Wisconsin is the Sweden of the United States. Illinois is the Greece.

When Congress returns next week, House Republicans plan to introduce a two-week CR that would cut federal spending by $4 billion, which is essentially a pro-rated amount based on the $61 billion in cuts (over a 30 week period) contained in the CR passed by the House last week.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R., Nev.) proposed a 30-days “stop-gap” spending resolution to keep the government funded at current levels while a longer term deal is negotiated. The current continuing resolution expires on March 4.

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) said this was unacceptable, arguing that even a short-term continuing resolution must contain spending cuts. “The only people who refuse to consider any spending cuts in the short-term CR are the Senate Democratic Leaders like Sens. Reid and Schumer,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in a statement. “With a massive federal deficit and record-setting debt, the idea that we can’t cut one penny worth of federal government spending is indefensible.”

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to insist that they have “already cut $41 billion” in the last CR, which is blatantly untrue. 

This move by Republicans puts pressure on Harry Reid, but even more so on Democratic senators like Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), Ben Nelson (D., Neb.), Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and others, including President Obama, who will be hard-pressed to say no to significant cuts.

Either way, at least one Republican Senator won’t be voting for it.

UPDATE: From The Washington Post:

Senate Democratic leadership staffers sat down earlier Wednesday with aides to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in their first formal meeting to discuss the way forward on funding the federal government.

“Republican staff told [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's] staff that we will move a short-term [resolution] that cuts spending, and that it’s up to Senator Reid to tell Americans what — if anything — he’s willing to cut,” Boehner spokesperson Michael Steel said. “At this point, the House has done its work by passing a [spending resolution], and the Senate has done nothing.”

More here.

UPDATE II: In a statement, Harry Reid’s office declares the GOP proposal a “non-starter” in the senate.

“The Republicans’ so-called compromise is nothing more than the same extreme package the House already handed the Senate, just with a different bow,” Reid spokesman Jon Summers said. “This isn’t a compromise, it’s a hardening of their original position.”

Also, Summers repeats the claim that Democrats “have already agreed to $41 billion in cuts” in the current CR. This, again, is false. It is based off President Obama’s 2011 budget request (which would have increased spending) that was never enacted. Congress simply voted to keep the government funded at current levels in the absence of an actual budget. They didn’t “cut” anything. The Democratic counterproposal remains at $0 (plus the threat of a government shutdown).

Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring responds: “I’m not sure how Senator Reid rejected spending cuts that he hasn’t seen yet, but it certainly reinforces the notion that he is willing to shutdown the government rather than cut one penny in federal spending.”

Few elected officials have tasted the vitriol that public-employee unions are spewing against Gov. Scott Walker these days. But Tom Luna is one of them.

The superintendent of public instruction in Idaho, Luna has offered a bill to the state legislature to reform the Gem State’s education system. It is a teacher union’s worst nightmare: The legislation phases out tenure, removes seniority as a criterion for layoffs, makes student achievement at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, and includes a pay-for-performance bonus. But wait, there’s more: Luna’s bill would require the state to publish a “fiscal report card,” so parents could go online and evaluate their school district by the numbers: average teacher salary, expenditure per child, administrative expenses, etc. To top it all off, the bill would mandate that towns hold teacher-contract negotiations in the open. “I think this is probably the most comprehensive package that is working its way through a state legislature in the country,” Luna tells National Review Online.

And the unions are miffed. Over 1,000 people protested the bill at the statehouse on Monday. Yet that demonstration was relatively tame. A little over a week ago, Luna awoke to find his car had been vandalized.

Some protesters have even menaced his family. “The thing that concerned me most was the first incident when a teacher showed up at my mom’s house,” Luna says. “Like in Wisconsin, we’ve had union representatives and others putting people’s home addresses and phone numbers on websites and Facebook profiles. And they’ve actually encouraged people to go to these addresses of people with whom they don’t agree and if they’re not home, to go to their neighbors’ home. That’s way out of line.”

Luna notes his experience is rather similar to Walker’s: “When you look at what the union in Wisconsin is saying about what’s happening in Wisconsin, the talking points are almost the same thing the unions in Idaho are saying: teachers are scapegoats, nobody discussed this during the campaign, the legislation is moving too fast, it’s all about corporate fat cats. It’s obvious that the plans are different but the push back and the talking points are the same.”

Still, Luna is thankful that unlike many Wisconsinite teachers, most Idahoan teachers have stayed in the classroom: “I guess Idaho is fortune that our teachers for the most part have chosen to stay in the classroom and educate children and we haven’t seen a disruption in our school days as they experienced in Wisconsin. In Idaho, I firmly believe that our union leaders are completely out of touch with the Idaho electorate and in many cases with their own members.”

As Luna’s experience shows, Walker’s headache today could be a national convulsion tomorrow.

Yesterday, I explained that, contrary to what OMB director Jack Lew claims, Social Security is in fact contributing to the deficit. The main reason, I argued, is that the Social Security Trust Funds are required by law to invest in Treasuries. The payroll-tax proceeds collected to pay for future benefits are thereby handed over to the federal government, which then spends it. Each time the program runs a cash-flow deficit, it redeems some of its trust-fund IOUs, and the government then has to borrow money, which adds to the deficit . In other words, while it’s not really Social Security’s fault, the reality is that the program contributes to the deficit.

Today, I read this piece by AEI’s Alan Viard, who is even harder on the program than I am. He looks at the issue from a different angle:

In 2009 and 2010 Congress enacted four provisions authorizing implicit or explicit transfers of general revenue to the Social Security Trust Fund, continuing a pattern set by earlier provisions.

Social Security’s raid on the general treasury has largely escaped attention. Indeed, in a startling inversion of reality, the general treasury is often accused of raiding Social Security, based on the premise that the $1.7 trillion of surplus Social Security taxes collected from 1984 to 2014 have been looted from the program. In reality, current law provides that the surplus taxes will be paid back to Social Security more than fourfold (reflecting compound interest), enabling the program to pay $7.2 trillion of benefits in excess of taxes from 2015 to 2037.

Although general revenue financing averts Social Security tax increases and benefit cuts, it forces larger tax increases and spending cuts in the remainder of the federal budget. Using the general treasury as a piggy bank for Social Security distorts the budgetary process by giving the program the best of both worlds. Social Security receives political protection from tax increases and benefit cuts on the grounds that it is a self-supporting program financed by earmarked taxes, but it is not required to actually live within its earmarked revenue.

The provisions that Viard is talking about are stimulus provisions, e.g.,  the one-time $250 check for Social Security recipients, or the Making Work Pay credits in 2009 and 2010, which refunded up to $400 (single) and $800 (married couples) of employees’ payroll taxes. (In my opinion, the $250 check did represent an increase in benefits for seniors funded through general revenues, but the other provision, I would say, was another instance of social engineering through the tax code rather than an example of Social Security raiding the general funds.)

The bottom line is that no matter how we look at it, Social Security is contributing to present and future deficits. Short of privatization (which I would favor), Congress should make the program truly independent and self-supporting. In this case, it should collect taxes that will be earmarked to pay for benefits and only benefits. Social Security shouldn’t have to turn over its cash to Treasury, and it shouldn’t be allowed to receive money from the general revenue.

Maggie Gallagher:

After gay marriage, what will be the next item on the left’s agenda of reshaping the American people so we conform better to their tastes, views and values?

In Canada, the polygamist and polyamorists are now in court fighting for their right to marry.

In Massachussetts this week, Gov. Deval Patrick quietly signed an executive order mandating affirmative steps to end “discrimination” for people with diverse “gender identity and expression” — and requiring this not only of state agencies but of all who contract with any state agency. Affirmative action for cross-dressers, with or without surgery? Co-ed public bathrooms?

In San Francisco, the newest idea is to get voters this November to criminalize infant circumcision. That’s right. In the paradigmatic American city of liberalism, the big new idea is to put out a big sign: Jews Not Welcome Here.

The culture war will never be over because the left will never permit itself to declare victory and stop pushing for more.

The progressive imagination requires victims in order to sustain its own identity as the hero.

And being men and women of the left, they have no problem using government to reshape morality, preferably using your tax dollars to build institutions to reshape your children’s and grandchildren’s moral outlook. And on the left, they have no problem aggressively condemning fellow citizens who disagree with their novel views as bigots, haters and all-around morally bad folks.

In short, when it comes to the culture war, gentlemen may cry “peace, peace,” but there is no peace.

And so, for those of us who are the objects of the left’s culture war, the questions become: “Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”

Attorney General Eric Holder today sent his own version of a “Dear John” letter to the Speaker of the House, informing him that President Obama’s Justice Department is abandoning its legal defense of part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Groups advocating same-sex marriage — along with the New York Times, which often acts like such a group — had stepped up calls for such a surrender, but Holder’s letter still comes as a surprise.

The letter is no mere perfunctory notice; it runs to three pages and is full of interesting turns. Holder makes clear that the determination not to continue defending Section 3 of DOMA — which sets the federal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman — was made by President Obama, whose grounds are that this definition is irrational and violates “the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment,” making it unconstitutional.

Holder proceeds to explain that although Justice was able to defend DOMA in the First Circuit courts, it cannot do so in two cases now pending in Second Circuit courts. If that sounds convoluted, it probably is meant to. The bottom line is that the Obama administration is reacting to pressure and dropping any pretense of interest in preserving the 1996 law.

Advocates for DOMA and the natural definition of marriage have pointed out from the beginning how flawed Justice’s work on these cases has been. Richard Epstein, who favors same-sex marriage on policy grounds, called it “almost like collusive litigation.”

DOMA’s defenders agree that the strongest argument for its rationality rests on the central purpose of marriage: the effective uniting of a man and a woman and the children they beget into the core unit of society, the family. In his letter, Holder dismisses this concern by noting that Justice “disavowed” any claim regarding “procreational responsibility” in the lower court.

In other words, this trifling matter of fostering bonds between parents for the sake of the next generation was tossed overboard back in port. No need to swim back for it.

Holder then rakes over the coals the “moral disapproval” that was expressed in the “debates and discussions” over DOMA regarding “intimate” same-sex relationships. This is enough, the attorney general asserts, to doom DOMA as unconstitutional because, he says, it represents “stereotype-based thinking.”

A fairer statement would be that it is impossible for most observers of these issues to take a stand that does not reflect, at least in part, a moral judgment. Writers and activists on both sides of the issue routinely make morality-based arguments: about the wellbeing of children, the cost to society of family decline, varying notions of equality, and so forth. Any Justice Department lawyer or court bent on weeding out every type of moral judgment from the law will have to bring a backhoe to the task.

The Holder letter concludes: “Our attorneys will notify the courts of our interest in providing Congress a full and fair opportunity to participate in the litigation in these cases.” It would have been fuller and fairer for President Obama and the Justice Department to have done that from the beginning when the DOMA suits were filed in Massachusetts. The silver lining is that the way has now been cleared for a real adversarial process. The law enacted by Congress and the views of the American people finally will have a champion in court.

— Chuck Donovan is senior research fellow in the DeVos Center on Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation.

Ynet News is reporting a rocket fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza into Beersheba for the first time in over two years. No one killed. Earlier in the day, three mortar bombs were set off, also in civilian areas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad claims it fired mortars at the responding IDF forces.

It was just a few days ago that, in reluctantly vetoing a U.N. resolution attacking Israeli settlements as illegal, President Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, took pains to say the administration “reject[s] in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.” And that, of course, was after the administration’s intelligence chief blew kisses to the “largely secular” Muslim Brotherhood. Probably a coincidence.

Robert Costa explains that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has tangled with unions before.

Hans von Spakovsky warns that the Obama Justice Department is threatening to override state-level redistricting decisions.

Jonah Goldberg volunteers to sound the death knell for public unions.

Michelle Malkin notices Democrats cut and run abroad in wartime and at home in crisis.

Bruce Edward Walker argues taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize NPR.

Thomas Sowell criticizes Michael Medved’s complaint that the GOP has been too harsh with President Obama.

Michael Tanner encourages Republicans to defend every penny of their cuts.

The Cato Institute’s Arnold Kling wrote an excellent piece for NR about a year ago on why we need to break up the big banks — a position that, at the time, many would have considered fringe at best. However, in a recent white paper, Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says much the same thing:

Today, I am convinced that the existence of too big to fail financial institutions poses the greatest risk to the U.S. economy. The incentives for risk-taking have not changed post-crisis and the regulatory factors that helped create the crisis remain in place. We must make the largest institutions more manageable, more competitive, and more accountable. We must break up the largest banks, and could do so by expanding the Volcker Rule and significantly narrowing the scope of institutions that are now more powerful and more of a threat to our capitalistic system than prior to the crisis.

“Too Big to Fail” is an issue that Republicans shouldn’t duck in 2012. President Obama is in bed with these guys. I don’t know if breaking up the TBTFs is the solution, but Republicans need to shame the president and put daylight between themselves and the crony capitalists responsible for the financial meltdown. They could start by promising not to stock Treasury and other major economic posts with these, if you pardon the phase, malefactors of great wealth.

The nagging issue of “Birthers” raises a chicken/egg question: It is an issue that lingers of its own accord, or does it linger because the media won’t let it go away?

Republicans appearing on cable to talk about important issues of the day — unemployment, the national debt, Egypt, Wisconsin, etc. — can bet the “Birther” question will come up. And there appears to be nothing a Republican can do to satisfy an interviewer on this question. It is not enough to state a belief in the president’s Christianity, or that one takes the president at his word. In question after question, interviewers call on Republicans to condemn, repeatedly, rumors they neither believe nor spread; then they condemn the condemnation for not being condemnatory enough.

And so the issue keeps coming up. It’s self-perpetuating. Twice in the past week, George Stephanopoulos has asked Republican guests on Good Morning America about it. David Gregory routinely does the same on Meet the Press.

That doesn’t take into account the cable shows — whether news, opinion, or commentary — where it is often topic #1. Recently on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the issue came up again when the host, hardly a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, surprisingly said he does not believe President Obama is a Christian. Some days, Hardball could practically change its name to “BirtherWatch.”

I can speak to Hardball’s obsession with the issue with some authority. Shortly before a late August broadcast, while I was working for the Republican National Committee, a Newsweek reporter asked for the committee’s position regarding questions about President Obama’s religion. I told the reporter the RNC had not discussed the issue, precisely because it had not.

This raised the ire of Chris Matthews, who in that night’s program called Republican responses on the issue a “pitch-perfect dog whistle to the haters” and said that the Right was attempting to “de-Americanize the president” and “played birther politics with abandon.”

“The Republican National Committee knows this is a hot issue today,” Matthews thundered. “They’re prepared to answer it, and their answer is ‘We’re not talking.’” (A-ha, the old “keep an issue alive by not talking about it” ruse!)

The next day, August 24, I issued a statement on behalf of the committee that read: “The RNC has never spoken about the President’s Christianity because it is both crystal clear and a non-issue. What is an issue, and remains foremost in the minds of voters is the failed efforts of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to grow jobs. Today, it was announced that existing home sales plunged by 27%; discussing this issue will serve the voters far better than any nonsense that won’t employ a single American.”

That statement, which the Huffington Post called “clear and direct in putting to bed the Muslim rumors” and which should have been music to Matthews’s ears, was never mentioned on Hardball.

And so when a Democratic polling firm released a poll whose results conveniently said that 51 percent of Republican primary voters questioned President Obama’s place of birth, it was off to the races again — even though Republicans still were not talking about the issue except when asked about it by the media. Indeed, in three days of Conservative Political Action Conference speeches, the issue was mentioned exactly once.

Every week, party officials submit question ideas they hope Sunday-show guests will be asked. There’s no doubt that Democrats routinely push for Republican elected officials to be asked about the president’s birthplace and/or religion. Tactically, it’s a smart move: Keep the Republican elected officials talking about something they don’t believe while the media and/or the Democrats get to use the word “fringe” over and over. But let’s not confuse shrewd, if disingenuous, political tactics with substance.

Last month, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank declared a 30-day personal  moratorium on all things Sarah Palin. Here’s a suggestion for a media that appears to want to work itself into a lather over this nonsense issue: Stop talking about it. After a while, the media might like the results; in the meantime, we can discuss serious issues.

— Doug Heye served in the George W. Bush administration, in leading communications positions in the House and Senate, and most recently as the communications director of the Republican National Committee.

In a column that appeared in last Friday’s Washington Post, Frances Kissling, who served as president of Catholics for a Free Choice, offers some advice for supporters of legal abortion. Kissling acknowledges that recent pro-life efforts — specifically our focus on fetal development and our efforts to pass incremental laws — have been effective in shifting public opinion in a pro-life direction. She acknowledges that supporters of legal abortion are now losing, and that the pro-choice arguments that were persuasive in the 1970s are no longer working today.

As a result, Kissling suggests a shift in strategy. Specifically, she urges her pro-choice allies to support some restrictions on late-term abortions. She states that supporters of abortion rights need to “firmly and clearly reject post-viability abortions, except in extreme cases.” She even says that abortions in the second trimester “need to be considered differently.” Kissling encourages an approach that would mandate counseling for women seeking abortion in these circumstances.

In this editorial, Kissling is saying something publicly that many pro-choice activists and leaders have likely been thinking for years. The legality of partial-birth abortions and other late-term abortions has caused considerable damage to the pro-choice cause. In fact, the campaign to ban partial-birth abortion during the mid-1990s is what started the gradual but consistent increase in the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “pro-life.” Therefore, it is only natural that supporters of abortion rights would want to preempt future debates about the legality of late-term abortions.

However, there is clearly some risk involved with this strategy. If abortion-rights supporters fail to oppose restrictions on late-term abortions, they are at least tacitly acknowledging that some fetal life should be legally protected. This could lead to some potentially uncomfortable — and politically damaging — discussions about the exact stage in development at which unborn children merit legal protection. All of this could open the door for even greater protections for the unborn. On the other hand, it should also be noted that many countries in Western Europe restrict late-term abortions, and the legality of early-term abortions seems fairly secure in most of these countries.

On the whole, it is unlikely that the leaders of NOW, NARAL, and other pro-choice organizations will heed Kissling’s advice. Ever since the mid-1990s, organizations supporting legal abortion exerted a considerable amount of pressure on their allies in the Democratic party to oppose bans on partial-birth abortion. If abortion-rights groups backed down now, they would lose credibility in the eyes of their Democratic allies. In fact, one can only imagine how exasperated Democratic leaders would be to see supporters of legal abortion back away from a position that caused the Democratic party a considerable amount of embarrassment and political damage.

Of course, pro-lifers should be heartened by all of this. There is always plenty of intense debate in pro-life circles over various political and legislative strategies. The fact that a pro-choice leader is acknowledging our effectiveness should hearten those who have worked tirelessly — and often thanklessly — on incremental approaches. Better yet, the fact that our opponents are moving toward our position — albeit slowly and grudgingly — should give pro-lifers confidence as we continue our ongoing efforts to protect the unborn.

— Michael J. New is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.

John Pitney Jr. writes: “The president won the perception war for a couple of reasons. First, he and his party showed great message discipline in repeating the claim that the Republicans shut down the government. Second, while the Democrats had one clear leader who set the party line, the Republicans spoke with multiple voices. Some even celebrated the shutdown. And Speaker Newt Gingrich did not help matters when he complained that the president had snubbed him on a flight to the Middle East.” All true, but there was one other reason: Republicans are the more anti-government party in the public mind. The message that the Republicans had shut down the government out of zeal was thus an easier sell than the message that the Democrats had shut it down for tactical reasons. Apolitical people, asked to guess which party had shut down the government, would naturally gravitate to the answer “the Republicans.”

Republicans had a similar problem on the substance of the dispute. They could say every other sentence that they wanted only to “save Medicare” — a message Fred Barnes is now urging them to revisit — but the public was not predisposed to believe that the Republicans were trying to save the program and that Democrats were standing in the way. It just didn’t sound right.

But maybe everything has changed, as I keep hearing, and things will work out differently this time.

A lot of you morons are beside yourselves with “outrage” over the actions of the lamister Democrats of Wisconsin and Indiana, scooting off to Illinois rather than discharge their constitutional duty to, you know, show up for work and take their lumps like a metrosexual.  

Please.  

It’s obvious to me that none of you has ever read Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which was one of the sacred texts of my father’s youth and which I was forced to memorize as a child, reciting it at cell meetings and dinner parties just before we all joined in singing “The Internationale.”

Yes, like all good sixties radicals, the sainted “Che” Kahane was raised to believe that there is nothing more important, no higher moral calling, than Sticking It to the Man. And Thoreau was their Virgil, guiding them past the shoals of accommodationist danger in the Inferno that was Nixon’s Amerikkka. 

Back then, they defined the Man as, basically, the head of the local draft board, as well as campus narcs, snitches, and other fun-spoilers, but now we’ve come to understand that you are the Man Thoreau was talking about. Naturally, we’ve had to make some peace with the fact that you devils have co-opted the famous opening:

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.  

But what’s your answer to this?

. . . a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? 

In other words, we men of the Left answer to a higher power than your mere laws. Especially when we’re on the losing side. So come, sing along with me. You know you want to:

Few people have been as vindicated by recent events in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and elsewhere as the president.

Bush, that is. In remarks before before the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, Bush noted that “sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

The foreign-policy elite responded to Bush’s freedom agenda with derision: Some believed democracy promotion to be idealistic and a faulty basis for U.S. realpolitik; others found Bush’s vision “contaminated” because they equated it with regime change in Iraq. When Bush left the scene, so too did the U.S. standard bearer for democratic reforms in autocratic states.

What a difference a crisis makes. “Egypt Proves Bush Right,” declared Newsweek on February 2. Bush’s successor, who campaigned on a platform of finding common ground with the despots in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, finds himself walking a fine line as he encourages peaceful democratic change in Egypt, Bahrain, and other regional stalwarts.

And in our hyper-connected modern era, this may be just the beginning. The leveling wind of popular dissent against autocracy and dictatorship is blowing — across North Africa, into the Gulf, and beyond. What happens if Saudi Arabia is next?

Or China?

Far-fetched? The Chinese government doesn’t think so. It was reported by Reuters and Newsweek, among others, that the Chinese government restricted Egypt-related Internet searches when popular protests against Mubarak exploded late last month.

But, as usual when it comes to China, what’s really going on is rather more complicated.

News organizations in China — including the Global Times, an English-language daily linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily — reported on the crisis in a fairly straightforward fashion. What the government seems to be trying to block is not news of the protests, but its citizens’ ability to do anything about it, e.g., flash mobbing or other activities facilitated by micro-blogging.

In fact, what has been written and said in China about the situation in the Middle East is at least as interesting as what has been blocked. The Global Times recently editorialized that “democracy is still far away in … Egypt. … When it comes to political systems, the Western model is only one of a few options. It takes time and effort to apply democracy to different countries, and to do so without the turmoil of revolution.”

This view — which echoes some American analysts’ criticism of the Bush freedom agenda — is that some countries just aren’t ready for democracy. It is a common defense of autocratic regimes; the regimes themselves often use it.

When visiting the White House in January, Chinese president Hu Jintao offered the same basic formulation in response to a question about human rights and democracy. Hu told reporters that “China recognizes and also respects the universality of human rights. And at the same time … China is a developing country with a huge population, and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform. In this context, China still faces many challenges in economic and social development. And a lot still needs to be done in China, in terms of human rights.”

The problem for authoritarian regimes is that it is difficult to know when the people have had enough and will no longer tolerate the argument that they are not ready for self-rule. This seems to be what’s happening in the Middle East right now, where the problem has been compounded by the economic challenges facing the region (rising food prices and an unemployment pandemic in the under-25 population).

Which is why China is so concerned. For all the Western, business-driven hype about China’s economic appeal, its own leaders understand that it is an underdeveloped country with a per capita income about the same as Tunisia’s. At any given time, there are probably about 150 million Chinese — twice the entire population of Egypt — out of work. Over a decade of non-stop government stimulus spending, by government-controlled banks through government-controlled companies, has been needed to keep economic growth at a level high enough to keep unemployment in check. After years of hyper-spending, the country is on the verge of serious inflation and, very likely, a real-estate bubble.

China’s leaders know their situation is a precarious one. While President Hu was being feted in Washington as the leader of a global power equal to the United States, Premier Wen Jaiobao told Communist Party leaders back home what he told them during the party congress in 2008 and has repeated many times since:

Keep reading this post . . .

The one analogy between Scott Walker and Hosni Mubarak that the Madison protesters’ bogus narrative gets right? A number of his enemies want him dead:

One of the most insidious practices of the insidious Obama Justice Department is the sabotaging of litigation — i.e., DOJ purports to defend some statute or government policy so that it can appear to be moderate, but uses its resulting control over how the case gets litigated to forfeit some of the best legal arguments supporting the statute/policy. This way, DOJ can steer the case toward the radical outcome the Obama base desires rather than the outcome DOJ is ostensibly pursuing.

On balance, I far prefer that Obama’s Justice Department openly advocates for the outcome desired by Obama’s base, as it is finally doing with DOMA. This way, the court can appoint lawyers who will truly defend the statute with the best legal arguments available.

That is what happened in 1999, when the Clinton administration decided not to defend the statute by which Congress had tried to reverse the Miranda decision. The Supreme Court appointed special counsel to defend the conviction of a bank robber whose confession, though voluntary, had been obtained in the absence of Miranda warnings. (The conviction was reversed; DOJ’s abandonment was a bad legal and policy decision, but at least it was transparent and accountable, and it ensured that the law enforcement position was adequately represented by other lawyers.)

Regardless of where the DOMA litigation goes from here, what’s interesting is the administration’s political calculation as the president gears up for the 2012 campaign. Obama has clearly decided that it’s more important to be publicly aligned with his base — which he desperately needs to drum up enthusiasm for his reelection — than to pursue the more subtle (and effective, albeit unethical) strategy of masquerading as DOMA’s defender while actually undermining the statute.

Stanley Kurtz writes, “Did anyone on any part of the political spectrum ever actually believe that Obama opposed gay marriage?” My guess is that the answer is yes, millions of people heard him and assumed he was telling the truth. That is, after all, why he said what he did.

As you probably know, Republicans have proposed, once again, to end federal funding for National Public Radio. Independently of whether one likes their programming, it is the right thing to do. First and foremost, there is no reason for taxpayers to subsidize radio programs through their tax dollars. As far I know, NPR (and PBS, for that matter) isn’t a matter of national security or part of any social safety net. It’s simply not the role of the federal government to support them, and taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for a business that is private in nature, whether it is balanced or biased, interesting or boring.

Also, if their federal funding goes away, NPR and PBS won’t disappear. In fact, one of the most interesting arguments I have heard for ending their funding was made by my colleague Adam Thierer over at the Technology Liberation Front. He argues that not only will public broadcasting be fine if its federal funding ends, it could turn that “into a golden opportunity by asking its well-heeled and highly-diversified base of supporters to step up to the plate and fill the gap left by the end of taxpayer subsidies.” This part is particularly interesting:

In many ways, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS, has the perfect business model for the age of information abundance. Philanthropic models — which rely on support for foundational benefactors, corporate underwriters, individual donors, and even government subsidy — can help diversify the funding base at a time when traditional media business models — advertising support, subscriptions, and direct sales — are being strained.  This is why many private media operations are struggling today; they’re experiencing the ravages of gut-wrenching marketplace / technological changes and searching for new business models to sustain their operations. By contrast, CPB, NPR, and PBS are better positioned to weather this storm since they do not rely on those same commercial models.

Also, here is the demographics of NPR listeners (according to NPR):

The median age of the NPR listener is 50.

The median household income of an NPR News listener is about $86,000, compared to the national average of about $55,000.

NPR’s audience is extraordinarily well-educated.  Nearly 65% of all listeners have a bachelor’s degree, compared to only a quarter of the U.S. population.  Also, they are three times more likely than the average American to have completed graduate school.

The majority of the NPR audience (86%) identifies itself as white.

Thierer also gives a list of NPR corporate supporters. He concludes:

Read rest of the list of this impressive list of NPR corporate and foundational supporters here.  Has there ever been a more well-diversified base of support for any media operation in American history?  I think not. As Jill Lawrence points out on Politics Daily, public media’s extremely loyal — and rich – fan base are not about let NPR and PBS die.

Now, if only we could get the federal government out the business of subsidizing opera houses and museums . . .

Obama’s pulling the plug on the Justice Department’s defense of DOMA ends a long-running charade that had DOJ lawyers “defending” the statute while refusing to make arguments that political higher-ups in the department deemed “unreasonable.” For instance, as Attorney General Holder’s letter admits, the department had already deemed legally undignifiable the argument that heterosexual marriage serves a procreative function necessary for an ordered society, so the AG and the White House instructed Civil Division lawyers simply not to advance that highly credible argument because, in the view of political appointees, more modern social science did not bear it out.

In other words, while the DOJ was nominally defending the statute, it was, as a result of political interference, already taking a dive. It was the sort of thing that a Republican administration would have been excoriated for. Today’s announcement at least has the advantage of admitting what was already the case.

What puzzles me, however, is White House press secretary’s Jay Carney’s suggestion at today’s presser that President Obama is still “grappling” with the gay-marriage issue. If today’s letter from the attorney general to Congress is any indication, the administration has now fully committed to the idea that it is unconstitutional to deny marriage benefits to homosexuals. According to the letter, it is the administration’s position that discrimination against homosexuals is subject to strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause and that all sorts of proffered rationales not borne out by “modern social science” — such as the procreative function of marriage — are categorically unreasonable or simply moral bigotry.

The administration’s analysis of DOMA leaves little left to decide on the question of gay marriage. Let there be no doubt, Mr. Carney, President Obama has declared his support for gay marriage, at least as a constitutional matter. And since that constitutional analysis is really policy dressing itself up as law, I think we can guess where he is on the policy question, too. 

The always sharp Ed Morrissey has it about right on Obama and DOMA. This is a political move designed to distract attention from debates on public-sector unions and the budget that are not going the president’s way. It’s also a departure from Obama’s fundamental strategy of downplaying social issues and foreign policy so as to build a broad-based coalition around issues of economic populism. That was the approach of Obama’s organizing mentors, and I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama has adopted it for himself.

For Obama to risk that broader strategy now is a sign of weakness. I suggested the other day in “Obama’s Wisconsin Bind” that having unpopular public-sector unions as the face of his coalition might force him into aggressive but risky efforts to shore up a broader-based movement of the Left. The problem for Obama is that assembling such a movement forces him to drop his centrist persona. Yet that is what events are now demanding of him.

Did anyone on any part of the political spectrum ever actually believe that Obama opposed gay marriage? That was never anything but disguise. This new move suggests that the centrist mask is slipping, the country is polarizing, and Obama is being forced to fly his true flag. I don’t doubt that the president will continue to resist full disclosure of his leftist political allegiances. Yet that is the direction in which he is now being pulled.

When 43-year-old Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson signed the first collective-bargaining law for public employees in 1959, he did so with little fanfare. There were no sign-holding people dressed as gorillas ululating on the capitol grounds; the capitol rotunda didn’t smell like microwaved feet from a week of college students sleeping there; legislators from the opposition party did not flee to Illinois to prevent the law’s enactment.

That law is the one that 43-year-old Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is now trying to substantially amend, which has turned the statehouse into a cacophonous hostel and left public-sector-union leaders waxing nostalgic for the Nelson era. “Gutting law that was put into place in 1959, signed by the great Gaylord Nelson, granting public employees the right to collectively bargain, is ludicrous,” said Mike Lipp, president of Madison Teachers, Inc.

Yet passage of the 1959 Municipal Employees Relations Act (MERA) wasn’t exactly free of controversy. As it turns out, the fact that Wisconsin was the first state to permit public-employee collective bargaining may have had just as much to do with the unique and perilous position of the Democratic party in the state as it did “workers’ rights.” Fifty years ago, collective bargaining looked less like a right and more like a partisan favor.

Due to the Progressives’ takeover of the state Republican party in the early 20th century, elected Democrats in Wisconsin were scarce. By 1958, it had been 26 years since a Democrat had won the Wisconsin governorship. Democrats had been in the minority in the state senate and assembly since 1893. For four straight legislative sessions (1923–1929), there were no Democrats in the Senate.

Yet in the 1950s, Democrats began to emerge as a serious party in Wisconsin, in large part due to the money they raised from labor unions. When Democrat William Proxmire ran for governor in 1954, 55 percent of the money he raised was from organized labor. Labor also offered Democrats vote mobilization, phone banks, Election Day transportation, and independent expenditures. Republicans still outspent Democrats two to one, but organized labor was able to close the gap considerably.

Republicans, sensing the threat, in 1955 passed the Caitlin Act, which prohibited labor unions from contributing to political parties, committees, or candidates for state or local office. After passage of the act, union donations to Democrats plummeted.

But Democrats quickly adapted, and soon the state stopped enforcing the Caitlin Act altogether. In Nelson’s successful gubernatorial race in 1958, 21.7 percent of his money was raised from labor.

Shortly after Nelson took office came the law allowing collective bargaining for state and municipal employees. Soon, government unions flourished — and so did Democratic fundraising. Soon, Democrats became the dominant political party in Wisconsin.

Nelson was always a supporter of public-employee unions — in 1946, his first job as a young attorney in Madison was working for a nascent labor organization known as AFSCME. Yet in today’s political world, such a nakedly obvious gift to a political constituency would crash Twitter. Nelson’s record of clean governing is the stuff of legend in Wisconsin — but public-sector collective bargaining clearly helped the fortunes of his Democratic party. To think he didn’t understand that is to insult the intelligence of a political legend.

At his inauguration in 1959, Nelson quoted Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. We must think anew and act anew.”

Sounds like good advice for Gov. Scott Walker.

— Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

Over on the home page, a glance at Gov. Scott Walker’s rise:

Madison, Wis. — His high-ceilinged, wood-paneled office is chapel-quiet. His navy jacket is off; his desk a sea of family photos and legislative memos. But below the east window, where icicles hang, bedlam sprawls across the capitol lawn. Hundreds of labor activists — graybeard professors, dreadlocked undergraduates, hulking Teamsters — tote bright banners. Through the thick marble, their chants soften, blurring with the hum of the desktop computer. More protesters assemble outside the door. A wild scene recycles beneath the rotunda: Bongos beat, skinny girls twirl, and schoolteachers bark into bullhorns. As we settle into chairs, the room feels eerily like an airport gate: a padded cocoon propped between lurking, nonstop rumble. Gov. Scott Walker, calm as a public-radio newsreader, shrugs off the cacophony.

A few days ago, the governor spoke with NRO about budget politics.

We’re seeing a pattern to how Democrats respond to election losses: do an end-run around democracy. You can’t block a union bill? Flee the chambers. You can’t repeal DOMA? Declare orientation a protected class all on your own. This tactic may backfire, however: It opens up the pathway for the House to intervene to defend the law.

This also shows how much they don’t believe they have the Supreme Court votes to win yet.

What is it with Democrats and facing up to the nation’s budget woes? As vividly described in the Washington Post, the federal government, state governments, and municipal governments face a sea of red ink. The president’s Fiscal Reform Commission called this a national “moment of truth” that would require facing up to hard choices and ending the tradition of dodging decisions and playing political games with the budget.

Right.

In Wisconsin, Democrats have chosen Illinois water parks over the job in the state legislature of addressing the fourth-largest pension gap per resident in the nation, and the additional red ink from health benefits. Over in Indiana, they are simply AWOL. At least in Ohio they appear to be merely protesting the tough work they face.

But the states are little fish in the big pond of budget irresponsibility. As the federal government churns inexorably towards the expiration of its stopgap financing on March 4, the Republican-led House stepped up and passed a continuing resolution in timely fashion this past Saturday. Did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid call the Senate back, push through a Senate CR, and begin the crucial task of mediating policy differences from the House in conference? 

No. He gave a stirring speech on brothels and prepared to take up patent reform upon the Senate’s return. Patents? (NBAers, imagine saying it like Allen Iverson used to pronounce practice.)

Last but not least, President Obama continues to be the Incredible-Disappearing-Leader-on-Entitlements (IDLE). He has produced a budget empty of any real effort to address the nation’s greatest threat to its prosperity and freedom, has apparently reined in Senate Democrats willing to discuss Social Security reform, and on the 2011 budget has restricted himself to exactly the “just say no” approach he has consistently tried to pin on Republicans. 

It is a wearying political moment. On a bipartisan basis, the consensus has emerged that this is the moment to take on the government’s spending problem. The evidence is growing that reductions in government payrolls and transfer payments can be combined with restraint on taxes to generate growth, jobs, and a future for the next generations free of the burden of debt. But Americans need both parties to be serious.

Matthew Miller complains that Gov. Christie has called for trimming Medicare and Social Security but not for raising taxes. “Courage is when a politician tells his strongest supporters things they don’t want to hear. I’m a little tired of Republicans calling for an ‘adult conversation’ that mainly takes things away from adults who don’t vote Republican.” Is Miller under the impression that Republicans don’t collect Social Security? Given the way older voters have trended lately, I doubt that even that “mainly” saves his claim.

National Journal is reporting that the president is ordering the Department of Justice not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in two pending court challenges in the U.S. Court of Appeals (1st and 2nd Circuits). He believes, the report says, that the law is unconstitutional. There’s no word on the analysis used to come to this conclusion; I suspect politics is at the core [see below].

There is something about the marriage issue that provokes an “any means necessary” approach from its proponents (among whom I believe we can count the president, notwithstanding campaign rhetoric to the contrary).

The president’s strategy, however distasteful, could be successful. In almost every successful same-sex-marriage case so far, the attorneys charged with defending the marriage laws either refused to do so (Iowa, Northern District of California) or made only pro forma defenses while conceding key points to the pro-redefinition side (Connecticut, California Supreme Court). Whether it is a good thing to have key social policies decided by lawyer inaction is an important question.

Presumably Congress can seek to intervene in the DOMA suits in order to defend the law. Maybe the federal courts need a public-defender program for statutes that have fallen out of favor with the elites in power.

Update: Daniel Foster has very helpfully provided the DOJ letter justifying (if that’s the right word) the president’s decision not to defend DOMA. The basic argument seems to be: (1) “Sexual orientation” is like race for all legal purposes, and (2) some DOMA supporters in Congress made arguments that reflect “moral disapproval” of gays and lesbians, so the law really can’t be justified.

Some very initial reactions

● The DOJ (and the president) are attempting to unilaterally amend the Constitution to add a sexual-orientation discrimination clause.

● Over the last decade, most of the courts that have weighed in on the issue have found marriage laws to be consistent with the federal Constitution or the relevant state constitution, but the DOJ does not even mention these decisions.

● If the “equal protection component” of the 5th Amendment means that Congress can’t define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, how could the states do so under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment?

● Can the letter’s assertion that gay and lesbian activists lack political power really be take seriously, given this very decision, the repeal of DADT, etc.?

National Review is accepting applications for its 2011 summer internship. The intern will work in our New York headquarters and receive a modest but adequate salary. Duties will include sundry editorial and administrative tasks, and there will be occasional opportunities to write. The ideal candidate will be a rising college senior with an excellent academic record, some experience in student or professional journalism, and a strong, principled belief in NR’s mission. If you wish to apply, please send a cover letter, your résumé, and a few clips to nr.summer.internship@gmail.com.

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? A major cause of the revolutionary fervor sweeping the Arab world, according to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, is catastrophic climate change caused by human beings. The causal link is famine, say the authors of the piece: “Could hunger, and the threat to power that accompanies it, be what finally forces political leaders to act” against greenhouse-gas emissions?

The authors get one important thing right: Rising food prices and shortages have helped drive many long-disenchanted residents of Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Algeria to convert their disenchantment into rage, and then into street protest. There is clearly an economic component to a movement that also includes desires for political and social reform. Remember that the Tunisian revolution was set off by the self-immolation of a young man who couldn’t find work, began selling produce to hungry neighbors, and then had his produce cart seized for failing to pay the required bribes.

It is also true, as Businessweek reports, that monetary inflation exported by Western central banks isn’t the only reason for rising food prices. Recent natural disasters — droughts, floods, and fires — have plagued grain-growing regions of Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, and Africa. The leap was to blame these disasters on human-induced climate change. There remain far too many unknowns in global climate and weather patterns to take such a leap. Any theory that purports to explain both droughts and floods, depending on local circumstance, is subject to the problem of non-falsification; it starts to look more like a product of stubborn faith than empirical science.

There’s more on the subject here, here, and here.

Since the beginning of the uprising in Egypt and the expected power shift in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic world has rallied around the Brotherhood and demanded that the West engage with them. But a crack in that unity appeared today when Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said that the Muslim Brotherhood “shouldn’t be part of the process as long as they don’t reject violence and extremism.”

“Anyone who wants to be part of the political process should adopt values that are compatible with democracy,” Najib said in an interview in Istanbul, where he is speaking at a conference on moderation. “It’s not just about having a vote and choosing your leaders; it’s also part of imparting the right values for democracy to work, because there are failed democracies as well.”

Najib said he has “some concerns, deep concerns” about Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader. Those concerns center on Qaradawi’s support and justification for terrorism, which carries a great deal of weight given Qaradawi’s credibility as an Islamic scholar. It is exactly that type of Muslim leader that has led the Middle East astray, according to Najib. “We have lost a lot of ground to the extremists in the Middle East.”

He offered his own country as a model to emerging Islamic governments in the Middle East, saying that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described Malaysia as “modern, progressive, and moderate.”

“We shouldn’t want to impose on people, but people are welcome to study our experience and how we’ve done things in Malaysia. Perhaps it could be useful in their country,” he said.

Too many leaders, Najib said, misunderstand moderation. “I think they’re not paying enough attention to the values associated with being a moderate,” he said. “Moderate doesn’t mean that you’re a wimp — far from it. It means that you’ve chosen a path because you believe that’s the only way for global harmony and peace.”

— Seth Mandel is a fellow in the Foundation for Defense of Democracies National Security Fellowship Program.

National Journal reports:

President Obama has decided that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and has asked his Justice Department to stop defending it in court, the administration announced today.

“The President believes that DOMA is unconstitutional. They are no longer going to be defending the cases in the 1st and 2nd circuits,” a person briefed on the decision said.

The administration will formally notify Congress later today. The act sought to restrict single-sex unions.

Full text of the letter from the DOJ to Congress after the jump.

Keep reading this post . . .

Is libertarianism surging among the young? Conor Skelding of the Student Free Press Association has the story.

This is not quite Arthur Carlson and Herb Tarlek throwing helpless turkeys from a WKRP helicopter, but The Daily Show had a misfire with a camel in Madison yesterday. It apparently did not make the show.

From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On President Obama’s silence on Libya:

I think the reticence of this administration is simply astonishing. This is a president who arrogantly went around the world in the first year in office saying how he was raising the moral standard of the United States in the world … [Yet] here he is — he has said nothing on what’s happening in Libya, which is a case of brutality and near-genocide — to use the word of one of Qaddafi’s own diplomats — the shooting of demonstrators from helicopter gunships, the strafing of demonstrators from bombers. … Here was a president, our president, who went out there on television again and again on Egypt, which in comparison [to] what’s happening in Libya was Boy Scout treatment of those demonstrations. But … a year and a half ago in Iran, where there was also a higher order of ruthlessness and brutality, shooting at the demonstrators in the streets, the mass trials and the rapes and the hangings and all that … he said almost nothing.

Why can’t the president find a voice, (a) for reasons of morality, simply upholding our traditions, and (b) strategic interests?

On the situation in Wisconsin:

The outcome is really in the balance now in Wisconsin. And I think the governor is going to make a big mistake if he goes to layoffs next week. He will have gratuitously created victims, hostages, scapegoats …

What he can do and ought to do is to take out of the bill [mandating concessions from the government workers unions] the parts that don’t have to do with fiscal matters. The real heart of the issue is to take away the [government workers unions'] bargaining rights. That he can pass in the Senate. He doesn’t need a quorum of 20. He doesn’t need Democrats. He can do that.

And then if he passes that, he’s won, because all that’s left [in the bill] is the [financial] givebacks, which the unions have already agreed they’re going to do. … And there’ll be no reason for a Wisconsin Democrat [senator] to stay in Chicago and hide.

So he [Governor Walker] has at hand a winning tactic and he’s not exercising it. I don’t know why. Because in the absence of that stalemate continues, and then if he goes to selective layoffs, he’s going to lose the public relations battle, which he’s winning now. And it’s all going to be decided on public opinion.

Speaking to a union rally in Boston yesterday, Rep. Michael Capuano (a Democratic member of the U.S. House) told the crowd:

I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once in a while you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.

A reader in Israel sends me the following note, which I cannot keep to myself:

Hi, Jay,

Last night, I was invited to a dinner in Jerusalem at which the great Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis was to give a talk. And there, sitting at the table next to mine, was not only Professor Lewis but also David Pryce-Jones, whom I hadn’t even heard was in Israel. Professor Lewis’s talk was amazing, as expected. He covered almost everything going on in the Middle East, with a depth of knowledge and nuance that only he can summon. Then a friend introduced me to David Pryce-Jones, and I actually got to sit down and chat with him one-on-one.

To be in the presence of even one of those intellectual giants is humbling. To be in the presence of both simultaneously was like watching the Sistine Chapel being painted.

Then this morning, on my way to the office, former Israeli president Yitzhak Navon got in the elevator with me. I got to listen to Bernard Lewis, talk with David Pryce-Jones, and say good morning to a former president all within the space of 14 hours. It was like being on a National Review cruise without needing to worry about getting seasick.

Hey, nobody ever gets seasick on an NR cruise. Right, cruisers?

An e-mail from a reader, in response to this.

You are a published author and I respect that. I have little claim to being any sort of grammarian as my wife would tell you if you inquired.  But you had a post this morning in The Corner about Lincoln in which you recount that he “snuck” into D.C. Yes, this word is an Americanism.  And I am American true-blue, through-and-through. But I truly believe that if you had turned in a paper in public school pre-1970 you would have had points taken off for using this instead of sneaked.  Besides, it is inelegant in its sound.  OK, small beer, I realize.  Forgive the intrusion.

My reply:

I actually gave this some thought and almost wrote “sneaked” but decided against it because “snuck” is what I would say in conversation and one of my dictionaries defined it as an acceptable colloquialism. But point taken. It’s good to hear from readers who care about words.

Maybe the comment section can offer its own verdict. Is it okay to have sneaked in “snuck”?

Given the unprecedented Continuing Resolution amendment vote to defund Planned Parenthood last Friday, along with the president commenting this weekend on it and Lila Rose’s investigatory work in Virginia, I asked House Speaker John Boehner’s office about the speaker’s outlook on the situation. A spokesman tells me: “The speaker supports the Pence amendment and is pleased that the open process in the House led to Friday’s vote. He welcomes the enthusiasm for debate and oversight that has followed from the recent alarming Live Action videos. Planned Parenthood and its affiliates have demonstrated they are not defenders of women’s rights and health.”

Yesterday, here in the Corner, I said something about unionism and the music business. Someone very close to the New York Philharmonic said to me, “You may think of them as an orchestra. You should think of them as Local 802.” The topic of unionism and music is an important, painful, and vexatious one. I have done a fair amount of writing about it.

Let me share a letter, which is rather long, but very good. I’ll publish the letter after the “jump” — click if you like. It’s not anything like the last word on the subject, but it is certainly one word — one woman’s word, and experience. Worth listening to, too. I think that many across the country, if they read this letter, will know exactly what our correspondent means.

Keep reading this post . . .

Liberal political theorist Benjamin Barber has an extraordinary, quasi-insider account of the situation in Libya that should not be missed. Barber has just resigned from the board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, run by Gaddafi’s son Saif. It’s tough to know how seriously to take the story Barber tells. Saif Gaddafi has advertised himself as a genuine liberal reformer. He apparently even has two books under contract with Oxford University Press on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world. Yet Saif has now thrown all this over to align with his father in what Barber describes as an essentially tribal battle hiding beneath the surface of Gaddafi’s rhetoric about a revolutionary people’s democracy. Maybe, as Barber would have it, this is a tragic resort to tribalism by Libya’s greatest liberal reformer. Or maybe Barber was taken in by Saif, who was never sincere about democracy to begin with. I’m not sure which interpretation would be worse from the standpoint of Western hopes for liberal reform in the Middle East. In any case, Barber’s account reveals the hidden tribal underpinnings of what’s playing out now in Libya.

President Obama is now widely acknowledged to have defaulted on his leadership obligations by opting for an election-driven budget that ignores economic reality and the guidance of his Fiscal Reform Commission. Fortunately, there are signs that a bipartisan group of senators is willing to step into the vacuum and take steps to roll back the growing debt that threatens the foundation of our prosperity and freedom.

But not so fast! Suddenly Democratic leaders Reid and Schumer, with at least the acquiescence of President Obama, are demanding that Social Security be excluded from any effort to deal with the federal budget outlook. They argue that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit and should not be part of any solution. This reveals a terrible misunderstanding of economic and budgetary facts.

The prospect of tripling federal debt, rising debt-to-GDP ratios, and ever-increasing interest costs send the message to international capital markets that the U.S. is planning to become an increasingly risky borrower. Lenders will respond by demanding ever-higher risk premiums — higher interest rates — and may demand higher taxes before continuing to lend. The U.S.’s current fiscal future promises to involve higher interest rates, higher taxes, or both.

In the other direction, a serious plan now to address the prospect of higher debt would eliminate those interest-rate and tax threats. That is, it would be the single best pro-growth policy the federal government could adopt.

A casual examination of the budget shows that entitlements — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare — are already 60 percent of spending and on track to explode. As the Fiscal Reform Commission made clear, entitlement reform is the heart of addressing what it described as America’s “moment of truth.”

Obviously, any immediate improvement in the outlook for entitlement spending would send a valuable signal to credit markets and improve our economic outlook. Naturally, it would be good to focus on the big dollars in Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, but the administration has taken health programs off the table. Republicans will try, but the only promising area for bipartisan entitlement reform consistent with long-term economic growth is Social Security.

In sum, from an economic-policy point of view, Social Security reform is the most important thing that a bipartisan group of senators could do. As the past two years have proven, the liberal leadership has it exactly backwards.

And Social Security does affect the deficit. At present, Social Security is running a modest cash-flow deficit, increasing the overall shortfall. As the years pass, these Social Security deficits will become increasingly larger. They are central to the deficit outlook.

One hopes that entitlement reform, especially Social Security, will remain a priority for the 112th Congress. Republicans in the House have committed to include these reforms in their budget. Senate Republicans cannot control the agenda, but one should not be surprised to see some conservative senators assuming the leadership mantle and pushing for Social Security reform.

It would be nice to see someone in Washington willing to lead.

I’d like to share the below letter, not because it’s unusual — although it’s interesting — but because I have received many, many letters like it in the last week or so.

Jay,

I don’t work in secondary education; I’ve worked at a large urban community college that hires many high-school teachers to teach part time, usually at night during the school year. Most of them were wonderful.

For several years, I was the department chairman, in charge of staffing classes in fall, spring, and summer. I always had a group of high-school teachers who coveted the summer classes, because they were the best and easiest source of money between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I was happy to help when I could, but there was always the problem of too few classes and too many teachers. Plus, my full-time community-college instructors always had first pick.

One year, I was staffing for “Summer I” — classes that ran to about the Fourth of July — and was explaining to one of my high-school charges that I simply had nothing for him. “What do I tell my wife?” he demanded. “How will I pay my rent? You know I have two kids. What do I tell them?”

I felt terrible, but simply had nothing. I wasn’t running an employment agency. I kept an eye peeled, though, and a day later I called him. Something had come open after all: not Summer I, but a ten-week class that would finish out the summer. Without a trace of self-consciousness, he turned me down. “Oh,” he said, “I couldn’t teach that. We’re going to Spain in July.”

Last week, I wrote quite a bit about the lying of teachers — the lying of all those teachers in Madison and elsewhere who called in “sick” when they weren’t sick at all. They were just striking, using the sick leave paid for by the taxpayer.

A reader wrote me a letter about the pros and cons of teachers’ unions. Here are two, bracing sentences: “One thing I always told my students was, ‘I won’t lie to you, and I don’t expect you to lie to me.’ Mass lying and abandoning the classroom for political purposes is not congruent with my understanding of the teacher’s role.”

Many conservatives are displeased that Mitch Daniels has not supported his legislature’s attempt to pass right-to-work legislation. Given the passions engendered by the Wisconsin situation, it’s understandable that many conservatives are upset with what they see as an unnecessary punt on an important issue. There is, however, a fair amount of Indiana-specific context that they should consider.

First, as Josh Barro notes, there are important differences between public-sector unions (the topic in Wisconsin) and private-sector unions (the topic in Indiana). Given the problems posed by the Wagner Act, right-to-work laws do have their merits, as Daniels himself has acknowledged. But private-sector unions represent only 7 percent of the private-sector workforce. Public-sector unions are a far more serious problem, given the conflicts of interest they have with the taxpaying public.

Second, as Katrina Trinko points out, Mitch Daniels decertified all public unions, entirely rescinding their collective-bargaining rights, on his first day in office in 2005. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, as a reminder, is seeking to limit collective-bargaining rights for most public-sector employees, with notable exceptions for public-safety workers: a reasonable, but much more modest, reform. In other words, Mitch Daniels has already done more on the issue of public-sector unions than Scott Walker is even attempting.

Third, the Democratic minority in the Indiana legislature wields considerable power that Daniels has no choice but to deal with. In the Indiana House of Representatives, Republicans have 60 seats and Democrats 40. However, quorum in the Indiana House is 67. By contrast, in the Wisconsin Senate, a quorum of 20 senators is required to pass fiscal legislation, but only 17 are required to pass non-fiscal legislation; Republicans control 19 seats there. Hence, in Wisconsin, Republicans have the ability to pass a wide range of legislation while Democrats are absent. Not so in Indiana.

Fourth, as much as Republicans may not like it, quorum requirements are effectively quite similar to U.S. Senate filibusters, and unless those quorum requirements are modified, the Indiana minority can block all legislation. Indiana’s legislative calendar is only four months long, meaning that other pressing reforms that Daniels campaigned on will wither. These include education reform, which, it is worth mentioning, is fundamentally about challenging the interests and security of teachers’ unions. The moral case against absentee legislators is compelling — but that moral case may not be enough to get things done this year in Indiana.

Fifth, it’s worth reviewing Indiana’s recent history, for those who have the impression that Daniels is a coward. Back in 2005, Indiana House Democrats used the same tactic, leaving the capitol and boycotting votes on dozens of pending bills just before a critical deadline. At that time, Daniels said that “Indiana’s drive for growth and reform was car-bombed yesterday by the Indiana House minority. … If you want to know why Indiana’s economy fell behind, why state government is broke, broken, and awash in scandal, just look at [Democratic minority leader Pat] Bauer.” He said Democrats didn’t have “the courage or conscience to stay at work” and that he was “embarrassed for them.”

In 2011, Daniels’s rhetoric has been more conciliatory, likely because he knows from his experience in 2005 that he needs seven Democrats in the House to get anything done. Jim Geraghty asks, “If the Indiana House Democrats get what they want through this tactic, what’s to prevent them from using it again and again every time they think they’ll lose on a big issue?” The answer is, they already have, and Republicans can’t do much about it. Indiana House speaker Brian Bosma admitted as much to Katrina Trinko. What Daniels seems to be hoping is that Democrats won’t walk out for an issue like education reform, which has broader public support, because he campaigned on it.

Conservatives who criticize Daniels for his stance on the right-to-work legislation remind me a bit of liberals who called Obama a coward for abandoning the public option in 2010. Obama said often that single-payer health care was his preferred approach, but that he simply didn’t have the votes for it in the Senate. Daniels is, unfortunately, in a similar position in Indiana.

Daniels may or may not run for the White House in 2012. But the courage of those who do run should be judged by one issue above all: their willingness to put substantive entitlement reform on the table, instead of vague but crowd-pleasing rhetoric. If conservatives assess Daniels on that basis, he will come out ahead.

Ezra Klein has responded to the post in which I argued that the EPI study that claimed to show that Wisconsin public-sector workers were underpaid is unpersuasive:

Jim Manzi has posted a critique of the Economic Policy Institute’s study (PDF) suggesting that Wisconsin’s public-sector workers are underpaid relative to their private-sector counterparts. It basically boils down to the argument that this sort of thing is hard to measure. The study controls for most every observable worker characteristic that we can imagine controlling for.

But my basic criticism was that it fails to control for lots of plausible, commonsense differences. That is, that the study doesn’t control for all the characteristics we can imagine, but rather, some of those for which we happen to have data.

Klein is correct to say that my post “basically boils down to the argument that this sort of thing is hard to measure.” But he then argues that the purpose of the original study was not to demonstrate that public-sector workers are underpaid, but rather to rebut the claim that they are overpaid:

The EPI study is aimed at a very specific and very influential claim: that Wisconsin’s state and local employees are clearly overpaid. It blows that claim up.

That may have been the author’s motivation, but here is the final conclusion of the executive summary of the report:

Public sector workers in Wisconsin earn less in annual or hourly compensation than they would earn in the private sector.

The report makes a positive claim that it has determined a compensation “penalty” for working in the public sector, and repeats it many times.  My argument was that this report does not establish whether or not this claim is true. 

By the same logic, it also fails to “blow up” the claim that Wisconsin’s public workers are overpaid.  The methodology is inadequate to the task of establishing whether these workers are overpaid, underpaid, or paid perfectly. As the last paragraph of my post put it:

I don’t know if Wisconsin’s public employees are underpaid, overpaid, or paid just right. But this study sure doesn’t answer the question.

Statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman has a very interesting response to my post, in which he agrees that this conclusion “sounds about right,” but cautions that the study is not “completely useless either,” because this kind of adjusted comparison is better than simply comparing raw averages between public- and private-sector workers. I agree with that entirely. But that is, of course, a very different thing than saying that these adjustments create sufficient precision to support the bald statement, made in the report, that the author has analytically established that there is a “penalty” for working in the public sector.

Wisconsin Republicans are slowly turning up the heat on Democrats, like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled (a trope that is untrue, by the way). Stopping direct deposits of paychecks and per diem payments (how can legislators collect per diem expense payments if they aren’t on the job?) is nice, as is the threat to pass a photo ID requirement for voting. But if Republicans really want to turn up the temperature, they should consider fast-tracking two other measures: easy and quick alternative certification for new public-school teachers, who could then replace striking teachers, and expanding school choice.  

Another note: One of the signs that Reagan was going to succeed in breaking the air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 was when other labor unions offered only verbal support. No other labor union observed the striking controllers’ picket lines at airports. Of course, there are no picket lines to cross in Wisconsin, but have there been any of the usual threats to boycott Wisconsin cheese, cancel conventions, and otherwise make the state a pariah, as happened when Arizona passed its anti-illegal-immigration measures last year? So far, all you’ve seen from the AFL-CIO’s Rich Trumka is his best imitation of a thug.

When it comes to the leaders of Egypt’s anti-Mubarak opposition, it doesn’t get any better than the blogger Sandmonkey. So it’s instructive to see how even the best-of-the-best of Egypt’s opposition see future developments regarding Israel and the Muslim Brotherhood. Barry Rubin, a Middle East expert I like, has produced a commentary on some of Sandmonkey’s recent tweets. Call it an international experiment in blog-tweetery.

The larger problem is that Sandmonkey is an outlier among Egypt’s opposition. Even young people in the movement generally fall closer to the spectrum of parties I describe in my piece “A Frightful Democracy,” just out in the new issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.

I think the president is going to have to offer tough commentary on Libya sometime soon, since the following pattern is unsustainable: ad hoc, erratic, and frequent sermonizing condemning the authoritarianism of the pro-American strongman Mubarak, despite having lectured in 2009 about not meddling in the internal affairs of Iran when nearly a million people risked their lives to demonstrate for human rights — and now more silence as Libyans are butchered by the unhinged thug Gaddafi.

Given all the complexities, consistency is as necessary as it is difficult. At some point, the president is going to have to realize that the brutal totalitarian regimes of the Middle East — an Iran or a Libya — deserve the same degree of censure, if not more, than less savage dictatorships of the Mubarak stripe. There is a reason, after all, why BBC and CNN reporters are not in the streets of Tripoli and Tehran as they were in Tahrir Square. If the president’s baffling silence continues, observers will conclude that, to the degree a regime uses greater force and kills more of its own, or to the degree that it has a more atrocious record on human rights, or to the degree that it is more anti-American, it enjoys greater immunity from serial American criticism. The only mystery is, why?

Daniel Pletka offers a bipartisan list of American leaders using “unacceptable” to mean “we fully accept what has happened but want everyone to think we don’t.”

—President Obama on Egypt (2/4/11): “Attacks on reporters are unacceptable, attacks on human rights activists are unacceptable, attacks on peaceful protesters are unacceptable.”

—Obama on militant safe havens in Pakistan (11/8/10): “We will continue to insist to Pakistan’s leaders that terrorist safe-havens within their borders are unacceptable, and that the terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks be brought to justice.”

—Admiral Mike Mullen on Iran acquiring nuclear weapons (8/26/2010): “Iran is a particularly difficult issue. Their achieving a nuclear weapon capability is unacceptable and incredibly destabilizing.”

—Hillary Clinton on North Korea sinking a South Korean ship (5/25/10): “This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea, and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.”

—Hillary Clinton on Iran acquiring nuclear weapons (3/22/10): “In addition to threatening Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran would embolden its terrorist clientele and would spark an arms race that could destabilize the region. This is unacceptable. It is unacceptable to the United States. It is unacceptable to Israel. It is unacceptable to the region and the international community. So let me be very clear: The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

—Hillary Clinton on Eritrea supporting Somali militants (9/6/09): “It is long past time for Eritrea to cease and desist its support of al-Shabab and to start being a productive rather than a destabilizing neighbor. We are making it very clear that their actions are unacceptable. We intend to take action if they do not cease.”

—Dick Cheney on Russia invading Georgia (9/6/08): “Russia’s actions are an affront to civilized standards and are completely unacceptable. Russia has offered no satisfactory justification for the invasion, nor could it do so.”

—George W. Bush on Russia (8/11/08): “I said this violence is unacceptable. I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia.”

—Condi Rice on Russian threats towards Ukraine (2/13/08): “The unhelpful and really—I will use a different word—reprehensible rhetoric that is coming out of Moscow is unacceptable, and it’s not helpful to a relationship that actually has some positive aspects.”

. . . that Gaddafi looks like an old drag king?

Ex-justice minister says Gaddafi personally ordered the Lockerbie attack.

STOCKHOLM — Swedish tabloid Expressen says Libya’s ex-justice minister claims Moammar Gadhafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988.

Expressen on Wednesday quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil as telling their correspondent in Libya that “I have proof that Gadhafi gave the order about Lockerbie.” He didn’t describe the proof.

Abdel-Jalil stepped down as justice minister to protest the violence against anti-government demonstrations.

He told Expressen Gadhafi gave the order to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

“To hide it, he (Gadhafi) did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.