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Jennifer Rubin’s post on her Friday Question reminds of the great week.

Last week was definitely a newsworthy one, thanks to three days of Supreme Court argument, the president’s open mike gaffe, the passage of the House Republicans’ budget and the consolidation of GOP support behind Mitt Romney. Some readers marveled, as Tuscany1 did, at the “historic nature” of the Supreme Courts arguments. Marylandmama put it this way: “Whatever they decide will have major implications for health care in the future and for the Presidential race in the fall.” Jafco wrote of the Supreme Court hearings: “The Court arguments, wherever they lead, exposed our exalted Constitutional Instructor as knowing about as much about the Constitution as he does about ‘shovel ready jobs.’ He’s further exposed as incompetent.”

But Jafco ( “The open mic incident suggests he’s completely untrustworthy”)and many more readers considered the hot mike incident as the one with long-term political ramifications. Timmy84 writes:

“The “hot mic” was the most important development because it gives substance to the conservative fear that the President does have a more unpopular agenda in mind for his second term (else why be concerned about electoral repercussions?). Now when the GOP nominee stumps with the claim that Obama needs to be stopped from another term of failed and unpopular policies, there is an actual event of the President’s own making to hold up as a glimpse into the future.” … 

Breitbart’s Big Government reports on the real power in the White House – Valerie Jarrett. She tells him to attack the Court, and he does.

… Obama was not Valerie Jarrett’s only project. She saw to the appointment of Van Jones as White House “green jobs” czar, noting that “we’ve been watching him…for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.” (That activity included an anti-American rally on Sep. 12, 2001.) Her authority in the White House is almost unchallenged, and on visits to Chicago, local Democratic judges, officials and activists flock to see her and curry influence.

Jarrett attended the Supreme Court last week as it heard arguments on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Her presence as the president’s “eyes and ears” was noted by Breitbart.com’s Ken Klukowski. Jarrett had also led the administration’s media charge in advance of the Supreme Court arguments, arguing that Obamacare is necessary because it protects women’s health in particular, shaping the case to fit Democrats’ narrative of a Republican “war on women.”

As more moderate, pragmatic voices have abandoned the White House to attend to the actual business of governing–Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel being only one of many defectors–Jarrett has remained and her influence has grown. 

Jarrett endorses the idea that Obama is still a “community organizer” in the White House, and the administration’s Alinksyite tactics of race and class division bear her fingerprints as much as his own.

Daniel Foster notes Keith Olbermann’s passage from The Current.

… We don’t yet know the details of the dispute that led to Olbermann’s apparent ouster barely more than forty weeks into his five-year, $50 million contract, though the Times says Current cut him loose for failing to honor the terms of his contract. But, seriously, what kind of awful luck does he have that he keeps running into these unreasonable, unprofessional, two-timing, back-stabbing television executives? I mean, network after network after network, the same kind of low-down, no-good greedy fatcats who wouldn’t know a visionary news commentator if it bit them on the ass. Why can’t Keith just meet one nice network head who loves him for him, who understands what a precious little snowflake he is? …

Howard Kurtz airs some of Olbermann’s dirty laundry.

It was a terrible marriage from the beginning.

Just weeks after Keith Olbermann launched his nightly program on Current TV last June, his team was complaining that the network founded by Al Gore and attorney Joel Hyatt wasn’t living up to its promises to support a professional cable news show. 

The arguments escalated for months, with Olbermann directly appealing to the former vice president on three or four occasions, until relations had become so poisoned that, on Friday, Current fired Olbermann for breach of contract. He has vowed to take the matter to court and questioned the ethics of Gore and Hyatt.

Some of the disputes are fundamental—such as missing days of work—and some sound petty, but they add up to a portrait of a dysfunctional alliance that was doomed from the start. Where Current management viewed Olbermann as a chronic complainer who had clashed with the bosses before leaving his previous jobs at MSNBC and ESPN, the liberal commentator came to believe that he had joined a rinky-dink operation, even if the channel was committed to paying him $50 million over five years.

On Aug. 2, 2011, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, Olbermann’s manager, Michael Price, sent Hyatt a list of about 40 “deficiencies” that needed to be corrected. Six days later, Price told Hyatt that the problems required “immediate attention” and that “we are not aware of any demonstrable effort to address the issues.”

One of management’s complaints was that Olbermann would not participate in some press and marketing events, even though he was contractually obligated to promote the network. Executives grew upset when Olbermann balked at touting the programming that followed his 8 p.m. show, Countdown. In the email, Price explained that reluctance by saying the host was being given wrong information about what was to air. It was “inexcusable,” he wrote, to repeatedly have Olbermann “identify incorrect programming following Countdown. If people cannot trust him to correctly identify the programming, his credibility on larger matters comes into question.” …

… No issue was too small to precipitate a fight. A continuous argument over which car service would ferry Olbermann, who doesn’t drive, was emblematic of the deteriorating situation. Olbermann wound up using eight different car services, finding fault with each one, sometimes objecting when drivers talked to him. …

Popular Mechanics on what it’s like to drive an electric car.

Fully charged on a brisk March morning, the all-electric Mitsubishi i’s range meter estimated that the battery pack had enough energy to travel 56 miles. That’s plenty, I thought, for the several-stop route I planned to a neighboring town and back. But as I pulled out into traffic, I flicked on the heat and watched the range meter recalibrate, dropping the estimated range down to 37. I did a quick mental calibration: A few miles to the first stop, 12 miles on the highway, 12 to return, another five to the next location, and so on. I then had a choice to make: Either shiver in the car or risk getting stranded. I chose the former.

Of course I could have made the ride a more comfortable if I’d used the car’s little remote fob to preheat the interior while it was still plugged in. The trouble is that the little receiver, which has a tiny antenna like something from a 1970′s-era sci-fi movie, isn’t at all clear. I thought I had engaged the pre-heat function, but when I got inside, the interior was the same 30 degrees as the ambient air.  …

A peek inside the North Korean GULAG from Readability.com’s review of Escape From Camp 14.

Nine years after watching his mother’s hanging, Shin In Geun squirmed through the electric fence that surrounds Camp 14 and ran off through the snow into the North Korean wilderness. It was January 2, 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do it.

He was 23 years old and knew no one outside the fence.

Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in Southern California.

Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight — five feet six inches, about 120 pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labor. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer’s fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard’s punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.

Shin is roughly the same age as Kim Jong Un, the chubby third son of Kim Jong Il who took over as leader after his father’s death in 2011.

Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage barbed-wire fence. His mother beat him, and he viewed her as a competitor for food. His father, who was allowed by guards to sleep with his mother just five nights a year, ignored him. His older brother was a stranger. Children in the camp were untrustworthy and abusive. Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.

Love and mercy and family were words without meaning. …

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From The Tablet, the story of another diary contemporaneous to the Holocaust. The description here of Himmler is interesting. 

David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.

Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian at Toronto’s York University and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.

Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis. …

John Fund leads off our look at the, “President Petulant.”

I spoke last night at a symposium on “The Obama Presidency” at the University of California at Berkeley. In a radical city known sometimes for its liberal anger, it won’t surprise you, many of those in the audience were upset at the prospect of the Supreme Court’s overturning part or all of Obamacare. After all, Berkeley voted 88 percent for Obama in 2008. But almost no one present at the symposium was as petulant as President Obama was yesterday, when he incorrectly claimed that if the Court rules against his landmark legislation it would be taking “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” 

The implication of his statement was that he hasn’t heard of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court laid down the doctrine of judicial review in 1803, and by which the Court can strike down unconstitutional laws. Indeed, since 1981, the Court has struck down 57 specific legislative acts of Congress, an average of two per year. 

The president’s statement was so extraordinary that a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the administration indeed respects the right of court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. As CBS’s Jan Crawford reported, Judge Jerry Smith became “very stern,” telling the lawyers arguing a separate case on the constitutionality of Obamacare that it was not clear to “many of us” whether the president believes such a right exists. He also noted Obama’s remarks yesterday in the Rose Garden about judges being an “unelected group of people.” The court was clearly not amused.

There appear to be few limits on how far President Obama will distort facts. In truth, his health-care plan passed the House by only 219 to 212, despite that body’s overwhelming Democratic majority. It was the first major piece of social legislation within memory to pass Congress without a single vote from the opposition party.

Even some liberals believe the president went too far yesterday. Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer who covers the Supreme Court for the Washington Post, said Obama’s assault “stopped me cold . . . for the president to imply that the only explanation for a constitutional conclusion contrary to his own would be out-of-control conservative justices does the court a disservice.” It was a mistake for Obama to “declare war” on the court, says Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of Time magazine. Voters don’t like hearing assaults on the Supreme Court itself, probably because Americans believe “life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.”

So it is surreal for Obama, a former constitutional-law professor and president of the Harvard Law Review, to go after the court as if he were a demagogue seeking reelection. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “Obama’s inner community organizer seems to be winning out over the law professor.” …

Steve Hayward continues the theme.

I’m grateful for the favor Obama did for us yesterday of exposing his extreme constitutional ignorance, with his comments on how it would be “unprecedented” for the Court to strike down a law passed by a “strong majority” in Congress.  (As if a House margin of seven votes is a “strong” majority.)  True, he walked back the comment today, but surely because his statement was not merely indefensible but outright embarrassing to his media defenders.

I’ve been growing weary of hearing people mention that he’s a “constitutional scholar,” since he never published a single thing on the subject either as editor of the Harvard Law Review or as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School.  But hey—he taught constitutional law, didn’t he?

Not really.

His course on constitutional law, one of several constitutional law courses on the U of C curriculum, dealt exclusively with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment—the favorite, all-purpose clause for liberal jurists to use to right wrongs and make us more equal by judicial fiat.  There is no evidence that Obama ever taught courses that considered other aspects of constitutionalism, such as executive power, the separation of powers, the Commerce Clause, or judicial review itself.

I have a copy of one of his final exams.  It is a long hypothetical involving civil rights, which begins thus: …

We stuck a relevant cartoon in the text, perhaps because Bart Simpson stars in it.

John Hinderaker has more.

… Is there any truth to Obama’s claim that the Supreme Court hasn’t invalidated any statutes that are “economic” and relate to “commerce” since Lochner v. New York, which was in 1905? Of course not. To name just a few examples a great deal more recent than 1905, the Court ruled unconstitutional provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that had permitted only “for cause” removal of members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2010; the 1990 Mushroom Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act in 2001 (this case was actually quite similar to Obamacare because the Court held unconstitutional provisions that required mushroom growers to contribute to mushroom promotion programs); provisions of the Patent and Plant Variety Remedy Clarification Act, the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act, and the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act in 1992; the Harbor Maintenance Tax Act in 1998; the Transfer Act which authorized the transfer of operating control of Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport from the Department of Transportation to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in 1991; and many, many more dating back to 1905.

One could be charitable and say that Barack Obama is a bullshitter who makes stuff up whenever he is in a tough spot, or one could say that he is a habitual liar. Take your pick.

Michael Walsh thinks it is all of one piece.

Jonah’s cited this below, but be honest: Tell me you ever expected to read a second-day lede like this on an American news site. From CBS:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president’s bluff — ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

“In the escalating battle…” Even making allowances for normal journalistic hyperbole, this is a remarkable admission that something is seriously amiss in our politics; it’s like we’re suddenly living back in 1937. The president of the United States is actively waging a war of words against the federal judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular. And, right on cue, comes a horde of lefties suddenly concerned about “unelected” justices, whether Marbury v. Madison was properly decided back in 1803, and whether it’s not time to revisit it in the interest of, you know, “social justice.” You don’t have to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows — especially when the hot air is emanating from the White House. Good for the 5th Circuit to call them on it.

Many have commented that last week was the worst week (so far) for the Obama administration, but I don’t think the apparatchiks have quite yet realized how bad things are going to get for them. The decision to insult and attack the Catholic Church was spectacularly stupid, even as a crass political tactic, since there are some 77 million Catholics in the country, representing about a fifth of the population. True, Catholics tend no longer to vote as a bloc (the old FDR coalition has splintered as the Irish and Italians moved out of the cities and up in the world), but a thumb in the eye to one is a thumb in the eye to all, especially when that one is the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York. …

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John Fund profiles Saul Alinsky and shows Obama’s ties to him.

… What exactly are the connections between Obama and Saul Alinsky’s thought? In 1985, the 24-year-old Obama answered a want ad from the Calumet Community Religious Conference, run by Alinsky’s Chicago disciples. Obama was profoundly influenced by his years as a community organizer in Chicago, even if he ultimately rejected Alinsky’s disdain for electoral politics and, like Hillary Clinton, chose to work within the system. “Obama embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life,” wrote Peter Slevin of the Washington Post in 2007. That same year, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza found Obama still “at home talking Alinskian jargon about ‘agitation’” and fondly recalling organizing workshops where he had learned Alinsky concepts such as “being predisposed to other people’s power.” …

… Obama’s 2008 campaign showcased many Alinsky methods. “Obama learned his lesson well,” David Alinsky, the son of Saul Alinsky, wrote in the Boston Globe in 2008. “The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board.” 

In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival: “The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”

You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.

NY Sun editors answer the president’s attack on the Court.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard a presidential demarche as outrageous as President Obama’s warning to the Supreme Court not to overturn Obamacare. The president made the remarks at a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. It was an attack on the court’s standing and even its integrity in a backhanded way that is typically Obamanian. For starters the president expressed confidence that the Court would “not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Reuters’ account noted that conservative leaders say the law was an overreach by Obama and the Congress. It characterized the president as having “sought to turn that argument around, calling a potential rejection by the court an overreach of its own.” Quoth the president: “And I’d just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

It is outrageous enough that the president’s protest was inaccurate. What in the world is he talking about when he asserts the law was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act barely squeaked through the Congress. In the Senate it escaped a filibuster by but a hair. The vote was so tight in the house — 219 to 212 — that the leadership went through byzantine maneuvers to get the measure to the president’s desk. No Republicans voted for it when it came up in the House, and the drive to repeal the measure began the day after Mr. Obama signed the measure.

It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton. …

In American.com, Edward Pinto performs admirable detective work in showing how the sub-prime crisis was a federal government enterprise. He quotes Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee who had this to say in a 2007 NY Times OpEd.  

… [t]he three decades from 1970 to 2000 witnessed an incredible flowering of new types of home loans. These innovations mainly served to give people power to make their own decisions about housing, and they ended up being quite sensible with their newfound access to capital.

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” It has allowed them access to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.

And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted. …

Matthew Continetti’s post at the Free Beacon allows us to relive our wonderful time last week.

… As it happened, the hot microphone mess was the least of the president’s troubles. The gaffe was still in the news when oral arguments over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act began at the Supreme Court. The first day of proceedings concerned whether the Court could rule on the law at all since the individual mandate will not be enforced until 2014. But even those arguments went poorly for the administration and its hapless solicitor general, Donald Verrilli Jr., who was unable to explain how the mandate could be a “penalty” one day and a “tax” the next day.

Yet the liberal panic did not truly begin until Mar. 27, when the Court heard arguments over the mandate’s constitutionality and even the president’s most hardened supporters had to acknowledge his signature policy was in trouble. No sooner had the proceedings concluded than a hysterical Jeffrey Toobin fled the courtroom, screaming that Obamacare was in “grave, grave” condition. The flimsiness of the administration’s arguments had transformed Toobin into a Henny Penny in drag, running around Capitol Hill and warning his fellow liberals that the Court could overrule Obamacare in “one big package” and that at the very least the mandate is “doomed.”

The administration and its friends in the media found themselves in a truly helpless position. If Toobin is proven right and the Court overrules Obamacare in part or in whole, Republicans will pounce, the president will look like a loser, and Democrats will be both demoralized and radicalized (not a winning combination). If Toobin is proven wrong, however, he will look like an idiot, Republicans and Tea Party activists will mobilize for the fall, and Democrats still will have to defend an unpopular law whose consequences grow worse with each passing minute.

The liberal reaction to this dilemma has been a predictable combination of spin and scapegoating. The noted legal mind Chuck Todd, who seems to have missed the class on Marbury v. Madison, asked guests on his show whether a Court decision against the health care overhaul might not be an unprecedented intrusion of one branch of government over the elected branches. Meanwhile, James Carville and Harry Reid lamely suggested an anti-Obamacare ruling would be good for the president and his party. The White House was reduced to using Newspeak, referring to the mandate as the “personal responsibility clause.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: Charlie Sheen says he cringes watching his crazy rants from last year. Sheen says he’s moved on and is now focused on his new career as a JetBlue pilot.

Conan: Rumors of a secret meeting between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Apparently, Romney asked if Gingrich would consider being his running mate and Gingrich asked Romney, “Are you going to finish those fries?”

Leno: After this week’s arguments it looks like Obama now expects the Supreme Court to throw out his healthcare plan. Today he started calling it Bidencare.

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Peggy Noonan says the president is coming across as devious and dishonest.

… The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. …

Liz Peek at Fiscal Times says Obamacare derailed the economic recovery.

Here we go again. All eyes are on the Supreme Court as it wrestles with whether or not President Obama’s healthcare bill is constitutional. The country is divided on the merits of the law, but this we can say with certainty: Obamacare profoundly gummed up our recovery from the financial crisis.

Like every predecessor, President Obama has made mistakes. Perhaps none will cloud his legacy more that his decision to focus on overhauling our healthcare system early in his administration – before our economic recovery had gained enduring momentum.

Assuming that the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, would work the magic promised by his economics team, Mr. Obama set off on his quest to guarantee healthcare for every American. The resulting food fight over the legislation – the ugly parceling out of favors in return for votes and lies told to justify passage — permanently damaged President Obama’s reputation, divided a country desperate to heal, and distracted the White House from further efforts to build employment. It was a terrible decision, and the country continues to pay for it.

It was, ironically, a decision made by a president eager to secure his legacy. Undaunted by the abject failure of Hilary Clinton to win support for universal healthcare, Mr. Obama took up the quest with enthusiasm. Just as he admitted to excessive optimism about bringing peace to the Middle East in an interview in Time Magazine, dubbing that effort “really hard,” Mr. Obama naively staked his presidency on healthcare reform. Here’s a shocker: remaking 17 percent of the economy is also “really hard.”

James Pethokoukis agrees that the president can be blamed for the weak recovery.

Not even the most die-hard, partisan Democrats would dare argue that the Obama recovery has been especially vigorous. Instead, they argue that the new president was dealt an impossible hand.

But was he?

Nearly three years after the Great Recession officially ended, the jobless rate is still above 8 percent — the longest stretch of such high unemployment since the Great Depression. Add back in all the discouraged job seekers and the part-timers who wished they had full-time gigs, and the unemployment rate is just shy of 15 percent.

While the economy is growing, it’s not growing rapidly. At this point in the typical post-World War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5 percent. The Obama recovery has managed just over 2 percent average annual GDP growth.

Indeed, take-home pay for US workers, adjusted for rising prices, has actually fallen over the last year.

Then there’s the moribund housing market. …

Kevin Williamson catches Elizabeth Warren at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast/roast in South Boston. This profile from National Review should convince you support for Scott Brown is almost as important as defeating the kid president. After all, she claims to have “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the Occupy crowd.

Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. She goes bulling her way through a crowd of faces the color of 2 percent milk, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Southie Irishness, or rendered rosy by the effects of seriously draining down a full bar that opened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, plowing through like she’s just graduated from a seminar in Advanced Executive Body Language, all exaggerated masculine gestures and “Yes! I am very seriously paying attention to you!” head bobs and vigorous “This is what Sincerity looks like . . . approximately!” power nods, complemented by “Move along, sir!” shoulder grips followed by quick and vigorous “Back the Hell Off” chest pats when some florid Southie denizen moves in for a hug — she is like Moses parting the kelly green sea. She is a populist in search of a people, and the wall-eyed gang shout-singing “Southie Is My Home Town” and chasing their eggs and rashers with Jameson on the rocks isn’t it. St. Patrick’s Day, as state senator Jack Hart (“Senator Hot,” in the local pronunciation) reminds the crowd, is also celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, and Warren looks like she is in dire need of an emergency airlift back to Cambridge. …

Villains must be identified and crucified, plain facts be damned. And that is really the truth that Elizabeth Warren is speaking when she says of Occupy Wall Street: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren is everything her admirers say she is — smart, tough, principled — and almost everything her critics say — out of touch, ideological, narrow. The one inaccurate barb thrown at her is that she’s homely — “Granny Warren,” Senator Brown’s factota call her. She isn’t. If she were lined up at a party with a representative cross section of 62-year-old American women, Warren would be the one you’d ask to dance. But there is a meanness in her, a nasty little puritanical streak gone left, and her secularized Puritanism is probably the most Massachusetts thing about her. Like Hillary Clinton, she has Methodist roots and cites the Wesleyan approach as key to the development of her political thinking.

The Dem mayor of Boston is not backing her according to The Hill.

Popular Boston Mayor Tom Menino — an influential Democrat many have credited with bringing the party’s convention to his hometown in 2004 — told WBZ this week that he wasn’t taking sides in Massachusetts’s high-profile Senate race.

But Menino’s reluctance to put the weight of his campaign operation behind Harvard professor and consumer rights activist Elizabeth Warren is a tough blow for the Democrat, who is hoping to upset incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown. …

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We can’t keep our hands off the open mic kerfuffle. Our favorites continue. Here’s Charles Krauthammer. 

You don’t often hear an American president secretly (he thinks) assuring foreign leaders that concessions are coming their way, but they must wait because he’s seeking reelection and he dares not tell his own people.

Not at all, spun a White House aide in major gaffe-control mode. The president was merely explaining that arms control is too complicated to be dealt with in a year in which both Russia and the United States hold presidential elections.

Rubbish. First of all, to speak of Russian elections in the same breath as ours is a travesty. Theirs was a rigged, predetermined farce. Putin ruled before. Putin rules after.

Obama spoke of the difficulties of the Russian presidential “transition.” What transition? It’s a joke. It had no effect on Putin’s ability to negotiate anything.

As for the U.S. election, the problem is not that the issue is too complicated but that if people knew Obama’s intentions of flexibly caving on missile defense, they might think twice about giving him a second term.

After all, what is Obama doing negotiating on missile defense in the first place? We have no obligation to do so. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a relic of the Cold War, died in 2002.

We have an unmatched technological lead in this area. It’s a priceless strategic advantage that for three decades Russia has been trying to get us to yield. Why give any of it away?

To placate Putin, Obama had already in 2009 abruptly canceled the missile-defense system the Poles and Czechs had agreed to host in defiance of Russian threats. Why give away more?

It’s unfathomable. …

The GAFFE has moved Marty Peretz to write a column.

… But really the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust of his own people to a leader of a nasty foreign government that seeks to thwart our purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Obama is in cahoots with the Russian regime against America’s very body politic.

Mr. Obama’s revealing comment, and the question of missile defense, and the question of Mr. Obama’s bizarre desire for coziness with Vladimir Putin, is a matter about which our European allies have great concerns.

Additional “give” to Moscow on the nuclear issue was not something he admitted to the relevant senators that he was contemplating when they were weighing and approving the New Start Treaty a bare year ago. Yet it is a matter of deep interest to the Kremlin which, without any moral credit and without much material credit either, seems to be charting the cartography of another Cold War. (Remember, it pursued the last one from an impoverished base.) Mr. Obama’s pliancy on the matter will encourage them to think that we are, in this matter, a patsy.

And not only in this matter, alas: Mr. Obama is presiding over what might be called a withdrawalist moment in American foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has seemed strangely unmoved by the claims and values of American nationalism as they were expressed in most of the last century—for the rights of other peoples to establish nation-states after World War I, to free Europe and Asia from the bloody rule of monstrous fascist tyrannies in World War II, to defeat the egalitarian phantasm of communism as a civilized way of life. You might say that he dislikes the 20th century and refuses to accord the lessons of its bitter experiences any pride of place in his view of the world.

I don’t mean to say that the president is altogether against the use of force. In his counterterrorism policy he has been relentless. But his stewardship of the wars he inherited reveals a leader unsure of his beliefs, or else ruled by an almost cynical devotion to his own political survival. …

Craig Pirrong remembers back in the day when Obama thought he could drive a wedge between Putin and his toady Medvedev.

… We know Barry is a slow learner.  Actually, he is a no learner.  Exhibit 1: energy.  Exhibit 2: this whole Russian fiasco. BHO is proceeding blithely as if nothing has changed.  Well, nothing has really changed, because Putin was always in charge, but Barry apparently didn’t understand that.  So if Obama was sincere in his earlier statements (I know, I know), he should believe that things have changed-and he should adjust course accordingly.   But apparently not.  He is proceeding with his grandiose Russian schemes that were predicated on exploiting an imagined split in the Russian power structure, even though it is now evident even to the dimmest of the dim that said split never existed. And he is willing to do so by actively concealing his intentions from the American people.

It is bad enough to pursue a policy that is based on a delusion that anyone remotely familiar with Russia should have known to be such.  It is beyond bad to continue to pursue that policy once it has been proven to be based on a delusion. And to do so in such a deceptive way staggers the imagination.

But that’s our Barry.

The NYT is of course utterly clueless on the subject, but even the WaPo, normally in the Obama Tank, can’t swallow this. Neither should anybody else in possession of their sanity.

Andrew Malcolm says it was the open mic comments that convinced Marco Rubio he should go ahead and endorse Romney.  

… “It’s been weighing on my mind all week,” Rubio told Lewis, adding: 

“I’ve never thought about this as a political calculation. I’m just sitting back here and watching a president that just got back from overseas — where he told the Russian president to work with him and give him space so he can be more flexible if he gets re-elected.”
 
“The stakes are so high,” Rubio noted.
 
The senator said there are others he wished had run. But they didn’t. And he concluded that given the Obama threat, that Romney was “plenty conservative” and ”way better than the guy who’s there right now.”

While Rubio endorsed Romney, Malcolm notes Medvedev endorsed Obama.

… Strangely, Medvedev went on Russian TV Tuesday to defend Obama, which should set off car alarms across this country. ”There are no secrets here,” he said at a Seoul news briefing. He endorsed President Obama as “a very comfortable partner,” which you may not see on any Obama TV ad.

And the Russian leader had some advice for American politicians, presumably Romney since the other two are out of the picture now and the third never was in it. 

“All U.S. presidential candidates (should) do two things,” Medvedev said. “Use their head and consult their reason.” He said cliched criticism “smacks of Hollywood,” adding that whatever party Obama’s critic belongs to, Medvedev suggests he look at the calendar: “We are in 2012 and not the mid-1970′s.”

Well, that’s reassuring isn’t it? In the eyes of the outgoing Russian president, who’s been doing what he’s told all these years by the incoming Russian president, a former KGB leader looking out for his dream of empire-rebuilding, Russia is not America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” as Romney called it.

All the more reason for Americans to relax then, spend more money on teachers’ unions and drastically reduce national defense spending, including cuts to U.S. troop strength of at least 100,000, as Obama vows. …

American Crossroads has a new ad using the open mic faux pas.

Time to look at the other half of our wonderful week. Mark Steyn on the healthcare court hearings.

… A land of laws decays almost imperceptibly into a land of legalisms, which is why America has 50 percent of the world’s lawyers. Like most of his colleagues, lifetime legislator John Conyers (a congressman for 47 years) didn’t bother reading the 2,700-page health care bill he voted for. As he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did:

“They get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Rep. Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit. So let’s take him at his word that it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. Who does read the thing? “What happened to the Eighth Amendment?” sighed Justice Scalia the other day. That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages? Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?”

He was making a narrow argument about “severability” – about whether the court could junk the “individual mandate” but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a “law” by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege microregulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown and unnumbered bureaucracy. It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can ever hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

If the Supreme Court really wished to perform a service, it would declare that henceforth no law can be longer than, say, 27 pages – or, at any rate, longer than the copy of Playboy Congressman Conyers was reading on that commuter flight.

C’mon, Justice Kennedy. Obamacare vs. Playboy: It would be a decision for the ages – and an act of bracing constitutional hygiene.

Jennifer Rubin too.

I’m with David French on this:

“While we still don’t know the outcome of the Obamacare case, that hasn’t stopped some on the left from piling on Solicitor General Donald Verrilli for allegedly “choking” during oral arguments. While I haven’t argued in front of the Supreme Court, I’ve had more than my share of state and federal appellate arguments, and these armchair quarterbacks are overlooking a few factors.

First, it’s tough for any advocate to compare well to Paul Clement. Virtually any fair-minded liberal or conservative can tell you that Clement is just about the best in the business — one of the great oral advocates of our generation. This was his Superbowl, and he delivered a performance about as “clutch” as anyone can deliver.

Second — and more importantly — it’s tough for anyone to perform brilliantly when your argument is weak on the merits.”

I’ll add a few final thoughts and look forward to the opinion in a few months.

First, the desire to impugn Verrilli stems, maybe understandably, from the frustration on the left ( How can we be losing this?!) and the lack of understanding as to how courts make their decisions. Many eloquent advocates lose a lot of Supreme Court cases because a good advocate can make a marginal case better but rarely can he save one with a central defect. At this level of judicial advocacy it’s too hard to hide the ball. …

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Toby Harnden starts off the coverage of the open mic in Korea.

Caught on an open mic during a photo op with outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul, President Barack Obama did something very, very stupid. He got caught committing what is known in Washington as the ‘Kinsley gaffe’ – being accidentally caught telling the truth – which is, naturally, the most damaging type of all.

‘On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space,’ he told Medvedev, who responded: ‘Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…’

Barack Obama was chatting with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a bilateral meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul Obama then cut him off to stress, ‘This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility’ before tapping the Russian reassuringly on his forearm. Medvedev indicated that the message had been received loud and clear: ‘I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.’

Great. So once the election is over, Vladimir Putin, the incoming Russian president, will know that a re-elected Obama can abandon all his campaign promises about taking a tough line with the Russians blah blah because he will never again have to face voters. …

Andrew Malcolm enjoys the flap too.

Barack Obama has, like most in public life, made his share of gaffes–the president of Canada, 57 states, the Austrian language, E Pluribus Unum, the pronunciation of corpsman, among others. To be sure, they are stunning signs of ignorance of things that are common wisdom for most, even Harvard alums.

Closet Obama supporters will seek to downplay the incident. But his Monday mis-step is huge politically and may well come to haunt and hurt him as Republican Mitt Romney rolls out the attack plan for this fall’s campaign and before. Of all the GOP wannabes, Romney has been Obama’s most outspoken critic, especially on the Democrat’s “failed leadership” in foreign policy.

A main strain of Romney’s assaults has been basically, Given the spending, chronic ineptness and apologies for America, can you imagine what Barack Obama would do in a second term unrestrained by any need to face voters ever again?

That’s an effective line because it leaves the worst things possible to voters’ imagination. And there is no response. What can Obama say, “My secret plans aren’t as bad as you think.”

What makes Obama’s Monday blunder so bad is that it doesn’t come from any sort of dismissable ignorance by someone who spent formative childhood years in Indonesia. It was clearly backstage conniving on Obama’s part and feeds directly into Romney’s ‘Can you imagine’ line.

Plus, it fits with the suspicions of millions that the community organizer has unspoken plans to take America in a transformative direction involving much more government. How else to explain his baldly touting more domestic energy while reducing federal drilling permits and torpedoing the Keystone pipeline? …

More on this from Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor, who has a more sophisticated understanding of Russia and its place in the world.

… Obama is trying to deceive someone.  He is either deceiving the American people, by his refusal to be honest with his intentions regarding missile defense, or he is attempting to deceive Medvedev (and Putin-the “him” referred to in Obama’s “give me space” remark), by insinuating that he will make a deal after the election.  But even the latter interpretation involves an attempt to dodge the US electorate: if he convinces Russia to tone down its rhetoric on BMD, he takes this issue-and the issue of Russia generally-away as a campaign matter.  This relieves him of the necessity of dealing honestly and forthrightly with a potentially contentious issue, and permits him to avoid accountability for the complete lack of concrete results arising from the vaunted Reset.  If the Russians continue to be cantankerous about missile defense, the Reset looks like a sham.  (Well, it is, but it will be obvious to everyone.) If Putin tones it down, based on Obama’s wink and stroke, Obama can continue to claim that he has improved relationships with Russia.

But given the fact that Obama is obviously playing somebody, do you really believe that Putin will conclude that Obama is playing the American electorate, and not Putin?  Given Putin’s suspicions of the US, I doubt it.

But I think that Americans have to take seriously the possibility that Obama is planning to conceal actively his intentions regarding a second term.  If he is willing to be “flexible” after the election-i.e., if he is willing to do things after the election that are contrary to what he says before it–about Russia and missile defense, what else is he being “flexible”-i.e., lying-about?

In other words, this exchange with Medvedev raises serious additional questions about his sincerity and honesty.  I don’t think he deserves space.  He deserves to be pressed repeatedly on his intentions, and this video provides a perfect pretext for the pressing.

The exchange with Medvedev was also notable for its confirmation of Medvedev as Putin’s errand boy: “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”  How embarrassing, mainly because Medvedev says that without a trace of embarrassment.  He is well and truly whipped. He has his mind right.  He knows who is boss.

In fact, pretty much anybody paying attention knew who was boss from day 1.  But Obama predicated the Reset on the idea that Medvedev was a rival of Putin’s.  How’s that looking now? …

Karl Rove has advice for the GOP on how to handle the open mic.

… Just as Senator John Kerry’s explanation in 2004 that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” exposed the Massachusetts Senator as a pandering flip-flopper, so may Mr. Obama’s private-turned-public remarks confirm doubts that he’s not shooting straight with the American people. It may also contribute to a belief that he holds voters in thinly disguised contempt.

Is Mr. Obama also concealing unpopular domestic policies he’ll spring on the country in a second term? What the president calls “flexibility” with Russian autocrats, Americans voters will likely view as a lack of candor with them. If that’s the case, it could seriously undermine the president’s chances for reelection.

This won’t all happen by itself. To make the most of Mr. Obama’s statement, Republicans will need to raise it again and again in speeches, ads, videos and debates. After all, Mr. Kerry’s March 2004 remark became an issue only when repeated endlessly in ads and on the stump by the GOP’s surrogates. Then and only then did it become the “a-ha!” moment that shaped perceptions of the Democratic nominee and helped bring about his defeat.

Alana Goodman deals with excuses from Obama and the NY Times.

… Read the New York Times coverage of Obama’s explanation this morning to get an idea of how fast the media is trying to sink this story. The spin is that Obama was simply being pragmatic. Of course he can’t deal with an issue as complex as missile defense during an election year, what with all those radical Republicans in Congress trying to sabotage his chances in November, and the media jumping all over every little perceived controversy. “I think the stories you guys have been writing over the last 24 hours is pretty good evidence of that,” Obama told reporters this morning. Can you believe the nerve of the press to actually report on the president’s hot-mic conversation with Medvedev?

If Obama had been caught on the hot mic saying, “This is my reelection year. After my election, I can actually get something done on this,” that might mesh with his excuse today that he can’t “get this stuff done” because the politically-charged election year “is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations.”

But Obama didn’t say that. He said: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” That doesn’t sound like someone who is primarily concerned about reaching a bipartisan agreement with Congress. That sounds like someone implying that he can personally offer more after he’s no longer beholden to voters (the key words being “my last election”). …

For a change of pace we have a few items on Mitt Romney’s success lately. Bloomberg News says the GOP is beginning to get behind him.

Republican leaders across the party’s ideological spectrum are lining up behind front-runner Mitt Romney in an escalating effort to conclude the presidential primary battle and close ranks before the general election.

Even as Rick Santorum vowed from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) to continue his challenge to Romney, calls for an end to the contest echoed yesterday across Capitol Hill. Some Republicans fear a prolonged fight could damage their party’s prospects in November.

“Every day we continue to have a protracted primary is one less day you can get prepared for the big race in November,” Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who hasn’t endorsed a candidate, said in an interview.

A series of elected officials, business leaders and party activists have raised similar concerns in recent days, urging Republicans to unite around Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, to avoid further damaging the standing of their nominee against President Barack Obama in the November election. …

According to Naomi Decter at Contentions, Romney was a big hit on Jay Leno two nights ago.

Did my ears deceive me? Was that the “Tonight Show” audience Tuesday night giving Mitt Romney big ovations? On everything from foreign policy to health care and the tax code to Rick Santorum?

They cheered when Mitt said President Obama shouldn’t have hinted to Dmitri Medvedev – even away from a hot mic – that there would be more “flexibility” on missile defense once Obama was reelected. They cheered when Mitt said that if Vladimir Putin was really on our side, he would be fighting for freedom, not for oppression. They cheered when Mitt said he hopes to be the Republican nominee (and laughed when he spontaneously suggested Santorum as press secretary in a Romney administration). They cheered when Mitt said we should encourage businesses to bring foreign profits back to the U.S. They even cheered when Mitt said it’s a dangerous world, and we shouldn’t reduce the size of our military! Oh, and there was a smattering of applause for Marco Rubio; maybe a few tourists from Florida? …

Andrew Malcolm brought us the transcript of the Romney/Leno dialogue.

JAY LENO:  Now, this whole election, at least to me, it seems to be about the economy, or it should be about the economy. What would you change about the tax code? What would you do there?

MITT ROMNEY: What I want to do with tax code is create more growth that creates more jobs, and puts more people in a position to have rising incomes, and to pay their taxes. So how do you create a tax code that encourages small businesses to hire? 

And the answer is, you bring down the marginal rates, at the same time you get rid of some deductions and exemptions, or you limit them, so that you stay with a code that’s progressive. But you bring down those top tax rates, you get rid of some of the special deals, and by doing that you encourage investment and hiring of American workers.

(Applause.)

JAY LENO:  You said something interesting a while back. What is the tax rate for corporations in most of the rest of the world?

MITT ROMNEY: Well, it’s in the 20s. Some nations are lower than that. Our corporate tax rate is 35 percent. So I would want to bring that rate from 35, down to 25. Get rid of some of the special breaks and special deals so we keep the same revenue coming in, but have a lower tax rate so it’s a more attractive place for people to come and invest. But do you know that 54 percent of American workers in the private sector work in business that are taxed at the individual tax rate, not the corporate tax rate?

JAY LENO:  Right.

MITT ROMNEY: So when the President says he wants to raise that tax rate from 35 to 40 percent,    he’ll kill jobs and small business. And I want to take that tax rate, bring it down to 28 percent so we can create more jobs.

(Applause.) …

Thomas Sowell has nice things to say about Jerry Rivers. Oh wait, I meant Geraldo Rivera.

It is not often that I agree with Geraldo Rivera, but recently he said something very practical and potentially life-saving, when he urged black and Hispanic parents not to let their children go around wearing hoodies.

There is no point in dressing like a hoodlum when you are not a hoodlum, even though that has become a fashion for some minority youths, including the teenager who was shot and killed in a confrontation in Florida. I don’t know the whole story of that tragedy, any more than those who are making loud noises in the media do, but that is something that we have trials for.

People have a right to dress any way they want to, but exercising that right is something that requires common sense, and common sense is something that parents should have, even if their children don’t always have it.

Many years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, there was a warning to all the students to avoid a nearby tough Irish neighborhood, where Harvard students had been attacked. It so happened that there was a black neighborhood on the other side of the Irish neighborhood that I had to pass through when I went to get my hair cut.

I never went through that Irish neighborhood dressed in the style of most Harvard students back then. I walked through that Irish neighborhood dressed like a black working man would be dressed — and I never had the slightest trouble the whole three years that I was at Harvard. …

Turns out popcorn is a very healthy snack. At least that’s what the Daily Mail says.

As well as being a great diet food, popcorn also contains a high level of antioxidents, which help fight harmful molecules.

Plain popcorn has already been hailed as a great diet food for its low calorie content but now a group of scientists claim it may even top fruits and vegetables in antioxidant levels. Antioxidants – known as polyphenols – have huge health benefits as they help fight harmful molecules that damage cells. Popcorn was found to have a high level of concentrated antioxidants because it is made up of just four percent water while they are more diluted in fruits and vegetables because they are made up of up to 90 percent water.

Researchers discovered one serving of popcorn has up to 300mg of antioxidants – nearly double the 160mg for all fruits per serving. …

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Mark Helprin was in the Journal yesterday wondering why the president wishes to emulate Europe. 

Both in his re-election campaign and as the core principle of his presidency, Barack Obama asks America to cast off reliance on the free market—because, in his characterization, the free market “doesn’t work”—in favor of the European model of ever-tightening, ever-regulating, ever-expanding governance. This he does, astonishingly, at the very moment of the European model’s long-predictable crisis, collapse, bankruptcy, and devolution.

With his trademark certainty he proposes—indeed, at times commands—that we follow him over the Niagara to which his back is turned. The writer Henry James cautioned that, “It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” Promiscuous endorsement of things European, inveterate in the president’s academic coterie, has long been characteristic of American snobs. As Harvard once dispatched missionaries to better the savages, it now sends students abroad so they might better us. To be wrong on both counts requires congenital blindness to the facts, which suggest that despite our own grievous failings Europe is hardly worthy of imitation.

As a museum of culture, it has few competitors. Europeans make better movies; their cuisine is better (except in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia, England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland); and they do a better job of suppressing modern architecture, for which they are to be commended.

But in suppressing and over-engineering their economies they court national bankruptcies. Just as reckless are their efforts to ameliorate economic stagnation via the all-guzzling welfare state. Shall we create more jobs by aping Europe, which since 1990 has averaged 9.16% unemployment while ours was 5.95%?

European structural unemployment is supposedly tolerable in the context of less income inequality and greater social analgesia, but although income equality may be the socialist ideal, isn’t the more civilized object to provide as abundantly as possible rather than to annihilate the potential for envy? Incomes are perfectly level in the Gulag, whereas in Boston and Singapore they are not. …

Bill McGurn of the WSJ was featured in a recent issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. His subject was public employee unions.

These days, when conservatives get together to discuss the debilitating role played by government workers, we reassure ourselves with statements by FDR and labor leader Samuel Gompers about the fundamental incompatibilities between a union of private workers working for a private company and a union of government workers laboring for our city, state, or federal governments. We also trace the line of expansion to various events, including John F. Kennedy’s executive order that opened the path for collective bargaining for public employees at the federal level.

I don’t want to rehash that today. Today I want to talk about the situation as we find it, and suggest that the first step toward a cure is to diagnose the illness accurately. This means changing the way we think of public sector unions. And in what I have to say, I will concentrate on public sector unions at the state and local levels. …

… Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. New Jersey has been telling here. Look at our former governor, Jon Corzine. …

… When workers at Rutgers University were planning to unionize, he (Jon Corzine) turned up at their rally. This was too much even for the liberal Star Ledger, which—in an article entitled “Jon Corzine, Union Rep?”—noted that Mr. Corzine’s appearance at the rally raised the question whether he truly understood that “he represents the ‘management’ side in ongoing contract talks with state employees unions.”

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money. …

… My second point relates to my first. Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them.

Take the case of Northvale, a small, affluent town of about 4,600 people at the northeast tip of New Jersey. Its median income is about $99,000, comfortably above both the New Jersey and national levels, and its budget is $21.8 million. Of this, $13.2 million—or nearly two-thirds—goes to the schools. The lion’s share of that, of course, goes to salaries and benefits.

Northvale’s school budget is voted on in the spring. That’s part of the scam, because turnout for these elections is much lower than it is in November for the regular elections. With lower turnout, it’s easier for teachers and other interested parties to dominate the elections. Thus the great bulk of Northvale’s budget is not determined in the regular elections, or by the mayor and city council. Effectively, it is determined by the education lobby and school officials—who in turn are chosen in elections involving only 20 percent of the electorate. …

.. My father was a federal employee, as an FBI agent. I spent some time as a government worker in the White House. I also know many fine and devoted people on the public payroll who work hard, are good at what they do, and earn everything they get. But there are also those who work without results. I believe Americans are a generous people who can recognize the difference. We need to restore our public sector to a place where those in charge can make those distinctions and allocate rewards and resources accordingly.

In the meantime, I think the best thing we can do is speak honestly. That is what Mr. Christie is doing in New Jersey. His style isn’t for everyone. Yet his popularity suggests that Americans appreciate a politician willing to talk about the reality of public employee unions today—and the unreasonable costs they are imposing on our society.

We’ll never return to the ideal of public service until the rest of us start speaking honestly as well.

It was October 2009 when a reporter asked Pelosi about the constitutionality of the healthcare law. She answered, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”  The NY Times profiles the law professor who led the charge that became the very bad day the Affordable Care Act had yesterday at the Supreme Court.

When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional. Many of his colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea as ridiculous — and still do.

But over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.

“He’s gotten an amazing amount of attention for an argument that he created out of whole cloth,” said one of his many critics, Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “Under existing case law this is a very easy case; this is obviously constitutional. I think he’s going to lose eight to one.”

On Monday, as the court began three days of arguments, questioning by the nine justices suggested they were ready to review the law now rather than wait until it has fully kicked in. That lays the groundwork for arguments for the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.

Professor Barnett, who watched Monday from the spectator seats, was not the first to raise the constitutional critique of the health law, but more than any other legal academic, he is associated with it. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

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Looking at the healthcare debate, Jonathan Tobin wonders if economic freedom is still imaginable.

The nation will be holding its political breath this week when the U.S. Supreme Court spends three days hearing arguments about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Though the issue is split into three parts, the main event will be on Tuesday, as the question of whether the Commerce clause of the Constitution can be interpreted in such a manner as to allow the government to require Americans to engage in commerce rather than to merely regulate it, is debated.

For most liberals, including President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress that rammed this law down the throats of an unwilling people two years ago, the notion that there are any such limits on the power of the federal government is laughable. To be fair to them, they do have much of the history of 20th century American politics on their side. During the last century, Washington’s power has expanded to the point where there is almost nothing that can be imagined that can’t be justified by the Commerce clause. That’s why this case is so important. Barring an electoral revolution this November in which Republicans sweep both Houses of Congress and the White House, we will have lost our last chance to preserve our freedom. …

Just in case anyone is interested, Robert Samuelson says health insurance is not necessary for good health.

As the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — Obamacare, as many call it — the justices will probably share at least one assumption: that their decision will have a big effect on the health of Americans. Ideally, everyone ought to have insurance, and it’s popular wisdom that this would significantly improve people’s health. But it’s not true. The ACA’s fate will dramatically affect government and the health-care system; the impact on Americans’ health will be far more modest.

Rarely has a program with so little potential inspired so much contention. Although millions would benefit from health insurance, the overall relationship between people’s insurance status and their self-reported health is underwhelming. Consider a study of Massachusetts’s universal coverage program, enacted under former governor Mitt Romney, by economists Charles J. Courtemanche of the University of Louisville and Daniela Zapata of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It estimated that about 1.4 percent of the state’s adult population moved into the “very good” or “excellent” health categories.

Another study by economist Daniel Polsky of the University of Pennsylvania examined what happened to uninsured Americans who went on Medicare at age 65. Polsky found “no significant health effect for the uninsured relative to the insured upon reaching Medicare eligibility.” Although other studies report somewhat larger effects, most share a weakness. They rely on people’s self-reported assessment of their health. Just receiving government-subsidized insurance, worth $8,000 to $12,000, may make people feel better. It shields them from financial setbacks.

On reflection, the loose relation between health and insurance is not puzzling. …

John Hinderaker of Powerline spots a Telegraph, UK story about Britain’s National Health Service denying care to elderly.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Obamacare today, which makes the timing ideal to consider this news story from the cradle of socialized medicine, the United Kingdom. The article is titled “Elderly dying due to ‘despicable age discrimination in NHS.’”

“Thousands of elderly people are dying unnecessarily early because “despicable” age discrimination in the NHS is denying them treatment for cancer, a charity has warned.

A lack of treatment or insufficient treatment is contributing to 14,000 deaths a year in people over the age of 75, Macmillan Cancer Support has found, in what it called an “unacceptable act of discrimination”.

Deaths from cancer are reducing in most age groups but at a slower rate in those aged 74 to 84 and are increasing in people aged 85 and over, the report said. The report, The Age Old Excuse: the under treatment of older cancer patients, said treatment options are too often recommended on the basis of age rather than how fit the patient is.”

This point is especially salient, given the current debate over health care in the U.S.:

“According to research published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, there would be 14,000 fewer deaths from cancer in those aged over 75 per year if mortality rates from cancer matched those in America.”

A gaff is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. The president did that today in Korea when an open microphone caught him telling Medvedev he would have more flexibility after the election. You can figure we’re gonna hear about this again and again up to the election. Peter Wehner has the story.

ABC’s Jake Tapper reports that at the end of his 90-minute meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev today, President Obama said he would have “more flexibility” to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense, but incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to give him “space.”

The exchange was picked up by microphones as reporters were let into the room for remarks by the two leaders.

Here’s the exchange:

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

I imagine scores of voters will find it comforting to know President Obama is sharing his plans for a second term with both Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, even if he’s keeping them secret from the American people. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

… is there anyone who thinks Obama, should he get a second term, wouldn’t run wild with policies and positions that the majority of the electorate oppose? Otherwise, he’d roll them out now, of course.

It’s remarkable, actually, that Obama could be any more flexible with Russia after the election than he’s already been under the “reset” that is indistinguishable from appeasement. He praised the rigged Russian elections, helped get Russia into the World Trade Organization, has tried to slow down human rights legislation aimed at Russian perpetrators and yanked missile defense sites out of Eastern Europe. One can only imagine how much worse things would get if he no longer had to worry about public opinion and all those troublesome human rights groups nagging him.

The same is, of course, true on everything from gay marriage to Israel policy to taxes. …

All during the coming campaign the administration will be reminded of their energy record. Victor Davis Hanson starts the parade. 

When the summer driving season starts soon, and tension heats up about Iran, gas may reach $5 a gallon. Nothing bothers voters more than paying an extra $20 or $30 every time they fill up. In times like these, they soon might prefer even an oilman in the White House to an ideologue whose opposition to new oil development seems more religious than empirically based.

All presidents, of course, usually get the blame when the price of gas skyrockets and praise when it plummets, just like they own a bad or good economy, or a successful or failed war.

President Obama, however, earns additional blame for the gas rise for reasons well beyond the normal oil bogeymen – tension in the Middle East, rapacious OPEC dictators, oil company greed and Wall Street speculation.

Why? Americans remember that his team boasted about wanting higher energy costs in 2008, when Mr. Obama was still basking in hope-and-change adulation. Steven Chu, then the energy secretary-designate who doesn’t own a car, pontificated about wanting higher American gasoline prices, hoping they would somehow reach European levels.

Candidate Obama breezily warned of skyrocketing energy prices – the necessary cost of his planned cap-and-trade, anti-global-warming legislation.

Sen. Kenneth L. Salazar, Colorado Democrat who was soon to become Interior secretary, bragged that even if gas reached $10 a gallon, he would not vote to open up new federal offshore oil leases.

Once upon a time, Mr. Obama and his supporters believed that high gas and oil prices were either helpful in ensuring that favored subsidized green energies would be cost competitive, or that they helped the environment. That’s why a now-embarrassed Mr. Obama digs in by mocking opponents who call for increased drilling. …

If you’re surprised the recovery is so slow, David Boaz has a great post at Cato.

Here are some news stories you could find in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Reserve is holding an international conference of central bankers to reassure themselves that their “easy-money policies” are working and won’t cause too much inflation this time.

The IRS is ramping up audits of the most successful people in the economy. If you make more than $5 million in a year, you can pretty much expect a time-consuming audit.

“Federal regulators are preparing a drive to tell workers at nonunionized businesses they have many of the same rights as union members, a move that could prompt more workers to complain to employers about grievances ranging from pay and work hours to job safety and management misconduct.”

“The Department of Energy has placed nearly one-third of its clean-energy loan portfolio on an internal ‘watch list’ for possible violations of terms or other concerns, according to a copy of the list obtained by The Wall Street Journal, highlighting how such concerns have spread beyond the now-bankrupt Solyndra LLC.”

The European Union is beefing up its permanent bailout fund to keep failed businesses alive.

States are circling Amazon and other online retailers, about to pounce with new taxes.

The Labor Department has “stepped up pressure” on PulteGroup, demanding thousands of records on its contracts with employees and subcontractors.

That’s one day’s stories about new government assaults on wealth creation and new political transfers of wealth. And so maybe it’s no surprise that the paper also carries these stories:

FedEx scaled back its forecasts for domestic and global growth.

“New signs of a slowing global economy rattled investors on Thursday and put stocks on pace for their worst week this year.”

Burton Malkiel writes that, while stocks don’t look as bad as bonds, “we are likely to be in a low-return environment for some time to come.”

Note that few if any of these stories made headlines, or even appeared in other newspapers. Many voters know about Obamacare, the massive 2009 stimulus bill, and Cash for Clunkers. Many fewer realize the tax tsunami planned for 9 months from now. Hardly anyone knows about the costs of stepped-up regulation and regulatory enforcement. But everyone wonders why the recovery is so slow and unemployment remains so high. Just read the papers — in detail.

If you own gold, or are thinking of purchasing some, you will want to read this story from ZeroHedge.com. A one kilo gold bar has surfaced in the UK that was doctored.

The last time a story of Tungsten-filled gold appeared on the scene was just two years ago, and involved a 500  gram bar of gold full of tungsten, at the W.C. Heraeus foundry, the world’s largest metal refiner and fabricator. It also became known that said “gold” bar originated from an unnamed bank. It is now time to rekindle the Tungsten Spirits with a report from ABC Bullion of Australia, which provides photographic evidence of a new gold bar that has been drilled out and filled with tungsten rods, this time not in Germany but in an unnamed city in the UK, where it was intercepted by a scrap metals dealer, and was supplied with its original certificate. The reason the bar attracted attention is that it was 2 grams underweight. Upon cropping it was uncovered that about 30-40% of the bar weight was tungsten. So two documented incidents in two years: isolated? Or indication of the same phenomonenon of precious metal debasement that marked the declining phase of the Roman empire. …

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Mark Steyn thinks our profligate ways are going to catch up to us soon.

I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.

Well, what does some rinky-dink ‘roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later

I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the Treasury Secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.” …

George Will says the Institute for Justice has filed a compelling amicus brief in the healthcare case.

On Monday the Supreme Court begins three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central to the debate as it should be.

Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm, has focused on this fact: The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.

The brief, the primary authors of which are the IJ’s Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson, says that Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law “from which there is no escape.” And “coercing commercial transactions” — compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies — “is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today.” …

Bill Kristol on Etch A Sketch politics.

… A healthy politics realizes that calling an expensive piece of legislation the “Affordable Care Act” doesn’t make it affordable, that promising you can keep your doctor doesn’t mean you’ll be able to, and that calling an Independent Payment Advisory Board independent and advisory doesn’t make it so.

The American public tends to appreciate these realities. Many in the political class—indeed many of our elites, especially those of us who etch and sketch for a living—tend to want to show our cleverness by arguing realities away. Sophistry is the fatal conceit of the political class in our time. For reasons having to do with the very nature of modern liberalism, the left is more expert at sophistry than the right. That’s why Republicans will have difficulty winning an Etch A Sketch election. Obama is the master of transient talk and vanishing promises. The Republican nominee won’t beat him at his own game. But the Republican nominee can elevate our politics and prevail by putting before the public a reality-based choice.

Citigroup report says North America oil fields could become the new Middle East. Telegraph,UK has the story.

Deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tapping shale deposits for gas and oil and Canada’s oil sands are among the ingredients that could see North America’s production of oil and natural gas liquids almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020, according to a report by analysts at Citigroup.

“The energy sector in the next few decades could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalisation and reindustralisation of the US economy,” the 80-page report said.

The vexed question of America’s future energy needs and how to meet them has dominated the battle for The White House in recent weeks, as the Republican challengers blame President Barack Obama for the recent rise in petrol prices.

Experts say the subject is also gaining political traction among both Republicans and Democrats because the US is at an important crossroads on its future energy policy. 2011 was the first year since 1949 that the country exported more petroleum products than it imported.  …

Wither the Nobel? Andrew Roberts reviews Jay Nordlinger’s book on the Prize.

… In an absorbingly well-researched, well-written and thoughtful history of the Peace Prize, the distinguished National Review senior editor and New Criterion writer Jay Nordlinger looks with a critical but not jaundiced eye at the laureates who have been feted in Oslo, Norway, every December since 1901, and has come up with a number of remarkable conclusions. In the course of his deliberations he has thought deeply about what genuinely constitutes peace, and whether several of the laureates have genuinely fulfilled the stipulation in Alfred Nobel’s will that the committee should find “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Al Gore, anybody?

There has been an identifiable trend of anti-Americanism in recent years, or at least anti-Republican Americans. When once it was awarded to Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg and Henry Kissinger, by the 1980s a deep strain of leftist assumptions had taken root. Instead of awarding the Peace Prize to President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II for their part in the destruction of Soviet Communism, the most vicious system of oppression to besmirch the face of humanity since the Nazis, in 1987 the Nobel Committee apparently told Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that they were giving him the prize as a weapon against Ronald Reagan.

“At one time,” said Yelena Bonner, the widow of the 1975 winner Andrei Sakharov, “the Nobel Peace Prize was the highest moral award of our civilization. But after December 1994, when Yasser Arafat became one of the three new laureates, its ethical value was undermined.” Yet still the world pays lip service to the prize of which Kissinger said: “There is no comparable honor.”

The speeches the winners give are sometimes uplifting. But more often, in Clare Booth Luce’s term, they’re “globaloney.” …

At least the Danish press is not in the tank for Obama. You will enjoy the irreverent look at the president from Danish TV brought to us by the Weekly Standard. 

Thomas Buch-Andersen, host of the Danish TV show Detektor, mocked President Obama’s political rhetoric in a recent episode. “Obama used a metaphor from boxing to explain Denmark’s role in the world,” says Buch-Andersen, introducing the segment.

He then roles the tape. “That’s fairly typical of the way that Danes have punched above their weight in international affairs,” President Obama says at a press availability in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark.

“It’s nice to be praised,” Buch-Andersen remarks. “We punch harder than our weight class would suggest. But how much should we read into his words? According to Obama, are we doing any better than, say, the Norwegians?”

The TV host again turns to the tape, this time showing President Obama in the Oval Office with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. “I’ve said this before, but I want to repeat: Norway punches above its weight,” Obama says. …

Now you can roll the tape.

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Craig Pirrong has some thoughts about the president’s trip to Oklahoma.

… Talk about chutzpah.  Unbelievable.  It is worse than the rooster claiming credit for the sun rising, because the cock doesn’t know any better, but Obama should.

Fact: the US government generally, and Obama and his administration particularly, have nothing to do with the construction of this pipeline.  It is an eminently rational commercial response to price signals.  It is the market in action.  It is what happens when the market is allowed to operate.

If Obama were a thoughtful, fair minded man, rather than a somewhat dim political hack and complete economic ignoramus bent on re-election, instead of conscripting Keystone into his demented narrative about his cockamamie energy policy, he would learn a lesson.  That lesson would be: market participants responding to price signals will undertake the investments necessary to produce and transform energy.  Maybe I should get out of the way and let the market work.

But Obama will never acknowledge any such thing.  The only thing he is invested in is a delusional energy policy that is determined to ride roughshod over price signals.  A policy that is predicated on a worldview that distrusts-and arguably hates-markets.  A policy that is hell-bent on subsidizing losers (the losses being a flashing red-light price signal) and stymieing winners.

And the hits keep on coming.  He wants to tax Chinese solar panels because the Chinese subsidize their production.  Look, solar is one of the biggest losers, but if the Chinese are going to be so generous as to make them less loser-like by selling panels below cost, we should thank them.  It means that the Chinese are bearing some of the cost of our stupidity.

But I forgot.  The solar manufacturing sector is teeming with Obama supporters and donors. Go figure.

Taking heat on his energy policy, such as it is, Obama had the loathsome and aptly named Jay Carney (who makes me pine for Robert Gibbs!, which is a staggering thought) lecture the world on the subject.  Apparently anyone who disagrees with Obama’s policy has “severely diminished capacity.”  …

Snarky comments by Jay Carney get more play in the Examiner.

If the tone of the rhetoric coming from the White House is a reflection of how President Obama feels about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new Path to Prosperity plan, then the Wisconsin Republican has scared Obama silly.

Yesterday, from a podium in front of the White House seal, Press Secretary Jay Carney said of the clean energy subsidy cuts in Ryan’s budget, “You have to be aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century. You have to have severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.”

Which is an interesting statement considering an anecdote liberal author Noam Scheiber revealed in his new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:

“Energy was a particular obsession of [Obama]’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.” …

Even Dems are piling on. This from Roll Call.  

… Rep. Dennis Cardoza said the president’s move wouldn’t satisfy anybody and would merely keep the issue alive.

“I think it’s the most idiotic political move I’ve ever seen,” said Cardoza, who supports the pipeline. The California Democrat said the president needs to make a decision one way or another and stick to it.

If he’s going to build it, “do it, take your lumps, be done with it,” he added.

Cardoza said the latest maneuver amounts to “highlighting a waffle.”

“They don’t build statues to wafflers,” he said. …

Etch A Sketch comments by one of his advisors raise issues about Romney’s hold on firm principles. In that light, American.com calls attention to the fact that Mitt has been the only GOP candidate who has not panicked in his Afghanistan comments.

… How have the GOP contenders responded to this rising call for retreat? Newt Gingrich has led the rush to the exits, declaring that America’s mission in Afghanistan is “not doable” and our presence in the country “is probably counterproductive.” Perhaps this is a desperate bid to win over some Ron Paul voters, but it pretty much disqualifies him as commander in chief. Rick Santorum has not gone as far as Gingrich, but the once hawkish candidate has softened his support for the mission in the wake of recent events, declaring: “We have to either make the decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done, or we have to decide to get out, and probably get out sooner.” Not exactly channeling Winston Churchill.

So among the three leading contenders, that leaves Romney as the only one who has refused to pander to the rising sentiment for retreat. Speaking on CNN after the shootings, Romney said “You don’t make an abrupt shift in policy because of the actions of one crazed, deranged person” adding “to say we’re going to throw in the towel without getting the input of General Allen or actually making trips to Afghanistan and meeting with leaders there and meeting with our commanders there and troops there, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. I’m more deliberate when it comes to the lives of our sons and daughters and the mission of the United States of America.” …

Peggy Noonan.

… It is not fatal that Mr. Romney has been tagged as Etch A Sketchy. Almost all of 2012 will come down to plans and policy, to which path seems likely to get us out of the muck. The American people are in a post-heroic presidential period. They just want to hire somebody to come in and fix some essential problems.

Mr. Romney should feel optimistic.

If the issue is our national economic life, the GOP will very likely win. If the subset of that issue is freedom and personal liberty, the GOP will win with meaning.

The Obama campaign knows this. That’s why they’ll do anything to throw Republicans off those subjects. Two weeks ago it was contraception, next week it will be another social question. They used to scorn Republicans for using wedge issues, but now their entire strategy is a tribute to the political hacks they hated. And if any Republicans were sad that contraception actually came up as the subject of public debate, they were not as sad as Democratic strategists, who were hoping to save it for September.

If the economy significantly rebounds between now and November, will that leave Mr. Romney without an issue? No. First of all, magic is not about to occur. But more important, if unemployment plummeted to 6%, the American people would think, “Nothing personal, but this didn’t happen because of Obama, it happened in spite of him.”

No one thinks he’s got a good hand on the economy. No one, not even his supporters.

Charles Krauthammer says ObamaCare is back in our faces.

Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground.

Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.

Cost: Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.

But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.

It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.

Constitutionality: Beginning March 26, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. …

Joe Queenan doubts the media’s economic news.

… It is always dangerous to base assumptions about the state of the economy on anecdotal information, but in my experience, anecdotal information trumps government statistics any day of the week. I live in a typical small town, with the typical mix of businesses and a typical citizenry. My town is still reeling.

The large store that used to be a bike shop is empty. The space that used to be an optometrist’s shop is empty. The ice cream parlor down the street, the one that used to be a Carvel’s and then became a Brainfreeze, is gone. The gelato place at the foot of the hill has closed its doors. The massive gourmet shop that used to occupy the center of town has been shuttered for two years, vastly reducing traffic for other merchants. We’ve got plenty of nail salons and bars and pizza parlors, but that doesn’t really suggest a booming economy. And no, the barber shops and hair salons are not turning away customers, either.

There’s more. The commercial building where I work has five suites. Over the years, they have been occupied by psychologists and tour promoters and expert numismatists and accountants and software engineers and import-export companies and even a local newspaper. Four of them are now empty. Three of them have been empty for more than two years. The rents are not excessive; one two-room unit lists for $500 a month. Offer $450 and it’s yours! There are no takers in sight. The last thriving business in this building was a massage parlor that the cops finally padlocked. Now I’m the only one here. This is one spooky building. This is one spooky economy.

As for jobs, forget it. Lots of my friends’ kids are going to law school, because there’s no work out there. Others are going to grad school to get an even more useless degree than the one they already have. Everyone is waiting tables, or parking cars, or pinch-hitting as a substitute teacher, or on the prowl for a nonpaying internship. When you hear that a kid with a college degree actually got a job earning more than the minimum wage, it feels like someone just won the Stanley Cup or the Nobel Prize. …

A Blast from the past from a blog named Thepastisablast. They have a menu from the restaurant counter of a 1957 Woolworth’s.