Valerie Plame.  Valerie Plame, for those who may not remember, is the former CIA employee who was supposedly "outed" by the Bush White House in retaliation for a New York Times op ed by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson. 

When George Bush said in a State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had been trying to acquire large quantities of uranium from Africa, Wilson countered in his editorial that in his opinion the African country of Niger could not possibly have gotten away with selling uranium to Iraq.  Therefore George Bush was lying. 

The couple have been glorified by Hollywood, but the glory isn't sticking so well.

“Fair Game” starred Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It grossed $9.4MM domestically, against a production budget of $22MM. Fewer Americans than anticipated, it seems, wanted to view the sweeping drama of a couple of D.C. mediocrities sipping poorly selected wine at the Four Seasons Georgetown and falling backwards into a glorious victimhood.

As you may or may not remember, it was not the Bush White House who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame.  A higher up State Department official, Richard Armitage, was the leaker.  I don't think I ever knew exactly why, but he revealed to the late Robert Novak that Wilson's wife had helped to arrange the trip her husband made to Africa upon which he based his Times op ed.  Armed with that information Novak looked up the double top secret name of Wilson's wife in "Who's Who in America" and published it in a story of his own about Wilson's trip and his editorial.  A witch hunt ensued.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald conducted a grand jury inquisition into possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.  Fitzgerald learned early in the investigation that it was Richard Armitage who revealed the identity of CIA "operative" Valerie Plame, but he concluded that no crime had been committed.  Still, he kept the investigation going until he finally netted Scooter Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, for lying. 

In grand jury testimony Libby said he thought he had first heard of Valerie Plame from the late Tim Russert of Meet the Press fame.  He later amended his testimony, based on notes he had showing that he must have heard her name earlier, but he said hadn't recalled the notes, nor the meetings in which they were made.  Patrick Fitzgerald argued that he did too recall them.  Libby was convicted of lying.  Lying about a non-crime, actually. 

So why does the subject of Valerie Plame resurface?  Just recently another agent — this time a real honest to god covert agent — was outed.  But this time, news outfits tripped all over themselves celebrating an Obama administration intelligence coup.

WASHINGTON — The suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the double agent left Yemen last month, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his aviation attack and inside information on the group’s leaders, locations, methods and plans to the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi intelligence and allied foreign intelligence agencies.

Officials said the agent, whose identity they would not disclose, works for the Saudi intelligence service, which has cooperated closely with the C.I.A. for several years against the terrorist group in Yemen.

Apparently there are a couple of problems with that narrative. 

As the story broke, the establishment media was more than happy to attribute the intelligence coup to the CIA and the Obama administration, describing the mole as a “CIA informant.”

It turns out that wasn’t true. The double-agent hadn’t been recruited and placed by the CIA, but by British intelligence, who also managed the operation. In fact, the Americans had only recently been made aware of the joint British-Saudi effort.

The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as “despicable,” attributing them to the Obama administration.

Compare press coverage of this blown cover to the trumped up case over Valerie Plame, a CIA employee who commuted to an office at CIA headquarters in Langley every day, and whose name was listed in "Who's Who in America."  Ms. Plame, who was in no way endangered by publication of Novak's story, became a media celebrity, victim of an imagined retaliatory leak from the Bush White House. 

This time, though, the life of a British agent is threatened, opportunities for more intelligence have been thrown away, and from all outward appearances it's because of the Obama administration's compulsion to score political points wherever they may be had.  And this time the press is too busy touting Obama's supposed "evolution" on gay marriage to report on anything else.

German physicist and meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls recently voiced his skepticism of current climate change theory in an interview by Bettina Hahne-Waldscheck of the Swiss magazine “factum“.  A translation of the interview, which can be found here, concludes with this:

factum: So we don’t need to do anything against climate change?

Puls: There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob. Many confuse environmental protection with climate protection. it’s impossible to protect the climate, but we can protect the environment and our drinking water. On the debate concerning alternative energies, which is sensible, it is often driven by the irrational climate debate. One has nothing to do with the other.

Via Power Line.

Kimberly Strassel describes what we might call America transformed.  Frank VanderSloot, CEO of Melaleuca Inc., gave $1 million to a Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney. 

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, "Keeping GOP Honest," took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled "Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney's donors," the post accused the eight of being "wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records." Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being "litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot's divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.

Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk's office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and a private cellphone number.

Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He's found new work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from "Glenn Simpson." That's the name of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.

The website for that company, Fusion GPS, describes itself as providing "strategic intelligence," with expertise in areas like "politics." That's a polite way of saying "opposition research."

When I called Fusion's main number and asked to speak to Michael Wolf, a man said Mr. Wolf wasn't in the office that day but he'd be in this coming Monday. When I reached Mr. Wolf on his private cell, he confirmed he had until recently worked at the Senate.

When I asked what his interest was in Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records, he hesitated, then said he didn't want to talk about that. When I asked what his relationship was with Fusion, he hesitated again and said he had "no comment." "It's a legal thing," he added.

In Barack Obama's America there are political prices to be paid for having the wrong opinion.  In Barack Obama's America, there are not more ways than one to approach a problem.  Pick an issue — energy, health care, you name it — there is Barack Obama's way and there is heresy.  If you don't support Barack Obama's way you are the enemy.  Enemies must be punished in Barack Obama's America.

Rasmussen has Mitt Romney with 50% to Barack Obama's 43% in the Presidential Tracking Poll today.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney earning 50% of the vote and President Obama attracting 43% support. Four percent (4%) would vote for a third party candidate, while another three percent (3%) are undecided.

...

This is the first time Romney has reached the 50% level of support and is his largest lead ever over the president. It comes a week after a disappointing jobs report that raised new questions about the state of the economy.

It's too early to predict an outcome, but 50% seems to me to be a pretty significant number.

At one point in his career, Arthur C. Brooks played French horn for the Barcelona Symphony.  It was a government job, for the Spanish government, but he gave it up to the dismay of relatives and friends.  What was he thinking?  To abandon a job that was his for life?  Predictions of hardship and destitution didn't materialize, though.

He came to the U.S. where he taught music, while at the same time he earned a college degree in economics.  Since then he's written a book, "The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise."  He's become president of the American Enterprise Institute.  Of his experiences he said,

In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between earned success and learned helplessness.

That's also the difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.  Romney believes in America and Americans.  He knows that the only way to avoid national financial ruin is by providing opportunity for Americans and relying on their initiative and determination to build up themselves, and in the process build up the nation. 

Inspiring envy and helplessness in people has always been the progress strategy for getting and keeping power, and never has it been more blatant than now.  Just listen to an Obama campaign speech as he rails against the wealthy 1% who are supposedly not doing their fair share. 

But simply inspiring helplessness is not going to be enough to satisfy Obama and his allies.  In order to solidify his grip on power, the helplessness must be real.  The Obama administration's mountain of new federal regulation and promise of higher taxes are on their way to doing just that.  Progressives seek to become gatekeepers to opportunity.  Stray from the party line, and well, just see how well you do.

Fortunately there is still a majority of Americans who know what Mr. Brooks knows.  Happiness is not a handout.  It's having the opportunity to make your own way in the world and the satisfaction of doing it.  Earned success.

From Daniel Henninger's  column today, Memo to the Youth Vote:

The election really is about the economy. If so, the job market for many young people during the Obama presidency has bordered on, well, social Darwinism. Many students who did well in school either don't have a job or took one far below their expensive skills.

Last May, the Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas, an expert on economic growth, put together a lecture on the economy because so many people asked him why the U.S. economy's post-recession growth rate was struggling around 2%.

He noted that in the years after World War II, both the U.S. and Europe grew at an annual rate of about 3%. But in the mid-1970s, Western Europe dropped below that growth rate and stayed there, creating a 20% to 40% gap in income levels between Europe and the U.S. Prof. Lucas suggested this had to do with the cost of maintaining the social-welfare commitments Europe accumulated in the postwar years.

He then looked at the levels of U.S. social-welfare commitments, including the new Obama health-care entitlement, and ended with a simple observation: "Is it possible that by imitating European policies on labor markets, welfare and taxes, the U.S. has chosen a new, lower GDP trend? If so, it may be that the weak recovery we have had so far is all the recovery we will get."

That stark assertion—this may be all the growth we're going to get—is something the youth vote should think about.

It's the flaw in the Obama model:  Whatever someone receives without working for it, someone else must work for without receiving.  People don't like working for nothing.  How do you get growth out of that?

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore write that the 50 states offer a "teachable moment" for Obama if he would only pay attention.

In California, a union-backed ballot initiative would raise the state's highest tax rate to 13.3%. Union-funded groups in Illinois aren't satisfied with last year's income tax rate hike to 5% from 3%, so they now want to go as high as 11%. That would put them in the big leagues with California and New York. And in Oregon, lawmakers are considering raising the highest rate to 13% from 9.9%. In all of these states, proponents parrot Mr. Obama, insisting that the rich can afford it.

They can, but they can also afford to save hundreds of thousands or more each year by getting out of Dodge. Every time California, Illinois or New York raises taxes on millionaires, Florida, Texas and Tennessee see an influx of rich people who buy homes, start businesses and shop in the local economy.

Republican governors in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Wisconsin and even Michigan and New Jersey are cutting taxes to lure new businesses and jobs.

Asked why he wants to reduce the cost of doing business in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker replies: "I've never seen a store get more customers by raising its prices, but I've seen customers knock down the doors when they cut prices."

Georgia, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma are now racing to become America's 10th state without an income tax. All of them want what Texas has (almost half of all net new jobs in America over the last decade, for one thing).

Try to imagine what would happen if Congressman Paul Ryan produced his budget proposal only to have House Speaker John Boehner kill it so that Republican members could dodge a difficult vote.  A media feeding frenzy!  That's what would happen!

Well, it all came true, almost.  All except the part about the feeding frenzy.  Oh, and the players were Democrats, not Republicans.  Gee, I wonder if that's why the press had such a poor appetite for the story.  It was Democrat Kent Conrad, Senate Budget Committee chairman, who proposed, and Democrat Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, who shot him down.

Well that is exactly what has happened among Senate Democrats this week. Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad proposed a version of the Bowles-Simpson plan as a draft Democratic budget and said he would bring it up for markup and eventually a vote in his committee—which would be the first time the Senate Democrats have actually bothered to propose a budget in nearly three years. But then Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid stepped in and killed the idea, insisting that no budget was necessary and forcing Conrad into a bizarre farce in yesterday’s committee markup—which involved no votes, and consisted largely of pleading by the chairman directed implicitly against his own leader.

Our liberal press blames the Republicans, naturally.

At 2 p.m., Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, began marking up the Simpson-Bowles plan. "What I am proposing is not partisan," he said in a statement. "I am trying to break from the ‘business as usual’ practice that has gone on for too long." But 'business as usual asserted itself in a hurry.

As the Committee's Republicans pointed out, this was a peculiar kind of mark up: There were no amendments allowed, and no vote scheduled. "I've got to say how deeply disappointed we are that we can't go forward with the kind of mark up that seems justified, that we can't offer amendments, that we can't offer alternatives," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Budget Committee's top Republican.

But Sessions wasn't looking to pass the bill. He hated it.

Oh those intransigent Republicans!  But at least the were there which is more than you can say for the Democrats.  Here's the photographic proof which comes by way of Hot Air where Ed Morrissey writes:

This picture comes from yesterday’s so-called “mark-up session” of the Senate Budget Committee, a meeting which chair Kent Conrad helpfully promoted by declaring that he wouldn’t allow any votes to be taken on budgets.  That turned the meeting into nothing more than a discussion forum, one that Conrad’s colleagues decided to skip. The picture, taken by a Republican staffer at the meeting, shows all 11 Republicans sitting on the far side of the table — and almost no Democrats in their chairs:

It's not hard to see who's responsible for the gridlock when Senate Democrats have refused to vote on a budget for nearly three years.  No story here, though. 

Among the obstacles facing Barack Obama in his quest for re-election, writes Jonah Goldberg, is his dismal record on the economy.  It's an economic record that has Obama trying to pretend he's Ronald Reagan.

And last year, Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Obama [Hearts] Reagan,” which in Time’s words gave the true story behind “Obama’s Reagan Bromance.”

There were two key elements to Obama’s man-crush. The first was the simple hope that history — or at least the business cycle — would repeat itself.

The White House’s plan was to run for reelection in 2012 with a soaring economy at its back. After an absolutely bruising recession (that was in some ways worse than the one Obama inherited), Reagan got to ride a surging economy to reelection.

Soaring economy?  So much for the first key element of Obama's infatuation with the Gipper.  How about number two?

The other reason the White House admired the Reagan White House? According to Time: “Both relied heavily on the power of oratory.” Then– press secretary Robert Gibbs added, “Our hope is the story ends the same way.”

And there’s the problem for Obama. He’s sticking to his rhetorical guns on the assumption that he’s the great orator his fans have always claimed.

Actually there are two problems.  Number one: Obama is not really a great orator, though he reads a teleprompter pretty well.  Get him off script and he says the dumbest things.  Just ask the Cambridge Police. 

But there is a bigger problem for Obama.  According to Goldberg, presidential oratory rarely sways the public anyway.

Asking whether Obama is as good a communicator as Reagan is like comparing boxers from different generations; there’s plenty of evidence to form opinions but no way to settle the matter.

But what must be very troubling for Obama is the mounting evidence that presidential persuasion is vastly overrated. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan has noted that Reagan’s rhetoric had little effect on the polls or his media coverage. Liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, surveying the academic literature in a recent issue of the New Yorker, found that there’s little evidence that any president has really moved the country with his rhetoric.

That would seem to argue that a president's apparent powers of persuasion really indicate how closely his ideas match up with public opinion rather than how effectively he reads his teleprompter. 

Ronald Reagan was instinctively in tune with the American people.  He was your middle American guy living the dream.  And because of who he was, he understood what made sense to people and what didn't.  The media, caught completely by surprise, was no match for Reagan as he was able to present his case with a logic that made sense to average Americans, regardless of the media slant.

Thirty-two years later media contrived issues, of the type that Ronald Reagan cut through like a hot knife through butter, are the mainstay of Obama's campaign.  By way of example we have the Catholic Church rejection of Obama's mandate to provide free birth control pills as an insurance benefit.  Obama and his media allies see, not an assault on religious freedom, but a "war on women."  Naturally it's a Republican war on women, since Republicans take constitutional guarantees, like freedom of worship, more seriously than Democrats. 

Middle Americans get it, and no amount of teleprompter oratory is going to convince them they don't.  And especially not now, after three-plus years of Obama.   Americans understand that the American dream is about opportunity.  Barack Obama's American dream is all about the satisfaction of ancient grievances.  This is going to be a big problem for Obama.

When Paul Ryan offered up his new budget President Barack Obama went hysterical.  Ryan's budget, he said, was "Social Darwinism."  It would end air traffic control services and it would cause "less accurate" weather forecasting.  He also called the Ryan Budget a "Trojan Horse" which made me wonder if he wasn't really talking about ObamaCare.  But that's another story.

Today, Daniel Henninger wonders if by taking aim at Paul Ryan's budget plan Obama hasn't picked a fight that he can't win. 

On Tuesday, Mr. Ryan pushed back. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said that in fact the Catholic Church's "social magisterium" had informed his House budget. One goal of that teaching, he said, is to prevent the poor from staying poor. Nor, he added, should individuals become lifelong dependents of their government.

Just as the left thought the regulating reach of the Commerce Clause was beyond serious challenge, it long ago decided that none dare question the moral case for public spending. That social Darwinism speech Barack Obama is giving now in defense of federal programs isn't merely a public-policy statement. It's a Democratic encyclical. Paul Ryan's ideas are worse than wrong. They are heresy.

The timing is intriguing.  As Mitt Romney solidifies has position as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, out comes the Ryan Budget to draw fire from the White House.

This is the debate Barack Obama hopes mockery and rhetorical carpet-bombing can kill before the fall campaign.

Democrats, who haven't bothered to pass a budget in three years, may suddenly decide they want to vote on this one.  Quickly.  To make it go away before fall.  Otherwise there is the worry, how will Obama's hysterical rhetoric play come November?  Pretty well with his left wing extremist base, but alas.  We live in a largely conservative country.

In a news conference this afternoon, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum announced that he was suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Santorum was the last viable challenger to Mr. Romney, and his decision to exit the race marks the unofficial end of the Republicans' months-long, highly combative primary. Mr. Romney has yet to gather the 1,144 convention delegates needed to win the nomination, but it is unlikely that the remaining challengers, Newt Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul, can prevent him from doing so.

Mr. Romney congratulated Mr. Santorum on his campaign, calling him an "able and worthy opponent," according to the Associated Press.

It's my opinion that this is the best time for Rick Santorum to make this announcement.  There was no chance that he was going to win more delegates than Mitt Romney in the remaining primaries, never mind win enough to secure the nomination.   Santorum's only significant impact on the race going forward would have been to draw down Romney's war chest.  That's money Romney needs in the general election campaign against Barack Obama. 

The country does not need to be saved from Mitt Romney, as Santorum seemed to imply.  What we need is to save from Barack Obama and the Democrats.  Unfortunately, Santorum was not likely to succeed in doing it — in my view, anyway.

In spite of all that, Rick Santorum deserves congratulations for running a surprisingly strong campaign, and providing voice for the hopes of a significant block of conservative voters.  Because of his strength in the primaries it's likely he'll play a significant role going forward, whether it is by helping to shape the party platform, or perhaps by taking a position in a new administration.  In any case, now is the time for Republicans to coalesce.

Early on in the Republican debates I had this fantasy about a Republican campaign in which the presidential contenders continued their campaigns on behalf of the eventual Republican nominee.  Newt Gingrich recently said that he was planning to do just that.  Maybe my fantasy will be real.

Though he would like really like us to forget it, Obama's energy plans included a steep rise in the cost of conventional energy — like coal.

"I was the first to call for a 100 percent auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter," Obama continued. "That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

But Cap and trade never happened.  By fortunate happenstance, emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were leaked to the public, creating massive doubt about global warming.  The public was not ready for any extraordinary new taxation schemes based on doubtful theories, no matter how popular they were with the press. 

Though cap and trade fell by the wayside, Obama was not about to be deterred.  He unleashed the EPA.

WASHINGTON — Taking aim at the gases that the vast majority of scientists say are the main contributor to climate change, the Obama administration proposed rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new power plants, a move that could essentially bar new coal-fired electric generation facilities.

Coal is just one example of of how Obama's energy policy was supposed to work.  Other non-green energy sources, like oil,  would be hit just as hard.

Reviewing a host of recent studies, Buckley and Mityakov show that estimates of job losses attributable to cap-and-trade range in the hundreds of thousands. The price for energy paid by the American consumer also will rise. The studies reviewed showed electricity prices jumping 5-15% by 2015, natural gas prices up 12-50% by 2015, and gasoline prices up 9-145% by 2015.

Lately the president has been bragging about an increase in U.S. domestic oil production, but he is responsible for none of it.   Issuance of oil drilling permits have declined under the Obama administration.

When the president says he is opening up millions of acres for drilling exploration in the United States, Cavuto says you might want to thank the previous presidents instead, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the current administration has actually decreased approval of drilling permits by 36 percent.

Let's not forget the Obama administration's drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill.  A federal judge overturned it, but the administration kept it in place, anyway.

Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) – - The Obama Administration acted in contempt by continuing its deepwater drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down, a New Orleans judge ruled.

Interior Department regulators acted with “determined disregard” by lifting and reinstituting a series of policy changes that restricted offshore drilling, following the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, U.S. District Judge, Martin Feldman of New Orleans ruled yesterday.

Can anyone be surprised that gas prices are up?  I think it's safe to say, that's what Obama had in mind when he took office, so let's give the man credit for keeping his eye on the big green ball.  It just hasn't all worked out the way he thought it would.  The green economy was supposed to create millions of green jobs.

[I]n an effort to force the pace at which this utopian green vision will become reality, tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money are being shoveled into a wide range of frequently speculative technologies and even individual companies in the form of grants, loan guarantees, tax credits etc.

Precisely because the vision of “millions of green jobs” now equates to billions of dollars in grants and subsidies to support their development, all sorts of organizations with heavily vested interests in encouraging taxpayer support for green job development are conducting “research” on the topic and delivering projections of how many “green” jobs will be created if a certain set of public policies is implemented. Needless to say, the definition of a “green” job has been stretched every which way to suit the particular needs of whatever organization is doing the “research”. This has led to some quite  extraordinary projections and statistics.

Bottom line: The millions of green jobs haven't materialized.  In fact it's hard to see evidence of a recovery after 3-plus years of Obama's energy policies.  Why is that, you may ask.  Maybe it has something to do with the price of a gallon of gas.  Cars run on gas.

Paul Sayler, sales manager at Milbank Ford & Mercury Inc., a car dealership in Milbank, S.D., said he is seeing "tremendous traffic" of customers looking to buy new cars. Two weeks ago, his 11-person firm held a meeting to decide whether to ramp up hiring to meet the demand. But they decided against it.

"I'm a pessimist," the 37-year-old Mr. Sayler said. He worries that rising gasoline prices will eventually snuff out demand for cars the way it did in 2008. "Obviously we're hoping that doesn't happen."

File this one under "Hazards of Getting What You Wished For."

Hold the celebration.  The recession may be technically over but it's hard to see it.  Democrats in Congress and the administration will have to keep the champagne on ice, as the Wall Street Journal reports unexpectedly tepid job growth last month.

WASHINGTON—U.S. job growth slowed in March, and the labor force shrank, signaling that the economy could be losing momentum.

Jobs outside of agriculture grew by 120,000 last month—half the number that the economy added the prior month—the Labor Department said Friday, marking the first time since November that job growth fell below 200,000.

At the same time the unemployment rate dropped a tenth of a percent, from 8.3% to 8.2%. Ordinarily this would be good news, but what it truly reveals is the growing number of people giving up on finding a job.

The unemployment rate, obtained by a separate survey of U.S. households, ticked down a tenth of a percentage point to 8.2%, but the drop resulted in part from fewer Americans seeking work.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expected a gain of 203,000 in payrolls and for the jobless rate to remain at 8.3% for March.

Could the cause of this anemic growth be the spike in gas prices?  That's my bet.  I know we've been told, ad nauseaum, that the president has no control over the price of a gallon of gas.  But he does, really.  He could chart a policy course that ramps up domestic production, which would signal the markets that supply is on the way.  That's what President Bush did, and prices went down.  Pretty quickly, too. 

Don't hold your breath, as I suspect our reluctant president wants to keep the deck stacked in favor of his green energy plans.  We can expect our watch dogs in media will be more than happy to cover for him on that.  Falling gasoline prices would squeeze fledgling solar and wind companies, and we can't have that.  Especially for the ones his campaign bundlers are so heavily invested in.

The argument that was before the Supreme Court last week comes down to this.

If Congress can force the individual into a private contract by authority of the commerce clause, what can it not force the individual to do? Without a limiting principle, the central premise of our constitutional system — a government of enumerated powers — evaporates. What, then, is the limiting principle?

Liberals were quick to blame the administration’s bumbling solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, for blowing the answer. But Clarence Darrow couldn’t have given it. There is none.

Justice Stephen Breyer tried to rescue the hapless Verrilli by suggesting that by virtue of being born, one enters into the “market for health care.” To which plaintiffs’ lawyer Michael Carvin devastatingly replied: If birth means entering the market, Congress is omnipotent, authorized by the commerce clause to regulate “every human activity from cradle to grave.”

When June finally rolls around we get to find out which of the justices is in favor of elevating Congress to omnipotence.  Anyone care to guess who they are? 

As I sat in the courtroom, and later as I reviewed the transcripts, many justices sounded as if they were laying out their positions. All four liberals mostly used their questions to try to suggest answers or help [Solicitor General] Verrilli...

There's hardly a doubt in anybody's mind about how Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor will vote.  But what about the others, the unpredictable ones who now seem likely to oppose such unbridled power in Congress?  According to lefty pundits, they are the partisans justices.  Funny that it's the "partisan" side that's considered least predictable.

Maureen Dowd, the dolt from the New York Times, has issued her ruling:  Conservatives on the Supreme Court are a bunch of hacks in black robes.  Of Antonin Scalia she writes,

If he’s so brilliant, why is he drawing a risible parallel between buying health care and buying broccoli?

Maybe if she paid better attention, she'd get it.

It's astonishing.  I simply cannot get over President Obama's really partisan attack on the Supreme Court, and it turns out, neither can the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  On Monday Obama announced that overturning ObamaCare would be "an unprecedented, extraordinary step."  On Tuesday he clarified "unprecedented" by saying that Supreme Court hadn’t struck down a law that “was passed by Congress on a economic issue."  This provoked Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit, which was hearing a separate case on the Affordable Care Act, to demand a letter explaining just what Eric Holder and the Justice Department think the authority of the federal judiciary is.

Smith: Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?

Kaersvang: Yes, your honor. Of course, there would need to be a severability analysis, but yes.

Smith: I’m referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect…that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed “unelected” judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed — he was referring, of course, to Obamacare — what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.

That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review. And that’s not a small matter. So I want to be sure that you’re telling us that the attorney general and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.

Kaersvang: Marbury v. Madison is the law, your honor, but it would not make sense in this circumstance to strike down this statute, because there’s no –

Smith: I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday…a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president’s statements and again to the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice.

Unsurprisingly, lefties immediately climbed all over the Fifth Circuit, calling the above exchange partisan.  Partisan?

This is not how judges behave. This is how politicians behave. If Judge Smith and his co-ideologues cannot refrain from such purely political tantrums, they should resign their seats and run for office as Republicans.

No question that our "constitutional law professor" president launched a partisan attack when he deliberately misrepresented the role of the courts.  For lefties, though, "partisan" means you disagree with them, which is what the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did.

Getting back to Obama's partisan political objective, how's that going to work out?  Will his attack on the court intimidate the justices and get him the decision he wants?  Doubtful.

Still, the decision could go either way.  I imagine that precedents abound on either side, and that the justices will choose among those they conclude are the relevant ones based upon their separate views of the law.  But with Obama's recent attacks, the justices might also feel that it's time for the Court's authority to be emphatically restated.

ObamaCare was a Hail Mary pass in the waning seconds as Democrats saw their House majority about to disappear.  Its completion was meant to lock in progressive power.  With federal control over the health care industry, which adds up to one fifth of the U.S. economy, progressives would be in position to guide its revenues and policies in ways that could guarantee progressive majorities for generations. 

There's a lot at stake, for both the country and the Court.  As the final authority the Supreme Court is uniquely empowered to strike down laws that abuse constitutional limits.  Is there a better time or a better way to demonstrate that point than by striking down ObamaCare in its entirety?

Yesterday in dramatic tones President Obama expressed his confidence that the Supreme Court would not strike down ObamaCare.

"Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," Obama said at a news conference with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Over on the left they like to mention that Obama was a constitutional law professor.  In fact, Obama said it himself, so I think we can say with a certainty that it's true — Obama is way over there on the left.  As to the part about him being a "constitutional law professor," well maybe not quite.

Sen. Obama, who has taught courses in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, has regularly referred to himself as "a constitutional law professor," most famously at a March 30, 2007, fundraiser when he said, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution." A spokesman for the Republican National Committee immediately took exception to Obama’s remarks, pointing out that Obama’s title at the University of Chicago was "senior lecturer" and not "professor."

Recently, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has picked up on this charge. In a March 27 conference call with reporters, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer claimed:

Singer (March 27): Sen. Obama has often referred to himself as “a constitutional law professor” out on the campaign trail. He never held any such title. And I think anyone, if you ask anyone in academia the distinction between a professor who has tenure and an instructor that does not, you’ll find that there is … you’ll get quite an emotional response.

The campaign also sent out an e-mail quoting an Aug. 8, 2004, column in the Chicago Sun-Times that criticized Obama for calling himself a professor when, in fact, the University of Chicago faculty page listed him as “a senior lecturer (now on leave)." The Sun-Times said, "In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter."

Yes, details do matter.  One particular detail leaps out at me and that's the part where Obama said that the Supreme Court would be taking "an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."  The "constitutional law professor's" words.

I wonder if the University of Chicago Law School is embarrassed about that.  You would think someone calling himself a constitutional law professor would know that the Supreme Court has overturned laws in the past.  Unprecedented?  According to Answers.com,  between 1789 and 2002 the Supreme Court struck down a total of 1,315 laws because they were found to be unconstitutional.  Of those, 158 were Acts of Congress. 

The first time the Court declared a federal law unconstitutional was in Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion for Marbury v. Madison, 5 US 137 (1803), in which he asserted Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 was unconstitutional because it extended to the Supreme Court an act of original jurisdiction not explicitly granted by the Constitution.

Unconstitutional and Preempted Laws 1789-2002
According to the GPO (Government Printing Office Database):

1789-2002 Acts of Congress Held as Unconstitutional..............................158

1789-2002 State Statutes held unconstitutional......................................935

1789-2002 City Ordinances held unconstitutional....................................222

1789-2002 State and City laws preempted by Federal laws.......................224

Total State, Local and Federal Laws Declared Unconstitutional................1,315

Total State and Local Law Preempted by Federal Laws..............................224

Total Laws Overturned, all governments..............................................1,539

"Unprecedented," he called it.  I wonder if that counts as a gaffe.  Naw.  Obama is brilliant and learned. So they say on the left.

Despite all their tough questions for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, there's still a fair chance the Supreme Court will find that ObamaCare is constitutional.  Even if they find the mandate unconstitutional, the Court may still leave most of ObamaCare standing by ruling that the mandate is severable from the rest of the law.  This would create a huge mess.

AmericanDoctors4Truth and Docs4PatientCare have joined forces to produce this TV commercial explaining the "catastrophic effects" of ObamaCare.  Unless the Court rules to throw ObamaCare out in its entirey, there is really only one solution.  Repeal.  It's "the first step to effective and lasting reform."

One of my favorite bloggers, Richard Fernandez of Pajamas Media, detected a threatening tone in comments by Senator Richard Blumenthal, the former Democratic attorney general of Connecticut. 

Blumenthal said the US Supreme Court  would damage itself if it found Obamacare unconstitutional.

“The court commands no armies, it has no money; it depends for its power on its credibility. The only reason people obey it is because it has that credibility. And the court risks grave damage if it strikes down a statute of this magnitude and importance, and stretches so dramatically and drastically to do it.”

How reminiscent of Josef Stalin:

Churchill was telling Stalin, “that is why I attach such paramount importance to good neighborly relations between a restored Poland and the Soviet Union. It was for the freedom and independence of Poland that Britain went into this war. The British feel a sense of moral responsibility to the Polish people, to their spiritual values. It is also important that Poland is a Catholic country. We cannot allow internal developments there to complicate our relations with the Vatican…”

“How many divisions does the Pope of Rome have?” Stalin asked, suddenly interrupting Churchill’s line of reasoning.

Churchill stopped short. He had not expected such a question.

But Fernandez concluded on a positive note.

And by the way, the Soviet Union is gone, but there’s still a Poland. And last I heard, there was still a Pope.

Ilya Somin expects the Supreme Court to issue a ruling on ObamaCare this year, and if it decides that the mandate is constitutional, it will not be on the basis of its being a tax. 

Thus, today’s events do not bode well for the federal government’s constitutional tax argument. However, there are two caveats to this conjecture. First, the justices sometimes ask questions for rhetorical effect or play devil’s advocate. I don’t think they are doing so here, but obviously I can’t be sure. Second, it is theoretically possible that the constitutional definition of what qualifies as a “tax” is broader than the AIA definition. This is not the usual view of the matter...

Even if the federal government loses on the tax argument, they could still win on the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. The latter is probably their strongest point.

Since my legal education came mostly from Law and Order and Perry Mason re-runs, my opinion on the constitutionality of ObamaCare based on the Necessary and Proper Clause is not something you should take as a sound legal argument against it.  Here it is anyway.

Conceding that Ilya Somin is correct when he says the strongest argument for the constitutionality of the mandate is based on the Necessary and Proper Clause, my question is this:  How can the mandate be necessary and proper when the law itself is arguably unnecessary and its passage was improper? 

A window of opportunity opened for Democrats to push through a piece of unpopular legislation, and they took it.  ObamaCare was passed by means of legalized bribery where Senate holdouts were offered special incentives to vote in favor.  The Louisiana Purchase and the Corhhusker Kick Back were the most notable and most egregious examples. 

Passage also depended upon legislative gimmicks.  Scott Brown, a Republican who was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy, became the 41st vote against ObamaCare.  At the time that he took his seat there were differences between the Senate and House versions of ObamaCare.  When that happens bills usually go to conference committee so that differences can be resolved, then a final bill is voted on again in each house.  In the wake of Senator Brown's election, Democratic congressional leaders ruled out conference committee resolution of the differing ObamaCare bills out of fear that there were no longer enough votes in the Senate to pass the conference committee bill.  Instead the House resorted to something called "deem and pass" to avoid another Senate vote on the bill, which most likely would have come up short.

ObamaCare was the reason Scott Brown got elected.  The looming prospect of ObamaCare on the political horizon motivated people by the hundreds of thousands to descend upon Washington, DC in September of 2009 to protest against it.  When it got rammed through and signed by President Obama anyway, the opposition did not dissipate.  Instead Democrats got an historic shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections, and the opposition has grown since then.

How does it make sense for the Court to profoundly impact the relationship between citizens and their government for the sake legislation that has such a good chance of being repealed in 2013? 

Congress provides the best argument against the mandate.  Most members of Congress did not know what was in ObamaCare when they voted for it.  Remember when Speaker Pelosi urged members to vote for it so that they could learn what is in it?  Should a mandate be ruled necessary and proper to the implementation of legislation that Congress doesn't even know what it is?

ObamaCare is, at best, an approach to solving a problem, but it is not the only approach.  The ObamaCare solution is a top down model that relies upon government mandates for everything.  It seeks to mandate what coverage is provided, at what cost, and by whom.  It mandates how much doctors will be paid for their services, and it mandates how much of it states must pay. As in so many top down models, it fails to deliver as promised.  In fact, it has failed to do the primary excuse for its passage.  That is to "bend the cost curve down," which ObamaCare has predictably failed to achieve.  The mandate will not make it work.

A more realistic approach to health care reform would involve less government interference and more competition in a free and open market.  We have several examples where deregulation has reduced cost by fostering competition among an expanding pool of suppliers.  Prior to the breakup of AT&T the cost of a single long distance phone call could be higher than a month of unlimited phone, text, and data in today's unregulated market.  When adjusted for inflation the cost of an airline ticket has dropped significantly since deregulation.  It was predictable, which was the point of deregulating.  Yet in health care we're expected to believe that reduced competition and increased regulation is somehow going to improve service and reduce costs.  The idea is absurd.

Can the mandate be ruled "Necessary and Proper" to the implementation of a law that itself is neither necessary nor proper?

Update:  The oral arguments over the individual mandate are done and according to Jeffrey Toobin of CNN today was a train wreck for the administration.

The Supreme Court just wrapped up the second day of oral arguments in the landmark case against President Obama's healthcare overhaul, and reports from inside the courtroom indicate that the controversial law took quite a beating.

Today's arguments focused around the central constitutional question of whether Congress has the power to force Americans to either pay for health insurance or pay a penalty.

According to CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the arguments were "a train wreck for the Obama administration."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli focused on dollars and cents while the justices probed the constitutional issues.

In his brief, Verrilli argued that insured people account for at least $43 billion of uncompensated health-care costs each year and that much of that is passed on to people with coverage, adding about $1,000 a year to family insurance policies.

Still, Scalia and several other justices seemed unconvinced that Verrilli had articulated a principle by which Congress’s authority under the Constitution’s commerce clause could be limited.

“Government is supposed to be a government of limited powers,” he said. “What is left if the government can do this? What can it not do?”

Justice Kennedy, who is often the crucial swing vote on issues, appeared to be swinging conservative today. From Adam Liptak of the New York Times:

“Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked the lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., only minutes into the argument.

Sam Baker of The Hill:

Liberal justices on the court appeared to be more favorable to the government’s argument on the mandate, and if they unite behind the law, the Justice Department would need to just peel Kennedy away to secure a majority.

But Kennedy didn’t sound like he was in the administration’s camp on Tuesday.

The Reagan-appointee argued the court has a “very heavy burden of justification” for requiring that people purchase insurance. He also indentified the insurance mandate is the first time the government has used its regulatory powers to force citizens to buy a product.

“That changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way,” Kennedy said.

The Hill provides the full transcript here.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey just weighed in with five possibilities.  Here are two of them.  First on the question of the constitutionality of the mandate.

3. Overturn the individual mandate alone
Easily the most unpopular part of the bill, the individual mandate, which requires Americans to obtain health insurance, is also the most constitutionally fraught. It's also the financial linchpin of ObamaCare. Without it, the insurers who gave qualified support for the PPACA would go broke, thanks to additional must-insure mandates and an abolition of bars on pre-existing conditions. Given the already-expressed skepticism from Breyer and Ginsburg about the argument that the mandate is a tax, the real possibility exists that the court may strike this down, and not just on a 5-4 vote. During Tuesday's argument, swing justice Anthony Kennedy was "enormously skeptical" of the individual mandate, as CNN's Jeffrey Toobin put it. Indeed, the punditocracy's instant analysis suggests the mandate is not long for this world.

Next is on the question of severability.

4. Overturn the entire bill
Two lower courts split on the question of whether a lack of a severability clause in the PPACA meant that Congress intended the bill to be an all-or-nothing proposition. If the court determines that one or more of the components are unconstitutional — especially the central individual mandate — and that Congress deliberately chose not to include a severability clause, then the court could throw out the entire PPACA.

If the court strikes down the mandate on a 5-4 split and/or throws out the whole bill, mandate advocates could argue that the court took a political rather than legal position. But that won't convince anyone except the true believers. With a majority of people already opposed to the individual mandate, it would only deepen their impression of ObamaCare as a radical departure, and make it even less likely that Obama could fashion a way to salvage the framework of his reform — even if House Republicans were inclined to help Obama escape from the trap. If one or more of the liberal justices join in declaring the mandate and/or the entire bill unconstitutional, then the PPACA becomes an albatross around Obama's neck, and also those Democrats in the Senate running for re-election.

I especially like the part about it being a albatross.  Warms my heart.