Discussing United States policy toward North Korea can seem exhaustingly futile. There are no “good” options, and the North’s behavior appears utterly intractable; yet because of its magnitude, the threat from Pyongyang demands our constant attention.

That threat was thrown into stark relief on March 26, when a North Korean torpedo slammed into South Korea’s Cheonan warship, killing 46 servicemen. It is surely Pyongyang’s most spectacular atrocity since the 1987 terrorist bombing of Korean Air Flight 858, which left 115 dead. The proof of North Korea’s culpability is now overwhelming; indeed, the North’s repeated denials would be comical if the act itself were not so appalling.

In response, the U.S. and South Korean governments have planned joint military exercises, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working to build support for a fresh round of global sanctions on the Communist regime. We don’t expect new sanctions to topple the dictatorship, nor do we expect them dramatically to alter North Korea’s conduct. However, tightening our grip on Pyongyang’s finances would bolster U.S. leverage at a critical moment in Korean history, with 69-year-old Kim Jong Il in deteriorating health (it is believed he suffered a stroke in 2008) and a shaky leadership transition already under way.

Sinking the Cheonan was a heinous act, and also a desperate one, carried out by a regime that urgently needs hard currency to mitigate a severe domestic economic crisis. Now is the time to do everything possible to choke Pyongyang’s cash flows. Of course, passing a robust Security Council measure will be impossible without gaining Chinese support, and Beijing’s North Korea policy continues to be guided by its twin fears of (1) a massive refugee disaster and (2) a unified, pro-American democracy on the Korean peninsula.

If the Obama administration is unable to win Chinese backing for an aggressive Security Council resolution, U.S. officials should re-freeze North Korean assets at Banco Delta Asia (assets that were originally frozen in 2005 but then released as part of a 2007 nuclear-disarmament accord) and also target specific North Korean entities. Meanwhile, the United States should re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism. Removing Pyongyang from the State Department blacklist was a premature decision in 2008, given that Pyongyang still refuses to account for the untold number of Japanese citizens it abducted during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the decision seems embarrassing. The Cheonan incident was nothing short of a terroristic massacre; moreover, there is strong evidence that North Korea has been selling weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and Syria.

We don’t have a silver bullet to topple the North Korean dictatorship and should not expect sanctions or moral pressure to trigger a velvet revolution. But the steps outlined above would weaken Pyongyang and boost America’s Asian alliances, while providing incentives for a post-Kim regime to seek rapprochement with its democratic neighbors. Democrats on Capitol Hill could do their part to affirm U.S. solidarity with South Korea by approving the bilateral free-trade deal that was signed in June 2007 and has effectively been held hostage by the United Auto Workers ever since.

We must remember that the key foreign player in the North Korean saga is China, which has long subsidized the Hermit Kingdom with food and fuel aid. The coming weeks will tell us whether the Cheonan incident has finally spurred Beijing to rethink its approach. As a former U.S. Asia hand puts it, “This is a defining moment for China’s foreign policy.” It’s also a defining moment for the Obama administration, which now has an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of its predecessor and embrace a Korea strategy that is tough, forward-looking, and realistic.

When politicians and environmental activists hammer the table about the need to break our so-called “addiction to oil” -- as they are doing with increased fervor in response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- they seldom spend much time explaining exactly how we should go about doing so. About 70 percent of the oil we consume goes into the transportation sector, so wind, solar, and nuclear power plants are of little help. Ethanol, methanol, compressed natural gas, all-electric vehicles, and hydrogen-powered fuel cells might someday do the trick, but at present, those fuels and technologies are far too expensive and environmentally problematic to substitute for gasoline.

Hybrid-electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius are much beloved by the table-pounders, but alas, even under the optimistic assumption that a third of new cars sold in 2020 will be hybrids, U.S. oil consumption will be reduced by only 200,000 barrels a day -- to less than 1 percent below what it would have otherwise been. Despite these limitations, the addiction-busters are increasingly enamored with the next step in hybrid technology: plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs).

There are two basic kinds. One is the PHEV-10, the first of which is basically a Prius with a larger battery pack and power cord that is scheduled for release by Toyota in 2012. It will run for ten miles (thus the “10” in the name) on lithium-ion batteries before the gasoline engine kicks in and recharges it. The other type, the PHEV-40, is typified by the much-ballyhooed Chevy Volt, which has a 40-mile battery range and is scheduled for release later this year.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have asked for -- and gotten -- tax credits to subsidize the purchase of these vehicles, favorable taxpayer-financed loans to auto companies so that they can build the requisite manufacturing facilities, and a host of expensive favors in the tax and regulatory codes. But a new report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that PHEVs may well be another in a long list of failed government attempts to redesign our cars. The study, titled “Transitions to Alternative Transportation Technologies -- Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles,” is brutal.

Simply put, these cars are not affordable. A PHEV-10 will likely be $8,800 more expensive than an equivalent midsize (non-hybrid) car when it comes to the market. A PHEV-40 will likely carry a $24,400 premium. These cars use less gas, but you’d have to own one for decades for the fuel savings to make up for the higher purchase price.



So, why would consumers buy them? Well, many won’t. Some, however, will pay extra to feel environmentally virtuous and take the federal subsidies to help cover the cost. But those subsidies would have to be immense to move substantial numbers of PHEVs into the market, according to the NRC -- about $133 billion ($5,000-$6,000 per vehicle), not counting the infrastructural investments necessary, which will add another $1,000 per car. Hence, while the subsidies that have already been made available are quite impressive, they are still short of what will be needed to translate wish into reality.

We often hear, of course, that once the production lines are going strong, cost reductions will follow and technological improvements and innovations are inevitable. The NRC, however, begs to differ. The main cost item here is the lithium-ion battery pack, and “Li-ion batteries based on similar technology are already being produced in great numbers and are well along their learning curves. The steep early drop in cost often experienced with new technologies is not likely. The incremental cost to manufacture these vehicles is expected to decline by about one-third by 2020 but only slowly thereafter#...#the potential for dramatic [cost] reductions appears limited.”

Would a sharp, prolonged, and unexpected increase in oil prices make these vehicles economical? The NRC doesn’t think so: “The adverse consequences of such an event for the health of the economy could leave consumers without sufficient financial resources to purchase large numbers of PHEVs.”

Even when subsidies are no longer theoretically necessary (that is, when the fuel savings can reasonably be said to balance out the higher purchase price, defined by NRC as 2028 for PHEV-10s and 2047 for PHEV-40s), will large numbers of consumers buy vehicles with such steep up-front costs? Even at that point, you could buy a conventional car, park the extra money in a savings account, and earn more money than you’d have saved in gas with a PHEV. Also, you might not be wild about having to plug in your car every day, particularly when it will take almost four hours to recharge a mid-size PHEV-10 battery pack on a standard outlet and 14 hours to recharge a mid-size PHEV-40. Sure, you can upgrade an outlet to provide more juice, but if you’re a home owner, that’s another $2,100 out of your pocket. And if a substantial number of drivers decide to fire up those batteries during the daytime when they’re at work or play -- instead of at night, when electricity usage drops -- billions of dollars will be necessary to upgrade the electricity grid.

We are “addicted” to oil for a reason: It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to move our cars with gasoline than by any other means. That most of us prefer relatively cheap to relatively expensive transportation is not an “addiction,” really -- it’s an exercise in economic self-interest. It’s hard to find evidence in this report that the same could be said for policies forcing PHEVs onto otherwise unwilling consumers.

-- Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren are senior fellows at the Cato Institute. Peter Van Doren is also editor of Cato’s Regulation magazine.

You know how Hemingway wrote a story called “Up in Michigan”? (Such a good title.) Well, this little journal here will be “Up in Norway.” And it is not to be confused with the series I had about a month ago: the “Oslo Journal.” That was about the Oslo Freedom Forum, the human-rights conference that takes place in the Norwegian capital. This one is about a separate trip to Oslo, and it should be a little more fun -- unless you consider accounts of persecution a gas.

And what was my journal last week? (I know, I’m on journal overload.) It was about National Review’s Portugal cruise. When I left off, I think, I was in the Barcelona airport, transiting to Oslo. So here I am, waiting in line at the SAS counter -- SAS standing for Scandinavian Airlines (somehow). And I feel like I’m in Norway already -- because almost everyone in line is blond. I mean, really blond, not the bought kind of blond.

As if to confirm the point -- that I am in Norway already -- someone’s cellphone goes off, and the “ring” is “Morning Mood” -- the beloved, cheering piece from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. How much more Norwegian can you get: being blond and having your cellphone play “Morning Mood”? That is almost gilding the Norwegian lily.

When we land in Oslo, I see a plane on the tarmac -- it has Garbo’s picture on it. But it’s not a Swedish plane (Garbo was a Swede); it’s a Norwegian plane. Scandinavian solidarity?

Pat Buckley once told me that Greta Garbo was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. She encountered her in a doctor’s office in New York once. Garbo did not behave very well -- but she was beautiful.

My fellow senior editor David Pryce-Jones knew her -- there was a family connection. Ask him about the time he played tennis with a topless Garbo. I can’t wait for his memoirs: which should include a heck of a lot more than Garbo’s you-know-whats.

In the Oslo airport, people are very friendly -- particularly the girls behind the food counters. They smile brightly and say, “Hey!” They don’t know what language you’re going to speak to them -- Norwegian or English (or German or something else?) -- so they start with something neutral, such as “Hey!” I even hear one say, “Hey-hey!” Charming, from her.

I meet another girl who lived in L.A. for a year, volunteering with a charitable organization -- very Norwegian.

I have heard some Americans say that Norwegians are stand-offish, particularly the older ones. I myself don’t find that this is the case. I find the Norwegians almost uniformly lovely: exceptionally polite, patient, good-humored, friendly, helpful. It’s like some law -- some national law -- has decreed niceness. Read a map in the street, and chances are someone will stop to ask whether he can direct you. He may even walk you to your destination.

Boy, do they smoke here in Norway. I don’t sense that smoking has been stigmatized, like it has in the U.S. (Memo to itchy-fingers: Yes, I mean, “like,” not “as” -- there is a distinction. Please don’t write me. Thank you!)

And a Norwegian American who lives here tells me, “They drink like it’s their job. They drink into the night, vomiting in the streets, and by 8 in the morning or so, it’s all cleaned up.” I myself don’t witness this. Hey, I can’t have my eyes, and ears, on everything . . .

In a train station, there is a poster -- an ad for something -- with a beautiful woman in it, in mid-stride. The effect is a little spoiled, however, when, in the text, there are the words “full fart.” (Meaning a sprint, I later learn.)

My hotel is just off Bernhard Getz Street -- and I contemplate how interesting it is that the Norwegians should pay tribute to New York’s famed subway vigilante. (I’m a real card, I know: Norway’s Bernhard Getz was an esteemed jurist, I believe.)

A clerk tells me how much she likes President Obama, and what a good thing for America it is that we have now been given Scandinavian-style health care. I smile at her.

Oslo is the most expensive city I have ever been in, by far. (I have not been to Tokyo, so can’t compare.) The sticker shock never ceases. Everything is like quadruple a normal price. I have been warned about this, and I experienced it myself, during the Freedom Forum. But I still cannot quite adjust. Do you want to buy dinner in a restaurant, or would you like a new mountain bike instead?

An American who knows this place well recalls her first week here: “I ordered a beer, and I was later given the bill. I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, I’m just paying for one beer.’ I thought they were charging me for an entire party or something. But the bill was just for one beer.”

I’m told that many Norwegians make a run for the Swedish border, when they want to buy certain goods: particularly those that are whoppingly taxed in Norway, such as cigs. These shoppers-in-Sweden are branded economic traitors, by some Norwegians. Interestingly, Swedes come here in droves in order to work. The Norwegians go to Sweden to buy things; the Swedes come to Norway to work. As I said, interesting.

A Norwegian friend tells me a story that has him buying a pair of jeans in America. I say, “You must have thought they were free!” He grins. I look forward to getting back to New York City, to pay low prices -- which is a strange feeling.

Prices are lower in Toledo, Ohio, than they are in New York City -- much lower, as you know. But the gap between Oslo and New York is much, much greater.

A marching band parades by outside my window. How civilized, how pleasant, how buoying! I reflect how Mahler loved bands (and incorporated them into his symphonies, nostalgically). And how Ives loved bands. I do too. You? I never hear them anymore, however -- not at home. Maybe it’s because I don’t go to Friday-night football games.

The sun sets at about 10:30; and rises about 3. Sunny times, here in the North.

May 17 is Norway’s national day, its Fourth of July, so to speak, and what a spectacular day it is: something to experience no matter where you’re from. Tell you a little about it in Part II? Thanks for joining me today. See you.

 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: While Thomas Sowell is on vacation, enjoy this classic column from the archives.

A heartbreaking social statistic is that children on welfare have only about half as many words per day directed at them as the children of working-class families -- and less than one-third as many words as children whose parents are professionals. This is especially painful in view of the fact that scientists have found that the actual physical development of the brain is affected by how much interaction young children receive.

Even if every child entered the world with equal innate ability, by the time they were grown they would nevertheless have very different mental capabilities. Innate ability is the ability that exists at the moment of conception, but nobody applies for a job or for college admission at the moment of conception. Even between conception and birth, other influences affect the development of the brain, as well as the rest of the body.

The mother’s diet and her intake of alcohol or drugs affect the unborn child. Differences in the amount of nutrition received in the womb create differences even between identical twins. Where one of these identical twins is born significantly heavier than the other, and the lighter one falls below some critical weight, the heavier one tends to have a higher IQ in later years. They may be the same weight when they become adults, but they didn’t get the same nutrition back when their brains were first developing.

Inequalities have so many sources that this fact undermines the simple dichotomy between believing that some people are innately inferior and believing that discrimination or other social injustices account for economic and social differences. Yet people who are afraid of being considered racists, or believers that the lower classes are born inferior, often buy the notion that only the sins of “society” can explain why some people end up so much better off than others.

Decades ago, Edward Banfield pointed out how the different ways that children from different classes are raised help or hinder them in their later lives. Yet he was demonized by the intelligentsia for saying what most people would consider only common sense.

While it is heartbreaking to think of the large differences in ability and behavior that can be created by the ways different parents raise their children, it is no less heartbreaking to think of other social differences that go back to the ways kids are brought up. For example, anyone who watches the television program Cops will see an endless succession of real losers who wreck their lives and the lives of others through sheer irresponsibility and lack of self-control.

When one of these losers is being chased on the highway by a couple of police cars, and with a police helicopter overhead, you wonder why he doesn’t just stop and give it up before his crazy driving kills him or someone else. But you also have to wonder what his parents were doing while he was growing up that they couldn’t raise him to become a rational adult.

A majority of the men in prison came from fatherless families. In some cosmic sense, it may not be entirely their fault that they took the wrong road. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was the wrong road -- or make it any less dangerous to turn them loose.

No doubt such concerns are behind efforts to “rehabilitate” prisoners or substitute “crime prevention” programs for incarceration. But magic words do not create magic realities. Innocent people have been killed by “rehabilitated” criminals who had been set free. And “prevention” programs do not prevent anything other than putting dangerous people behind bars.

The pretense of having solutions can be more dangerous than the problem. Yet there are whole armies of shrinks and social workers whose jobs depend on pretending that they have answers, even when no one has answers.

In terms of broader social policy, we need to make a sharp distinction between saying that some people are victims of a tragic fate and saying that they are victims of discrimination by employers, bias in the courts, or the sins of other individuals they encounter. Scapegoating other people is not likely to help -- and it can distract attention from the real problems, which are too serious to misdiagnose.

-- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The 7/7 bombings in London, in which Islamists killed 52 and injured 700, prompted British authorities to work with Muslims to avoid future violence.

However, rather than turn to anti-Islamist Muslims who reject the triumphalist goal of applying Islamic law in Europe, they promoted non-violent Islamists, hoping these would persuade coreligionists to express their hatred of the West in lawful ways. This effort featured Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), a prominent Islamist intellectual. For example, London’s Metropolitan Police partially funded a conference that Ramadan addressed, and Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him to an official “working group on tackling extremism.”

Deploying an Islamist may have seemed like an original and clever idea, but it was neither. Western governments have been allying without success with Islamists for decades. Indeed, they have been allying with Ramadan’s own family.

In 1953, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower hosted a group of foreign Muslims that included Said Ramadan (1926-95), a leader of arguably the most influential Islamist organization of the twentieth century, the rabidly anti-West Muslim Brotherhood -- and also Tariq’s father. The Eisenhower-Ramadan meeting took place in the context of sustained U.S. government efforts to rally Muslims against Soviet Communism, in part by putting Said Ramadan on the CIA payroll. Talcott Seelye, an American diplomat who met with him about that time, explains: “We thought of Islam as a counterweight to communism.”

Then there was Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), Tariq’s grandfather, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and recipient of Nazi funding. American diplomats in Cairo in the late 1940s had “regular meetings” with al-Banna, found him “perfectly empathetic,” and perceived his organization to be a “moderate” and even a “positive” force. The British apparently offered al-Banna money.

In other words, Western governments have a history of ignoring the Islamists’ repulsive ideology and working with them, even strengthening them.

In a stunning piece of investigative historical research, Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly with the Wall Street Journal, reveals new twists and turns of this drama in his just-released book, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West.

Johnson opens with a review of the systematic Nazi efforts to recruit Soviet Muslims from among their prisoners of war. Many Muslims loathed Stalin, and between 150,000 and 300,000 of them fought for the Axis in World War II. In other words, over and above their unfulfilled propaganda effort directed at Arabs, the Nazis actually fielded a substantial force of mainly Turkic Muslims under the leadership of a scholarly Nazi enthusiast named Gerhard von Mende.

After the German defeat in 1945, Johnson follows von Mende as he continued his anti-Communist work with ex-Soviet Muslims, now in a Cold War context. But his network of former soldiers proved not very competent at the task of arousing Muslim hostility against the Soviet Union. Their leading intellectual, for example, had served as the imam of an SS division that helped suppress the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Islamists quickly proved themselves far more competent at this political and religious challenge. Johnson explains that they “wear suits, have university degrees, and can formulate their demands in ways that a politician can understand.”

The heart of his fascinating study lies in tracing the evolution, much of it in Munich, from old soldiers to new Islamists. It’s a classic tale of 1950s intrigue, complete with rehabilitated Nazis, CIA front organizations, and dueling Soviet and American ambitions.

Johnson shows how, without anyone quite planning it, the Americans usurped von Mende’s network and handed it over to Said Ramadan. This early U.S. boost to the Muslim Brotherhood, Johnson argues, gave it the means to establish an Islamist framework just in time to welcome the surge of Muslim immigration to Europe in the 1970s.

Thus did the Islamist domination of European Muslims have two hidden facilitators, Nazi and American. Its origins in Operation Barbarossa reveal the ugly pedigree of today’s Islamist strength. Hitler and his thugs could not have foreseen it, but they helped set the stage for Eurabia.

American backing for Islamists prompts Johnson to warn against the futility of allying with the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk -- as Tony Blair once again recently attempted. However tempting, it invariably harms the West. The lesson is simple: Be cognizant of history and do not assist the Islamists.

-- Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. © 2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

I am often asked whether I support Sarah Palin for president. I don’t. But I do very much support her as America’s next Oprah. Her cultural antennae are exquisitely sensitive, and she relishes combat. “Sarah’s book club” would be an improvement.

After a recent speech in which she argued that “choosing life may not be the easiest path, but it’s always the right path,” the Washington Post web edition invited responses. Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, thundered that “Palin calls herself a ‘frontier feminist,’ but she sounds more like a Pat Robertson feminist.” Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary, noted that “A woman’s life is a human life: Those who would deny women the right to moral autonomy, the ability to engage in moral reasoning about whether to continue a pregnancy to term or to have an abortion, develop their arguments based on assumptions of women’s moral ineptitude.”

Debra Haffner, of the Religious Institute, wrote, “In more than 30 years of working with women struggling with the question of continuing a pregnancy to term or having an abortion, I can think of fewer than a handful who approached the decision lightly. Almost every woman wrestled with what would be best in her individual circumstances, and with what her faith taught her.”

This is fatuous moral reasoning. Professor Thistlethwaite suggests that to oppose abortion on moral grounds is to “deny women the right to moral autonomy.” Rights talk, as Mary Ann Glendon has observed, has invaded every arena of American life and impoverished civic discourse. Of course women are moral actors. But what is “moral autonomy”? Is it a new right to make immoral choices without being criticized? Does it apply in areas beyond abortion? Do laws against prostitution or baby selling compromise women’s “moral autonomy”? Do all laws?

Ms. Haffner’s argument is also familiar -- not to say hackneyed. We’ve heard it many times. Abortion is an “agonizing personal choice.” Women struggle with the decision. Well, some doubtless do agonize, but, let’s face it, many do not. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf admitted in 2004, “I used to think of abortion as being somewhat trivial; the moral equivalent of serious root canal dentistry.” A recent survey by the Allan Guttmacher Institute found that 50 percent of women undergoing abortions each year have had at least one abortion in the past. If the process of deciding on abortion were truly that wrenching, repeat abortions would not be nearly as common.

But, in any case, agony is irrelevant. If, before robbing a bank, the thief agonizes about the act, does that make the decision a moral one? Is it a “very personal choice” whether to libel someone? Shall we say that making insider trading illegal compromises people’s “moral autonomy”? These terms are designed to obscure the issue rather than clarify it.

Though the pro-life position continues to be characterized by the press as marginal, it has in fact become the majority view. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 51 percent of Americans described themselves as “pro-life” versus 45 percent who said they were “pro-choice.” This year’s poll saw some narrowing, but the pro-life position still outnumbered the pro-choice. Only 38 percent of respondents said abortion was “morally acceptable.” The poll also found that young people, ages 18 to 29, were much more likely to say that they oppose abortion in all circumstances today than a decade ago (one in four, versus one in seven). NARAL president Nancy Keenan has noticed this collapse of support among the young, even referring to herself and her contemporaries as the “postmenopausal militia.”

Partisans among the press, meanwhile, continue their rear-guard actions, making themselves ridiculous with semantic gymnastics. It is not abortion, it’s “reproductive choice” or “abortion rights.” The New York Times consistently skirts the term “partial birth abortion,” as in this story about Sen. Blanche Lincoln: “Even Emily’s List#...#joined the pile-on last week, reminding followers that it stopped supporting Mrs. Lincoln#...#after she voted to ban a form of late-term abortion in 1999.” A form.

For decades, feminists have argued that the unfettered discretion to harm their unborn children was the foundational women’s “right.” The law has changed little in that time, but the psychological shift has been significant. The number of annual abortions has been steadily declining since 1981, and polls suggest that people see through such cynical manipulations as calling abortion “choice.”

By provoking their ire, Palin reminds us of the shallowness of the “pro-choice” case.

-- Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Editor’s note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, kfsreprint@hearstsc.com or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.

The Arizona immigration law has become the occasion for a sorry exercise in national self-abasement.

When Mexican president Felipe Calderón addressed a joint session of Congress last week, he rapped Arizonans -- ignorantly and unfairly -- for using “racial profiling as the basis for law enforcement.” If Democrats felt any residual reflex to stand up for their fellow Americans in Arizona, who are grappling with a hellish problem partly caused by the misgovernment of the country whose president stood before them, they swiftly repressed it.

They rose and applauded, and the president of Mexico and a majority of America’s Congress united in their disdain for Arizona’s handiwork. No one seemed to mind that they were cheering a man from a country where the kidnapping and abuse of migrants is “a human-rights crisis,” according to Amnesty International.

In his whirlwind anti-Arizona campaign, Calderón called the law “discriminatory” at a joint press conference with Pres. Barack Obama, eliciting not a peep of protest. Obama agreed that the law “has the potential of being applied in a discriminatory fashion.” He tried to soften the blow by shifting into Gunnar Myrdal mode and interpreting the strange customs of his compatriots, who cling to guns, religion, and a belief that the southern border should mean something.

The law is a “misdirected expression of frustration over our broken immigration system,” Obama explained in his best sociological diagnosis. In other words, those poor boobs have deluded themselves into thinking that checking the identification of suspected illegal immigrants makes sense. Pity them, and hope their fit of irrationality passes soon.

In his reference to a “fair reading” of the law, Obama at least implied he had read the ten-page text, a feat beyond his cabinet. His attorney general and secretary of homeland security blasted away at the law without pausing even to give it a good skim.

And why would they? It wouldn’t change their view of the law or its supporters. The country’s progressives believe that they are a lone oasis in a vast archipelago of racism and backwardness called the United States of America. If they apologize for their country, it’s only because they think they have so much for which to apologize.




By his own account, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner repeatedly brought up Arizona in human-rights talks with the Chinese. He wanted the representatives of a state that jails, tortures, and kills dissidents to know we are grappling with this “troubling trend in our society.” Arizona governor Jan Brewer should be glad she hasn’t yet been referred to the International Criminal Court.

Obama says that Justice Department lawyers are reviewing the law -- or, more accurately, looking for any possible excuse to challenge it. They’ll have to be creative. A Department of Justice memo from 2002 says that states have the “inherent power” to make arrests for violations of federal law, and drafters of the Arizona statute were careful not to exceed federal statutes.

There are other, more direct ways to vitiate the law. John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says the government might “not necessarily process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona officials.” This is the nation’s top immigration cop flirting with civil disobedience against enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. If Morton gets the vapors over asking suspected illegals for their IDs, he’s clearly in the wrong line of work.

Arizonans, are you feeling less frustrated yet? At bottom, the dispute over the state’s law is a conflict of visions. The law’s supporters believe we should take the border seriously and assert the country’s sovereign right to control who comes here and who doesn’t; its detractors believe any serious effort to make good on that sovereign right is exclusionary and tinged with racism because it’s primarily directed at Latinos.

In this struggle, the latter camp sees Felipe Calderón as an ally and thrills to his disparagement of their countrymen.

-- Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

One of the many beliefs -- i.e., non-empirically based doctrines -- of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and leftism.

The amount of evil done by Christians -- against, for example, “heretics” and Jews -- in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.

But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes -- systematic genocides of every man, woman, and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags -- the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost inevitable end.

The anti-religious Left offers two responses to these facts. The first is that modern technology made the Nazi and Communist murders of scores of millions possible; had the church been technologically able to do so, it would have made its own Auschwitz and Gulag. The second is that Nazism and Communism were religions and not secular doctrines.

The response to the first is that technology was not necessary for the Communist murders of over 100 million innocent people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. In Cambodia, millions were murdered with hammers, in Rwanda, with machetes.

The response to the second is that Communism and Nazism were secular movements, and to deny that is to tell a gargantuan lie. Even if one argues that Nazism and Communism were religions, they were nevertheless secular religions. That too many Christians morally failed when confronted with Nazism is true but irrelevant to the fact that Nazism was in no way a Christian movement.

And now the post-Christian world is getting worse.

The moral news about the world in which we live is almost unremittingly negative.

RUSSIA
Russia is devoid of a moral values system. Whatever moral role the Russian Orthodox Church played was largely extinguished during the seven decades of Communist suppression of religion. Today, pockets of religious morality notwithstanding, Russia is essentially a nihilistic state. Under the leadership of a former KGB director, Russia now plays a destructive role in world affairs. Russia today is characterized by major arms shipments to Syria, protection of Iran while it becomes a nuclear power, imposition of Russia’s will on Ukraine and other neighboring states, and the violent suppression of domestic critics who shed any light on the organized-crime syndicate that rules the geographically largest nation in the world.



TURKEY
The Ataturk Revolution is being undone. Turkey, the country long regarded as the bridge between the West and Islam, is rapidly moving away from the West and toward an increasingly anti-Western Islam.

IRAN
Iran is ruled by the heirs of Nazism, if that word still means anything after being cheapened by the Left for decades, most recently by the Left’s comparison of Arizona to a Nazi state. The rulers of Iran boast of their desire to initiate a second Holocaust against the Jews, all while denying that the first Holocaust took place. And the country’s treatment of citizens who seek elementary human freedoms and of women is among the worst on earth.

CONGO
According to all reports, nearly 6 million people have been killed in the Congo in the last decade. The great secular, liberal hope in “humanity” and “world opinion” has once again been shown to be the false hope it is. World opinion and “humanity” have rarely done anything to help the truly persecuted. But there is more to the Congolese genocide: the absence of reporting about it in the world’s media and its being a non-issue at the United Nations. If an Israeli soldier kills a rock-throwing Palestinian, or even worse, makes plans to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the U.N., world opinion, and the world media cover it as if it were the primary evil on earth. But the Congolese deaths are barely worth a mention.

MEXICO
Mexico is fighting for its life against narcotics gangs that compete with Islamists in their sadism. Mexico could become the largest narco-state in the world. To be a good person in Mexico today, i.e., to oppose the drug lords in any way, is to put oneself in danger of being slowly tortured to death.

EUROPE
Europe long ago gave up fighting for or believing in anything other than living a life with as much economic security, as many days off, and as young a retirement age as possible. World War I killed off European idealism; whatever remained was destroyed by World War II. What I have written about the Germans is true for nearly all of Europe: Instead of learning to fight evil, Europe has learned that fighting is evil.

Other consequences of European secularism and the demise of non-materialistic ideals there include a low birth rate (children cost money and limit the number of fine restaurants in which one can afford to dine) and appeasement of evil. Thus most European nations are slowly disappearing and nearly every European country has compromised Western liberties in order to appease radical Muslims.

RADICAL ISLAM
Polls taken in the Muslim world regularly report that about 10 percent of the world’s Muslims say they support radical Islam -- meaning Islamic totalitarianism as practiced by the Taliban and terror as practiced by al-Qaeda. That means at least 100 million people. Add to that the unspecified number of Muslims who support the Nazi-level and Nazi-like anti-Semitism promulgated in much of the Middle East, and you have an enormous body of people committed to the death of the West.



CHINA
As in Russia, traditional virtues were largely destroyed by Communism in China, and China, too, is essentially a nihilistic state whose government spends its vast sums if foreign currency in buying influence in some of the cruelest places on earth (Zimbabwe, for example) and protecting the genocide-advocating regime of Iran.

THE UNITED NATIONS
The net result of the United Nations is an increase in evil on earth. Whatever good is performed by some of its institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, that good is outweighed by the amount of evil the U.N. either abets or allows. It has supervised genocide in Rwanda, done nothing to stop genocide elsewhere (e.g., Congo and Sudan), gives a respectable forum to tyrannies, and is preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its contribution to human suffering is exemplified by Libya’s election to its Human Rights Council and Iran’s election to its Commission on the Status of Women.

THE UNITED STATES
The United States was described by Pres. Abraham Lincoln as “the last, best hope of earth.” Most Americans agreed then. However, with the ascent of the Left in America -- in our educational institutions, in our news and entertainment media, and in the arts world -- fewer and fewer Americans believe this. On the contrary, the leftist view of America, which pervades American life, is of a country deeply morally compromised by endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, militarism, imperialism, and a rapacious capitalism that leads to immoral levels of economic inequality.

As they are doing to Europe, these views are leading America to avoid offending its enemies. The American attorney general recently refused to answer a congressman’s repeated question about whether he believes that radical Islam might have been one factor motivating recent Muslim terrorists in America.

With America more interested in being like Europe and being liked than in fighting its enemies, more and more countries are identifying with America’s enemies than with America. Last week’s three-way hug among the leaders of Brazil, Turkey, and Iran was a clear example of this.

Meanwhile, America is rapidly accumulating unpayable debts that will render it not very different from Greece. Indeed, California, once the grease of the American economy, has become the Greece of the American economy.

As the Left’s power increases, America’s power recedes -- and the world further deteriorates. Under Democratic rule, the last, best hope of earth has decided that the United Nations and Western Europe deserve that title, not the United States.

Those of us working to remove Democrats from power regard this November’s election as a referendum on the direction not only of America, but of the world itself.

-- Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

For Meg Whitman, it never should have been this tough -- or, for that matter, this expensive. Whitman, a former eBay chief executive, has burned through $68 million from her personal fortune in the run-up to California’s GOP gubernatorial primary on June 8. All that cash, she thought, would build up a comfy lead. For a while, it did. A March poll from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California pegged her as a near-sure thing -- up 50 points, with her 30-second meet-Meg spots as ubiquitous on California televisions as Law & Order. Now, thanks to her wobbly stance on illegal immigration and growing conservative skepticism, her campaign has become the Spruce Goose of California politics -- too big to fly.

Whitman has tumbled in the PPIC’s latest poll; she now holds a meager nine-point lead, with 31 percent of voters undecided. (SurveyUSA has her up by two, Research 2000/Daily Kos by ten.) Nipping at her heels is Steve Poizner, a bespectacled, silver-haired engineer who was elected state insurance commissioner in 2006. Like Whitman, he’s a 53-year-old tech-boom gazillionaire and holds an MBA (she Harvard, he Stanford). He speaks with the wonky, soft cadence of a high-school teacher, which, he loves telling you, he became, after selling his cell-phone-gadget company for $1 billion at the height of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Whitman’s slow dip into hot water began in April, when she came out strong against Arizona’s immigration law, saying “if that law were to come before me, I would oppose it.” In an interview with the Associated Press she said there are “just better ways to solve this problem.” Compounding that headache were comments she made in October 2009, recommending a “fair program” for illegal immigrants to “stand in the back of the line” and “pay a fine”-- not deportation -- as one possible solution. State conservative blogs and activists had a field day.

Soon after, in a town-hall meeting with supporters, Whitman quickly tacked right, telling the assembled that she had “tremendous amount of sympathy for the people of Arizona#...#they rose up.” Her opposition to amnesty, she lamented, “has been so misrepresented,” but still, even she admitted, the episode had been her “welcome to politics” moment. Indeed.

Despite Whitman’s sinking numbers, she remains as upbeat (and pointedly vague) as the sellers on her old website. Such confidence is a staple of Team Meg, who have had to reassure California Republicans for months that they are Terminator 4 -- no Ahnuld, but a sure summer blockbuster, so damn the early reviews. After PPIC’s May survey was released, Whitman told local reporters that she, of course, “knew the polls would close” and that she “can feel the momentum beginning to shift back my way.” Her advisers say their internal polls have her up by 20 points. Others aren’t so sure.

“This election is very much in flux,” says Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO. “Voters are alienated. Republicans are struggling to figure out what to do about it and what their party stands for. The Democrats -- with their candidates unchallenged -- aren’t going through this soul-searching.”

“Whitman’s 50-point lead was always artificial,” argues Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who advised Pete Wilson when he was governor of California. “For a long time, Poizner was nowhere to be seen. Since he started to air television ads, the polls began to naturally move toward an equilibrium.” Whitman, he says, has been “running a November campaign, focused on inevitability and electability against Jerry Brown in the general election,” while Poizner, running to her right, has been “all about June.” If she loses, “it’ll be a historic collapse, on par with former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan’s fall in the 2002 gubernatorial primary to conservative Bill Simon” and Michael Huffington’s failed $28-million bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 1994.



Poizner tells National Review Online that his tough position on border security and enforcement is a key explanation for his sudden surge. California is plagued by illegal immigration, and Poizner supports neighboring Arizona’s new immigration law. “Meg Whitman is in complete concert with Mexican president Felipe Calderón and President Obama,” he says. “I was outraged when Calderón went to the floor of Congress and criticized the people of Arizona. Like him, Whitman is opposed to what Arizona’s doing.”

Poizner pledges to crack down on illegal immigration if elected -- ending taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal immigrants, cutting off state funding for “sanctuary cities” such as San Francisco, suspending business licenses for employers who break immigration laws, and sending in the National Guard if border security does not improve. “The federal government is not addressing this, so it’s now our responsibility to turn off the economic magnets,” he says. “It’s an economic and national-security issue.”

The PPIC’s March poll hinted at this emerging thorn in Whitman’s side. Sixty-percent of Republicans view immigrants “as a burden,” with 69 percent of respondents, across parties, calling for “major changes” in immigration policy. Poizner, no Scrooge, has ladled himself $24 million of his own cash to hammer Whitman on this issue via statewide television ads. For effect, he’s even traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro with reporters.

In Poizner’s latest commercial, he highlights Calderón’s words and flashes the Mexican leader’s image alongside Whitman’s. Whitman, on the defensive, has snapped back with her own spot, proclaiming to be “100 percent against amnesty for illegal immigrants. Period.” She has also released a radio ad featuring Wilson, one of her most prominent backers (along with other kings of the GOP establishment such as Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich). Wilson calls her “tough as nails” on immigration, even though she opposes Proposition 187, the 1994 anti-illegal-immigration referendum that Wilson backed. (Proposition 187 would have set up a screening system to keep illegal immigrants from using social services, but it was declared unconstitutional by a federal court. Wilson appealed the decision, but his successor, Gray Davis, stopped the process, leaving the law dead.)

Poizner then used Whitman’s Wilson support against her, featuring it in a Spanish-language radio ad -- tarring her as soft on immigration with one hand while extending the other to the Latino community. Only in California.

All of this border talk could lead to a Poizner upset. “Immigration has become the issue of the campaign,” says Tony Krvaric, the San Diego County GOP chairman. “Everyone is fired up about it. With California’s terrible, 12.6 percent unemployment rate, everyone I talk to on the grassroots level is concerned about jobs and the border.”

Jon Fleischman, vice chairman of the California GOP, tells the Sacramento Bee that, according to the party’s internal polling, 84 percent of California Republicans support the Arizona immigration law. Still, Dan Schnur, another former Wilson aide and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, says that Poizner’s immigration focus may have “turned this race into a real contest, but it still remains an uphill battle for him.”



Schnur says another hot-button issue could damage Whitman’s candidacy, namely her ties to Goldman Sachs. In 2001, Whitman was put on Goldman’s corporate board, earning $475,000 for her part-time gig and gaining access to initial public offerings of top stocks. “While the GOP base in California may be economically conservative, it is culturally conservative and populist as well,” Schnur says. “A lot of the grassroots activists and conservative voters harbor just as much suspicion toward Wall Street as they do toward Sacramento and Washington. What Whitman did may alienate a number of voters.” Poizner has leaped onto this connection since Goldman rocketed into national headlines, running an ad charging that Whitman “helped manage Goldman and received sweetheart stock deals so unethical they were outlawed.”

Still, even as Poizner continues to call himself the race’s “true conservative,” he could be haunted by his moderate history. In 2004, Poizner ran for (and lost) a state assembly seat, and during the campaign he portrayed himself as a center-right Republican. Whitman has seized on his past statements and associations -- the “Steve shuffle” -- on her campaign site. In one ad, she charges that Poizner “gave $10,000” to Al Gore’s recount efforts in 2000. Poizner’s campaign says that his wife made the donation from a joint checking account. Then again, as PolitiFact observes, “the fact that he signed the check officially makes the donation his, and the listing of his employer, rather than his wife’s, on the disclosure form provides additional evidence that he was the intended donor.”

Whitman has also criticized Poizner on global warming, noting his previous support for Assembly Bill 32, a state law passed in 2006 to curb emissions. Now he calls the measure a “draconian set of regulations.” He's a “convenient convert,” says Rob Stutzman, Whitman’s political strategist. Whitman, however, gave $300,000 to the Environmental Defense Fund and took an Arctic cruise with Van Jones, the disgraced former environmental czar for President Obama.

“Look, I’ve been conservative all my life,” Poizner explains. “I worked in the Bush White House as a counterterrorism fellow. My conservative principles have crystallized in recent years, once I got to see Sacramento from the inside as insurance commissioner. The culture of corruption has been an eye opener and I’m now much more passionate about my conservative values -- in the free market, personal responsibility, the Tenth Amendment, local control, and small government.”

State senator Tony Strickland (R.), a co-founder of California’s Club for Growth chapter, says he remains worried about Poizner’s true values and will back Whitman. Poizner, he says, has “confused” conservatives with his ads. “I don’t think either is a social conservative, but Meg Whitman is by far the conservative candidate here,” he tells us. “She’s focused on what we’re all concerned about: the economy, downsizing state government, and making this state pro-business and pro-growth.” Whitman, he believes, “will bounce back, once people hear her full take on illegal immigration,” though he understands why Poizner has risen, since “the issue is as hot this year as [Proposition] 187 was.”

Jarrod Agen, Poizner’s political strategist, brushes back against any concerns. “Steve has reached out to the tea-party movement and worked very hard on the grassroots level,” he says. “This is an anti-establishment year and Whitman is the establishment. The Arizona law has become a litmus test.” Besides, he reasons, “we’ve been endorsed by Congressman Tom McClintock, the state’s conservative standard bearer, while Whitman is backed by out-of-state folks.”



Poizner hasn’t stopped his beat-Meg campaign at immigration and, frankly, he’s made some low blows. In a new web ad, he calls her a smut peddler, criticizing her for allowing pornography to be purchased on eBay while as CEO while taking away the ability for eBay users to sell guns. In the campaign’s final days, Poizner will have some help on the trail from Democrats. According to the Orange County Register, the California Democratic party and labor unions are spending nearly $2 million on anti-Whitman ads.

“There is a lot of growing discontent with all of this negativity,” cautions Don Watnick, the Fresno County GOP chairman. “They’re spending so much money to beat each other up. Airing so much laundry only helps Jerry Brown.”

“With both Poizner and Whitman, their conservative garments still have their tags on them,” said Jack Pitney, a political-science professor at Claremont McKenna College, to the Bee. “You’ve got Poizner, who not that long ago called himself a Schwarzenegger Republican and is now trying to morph his opponent into Schwarzenegger. And Meg Whitman is trying to come across as the California version of Margaret Thatcher.”

Schwarzenegger, for his part, is raising his eyebrows at the primary kerfuffle. At a press conference last week, he lamented that the duo is “outdoing each other [to see] who is more to the right.”

To Poizner, that’s just fine. “California is a few years ahead of where Obama wants to take the whole country,” he says. “These left-leaning socialist policies need to be stopped. Schwarzenegger is unpopular for good reason, as is Whitman, who has surrounded herself with his advisers. The people don’t want another governor who lacks core conservative principles. They want sweeping, bold changes in the most liberal, bankrupt state in the country.”

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

The bond vigilantes have pulverized Greece, and New York University economist Nouriel Roubini (a.k.a. “Dr. Doom”) is warning that they may eventually target the United States. Southern Europe’s riot-torn basket case has come to epitomize a nightmare scenario of budgetary meltdown triggered by unsustainable government spending. To be sure, Greece has also been hobbled by cultural factors -- widespread corruption, tax evasion, extremely low birth rates -- and we should be wary of drawing superficial comparisons between countries. But the Greek crisis does highlight an inescapable truth about America’s public finances: At some point, the era of Peter Pan fiscal policy will have to end.

Crunch time may arrive sooner than previously expected. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that under President Obama’s 2011 fiscal blueprint, net interest payments on the national debt would represent 18.7 percent of total federal tax revenues in 2018. As Investor’s Business Daily reports, this level of debt service would push the U.S. toward “the outer limit of AAA-territory” established by Moody’s, the credit-rating giant. For that matter, “under more adverse scenarios than the CBO considered, including higher interest rates, Moody’s projects that debt service could hit 22.4 percent of revenue by 2013.” Obama’s budget would increase the relative size of publicly held federal debt from 63.2 percent of GDP in 2010 to 90 percent of GDP in 2020, reckons the CBO. Ninety percent is the threshold above which public debt is “associated with notably lower growth outcomes,” according to economists Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard.

America’s public-debt-to-GDP ratio is already higher than it has been since the 1950s. Writing in National Affairs, economist Donald Marron, who served as acting CBO director and a White House economic adviser under Pres. George W. Bush, says the most immediate objective of U.S. fiscal policy should be to stop that ratio from rising. He stresses that this would not require balancing the federal budget; indeed, it would be possible to run moderate deficits while simultaneously trimming the debt-to-GDP ratio, provided the economy was expanding at a fast enough pace.

Think of it this way: To maintain a constant debt-to-GDP ratio, we would have to maintain an identical deficit-to-growth ratio. For example, writes Marron, if we had a debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 percent and a deficit equal to 3 percent of GDP, then nominal GDP growth (that is, real growth plus inflation) would have to reach 5 percent in order to keep the ratio from increasing. The fact that such a humble aim -- holding the debt-to-GDP ratio steady -- seems so quixotic in the short run indicates the severity of America’s fiscal plight. Marron, who is now director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, believes a practical, attainable medium-term goal should be to reduce the ratio to 60 percent by 2020. But over the long haul, he adds, even 60 percent would be unacceptably steep. From the mid-20th century through the early 2000s -- until the Wall Street panic -- the average ratio was roughly 40 percent.

Given the magnitude of our budget problems, it is unrealistic to think that tax hikes alone, or spending cuts alone, or economic growth alone, would be sufficient to fix them. Let’s say that real annual GDP growth averaged 3.8 percent over ten years. That hasn’t happened since the 1960s and 1970s, Marron reminds us, and it is very unlikely to happen in the decade ahead -- but even with that level of growth, the federal government would still see only modest deficit reduction without serious fiscal reforms.

No, we don’t have a “silver bullet,” but we do have empirical evidence to guide our policy decisions. Marron cites a paper by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, who studied OECD data from 1970 to 2007 and concluded that “spending cuts are much more effective than tax increases in stabilizing the debt and avoiding economic downturns.”



Are there any specific countries whose fiscal achievements offer grounds for optimism? In an April 16 New York Times article, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen pointed to Canada, which was forced to address its persistent debt woes after being rocked by spillover effects from the 1994-95 Mexican peso crisis. Prior to the recent global financial shock, our northern neighbor had balanced its federal budget consistently for more than a decade. According to government projections released in early March, Canada’s deficit-to-GDP ratio will peak at 3.5 percent in the current fiscal year before plunging to 0.1 percent of GDP by 2014-15. The Canadian parliamentary budget officer, an independent federal watchdog, puts the latter figure at 0.6 percent of GDP, which is still comparatively low.

Indeed, at a time of surging debt burdens in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, Canada stands out as a beacon of fiscal stability. It now boasts the lowest ratio of total government net debt to GDP among all G7 countries. Since the mid-1990s, its federal debt has dropped from 68.4 percent of GDP to around 35 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, Canada’s rating in the Index of Economic Freedom (compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation) has improved markedly. The 2010 Index ranks Canada ahead of the U.S., owing to its superior scores in the categories of business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, financial freedom, property rights, and freedom from corruption. Doesn’t the Great White North have a lavish welfare state? Yes, but as a share of GDP, aggregate Canadian government spending is significantly lower today than it was 15 years ago.

Of course, Canada enjoys certain structural advantages. For one thing, the oil-rich country is a net energy exporter; for another, it has a relatively small defense budget, thanks to the U.S. security umbrella. Its fiscal gains were driven partly by a massive commodity windfall. Those gains were diminished somewhat by the global credit bust, but Canada was insulated from the turmoil by its conservative banking system, which weathered the storm quite impressively and did not require a state bailout. As Cowen writes, Canadians tend to have a more benign view of government than do Americans, which arguably made it easier for Ottawa to enact painful spending cuts in the 1990s: “Citizens were told by their government leadership that such cuts were necessary and, to some extent, they trusted the messenger.”

We should also note that Canada introduced a federal value-added tax (VAT) in 1991. However, the VAT effectively replaced a manufacturing sales tax that had been hampering Canadian exports, and it has been slashed from 7 percent to 5 percent by the incumbent center-right government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which has also scheduled reductions in corporate-income taxes. Today, Canada’s combined corporate-tax rate (31 percent) and its top personal-income-tax rate at the federal level (29 percent) are both lower than the equivalent rates in the U.S. (39 percent and 35 percent, respectively). On balance, household taxes are more progressive in the U.S. than they are in Canada, according to the OECD.

All of this is worth remembering amid the ongoing fiscal debate. Tax Foundation economist Robert Carroll has observed that the combined U.S. corporate-tax rate went from being nearly twelve percentage points below the weighted G7 average in 1988 to being more than five points above it in 2009. Over that same period, the U.S. rate spiked from almost ten points below to more than eight points above the weighted OECD average. “Reducing or eliminating the corporate tax would curtail numerous wasteful tax distortions, boost growth in both the short and long run, increase America’s global competitiveness, and raise future wages,” Stanford economist Michael Boskin argues in the Wall Street Journal. He refers us to a 2008 OECD paper, which reported that, among different types of taxes, corporate taxes are “most harmful for growth, followed by personal-income taxes, and then consumption taxes.” As Marron tells me, “Not all tax increases -- or tax cuts -- are created equal.”



Consider a fascinating new study by economists Mathias Trabandt of the European Central Bank and Harald Uhlig of the University of Chicago, who examine the relationship between tax rates and revenues in the U.S. and Europe. Using one model of labor elasticity, Trabandt and Uhlig find that raising labor-income taxes can produce, at most, a 30 percent jump in American tax revenues, while raising U.S. capital-income taxes can yield a maximum revenue increase of only 6 percent. Trabandt and Uhlig reckon that 51 percent of a capital-tax cut in the U.S. effectively pays for itself by spurring economic growth, compared with 32 percent of a labor-tax cut. In general, Western European countries would recoup much more of the lost revenue if they cut those taxes. “There rarely is a free lunch due to tax cuts,” Trabandt and Uhlig write, but “a substantial fraction of the lunch will be paid for by the efficiency gains in the economy due to tax cuts.”

Their analysis suggests that hiking capital-income taxes would be a deeply misguided way for U.S. policymakers to tackle the deficit. It also suggests that boosting consumption taxes could deliver a “dramatic” surge of revenue. “The VAT seems to be a less economically distorting tax than income taxes,” Marron tells me. “It seems like the path of least resistance if we have to raise a lot more revenue.” But we should not underestimate its costs. A 2008 Government Accountability Office report on VAT implementation in five Western countries -- Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom -- showed that “even a conceptually simple VAT” (i.e., a single statutory rate for all goods and services) would engender substantial administrative and compliance burdens.

For now, talk of a VAT remains premature. When former Federal Reserve chief and current Obama economic adviser Paul Volcker floated the idea, 85 senators -- including most Senate Democrats -- approved a nonbinding resolution expressing their opposition. Many conservatives would be more amenable to a VAT if it were combined with major income- and investment-tax cuts. “America taxes income and investment too much and consumption too little,” declares The Economist. Coupling a VAT with sweeping tax reforms would address this disparity, and could make the broader tax system far more efficient. Such a grand bargain seems fanciful in the present political environment, though.

It may be inevitable that a bipartisan agreement on debt reduction will include some form of tax increases, but policymakers should recognize that the labor supply can be highly sensitive to tax rates. Economists Lee Ohanian of UCLA, Andrea Raffo of the Federal Reserve Board, and Richard Rogerson of Arizona State University (ASU) have determined that variations in hours worked across 21 OECD countries from 1956 to 2004 can mostly be attributed to tax distortions. Similarly, ASU economist Edward Prescott, a 2004 Nobel laureate, has concluded that “virtually all the large differences between the U.S. labor supply and those of Germany and France are due to differences in tax systems.” Prescott reckons that if France lowered its effective tax rate on labor income to the U.S. level, “the welfare of the French people would increase by 19 percent in terms of lifetime consumption equivalents. This is a large number for a welfare gain.”

Deciding how to overhaul the U.S. tax code may ultimately prove easier than deciding how to curb federal entitlement spending. Marron recommends that Congress begin with incremental changes to Social Security. In the near term, he says, lawmakers should lift the retirement age, institute progressive price indexing of benefits, and adopt a more realistic inflation measure. The immediate revenue impact would be minimal, but these actions would send a positive signal about Washington’s commitment to pruning the welfare state. (Attempting to launch private Social Security accounts would obviously stoke greater controversy.)



Medicare poses a more daunting challenge. Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the GOP’s leading budget wonk, has advocated voucherizing the program for Americans currently under age 55. When these folks became eligible for Medicare, his plan would give them a lump-sum payment to buy private health insurance -- a payment that would be adjusted for inflation, income, and risk -- and also fund tax-free Medical Savings Accounts for low-income recipients. “Both the level of expected federal spending on Medicare and the uncertainty surrounding that spending would decline, but enrollees’ spending for health care and the uncertainty surrounding that spending would increase,” according to the CBO. Democrats have sharply attacked the Ryan proposal, and relatively few Republicans have endorsed it, which underscores just how difficult Medicare reform will be.

The dollar’s status as the global reserve currency continues to shield Beltway politicians from having to make tough fiscal choices. But those choices can’t be postponed forever.

-- Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests -- including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

We’ve had presidents who wanted to thrust visions of a new world order on us: after World War I, after World War II, and then after Desert Storm. But all these great grand visions came hot on the heels of amazing American success in war and foreign policy. Obama, in contrast, is pushing his new multilateral “international order” hot on the heels of two important failures -- in Iran and North Korea. Obama’s vision for America’s future flies in the face of reality and fails to account for his own experience as president.

Last week, Iranian president Ahmadinejad gleefully joined hands with the presidents of Brazil and Turkey after striking a deal that all but ensures Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon -- a development that Obama and his predecessors, Democrat and Republican, hoped to prevent. Promises of tough future United Nations sanctions are worthless. The critical votes on the Security Council, China and Russia, are clear that they will never approve anything that interferes with their economic interests in Iran. In China’s case, that means new lucrative oil and natural-gas deals, while Russia is selling Tehran surface-to-air missiles that will render Iran’s nuclear sites impregnable by anything short of American stealth bombers.

Those stealth bombers are directed and piloted by the U.S. Air Force, meaning that the counterparts of the West Point cadets in Obama’s audience will soon be all that stands between the world and a nuclear-armed Iran, thanks to a misplaced faith in diplomacy and multi-lateral engagement.

Then there is North Korea. We learned last week that its torpedoing of a South Korean warship last March, an act of aggression that killed 46, was deliberate and probably was ordered by dictator Kim Jong Il. The North Korean situation is also the product of faith in diplomacy without strength, and faith in the same two fickle partners, Russia and China. Back in the Clinton years, our goal was to keep North Korea from acquiring a nuclear bomb. When that failed, the goal became preventing Pyongyang from building and testing the missiles needed to wreak nuclear annihilation on its neighbors. North Korea’s success at acquiring long-range missiles means that neighborhood may now include Alaska.




The most recent diplomatic project for North Korea is intended to keep the planet’s last Stalinist regime from spreading its lethal technologies to other rogue nations, such as Iran and Syria. Given our track record, the prognosis for this undertaking is not good. In fact, North Korea offers a preview of what to expect if Iran does get the bomb, or if Saddam Hussein had done so before 2003: a rogue nuclear power too dangerous to stop as it commits outrages and blackmails its neighbors, marauding where it pleases and threatened by nothing more lethal than one long-winded United Nations resolution after another.

The one object of Obama’s disapprobation in his speech was not Iran or North Korea but George W. Bush. Obama never mentioned Bush by name, but he took a stab at his predecessor, saying that that under his administration the war against al-Qaeda has been “going better in recent months than in recent years.” (If it’s going so well, then why is Dennis Blair being forced out as director of national intelligence?) Another implicit criticism of Bush was Obama’s claim that “America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation.” Yet it was precisely Bush’s willingness to move away from that current that has offered the nation one key foreign-policy success that Obama is eager to seize: Iraq. We owe what Obama called “the emergence of a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” to George W. Bush’s willingness to defy conventional world opinion on Iraq. Bush was willing to apply America’s military might, and to persist -- despite savage attacks from Senator Obama and others who would have preferred to cut and run -- because he saw a different future. And that future was made possible because Bush took actions that were at odds with what is called the international community. He unleashed our soldiers to fight the enemy, and fight they did.

In that sense, Saturday’s speech was a sad but revealing episode -- and an ill-timed one, coming one week before Memorial Day. The alternative to Obama’s vision was, literally, staring him in the face. Without ready military power and the will to use it, even the most exquisite diplomacy is useless. Unlike Obama, West Point cadets don’t get to graduation without learning that lesson.

-- Arthur Herman’s most recent book, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn don’t mince words on NRO: “Allowing the running down of a part of the United States by the head of a foreign government, at the White House, standing next to the president — who not only didn’t challenge him, but encouraged him — is a foreign- and domestic-policy catastrophe.” I couldn’t agree more with them, or with Mona Charen and Michelle Malkin, who’ve written forcefully about the absurdity of entertaining commentary on our immigration enforcement (or lack of same) from Mexico. That would be the same Mexico that enforces its immigration laws with the very “intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse” of which its president, Felipe Calderón, falsely accuses Arizona.

It is sadly noteworthy, though, that Bill and Seth wrote their essay before Calderón’s appearance Thursday before a joint session of Congress. It was at that latter event, with Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi presiding, and with President Obama’s cabinet front and center, that the most breathtaking display took place. I refer not to the tongue-lashing from Calderón, but to the standing ovation from nearly two-thirds of the People’s representatives and from the assembled administration officials. The ovation was for a brazen attack on the People.

Make no mistake: In the Congress of the United States on Thursday, it was a hostile Mexico against a besieged Arizona. Mexico won in a rout.

I was talking to a friend the other day, trying to explain my melancholy over the country. Conversations like that tend to get a bit self-absorbed, but indulge me for a second. I said I couldn’t think of a better example than myself for relating the problem no one wants to face up to. A number of years ago, at some risk to myself and my family, I prosecuted savage jihadists who had made themselves enemies of the United States. I was lauded for doing so by the Clinton administration. Though I disagreed with that administration philosophically, and particularly with its conception of international terrorism as a crime problem, I praised the much-needed overhaul by which it put teeth in our counterterrorism laws. Our disagreement was over the best way to protect the country, not over the imperative that the country be protected. Our debate was the traditional Right-Left debate.

Moreover, as a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona -- for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens’ lives and property -- is slandered as a human-rights violator.



And here is the excruciating part: As the Calderón spectacle demonstrates, these sentiments are not fringe sentiments.

To be sure, they are not held by the majority. To be elected, candidate Obama had to run as a post-partisan moderate, a pragmatic centrist who would not be constrained by ideology. Two camps well knew that this was nonsense: those few of us on the right who bothered to study Obama’s record, and those on the Alinskyite left who understood the campaign to be merely a charade necessary to grab the reins of power.

It was the second camp we saw standing and cheering for Calderón in Congress on Thursday. They used him as a vehicle to condemn Arizona.

This second camp, Obama’s transformative Left, had the numbers to give a thunderous ovation in the People’s House because a lot of people agree with them. If I had to guess -- after its two generations of marching through our institutions, controlling the academy, and scripting the legacy media -- I’d put it at one in five, or maybe even four, Americans. That’s enough to form a country the size of France or Germany.

Whatever that country may be, it is not America as we know it. Quite the opposite: Its purpose is to remake America, to render it unrecognizable to those who love America as she is, or has been. To that frightening new country, the rest of us are Arizona. We are here to be jeered and loathed. We are necessary only to pay for the unsustainable Change.

That, however, is not supposed to be the social contract, not for most of us. We don’t aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine. Arizona suits us just fine. And while the Alinskyites know they need us to underwrite their utopia, we will eventually figure out that we don’t need them to govern -- and bankrupt -- us.

A nation is a big, bumptious thing. It needn’t agree on everything. It can even bitterly disagree on major things. But to be a nation, a People, it has to agree that it has a shared destiny: that its unique culture, core principles, and independence are worth preserving, protecting, and defending.

I didn’t see a shared destiny during those moments in the People’s House Thursday. I saw Democrats cheering for Mexico’s attack on Arizona. It was a catastrophe.

— 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, to be published by Encounter Books on May 25.

This month, three members of Congress have been beaten in their bids for reelection -- a Republican senator from Utah, a Democratic congressman from West Virginia, and a Republican-turned-Democratic senator from Pennsylvania. Their records and their curricula vitae are different. But they all have one thing in common: They are members of an appropriations committee.

Like most appropriators, they have based much of their careers on bringing money to their states and districts. There is an old saying on Capitol Hill that there are three parties -- Democrats, Republicans, and appropriators. One reason that it has been hard to hold down government spending is that appropriators of both parties have an institutional and political interest in spending.

Their defeats are an indication that spending is not popular this year. So is the decision, shocking to many Democrats, of House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to retire after a career of 41 years. Obey maintains that the vigorous campaign of a young Republican in his district didn’t prompt his decision. But his retirement is evidence that, suddenly this year, pork is not kosher.

It has long been a maxim of political scientists that American voters are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. That is another way of saying that they tend to oppose government spending in the abstract but tend to favor spending on particular programs. It’s another explanation of why the culture of appropriators continued to thrive after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

In the past, rebellions against fiscal policy have concentrated on taxes rather than spending. In the 1970s, when inflation was pushing voters into higher tax brackets, tax revolts broke out in California and spread east. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were popular, but spending cuts did not follow. Bill Clinton’s tax increases led to the Republican takeover and to tax cuts at both the federal and state levels, but spending boomed under George W. Bush.

The rebellion against the fiscal policies of the Obama Democrats, in contrast, is concentrated on spending. The tea-party movement began with Rick Santelli’s rant in February 2009, long before the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2011.

What we are seeing is a spontaneous rush of previously inactive citizens into political activity, a movement symbolized but not limited to the tea-party movement, in response to the vast increases in federal spending that began with the TARP legislation in fall 2008 and accelerated with the Obama Democrats’ stimulus-package, budget, and health-care bills.




The tea-party folk are focusing on something real. Federal spending is rising from about 21 percent to about 25 percent of gross domestic product -- a huge increase in historic terms -- and the national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of gross domestic product within a decade. That is a bigger increase than anything since World War II.

Now the political scientists’ maxim seems out of date. The Democrat who won the Pennsylvania 12 special election opposed the Democrats’ health-care law and cap-and-trade bills. The tea-party-loving Republican who won the Senate nomination in Kentucky jumped out to a big lead. The defeat of the three appropriators, who between them have served 76 years in Congress (and whose fathers served another 42), is the canary that stopped singing in the coal mine.

Will Republicans come forward with a bold plan to roll back government spending? The natural instinct of politicians is to avoid anything bold. The British Conservatives faced this question before the election this month. When Britain was prosperous, they promised no cuts at all. When recession hit, they were skittish about proposing cuts and mostly unspecific when they did.

That may have been why they fell short on May 6 of the absolute majority they expected. Now they’re in a coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats, who proposed more cuts, and the cuts they’ve announced have been widely popular. Boldness seems to work where skittishness did not.

Unlike the Conservatives, Republicans have no elected party leader. But House Republicans like Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Peter Roskam are setting up websites to solicit voters’ proposals for spending cuts, while Paul Ryan has set out a long-term road map toward fiscal probity. Worthy first steps. I think voters are demanding a specific plan to roll back Democrats’ spending. Republicans need to supply it.

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

I know that the issue of color-coding the states is over and done with in America: The left-leaning states are the “blue” states, and the right-leaning ones are the “red” states. But it still irks me. I mean, how in the heck did the lefties end up blue while the righties ended up red? For ages and ages, the color of conservatism has been blue; and for ages and ages, the color of -- well, I don’t want to sound McCarthyite. But you know what I’m talking about.

I was reminded of all this -- a re-irking took place -- when I was perusing the British press. In The Spectator, Toby Young talked about coming out Conservative: “By remaining closeted for so long I have been tacitly accepting that society is right to disapprove of people like me. After all, if I didn’t think that being blue was something to be ashamed of, why keep quiet about it?” And in Standpoint, Douglas Murray quoted the phrase “blue-on-blue fire,” meaning intra-Conservative sniping.

But conservatives here in America are stuck being known as red. The other week, I was interviewing the former governor of Maryland, Bob Ehrlich, who referred to his state as “the bluest of the blue.” It just seems so wrong. You know that wonderful Gershwin song “Blue, Blue, Blue”?

Last month, President Obama said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” That was the kind of attitude I grew up with. Actually, Obama put the point pretty mildly. I heard such things as, “No one should make that much money. It’s obscene.” The underlying assumption was always that, if someone was making a lot of money, it meant that someone else was making less money, as a result. This is kindergarten economics: but it persists in some adults.

At a certain point is your company too big? Do you have too many franchises? Are you making too many widgets? Are you employing too many people? What is “enough” money: enough to live like the Obamas (I mean, pre-White House, and pre-Senate)? When people start talking about how much money is “enough” money, watch out -- especially when those people run governments.

Above, I quoted something I often heard: “No one should make that much money. It’s obscene.” Just so you know, “obscene” was always the word associated with wealth: “He’s obscenely rich,” “He makes so much money, it’s obscene.” If I had a buck for every time I heard someone say that -- I’d be obscenely rich!

Several months ago, a dear friend of National Review in Wisconsin wrote me and said, “Watch the congressional race in the 7th District. David Obey has been there forever, but he’s beatable. There’s this excellent new Republican named Sean Duffy. He’s a world lumberjack champion. Extremely interesting guy. Weird year. Duffy could win.”

I thought “Hmmm,” and tucked that note away. (Remember the rap song “Things That Make You Go ‘Hmmm’”?) And I thought of that note when reading, a couple of weeks ago, that Obey was dropping out of the race. Amazing. To heck with November: I wish the country could vote now.

You know Sen. Bob Bennett, the Utah Republican who has been pushed aside by more sparky conservatives? You know all the good press -- good liberal press -- that Bennett is getting now? About how sensible and decent and patriotic he is? Such an admirable legislator? Do you remember Bennett’s ever getting such press, before he was upended by his fellow conservatives in Utah?

I don’t either.

Rand Paul, the Republican senatorial nominee in Kentucky, is being asked to distance himself from his father Ron, or to disavow some of his father’s views. This reminds me of the election of 2000, particularly the Republican presidential primaries: when Gov. George W. Bush was repeatedly asked, or invited, to put distance between himself and his father, particularly on tax policy. (For example, he was invited to criticize Bush 41’s 1990 budget deal.) W. bristlingly refused to do it. Everyone knew, or most people knew, he was more anti-tax than his father, or regarded the 1990 deal as a mistake. But he was damned if he was going to say so. He would not knock his father for political gain.

Rand Paul, if only as a matter of manners, should not be asked to put distance between himself and his father. You should not really ask a son to do that, is my opinion. (We can all think of exceptions.)

For his first foreign trip, David Cameron went to Paris. I wish he had come to Washington, to America. But then, I’m a special-relationship-ist.



Since the swearing in of the apparently Anglophobic Obama, the special relationship -- I suppose I should use quotes: “special relationship” -- has been called into question. That’s on both sides of the Atlantic. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Miami Republican, sponsored a resolution that passed the House on May 12. It recognized the special relationship and did several other things as well. For example, it expressed appreciation for the enduring influence of Britain on America. And it honored the British fallen in the Afghan and Iraq wars.

On the floor of the House, as in the resolution itself, Diaz-Balart quoted Churchill, who said on becoming an honorary citizen of the U.S., “In this century of storm and tragedy I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands. Nor has our partnership any exclusive nature: the Atlantic community is a dream that can well be fulfilled to the detriment of none and to the enduring benefit and honour of the great democracies.” Diaz-Balart then said, “During the most trying times in the history of the United States, we have had no truer friend than the United Kingdom.”

I find it interesting that it took a Cuban-born congressman to hail and affirm the Anglo-Saxon inheritance. If you’d like to see that resolution -- which is worth reading in full, I think -- go here.

So, I saw that Saadi Gadhafi, one of the Libyan dictator’s boys, is big into movies. He is backing some Hollywood project to the tune of $100 million. He can afford it: According to the article I read, he’s a billionaire. How’d he get the money? Did he come up with some kick-a** software? Some sort of miracle diet?

Oh, yeah . . .

By the way, the article I read described the movie mogul’s dad as “one of the Middle East’s most notorious figures.” “Notorious,” huh? How should we describe Pol Pot? “One of Southeast Asia’s most notorious figures”? I’ll say. An old friend and I once described Pol Pot as “the Wade Boggs of genocidal dictators”: He hit for average. Something like a fifth of the population -- more than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao ever did.

But listen, we must treat Moammar Gadhafi with respect: He has just won a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, you know. The one W. left, and Obama rejoined. Great.

I quote from an Associated Press report:

The youngest climber to reach the peak of Mount Everest hugged his tearful companions and told them he loved them. Then 13-year-old Jordan Romero took the satellite phone and called his mom.

“He says, ‘Mom, I’m calling you from the top of the world,’” a giddy Leigh Anne Drake told The Associated Press from California, where she had been watching her son’s progress minute by minute on a GPS tracker online.

“There were lots of tears and ‘I love you! I love you!’” Drake said. “I just told him to get his butt back home.”

I’m touched and all, but I don’t think I really understand today’s phones. This kid can call his mom from the top of Mount Everest? And I can barely hear my mom when I’m in Central Park and she’s in Michigan? Criminy.

Feel like a little language? I’ve written several times about a touchy issue in American politics: “Democrat” as an adjective. “Democrat wars,” Bob Dole notoriously said, in his vice-presidential debate with Mondale. GWB uses “Democrat” as an adjective. So do some Democrats (in the West, I think). And I was quite interested to learn something in the British press: that Nick Clegg talks about “Liberal Democrat values.”

Hmmm . . .

A little music? For a piece published in (New York’s) City Arts, go here. I cover the farewell recital in Carnegie Hall of Frederica von Stade, the American mezzo-soprano. And an all-Stravinsky concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Valery Gergiev.

End with a little reader mail? Okay. Here’s one:

Dear Mr Nordlinger,

I saw the hissing you’ve described a few times for the first time as I was watching C-SPAN recently.  Man, was it was disturbing. There was something really evil about it, I felt. Anyway, where does the phenomenon originate?

Dunno -- Eden?

And I loved a sentence in this letter -- you’ll see:

One of my favorite profs studied at UConn under Herbert Marcuse. Even stormed the Dean’s office. He has mellowed nicely since, and is a great historiographer. (You should have seen his face at the end of our French Revolution seminar, when every single student saw the revolution negatively! One said so eloquently, “After taking this course, I want to drive to Hilton Head and kiss the Atlantic for keeping that crap away from us.”)

Adore it. Thank you, dear readers!

 

 

‘Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business,” Pres. Calvin Coolidge told journalists in March 1929.

If Coolidge suddenly sprang to life today, he would look around and drop dead.

Washington Democrats are minding their own business#...#and everyone else’s. In this Era of Unlimited Government, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats stick their snouts anywhere they will fit, without the guidance of common sense, frugality, or any sense of priorities. For today’s federal government, it’s everything, all the time.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) has moved to cap ATM fees at 50 cents per transaction. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of money machines has exploded from about 227,000 to 425,000 nationwide, reports CNNMoney.com. Independent operators spend $9,000 to $50,000 to purchase each ATM and $12,000 to $15,000 annually to operate it. If Congress slaps price controls on ATM transactions, these businesses will shrivel -- perhaps fatally. And then who will install and maintain ATMs?

Harkin should ask himself this: Do ATM owners put pistols to consumers’ heads so they will withdraw cash? Nope. May consumers use their own banks’ ATMs for free or cheap, shop with credit cards, or pay with checks? Yup. So, would Tom Harkin kindly keep his nostrils to himself?

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing so-called “net neutrality.” Although the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on April 6 that this agency has no jurisdiction over the Internet, FCCniks want to regulate cyberspace via the Communications Act of 1934, which was adopted to oversee telephones. The Internet does not pollute. It does not keep ten-year-olds busy making shoes or force people to transmit e-mails, purchase plane tickets online, or locate lovers with a mouse click. So, why can’t the FCC back off and enjoy some Internet pornography, as did 28 on-duty Securities and Exchange Commission staffers? (None was fired.) Instead, Democrats want to eclipse one of this economy’s few glimmers of sunlight. This is net brutality.

In a February 2001 interview with Chicago public-radio station WBEZ, law professor Cass Sunstein prophesied how such e-rules could go beyond technical issues like bandwidth. Sunstein suggested that “if you are reading a conservative magazine, they would provide a link to a liberal site and vice versa, just to make it easy for people to get access to competing views.”

Sunstein also proposed that websites include randomly selected links to one or more of the Internet’s top 25 websites.

“The best would be for this to be done voluntarily,” Sunstein added. “But the word ‘voluntary’ is a little complicated. Sometimes people don’t do what’s best for our society unless Congress holds hearings or unless the public demands it. And the idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort#...#but to have that as an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better.”
  
Sunstein is on leave from Harvard Law School. This frees him to wield his ultimate weapon as President Obama’s “regulatory czar.”




Precisely 3,006 pages of new federal rules (including a Final Environmental Impact Statement spanning 1,775 pages) require automakers to boost car mileage 37 percent by 2016, at an estimated $51.5 billion reengineering cost. That year, Csaba Csere calculates in June’s Car and Driver, these standards will boost an average vehicle’s price by $926.

As if nosing around cash machines, computers, and cars were not enough, Washington Democrats wants to control everyone’s salt intake. The federal Institute of Medicine last month urged the Food and Drug Administration to limit how much salt restaurants and manufacturers can add to food products. The Institute hopes “to do so in a gradual way that will assure that food remains flavorful to the consumer.” How thoughtful. Of course, Americans who find bureaucratically correct entrees bland will reach for their salt shakers and counteract this entire enterprise. So, why not just skip it?

Of course, unlimited government means new taxes.

Congress is considering a $220 billion “tax extenders” bill through which Democrats would increase from 15 percent to 35 percent the tax on private-equity and hedge-fund profits, confiscating $26 billion. This is in addition to a new 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on interest and dividend proceeds on incomes exceeding $250,000. Democrats also plan a $10 billion crude-oil tax. Expect fewer deals and pricier gasoline.

As if from a ruptured pipeline, Washington continues to gush taxpayer dollars.
 
Greece soiled its national balance sheet, so European bankers and the International Monetary Fund raced to the rescue. Given America’s 17 percent share of the IMF, Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) estimates that exhausted U.S. taxpayers will pay $6.8 billion of the IMF’s $40 billion bailout of this Greek tragedy.

The Education Department requested $26 billion in emergency funds on May 13, supposedly to prevent 300,000 teacher layoffs. This is atop last year’s $100 billion in stimulus spending for school districts -- including $48 billion to prevent teacher layoffs.

Meanwhile, Obamacare -- essentially Disney World for federal busybodies -- will require $115 billion more than advertised in March. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if lawmakers appropriate all of this legislation’s promised spending, its price will leap from $938 billion to $1.053 trillion, an anticipated 12.5 percent cost overrun just six weeks after enactment.

About the only budget cut Obama has managed is a $53.2 million, 25 percent slash in New York City’s counterterrorism funding, unveiled eleven days after the Pakistani Taliban successfully sent terror suspect Faisal Shahzad to Times Square to park a car bomb just outside The Lion King. For Obama, New Yorkers seem valuable enough to milk for votes and campaign cash. But when it comes to stopping radical-Muslim terrorists who want Gothamites dead, Obama prefers to finance his teachers’-union allies.

This potentially lethal slice of fiscal restraint aside, Democratic Washington is like a fire-ant colony beside which the American taxpayer is tied, bare-legged, to a tree. The ants keep coming by the thousands -- hungry, angry, and in constant motion.

-- Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com.

When Sarah Palin speaks, liberal feminists go wild. The woman is like a stilettoed catalyst for backlash from the professional political sisterhood.

Much of the bitterness that gushes forth from the lefty sisterhood has very little to do with Palin herself. It’s about the things she represents. She’s a seemingly happy mom, surrounded by her husband and a big family. Pro-life, religious, conservative. Political powerhouse. Depending on who you are and what your gripe or wound is, you can add  to and subtract from this list.

A recent source of feminist madness over Palin was a speech she delivered at a Susan B. Anthony List fundraiser in Washington, D.C. The group supports candidates who are pro-life. They do so in the tradition of America’s early feminists, who were pro-life. The Susan B. Anthony List and groups like it, such as Feminists for Life, educate and promote the largely forgotten or otherwise suppressed history of the women who fought for the 19th Amendment. They were smart women, at home with their femininity and perplexed by those who would deny the very power of life within them. They didn’t all have to be mothers to have an appreciation for the difference that creative force of nature makes in a woman’s life.

In many ways, the women among the tea-party activists of today -- identified by Palin as part of a “mom awakening” going on -- would be quite at home with their foremothers. If polls I’ve seen and rallies I’ve attended are any indication, they’re pro-life and sensible. They’ve seen the pain that the last few decades of social radicalism have wrought. They’re a danger to the feminist establishment.

In her speech, Palin talked about “a new revival of that original feminism of Susan B. Anthony.” She said, “Together, we’re showing young women that being pro-life is in keeping with the best traditions of the women’s movement.”

Palin talked about “empowering women.” In her worldview, that means making sure women who are pregnant in “less-than-ideal circumstances” know that they have options. She talked beautifully about her son Trig and the beautiful challenge of raising a son with Down syndrome.

As the former governor of Alaska tends to do, Palin rallied the crowd about the future and their role in it. Referring to the recent health-care debate and the disappointment so many so-called pro-life Democrats turned out to be, Palin talked about a “new pro-life, pro-woman majority [that] will actually be pro-life when it counts, when those votes are needed.”



And so, for days after, there was the usual march of anti-Palin derision. On the Washington Post’s website, two Anthony aficionadi explained that “Sarah Palin is no Susan B. Anthony.” Underwhelmingly, they criticized Palin for not providing enough footnotes in her speech to prove that Anthony cared all that much about abortion. They repeated the bogus conventional assumption that to oppose legal abortion is to want to throw women in jail, something, they point out, that Susan B. Anthony didn’t want to do. Well, Susan B. Anthony is in the mainstream of the pro-life movement on that point, too.

I know the pro-life movement, and I can assure you that the mainstream is not waiting for the day they can lock up women. They want to save lives and heal pain. They want moral, constitutional laws. Somehow I don’t picture Sarah Palin leading the march from Planned Parenthood to the slammer.

As they worked to demonstrate that Anthony was indifferent on abortion and an enemy of Palin, the Palin critics managed to conveniently skip over the other suffragettes and their writings, newspapers, and letters. Take the letter Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Julia Ward Howe in 1873, in which she explained that, “when we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” They dismiss anonymous editorials in The Revolution, the newspaper Anthony was intimately involved with. But, in doing so, modern feminists ignore the attitudes that were a natural part of the activism for which these women are most well-known -- attitudes that are truly reflective of so many pro-life groups today, including the much-derided Catholic Church and evangelical activists who, for decades now, have labored to keep the fight a fight.

One respondent to Palin argued that “her usual rhetoric extolling the values and importance of freedoms doesn’t extend to women.” In the rhetoric and reality of the liberal feminist movement, freedom doesn’t extend to the unborn child. But, more and more, Americans are not tolerating this. In the tradition of the suffragettes, women, increasingly, will have none of it.

And so I understand why women of the Left react early and often to Palin. It’s not about her, it’s about the threat to their power she represents. They’ve based so much of their political activism on the tenets of the sexual revolution, which have been a disaster for women, men, children, and families. But the jig is up. It didn’t fly with the likes of Anthony and Stanton, and, for a growing number of women, it’s not flying now. As human nature itself makes clear, it’s not the pro-lifers who went rogue in the first place.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com.

Barack Obama’s remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago’s Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley’s bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health-care “reform” and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”

Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Even if Americans don’t get the message, the rest of the world does. This week’s pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the “loss” of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was “one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination.” Really? Evidently it never captured Obama’s imagination, because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: “one of those moments” -- you know, like Princess Di’s wedding, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, whatever -- “that captured the world’s imagination.”

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite -- that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don’t even need an “imagination.” Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassas and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Va. In the old days, you needed an “imagination” to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism, the sight of Pearl’s severed head is a mere click away.



And the rest of “the world”? Most gave a shrug of indifference. And far too many found the reality of Pearl’s death too uncomfortable and chose to take refuge in the same kind of delusional pap as Obama. The president is only the latest Western liberal to try to hammer Daniel Pearl’s box into a round hole. Before him, it was Michael Winterbottom in his film A Mighty Heart: As Pearl’s longtime colleague Asra Nomani wrote, “Danny himself had been cut from his own story.” Or, as Paramount’s promotional department put it, “Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero. Win a trip to the Bahamas!” Where you’re highly unlikely to be kidnapped and beheaded! (Although, in the event that you are, please check the liability-waiver box at the foot of the entry form.)

The latest appropriation is that his “loss” “reminded us of how valuable a free press is.” It was nothing to do with “freedom of the press.” By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl’s murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi.” But Obama’s not the kind to take “guilty” for an answer, so he’s arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.

Listen to his killer’s words: “The American Jew Daniel Pearl.” We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent’s Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl’s kidnappers: Killing him would be “a major blunder#...#the best way of ensuring that the suffering” -- of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians -- “goes unrecorded.” Other journalists peddled a similar line: If you release Danny, he’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out, “bridge the misconceptions.” But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that’s a misconception.

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims from Kenneth Bigley, whose last words were that “Tony Blair has not done enough for me,” to Fabrizzio Quattrocchi, who yanked off his hood, yelled “I will show you how an Italian dies!” and ruined the movie for his jihadist videographers. By that time, both men understood what it meant to be in a windowless room with a camera and a man holding a scimitar. But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, U.S.A.”

He didn’t have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That’s all President Obama owed him -- to do the same.

I mentioned last week the attorney general’s peculiar insistence that “radical Islam” was nothing to do with the Times Square bomber, the Pantybomber, the Fort Hood killer. Just a lot of moments “capturing the world’s imagination.” For now, the jihadists seem to have ceased cutting our heads off. Listening to Obama and Eric Holder, perhaps they’ve figured out there’s nothing much up there anyway.

-- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn.

Alleged Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was presented to a judge this past Tuesday, after being held in custody, incommunicado from everyone except his interrogators, for two weeks. According to reports, the interrogators included federal prosecutors and agents from Manhattan, as well as members of the president’s newly minted High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG).

Infamously, the HIG was not deployed by the Obama administration to question underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab back in December -- because (unbeknownst to the recently resigned director of national intelligence Dennis Blair) it did not actually exist yet, even though it had been announced with fanfare late last summer.

This time, the administration sprang into action much more spryly, taking its lead from Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, and others in law enforcement who prioritize public safety over safely covering their butts. Shahzad’s two weeks in custody without appearing before a judge is almost unprecedented and reflects the interrogators’ determination to get intelligence about other plots and prevent future attacks. Had the prosecutors followed the usual criminal-justice playbook, Shahzad would have been presented to a judge and given a lawyer as soon as possible after arrest, or at most 24 or 48 hours after arrest -- even though he waived his rights to appear before a judge and have a lawyer. Instead, the prosecutors accepted Shahzad’s waivers so that his interrogation would not be disrupted, informing a judge during the interrogation that “uninterrupted access [to Shahzad] has been, and continues to be, extremely beneficial, if not essential, to the investigation.”

The interrogation has produced results, including raids of possible co-conspirators, search warrants, and overseas arrests of Shahzad’s bomb trainers, and it has made us safer. As we wrote last week, the prosecutors handling Shahzad deserve our praise and gratitude for taking the risk of a judge’s rebuke to gain knowledge about Shahzad’s co-conspirators.

But there remains the chance that a court might suppress Shahzad’s statements so they cannot be used against him at trial. The court might decide, essentially, that Shahzad’s two weeks in custody without appearing before a judge or getting a lawyer were so inherently coercive that his waivers should not be accepted as “knowing and voluntary.”




In addition, the prosecutors themselves, and even high-level officials in Washington, could personally face lawsuits from Shahzad if a bill sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter in the Senate or a similar one by Rep. Jerrold Nadler in the House becomes law. Congressman Nadler’s bill will be considered by the House Judiciary Committee as early as next week and could hit the floor not long thereafter.

These bills would overturn the Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, and also its 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly. In these cases, the Court announced that in federal civil lawsuits, the plaintiff’s case may not go forward unless he presents facts and legal arguments that are plausible. And that the judge should use his or her judicial experience and common sense to help decide the facts’ and arguments’ plausibility. That’s it.

Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler want judges to be prohibited from throwing out any case unless, as Nadler’s bill spells out, “it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of the claim which would entitle the plaintiff to relief.” Just in case any judge might dare to ask whether a claim is plausible, the bill would put a quick stop to that: “A court shall not dismiss a complaint#...#on the basis of a determination by the judge that the factual contents of the complaint do not show the plaintiff’s claim to be plausible or are insufficient to warrant a reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.” These bills would radically redefine well-settled law and lower the bar for lawsuits. No wonder the bills are opposed by the United States Judicial Conference, the principal policymaking body for the administration of the federal courts, and even Democrats such as Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia.

Why does this standard matter to the prosecutors and other officials investigating Shahzad? Look no farther than the Ashcroft v. Iqbal decision that Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler want to eviscerate. The plaintiff, Javaid Iqbal, was a Pakistani citizen and Muslim picked up in the large-scale FBI sweeps of illegal immigrants and other immigrants of interest in the tense months immediately following 9/11. Iqbal was arrested on criminal charges of identification fraud but detained as a person of high interest because of his suspected ties to terrorism. He was held under restrictive conditions, including 23-hour lockdown (he spent the remaining hour each day outside his cell, but in handcuffs and leg irons). Eventually, Iqbal pleaded guilty to the identification-fraud charges, served time in prison, and was deported to Pakistan.




From Pakistan, Iqbal filed a lawsuit against the federal officials and corrections officers who, he believed, were responsible for his detention as a person of high interest. Iqbal alleged that he was abused by guards, and that high-level law-enforcement officials such as former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller had ordered him detained not because they thought he might be a terrorist, but because of his race, religion, or national origin, in violation of his constitutional rights. In other words, his only “sin” was being a Muslim from Pakistan.

The lower courts permitted Iqbal’s lawsuit against Ashcroft and Mueller to go forward. The first court applied the same standard that Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler vouch for: “It cannot be said that there [is] no set of facts on which [Iqbal] would be entitled to relief as against [Ashcroft and Mueller].” The appellate court modified this a bit but nonetheless found that the case should go forward because this was not a context in which an assessment of “plausibility” was needed.

The Supreme Court reversed the lower courts, dismissing the case. In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy explicitly and repeatedly relied on the plausibility standard -- and found it implausible that Ashcroft and Mueller had been driven by anti-Muslim animus to order the sweeps that picked up Iqbal. He concluded, along with four of his fellow justices, that it was far more plausible that Ashcroft and Mueller were motivated by their goal of finding other terrorists and stopping future attacks. “It should come as no surprise,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the [9/11] attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.” The Justice found no more convincing Iqbal’s assertion that he was subjected to 23-hour lockdowns and other restrictions because he was Muslim: “The complaint does not show, or even intimate, that [Ashcroft and Mueller] purposefully housed detainees in [restrictive conditions] due to their race, religion, or national origin. All it plausibly suggests is that the Nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal should comfort the officials, prosecutors, and law-enforcement officers who held Shahzad for two weeks without bringing him before a judge. Now that Shahzad has a lawyer, he may come after them for allegedly violating his rights. He could even make claims similar to Iqbal’s -- for example, that the prosecutors took the extraordinary step of detaining him for two weeks without presentment or a lawyer because of his religion, race, or national origin (he is a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin).




Such a claim sounds implausible, of course. But the perversity of the bills sponsored by Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler is that plausibility would not matter in the slightest. Can it be said there is no set of facts that could support Shahzad’s claim, the pleading standard they insist on? Like the lower courts in Ashcroft v. Iqbal who allowed Iqbal’s case against Ashcroft and Mueller to go forward before the Supreme Court intervened, a federal judge in Manhattan might conclude that Shahzad’s claim -- no matter how implausible -- is not impossible.

It is bad for law enforcement and worse for national security to have prosecutors, agents, police officers, and policymakers constantly looking over their shoulders, and to worry that they will be sued on the flimsiest of grounds. Permitting implausible but not impossible lawsuits to go forward, as Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler propose, will have the effect of making the people entrusted with protecting us more risk-averse and less creative in doing their jobs. As Justice Kennedy put it, our officials “must be neither deterred nor distracted from the vigorous performance of their duties” by baseless lawsuits.

Would we be better off if the prosecutors and agents in Manhattan had played it safe and presented Shahzad to a court within hours of his arrest and given him a lawyer? We know the prosecutors’ answer. According to their letter [PDF] to the judge in Manhattan, they feared that interrupting the interrogation in this manner could have compromised their investigation of other plots or attacks Shahzad knew about.

To be fair, Senator Specter and Congressman Nadler are not driven by a desire to deter or distract our national security and law enforcement professionals. Rather, their bills do the bidding of plaintiffs’ lawyers, big campaign contributors who are eager to see pleading standards lowered across the board so they can more easily sue corporations and other entities with deep pockets. But the unintended consequences would extend beyond dollars and cents, and our nation could end up paying a far higher price.

-- Bill Burck is a former federal prosecutor and deputy counsel to Pres. George W. Bush. Dana Perino is former press secretary to President Bush. Mr. Burck and Ms. Perino are consultants to the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) has uncovered a conspiracy between conservative talk-radio hosts and the gold companies that advertise on their shows. According to Weiner, the conservative talkers scare their listeners into believing that the government under Pres. Barack Obama is headed for insolvency, and that the U.S. dollar is headed for a period of intense instability. This makes the listeners want to invest in gold, which is what the advertisers are selling.

Weiner is only about five months late to this party. Prompted by Ken Vogel’s reporting in Politico, MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann and Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert have been on the case since last December, respectively ranting and making (admittedly funny) jokes about the symbiotic relationship between conservative talk radio and retail gold companies such as Goldline International.

But the involvement of a member of Congress adds a disturbing element to the plot. Weiner has issued a formal report condemning Goldline, called on federal agencies to investigate the company, and explicitly accused Beck and others of impropriety in their relationships with Goldline, insinuating -- never proving, of course -- that Beck’s criticism of the administration is at least partially motivated by a desire to scare up business for an advertiser.

“Conservative Pundits Profit on People’s Fear” is the title of one section of Weiner’s report. After listing a number of conservative commentators who are sponsored by Goldline, the report concludes: “The message that these commentators push is that government is out of control and unsafe, inflation will continue to devalue the dollar and that as an investor you should protect yourself by stock piling gold coins.”

For example, one of these right-wing commentators recently said:

When I watch Chairman Bernanke, Secretary Geithner, and Mr. Summers on TV, read speeches written by the Fed governors, observe the “stimulus” black hole, and think about our short-termism and lack of fiscal discipline and political will, my instinct is to want to short the dollar. But then I look at the other major currencies. The Euro, the Yen, and the British Pound might be worse. So, I conclude that picking one [of] these currencies is like choosing my favorite dental procedure. And I decide holding gold is better than holding cash, especially now, where both earn no yield.

Except that wasn’t a right-wing commentator. It was famed investor and self-described liberal David Einhorn, speaking at the Value Investing Congress last fall (average registration rate: around $3,000). It turns out that while conservative talkers such as Beck are speaking loudly and angrily (and advertisers like Goldline are offering their listeners small, retail forms of protection), Democratic donors are silently making huge bets predicated on their being right.   

Granddaddy Dem donor George Soros recently doubled the size of his gold holdings, which now represent 7.5 percent of his $8.8 billion fund. Former Goldmanite Eric Mindich, head of the hedge fund Eton Park, has invested over 4 percent of his fund in gold. Mindich doled out around $94,000 in political contributions in 2008, all to Democrats. John Paulson, the investor who became famous for shorting the housing market and, more recently, for being named in the SEC’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, started a separate fund devoted just to gold investments. Paulson is another major donor to Democrats.



A Weiner spokesman tells National Review Online that the congressman has never said that investors shouldn’t use gold as a hedge against inflation or instability. His problem is with Goldline International and other retail gold companies that sell gold coins at significant mark-ups over the coins’ “melt value.”

The companies respond to this charge by arguing that the gold content of the coins is only part of their overall value. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order making it illegal for Americans to own more than $100 worth of gold, with the exception of gold coins “having a recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coin.” Gold retailers such as Goldline argue that part of what makes their coins valuable is that, in the event that this administration or a future one adopted a similar measure, the owners of these coins could argue that they are collectibles.

Weiner does not offer a satisfactory rebuttal. The report states that Roosevelt’s executive order “did not define special value or collector value,” implying (I guess) that Goldline’s coins might or might not meet that definition. But on the very same page, Weiner argues that Goldline’s coins are not a good investment because the IRS taxes them at the 28 percent rate that applies to collectibles, rather than the 15 percent rate that applies to stocks, bonds, and real estate. So Goldline’s coins are not worth the mark-up, because the government probably wouldn’t consider them collectibles. And they’re also a bad investment -- because the government taxes them as collectibles.

This is not to say that I personally think Goldline’s coins are a great investment. I own gold the way Soros and Paulson do, through the SPDR Gold Trust. (What’s the saying -- vote Right, live Left?) But this isn’t exactly a risk-free proposition, either. Put aside for the moment the obvious, which is that all these conservative commentators and all these liberal hedge-fund guys could be 100 percent wrong (hey, it’s happened before): Hard-core gold lovers love to denigrate what they call “paper gold,” the idea being that, in a crisis, an exchange-traded fund would be more vulnerable to chaos and instability than personally owned physical gold. Also, some people just like to collect gold coins for their own reasons.

One way to look at this is as a typical liberal nanny-state intervention. Busybody Democrat with too much free time wants to tell you what to buy -- news at eleven. But there is a darker possibility here, one foreshadowed by government bans on short-selling and denunciations of those seeking insurance policies against widespread sovereign defaults as greedy “wolf packs” bent on destroying the global economy. Weiner’s report is a tinny echo of these broader crackdowns, an attempt to delegitimize dissent by painting it as something motivated by profits instead of patriotism. Glenn Beck and others are trying to sound, for the nation’s small-dollar savers (what few we have left), the same alarm bell that the nation’s large-dollar money managers have evidently heard loud and clear. That’s not against the law -- yet.

-- Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.

Friends, welcome to the third and last installment of these notes from our recent cruise in Portugal -- and when I say “our,” I mean National Review’s. “Are you a magazine or a cruise line?” someone once asked, not too politely. We are a magazine that lives it up on a cruise once or twice a year. For Parts I and II of this journal, go here and here.

Where did we leave off? I think I was talking about Paul Johnson, the great historian, essayist, and critic who is one of our guest speakers on this ship. In our final session, which is about the future -- of America, of Britain, of the world, etc. -- I ask him about the future of art. One of his points: “There will always be a craving for beauty.”

You know what American politician he really, really loves? Sarah Palin. Thinks the world of her. I think I know why: Paul Johnson loves America -- appreciates America, understands America -- to a very unusual degree. He loves America as much as anyone I have ever known. And Palin is very, very American. You might even say classically American, or hyper-American. (The same is true of George W. Bush, who is a favorite of Johnson’s, as Johnson is a favorite of his.)

In one session, Rich Lowry and I are talking American politics. And, at the end, we take a little survey of the room -- on preferences for the ’12 Republican nominee. When we get to Palin, Johnson puts both of his hands up, high. That’s enthusiasm. That’s support.

But remember, only stupid people support Palin or enthuse over her. You’ve heard that over and over, right? Paul Johnson must be quite the stupe. What’d he ever write, anyway? What does he know about liberal democracy: what makes it tick, what it needs to survive and thrive?

One night, onboard, there is a Portuguese troupe -- a fado troupe. I think to myself, “This is the Portuguese version of Preservation Hall.” Before a mandolin player beings to sing, someone -- a fellow member of the troupe -- puts a black cape over him, with ceremonial solemnity. When the player ceases to sing, returning to the role of player, alone, the black cape is removed.

At dinner in a monastery one night, I have a jerk moment, I’m afraid. I’ll report it to you, because it’s kind of fun. A diner asks, “Did you read that review in National Review of George Gilder’s book on Israel?” I say, “Not only did I read it, I wrote it!” I am reminded of an eternal truth: Normal people -- normal readers (i.e., ones who don’t work in the journalism business) -- don’t look at bylines. Who cares who wrote the articles? We’re only interested in whether we’re interested in the articles.

Years ago, a colleague told me that his mother had enthused to him about a piece in a magazine or newspaper, on a topic he would appreciate. He himself had written it.

When we arrive in Porto -- Portugal’s second city (after Lisbon, of course) -- Pope Benedict XVI does as well. He is conducting mass in the central square. The atmosphere in town reminds me of a college-football Saturday. I don’t mean to be profane here, I promise you, but it does. I come from a town where college-football Saturdays are huge: Ann Arbor, Mich. (The town is a strange mixture of leftism, jockomania, and normalcy.)

Many streets are blocked off. People park far away, and then walk. They have come from far and wide. They are united in their purpose, and their enthusiasm. They wave pennants and sport buttons. Vendors hawk these items. And so on. The only thing missing is tailgating -- plus drunkenness. College football is nothing without drunkenness, right?

Everyone says that Portuguese people are exceptionally friendly, and everyone is right. I hate to generalize, or condescend, but . . . the Portuguese, I have found, are really pleasant to be around. I need directions from a policeman. He is pleased to show off his English -- which is quite good. I tell him how good it is. He says, “I’m afraid not.” I say, “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I’m afraid not.’” He grins.

I ask him to point me to the river, please. “Do you feel like a swim?” he says. No, I’m simply looking to return to my cruise ship. More grins.



Stop signs everywhere -- all over the world -- say “Stop.” Suppose that Anglo-American civilization tumbles. Just goes belly up. China will be the top dog (or someone else will). Will signs saying “Stop” be thought of as a relic, or souvenir, from the age of Anglo-American dominance? “Oh, the word ‘Stop’ comes from English. It used to be the lingua franca of the world, you know. Hard to believe now, huh?”

Shudders . . .

On the shores of the river as far as it runs, men fish -- men, boys, women, and girls fish. (Mainly men and boys.) I wish I could take pleasure in fishing. Those who do, really do. I am almost envious of people’s love of fishing. They seem like the most content people in the world.

Mind if I go back to Paul Johnson for a second? One afternoon, talking about America, he says there are three institutions we’d be much better off without - three institutions without which the country would be healthier, wiser, and more progressive: Hollywood, Harvard, and the New York Times. Have to say, I’m with him on the first and the third of those; Harvard, I think we can keep.

In our group, as we cruise the Douro, we have two pairs of top-notch dancers: Kim Ruska and Steve Warshawsky, and Margarita and Ron Farmer. There may well be other couples, but I’ve only noticed those two. Man, can they dance: the cha-cha, the rumba, the jitterbug, what have you. It’s like watching professionals. You -- or at least I -- can only look on, admire, and applaud.

We have regular cruisers who come from La Crosse, Wis. Boy, do they love the Packers; man, do they not love the Vikings. In any case, they have ten children, some of whom come, too. Eight are true-blue conservatives; the oldest and the youngest are liberals. Well, you can’t win ’em all. Also, one son-in-law -- whom we have met on a previous cruise -- is a Minnesotan and a devoted Viking fan. Agony. From the ten children come 30 grandchildren. At dinner one night, I ask the patriarch about the college tuitions he paid. He says that, from the ten kids, he paid for 58 years of higher ed: college and grad school. Fifty-eight years.

Great stuff. Great family.

Another night, at another dinner, I sit next to maybe the youngest person on the ship -- just out of college, I think. Not sure. I ask whether she has enjoyed the cruise. Very much, she says. What has she liked best? I ask. The Portuguese countryside, the vineyards? She answers, “The people on the ship, without a doubt. Mingling with them, getting to know them. They are really nice and fun and interesting.”

You know, most everyone says that. Another cruiser says to me, “You’ve gotten me where I can’t travel any other way. I don’t want to go on a vacation without National Review people. It seems to me a waste of time.”

Care to see a few cruisers? Okay, here’s a snap: of Janet, Mike, and Kim. (Photo used without permission -- like all the photos in this journal. My apologies to the people involved, and to the wildflowers as well.) Just so you know, Mike’s mother sometimes still calls him “Little Mike.” And he is a great storyteller -- earthier than Paul Johnson or David Pryce-Jones, maybe, but great.

Let’s wind this baby up (or is it down?). In the Porto airport, the TSA workers -- or whatever they’re called here -- look like fashion models. They’re also a little nicer -- a lot nicer -- than the ones I’m used to, back in the dear old U.S.A. One girl -- am I allowed to say “girl”? -- looks like she stepped out of a Pedro Almodóvar movie. (Wrong country, I know.)

Right country: In the Barcelona airport, I see, and use, escalators that are not staircases but ramps. Escalating ramps. I’m pretty much the last to notice these, right?

The personnel in the airport, especially on the phone, say “Vale” constantly: “Vale, vale,” “Okay, okay, fine, fine.” Vale, vale. Vale, vale . . .

A passenger wears a jacket that says “Junta de Andalucia” -- kind of interesting to see “junta” used in a non-condemnatory, neutral way!

In due course (as WFB would say), I arrive in Oslo, which, as I write, I’m departing. I’ll scribble you a journal about things Norwegian sometime soon. Thanks, guys, and see you.