April 2012

Best email of the day:

Pat Sajak says get rid of the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

A report issued last week by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) finds that the average tax burden on income in the United States has been declining in recent years, in sharp contrast to the trend in the other OECD countries. Naturally, progressives have been quick to…

Pete Hegseth, a 31-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran and the former director of Vets for Freedom, may be the GOP’s best chance to defeat Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota’s first-term Democratic senator. But he first has to win the endorsement of the state Republican party.

Marc Thiessen, writing in the Washington Post:

At a press conference with the prime minister of Japan this afternoon, President Obama said that Americans haven't excessively celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden, and suggested that Mitt Romney would not have made the decision to kill the terrorist mastermind.

According to Politico, the Obama campaign's new video, titled "Forward," may in fact prefigure a new Obama campaign slogan.

Republican congressman Allen West of Florida took to his Facebook page to criticize Washington, D.C. culture, after attending this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner over the weekend:

Osama bin Laden was killed by an elite group of Navy Seals one year ago this week. And bin Laden’s files, a massive trove captured in his Abbottabad, Pakistan safe house, have been the subject of various articles since. Now, the Obama administration has reportedly decided to release “some” of the…

Seth Jones, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

The father of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the historian and Zionist Benzion Netanyahu, died this morning. He was 102 years old.

The Wall Street Journal reports that President Obama is getting ready to raise possibly $10 million dollars at a single campaign event at George Clooney's home: 

The Obama campaign has released a new web ad that lists every apparent accomplishment of the president's three years in office. The seven minute spot begins by showing how bad the economy was when the president took office, and suggests that President Obama saved America with the stimulus, the auto…

Back when the expression “longhair music” evoked Handel, not Hendrix, William Mann made history as the first “serious” scribe to give a well-manicured thumbs-up to the Fab Four. On December 27, 1963, the Times of London critic declared in his column that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were “the…

On Friday, March 9, an Oregon jury reached its verdict in the case of Levy v. Legacy Health System. The jurors deliberated for just six hours before concluding unanimously that the plaintiffs, Ariel and Deborah Levy, had been wronged by the defendant and were due $2.9 million in compensation. The…

A phony peace is unlikely to end much better than a phony war. When the European Central Bank (ECB) poured a total of $1.3 trillion in cheap three-year funding into the continent’s financial institutions, that’s what it got. Sure, it beat the alternative. Lehman part deux was staved off yet again.…

"You’re going to Spain with or without your kids?” That was the question friends always asked when I mentioned the upcoming trip. And why not? So much of my social life these days revolves around my children that I regularly receive emails identifying the sender, after the signature and always in…

Since we don’t know what Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, said at the recent confab in Istanbul, we can’t be sure that Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu was right to dismiss the powwow as a “freebie” for Tehran. Also, the Islamic Republic is a theocracy: The most senior officials…

Sixty years ago, on April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman directed his secretary of commerce, Charles Sawyer, to seize and take over operation of the nation’s steel companies, in order to give steelworkers a wage increase and avert a strike threatening steel production during the Korean War.…

Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cannot claim to be the only world leader to lash out against oil speculators this week. Last Tuesday President Obama used an appearance in the White House Rose Garden to do the same. But Kirchner put her money where her mouth is. She announced she…

The popular Victorian novelist and travel writer Georgiana, Lady Chatterton (1806-1876), describing the bafflement she felt when reading the Bible as a girl, recalled how “one governess considered me unteachable, because I could not say the second Psalm by heart, and especially the verse, ‘Why do…

Here’s how Reuters recently summed up the race for the White House: “The 2012 presidential election is more than six months away, but here is what we know so far: It is going to be close, it is going to be nasty, and the outcome could turn on a series of unpredictable events.” The argument that…

Brookfield, Wisc.

With the Republican nomination now settled, electoral analysts are rolling out their models of voter behavior to predict the outcome of the general election. These “scientific” efforts at prophecy, which have become increasingly elaborate and arcane, boil down in the end to gauging voters’…

"Republican leaders urge candidate truce on social issues” was the headline in the Washington Examiner. “Republicans retreat on gay marriage” said another in Politico. The accompanying articles, while in some respects tendentious and a bit misleading, are accurate in relaying a mindset widely…

"It’s called art, dickhead.” So proclaims John D’Agata, a creative writing professor at the University of Iowa, in an email to Jim Fingal, an intern at the Believer magazine assigned to fact-check D’Agata’s article, “What Happens There,” ostensibly a work of nonfiction about a teenager who leaped…

"The value of an industry is inversely proportional to the number of awards it gives itself,” humorist and blogger David Burge recently quipped. Naturally, the occasion for this remark was the announcement of the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes. While the Pulitzer committee did recognize some worthy…

Turmoil in the Middle East has exposed the vulnerabilities of President Barack Obama’s listless foreign policy. As Iran closes in on its nuclear prize and props up Assad’s bloody regime in Syria, the United States has the opportunity to deal a crippling blow to its oldest, most dangerous enemy in…

A classics professor tells his students not to read The Republic because “only those who watch Fox News” read Plato. Another requires students to apply Latin translation assignments to the “terroristic” war policies of George W. Bush. Another professor dissuades black students from venturing into…

The blind, barefoot lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, imprisoned for exposing the morally repugnant practice of forced abortion and sterilization, just evaded one of the world’s most sophisticated state police. It’s a shrewd move: figuring out how to get a sick blind man from his house arrest to Beijing—a…

Bill Maher, the largest donor to President Obama's super PAC, called Mormonism a "cult" on his HBO show last night, and said that donating money to that religion doesn't count as charity because it's "bulls---."

The Young Guns Network, a group affiliated with House Republican majority leader Eric Cantor, is encouraging Democrats in Indiana to vote in the May 8 GOP primary for incumbent senator Dick Lugar. Politico's Maggie Haberman first reported that the YG Network has been sending mailers to Indiana…

Last Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast “Christians of the Holy Land,” by Bob Simon, largely blaming Israel for an exodus of Christians from the Holy Land. The showing coincides with a growing international campaign to portray Israel as anti-Christian, showcasing Palestinian Christians as evidence.

“The world is too much with us,” lamented William Wordsworth over 200 years ago. Lately, American investors, businessmen, policymakers, and workers agree inclined to agree. At least in the case of Europe. Just as our recovery from a deep recession seemed to be gaining momentum, strong headwinds…

Kim Strassel on President Obama's "enemies" list.

Arizona senator John McCain just released the following statement on the Obama campaign's Osama bin Laden campaign ad: 

Fyodor Dostoevsky once purportedly wrote that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.  As many in the mainstream media have reminded us since his April 21 death at age 80, Charles W. Colson first did so in 1973, as President Nixon’s “hatchet man” sent to…

The House of Representatives voted 215-195 to keep federal student loan rates at their current level of 3.4 percent, offsetting the cost by eliminating a $5.9 billion fund created by Obamacare. The Associated Press reports:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has endorsed Richard Mourdock over Dick Lugar for U.S. Senate in Indiana. From her Facebook page:

The men and women who go the hard yards to cover the White House belong to an organization that calls itself the White House Correspondent's Association. This outfit puts on a little soiree every year, where members can decompress after the tortures of being condescended to, hour after hour, by…

The Romney campaign is circulating this good memo, explaining that President Obama hasn't revealed "a clear rationale for running for president." Worth reading, especially to understand the path the Romney campaign is planning to take: 

The Scrapbook has been reading, with great interest and profit, not one but two stellar recent publications of that stellar journal, National Affairs.

Some words and phrases from this Reuters story about the morning's GDP numbers:

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren finds herself in a bit of a quandary. In the mid-90s there was a minor kerfuffle over the lack of diversity on Harvard Law's teaching staff. At the time, 54 of Harvard Law's 71 professors were white males. There was not a single minority female on…

Mitch Daniels, the popular two-term Republican governor of Indiana, has cut another advertisement on behalf of his political mentor, senior Republican senator Dick Lugar. "Our nation faces huge dangers," Daniels says in the 30-second spot. "And it'll take people with his big picture vision and…

Barack Obama's reelection campaign has released a new ad that focuses on the president's decision to go after Osama bin Laden: 

Yesterday the Washington Post inexplicably published a piece about the Vogue profile of Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad—a profile published in March 2011. It’s inexplicable because it’s old news: Vogue removed the story, titled “A Rose in the Desert,” from its website long ago—and the fact that the…

The people at Public Notice have a new, 30-second television ad excoriating the U.S. Senate on the third anniversary since the body last passed a budget. The ad, which will air on D.C.-area broadcasts and on national cable stations on Sunday, urges senators to "stop pointing fingers and start doing…

On Wednesday I argued that only a tiny swath of the actual electorate – maybe 10 percent – will be up for grabs in November. Today, I want to answer the obvious follow-up question: what are these voters thinking?

House Republicans tell Obama to stop misquoting them.

[A] regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, explained in 2010 that he understands the EPA policy to be to "crucify" a few oil and gas companies to get the rest of the industry to comply with the laws. So maybe it is better if the bureaucrats spend their time – and our money…

An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy by Egyptian-born activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East,” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Today Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament drafted a law permitting men to…

Republican Tom Cotton, running to represent Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District, has a new ad out with residents of his native city Dardanelle introducing Cotton to voters. Watch the ad below:

National Journal reports: 

As Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I'm here to help.’” Portland, Oregon, though, really is here to help. The problem is that the city hasn’t created laws to benefit Portlanders—it’s created them to benefit one…

The White House just announced that it will be giving Bob Dylan a Presidential Medal of Freedom:

The president was unaware of further allegations about Secret Service misconduct before reading about in today's newspapers, spokesman Jay Carney said at today's White House briefing. KIRO TV reported this morning that they had interviewed someone who "joined about a dozen Secret Service agents and…

At a bring your kids to work day event at the White House, Michelle Obama said that she isn't interested in running for president. "Absolutely not. No," the first lady said in response to a question from a kid on whether she'll "ever run for president."

American Crossroads has a new ad riffing off the John McCain campaign's popular "Celebrity" ad from the 2008 election. The Crossroads spot juxtaposes President Obama's celebrity status--singing Al Green, calling Kanye West a "jacka--," and appearing on Jimmy Fallon's late-night talk show--with some…

Vice President Joe Biden, who gave a foreign policy speech this morning that attacked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said, "I promise you, the president has a big stick. I promise you."

A new campaign poll released to Poitico shows Republican senator Dick Lugar of Indiana five points behind his primary challenger, state treasurer Richard Mourdock. In the Wenzel Strategies poll, conducted on behalf of the Mourdock campaign, 44 percent of those Hoosier Republicans surveyed said they…

Senator John McCain will take to the Senate floor this morning to blast the Democrats’ “War on Women.” He will call it divisive, saying that “[declaring] phony wars is intended to avoid those hard choices and to escape paying a political price for doing so.” And the former Republican presidential…

The latest Purple Strategies poll finds that, in Florida, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is running slightly ahead of President Barack Obama, 47 percent to 45 percent. Seven percent of the poll's respondents are undecided.

"Independent agencies" occupy an odd corner of American government. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, Federal Communications Commission, and others are nominally "independent" of the president's control—usually thanks to limits on the president's power to…

Steve Hayes, with A.B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Once again, North Korea flouted international law and disturbed the world with its launch of a rocket that could be used to carry a nuclear warhead.  Once again, the United States and the international community denounced the action and mobilized the U.N. Security Council to issue yet another…

Noemie Emery on the plague of Obamacare.

Last week Politico reported that Planned Parenthood was spending big money in a Pennsylvania state house special election. "Most state legislative races and ad campaigns don’t necessarily have any larger resonance, but Democrats have been working to make the ultrasound bill the kind of liability…

Politico reports that the Young Guns Network, "a group affiliated with two former aides to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor," just spent $104,628.00 to support six-term incumbent senator Richard Lugar in his primary battle to hold his seat against state treasurer Richard Mourdock. The money,…

With less than two weeks to go until Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial recall primary, it seems that former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk's labor allies have given up on her. 

On Tuesday, World Wrestling Entertainment sent a letter to the Senate campaign of Chris Shays asking the former Connecticut congressman to publicly apologize for alleging that WWE promotes bullying and violence. Shays contends that these practices reflect on his Republican primary Senate opponent,…

Great relief here at WEEKLY STANDARD HQ after watching last night's Jeopardy!. At a pivotal point in the contest, longtime host Alex Trebek showed a photo accompanied by an answer: "This editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD can also be seen on Fox News Sunday.'"And one of the contestants (who doesn't work…

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Massachusetts running against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, received a 20-year interest-free loan from her employer, Harvard University, in 1996, the Boston Herald reports:

With less than two weeks to go before the May 8 Republican primary, incumbent senator Dick Lugar and Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock are fighting hard with television ads airing across Indiana.

In a recent interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, former Connecticut congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Chris Shays criticized the business of his Republican primary opponent, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon. “Folks in Connecticut are not likely to elect someone whose…

Here's the text of Senator Marco Rubio's foreign policy speech, which he's delivering right now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.: 

Some in the Obama administration are desperate to jumpstart peace negotiations with the Taliban in advance of NATO’s summit in Chicago next month.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) delivered the following remarks today during a hearing on replacing the budget sequester:

"If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition," President Obama said shortly after taking office on February 2, 2009. He was then referring to the economic recovery but, over three years later, the president's words seem prescient.

President Barack Obama sat down with Rolling Stone for an hour long interview, which the editors there are billing the "most substantive interview the president has granted in over a year." The president used the opportunity to single out two conservative Americans for attack.

Food blogger, chef, and bestselling author Michael Ruhlman is once again up in arms (you might recall his previous rant against the anti-fat brigade). This time, a reader poses a dilemma about where to host a post-wedding luncheon considering several guests "have every variation of diet extremism…

An emerging genre in popular commentary on politics is the use of statistical models to predict election results. Once the domain of academics writing for the scholarly journal P.S., it has become very widespread in recent years. And now, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein offers up his own model:

The president is in Boulder, Colorado giving a campaign-style speech at the University of Colorado. Reportedly, on his way to the speech, he decided to stop for a bite at "The Sink ... a divey kind of place that seems more about the beer than the food," according to the the pool report. The report…

Here's the text of Mitt Romney's victory speech, which he's delivering now in Manchester, New Hampshire: 

Orrin Hatch rips into FreedomWorks.

If I ever doubted that reporters crave a good story more than almost anything else, my own reaction to the Alberta election last night would have reminded me of its veracity. Before the polls in the province were even closed, I had begun thinking about how I’d pitch a short piece about it to the…

The Chinese Communist party’s preoccupation with its leadership transition, expected to be made final next fall when Xi Jinping becomes general secretary, should not dissuade the U.S. from making a “strong intervention at the highest level” regarding Tibet, according to Lodi Gyari, who spoke…

Senator Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) is fighting for survival in his contentious Republican primary with state treasurer Richard Mourdock, a conservative with broad Tea Party support. Speaking with reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, Lugar seemed to be unsure about whether or not the Tea Party…

Most administrations are a bit reluctant to pass regulations that anger prominent members of their own party, but President Obama apparently has no qualms doing so. Last week the administration announced the final version of a regulation that will require depository institutions to report interest…

Connoisseurs of tea leaves will note that President Obama, in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day, was very careful to avoid use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. The killings, he explained, were…

At an event at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, President Barack Obama tried to rouse the crowd by asking for an "amen."

Yesterday, the White House’s Atrocities Prevention Board held its first meeting. Chaired by NSC staffer Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the board will “coordinate action across the entire government on stopping genocide and liaise with the NGO…

As we've previously noted, the Spirit of America is a "terrific non-profit [that] supports our troops' efforts on the front lines by supplying materiel they judge will be helpful in accomplishing their mission."

The 2012 Medicare and Social Security trustees’ reports have been released (see here and here). The headline is that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will have insufficient reserves to pay full benefits beginning in 2024 (the same year that was projected in last year’s report).…

As the general election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney begins in earnest, what sort of polls should we observe to get a sense of how the candidates are performing? At Hot Air, blogger Karl argues the most helpful polls to examine right now is Obama's job approval numbers, since, as Sean…

Until last week, Mitt Romney had trouble getting potential voters to care so much that they would crawl over ground glass to get to the polling station and vote for him.  But now, the man and moment may have come together, thanks to employees of the General Services Administration and the Secret…

In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration is grappling with how to handle Islamists, radical adherents to Islam. Particularly, the issue has come to the fore in regards to Egypt, which, as Reuel Marc Gerecht notes, "is now certain" to elect "an Islamist" as its leaders the next time…

How Ann Romney got her campaign spouse groove back.

Bill Kristol, with Joe Trippi, Karl Rove, and Juan Williams, yesterday on Fox News: 

An agreement to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons was not reached at the International Conference in Istanbul. The West came to the conference with no unified strategy or coherent goals because it seems confused about Iran's intentions and strategy. Few asked why Iranian leaders are…

In the Washington Times yesterday, Robert Zubrin marked Earth Day by pointing out how the green movement’s holiday is connected to such horrors around the world as China’s one-child policy:

Robert Zarate, writing in an FPI bulletin: 

The big headline from this weekend’s Utah Republican convention may have been that Senator Orrin Hatch was forced into a GOP primary against challenger Dan Liljenquist. But perhaps the more surprising development was little known Saratoga Springs mayor Mia Love's overwhelming victory at the…

The situation of the Palestinian Authority is grim. Its diplomatic offensive against Israel in the United Nations did not win it statehood, there are no serious negotiations with Israel because the PA refuses them, Hamas controls Gaza, and Palestinian elections keep getting postponed despite the…

The backlash to the backlash over "pink slime" continues: This past weekend in the Washington Post business section, Dina ElBoghdady reported on the consequences resulting from the panic. What is interesting is how it's understood within the piece that, at this juncture, what transpired was an…

Over a decade ago, Joe Loconte profiled Chuck Colson for THE WEEKLY STANDARD:

George Zimmerman, the accused murderer of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, has been released from jail on bail. Meeting Zimmerman's release are calls (on Twitter) for him to be killed. As Twitchy reports, "Twitter lynch mob: George Zimmerman is out on bail? Let’s kill him!"

Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock has a new 60-second radio ad airing in Indiana, which focuses on his GOP primary opponent Dick Lugar's "36 years in Washington" and his record. (Listen to the ad here.)

Former Palestinian intelligence official Muhammad Abu Shahala has reportedly been sentenced to death by the Palestinian Authority for selling a Hebron home to Jews. In response, Jewish officials from the community in Hebron are calling for international officials now to get involved—in order to…

As a constituent of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.), I regretfully offer up my congressman to the country. Residing in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District affords more than 700,000 southeastern Wisconsin citizens the privilege of being represented by Ryan. Those who vote against him every two years…

In today's New York Post, Benjamin Sasse and Charles Hurt report that the White House is again playing politics with Medicare. Obamacare guts Medicare Advantage, the popular market-based program to get Medicare coverage. (And it's very popular -- the program had 5.3 million enrollees in 2003, and…

The New York Times reports on the French elections: 

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a bold stand for religious freedom. In a recent statement, titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the bishops call for repeal of contraception coverage mandated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The clarified position…

Merced, California

There I was, in a posh resort south of Los Angeles, addressing an audience of mostly lawyers. I had arrived a few days early to see some clients and, in the lingo of the aging hippies of nearby Laguna Beach, “chill out” by catching the NCAA semifinals and a Knicks game on Pacific Coast time.

Summer camp! The phrase calls up images of freedom and play: diversions and discoveries, secrets whispered in humid tents, children roaming the woods without getting lost for too long. For the young adults who answered an emergency call for new counselors at a Missouri summer camp in The Inverted…

In the conclusion to Coming Apart, after describing a society that is in even greater disarray (literally, coming apart) than we had supposed, Charles Murray holds out one hope for the future: “a civic Great Awakening.” Previous Great Awakenings in America had been religious. The new awakening…

Does President Obama have the foggiest idea how jobs are created in America? There’s not much evidence he does, beyond lip service to the helpfulness of the private sector.

The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction,…

"Social Darwinism, a popular topic in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” reported the Associated Press on April 5, “is making its way into modern American politics.” The news peg for the story was President Obama’s claim that the House Republican budget is nothing but “thinly veiled Social…

"Our Mona Lisa,” is how Ronald S. Lauder described the portrait he had just paid a record $135 million for in 2006. The shimmering Gustav Klimt painting, destined to become the centerpiece of Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York, depicts Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a wealthy Viennese sugar…

Michael Dirda, a longtime Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan, ascribes his critical abilities to Sherlock Holmes. He still remembers the spell cast on him when, during the 1950s in elementary school, he discovered The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with its cover “depicting a shadowy Something with…

Magic City, a lavish new series on the cable channel Starz, throws Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire into a blender. The resulting mish-mosh has all the attention to costumes and wallpaper and hairstyles you find on Mad Men, all the bad casting of Boardwalk Empire, and all the excessive…

Any hope that the media might fairly and responsibly cover the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin was effectively doomed the moment Al Sharpton descended on Sanford, Florida, and started holding rallies with the victim’s family. Recall that Sharpton once said of Clarence Thomas’s…

While he couldn’t resist exaggerating a little for effect, the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer had a point when he observed that, all too often, great movements “start as a cause, evolve into a business, and end up a racket.” Consider three of the major social crusades that reshaped modern…

Carlsbad, N.M.

In 2008, Barack Obama promised he would put an end to the type of politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism” and he would help us “rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics.”

Soviet history has crystallized in Western memory as a conflict between apparatchiks and heroes. The apparatchiks were ideologically rigid autocrats and pandering toadies, while the heroes—such as Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Sharansky—were the voices of humanity, reverberating until they eventually…

I’m not the first president to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share. Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower…

It’s widely reported that Charles Colson once said he'd walk over his grandmother to get Richard Nixon elected to a second term. In the Nixon White House he was considered smart, effective, and ruthless—Nixon's "hatchet man." Then came Watergate, a prison sentence, and a conversion nearly as…

David Axelrod, a top level campaign adviser to President Barack Obama, seemed to suggest on CNN this morning that so-called "scandals" under Obama aren't really scandals. (Particularly, the question was about the GSA and Secret Services issues.) Axelrod, a Democrat, did however suggest that if…

Paris

An alarming news report from Iran's Press TV, a propaganda arm of the Iranian government, showing American professors gathering in Tehran to discuss the Occupy Wall Street Movement:

Juan Williams reviews Stephanie Deutsch's You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South for the Philanthropy Roundtable:

Good news for those of us who know that only a reformed version of market capitalism can survive current unhappiness with its performance. Citigroup’s shareholders have told their executive employees, and most especially CEO Vikram Pandit, that it is the owners of the business, not their hired…

New tone: Mitt Romney is an extremist!

The Department of Defense announced on Thursday that two Guantanamo detainees had been transferred to El Salvador. The DoD did not name them in its press release, but the New York Times identified the men as two Uighurs (Muslims from western China): Abdul Razak and Ahmed Mohamed. 

Among Barack Obama's newly released list of campaign bundlers is Mark Gilbert of Boca Raton, Florida. Gilbert, who is listed among those who have raised more than $500,000 for the president's reelection effort, is the father of Dani Gilbert, the recently appointed Jewish outreach aide to Democratic…

In a Sunday story in the New York Times, former congressman Patrick Kennedy alleged "quid pro quo" access to the White House. After telling the Times it's "how this business works,” Kennedy said, "If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine."

Barack Obama's reelection campaign has released the most recent list of names of fundraising bundlers. On that list is Jon Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey and embattled money man, the former head of MF Global: 

The National Organization for Women, a feminist group, announced a new initiative: "Enough Rush," a campaign against radio host Rush Limbaugh. The effort is designed to reignite the short-lived furor over apparently disparaging jokes Limbaugh made on his show earlier this year about feminist…

Yesterday, Jay Cost discussed President Obama’s problem with independents, noting that Obama started to lose independents by the truckload when the debate over Obamacare heated up and “has never won [them] back.”  Today, a new Quinnipiac poll further highlights the extent of the trouble that Obama…

It's been a good week for Republican House candidate Tom Cotton. Cotton, a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced earlier this week that he had raised $350,000 for the first quarter, far outraising his Republican opponents running in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional…

As the United States and other members of the P5+1 commence negotiations with Iran, it is worth recalling the classic analysis of Iran’s negotiating style sent in from the U.S. embassy in Tehran on August 13, 1979. The author of the cable, political counselor Victor Tomseth, and the man who…

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated President Obama’s August 2011 demand that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad step down. However, neither explained how this…

Lawrence Pitts, provost of the University of California, writes this letter to the editor in response to Charlotte Allen's “Boondoggle U.,” which appeared in the most recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD:

The New York Times reports: 

Matt Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon:

The conventional wisdom in American politics is that Democrats win poor voters, Republicans win the rich, and the two sides battle over the middle class. That used to be true – indeed, that was basically the case during the earliest Whig-Democratic battles in the 1830s and 1840s, and the…

Last week, a federal judge in Washington issued a truly extraordinary opinion. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, went out of her way to challenge one of bedrock achievements of the 20th Century liberal legal establishment: the de-emphasis of economic…

The 411,618 square foot Solyndra building in Fremont, California has been put on the market:

A new poll says young people now split on Obama.

On MSNBC Thursday, Senator Jon Tester (D-Mont.) was asked whether President Barack Obama being at the top of the ticket in November would be a "drag" on Tester's reelection chances. Watch the video below:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes about the similarities between President Obama’s campaign message and that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection message. Henninger argues that Obama won’t be nearly so successful as FDR was in championing a big government…

Wauwatosa, Wisc.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a pro-traditional marriage organization, alleges that confidential tax forms were either leaked or stolen from the IRS and illegally distributed by its opponents to the media. 

President Obama likes to say that a strong America abroad rests on a strong America at home. What he and his administration continue to ignore, however, is that a prosperous America at home has in no small way rested for decades on America’s global military preeminence.  

Sadly, Levon Helm – the drummer for the Band – died this afternoon at age 71. A terrible day for music fans everywhere, indeed. But let’s stop to appreciate Helm's great influence on American music.

Well, actually, Democrat Elizabeth Warren can't do this all by herself.  But she can propose this carve out which, fortuitously, works to the advantage of her state—Massachusetts—where, she writes:

As I mentioned yesterday, northwest of Salzburg is a picturesque little town called F—g. And while Austrians obviously know what that word means in English, it doesn't mean it in German (that word would be ficken). So nobody seemed to be bothered by the town's name during its early existence.…

Here's the text of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's powerful Holocaust Remembrance Day speech to his countrymen. Worth reading.

Texas governor Rick Perry has endorsed his lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, in the latter's Republican primary for U.S. Senate. "David's been a loyal supporter of mine, and I, in turn, am a loyal supporter of him and his task to become the next United States senator," Perry said in an interview…

Democratic senator Jim Webb, who is retiring after the election, said yesterday morning that Obamacare "cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader." The Washington Post reports:

The future of Iran’s nuclear weapons program depends on one of those strange alignments of justice and personal gain that create eclipses and flood tides when planetary bodies are the actors.  It’s important that the world understand these strange circumstances.

Bill Kristol, with Kirsten Powers and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Sean Trende has an important column that connects presidential job approval to reelection results. You really should read the whole thing, but here is the big take home point:

R.I.P. Olda Cerny, Czech freedom fighter.

For the first time, Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock leads incumbent senator Dick Lugar in a Republican primary poll, 42 percent to 41 percent. The poll, commissioned by the Mourdock campaign, was conducted on April 16 and 17. The Indiana primary is on May 8, less than two weeks away.

Rock 'n' roll may be here to stay, but the impresarios who brought it to us are only human. Bill Graham of Fillmore fame was killed in a helicopter crash in 1991. The two Dons, Kirshner of Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and Cornelius of Soul Train, died recently in their mid-seventies. Now, the…

The staff of Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) sends along this photo of the committee's meeting today:

A clown and mindreader stood in front of Senate office buildings, passing out their resumes to employees of the Government Services Administration (GSA), who were on Capitol Hill to testify, and asking the embattled government bureaucrats for jobs.

I don't know why GOP candidates haven't made more out of the ongoing investigation into the Fast and Furious scandal, but it looks like Ted Cruz, who's running for a Senate seat in Texas, is looking to make an issue out of it:

White House spokesman Jay Carney reacted to the publication of photos in the Los Angeles Times of U.S. soldiers posing with corpses in Afghanistan by  saying the Obama administration is "disappointed.. [with] the decision to publish two years after the incident," according to a pool report.

Maureen Dowd weighs in today to decry the "Phony Mommy Wars" over Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's attack on Ann Romney. I know what you're thinking: If anyone is qualified to call a cancer-survivor "phony" for her decision to stay at home and raise five boys—it's the author of Are Men…

Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, published a study last week about the disastrous effect of Obamacare on the budget deficit--in direct contrast to claims by the Obama administration (supported by the Congressional Budget Office) that the law would reduce the…

The cost of President Obama is $5,027,761,476,484.56 (so far!), according to CNS News:

No budget, just now, says Senator Conrad. The timing isn't right.

A key feature of the negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear program is doublespeak. To be more precise, you’ll notice that Iranian officials offer different accounts of what they are--and are not--willing to consider. Moreover, the meaning behind their words is often left obscure. 

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Zwara, Libya


Blue Dog Democrats, 1995-2012?

The Democratic firm PPP polls four Wisconsin state senate recall elections and finds Republicans above 50 percent and leading their Democratic opponents by double digits in three races: 

Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) indicated late Monday he was prepared to hold a markup on a budget proposal Wednesday afternoon. But at a press conference in the Capitol on Tuesday, Conrad said tomorrow would only be “the beginning of a markup” and that a vote on the budget…

Michelle Obama made a remarkable claim when talking up her husband, President Barack Obama, at a campaign event earlier today in Nashville, Tennessee.

Yesterday, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue released data showing that the property tax bill for the median home in the state had decreased for the first time in over a decade. While Governor Scott Walker was heralding the news, the two leading Democrats vying to replace him in the June 5 recall…

Retiring Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent Democrat, did not rule out supporting his friend from across the aisle, former Republican congressman Chris Shays, in the Senate race to replace himself.

From failing European economies to staggering murder rates in Central America, there’s no shortage of crises on the agenda as the International Monetary Fund holds its annual spring meeting in Washington this week. Of all the problems within the IMF’s purview, however, the ongoing economic…

Twenty years have passed since the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia at the beginning of March 1992. Bosnian independence came after Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia had left Yugoslavia in 1991. Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav dictator, proclaimed Serbian…

Republican Senate candidates in Texas, Indiana, and Connecticut are fighting back against primary opponents with new ads.

In the great tradition of its middle column stories, this morning's Wall Street Journal features a hilarious tale out of the Pentagon involving the purported portrait of Ensign Chuck Hord, "Lost at Sea 1908." Until recently the framed picture of the dashing young Annapolis grad was hanging in the C…

Madison, Wisc.

In times past, government "service" was the career choice for people who didn't really believe in fun. Or had never had much practice at it, anyway. The federal bureaucrat, back then, dressed gray and thought in columns of figures. The kind with many, many zeroes. Washington, D.C., in those days,…

According to an AP story, President Obama, who is feeling the pressure on gasoline prices, has a plan for action which comes down to the usual, instinctive reaction of those in political power who find themselves frustrated by events in the real world. Namely ... prosecute somebody. Or threaten to,…

National Journal reports:

Christian Heinze reports on the latest Monmouth University, showing that New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie remains popular at home: 

The Senate rejected the so-called Buffett Rule on Monday evening. Fifty-one senators voted in favor the tax increase on high-income owners, officially called the Paying A Fair Share Act, while 45 voted against it. But the Buffett Rule failed to get the necessary 60 votes to invoke cloture and end…

"Obama's Cognitive Dissonance."

[img nocaption float="center" width="640" height="386" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]17909[/img]

Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse admitted on the Senate floor that the aim of the so-called Buffett Rule "is not to lower the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline":

In February, Public Policy Polling found Wisconsin governor Scott Walker trailing Milwaukee's Democratic mayor Tom Barrett by 3 points (46 percent to 49 percent). But a new PPP poll conducted for the liberal website Daily Kos shows that Walker has retaken the lead:

The Obama administration set forth its demands of Iran in advance of this past weekend’s negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. The New York Times reported on April 7 (emphasis added):

With independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman retiring from the Senate after four terms, do Connecticut Republicans have a shot at the seat in 2012? Republicans Linda McMahon and Chris Shays think so.

On March 20, Armenian defense minister Seyran Ohanyan visited Washington, D.C. Talks focused on U.S. defense assistance to the small republic, and regional issues were also discussed, but there is no evidence that Ohanyan’s U.S. counterpart, Leon Panetta, raised the question of Armenia’s excessive…

Democratic National Committee chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been called on to release her personal income tax returns. The request was made by her congressional opponent, Republican Karen Harrington of Florida.

On Sunday, insurgents launched a series of coordinated attacks on Western embassies in Kabul, as well as other targets throughout Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s interior minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, said that at least two detained terrorists – one captured in Kabul, the other in Jalalabad – have…

Tim Tebow attended a Yankees game last night at the Stadium (if you are a Yankees fan, there is only one "stadium") where the fans booed him. This, despite the fact that he was wearing a Yankees cap and did not, so far as the news stories go, take a knee or quote scripture or throw a wounded duck…

How do you indicate a character in a film is a villain? In these politically correct times, you can't just note he comes from a country whose leaders have declared "Death to America." It wouldn't work simply to make him a capitalist: Steve Jobs, who made pretty things, is different from Jeff Bezos,…

Following almost daily coups de théâtre after the Malian junior officers’ coup d’etat of March 22 led by Capt. Amadou Sanogo, indications of the political evolution of the shaken West African country and of the possible military repercussions of the past weeks’ events are being voiced in Bamako.

The chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas (who is also president of the Palestinian Authority), has drafted a letter to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for delivery this week.  What is apparently the current state of the draft is published by Times of Israel, a terrific new web site about…

Here's video from Homs, documenting yet more violations of the Kofi Annan-brokered Syrian ceasefire that the Obama administration is celebrating:

There's a profile of the late Andrew Breitbart in the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section by reporter David Carr. Carr's a talented and fair journalist, by Times standards, and the piece is mostly fair enough. But in the middle of it is this striking sentence, or rather this striking parenthesis:

Access to the Obama White House is in direct correlation to the amount of money donated to the president's reelection effort and the Democratic party, the New York Times reports today.

One hundred years ago, on the evening of April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg. A few hours later, on April 15, the great ship went down, taking the lives of 1,514 people.

The largest donor to President Obama's super PAC blasted Ann Romney, the wife of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, last night on his HBO TV show for having "never gotten her a-- out of the house to work."

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan sought a ceasefire in Syria between forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. The Obama administration insists that the ceasefire is holding. "What we saw in the last day or so was a very fragile truce emerge, a very fragile first step," State…

In addition to remembrances of James Q. Wilson written by Christopher DeMuth, Harvey Mansfield, Jeremy Rabkin, and the boss, we recommend reading this one, by James Piereson in the New Criterion:

We’re all in this together. The globalized economy, that is. We Americans worry that the eurozone crisis has returned, and will abort our fragile recovery, while Europeans worry that America’s none-too-robust economy and its weak dollar will make it difficult for EU export industries. America’s…

Scott Brown's "brew-haha."

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Steve Hayes notes what will be missing in this weekend’s attempted negotiations with Iran: a serious discussion of Iran’s broad sponsorship of terrorism, particularly against American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Politico reported yesterday that American Action Network, a 501c(4) group founded by former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), is buying up ad time on Indianapolis television to run ads against Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock. Mourdock a Republican Senate candidate challenging incumbent…

President Obama and the Democratic party sure are fighting wars on many fronts. NBC reports that "the Obama campaign is calling on Mitt Romney to release his -- as well as those going back several years."

From a talk TWS contributor Geoffrey Norman gave a couple years ago, in which he explained Thomas Jefferson, the Southerner, to a room full of Vermonters:

Evidently, neither of the all or nothing alternatives so furiously argued yesterday in a major battle between the stay-at-homes vs. the working moms. According to the most recent polling data I could find, most women would, unsurprisingly, prefer something of a compromise:

President Obama has implied that he himself would pay more under the Buffett Rule--and that he supports it anyway. But according to tax returns released today by the White House, the Obamas wouldn't have to pay higher taxes under the Buffett Rule.

President Obama and Vice President Biden released their tax returns today, ahead of Tax Day, which is on April 17 this year (since April 15 falls on a Sunday and Monday is a Washington, D.C. holiday).

Steve Hayes, writing in the Wall Street Journal: 

Rasmussen reports:

Fox News reports on its latest national poll: 

Last week, foreign press outlets ran a story that deserves to receive a lot more attention in America. Documents captured in Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan compound reportedly show that the terror master helped plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

Matt Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon:  

Zeke Miller reports, "At Easter Egg Roll event, the ball-player-in-chief missed four of five 3-pointers, but you'll only see the one basket Obama made in the White House's video recap of the week." Miller's post is titled, "White House Scrubs Obama's Missed 3-Pointers In Weekly Video."

Karl Rove had a spot-on column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. He wrote, in part:

I, and every conservative I know, have been eagerly polite, warmly encouraging to women who chose to work—from the very beginning, from the 1970s or ‘80s, when working women first changed the national landscape.    

Introspection with John Edwards.

President Obama, during an interview with St. Louis's KMOV, was hammered for "jetting around, [taking] different vacations and so forth, sometimes ... under the color of state business." The interviewer, Larry Conners, suggested even that folks "get frustrated, even angered" seeing the president…

Writing at BuzzFeed, my colleague James Kirchick informs readers that famed New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh once opined that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy “might have been some justice.” Kennedy had plotted to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. So, in Hersh’s view, it is…

Ahead of the president’s trip to the Summit of the Americas this weekend, Gallup reports that Latin America is losing faith in President Obama. Specifically, the Gallup shows that only 24 percent of respondents in Latin American countries now believe Obama will strengthen ties between Latin America…

In just the last few months, Bidzina Ivanishvili, one of the world's richest men with an estimated $6.5 billion fortune, hired a small army of PR consultants and lobbyists in Washington, including at least 7 of Washington’s most prominent firms. And though Ivanishvili built his business empire in…

Did U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz try to "rig" the next Texas Republican primary debate? That's what opponent Craig James is claiming.

White House spokesman Jay Carney played down Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's White House visits by saying, "I know three women, personally, named Hilary Rosen."

[Y]ou know what he wanted? Hot dogs! You know what they make those things out of, Chet? You know? Lips and a—holes!

Madison, Wisc.

NBC New York reports: 

Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock makes an appearance in a new TV ad criticizing his Republican Senate primary opponent, incumbent senator Dick Lugar. Mourdock says Lugar "left behind his conservative Hoosier values" when he went to Washington. Watch the ad below:

Madison, Wisc.

A cynic would be tempted to compare the eurozone to Ryou-Un Mara, the rusty Japanese ghost ship that floated across the Pacific after last year’s earthquake. Some wrecks surprise us by staying afloat for a long time, but that does not make them less of a wreck.

Fred Barnes, writing in the Wall Street Journal: 

Madison, Wisc.

Sean Trende wrote an important column yesterday connecting presidential job approval to reelection results. You really should read the whole thing, but here is the big take home point.

Experts: "Strong men more likely to vote Conservative."

Via Daniel Foster, a new Quinnipiac poll shows that Chris Christie's approval rating has hit an all-time high of 59 percent: 

Hillary Clinton sides with Palestinians over Republicans, Sara Sorcher of National Journal reports: 

It might not inspire much confidence CIA looking for 

The Romney campaign is none too happy with PolitiFact at the moment, issuing a blistering response to a recent fact checking item on a campaign talking point. As a response to Democrats' "war on women" rehetoric, the presumed GOP presidential nominee's press secretary pointed out that under Obama's…

In a grim footnote to the ongoing human tragedy in Syria, the country's cultural heritage as well as its civilian population is now in peril. Syria, a center of civilization in the ancient and medieval eras, boasts some of the finest archaeological sites in the near east, notably the old cities of…

Allen West created an apparent controversy when he stated at a Florida event, "I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party." Democrats decried West's comment--and even the Communist Party USA slammed the Florida congressman. 

“Look, I want folks to get rich in this country,” Mr. Obama said. “I think it’s wonderful when people are successful. That’s part of the American dream.”—New York Times

White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest calls today, "A busy day of tax fairness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." What that means is, President Obama is using today to talk about raising taxes, just as the tax filing deadline approaches.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative offer these suggestions for what President Obama should be doing in Syria: 

Tom Cotton, a Republican candidate for Congress in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District, raised over $350,000 in the first quarter of fundraising, his campaign announced today. Cotton, who is running for the seat held by retiring Democrat Mike Ross, squares off with fellow Republican candidates…

Yesterday, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll seemed to confirm the meme that Barack Obama is pummeling Mitt Romney among women, helping the former open up a 7-point lead in the general election horse race.

Yuval Levin on Obamacare and the deficit.

Conservative leader Gary Bauer, who endorsed Rick Santorum earlier in the year, did a good job of summing up the former Pennsylvania senator's presidential run.

Newt Gingrich is using Rick Santorum's announcement that the former Pennsylvania senator is suspending his presidential campaign to make a last ditch effort at becoming the Republican nominee--by drawing a contrast with front runner Mitt Romney.

Moments after Rick Santorum finished his speech announcing that he was suspending his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney issued a statement to "Congratulate Senator Santorum on the Campaign He Ran."

"Paul Ryan Claims Secret Democratic Support" reads the headline of a new report at Buzzfeed:

Fox News just reported that Rick Santorum will, in a few moments, announce that he is suspending his presidential campaign. His announcement is taking place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

President Obama is traveling to Florida today to tout the so-called Buffett Rule, as well as to raise money from people who would have to pay more taxes under that same rule. The president's proposal "asks everyone to pay their fair share" of taxes, according to the White House. In other words:…

President Obama is in Florida to tout his economic policy of raising taxes on the wealthy. But first he's holding a fundraiser. And it seems that many in the Palm Beach Gardens gated community, where the fundraiser is being held, are excited to see the president.

“This is the last time this person talks about politics.”

The Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee will release this chart later today, clearly showing that America's debt is greater than the combined debt of the entire Eurozone and the U.K.:

Last year, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD I discussed the growing number of existential threats to unions. One of the major challenges facing unions is that their multi-employer pension plans are deep in the hole, and the problems were being masked by accounting standards that allowed them…

Last year, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD I discussed the growing number of existential threats to unions. One of the major challenges facing unions is that their multi-employer pension plans are deep in the hole, and the problems were being masked by accounting standards that allowed them…

The death toll in Syria continues to climb. The AP reports that, in just over a week, 1,000 people have been killed by Syrian government forces, according to the main opposition group there:

Over the next ten years, Obamacare will add more than $340 billion to the federal deficit, according to a new study reported on by the Washington Post: 

It looked so easy when the bipartisan JOBS Act cleared the Senate (73-26) and the House (380-41) and was signed into law by President Obama last week. But passage of a strong bill wasn’t a snap. Only the maneuvering of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell kept the measure from being delayed,…

Facebook makes a big purchase.

Republican senator Orrin Hatch, a Mormon from Utah, said that President Obama and his campaign will try to use Mitt Romney's religion against the presidential candidate. “You watch, they’re going to throw the Mormon church at him like you can’t believe it,” Hatch reportedly predicted.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that an aide to DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Dani Gilbert, who is doing Jewish outreach for the Democrats, had Facebook postings that referenced "Jewbags." Now, after being asked about these postings, the DNC chair is sticking with her aide.

Robert Samuelson has a strong column today on how one of the biggest obstacles to Social Security reform might be psychological. Though FDR's original vision for the program was a "contributory pension plan" and most Americans are still under the the impression that this is what it is, the reality…

If you are a first-time winner of one of the four professional golf tournaments that are considered “majors,” then you will inevitably be asked, “Is this a dream come true?” 

A new poll from Rasmussen shows approval for the Supreme Court among Americans has risen since the Court held its high-profile hearings on Obamacare two weeks ago. According to the poll, which was taken on April 6 and 7, 41 percent of likely voters rate the Court's work as "good" or "excellent,"…

Reuters reports: 

Walter Russell Mead, writing in the Wall Street Journal: 

The politicization of intelligence by the Obama administration continues apace. 

In 2001, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill famously coined the acronym “BRIC” to describe four of the world’s most populous countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—each of which boasted great economic potential. Since then, China has enjoyed breakneck GDP growth while making very little…

http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20120409/APC010405/204090426/Falk-Barrett-face-fight-recall-election?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

With a month left before Indiana's Republican primary, incumbent senator Dick Lugar is facing more negative ads from two important conservative advocacy groups.

The Hill reports: 

When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sought a court ruling declaring SeaWorld’s killer whales “slaves” under the 13th Amendment, the nation got a badly needed chuckle. PETA argued that because the amendment doesn’t specify that its terms apply only to human beings—“Neither…

President Obama didn’t intend the world to hear him tell outgoing Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d have “more flexibility” to accommodate the Kremlin’s concerns about missile defense and other issues after the election in November. But as his now infamous meeting with Medvedev in Seoul…

We’ve had some fun with space policy in the 2012 presidential race. Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show, candidate debates, and other forms of low comedy had us all laughing at Newt Gingrich’s proposal for moon statehood. Ron Paul said, “I think we should send some politicians up there.” So it…

The conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential race, among most political professionals and especially Republican campaign operatives, has been this: Reelection efforts are all about the incumbent. This incumbent is beatable. President Obama’s job approval rating, for the last couple of years,…

Since the publication in 1978 of Allen Weinstein’s definitive Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, only partisans of the far left have continued to insist that Alger Hiss was innocent. They see him as a framed-up New Dealer who was painted by Republicans as a patsy through which they could indict…

Humor plays an extraordinary role in everyday life. The traditional Martian observer might marvel at our craving for the incapacitating, nonproductive seizures known as laughter. Many major philosophers have proposed an account of it—an expression of superiority (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes), the…

It would be tempting to describe Hilton Kramer, who died last week at 84, as the last of his breed, his kind: the cultural mandarin who, perched near the top of the totem pole, issued pronouncements on arts and letters with the confidence and erudition of, say, an Edmund Wilson or John Ruskin.

A

History’s greatest novelist has not received the definitive scholarly biography he deserves. Why not? I put this question to Joseph Frank of Stanford, the author of a celebrated five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky, but even Frank admits he has “no simple answer” to the question. Perhaps, he…

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean​ — ​armed with nothing more than a camera, a flashbulb, and a police-band receiver. Before Law & Order, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, and the “eight million stories” of Jules Dassin’s Naked City, there was the wandering eye of Usher…

George Kennan, the celebrated architect of U.S. Cold War doctrine, called arms control policy during the 1920s and 1930s a species of wishful thinking and a vapid distraction from the serious business of responding to the international threats that culminated in World War II. Contemporary U.S. arms…

All the Republican presidential candidates have called for repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act. Foreign governments are sending delegations to Washington to complain about the act’s Volcker Rule. Eighteen months after the legislation was signed into law, the president had to make a clearly…

Brooklyn

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey is getting an appetite for political controversy. 

No wonder that the movie version of the surpassingly strange young-adult novel The Hunger Games is an enormous hit and bids fair to become the most important cultural phenomenon of 2012. The thing is gripping as hell, with a profoundly intense central performance by Jennifer Lawrence that has the…

Every month I get a prescription for a Lipitor generic filled at my local pharmacy. I also get a prescription for another medication, but I don’t want to go into that. Each month, when I report to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, the person manning the counter asks my name, and I dutifully…

He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book​—​difficult but popular​—​a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no…

A month before President Obama signed Obama-care into law, his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, said, “I think the president remains committed to the notion that we have to have a comprehensive approach, because the pieces of the puzzle are too closely tied to one…

Surely Comedy Central’s The Daily Show meant well when it sent comedian John Oliver all the way to Africa to file a report savaging the United States for defunding the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Describing UNESCO as “an organization that helps people in need…

No, not that kind of "recovering" (thank God), but the actor, comedian, and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Larry Miller spent the last few days in the hospital after suffering a head injury, falling outside (of all places) a bar in Los Angeles on April 3. His rep told Hollywood.com, "It was…

In the latest turn of events in the decade-long war on terror, U.S. counter-terrorism policy in Africa was dealt a blow – or an opportunity – with the declaration of independence of the Azawad, the territory claimed by the Tuareg tribes of northern Mali.

It is no easy thing to peer through the fog of recent economic data. Confidence that the economic recovery would accelerate ran into a not-so-good job report Friday. To the chagrin of the president’s reelection campaign team, only 121,000 workers were added to private sector payrolls in March, far…

Charles Krauthammer: "Obama v. SCOTUS."

The latest chart from the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, showing that under President Obama's budget plan, debt would be $73,000 per American in 2022:

The White House sent out an email earlier today reminding folks that "President Obama created the Federal Taxpayer Receipt." (Previously, the White House promoted this very thing last year.)

On the jobs report, Jim Pethokoukis writes:

Under secretary for political affairs Wendy Sherman’s visit to Nepal this week is a praiseworthy sign of American concern about affairs in that nation wedged between Tibet and India. 

The latest taunt in the world of playground politics seems to be “Social Darwinist.”  Which, if you don’t know what it means, would be the theory that the toughest do not merely survive, but prevail, and deservedly so.

President Obama told the Women's Economic Forum that he had waited for the women in the room, who he had been told were "creating havoc," to settle down before addressing the group: 

Via Yahoo news:

Matt Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon:

Many commentators have expressed outrage over the president criticizing Paul Ryan and demagoguing the Supreme Court. Personally, I can't muster outrage. I think it's just a sorry spectacle.

In 2010, President Barack Obama praised the work ethic of GSA administrator Martha Johnson:

In an increasingly contentious Connecticut Senate primary, Republicans Linda McMahon and Chris Shays are arguing that each is a better fiscal conservative than the other. In a new blog post, the McMahon campaign says Shays, a former congressman, has a similar record on spending and debt as the…

Earlier this week we wrote that the chairman of the Joints of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, had “provoked a public confrontation” with House Budget Committee leader Rep. Paul Ryan. It appeared that Dempsey had made a grievous error by claiming that Ryan had “called [the JCS], collectively, liars.” 

Governor Bobby Jindal brings hope and change to the education system in Louisiana. The AP reports: 

President Obama has earned much criticism for preemptively challenging the Supreme Court's authority to strike down Obamacare's individual mandate. And deservedly so; his glib ignorance of constitutional history deserves a firm response.

Former White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein gave some advice on running "clean energy" firms in Las Vegas today and admitted that these sorts of ventures don't actually create many jobs.

The latest chart from the Senate Republican Budget Committee, pointing out that under President Obama's budget, the U.S. government will be spending more in 2019 to pay the interest on the national debt than it will be to defend America:

In April 2009, four months after taking office, President Obama wooed Latin American leaders and liberal elites at the Summit of the Americas by apologizing for decades of U.S. foreign policy and promising a new era of cooperation. Obama said:

New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie is touring Israel this week, visiting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. But right now he's gone north, visiting the Golan Heights for a security briefing and a tour.

Steve Hayes, with Mara Liasson and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Berlin

The Miami Herald's Marc Caputo reports that Florida congressman Connie Mack IV, a candidate for the GOP nomination for Senate in 2012, called the budget recently passed by the House of Representatives a "joke."

With Democrats defending 23 of the 33 Senate seats up for election in November, the opportunities for Republican pickups abound. Although Republicans will play defense in Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, they will almost certainly make gains in North Dakota and Nebraska. Republicans have good…

Lee Smith: "Who Leaked Israeli Iran Plan? Some analysts say the White House leaked details of Israel’s alleged attack plan to discourage the Jewish state. Others call the idea ‘absurd.’"

The latest Republican National Committee web ad, titled "Same Tired Rhetoric," shows that President Obama keeps saying the same thing over (and over!) again:

Adam Kredo reports that a New York Times journalist equated Israel with Iran:

Yesterday, President Obama said, “We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner. Right? So we’re going back to the…

A decade ago I found myself in a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, being given a tour of the local soccer stadium by the town’s mayor. During the tour he evinced great pride in their community’s support for the team despite the fact that it had not won a championship since the 1950s—the…

Terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), credited with being instrumental in al Qaeda carrying out the 9/11 attacks, will be tried along with other high-level terrorists by a military commission, the Defense Department announced today. The arraignment will take place "at [the] Naval…

Last week, President Obama clumsily announced that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down "a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." This week, his words are already having an effect in the courts—but not the effect he hoped…

President Obama hosted a pre-Easter prayer breakfast at the White House this morning with members of his administration and clergymen. Prominent breakfast attendees included Rev. Al Sharpton, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and Rev. Julius Scruggs. White House aides told the press pooler at the breakfast…

Six-term Republican senator Dick Lugar is seeking a seventh, but he’s been facing his toughest primary challenge in decades. His opponent, state treasurer Richard Mourdock, charges that Lugar isn’t conservative enough and is  “Obama’s favorite Republican”—a play on Lugar’s early reputation as…

Mitt Romney's latest campaign ad says that President Obama's "attack machine" is "spending millions to sling mud, err oil at" the Republican candidate "because in the five states where Obama is attacking Romney, gas prices have roughly doubled."

Jeff Jacoby, surely speaking for many, in today's Boston Globe column on the "uncivil income tax system":

Mitt Romney won a clean sweep Tuesday night, with victories in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Wisconsin. It is the latter state I want to focus on, as it was the most important of the bunch (from a political standpoint), and caps off an interesting back-and-forth between Romney and Rick…

It's over: CNN estimates that Barack Obama has won enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination for president in 2012.

Did President Obama pick a fight today with the man who could well be the decisive vote in the Supreme Court’s consideration of his health care plan?

Mitt Romney is projected to win the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary, according Fox News. Currently, 162 of 3,755 precincts are reporting, with Romney getting 42 percent of the votes so far, Rick Santorum with 40 percent, Ron Paul with 11 percent, and Newt Gingrich trailing with 6 percent.

As polls close in Maryland and Washington, D.C., "NBC News projects Romney the winner of both," tweets NBC's Chuck Todd. "Should be a delegate sweep in MD but too early to call that part just yet," says Todd, suggesting that Romney will go over 50 percent of the vote in Maryland.

Sabratha, Libya

Jane Perlez’s and William Wan’s articles in today’s papers (the New York Times and Washington Post, respectively) stand as a minor but important milestone in elite understanding of international relations in the 21st century. Though they provide only a summary of a Brookings monograph – the product…

A final get out the vote call from Mitt Romney's campaign in Wisconsin suggests an unholy alliance of the Santorum campaign, "union bosses," Democrats, and Santorum's "cronies" might be conspiring to extend the GOP contest, and urges Wisconsin voters to stop those efforts by voting for Romney. The…

Not even a full year into President Obama's first term, Politico observed that he had reached the point of caricature in using the term "unprecedented" to describe basically anything that occurs during his presidency. By now, Americans have learned to shrug off his use of this rhetorical tick.

A student in Norfolk, Virginia had a simple question for Vice President Biden: "Why is prices on gas increasing? You know what I mean?" Biden, after promising a "brief answer," takes 11-minutes not to answer the kid's question:

Dean Singleton, chairman of the Associated Press board, introduced President Obama this afternoon at a speech to news editors in Washington. But Singleton didn’t just tell the audience the president was the next speaker—the supposed newsman offered lavish praise for the Democratic president.

President Obama made another joke in a speech to newspaper editors about his hot mic moment last week with his Russian counterpart. "It is a pleasure to speak to all of you, and to have a microphone that I can see," Obama said. "Feel free to transmit any of this to Vladimir if you see him."

An alarming chart from the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee showing the "rate of debt increase during presidents' 4-year terms." 

Dick Cheney has been released from the hospital following a heart transplant ten days ago. The former vice president's staff does not reveal how Cheney's recovering from the surgery. But he looks like he's doing well, considering this photo of Cheney and his wife that his daughter Liz tweeted…

At a lunch time speech today, President Obama is expected to attack Paul Ryan's budget by calling it "a Trojan horse."

Politico reports:

Rather amazingly, President Obama stood at a podium between Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and Mexican president Felipe Calderon on Monday and declared that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to strike down “a law that was passed by a strong majority” of Congress. The law…

Rick Santorum is leading in his home state of Pennsylvania, according to a new Quinnipiac poll:

CNS News: "Ron Paul on If He'll Support Romney If He's GOP Nominee: 'I Haven’t Decided.'"

President Obama today attacked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his close ties to oil companies. 

For our readers preparing for Passover, we thought you might be amused by this version of the four questions, circulating anonymously on the Internet, recommended for use at President Obama's Friday night White House seder:

The Republican National Committee is releasing a new web ad today that contrasts Vice President Joe Biden's declaration last year that "the United States and Russia no longer have good reason not to trust one another" with news that Russia is arming Bashar al-Assad as he beats back protesters in…

Rick Santorum has released a new ad drawing a comparison between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and arguing the two politicians share positions on health care, the environment, taxes, and the Wall Street bailouts. Watch the ad below:

Americans don’t look to be inclined to rely on the Supreme Court to determine the future of Obamacare. For the 30th consecutive time, Rasmussen’s polling of likely voters shows that Americans not only support the repeal of President Obama’s centerpiece legislation but support it by…

Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the State Department’s man in Kabul, is clearly concerned about a premature drawdown of American and Western forces from Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will not be joining in the effort to reelect President Barack Obama. "Senior administration officials confirmed on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not be joining the president on the campaign trail, given the explicit need to avoid making her…

Texas Republican David Dewhurst has been the leading candidate to replace retiring senator Kay Bailey Hutchison for the last year. Dewhurst, a wealthy Houston-born businessman who served in the Air Force and CIA, has been lieutenant governor since 2003, making him second only to governor Rick Perry…

A new poll of the Massachusetts Senate race from the Boston Globe shows incumbent Republican Scott Brown in a dead heat against his likely Democratic challenger, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren. From the Globe:

In a book review of White House Burning titled, "The Endless Spending Spree: America's debt is $15.6 trillion and growing. Instead of raising taxes, here's an idea: Let's try capitalism," James Grant writes:

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, would decline an offer to be the vice presidential nominee, she tells ABC:

Tonight’s NCAA national championship game between storied basketball programs Kentucky and Kansas probably won’t top the 1992 East Regional final between Duke and Kentucky. Sportswriter and ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski meticulously recaps that March Madness landmark twenty years later in The…

PPP reports on its latest Wisconsin presidential primary poll, ahead of tomorrow's election there:

Chris Christie is arriving in the Holy Land this morning for a "whirlwind tour of Israel that winds through Tel Aviv, stops in Tiberius and ends Thursday in the Golan Heights," the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports.

The world came unhinged in the fall of 2008.

Rep. Paul Ryan calls his budget plan the “Path to Prosperity,” but it could be termed as well a “Path to Security.” In reclaiming more than $200 billion of the nearly $500 billion in military cuts made in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA), the House Budget Committee chairman takes national…

After weeks of high gas prices, President Obama is on the defensive about his energy policy. On March 15, he justified his administration’s high-profile green energy failures by invoking a predecessor’s alleged skepticism of innovations: “Rutherford B. Hayes reportedly said about the telephone:…

The folks at General Motors are blessed with more foresight than you might have suspected. They were prepared when Vice President Joe Biden wanted to address a United Auto Workers rally at the GM plant in Toledo, Ohio, that manufactures transmissions. Sorry, they informed the vice president’s…

No greater fantasts exist than writers, who are able to bring an extra dollop or two of imagination to their unreality. About no subject are they more fantastic than the potential commercial success of their books. When I publish a book with the least chance of popular appeal, I am unable, even…

Last week, Mitt Romney’s communications director, Eric Fehrnstrom, made a terrible gaffe: He told the truth, as he saw it, on national TV. Asked, “Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general…

London

After pretending to study law, and abandoning a brief attempt to work for a sugar importer in Bristol, David Hume, the second son of a prominent Edinburgh family, decided to return home and live with his mother, sister, and brother. He was then in his early twenties, and his mother had this to say…

Mitt Romney wants to eliminate government programs and shutter cabinet agencies. Doing so, he says, is “the critical thing” that needs to be done in order to bring government books back into balance and to begin restoring the promise of America. “Actually eliminating programs is the most important…

For a while, Friends with Kids is a breath of fresh air, a movie that offers a satirical look at fashionable New Yorkers as sharp in its depiction of low-level intimate conflict as a really good old New Yorker cartoon.

The crisis over Bo Xilai in huge Chongqing, a city-state double the size of Switzerland with 28 million people, proves the left lives on in China, despite 35 years of Communist party flight from Maoism—and despite U.S. China specialists’ calling leftists “conservatives.” A pro-free-market right is…

In many ways, the story of the 2012 Republican primary has been the inability of Mitt Romney to win over more than a third of self-identified “strong Tea Party supporters” or “very conservative” voters. If he had received the support of those voters, even a slim majority of them, the race would…

Over at Washington Monthly, Kathleen Geier writes about how The Ethicist columnist at the New York Times magazine is promoting an essay contest where readers argue that it is, in fact, ethical to continue eating meat. Only it seems that Geier is not amused about who is judging the contest: