Normal 0...

At a Compton elementary school, the community demands choice.

The parents whose children attend McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif., dropped a bomb on their school district’s central office on December 7. More than 61 percent of them signed a petition demanding that the school -- one of the worst in the state -- be handed over to Celerity Education Group, which already operates four charter schools in the L.A. area.

It’s fitting that the primarily Latino and black parents in this poor city, located in southern Los Angeles County, would be the first to use California’s landmark “parent trigger” law to convert their failing campus into a charter school -- on Pearl Harbor Day, no less. The year-old law exists precisely to aid parents like those at McKinley, who’ve grown frustrated with a school administration that does a better job excusing adult failure than educating kids.

#ad#Under the law, if more than 50 percent of qualified parents at a failing school submit a valid petition, the district must undertake one of several remedies: fire half the staff, overhaul the curriculum, convert to a charter, or close the school altogether.

In other states, including New Jersey, Indiana, and West Virginia, parent-trigger bills have been drafted or introduced, and some bills include private-school vouchers (as opposed to charter schools) as a fix. Several other states -- including Georgia, North Dakota, Michigan, and North Carolina -- may soon follow suit.

The Compton school is ripe for a radical transformation. Stuck in one of the worst districts in California, McKinley Elementary, which serves 438 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, ranks in the bottom 5 percent of all schools in the state. Who wouldn’t want to change that situation?

The teachers’ unions, of course -- along with their allies on the school boards and the ill-named Parent-Teacher Association. Predictably, establishment groups including the California School Boards Association and the powerful California Teachers Association are lobbying hard to place a lock on the parent trigger. They complain that McKinley’s parents, aided by the Los Angeles Parent Revolution, operated “under the radar” and never held a public meeting to discuss the petition drive or reached out to district officials. California’s attorney general has opened an investigation into allegations that parents on both sides engaged in threats and intimidation.

Whatever the outcome of the attorney general’s probe, the trigger law is simple and needs to stay that way. The state board of education is drafting permanent regulations that specify who qualifies to sign, clarify how petitions must be written and printed, and lay out timelines for parents to submit petitions and for districts to certify signatures. That’s all to the good.

But the law’s opponents would like to make the trigger more difficult for parents to squeeze by making it easier for districts to undermine organizers and by diluting the law’s remedies. Rewriting the rules to let a school district or the state board of education choose the charter, as some (including the editors of the Los Angeles Times) suggest, would shift the balance of power away from parents and undermine both the letter and the spirit of the law.

Relegating parents to a consulting role is unacceptable. If anything, the Compton effort reveals the need for rules that further level the playing field for parent groups. 

Grassroots organizing is amazingly difficult. Parents cannot simply pick up a roster of names and addresses from the district office to make signature gathering easy. Los Angeles Parent Revolution, which aided the Compton group in canvassing neighborhoods, is in the business of political organization -- and has thus gotten the effort accused of being “astroturf” (that is, fake grassroots). But the truth is, without the help of such an organization, amateur parents wouldn’t stand a chance in the face of the unions, which spend millions of dollars every election year on politics.

But if parents must file notice that they are engaged in a petition drive to convert, reform, or close a school, they deserve access to the data and resources a district or its union surrogates might use to oppose them. This need not damage parental privacy. It would merely require a mandate that any district communication regarding a parent-trigger petition drive contain information from both sides.

#page#A compromise might be to require a district-wide vote on whether to convert a school to a charter. By setting an attainable standard for signatures and compelling the local board to place a referendum on the ballot once that standard is met, lawmakers could involve the entire community in the process of converting “district infrastructure” into a true neighborhood school.

A referendum would have two advantages. First, the secret ballot guards against the social coercion that could take place in a petition drive. Second, districts would be unable to override parents’ or citizens’ votes. 

#ad#In any event, if we’re to have regulations, they should favor parents, not protect the education establishment from true accountability. At its best, the parent trigger could be another weapon in a growing arsenal of choice. Because parental choice increases parental involvement, it should be expanded, not restricted.

--- Ben Boychuk is managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s School Reform News. Bruno Behrend is an attorney and director of the Heartland Institute’s Center for School Reform.

Ben Boychuk Bruno Behrend

It’s not just about tax cuts.

The compromise extension of the Bush tax cuts illustrates how hidebound the leaders of both parties have been, and how sclerotic the whole tax discussion has become. These tax cuts did avoid a serious recession after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and should never have been set up to expire as they were, like a bent tree-branch, snapping on a long-announced date back to a sharply higher rate of tax in several areas, including succession duties. The administration should never have gotten into the silly chicken game of calling them unjust breaks for the rich and should never have imagined that increasing taxes on the incomes of anyone during a recession is justifiable fiscal policy. And the Republican leadership, apart from the very promising Paul Ryan, is not to be congratulated for failing to produce any policy suggestions except an endless caterwauling for retention of a tax-cut plan that was designed for a specific emergency nine years ago.

The approaching expiry date and the midterm elections were an opportunity for a serious discussion — or, as the current political cliché decrees, “a national conversation” — about taxes, the budgetary and current-account deficits, unemployment, and the recession. The political class funked it, as it has funked everything except welfare reform in the last 20 years. Just as it fumbled abortion into the incapable arms of the judiciary, ignored immigration until it was almost impossible to deal with it rationally, allowed the education and justice systems to become a national disgrace, did nothing about a hideously expensive and very uneven health-care system until finally making things worse with Obamacare, ignored income disparities and the economy generally, the administration and the Congress said little and did less that was useful or even sensible about long-term remedies for the worst economic challenge in more than 70 years.

#ad#All Americans pledge their adherence to the Constitution, but the Constitution, especially the protections of individual liberties and due process in the Bill of Rights, has been put to the shredder, and at least 300 congressmen are just puppets of their districts’ leading commercial interests. They come to Washington as special pleaders trading earmarks with their colleagues to assure vote-winning alliances spanning a Rube Goldberg spaghetti bowl of different bailiwicks all suckling at the fiscus. It is democracy of sorts, but it isn’t really deliberative legislation, much less enlightened or even disinterested governance in the national interest seen otherwise than as an agglomeration of thousands of patronage-seeking vacuum cleaners.

Tax policy should be designed to stimulate economic growth and finance the necessary activities of the government, and, occasionally, to assist in the natural and desirable evolution of the economy, especially toward higher productivity; an optimal ratio of savings, investment, and consumption; and the economically rational reduction of poverty. Let me take up a number of opinions that have previously been expressed in these columns, and add some new ones: Taxes should be increased on activities it is desirable to reduce, as they have been on the consumption of tobacco, and reduced on activities the national interest seeks to amplify. Thus, taxes on elective energy consumption beyond comfortable norms of heating and air conditioning should be increased. (There should also be incentives for alternative forms of energy, especially natural gas and nuclear power, and specifically a gasoline-tax increase, with rebates for those who earn their income from gasoline consumption, such as taxi companies.) There should also be taxes on legal bills, health-care benefits that are provided in unusual measures of choice and quality by employers, and most financial transactions -- especially any fees and windfalls to merchant banks, financial arrangers, and assorted categories of asset-strippers, no matter how imaginatively and hagiographically they describe their activities.

The government must not get into the business of valuing different categories of work differently in the personal-income-tax system, such as by over-taxing entertainers or athletes. (A derogation from this rule would require a severe tax penalization for most government employees, given how redundant to the interest of the nation and its citizens the work of many of them is.) But it would be acceptable to impose a surcharge on highly compensated services that are essentially accelerations of the velocity of money without meeting elemental criteria for betterment of anything, and on luxury-goods sales. A 10 percent surcharge on financial transactions alone would produce over $200 billion per year in deficit reduction, and would affect only deal-making, most of which deals would just as well not be made and few of which positively affect employment. The good deals would be just as good if they cost a little more to consummate. A 10 percent surcharge on legal and consulting bills would yield another $200 billion, and would merely be a tax on largely superfluous activity by any economic criterion.

#page#

Lawyers are strangling this country, and most consultants just provide an insurance policy for managers who can’t manage. Most luxury goods are imported from countries whose economies the United States has self-sacrificingly carried on its back for decades: Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. They are all great and friendly countries, and protectionism must not be considered, but a supplementary sales tax is justified and useful in itself, and especially so given that the crumbling euro and the long-term decline in the yen (though not occurring now) have conferred an advantage on the exporters. A reasonable menu of such measures as these would cut a swingeing stroke through the federal budgetary and current-account deficits and send the message that the U.S. is serious about retention of its status as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the world’s reserve currency.

The steady rise in life expectancy for most categories of Americans, and in their physical and mental fitness in the upper decades of their lives, justifies the raising of the retirement age in Social Security and private plans. People should be encouraged to work longer, and those who do so should enjoy a reduced rate of income tax in the last two to five years of their working lives. The alternative is to slide steadily further into the Greek nightmare, where 30 percent of the people were working and 70 percent were drawing benefits of some kind, from public education to state pensions, when the entire system came down.

#ad#The income-disparity issue would be addressed by modest -- I emphasize, not confiscatory -- surcharges on extremely large incomes and small taxes on very large fortunes, the proceeds to be directed by the taxpayers themselves toward approved projects (as bona fide philanthropies are approved), for the reduction of poverty. This would take the sting out of a nasty political controversy that incites envy and extreme political antics, and would put the most agile financial minds in the country to work trying to eradicate poverty. The taxes would be self-reducing, as defined poverty declined, so there would be a built-in incentive for the wealthiest to seek the end of poverty. This would be a practical, as well as an acoustic, improvement on Warren Buffett’s plaintive request to be taxed more highly and the unenforceable pledge to give most assets away when he and other wealthy people die.

These ideas are not carved in stone, but at least they conform to the need to reduce reliance on the service economy and addiction to imported goods and commodities. And they are something of a departure from the fierce firefight over tediously familiar tax arguments that is all our political class has been capable of since the flat tax and the simplified tax made their appearances as political ideas almost 40 years ago. The political class has generally failed and misgoverned the country almost since the end of the Reagan era, which is why the first President Bush was defeated and his three successors all had, and then lost, control of the Congress. Instead of threatening not to lift the debt ceiling, the Republicans in Congress should lift it with notice that it will not be lifted again and attach suggestions for deficit reduction, which will take automatic effect if the ceiling is pressed again. 

In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. The way to get better government is to require and reward original public-policy formation that addresses the country’s problems in the approximate order of their importance. There are a few high office-holders, visible already, who meet this criterion, such as Paul Ryan (mentioned above, chairman of the House Budget Committee), Mitch Daniels (governor of Indiana), and possibly Chris Christie (governor of New Jersey) and Marco Rubio (U.S. senator from Florida). There must be others, in both parties. They might raise their heads if the media made it clear that this would lead to appreciative attention and not instant decapitation, and if the public made it clear that business as usual is, for everyone, in Marlon Brando’s phrase from On the Waterfront, “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Conrad Black

Established rules-change procedures stabilize the Senate. Keep them.

For the first time in 35 years, a new Congress will open with an attempt by the Senate majority to muscle through changes in Senate rules. The rules may be amended at any time by majority vote; but the rules themselves also provide that debate on a rules change can be terminated only by a two-thirds vote for cloture. Cloture for everything else -- all legislation, nominations, and even treaties -- needs only 60 votes. The unique cloture provision, which is deeply rooted in Senate history, is a special and very important requirement. It protects the minority -- whichever party that may be at the time -- from the imposition of rules changes by majority-party fiat.

Senators like Tom Udall, who are eager to muzzle the minority, insist that they may break Senate rules to make Senate rules. They contend that they may disregard the two-thirds cloture mandate and end debate by majority cloture. In a Senate Rules Committee hearing on Sept. 29, 2010, Senator Udall explicitly said, “a simple majority of the Senate can adopt or amend its rules at the beginning of a new Congress because it is not bound by the rules of the previous Congress.” This ignores the plain language of Senate Rule XXII, which states, “The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.”

#ad#The language these senators find inconvenient was adopted in 1959 on the motion of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who declared, “This preserves, indisputably, the character of the Senate as the one continuing body in our policy-making process.”

The extraordinary methods proposed to override the rules have been attempted in the past -- and have always been rejected by the Senate. The Senate rules have never been changed other than through the regular order.

In 1953, Democratic senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico initiated an effort to adopt new rules at the start of the 80th Congress. He imagined that a Senate sitting in a new Congress could disregard its old rules and adopt fresh procedures at its whim. Majority Leader Robert Taft opposed Anderson on the basis of the fact that the Senate is a continuing body. The Senate tabled Anderson’s proposal.

Initiatives mimicking Anderson’s became a near-biennial rite of passage for the next two decades. These initiatives began in the civil-rights era but outlasted it. In 1959 and 1975, Senate rules were in fact amended to reduce the cloture threshold. But the changes were made through the regular order, and Majority Leaders Taft, Johnson, and Mike Mansfield successfully opposed efforts to use extraordinary means to achieve such ends.

As Senator Mansfield characterized Sen. Walter Mondale’s 1975 rules-change effort, “What the motion before us seeks to do is to destroy -- let me repeat -- is to destroy the very uniqueness of this body; to relegate it to the status of any other legislative body, and to diminish the Senate as an institution of this government.” Mansfield continued, “The present motion to invoke cloture by a simple majority vote, if it succeeds, would alter the concept of the Senate so drastically that I cannot under any circumstances find any justification for it.”

If Majority Leader Harry Reid endorses the use of extraordinary procedures to circumvent the two-thirds cloture requirement on rules changes, it will be the first time a majority leader has ever taken that position. Again, Senators Taft, Johnson, and Mansfield did just the opposite when they led, actively discrediting such tactics.

Senators from both parties have offered ideas for rules amendments. Some may be worthwhile. But does the two-thirds cloture threshold present some insuperable barrier to change? Senator Reid knows it does not. In 2007, when he was already majority leader, the Standing Rules of the Senate were amended regarding non-germane provisions in conference reports and requiring disclosure of earmarks. Two-thirds cloture was no barrier, because the rules changes were negotiated with the minority and had bipartisan support.

Rules changes have occurred under both Democratic and Republican majorities, but always by consensus across party lines. Amending rules on a purely partisan basis would destabilize the Senate and make it resemble the House of Representatives, which changes course on the basis of transient majorities. The Senate’s crucial role as a check and balance within the legislative branch would be damaged.

We marvel at the argument that the Senate is broken and extraordinary steps are needed to fix it. After all, Senator Reid recently pronounced the outgoing Congress “the most productive Congress in the history of the country.” President Obama and Speaker Pelosi have similarly characterized it.

In January 2010, after the Democrats rammed the health-care legislation through with a 60-vote majority, the voters of Massachusetts ended that filibuster-proof capability by electing Scott Brown. In November, voters again rejected the Democrats’ agenda in both the House and the Senate. The current effort to change the filibuster rules reeks of election nullification and should be rejected. If the Democrats lose their Senate majority in 2012, they will be thankful that precedent and common sense prevailed in deciding how Senate rules are amended.

--- Norm Coleman is a former United State senator from Minnesota. He currently serves as CEO of the American Action Network and the American Action Forum. Martin Gold is an attorney at Covington and Burling and was formerly senior counsel for several Republican senators.

Norman Coleman Martin Gold

The technocracy’s ignorance is showing.

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts of having “proved” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism -- but without a modern Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can be.

Take California, which is struggling with a near-record wet and snowy winter. Flooding spreads in the lowlands; snow piles up in the Sierras.

#ad#In February 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, because 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up -- but from government’s, not nature’s, irrigation cutoffs.

England is freezing and snowy. But that’s odd, since global-warming experts assured us that the end of English snow was on the horizon. Australia is now flooding -- despite predictions that impending new droughts meant it could not sustain its present population. The New York Times just published an op-ed assuring the public that the current record cold and snow is proof of global warming. In theory, they could be, but one wonders: What, then, would record winter heat and drought prove?

In response to these unexpected symptoms of blizzards and deluges, climate physicians offer changing diagnoses. “Climate change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration -- Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, and Christina Romer -- assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an additional $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly returned to either academia or Wall Street.

There is also a new generation of young sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York–Washington corridor. They usually have degrees from one or more of America’s elite colleges and navigate an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post’s 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed on MSNBC that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was “written more than 100 years ago” and has “no binding power on anything.”

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, someone writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing of money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials -- but not the logic -- of the writer.

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped, and monotonous -- circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington–New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors, and degrees among our policy-setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska, or a ranch in Idaho.

In classical sophistic fashion, rhetoric is never far from personal profit. Multimillionaire Al Gore convinced the governments of the Western world that they were facing a global-warming Armageddon, and then hired out his services to address the hysteria that he had helped create.

How many climate doomsayers have well-funded research positions predicated on grants and subsidies that depend on convincing the public and government of impending disasters that the researchers then can be hired to monitor and address? Are there no green antitrust laws? In contrast, how many of our climate theorists run irrigated farms and energy-intensive businesses, which are at the mercy of new regulations that emanate from distant theorizing?

The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of former budget director Peter Orszag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup -- itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Are we to wonder why an angry grassroots Tea Party spread -- or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?

 ---Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.© 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";}

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts of having “proved” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism -->

Victor Davis Hanson

Are Democrats really the party of new ideas?

A curious fact was unearthed by Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal. The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening this week is 54.9, younger than the Republicans’ average age in the previous Congress, 56.5. But the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2.

That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent–plus Democratic districts survived. Meanwhile, many young Republican challengers won.

#ad#But the results are historically anomalous. Going back to the Congress elected in 1950, there has never been more than a 2.8-year difference in the average age of House Republicans and House Democrats. The difference in this Congress is 5.3 years, almost double that.

The picture is similar on the Senate side of the Capitol, where the average age of Republicans is 61.4 and the average age of Democrats is 63.1. That’s as wide a margin as in any Senate since the one produced by the election of 1982.

Democrats like to think of themselves as the young party, the party of new ideas. And in 2010, they remained the choice of the youngest voters, though by only half the margin they had in 2008.

But when you look at the top Democrats in the House, you don’t see young faces. The ages of the ranking Democrats on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Education, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, and Judiciary committees are 70, 79, 65, 71, 70, 69, and 81. The three party leaders are 70, 71, and 70.

Just about all these members are competent at pushing bills through the House, thanks to the fact that the House Democratic caucus chooses the chairmen and ranking members by secret-ballot vote. Less competent members get weeded out.

And because House Democrats, unlike House Republicans, don’t limit most of their chairmen to three two-year terms, competent chairmen can stay on and on. All those referred to above stayed in the House during twelve long years of Republican control, waiting for their party to win control again. House Republican chairmen, by contrast, have often chosen to retire after their three terms.

You get a similar picture when you look at leading politicians in the nation’s largest and one of its most Democratic states, California. Jerry Brown, elected governor at 36 and 40, has now won that office again at 72. The state’s two U.S. senators are 77 and 70. They began their political careers, as did the leading House Democrats, way back in the 1960s or 1970s.

So if the Democratic electorate is tilted toward the young, the Democrats’ leaders are tilted toward the old. And I think this matters at a time when, as scholar Walter Russell Mead writes in The American Interest, “The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the 60 years after the New Deal don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them.”

Mead is looking back on the America of World War II and the postwar decades, when American life was dominated by the leaders of what I have called the Big Units: big government, big business, big labor. The assumption was that these units would grow ever bigger, to the benefit of ordinary people.

That assumption was shared by the Democratic leaders of the just-departed 111th Congress, who grew up in Big Unit America. They passed a $787 billion stimulus package on the assumption that big government would put people to work. They passed the health-care bill on the assumption that centralized experts in big government could provide better care at lower costs.

The voters in November 2010 rejected those assumptions. It’s not clear whether congressional Republicans can advance policies more in line with the changed character of our society. And it’s an open question whether they can reach agreement on any important issues with Barack Obama, who is a generation younger than most of his party’s leaders in Congress.

The Democrats’ congressional leaders will defend the Obama agenda to the greatest extent possible. But can they take their party in a somewhat different direction than the one voters rejected in November?

--- Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 The Washington Examiner.

Michael Barone

Dear Member of the New Congress: A few things you need to know about the War Against the West.

Last month, Americans celebrated the holidays without a terrorist attack on American soil. That should be a source of relief but not complacency. Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines were not so lucky.

The hard fact is a global conflict is underway. You, as an incoming member of the 112th Congress, need to understand that. You need to know who is waging this war, what motivates them, and what their goals are. Without such knowledge, you will not be able to make informed -- much less wise -- legislative and policy decisions. So here’s a very brief briefing:

#ad#In 1979, there was a revolution in Iran. Those who took power established the first modern nation dedicated to Jihad -- holy war against Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims who do not accept their radical Islamist agenda. Iran is a predominately Shia country but its revolution inspired the rise of militant groups among the more numerous Sunni Muslims of the broader Middle East as well. Al-Qaeda is only the best known.

Sunni jihadis and Shia jihadis are rivals, not enemies. They cooperate and collaborate against common enemies -- us, for example. The evidence for this is abundant.

What is the goal of jihad? It was articulated concisely by the scholar Ibn Khaldun:  “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and the [obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.#...#Islam is under obligation to gain power over nations.”

Perhaps Ibn Khaldun was speaking out of anger, considering the continuing incarceration of Muslim combatants at Gitmo, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iran, and the sufferings of the Palestinians? I’d guess not -- since Ibn Khaldun died early in the 15th century.

Most Muslims do not embrace this interpretation of Islam or view it as appropriate for the 21st century. But a supremacist reading of the Koran caters to the pride and vanity of a significant minority of the world’s more than 1.3 billion Muslims. Also important: In what we have come to call the “Muslim world,” modernizers and reformers do not control the lion’s share of the money (oil money) and power (which, in most countries, is not democratically derived).

The Muslim world is an expanding world: The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) claims 56 member states. Some are not -- or not yet -- Muslim-majority nations. The OIC is the most powerful bloc at the United Nations, an organization that the U.S. continues to generously fund. (You may want to consider whether such expenditures still make sense.) Meanwhile, the Muslim population of Europe is growing rapidly while what might be called the continent’s natives are in a demographic death spiral.

The “Hard Jihad” is fought with violence. There is also the “Soft Jihad” -- an effort to destroy liberal democracies from within, to use Western values and institutions to undermine Western values and institutions.

The most important organization promoting Soft Jihad is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates. Twenty years ago, an American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood issued an internal memorandum acknowledging -- boasting, actually -- that it was engaged in a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.” Anytime you are approached by members of a “moderate” Muslim group, you should ask about their links to the Muslim Brotherhood and their views of the Muslim Brotherhood.

One weapon of the Soft Jihad is “lawfare.” To take just one example, Soeren Kern, senior fellow at the Madrid-based think tank Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos (GEES), recently reported on a Spanish high-school geology teacher who is being sued for having “defamed Islam” by mentioning pork products in his classroom. Specifically, during a lecture on Spain’s regions, he noted that Andalusia offers the perfect climate for curing the world-famous delicacy known as jamón ibérico -- Spanish ham.

Kernn writes that though “Spanish legal scholars are divided over whether the lawsuit has merit, nearly everyone agrees that the case has potentially major implications for free speech in Spain. They also agree that the constant threat of lawsuits will force Spanish school teachers to carefully consider their choice of words in the future.”

Lawfare also embraces efforts to spread Sharia, Islamic law, for example by insisting that Western firms provide “Sharia-compliant financing,” which gives Islamic clerics say over investment decisions and, potentially, siphons off funds to “charities” that support terrorism.

And then there is this: Last week, a Danish court charged three men with plotting an armed assault on the office of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that in 2005 published satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Most significant is the message this sends: Under traditional interpretations of Islamic law it is forbidden for Muslims to portray Mohammed pictorially. Now, however, these religious prohibitions are to apply equally to non-Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries.  And, apparently, there is no statute of limitations. If the OIC were a moderate organization, it would object to that. Instead, it has been pushing in the U.N. for international laws that would limit free speech where Islam is concerned. The U.S. has an ambassador to the OIC. He should be vigorously opposing such efforts. You might want to inquire into why it does not appear that he is.

If you’ve followed me this far, here are three policy implications: (1) While the War Against the West is different from previous wars, it is not simply a “law-enforcement” problem as too many people (including, it seems, James Cole, just recess-appointed by President Obama as deputy attorney general) prefer to believe. (2) Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia -- these are not separate wars but rather fronts in a single global conflict. (3) Make up your mind that the jihadis in Tehran will not acquire nuclear weapons -- not on your watch. The sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 2010 are an important part of the effort but only a part.

Final point: 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden is alive. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a plan. Are you confident the U.S. has an adequate strategy for frustrating their ambitions? And by the way: Welcome to Washington.

--- Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

Clifford D. May

The House’s freshman class gears up for two years of budget battles.

Eighty-seven Republican freshmen stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, bringing with them an unbridled enthusiasm for conservative reform. Rep. Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel from Florida’s southeast coast, tells National Review Online that he and others are more than ready to rattle Washington -- and the House GOP leadership. “I’ve been in combat and I’ve been shot at,” he smiles, explaining his dauntless attitude.

West, like many of his first-term colleagues, was a Tea Party favorite on the campaign trail. As he settles into life on the Hill, he tells us that preserving the spirit and promise of the midterm sweep will be a challenge. Still, he notes, House GOP leaders sense that the largest incoming class of GOP legislators since 1938 will not retreat to the backbenches. West points to his own experience as an example: Already, he has publicly tangled with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor over the House schedule, pushing Cantor, on Sunday news shows and elsewhere, to keep Congress in session longer.

#ad#Tough votes ahead, on raising the debt ceiling and on the budget, could also be rumbles. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House GOP whip, tells NRO that he is confident that this class will not only speak up, but also help the leadership team craft effective policy. House GOP leaders, he says, want freshmen to be partners, and share the newcomers’ distaste for the big-spending ways of Congresses past. One early gesture, a nod to the principles upon which freshmen campaigned, will be the Thursday reading of the Constitution on the House floor.

“Not only does this class represent generational change, but it is going to change the makeup of government itself,” McCarthy says. “They haven’t yet performed, but they’ve already put their fingerprints on this Congress. They have changed the mindset.” By year’s end, he predicts, “you are going to be so impressed by them; they’ll have become household names.”

Indeed, firebrand freshmen are making noise -- not only on talk shows, but in the elite House committees that shape floor proceedings. “I’ve had an opportunity to make two presentations during their orientation, and I was very impressed with the caliber of interest, the intellectual curiosity, and the very life experiences that they’re bringing,” says Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), the chairman of the House Rules Committee.

Dreier’s influential committee, which is considered a plum landing spot for any member, welcomes four first-termers onto its roster this week -- Rep. Tim Scott (S.C.), Rep. Rob Woodall (Ga.), and two Floridians, Rep. Daniel Webster and Rep. Rich Nugent. That’s a big difference from the Republican wave of 1994, when Republicans added only one freshman to Rules. “We wanted to make sure that we had the new members represented well on the A-committees with us,” Dreier says.

House Speaker John Boehner has placed numerous freshmen in top-notch slots, from the Republican Steering Committee, which elects committee chairmen, to Judiciary, Ways and Means, and Appropriations. But freshman tentacles reach beyond the committees: Representative Scott, the first black Republican the Palmetto State has sent to Congress since Reconstruction, and Rep. Kristi Noem (R., S.D.), a telegenic 39-year-old, have been tapped for newly created seats at the leadership table.

On Wednesday, as members were sworn in and celebrated their new roles with family and friends on the Hill, the atmosphere, for most, was low-key, with easy laughs and plenty of finger food. The night before, a handful of freshmen had gone a step farther, partying away at the swanky W Hotel downtown, where country star LeAnn Rimes performed as part of a GOP fundraiser.

Such pleasantness, however, could be short-lived. With fiscal conservatism at the heart of the freshmen’s cause, finding a way to balance their goals with the political realities of Washington will be the early test. Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, tells NRO that the spring vote to raise the debt ceiling will be a difficult choice for many.

#page#The debt vote is slated to occur “a little earlier than we had thought, because of the payroll-tax holiday,” Ryan says. “It will probably be around when the [continuing resolution to fund the government] expires, so you can see a kind of confluence of appropriations and the debt ceiling coming together.” The question, he says, will not be simply a “yes” or “no” on raising the nation’s debt ceiling, but “what we can extract in exchange for it, that gets us pointed in the right direction fiscally.”

“There are a lot of ideas out there, and we’re going to have to figure out which ones are the best,” he says. “You have to have a unified party to get that.” Increased spending cuts, for instance, are one of the areas mentioned by staffers as a possible point of compromise.

#ad#“We’re going to have lots of debates, lots of conversations, lots of disagreements,” says Scott. “In the end, I think we’ll find ourselves on the same page [as GOP leaders] on most of the primary issues that the American people want addressed.” But on the debt ceiling, he says, “Until we find a compelling reason to vote for the debt ceiling, we won’t.”

Nothing has been decided, even though Boehner and others in leadership hope to avoid a government shutdown similar to the one that occurred in 1995, when Republicans last took over the reins in the lower chamber. Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), for one, is urging the budget hawks in the House’s freshman class not to back down, even if it leads to a faceoff. “None of us wants a government shutdown, but it’s not something that we should be so afraid of that we’re willing to cave in to more debt,” DeMint said in an interview with Human Events. “I think America expects us to fight more spending, more debt.”

House GOP leaders, aware of potential fissures on budget strategy within the caucus, are telling reporters this week that they will, with gusto, follow up on their commitment to cut spending. “We have committed in the Pledge to America, and we have continued to commit that we are going to [bring] discretionary non-defense spending down to ’08 levels,” said Cantor in an interview with National Journal. “I am looking to make sure we do that in an expeditious manner. So there’s no wavering on that.”

Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.) met with the incoming class for the first time on Tuesday afternoon at a Republican conference meeting. The five-termer from the Philadelphia suburbs, who has survived many close races, pushes back on the notion that freshmen will be rabble-rousers and unable to deal with a bit of cold water being poured on their ambitions -- be it from the slow-moving Senate or elsewhere. “I think everybody has a sense of realism here,” he says. “We can only do what we can do in the House; we’re going to run a lot of issues up the flagpole.”

“We will not always get it right,” echoed Boehner in his inaugural speech Wednesday. “We will not always agree on what is right. A great deal of scar tissue has built up on both sides of the aisle.” Nevertheless, he said, “hard work and tough decisions will be required of the 112th Congress. No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual, and today we begin carrying out their instructions.”

Regardless of the chatter about the rocky votes ahead, conservatives should keep their hopes up, says Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who has huddled with numerous freshmen this week. King, a top ally of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), the founder of the Tea Party Caucus, says this class is itching to put conservative thinking into action, not to posture or fold. From repealing President Obama’s health-care law to slashing spending, this crew of “new blood,” he says, is first-class.

“It’s a different personality, a different time,” King says. “The media will be competing to identify the leading members of the freshman class -- they might take over the media. If they do, and drive a strong, conservative message, great, more power to them.#...#The energy that’s there, we sorely needed that.”

--- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are moving toward growth.

‘Stop the bad stuff” is what John Boehner told a bunch of us at breakfast a few weeks before the election. That’s how he defined the GOP mission. Now he’s Speaker.

And now there’s an opportunity for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to move in the direction of a supply-side economic growth model to reduce chronic unemployment and really get the economy moving again.

#ad#You can’t govern from the House alone. Boehner knows that. But he also knows that you can stop the redistribution, the big spending, the overregulation, the tax hikes, and the war against business and investors.

The economy is picking up this new political vibe. Economic growth has shifted to 4 percent from 2 percent (even though the Fed hardly acknowledges this). And just in the last six weeks, indicators of better jobs and business confidence have been springing up everywhere.

The economic upturn probably started late last summer, but it has picked up steam since the elections. Car sales, ISMs, small-business confidence, 297,000 ADP private jobs, and brisk holiday retail sales -- the indicators all look good.

And what’s helping light things up? Low-tax-rate clarity. Stopping the pork-barrel, earmarked, omnibus spending bill. And now the potential undermining of Obamacare. Plus, the hope for broad-based spending limits, and even a corporate tax cut touted by Obama and hopefully the new House Republicans. Trust but verify. And right now I’m willing to trust.

If Obamanomics has been replaced by Tea Party Reaganomics 2.0, the revived Gipper approach is at heart an economic growth message -- operating through free-markets, not government. And it’s not simply budget bean-counting either.

Cut-and-grow seems to be the new House GOP mantra. And that’s fine, as long as the cut part includes corporate tax cuts to grow the economy and complement the hoped-for spending cuts. Growth is essential to the GOP political future, as well as the nation’s health and wealth.

Over at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack Obama won’t be the first liberal to move in the direction of supply-side growth incentives, especially lower tax rates. Think John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Then and now, the motives are undoubtedly political. Fine. It’s the results that count.

Just today, the White House announced that Obama will speak before the Chamber of Commerce in order to improve relations with business. This is good. Next thing you know he’ll be speaking at a Tea Party event.

And it looks like the president is Clintonizing his White House staff. He’s probably bringing in businessman and former Clinton Commerce secretary Bill Daley to be chief of staff. And he might pick former Clinton economic chief Gene Sperling to replace Larry Summers.

Bill Clinton was a liberal who got mugged in the midterm elections, and he changed his stripes on the economy and taxes. And now we may be seeing Obama make the same transformation. But I repeat my own mantra: trust but verify.

And there’s no smooth sailing ahead for the GOP. They’ll have to fight tooth and nail over the EPA carbon assault and the Obamacare health takeover if they’re to stop these monumental economy and job killers.

But stocks and the dollar are rising, and gold is falling. These markets are affirming the shift in politics and policy. We are moving toward the supply-side. That’s good. Haven’t been there in a while.

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Larry Kudlow

While we like a good party now and again, the fact that House Republicans held no official gala to celebrate their accession to the majority in the new Congress reflects both becoming modesty and the accurate understanding that it is time to get to work. John Boehner, now speaker, acknowledged on Election Night that in modern America the president, for the most part, sets the agenda. His job -- and that of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and of their Republican colleagues -- is to work with President Obama where constructive cooperation is possible, and to begin making the case for starting on a better agenda than his in 2013.

Undoing Obamacare must be near the very top of that agenda, and House Republicans were right to announce that they would hold a vote on repeal in their first days on the job. The law weakens our economy by adding to the cost of employment. It threatens our already-parlous fiscal condition by creating a new entitlement and only pretending to pay for it. It staves off real Medicare reform by relying on price controls. It impedes upward mobility by raising effective marginal tax rates on low- and middle-income workers. It promises to retard medical innovation. And it is flatly inconsistent with the constitutional design.

#ad#The health-care legislation is also an integrated plan that cannot be fixed piecemeal or more than modestly improved. Republicans should not be intimidated by polls that appear to show that this or that aspect of the law is popular. Those features of the bill are inseparable from its least popular provisions, the package as a whole remains unpopular, and there is no reason to expect that to change any time soon. The ban on insurers’ taking account of sickness when offering policies and setting rates is popular in isolation, for example, but in order to work, it requires making the purchase of government-approved insurance compulsory.

Senate Democrats and the president will block full repeal, but Republicans should not let the struggle end there. Republicans should next attack Obamacare’s sources of funding. They could offer legislation to repeal the bill’s taxes on medical devices, for example, and make up for the lost revenue by delaying Obamacare’s subsidies. Another bill could undo Obamacare’s cuts in Medicare Advantage and recoup the money the same way. Still another could bar Obamacare from funding abortions (an amendment to that effect passed by a large margin in a heavily Democratic House in 2009, but did not make it into the final law). These bills would put supporters of the health-care law in a very tough spot. They would also keep the controversy over Obamacare from fading. What opponents of the law have to fear is not that it will become more popular but that the public will become resigned to it -- that it will come to be seen as inevitable, like death and taxes. Republicans ought to keep hope (for repeal) alive.

On spending in general, the Republicans have to favor repeal as well. Non-security discretionary spending increased 24 percent over the last two years, not counting the stimulus. The run-up in the budget of federal departments has been spectacular: Since 2007, the Department of Labor is up 340 percent, the Department of Commerce 158 percent, the Department of Energy 90 percent, the Department of Agriculture 68 percent, and so on. House Republicans are committed to taking this portion of the federal government back to 2008 levels. It is only a $500 billion slice of a $4 trillion budget, but cutting that slice by 20 percent will be a significant, nay unprecedented, accomplishment. Every inertial force in Washington will resist this effort, not least the United States Senate.

Conservatives will have two points of leverage in the spring, but should be careful to use them with care. The debt ceiling must be raised -- since there is no chance that the deficit is going to be brought down to zero in short order -- and a new spending bill must be passed to keep the government from shutting down. It will be tempting to use these must-have pieces of legislation to bend the federal budget to conservatives’will in one fell swoop. But one lesson from Newt Gingrich’s battles with President Clinton in the mid-1990s is that whichever side seems most eager to risk default or a shutdown will lose. Limited-government conservatism only recently recovered from that earlier defeat. But getting nothing in return for passing these bills would also be a mistake. Our preference would be to couple them with caps on discretionary spending that last several years.

#page#The long-term driver of our debt crisis is not discretionary spending but entitlements. One of the most heartening developments of the midterm elections was the success of several candidates who campaigned on entitlement reform, including new senators Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul. In the House the reformers are led by new Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. Unfortunately these reformers are still in a minority of Republican congressmen, most of whom do not understand the issues nearly as well -- an ignorance they share with the public. If President Obama proposes real reform of Medicare and Social Security, Republicans should by all means work with him. They should not, however, hand the Democrats an opportunity to demagogue without the prospect of actually enacting reform. If President Obama refuses to lead on the old-age entitlements, Republicans should concentrate on getting the discretionary portions of the budget, and perhaps Medicaid, under control.

Tax reform probably also requires presidential leadership -- but Republicans can move the cause forward by advancing proposals to make the tax code less hostile to economic growth and middle-class families. Capping the deduction for state and local taxes, pruning back the mortgage-interest deduction, and broadening the top tax bracket to include more people should all be on the table, and any proceeds should go toward cutting taxes on investment and expanding the child tax credit. Republicans should not allow their message on taxes to consist wholly of the permanent extension of the Bush tax rates, which over time will put them in the position of defending an unacceptable and unpopular status quo.

#ad#Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac represent unfinished business. They were significant contributors to the financial crisis but have not undergone serious reform. Republicans ought to put them on a path to privatization or elimination -- and should consult extensively with Peter Wallison, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who sounded the alarm about the government-sponsored enterprises early and has developed several options for moving to a market-based system of housing finance. One promising idea is to shrink the companies’ presence in the market by gradually reducing the size of mortgages they are allowed to buy. They could then eventually be dismantled without disrupting the housing market. Studies have shown that Fannie and Freddie have done little to reduce mortgage rates or increase homeownership, and claims that they are necessary to stabilize the market are at this point a sick joke. Who needs them? Not a reformist, free-market-minded House majority.

The new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa, is making Fannie and Freddie one of his first targets for hearings, appropriately. All signs are that he will be extremely energetic on all fronts, giving the administration a strong dose of the accountability it has not gotten from the legislative branch over the last two years. As long as he does not get diverted into obsessing over minute scandals, as congressional Republicans did too often in the 1990s, Issa’s work will be welcome and important.

Speaking of scandal, Republicans must have zero tolerance for it in their own ranks. Every new majority comes in pledging purity. Then human nature intervenes. It is always easy to find an excuse for giving your own side a pass -- personal relationships and political considerations crowd out ethics and standards. The last Republican majority slid down this path until it became a watchword for corruption. The Tea Party movement is partly a reaction against that self-serving politics, and Republicans had best not forget it.

We should not end on an admonitory note, though. Instead, pause to consider that even before they arrived in Washington, the new Republicans had effectively ended most earmarks, forced President Obama to accept an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, and dealt Senate appropriators a stunning setback by defeating a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill in the lame-duck session. If nothing else, the new Congress will stop Obama’s legislative agenda cold, and that in itself is a wondrous change from the last two years of arrogant and overweening liberalism. Operation Rewind can’t truly succeed without a Republican president in 2013. If congressional Republicans help set the table for one, they will have done their part in inaugurating a historic era of conservative reform.

The Editors

The Iraqi prime minister battles unwelcome political interference by some of his country’s neighbors.

On December 21, more than nine months after Iraq’s elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki finally announced his new cabinet. Many Iraq skeptics have used the delay to argue that democracy is anathema to Iraq. They are wrong. The problem is not Iraq’s democracy but rather its neighbors’ antipathy to representative government and their interference in Iraqi politics.

#ad#Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy worked with Turkey’s government and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria to undermine government formation in Iraq. In repeated conversations with President Obama and Vice President Biden, Prime Minister Maliki has complained about Saudi and Turkish efforts to support the formation of a Sunni sectarian list and defeat his efforts to form a cross-sectarian slate. “We were making good progress,” one leader from Maliki’s Dawa party said. Ahmed Abu Risha, the Sunni leader who heads the Awakening Conference party, said he would join the coalition. “We had advanced talks with other secular Sunnis, with some members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, with Turkmen leaders, with technocrats and independents, and we even had some Kurdish politicians expressing a serious desire to become part of our national project,” Abu Risha reported. Then regional powers intervened. “Sunni politicians started coming to us saying, we would love to join you, but we have been threatened [by neighboring states]. Al-Iraqiya is being presented to us as our only alternative,” he said. Regional (and American) advocacy for former prime minister Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya list forced Maliki into a corner and set back efforts to promote a moderate bloc for months.

Unfortunately, the Saudis and Turks were somewhat successful at selling their plan to Washington as a way to contain Iran’s influence. If the White House truly wishes to limit Iranian influence in Iraq, it should avoid these sectarian games. Iraqis — regardless of their sectarian preference — are nationalists. Iraqi Shia are no more Iranian than they are Saudi. Still, Iraqi Shia suffered disproportionately under the Baathist regime, while many Arab states, as well as Turkey and the United States, often turned a blind eye. Iraqis fear that their Arab neighbors harbor such sectarian hatred that they would again countenance repression of the Shia. This concern means that rather than repelling Iranian influence, the Saudi-Turkish strategy actually fuels it, as Iraqis turn out of fear rather than desire into Iran’s embrace. Perhaps this is why the Iraqi National Alliance — perhaps encouraged by Tehran — polarized the situation by pushing de-Baathification to the top of the agenda.

As Iraqis prepared to vote in March 2010, three choices emerged: a largely Shia list with Iranian backing, a largely Sunni list headed by a ceremonial Shia (Allawi) and backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and Maliki’s State of Law list, with a Dawa core and a handful of Arab Sunni tribal sheikhs and independent politicians.

While voting was largely peaceful, the aftermath was problematic. Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission was inept at best and corrupt at worst. At key stations in Baghdad, Mosul, and elsewhere, there were illogical results, with candidates from the Sadrists or Iraqiya winning almost 100 percent. The Saudis and Turks rejoiced, and U.S. diplomats, perhaps fearing instability with a true recount, authenticated the process even before Iraq’s Supreme Court could do so. Maliki saw this as a betrayal, and Iraqis saw the United States as again siding with Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s efforts to turn back the clock on Iraq’s progress. As crowds of Iraqiya supporters reportedly went to the streets carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, Iraqiya politicians promised to reintegrate the former Baath party into Iraqi politics as part of “sweeping national reconciliation.”

Against this backdrop of regional intrigue, Maliki is seeking a “third way.” He sees Iraq neither as part of an Iranian axis nor as part of a Saudi one. Iraqis do not want to be party to the regional conflicts that plague the Middle East. Rather, they want economic and cultural ties with all their neighbors, and with the world at large. Regrettably, the State Department has failed to use its influence to encourage Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Cooperation Council states to end their informal boycott of Iraq.

Too many outside observers dismiss as a pipedream the idea that an independent, prosperous, democratic Iraq can emerge from the recent turmoil. Their pessimism is nothing new, but Iraqis know better. In 2007, the same voices declared Iraq dead. They wrongly said Maliki would never confront the Shia militias. Few believed Maliki would work effectively with Sunni tribes to battle al-Qaeda, and few believed that American troops could depart without a complete deterioration in the country’s security situation. But Iraq in 2011 is a better place than it was in 2006, when Maliki entered office. As U.S. troops depart, security is much improved. Foreign investment grows steadily.

We now look toward the future. The “third way” will build a diverse alliance without backsliding toward a Lebanese-style confessional system. Maliki must now try to realize the vision of a free, peaceful, thriving democracy for which so many Iraqis and Americans have sacrificed. Let us hope that the United States and all responsible actors in the international community will help him succeed.

— Jaffar al-Rikabi is a researcher in Iraqi politics and economics based in London and Baghdad. He holds an M.A. (hon.) from Georgetown University’s Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Jaffar al-Rikabi

For the foreseeable future, health care must be the dominant focus of conservative domestic policy.

Sixty-eight years ago, after a long-sought victory in Egypt that marked a turning point in World War II, Winston Churchill said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

In what will be a long and arduous struggle to bring fiscal stability and true reform to our tottering health-care system, partial Republican control of Congress was a necessary first step. But, now, the hard work begins.

#ad#The Republican health-care platform, such as it is, is pretty simple: Repeal Obamacare and replace it with incremental, common-sense, politically popular reforms. The GOP’s “Pledge to America” may therefore have been an appropriate platform for a midterm election. However, the document barely begins to address the profound and difficult issues that any serious government must. Indeed, if the early signals are any indication, the troubling reality is that the Republican health-care agenda for 2011 and 2012 may actually make it harder to repeal Obamacare in 2013, and thereby harder to achieve conservatives’ long-term goal of a humane, efficient, and fiscally sustainable health-care system.

The best way to grasp the enormous difficulties ahead is to work backwards.

Runaway growth in government spending is America’s biggest fiscal problem today. Growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending, in turn, accounts for nearly all the projected future growth in government outlays relative to GDP. If the principal domestic-policy goal of conservatives is to restore the country to a truly limited government that can live within its means, we can achieve that goal only through serious and thoughtful reform of health-care entitlements.

That is to say: For the foreseeable future, health care must become the single dominant focus of conservative domestic policy.

Hence, our first and most important problem is intellectual. Conservatives speak often of repealing and replacing Obamacare. But how many can articulate a conservative vision of what our health-care system should look like? Leading Republican politicians have plenty of detailed opinions on a broad range of subjects. But does anyone know what John Boehner’s vision is for the future of American health care? How about the main contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination? To ask the question is to answer it.

FREEDOM, SECURITY, AND INNOVATION
It should be said that, within the diminutive circle of conservative health-policy wonks, there is a fair amount of agreement as to where we should go. But translating that wonkery into plain English isn’t easy.

Among less specialized conservatives, a common refrain is, “I’m not clear on the details, but that Paul Ryan sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.” And Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan is indeed a solid start. But unless other Republican leaders fully immerse themselves in health-care policy, they will be able neither to articulate the core principles of free-market health care, nor to address new issues as they arise, nor to persuade American voters that they should be trusted to enact far-reaching reforms.

The core health-care principles that Republicans should embrace can be summarized in three words: freedom, security, and innovation.

First, the conservative vision must, out of both principle and pragmatism, hold that the best health-care system is one that trusts individuals to make the choices that are best for them and their families. The liberal view of health care is the opposite: that individuals are neither knowledgeable enough nor wise enough to make health-care decisions for themselves; instead, these decisions are best left to unelected government experts.

#page#Second, conservatives must stand firmly behind the principle of a safety net for those who are genuinely down on their luck, and also for the principle that those who pay for insurance and play by the rules will get the care that they’ve earned, without losing out on technicalities. Liberals might agree rhetorically with these principles, but they use them as a pretext for expanding the entitlement state, with destructive effects: extension of government insurance to those who don’t need it, at a cost the country can’t afford, and strangulation of private insurers with onerous regulations that the market can’t sustain.

#ad#Third, conservatives must always keep in mind that the entire point of health care is to extend and enhance life. Thus their vision can include, but must be broader than, the hot-button issues of abortion and stem-cell research. A pro-life health-care policy involves accelerating the pace of medical innovation, by reducing the regulatory and financial burdens we place on the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. That means strengthening the influence of market forces, as opposed to subsidies and price controls, on the development of drugs and devices. It also means streamlining the FDA so that innovative new therapies can reach the market more quickly and cheaply. It means minimizing, and if possible eliminating, the ability of federal bureaucrats to deny life-extending care.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to look askance at medical innovation. Most progressive health-care economists blame new medical technologies for rising health-care costs: costs that can, in their view, be lowered only by restricting patients’ access to those technologies. In addition, new drugs and medical technologies are developed by private companies, for profit: a concept to which many on the Left are instinctively hostile.

Health-care policy is exceedingly complex, and translating these basic principles of freedom, security, and innovation into actual legislation will not be easy. Doing so must start with three policy goals.

First, Republicans must foster a truly free market for health insurance by eliminating the differing tax treatment of employer-sponsored and individually purchased insurance. Second, Republicans must make dramatic improvements to Medicaid, using Mitch Daniels’s impressive reforms in Indiana as a template. Third, Republicans must move Medicare onto a sustainable path that puts financial control in the hands of seniors themselves rather than central planners.

On all three fronts, Obamacare moves us in exactly the opposite direction. The law will force employers to provide insurance for their employees, instead of allowing them to leave that money in their employees’ paychecks so that they can buy insurance for themselves. The law will dramatically expand Medicaid in ways that will accelerate the pending bankruptcy of several large states, even though Medicaid provides far worse care than people can obtain on their own. And the law will effectively eliminate Medicare Advantage and other programs that helped move Medicare from its traditional single-payer approach into a more market-oriented one.

THE OBAMACARE TRAP
And so, it remains true that the most critical task for Republicans in the 112th Congress is to lay the groundwork for the ultimate repeal of Obamacare. Given that House Republicans don’t have the power to repeal the law by themselves, what can they do in the meantime? More importantly, what should they do in the meantime? The question has been asked, but it hasn’t been adequately answered.

We must remind ourselves of the electoral realities. For Republicans to succeed in repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), they will need to control the House, the Senate, and the White House. From a political standpoint, if Republicans are not able to achieve this in 2012, they are unlikely ever to repeal Obamacare.

This means that influential Republican activists must -- must -- coalesce around the most electable Republican presidential candidate who can articulate conservative health-care principles. This is no time for single-issue small-ball or personal score-settling. A GOP nominee who passes all the litmus tests but can’t win in November would only succeed in making Obamacare permanent. One who can win but isn’t capable of pushing for real health-care reform wouldn’t be much better.

#page#In turn, this means that Republican presidential aspirants must place health-care policy front and center in their campaigns. They must avoid the easy rhetorical flourishes and expend the time and effort to gain fluency in the complexities and trade-offs of health-care policy. A politician who regularly speaks of fiscal responsibility and limited government without building a mandate for actual, specific legislation to achieve them will not move the country in his direction. This is a time for serious government, and there can be no greater test of a politician’s seriousness than his command of health-care policy.

And, of course, in order to repeal Obamacare, Republicans also have to gain control of the Senate. Here, too, we cannot afford any more Delaware Debacles: We need candidates who, whatever their flaws, are electable and who pledge to vote for repeal. A realistic best-case scenario is that Republicans get to between 51 and 55 seats in the upper chamber: a majority, but not a filibuster-proof majority. In the 2010 wave election, they gained six seats, raising their total to 47. Despite the favorable turf in 2012, they are unlikely to win the 13 additional seats needed to reach 60.

#ad#Hence, full repeal of Obamacare will require the participation of Democrats. There may be some Democratic senators willing to go along with a repeal effort: Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, and a few others. But it is very likely that even with those Democrats, there won’t be 60 repeal votes in the Senate. If that is the case, then Republicans will need to turn to the reconciliation process to roll back the law.

As we learned last year, the reconciliation process is different from the normal legislative process. The Senate parliamentarian, using Congressional Budget Office estimates, certifies measures that, either by raising taxes or by cutting spending, will reduce the budget deficit. Only deficit-reducing measures can be passed using reconciliation.

The problem for Republicans is that the CBO estimated that the PPACA would reduce the deficit by $132 billion over the 2010–2019 period. Because of amendments passed in late 2010, it’s likely that the CBO’s estimate of the cost of repeal will be even higher in 2013. Hence, a simple, two-paragraph repeal measure won’t get through reconciliation.

This is where the agenda of the next Congress comes in. In place of comprehensive health-care reform, House Republicans are promising to reverse some of Obamacare’s most unpopular elements: for example, the new 1099 provision, which requires that all businesses issue an IRS form 1099 for any payments to vendors of more than $600 per year. The CBO scores this measure as raising $18 billion for the government over ten years: indeed, that’s why it was included in the PPACA in the first place.

The individual mandate is another example. Last June, the CBO projected that repealing the individual mandate would expand the deficit by $252 billion in the 2011–2020 timeframe. In making that calculation, the CBO is counting on some people under PPACA paying the fine for not purchasing health insurance, thus increasing revenues to the government. In addition, the CBO believes that the mandate will reduce spending by reducing the number of people who rely on Medicaid and exchange subsidies.

Hence, if Republicans in the 112th Congress succeed in eliminating some of these provisions, they will increase the fiscal cost, as scored by the CBO, of repealing the rest of Obamacare in the next Congress. Every unpopular tax increase that is eliminated now will need to be offset by additional tax increases or spending cuts, if and when the real repeal effort starts in 2013. Republicans, therefore, may be setting a trap for themselves.

THE REGULATORY INTERREGNUM
Another problem with Obamacare is regulation. The PPACA dramatically expands federal regulatory control over the health-care system, concentrating enormous power within the Department of Health and Human Services. But, because most regulations aren’t germane to the budget, from a parliamentary standpoint, it’s far from clear that Republicans will be able to use the reconciliation process to reverse Obamacare’s substantial regulatory provisions. For example, the PPACA provision requiring health insurers to keep their medical-loss ratios above 80 percent -- a technicality that will drive many insurers out of business -- isn’t germane to the budget, but it is highly relevant to the future of the private insurance market.

Precisely because these regulations do not affect the fiscal calculus, and therefore will not undermine Republicans’ ability to repeal Obamacare after 2012, it is here that the new House majority can be most constructive.

#page#In other words, Republicans will be well advised to adopt a two-track strategy: using the conventional legislative process to turn back as much of Obamacare’s regulatory architecture as possible, while waiting until 2013 and then using the reconciliation process, to repeal Obamacare’s tax and spending increases.

Hence, in the near term, Republican policy experts and legislative staffers will need to come up with a comprehensive regulatory strategy, one that will entirely replace Obamacare’s regulatory architecture with a sounder one that hews more closely to conservative market principles.

#ad#The politics of smart regulatory reform are favorable, too. Remember that many of the negative headlines about Obamacare since the law passed have had to do with new regulations: the fact that McDonald’s almost dropped health coverage for its junior employees; the aforementioned medical-loss-ratio mandates, which will force many insurers to drop out of the market; the lobbyist-driven ban on new hospital construction, which preserves local hospital monopolies; and on and on. Regulatory reform is an important way for the Republican House to earn its credibility on health-care reform, while calling attention to Obamacare’s many flaws.

One other thing to keep in mind: The Prescription Drug User Fee Act -- the law that Congress uses to oversee the FDA -- is up for reauthorization in 2012. House Republicans should use this opportunity to reform the FDA and demonstrate that they are on the side of patients who want faster access to innovative new medicines.

MEDICARE AND MEDICAID REFORM
Finally, House Republicans must begin to build the case for real entitlement reform. Medicare is the most politically sensitive subject, but it is one where Paul Ryan has already done most of the necessary groundwork. Medicaid is an even more urgent issue, as many states are sinking under the weight of reckless commitments made by their governors in flusher times.

It will be difficult for Republicans in the next Congress to achieve much on these issues without leadership from the other side. If President Obama’s deficit commission is any indication, that leadership does not exist. The commission’s report effectively advocated rearranging Medicare’s deck chairs, and it proposed essentially nothing to address the grave problems with Medicaid.

There is one Medicare-related issue that the next Congress will be forced to deal with: the never-ending saga of Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate, a.k.a. the “doc fix,” which governs how Medicare reimburses doctors and hospitals for their services. Remember that the doc fix was kept out of Obamacare because it would have added $239 billion over ten years to the law’s price tag. Republicans will be under significant pressure from the American Medical Association and others to continue to pay doctors and hospitals at current rates, instead of the roughly 25 percent lower rates required by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.

It’s not clear that Republicans should go along. For one thing, the AMA was a strong supporter of Obamacare (albeit over the dissent of many of its members). More importantly, perpetuating the doc fix will cost tens of billions of dollars: money that will have to come out of some other vital priority. Republicans in the 112th Congress will need to consider ways to address the doc fix, and other pressing problems, without jeopardizing their ability to repeal Obamacare in the 113th.

Recent history is not encouraging. In December, with bipartisan support, Congress passed doc-fix legislation that froze reimbursement rates at 2010 levels for 2011, at a cost of $19 billion. The law was “paid for” using gimmickry: an amendment to Obamacare that would require some individuals to pay back insurance subsidies they may receive at some point in the future. Republicans saw this as a victory, as the compromise reduces future Obamacare spending, albeit in a manner that will be difficult to enforce. However, in the medium term, it is a victory for the Democrats, as the measure adds to the difficulty of repealing the entirety of Obamacare using the reconciliation process.

A TIME FOR GROWN-UPS
It has been said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But the experience of Ronald Reagan adds a corollary: Only those leaders who have a command of public policy before their candidacies begin can succeed at both campaigning and governing.

The problems we face are grave. If their solutions were simple, they would already have been tried. Our presidential aspirants and congressional luminaries, as well as the people who elect them, must face up to the difficult choices ahead. If they do, we just may succeed in turning Obamacare back, and putting something much better in its place.

— Avik Roy is an equity research analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. in New York City. He blogs on health-care issues at The Apothecary.

Avik Roy

The Obama Left has changed its mind about executive power.

No sooner did Victor Davis Hanson compile a prodigious list of national-security flip-flops by the Obama Left (posted on the Corner under the title “If We Say It Is, It Is . . . ”) than we learned the list would have to get longer. Keeping up with this administration’s reversals is a full-time job.

The New York Times reports that President Obama is considering the issuance of an executive signing statement in conjunction with his impending assent to the defense appropriations bill. Remember when the Law Profs Division of the Obama Left told us Bush signing statements were the death knell of our constitutional system?

#ad#In fact, as Times correspondent Charlie Savage concedes (you’ll find it if you stick around through the end of his report), then–Yale Law School dean Harold Koh joined his American Bar Association colleagues during those bad old Bush days in blasting signing statements as “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.” You may know Dean Koh better from his current job: top lawyer in the Obama State Department. In any event, it seems that in the age of Obama, signing statements are one of the few things that are not a crisis. Savage grudgingly recounts that Obama has actually issued several signing statements already. The reporter is quick to qualify Obama signing statements as “relatively uncontroversial challenges” to congressional authority, by which he apparently means they were not upsetting to the Times.

This one, though, will be controversial even by the Gray Lady’s forgiving standards for this president. Mr. Obama is weighing whether to announce that his sweeping powers under Article II of the Constitution nullify Congress’s prohibition against transferring terrorist detainees from Gitmo to the U.S. for civilian trials. The president also objects, we’re told, to a congressional provision that would bar transfers of detainees to other countries absent a certification from the secretary of defense that the countries in question had met what Savage describes as “a strict set of security conditions.” 

This is a truly remarkable development. The Lawyer Left went berserk over President Bush’s constitutionally rooted and historically tame assertions of executive power. Though the appeals court created by Congress to rule on surveillance matters had endorsed the principle that the president has inherent power -- which Congress cannot vitiate -- to conduct national-security surveillance, lefty lawyers screamed that the Bush NSA’s warrantless surveillance program was illegal, an inexcusable violation of Congress’s FISA statute. Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers and several other House Democrats even suggested that Bush be impeached over it.

Lawyers including Eric Holder filed briefs on behalf of al-Qaeda terrorist Jose Padilla, objecting to Bush’s assertion of commander-in-chief authority to detain Padilla, a U.S. citizen, as an enemy combatant rather than give him a full civilian trial. (We haven’t heard much from now–Attorney General Holder on why it’s nevertheless constitutionally kosher for commanders in chief to assassinate an American citizen, as Obama has apparently authorized with respect to Anwar al-Awlaki.) Georgetown Law School professor Neal Katyal -- now Obama’s acting solicitor general -- convinced a sharply divided Supreme Court that the commander-in-chief could not order military-commission trials for terrorist war criminals because such presidentially authorized commissions purportedly violated a congressional statute (the Uniform Code of Military Justice), notwithstanding that presidents and military commanders had been using commission trials since the Revolutionary War.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff were the targets of ceaseless scorn for what was breathlessly claimed to be a Cheney agenda to restore presidential power to the zenith it had reached before Watergate. Books were written lamenting the Bush administration’s purported aversion to working with Congress. (Little, though, was said about Democratic leaders in Congress being briefed in real time about the CIA’s interrogation program, the detention camp at Gitmo, and the NSA program.)

#page#Now, though, the president is a Democrat and Republicans are resurgent in Congress. Suddenly, executive power is cool and congressional statutes no longer reflect “the rule of law.” Statutes have become a partisan nuisance addling a really smart, progressive commander-in-chief, not to mention encroaching on the inviolable, irreducible powers the Framers wisely vested in him and him alone. (Did somebody say, “unitary executive”? John Yoo, call your office!)

As it happens, President Obama is right about Congress’s attempt to hamper his ability to transfer war prisoners to foreign countries. The presidency was established largely to conduct war and foreign relations. Presidential authority in the latter case is supreme. As the Supreme Court put it in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export (1936), the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations [is] a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress, but which, of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.” Congress may be able to cut off funding for the president’s foreign-affairs initiatives; it may not dictate how the president conducts foreign affairs -- that is his job.

#ad#As I argued last week, however, transferring prisoners into the United Statesfor civilian trials is an entirely different matter. It is Congress, not the executive branch, that sets the terms for entry of non-Americans into the United States. The fact that these non-Americans are war prisoners does not alter that fact or turn the transfer (as opposed to the detention) into a commander-in-chief exercise.

Moreover, Congress is supreme when it comes to civilian trials. The president would have no prosecutorial power unless Congress enacted laws creating federal crimes, established lower federal courts, and allowed the president resources for federal prosecutions -- the Framers assumed prosecution would be a state function, and both the attorney general and the Justice Department are creatures of statute, not of the Constitution.

The president has no more power to dictate to Congress whether and where civilian trials will take place than he does to dictate to the courts the rulings the judges are to make in such cases. The executive branch has considerable authority in the civilian justice system. Unlike in the arena of foreign affairs, however, prosecutorial power must be exercised strictly within parameters set by Congress.

President Obama should have been able unilaterally to order military-commission trials for enemy combatants and to prescribe the rules under which those trials would proceed. Alas, the courts have ruled that the presidency has lost those powers; for that, Mr. Obama can thank the lawyers now working for him. Presidents, though, have never had the constitutional power unilaterally to decide which aliens get to enter the United States, nor the power to prescribe crimes and vest courts with the jurisdiction to try them. When President Clinton wanted to try more terrorists in civilian courts in the 1990s, he needed to convince Congress to overhaul counterterrorism law, create new crimes that fit the behavior involved, and endow courts with jurisdiction to try them -- and Congress obliged him in 1996.

As the Left was fond of saying up until two Januaries ago, “the president doesn’t get a blank check.” Even in wartime, he needs the cooperation of Congress. Had President Obama asked, President Bush or Vice President Cheney would surely have explained that to him.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Battle royal over Bush’s PEPFAR program; George VI and other stutterers; the fashion in jeans and crinolines; and more.

Derb-Wehner punch-up    My month started off on a combative note, Peter Wehner and I trading insults over George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program to subsidize AIDS drugs for sub-Saharan Africans. If you missed it, here are:

• December 1: Bush’s World AIDS Day op-ed in the Washington Post.

• Same day: My reaction to it here on NRO.

• The article I was referring to: “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Unintended Consequences of Washington’s HIV/AIDS Programs” by Princeton N. Lyman and Stephen B. Wittels in the July/August 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs.

• December 2: National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez chiding me gently.

• Same day: Me responding to Kathryn.

• December 3: Peter Wehner’s attack on my December 1 remarks about the Bush op-ed.

• December 6: My response to Wehner’s attack.

• Same day: Kathryn trying to keep it nice. Lotsa luck there, K-Lo.

• December 8: Wehner’s counter to my response.

#ad#Some friends urged me to respond to Wehner’s last. I didn’t, because I thought enough had been said on both sides for readers to make up their minds for themselves as to who had the better of the argument.

Definition of “enough”? Well, let’s see: Those links give you 768 words from George W. Bush, 3,721 from Lyman & Wittels, 227 from Kathryn, 2,797 from me, and 2,773 from Wehner. The total is over 10,000 words -- longer than Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Does anyone really need more?

In any case, I got my disputational training in my high-school debating club, and I default to the standard structure thereof: Red makes its case, Blue makes the counter-case, Red answers Blue, Blue answers Red, audience questions, closing summaries from Red and Blue, audience votes. I have neither the patience nor the inclination for interminable who-gets-the-last-word nitpick-a-thons, and can’t believe many readers have, either. There is certainly enough material in those 10,000-plus words to let you judge for yourself whether, for example, my description of the Lyman-Wittels paper or Wehner’s is closer to the paper itself.

Other readers -- and, vide supra, my colleague Kathryn -- regretted the rancorous tone of the discussion. I don’t really see their point. I am of the same kidney as the late Auberon Waugh, who defined opinion journalism as being among “the vituperative arts.” I enjoy the sensation of my boot connecting with the other bloke’s groin. Perhaps it’s an English thing. If you prefer the genteel murmured sonorities of a David Brooks or a Jonathan Chait, I’m not for you. Neither, clearly, is Peter Wehner.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell the Pathans     Ah, the Pathans! (Nowadays “Pashtuns” or “Pushtuns.”) In the days of British India and skirmishes on the Northwest Frontier, these stern mountain men were famous for two things: utter deadly fearlessness in battle, and a certain regrettable romantic tendency.

That latter tendency adds some spin to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I refer you to the excellent mil-int blogger “In from the Cold” for the grisly details.

Fashion stasis     My daughter, who turns 18 on January 5, gets a fashion magazine titled Nylon. I’ve never read the thing. It’s all clothes, fashions, hair, styles, glamour, and other such stuff -- a zone of the human parade in which my interest is, and always has been, at absolute zero.

She leaves Nylon lying around, though, so I got a look at the cover of the December/January issue. It features movie actress Mila Kunis in a modelish pose. “Good grief,” I thought, “it’s Jean Shrimpton.”

For those of you who weren’t present, Jean Shrimpton was the supermodel of the early 1960s. She brought in the bony, pouty look that has been with us ever since. (Yes, I know, Brigitte Bardot was pouty before Shrimpton. Bony, however, she wasn’t.) With only slight changes, you could put that Mila Kunis picture on the cover of a 1963 fashion magazine, take it back in a time machine, and people would think it was the Shrimp.

#page#To see the oddity of this, go back a further 47 years from 1963 to 1916. There were no famous fashion models in those days, but there was fashion, and there were beautiful women to show it off. The pictures (and a very nice video) here give the idea. Imagine one of those gals on the cover of a 1963 Vogue!

The point is that aspects of human civilization change at different rates, and sometimes don’t change at all for long stretches. The latter is actually rather common, though we don’t realize this because the middle decades of the 20th century were a time of exceptional churning, and that has biased our perceptions.

#ad#As with fashion models 1916/1963/2010, so with, for example, commercial passenger planes. The planes of 2010 are very closely similar to those of 1963, which are utterly, radically different from those of 1916 (to the degree that there even were any). Of course, the planes of 2010 and 1963 were very different in terms of the amount of electronics in them, as were the handbags of Mlles. Kunis and Shrimpton; but electronics is almost the only area in which we’ve made any progress this past half-century.

Stuttering succotash!     I’m curious to see this new movie The King’s Speech. For one thing, I have a sentimental fondness for George VI. My sister and I came home one lunchtime in my early childhood -- I think it was my first year at elementary school -- to find our mother weeping by the radio. Mum -- a professional hospital nurse who had witnessed every dimension of human suffering a hundred times over -- wasn’t much of a weeper, so it made an impression on me. My sister asked what was the matter. “The poor dear king is dead,” Mum sobbed. I think this was the first large public event to impinge on my consciousness, though I can recall hearing people talk about the Festival of Britain the previous year.

And then there’s the whole odd business of stuttering. I’ve met a fair number of stutterers and am surprised at how many of them made it work for them. Some years ago I knew a stutterer who was a terrific ladies’ man. Women seemed to find his stutter charming; or perhaps it made them come over maternal, I don’t know. I actually suspected him of amping it up a bit for purposes of seduction.

You can even parlay a stutter into a showbiz career: Patrick Campbell had quite a severe stutter, but TV audiences loved him for it. (That clip, by the way, includes some footage of the great Frank Muir, who had an interesting lisp. He was generally known in Brit showbiz circles as “Fwank.” Far from being any hindrance to a career in late-20th-century British TV, speech impediments were an advantage.)

In politics -- which is, after all, as Jay Leno says, just show business for ugly people -- an affected mild stutter can come in handy when you need time to think while fielding an interviewer’s question. Tony Blair was a master of this strategic stutter.

The most memorable stutterer in literature that I know of is George Mulliner in P. G. Wodehouse’s short story “The Truth about George.” Like King George in the movie, Wodehouse’s George was advised that if he couldn’t get the words out by speaking, he should sing them. Does this ever work? (It failed disastrously for Wodehouse’s George.) It’s certainly possible to stutter while singing: Ask Roger Daltrey or Randy Bachman. There are even a couple of stuttering parts in the standard opera repertory: Dr. Blind in Die Fledermaus and Don Curzio in The Marriage of Figaro. (Though I’ve never heard either sung with a convincing stutter.)

Stutterers don’t seem to have made much effort to get themselves organized as a Protected Minority, with all the victimological perks thereof. Why aren’t they agitating for affirmative action? Perhaps they’re having too good a time making their impediments work for them -- seducing women, getting on TV, running for office.

Natural waist     One more fashion note. (Making a total of two: an all-time record for me.)

We all know we’re supposed to suffer for fashion: actually to suffer pain or even death. The crinolines worn by women in the mid-19th century got so big the wearers lost track of where massively inflammable garment ended and living room -- heated, in those days, by an open fire -- began. Thousands were incinerated, including Longfellow’s second wife. Women kept on wearing the fool things regardless. What does a fiery, agonizing death matter, so long as you’re keeping up with fashion?

#page#Fashion isn’t putting me in quite such dire peril, but I’ve been having issues with it. This arose from a previous epoch in Mrs. D.’s life, when she worked for a department store whose name rhymes with Bored Land Sailor. With her employee discount, the frugal Mrs. D. took over the buying of my clothes, including my jeans.

However, the kind of gents’ jeans you get at a store like that are for fashion, not for comfort. The waistline of these things is set somewhere around the acetabulum. A guy who grew up wearing pants whose waistline is at the, like, waist cannot be comfortable in them.

#ad#I have been thus uncomfortable for a couple of years. No longer! On a Christmas shopping trip to Sears I happened to notice that they still sell work clothes. Browsing around, I came across a stand of men’s jeans advertised as all the things work clothes should be advertised as -- “rugged” and so on -- but also as “Natural waist”!

Water in the desert. I bought a pair and they fit wonderfully. I shall buy more. They won’t be giving me one of those tickets for showing my underwear.

Passwords     If you have a blog, there’s a good chance your blog is owned by Gawker.com, one of the biggest online news and blog-hosting firms. You may therefore have been discomfited by the December 12 mass hack attack on Gawker servers. The hackers posted online details of more than a million Gawker accounts.

The most interesting feature of the posting was the passwords Gawker subscribers use. The Wall Street Journal published the top 50. No. 1, with more than 3,000 users out of 188,279, was “123456.” Runner-up: “password.” Third place: “12345678.” The rest of the top 50 were hardly any more imaginative.

To be fair, the passwords being tallied there are the ones the hackers decrypted. Complex passwords are harder to decrypt, so it’s not a fully representative sample. Still, the fact that there are 3,000 people using “123456” as a password is remarkable in itself. Do these people understand the point of passwords? Perhaps they just don’t care. You’d get a much more sensible collection of passwords from, say, PayPal, I’m sure.

Or perhaps not. I was once friendly with a locksmith who worked on safes and strongboxes. He told me that if you want to open a safe made by Britain’s biggest manufacturer of such items, try the combination “102030.” That was the manufacturer’s default factory setting, and a high proportion of safe owners never bothered to change it.

When I started needing passwords I wrote a wee script to print off ten thousand random strings. I bound up the printed pages in a report folder, which I still keep handy for occasional one-off use. When I seriously need a password, though, I use RoboForm, which in the twinkling of an eye gives you passwords like “VpA6s68#z!6MvjtM.”

Here’s my pet peeve with passwords: When a site asks me to enter a password, it hardly ever gives me any parameters. How long can my password be? Does it have to include both numbers and letters? Is it case sensitive? They rarely tell you.

The reason for this is that setting up the basic log-in page (user ID, e-mail, password) is the dumbest chore in web programming, and so is given to the 14-year-old intern to do.

That’s a shame. A bit of worldliness comes in handy, even for the lowest-level tasks. If a decent developer were assigned to setting up the log-in page, he might even put in a filter so that when the user offered “123456” as a password he’d get a rejection message saying: “ARE YOU KIDDING?” There’s no craft in programming nowadays.

The programmer’s art     Speaking of craft in programming, a reader passed this on:

New York (CNNMoney) -- Itemize your tax deductions? Itching for a refund?

You’re going to have to wait. The IRS said that it needs until mid- to late February to reprogram its processing systems because Congress acted so late this year cleaning up the tax code. The bill, which includes deductions for state and local sales taxes, college tuition, and teacher expenses, wasn’t signed into law until Dec. 17.

All I can say to that is, I just hope they’re using honest COBOL, not one of these newfangled too-clever-by-half coding languages.

#page#World’s largest army     Here’s another blogger who doesn’t get as much traffic as he ought: the brilliant TigerHawk.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer-hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth-largest army in the world -- more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined -- deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

#ad#Steve Sailer pointed out a few months ago that both halves of our paleolithic “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle are alive and well, at least in the Upper Midwest:

In western Michigan, many men take off from work the first week of deer-hunting season each year. Many of their wives have, in turn, made it traditional to stay in hotels that week on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and hit the department stores and Oak Street boutiques.

Environmental determinism     The ruling dogma of our culture, so far as discussion of the human sciences is concerned, is the one Steven Pinker called “See no genes, hear no genes, speak no genes.” Our elites live in cringing, gibbering terror of the idea that any human characteristic at all might be biologically inherited.

Their core position is “environmental determinism.” According to this doctrine, absolutely every human trait is entirely a product of environment. You stutter? It must be the fault of your parents, your siblings, your peer group, your schoolteachers, evil capitalist manipulators, racism.

The actual science of the matter is, as I pointed out in chapter 7 of that tremendous best-seller We Are Doomed, that of all the things we individually are, around half are genetically predetermined, the other half shaped by environment. “Genes load the gun: environment pulls the trigger.” This truth is about as firmly settled as the orbits of the planets, but environmental determinists are putting up a fierce rearguard fight nonetheless.

We got a specimen of this from the blog of science journalist Mary Carmichael on December 22, taking to task a disgraceful tweet by food ’n’ agriculture blogger Michael Pollan, who linked to a silly essay arguing that genes don’t matter a bit. Ms. Carmichael:

A number of people outside the genetics community . . . must have seen the essay [i.e. the one Pollan linked to]. Maybe some of them read it and thought, “Huh. My kid looks just like me, but these people are saying genotype has little to no effect on phenotype. Do they really think my kid has my distinctive Roman nose because he grew up in my house?”

Yes, that’s what leftist environmental determinists really think. They struggle to present a more sensible façade, but their ideology keeps breaking through, as in the essay Pollan linked to.

Mary’s post includes a link to a fine, sensible talk she posted to YouTube, giving it to the environmental determinists with both barrels. Well worth watching.

The main thing one wants to know about a human-science controversy like this is, What does Razib think? Here’s what he thinks.

After reading . . . [the genes-don’t-matter essay] I don’t think they’re dumb, I think they’re being lawyerly. Much of the piece is a rhetorical tour de force in leveraging the prejudices and biases of the intended readership. This is the Intelligent Design version of Left-wing “Blank Slate” Creationism. They smoothly manipulate real findings in a deceptive shell game intended to convince the public, and shape public policy. Their success is evident in Pollan’s response. “X paradigm appears to be collapsing.” “Why aren’t we hearing about this?” Does this sound familiar? . . . I think some of the criticisms within the piece are valid. Despite not being hostile to the maxim “better living through chemistry,” I do think that there has been an excessive trend toward pharmaceutical or surgical “cures” in relation to diseases of lifestyle (anti-depressants, gastric bypass, etc.). But we go down a very dangerous path when we make recourse to shoddy means toward ostensibly admirable ends. This sort of discourse is not sustainable! (just used a buzzword intended to appeal right there!)

Big point here: The “Intelligent Design” faction of Biblical creationists has set the gold standard for twisting science into pseudoscience for mass appeal to a politico-religio-ideological base. Now the radical Left has learned the creationists’ tricks and is applying them to its own ends. Science will survive, but people like Mary Carmichael, who write about science for a living, have to waste a lot of time rebutting these Luddites and Lysenkoists.

Science is hard. Follow all those links in Mary Carmichael’s post and get down into the weeds on heritability, gene-environment covariance, twin studies, and GWAS. You’ll need to set aside a couple of hours and do some thinking. Which is exactly what the Left see-no-genes crowd, like their cousins at the Discovery Institute, depend on your not doing.

There’s an old baseball adage: “You can b***s*** the fans, but you can’t b***s*** the players.” Science works the same way.

A gap in the language    My wife one day had occasion to utter the old Chinese saw Yi dong junzi, li dong xiaoren (義動君子, 利動小人). John Rohsenow’s invaluable ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs translates this as: “A gentleman is moved by humanity and justice, [while] a petty person is motivated only by self-interest.”

Having uttered it, Mrs. D. observed that: “You don’t really have a word in English for xiaoren, do you?” I did my best to stand up for the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Joe Biden, but at last I had to admit she was right.

We can express the notion, of course, as Rohsenow does with “petty person,” but we don’t have a single word for it. Which is odd because (a) the phenomenon is common enough to need a word of its own, and (b) we used to have a word for it: “caitiff.”

“Caitiff . . . Expressing contempt, and often involving strong moral disapprobation: A base, mean, despicable ‘wretch,’ a villain.” -- OxfordEnglish Dictionary

“caitiff . . . a base despicable person: a mean and wicked man.” -- Webster’s Third

William Drummond deploys the word “caitiff” very effectively in his poem “Madrigal.” He was writing more than 400 years ago, though. I’m sure I’ve never heard anyone use this word in normal speech.

#page#Why do languages have gaps in them like this? Boswell raised the general issue with Dr. Johnson, who in his dictionary had declared that the word “transpire,” in its secondary meaning of “to escape from secrecy to notice,” was unnecessary. What word would do for it, if it was unnecessary?

Johnson. “Why, Sir, get abroad.” Boswell. “That, Sir, is using two words.” Johnson. “Sir, there is no end of this. You may as well insist to have a word for old age.” Boswell. “Well, Sir, senectus.” Johnson. “Nay, Sir, to insist always that there should be one word to express a thing in English, because there is one in another language, is to change the language.”

#ad#Far be it from me to try conclusions with the Great Cham of English literature; but I can’t help thinking that a revival of “caitiff” would be worthwhile.

Light on politics    Scanning back over this diary, I see it’s light on politics. Oh well; with 2012 already visible on the horizon, you’ll be getting all the politics you want real soon.

Who cares about politics anyway? Some years ago George Will observed that he had written three books about politics and one about baseball, and his publisher’s statements told him where America’s heart lies.

I can second that. Nothing I write or say about politics ever generates one-tenth as much e-mail, or inspires one-tenth the number of people to cross a room to shake my hand, as do my treehouse and Boris pages. Those are my long-term star items. Politics? Fuhgeddaboutit. Perhaps I should write a book about baseball.

Math Corner     The solution to last month’s puzzle is here.

This month’s brainteaser is the traditional one for the New Year: Find something curious or interesting to say about the number 2011.

John Derbyshire

Americans understand the health-care law, and they hate it.

‘History repeats itself -- first as tragedy, then as farce,” noted Karl Marx. With the new Republican majority in the House planning to vote next Wednesday on repeal of Obamare, Democrats appear well into farce.

Throughout the debate over health-care reform, Democrats constantly told us (and themselves) that if only they could explain the bill better, Americans would come to understand how good it was for them. So President Obama went out and gave more than a hundred remarks, speeches, press conferences, and town-hall orations. But somehow voters resisted the president’s silver-tongued oratory. The more the president talked, cajoled, and explained, the greater public opposition to the bill grew. That January, voters in Massachusetts sent Scott Brown to the Senate largely on the basis of his promise to vote against Obamacare.

#ad#But Democrats were undaunted. They knew that once the bill finally passed the public would love it. As Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein predicted, the bill would “become more popular after passage than it was before passage.” New York senator Chuck Schumer summed up the Democratic argument, “Once it passes, it’s going to become more popular -- because the lies that have been spread, they vanish, because you see what’s in the bill.” The bill passed. The public saw what was in it. The public hated it.

But surely, Democrats said, when the bill’s consumer protections go into effect in September, then the public will come around. “People don’t know all the nuances of this thing,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, “Bit by bit, we’ll get it out there. Ten people will know, then it’ll grow to 20, then it’ll grow to 80, and it’ll have a snowball effect.” White House adviser David Axelrod echoed the sentiment. “I think that health care, over time, is going to become more popular,” he told Meet the Press. But, September came and went, the new rules went into effect, and the bill didn’t become more popular.

So the Democrats decided that the public was a bunch of dolts who were “scared” and “not thinking clearly,” in the words of President Obama. Then Democrats headed off into the November elections, in which every Republican running for an office higher than dog catcher was campaigning in favor of repealing the bill. Those doltish voters overwhelming rejected Democrats who had supported the health-care bill, giving Republicans one of the biggest midterm election victories in more than 60 years. A post-election survey found that 45 percent saw their vote as a specific message of opposition to the health-care bill.

Now, Democrats say they are anxious for another debate over health-care reform, because it will give Democrats an opportunity to explain the bill -- again. And this time, no matter how dense the public has shown itself to be so far, the voters will finally get it, rise up, and punish Republicans for trying to undo the Obama administration’s signature achievement. According to the New York Times, Democrats “see the renewed debate as a chance to show that the law will be a boon to millions of Americans and hope to turn ‘Obamacare’ from a pejorative into a tag for one of the president’s proudest achievements.”

#page#Given that the latest Rasmussen poll shows that 60 percent of likely voters support repeal, Democrats might have an only slightly harder time convincing the public to pardon Osama bin Laden, and they continue to labor under the delusion that the problem with health-care reform isn’t policy, but public relations. Americans oppose the health-care program because they don’t understand it. Sooner or later, the thinking goes, they will find the magic words that will convince the public of how right the Democrats have been all along.

#ad#But given two years of almost continuous debate on the issue, it is far more likely that the public really does understand the bill. They know, for example, that, despite the president’s reassurances, they are not going to be able to keep their current health insurance, even if they like it. They understand that outside experts now predict that Obamacare will cost at least $2.7 trillion over its first ten years of actual operation, not the $950 billion originally predicted, adding more than $350 billion to the deficit over that period, despite massive new taxes. They’ve seen their insurance premiums skyrocket in response to the law’s new mandates and regulations. Their common sense tells them that imposing the employer mandate will increase the cost of hiring workers and mean fewer jobs at a time when unemployment is still a national crisis. They oppose the unconstitutional individual mandate as an assault on their personal liberty. And they are rightfully concerned over how the law will affect the quality of the care they receive.

That’s not a situation likely to enhance Obamacare’s popularity.

Sure, there are some consumer reforms in the bill that are at least superficially popular. But even those come with fine print. For example: Starting today, parents will be able to keep their children on their insurance plans until age 26. Democrats imply that that extended coverage is free. But, in reality, the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that it will cost an estimated $3,380 a year per child. And since employers are balking at picking up the added cost, the parents themselves will have to pay more if they want to continue their children’s coverage. Democrats will also point out that insurers can no longer refuse coverage to children with preexisting conditions. True: And in response, insurers in Colorado, Ohio, and Missouri, among others, have stopped offering child-only insurance plans, depriving thousands of Americans of an inexpensive coverage option. Insurers are also prohibited from imposing annual or lifetime coverage limits. But this provision has proved so onerous that the administration has been forced to issue more than 100 waivers to prevent companies from dropping their employees’ coverage altogether.

Democrats claim that they welcome a fight over repealing Obamacare. Republicans should welcome the opportunity to give them one.

 — Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Michael Tanner

From Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley . . .

No matter how you rearrange President Obama’s inner circle, it still looks, smells, and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Ready for the latest topping on this moldy old pie? It’s a possible chief-of-staff slot for Wall Street banker/lawyer/wheeler-dealer William Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago mayor/machine-politics mastermind Richard M. Daley (the former boss of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and first lady Michelle Obama), whose retirement paved the way for former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Phew.

#ad#The White House is reportedly looking to manufacture a “pro-business” aura with Bill Daley, who holds a “corporate responsibility” executive office at JPMorgan and once headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- the latter a left-wing hate object and Obama punching bag leading up to the midterms.

But the Beltway-based Chamber of Commerce is too often a fair-weather statist lobbying organization. It supported the TARP all-purpose bailout, the auto bailout, and the bottomless, pork-filled stimulus package, all of which have forcibly redistributed money from taxpayers and small businesses to politically connected special interests (including Daley’s JPMorgan, which was recently swept up in a massive pay-to-play bond scheme in Alabama).

Daley has about as much real experience creating jobs as does Da Boss now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. -- which is to say, less than a thimble full. (It’s a new year. I’m being generous.) In 2009, the head of Chicago’s sanitation department implicated Daley in a hiring corruption scheme tied to his brother’s mayoral administration. The official was convicted; Daley shrugged off the federal probe. “Even if it happened -- and I’m not saying it did -- things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

Instead of distancing himself from the favor-trading Wall Street fat cats who have earned the ire of both anti-bailout Tea Party activists and anti-corporate liberals, Obama remains wedded, embedded, and indebted to the worst kind.

Daley has served on the board of government-sponsored financial behemoth Fannie Mae since 1993. Like the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Fannie Mae in Washington has served as an industrial-sized patronage factory -- sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to ethnic groups, and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens, and back-scratching buddies. Like Daley. And like close Obama adviser Jim Johnson, the Fannie Mae exec who got sweetheart loans from shady subprime lender Countrywide.

While they raked in six-figure salaries, Fannie Mae and government-sponsored sibling Freddie Mac engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt, and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through reckless lending practices.

Bill Clinton, the man who appointed Daley to the Fannie Mae board, also appointed Emanuel to the Freddie Mac board of directors at a time when its oversight manager called the quasi-governmental agency “so pliant” that it enabled rampant book-cooking. Freddie Mac’s stock skyrocketed; its CEOs helped themselves to massive bonuses. Emanuel’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, exposed how Emanuel’s “profitable stint” during this corruption-plagued period entailed almost no work:

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, executives told the board of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

And now the torch may be passed in an endless Windy City circle, from Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley, with Obama. ’Round and ’round it goes in Chicago on the Potomac. Remember: When crony-state corruptocrats brag about “job creation,” the only jobs they’ve ever created are each other’s.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger, and the perils of “pragmatism”

‘Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington,” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told Time magazine in 2007. Bloomberg, according to Michael Grunwald’s cover story, was the diminutive half of a dynamic duo revolutionizing American politics. The other partner: California’s then-still-shiny governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they were “The New Action Heroes” who, according to Grunwald, were “doing big things that Washington has failed to do.”

The article was mostly a clever way to slap George W. Bush. But there are still important lessons to be learned, particularly as the Big Apple remains immobilized not by partisan politics but by Bloomberg’s arrogance. Hizzoner was more concerned with getting salt off of New Yorkers’ plates than he was with getting it on the snow clogging their streets.

#ad#“The Governator,” meanwhile, leaves California $28 billion in the hole, his former presidential ambitions an absurd joke and the state’s GOP in tatters.

Both Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg were deemed heroic for abandoning ideology for pragmatism. Bloomberg has made this something of a crusade. He helped launch the laughingstock group No Labels, which seeks to get the “politics out of problem-solving.”

But people disagree about how to solve problems, and they may disagree about what is a problem in the first place. In a democratic republic, we hash out these disagreements through this thing called “politics.” Getting politics out of problem-solving is synonymous with getting democracy out of politics.

The same goes for ideology. If you agree with a solution, it doesn’t seem ideological. But if you disagree with the proposed solution (or that there’s a problem at all), the remedy might look very ideological indeed. Given Time’s political agenda, it saw Schwarzenegger’s decision to spend his political energies on the Global Warming Solutions Act as an exercise in “pragmatism.”

This was ludicrous because California can no more do anything substantive about climate change than it can halt Iran’s nuclear program.

In other words, even if you’re on the climate-change bandwagon, couldn’t you say that the governor of the state with the nation’s worst credit rating, a budget crisis more unbelievable than the plot of Twins, a cratering manufacturing base, and famously dysfunctional schools was making an ideologically blinkered decision to make global warming a priority, particularly given that the benefits of the law for California -- and the world -- will be somewhere between symbolic and trivial, while the costs will probably be huge?

Meanwhile, Bloomberg, who before snowmageddon reportedly took seriously the idea of being carried to the Oval Office by a groundswell of support from Americans who don’t believe in labels, thinks it’s not ideological to dedicate much of his mayoralty to fighting global warming by choking the streets with bike lanes and hybrid taxis.

The point isn’t to argue with every one of the Dysfunctional Duo’s decisions or priorities. They didn’t get everything wrong, and things in NYC and California might have been even worse with different men at the helms. The point is that ideology is in the eye of the beholder and that pursuing nonpartisanship for its own sake isn’t necessarily courageous or wise. Sometimes what seems visionary to Time magazine is nothing more than craven fad-following.

It is true that some serious problems are fairly free of partisan wrangling. But that doesn’t mean they are free of politics. It means that there is such an overwhelming political consensus that nobody disputes what should be done (even if they might fight over how, or how much to pay for it). We all agree, for example, that firefighters should fight fires and that police should fight crime.

Oh, and New Yorkers believe that one of the mayor’s top responsibilities is to make sure the snow is cleared so ambulances can reach those in need and so everyone can get to work. Mayors who spend more energy fighting “labels” in our politics than clearing the snow are rewarded with some labels too colorful for a conservative website. But “ideologue” works as a substitute.

--- Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

“Marginalized groups” are tokens, not beneficiaries, of elite self-regard.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere -- and is a slow poison that is largely being ignored.

Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today -- and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.

#ad#In Hanson’s own words: “Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards.”

This is a Third World culture, transplanted from Mexico, and living largely outside the scope of American law, state or federal.

Ironically, this is happening in a state notorious for its pervasive and intrusive regulation of the minute details of people’s lives, homes, and businesses. But not out in the Third World enclaves in the Central Valley, where garbage is strewn with impunity and unlicensed swarms of peddlers come and go, selling for cash and charging no sales tax.

While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries, and other parts of what he calls “the technological veneer of the middle class.”

Sadly -- and, in the long run, tragically -- this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States. It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.

In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments against the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.

The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional.

What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as mascots of the self-congratulatory elites.

These elites are able to indulge themselves in non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others.

The effect of all this on the mascots themselves is not a big concern for the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others. The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed benefactors.

So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize self-destructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their own children to private schools, they needn’t worry about what happens to the children of the mascots in the public schools.

Other people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools can simply be called “racists” for objecting to what the indulgence of the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to other children trapped in the same schools with them.

A hundred years ago, groups that are now indulged as mascots were scapegoated by  Progressive-era elites, treated like dirt, and targeted for eradication in the name of “eugenics.”

There are no permanent mascots. As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of tomorrow. But who thinks ahead any more?

--- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. ©2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Thomas Sowell

Midwestern Republicans are stuck on ethanol.

What kind of Republican supports high tariffs on imports, dubious green tax credits, and consumption mandates to prop up unprofitable environmental darlings? The ethanol-loving midwestern kind, especially the ones running for president.

Currently, imported ethanol is slapped with a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff, while oil companies receive a 45-cent tax credit per gallon of ethanol blended into their gasoline. Both the tariff and the tax credit have just been extended for another year, thanks to a bipartisan push from Cornbelt politicians. In case these provisions aren’t enough to help the industry hobble its way to satisfying profits, lawmakers also decided to mandate that U.S. consumption of renewable fuels (which will certainly be almost entirely corn-based and cellulosic ethanol) reach 36 billion gallons by 2022. And that’s just the assistance provided on the federal level.

#ad#There are four potential midwestern 2012 Republican presidential nominees: Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, South Dakota senator John Thune, and Indiana congressman Mike Pence. When it comes to doling out favors to the ethanol industry, none of them can credibly claim his attitude was “just say no.”

Does it matter? Absolutely: As this year’s tariff and tax-credit extensions showed, even a Tea Party–driven small-government surge can’t stop politicians from kowtowing to the ethanol lobby. Further, a Republican president who is willing to carve out exemptions for ethanol interests will lack credibility when he battles spending or tax breaks benefiting other special interests. And finally, while some claim that ethanol will allow our nation to achieve energy independence, the fact that the highest approved corn-gas blend is only 15 percent ethanol (and is approved only for certain automobile models from 2007 or later) suggests that an America running on corn is unlikely in the extreme.

Let’s examine some midwestern GOP politicians’ records on ethanol.

Mitch Daniels
When Mitch Daniels was sworn in as governor in January of 2005, there was one ethanol plant in Indiana. Now there are twelve operating plants and a thirteenth set to start running early next year. This isn’t an accident: Daniels aimed to increase Indiana’s annual ethanol and biodiesel production to 1 billion gallons by 2008. Once that thirteenth plant begins producing, Indiana will have met the goal.

Under Daniels’s leadership, Indiana has aggressively courted the ethanol industry. “He’s been a huge supporter of building ethanol plants . . . and also [has tried] to encourage consumers to buy ethanol,” says Indiana political analyst Ed Feigenbaum, adding that much of the new industry “has come at the cost . . . of state subsidies.”

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which is chaired by Daniels, has offered ethanol plants tax credits and training grants. Consider the package offered to the Hartford-Bio-Energy ethanol plant. It included “up to $32,000 in training grants for Indiana resident employees, $100,000 in infrastructure assistance to the local community, and up to $1.4 million in tax credits based on anticipated employment and capital investment levels,” announced an IEDC press release. In 2006, Daniels signed SEA 353, which upped the maximum tax credit available for ethanol production and biodiesel production and blending from $20 million to $50 million.

As of this year, Indiana offers existing ethanol plants a tax credit of twelve-and-a-half cents per gallon produced, with production-based caps on the credit ranging from $2 million to $20 million.

Daniels has also actively promoted ethanol-based fuels. In 2005, he signed a law mandating that state employees operating government vehicles use ethanol or biodiesel fuel whenever possible. That same year, he announced the conversion of  the rural town of Reynolds, Ind., to “BioTown, USA.” The plan was that BioTown would eventually use only renewable energy. The first phase included installing an E85 pump and encouraging residents to buy flex-fuel vehicles. Daniels hoped BioTown would become a model for other Indiana towns, but it’s now generally considered a failed experiment.

#page#BioTown wasn’t the only way Daniels promoted E85. SEA 353 included a two-year, ten-cent sales-tax deduction per gallon of E85 sold. In July 2008, the state set up a $500,000 fund to reimburse gas-station owners 18 cents per gallon of E85. The fund was gone in three months. In 2008, Indiana created a nearly $1 million fund and offered up to $20,000 for gas stations that were willing to set up an E85 pump.

Despite his support for ethanol over the years, Daniels decried the continuing level of federal subsidy support for ethanol in a statement to National Review Online.

#ad#“I’m disappointed that the Congress did not begin the transition out of subsidies,” Daniels wrote. “I support the use of ethanol for both economic and national-security reasons, because it enables us to pay Americans for energy we’d otherwise import, much of it from hostile nations. By stabilizing grain prices, biofuels use can also enable us to phase out the broader agricultural price support programs, but the current triple subsidy can no longer be justified, and I regret seeing it extended.”

Tim Pawlenty
In 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin got the vice presidential nod, much to the disappointment of one group: the Minnesota Corn Growers Association (MCGA). The group had been hoping that John McCain would pick Pawlenty, according to the trade magazine Ethanol Producer. Pawlenty, the MCGA said, had “more moderate views towards ethanol” than most Republicans. It was a telling endorsement, particularly when compared with the tongue-lashing the MCGA gave the GOP platform that year, which it considered anti-ethanol to the point of being “devastating” to the industry.

The endorsement was well deserved. Throughout his time as governor, Pawlenty has been a friend to ethanol. In 2004, Pawlenty created the JOBZ program, an innovative way to subsidize ethanol. While Minnesota was no longer approving producer payments (13 cents per gallon of ethanol) for new ethanol plants, the JOBZ program offered “a new incentive, one that many investors find nearly as alluring,” gushed Ethanol Producer. JOBZ, the magazine continued, “provides relief from corporate franchise tax, income tax for operators or investors, sales tax on business purchases and capital gains tax, and property taxes. It also provides an employment tax credit for high paying jobs.”

A year later, Pawlenty signed legislation mandating that all gas sold in Minnesota contain 20 percent ethanol by 2013, up from 10 percent. (Since the EPA has not yet approved the 20 percent blend, the mandate will most likely not go into effect in 2013.) In 2005, Pawlenty also urged other states, at a meeting of the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition (which had 31 member states at the time), to mandate that all gasoline contain 10 percent ethanol by 2010.

The “E85 Everywhere” program, which promoted the 85 percent–ethanol fuel, was launched in 2006. Pawlenty wanted there to be plenty of stations where consumers could purchase E85. He requested $12 million in subsidies for gas-station owners to encourage them to offer it. State legislators balked at the sum; instead, the state began offering $1.75 million in subsidies starting in 2007. But even with the subsidies, Minnesota did not achieve Pawlenty’s goal of 1,800 E85 stations by 2010. As of 2009, the state had 351 gas stations that sold E85.

Mike Pence
As a congressman representing Indiana, Rep. Mike Pence has not had the same opportunities to wield influence as Pawlenty and Daniels. But his voting record shows a willingness to buck the ethanol industry -- sometimes. He was not willing to do so in 2003, when he voted for the Energy Policy Act “to create a renewable fuels standard and tax incentives for ethanol and biodiesel production,” reported his press release. Nor in 2005, when he voted for that year’s energy bill, which mandated that by 2012, 7.5 billion gallons of fuel in the U.S. be from renewable fuels, including (and probably primarily) ethanol -- a mandate that Biofuels Journal noted was “nearly the 8 billion gallons many were dreaming of.” The Renewable Fuels Association, a powerful ethanol lobbying firm, called the bill “strongest biofuels legislation ever.”

But in 2007 and again in 2008, Pence voted against the farm bill, which extended the tariff on imported ethanol and the tax credit for U.S.-produced ethanol. It also included the industry’s beloved Biomass Crop Assistance Program. Pence also voted against the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007, which increased the Renewable Fuel Standard to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

John Thune
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota received the President’s Award from the National Corn Growers Association this summer. “I look forward to continuing to work together on . . . initiatives important to corn producers,” Thune said. The NCGA was enthusiastic. “Senator Thune has been an advocate for agriculture throughout his public career including work on such important items as the Renewable Fuel Standard and the 2008 Farm Bill. We are honored to call Senator Thune a friend of corn and look forward to continuing work with him and his staff,” said NCGA president Darrin Ihnen.

It’s no wonder there exists such mutual affection: To ethanol advocates, Thune is a dependable friend. Just last month, Thune signed a letter to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) asking them to renew the current tax credit and tariff, which were set to expire at the end of 2010.

In 2006, Thune teamed up with then-senator Barack Obama to introduce legislation that would have provided gas stations with 30 percent of the cost of installing a renewable-fuel tank, up to $30,000. (The legislation died in committee.) In 2007, Thune supported the Energy Independence and Security Act, which included a provision mandating that 36 billion gallons of cellulosic and corn-based ethanol be used by 2022. In 2008, when the EPA denied an ethanol-mandate waiver sought by Texas governor Rick Perry, Thune praised the decision. “Allowing states to waive the Renewable Fuels Standard would discourage needed investment in renewable fuels, hamper the transition to cellulosic ethanol, and would assuredly result in higher fuel prices for consumers,” he said in a statement.

That same year, Thune worked to pass the farm bill, which extended the tariff and tax credit for two years, although the credit was cut from 51 cents per gallon to 45 cents per gallon. Also in the bill was the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, created by Thune, which dictates that the government pay farmers matching funds for the corn husks, leaves, and cobs they sell to cellulosic-ethanol producers.

Also in 2008, Thune introduced the Open Fuel Standard Act, which would have required all U.S. car manufacturers to make 50 percent of their vehicles flex-fuel or able to use biodiesel by 2012. By 2015, 80 percent of vehicles would have to meet these standards. Ultimately, the legislation died in committee.

Asked about Thune’s position on ethanol subsidies, spokesman Kyle Downey said in a statement to National Review Online that “Senator Thune remains a strong proponent of breaking the nation’s dependence on foreign dictators and promoting the development and production of domestic energy, which creates American jobs so that we aren’t fueling and funding extremists who seek to harm us.” 

“Our energy policy should not remain static, however,” Downey added. “A number of leaders in the biofuels industry are seeking to phase out the ethanol blender’s tax credit in the coming years. Such ideas, which continue to advance the goal of promoting American energy independence, are welcome additions to the energy policy debate and should be part of a larger discussion on our nation’s energy policy.”

Katrina Trinko

Republicans cannot punt hard decisions to the judges.

The new Congress begins its session this week with historically rare fortifications: swelling ranks of Republican freshmen and a clear mandate to roll back Obama’s administrative statism. For the GOP, it is a short lease on a second life, won only after assuring a skeptical electorate that amends would be made for Republican complicity in our current mess. Congressional leadership would thus be wise to remember that, in our free society, there is only one branch of government capable of legitimate, dramatic course corrections: the one composed of the people’s representatives. They have to act, not just go with the Potomac flow.

#ad#There is reason to worry that leadership has instead caught a case of “let the courts do it.” Take Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.). Despite considerable conservative grumbling, Mr. Upton has been installed by Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner as the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If the Obama administration’s job-killing war on industry is to be tamed, that committee will have to be smart and aggressive. The chairman-to-be is not exactly off to a flying start. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week (co-authored with Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity), he proposed that Congress sit on the sidelines for a couple of years, trusting federal judges to handle the taming.

The EPA has condemned carbon dioxide, the air humans exhale, as a pollutant that imperils human health. Under the 40-year-old Clean Air Act -- legislation passed in a very different era, under very different assumptions -- this endangerment finding is a pretext for government’s administrative juggernaut to impose ruinous curbs on all CO2 emitters, everything from large factories to small homes.

Until about five minutes ago, Representative Upton was a member in good standing of the green crusade. He was an enthusiastic cosponsor of Leviathan’s prohibition of the incandescent light bulb -- the result of standards enacted with robust Republican support and signed into law by President Bush. Upton has now recanted, a stance he claims is sincere, not -- perish the thought! -- one of those cynical Washington conversions that happen when the chair on a powerful committee is up for grabs. He also says he grasps that the best corrective to the EPA’s sweeping power grab would be for Congress “to overturn the EPA’s proposed greenhouse-gas regulations outright.”

Yet, sensing that Democrats will not go along and, evidently, that Republicans are impotent to force them into doing so by winning the political debate, Upton urges a different tack: “a sensible bipartisan compromise” that would impose a two-year regulatory moratorium while “the courts complete their examination of the agency’s endangerment finding and proposed rules.” This is reminiscent of Washington’s last “sensible bipartisan compromise,” the two-year delay in ending the Bush tax rates -- a deal Republicans celebrated as a great achievement but which actually saps tax-reform momentum while shielding President Obama from accountability for his confiscatory designs. If anything, the Upton strategy for confronting the EPA is even more counterproductive.

It was the federal courts that empowered the EPA to bring us to this precipice in the first place. The congressman pays lip service to this fact, but its significance eludes him. Specifically, in 2007, at the urging of environmental activists who were later joined by Democrat-dominated state and local governments, the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc -- four died-in-the-wool progressives plus the trendy eccentric, Justice Anthony Kennedy -- directed the EPA to determine whether carbon dioxide could be dangerous to human health. The Bush EPA already had declined to do so, so left-wing justices pushed the agency into it.

It was an act of political willfulness no lawmaker accountable to voters would ever have made -- not unless he or she had a safe seat in a blue redoubt where socializing the prohibitive costs of central-planning solutions to imaginary crises is all the fashion. In the wake of Climategate’s data-manipulation revelations, the ruling (Massachusetts v. EPA) reads like parody, accepting as an undeniable given that global warming is a pending catastrophe unquestionably caused by human activity.

#page#As legal craftsmanship, the opinion is spurious. The slim majority ran roughshod over settled jurisprudence on standing. These principles require courts to stay their hands and let the regular democratic process handle policy disputes absent a concrete injury to an individual person -- not a policy decision that rubs an interest group the wrong way. Such an injury must be clearly traceable to harmful actions and be capable of redress by the remedy demanded; litigation is not for speculation and moral victories. Ignoring these principles and leaping headlong into the political fray, the justices waved off the Bush EPA’s reasons for declining to regulate carbon dioxide -- reasons that were both valid and adequately checked by the political process. Not the least of those considerations was this: If the “crisis” were truly global, any marginal benefit from U.S. regulations would be wiped out by the refusal of emerging foreign economies to join a green suicide campaign.

#ad#Nevertheless, Representative Upton has managed to convince himself that the courts, having spurred a reluctant EPA to action, will suddenly be disposed to rein in the agency now that Obama’s aggressive bureaucrats have forced it to get with the Supreme Court’s program. After all, the congressman rationalizes, there are clear-cut legal challenges pending against EPA’s gambit, including the agency’s failure to forecast likely job losses. He’s kidding himself. Does the congressman not think the Bush administration had pretty good legal claims when the EPA tried to fight off the climate alarmists in the Supreme Court? Does he not think Arizona had pretty good arguments last year when it explained to a federal district judge that its new immigration statute was merely aimed at upholding federal immigration law? How did those cases work out?

Whether there really is a climate crisis, the questions of what its material causes are and how costs and benefits should be weighed in deciding what is to be done are political questions, not legal ones. Policy is the work of Congress, not the courts.

A two-year legislative time-out so that litigation can proceed would most likely accomplish two things, both bad. First, we should expect at best a mixed bag of rulings. More likely, we’d see decisions favoring the Obama EPA from a combination of activist left-wing judges (more and more of whom are being appointed by President Obama) and from restrained judges who understandably feel obliged to follow the Supreme Court’s lead. Second, while sapping Congress’s will to act and imbuing court decisions with outsize significance, a two-year delay would reward Obama’s EPA with the patina of judicial legitimacy. That would further undermine any hope for a democratically driven policy that gives the environment its due -- whatever that may be -- while promoting economic growth.

Americans did not oust Democrats in droves because they wanted these kinds of “sensible bipartisan solutions.” “Bipartisanship” is a euphemism for avoiding risk and tolerating a wayward status quo. Little wonder that the word trips effortlessly off the tongues of professional politicians: Their influence depends on the status quo’s increasing concentration of power in Washington. Americans ousted Democrats in droves because they want the status quo changed and power over their lives transferred from Washington to themselves. That means fighting to reform relics like the Clean Air Act without fear of being caricatured as against clean air. It doesn’t mean sitting safely on the sidelines while the Left sees what it can get done in the courts.

Before the midterm elections, Republicans talked a good game about fighting the predicament they helped put us in. Now, it is time for the actual fighting. That will take thick skin and stiff spines. Without copious reserves of both, the new lease will be very short indeed.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy