latino and African American students” have the same access to AP (Advanced Placement) classes as do other students. This assumes that black and Latino pupils are mostly denied access to AP courses because of their ethnicities; the reality is that black and Latino high-school students are simply less likely than their white and Asian counterparts to have attained the requisite academic skills that would enable them to handle AP assignments. The solution is not to police the AP roll; the solution is to worry about the lousy elementary schools and middle schools where so many black and Latino kids are permitted to sit through years of classes while learning next to nothing in them.
Packing into AP courses students unprepared for AP coursework can have only deleterious results: Either an unprepared pupil will grow frustrated and fail, or his teacher will accommodate him by making the class easier. The first outcome is unfair to one group of students, the second outcome is unfair to another. This is not civil rights.

The WaPo editors comment on the latest funding battle in the D.C. voucher program.

DON’T BE FOOLED by the excuses offered by Senate Democratic leaders about why no vote has been scheduled to reauthorize the District’s federally funded private school voucher program. The truth is that opponents know how bad it would look to vote against a program that has helped low-income, minority children get a better education. So instead they take no action and hope the program dies a slow, quiet death. Those championing vouchers are right to call out Senate leaders for their cowardly refusal to — at the very least — allow a fair hearing for this successful program. …

…Unless Congress acts soon or the D.C. government decides to assume responsibility, the voucher program, which has benefited so many students since its inception in 2004, is in grave danger. The Obama administration closed the program to new students; children currently enrolled, while supposedly assured of getting vouchers until they graduate from high school, face uncertainty as the program’s administrator pulls out. This is exactly what the program’s chief antagonists, the teachers unions… Given that a rigorous, federally mandated study confirmed the program’s effectiveness and that local leaders such as D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee have supported it, we understand why Mr. Reid sits on his hands. What possible explanation could Democrats devise for killing something that has been so crucial in the lives of thousands of poor D.C. children? How would it look? No, better to do nothing and hope the issue goes away. …

In Pajamas Media, Christopher Monckton directs scathing commentary at the global warming crowd, and the editors of Nature in particular.

The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.

No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.

After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming” scare — driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends — has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe. …

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Jonathan Tobin compares and contrasts Palestinians and Israelis and their regard for murderers.

… It is true that the video did include a bit where one man sang a song in praise of Baruch Goldstein, the mad Israeli who murdered 29 Muslims in Hebron on Purim in 1994. That is offensive. But for those who see this as the equivalent of Arab incitement, it is worth pointing out that this is just one Jewish extremist. No one could credibly assert that the Israeli government or the overwhelming majority of the Israeli people share his views. In fact, such despicable beliefs are completely marginal in Israel. But while Baruch Goldstein is a hero only to a tiny fragment of a percentage of Israelis, Dalal Mughrabi is a heroine to virtually all Palestinians. Rather than an illustration of how both sides are mired in mutual hate, the reaction of the Israeli and Palestinian publics to these two names actually shows how different the two cultures are at this point in time.

Indeed, true peace will only be possible when Palestinians think of Mughrabi the same way most Israelis view Goldstein.

In Commentary, Tevi Troy reviews the past twenty years of healthcare politics.

…There are, however, alternatives to the expensive and cumbersome approach promoted by the Democrats thus far. Some proposals, if packaged in a smaller bill, could potentially secure bipartisan support. Although President Obama has recognized physician complaints regarding the high cost and perverse incentives generated by an uncontrolled medical–malpractice system, he has until now been unwilling to accept the well-reasoned position that punitive damages should be capped. Another proposal, long promoted by Republicans, is to expand the insurance market by allowing individuals to purchase insurance across state lines. A third idea, the expansion of high-risk pools, would help individuals with pre-existing health conditions secure insurance policies. The point is not that Democrats and Republicans agree substantially about these issues right now but that these are matters for both parties to talk about.

Unfortunately, while the Brown election has upset Obama’s plans in the short term, it has not caused the Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House to question whether they are right on either the merits or the politics of the health-care issue. The merits can be debated endlessly, but this review of the past two decades indicates the foolhardiness of Democratic certainty regarding health care’s political advantages. Not only do Republicans have the ability to play in the health-care arena, but the recent debates have also further diminished the American people’s faith in the Democrats, both on the issue itself and on the larger question of profligate government spending. …

In WaPo, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen comment on their polling results about Obamacare, and what it should mean to Democrats.

…As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late. At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise. …

…Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.

However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data. …

In The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez posts excerpts from Thomas Friedman. He wants to do an Iraq victory lap about now, but where was he when the heavy lifting had to be done?

Thomas Friedman today:

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Thomas Friedman in 2006:

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war. . . .

Leaving, while bringing other problems, might also make it easier to build coalitions to deal with post-U.S. Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria.

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby discusses Iraqi democracy, in light of their elections.

RONALD REAGAN liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn’t mind who got the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush’s presidency, and he probably doesn’t mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.

This week’s parliamentary elections in Iraq brought 12 million voters to the polls – a remarkable 62 percent turnout, notwithstanding a wave of Election Day bombings that killed 38 people.

…Iraqis have paid a steep price for their burgeoning young democracy; tens of thousands of lives were wiped out in the horrific insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps that awful butcher’s bill explains the fervor with which Iraqis have embraced democratic self-governance. In Sunday’s elections, 6,200 candidates representing 86 political parties contended to fill 325 seats in parliament. (Would that our own congressional elections were so competitive.) Such democratic passion would be impressive anywhere. To see it flourish in one of the world’s most dangerous and undemocratic neighborhoods is downright heroic. …

That the Obami have made no course corrections is still a source of amazement. In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery comments suggesting the president needs and intervention.

Denial is a river that runs through the White House, where the denizens are in the grip of two major delusions: One, that the country really wants really expensive big government, and two, that Obama is “sort of like God.”

Since early last spring, they’ve been waging a fight with the reality principle, convincing themselves (and fewer and fewer in the larger political universe) that in the very next speech, Obama will recapture that old campaign magic. …

…A year in, the Obamatrons barely seem to have noticed that they have divided the Democrats, lost independents, and revived the small-government forces as never before. …

In The Corner, Veronique de Rugy posts on spending issues.

The Hill reports that in a rare 100-0 roll call vote “The Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to tell the public when it isn’t paying for new spending or tax cuts.” The amendment, which would be applied to the job bill, “would create a running tally on the secretary of the Senate’s website of any new mandatory spending that isn’t paid for through offsetting spending cuts or tax increases.”

Still, “Coburn wasn’t optimistic over the chances his proposal will end up becoming law.” That is because Democrats may replace it with one authored by Sen. Max Baucus “that requires the Secretary of the Senate to create a new website that links to Congressional Budget Office information,” and “would only be updated every three months.” …