Court Watching

The decision on Obamacare will come down this week, perhaps even today. And even before the actual decision comes down, the navel-gazing is underway. Writing for the Washington Post, Peter Wallsten has a theory:

Obama, a former constitutional law instructor, and White House lawyers helped shape a legal strategy essentially portraying health care as a unique marketplace that Congress, under the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause, could regulate by imposing the requirement that consumers buy insurance before receiving treatment or pay a penalty.

Many liberals had criticized Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. for a halting performance during the oral arguments on the case in March. But while Verrilli took the lead in shaping the government’s case, the broader strategy being questioned in some circles stemmed from a close partnership between the solicitor general’s office and the White House — with the strategy securing Obama’s approval.

How one interprets the Commerce Clause makes all the difference. The clause itself seems straightforward enough:

Clause 3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes

Congress has this authority and everyone agrees on that. How much regulation Congress gets to do is where it gets sticky. One of the key cases in our modern understanding of the Commerce Clause is the Roosevelt-era decision Wickard v. Filburn. I've written about Wickard before and if you follow its logic, Obamacare pretty much has to stand.

What I suspect is that the conservative wing of the Court has been waiting to give Wickard another look and may have chosen to use the Obamacare case as its means. As recently as 2005, the Court used Wickard as a precedent in a case that essentially gave Congress the right to intervene in California's medical marijuana experiment. That case, Gonzales v. Raich, has been a source of consternation among conservatives and libertarians ever since.

Would the Court consider striking down Wickard in this case? Damon Root, writing for Reason, doesn't think so:

As I explained shortly before the Court heard oral arguments in the health care case, there was already good reason to think Scalia would vote against ObamaCare’s individual mandate. And since there’s zero chance the Supreme Court is going to overturn Wickard as part of its health care ruling, Scalia’s new hostility to that case only figures in as a sort of background influence.

The hostility that Root is referencing comes from a new book that Scalia has written, in which he is critical of Wickard. I'm not sure I agree with Root, however. Wickard is long since due for a good hard look, precisely because its logic pretty much lets Congress do anything it wants if there's even a hint of "commerce" involved. I'm thinking that there's at least a chance that the Court is going to give Wickard a good kick. I don't think there's necessarily any reason to assume that stare decisis will stop the Court. If stare decisis were always in play, Bowers v. Hardwick would still be on the books.

Title IX at 40

A few very random thoughts on this notable anniversary:

• I'm glad that girls and women get to play. More options are always better. And there is at least as much joy in watching Lindsay Whalen and Seimone Augustus as there is watching any other basketball player. They are very impressive players, as are their teammates.
• I graduated from high school in the early 1980s and women's sports programs were still relatively new. The progress they have made is simply astonishing. As it happened, my high school had some very good women's teams and we even won the state basketball title in 1978. If you go to a game today, the level of play is far superior. The best player on that 1978 team, who earned a scholarship to play at Iowa, would be good enough to start for a modern high school team, but I think most of the rest of the players would be lucky to be reserves now. There's a reason for that, about which more in a moment.
• It's worth pointing out that there are side effects to Title IX that aren't so good, though. First, it has meant in some cases that sports programs for men have been cut. It still bothers me that the University of Wisconsin does not field a baseball team, in large part because it's necessary to keep the overall participation numbers in line. That's not good.
• Second, and more important, the women's sports do not generate enough revenue to be self-supporting. There are instances, primarily in women's college basketball at places like the University of Tennessee and UConn, where programs pay for themselves, but in the main that is not the case. As a practical matter, that lack of self-support has meant that the revenue producing sports at the large college level, especially football, have had to be even more corporate and business-like. I don't think that is a particularly good development.
• One other thing that is less than desirable is that I see girl's sports, especially at the youth level, starting to emulate some of the less savory trends you see in youth sports for boys. My daughter has played softball for most of her childhood but her only option this year was to play for a traveling team, which would have involved a time commitment and cost that didn't make sense for her or for our family. She's finding other ways to stay active this summer, but she misses it. The youth programs increasingly are farm systems for the local high school programs and that's not necessarily the best reason to run a program. It does mean that the high school teams play at a much higher level than they did 30 years ago, but in some respects it also means that girls who might want to play for the fun of it are essentially weeded out at an early age. That seems counter to the spirit of what Title IX is supposed to be about. I wouldn't want to put this emphasis at the feet of Title IX, because it's more of a function of the problems inherent in youth sports generally, but it's worth pointing out. We are taking a lot of the joy of sports out of the game at the youth level and it's disheartening that the girl's programs are following the same pernicious model that the boys use.

Deep Gravy

Are you excited about this year's election cycle? Good for you if you are, because we need an engaged citizenry and there are any number of important issues facing the nation right now. We aren't talking about what really matters very much right now, but that doesn't change the importance of the issues.

And yet, I'm not feeling it. It's difficult to get very excited about the prospect of a Mitt Romney presidency, because my suspicion is that he's not going to do much beyond tinkering around the edges.

Increasingly the larger narrative of this race seems to be this: Barack Obama's campaign and presidency are clearly out of ideas and both appear to be, in the words of P. J. O'Rourke, dead but too dumb to lie down.

I don't dispute that there's certainly humor potential galore in the flailing:

It's the Obama Event Registry, and I know they are making fun of it over at Hot Air and Instapundit and all those right-wing places that attract the greedy sort of person who doesn't know what it means to truly bleed deep in your heart for the poor and suffering people of the world to whom Barack Obama will minister in his second term when he is finally free of the bonds of the electoral system. It is time to sacrifice — and to display to your friends and family how much you sacrifice — for the betterment of humankind. And if any of them are receiving presents for their wedding/anniversary/birthday, may they feel the shame and, in their weakness, may they know that you are a finer, truer liberal than they.

As Gino rightly points out, the Obamas aren't asking you forgo a gravy boat, but rather a gravy bowl, which in itself is a pretty good Freudian slip. I assume that potential second-term Obama HHS Secretary Michael Bloomberg would insist that any gravy receptacle hold no more than 16 ounces of the demon fluid, too.

But you know what? Those are cheap jokes. Too easy, too formulaic. A presidency that can be mocked that easily is circling the gravy bowl, so to speak. Perhaps the happy loving couples in the prospective gay marriage registries will be happy enough with the president's storied evolution on the matter to toss a few shekels at the Obama '12 campaign, so long as they don't have to give up the other kitchen gadgetry. This lovely example goes for $77.44 on the Amazon website, which should be enough to partially offset the cost of a 30-second attack ad about Mitt Romney's evil outsourcing ways on a late September newscast in Fort Wayne.

Remember, gravy is bad for you but Obama '12 will set you free

That would be change you can believe in, I suppose. And I'm certain the citizens of Fort Wayne will appreciate the sacrifice you made on their behalf. You can always put your gravy in a bowl.

Turning and turning

It's not getting any easier for President Obama.

Item: The Washington Post fact-checker gives a recent Obama campaign ad, which refers to Mitt Romney as a "corporate raider," 4 Pinocchios:

The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of “corporate raider” to its examples of alleged outsourcing.  Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Art Jay Carney is having trouble remembering the most basic details:

First, Carney couldn’t say if the documents that Obama is refusing to let Congress see actually involve the White House corresponding with the Justice Department about the false claim that law enforcement did not allow any guns to be smuggled into Mexico. “I don’t have a way to characterize the documents in question here,” Carney said.

Next, Carney was forced to back off his attempt to pin Fast and Furious on the Bush Administration. “It originated in a field office during the previous administration.  It was ended under this administration, by this Attorney General,” Carney said. ABC’s Jake Tapper quickly observed that “The operation began in fall 2009.”

Carney wasn't done, though:

As Carney continued to field questions, he appeared to forget the family name of border patrol agent Brian Terry, who was death ignited the investigation after he was killed by drug smugglers armed with weapons obtained through Operation Fast and Furious.

“We have provided Congress every document that pertains to the operation itself that is at issue here when you talk about the family that you referred to,” Carney said. When Tapper provided him the name, he repeated it — “the Terry family.”

And when Carney said that Obama’s decision to assert executive privilege over documents subpoenaed by Congress was “entirely about principle,” reporters openly laughed.

And on the banking front, Moody's has more bad news:

Moody's had announced earlier this year that it planned to review its rating rationale for global banks in the wake of the financial crisis, and had already downgraded two other banks before Thursday.

The Swiss bank Credit Suisse was downgraded three notches by Moody's, while Morgan Stanley and UBS each saw their ratings drop two levels.

As rumors of the downgrades spread among financial markets Thursday afternoon, stocks took a steep turn for the worse. The Dow Jones Industrial Average close the day down 250 points or nearly two percent, its second worst day of the year.

It's one thing when the falcon cannot hear the falconer. It's quite another when the falcon decides not to listen any more. Among other things, it's evident that the president is having trouble controlling the news cycle. This isn't surprising, because the news media are now scrambling to avoid losing any further credibility. It's likely too late for a lot of these outfits, though, because the internet is forever. We are a long, long way from 2008.

Fast and Furious and Increasingly Curious

It took some dramatics to actually get "Fast and Furious" on the front pages, but it's there now:

A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation known as "Fast and Furious."

The claim of executive privilege really surprised me, because it wouldn't seem to be germane. The claim all along is that the White House has not had any involvement in the matter beyond whatever is happening at the Justice Department. It certainly got Charles Grassley to raise an eyebrow:

Obama has denied knowledge of Fast and Furious, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Obama's assertion of executive privilege raises "monumental questions" about whether the White House was involved in the authorization of or the fallout from the botched operation.

"How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he's supposedly never seen?" Grassley said in a statement. "Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme?"

We don't really know the answer to that, but the claim of executive privilege certainly ups the ante on this matter. In her blog for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin explains the side effects, using a figure that Democrats might remember:

But we can now see how Obama has come full circle. As a senator he decried signing statements and invocation of executive privilege, as president he’s become the quintessential imperial president complete with czars, harassment of opponents’ donors and ham-handed efforts to bully the Supreme Court on Citizens United and then Obamacare.

John Yoo, who is second to none when it comes to defending the executive branch, told me this afternoon: “Holder is a gift that keeps on giving — for congressional Republicans. He is bringing a unique combination of political ineptness and constitutional myopia. Politically, he is sustaining a story of law enforcement incompetence that he could bring to a quick end by providing the Hill with documents that bear no national security implications (unlike the Obama administration leaks about our counter-terrorism programs).”

On the law Yoo commented, “Legally, he has given the Obama White House bad advice on the scope of executive privilege, which the Supreme Court in Nixon made clear is centered on the president’s right to discuss the most sensitive national security, military and diplomatic matters with his aides. Either the White House is admitting that President Obama was involved in the ‘Fast and Furious’ controversy (which seems hard to believe), or they are seeking to claim executive privilege to mere discussion of low-level staff with the Attorney General, which the Constitution does not recognize.”

When John Yoo thinks you're overreaching. . . .

It may not matter in the end that much. You might recall that in 2008, the Bush administration was battling Congress and found a couple of aides in contempt:

No congressional committee has held an executive branch official in contempt of Congress since July 2008, when the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee found Karl Rove, the former adviser to President George W. Bush, in contempt over the alleged politicization of U.S. attorneys’ offices.

The resolution was never taken up by the full House, though two other Bush officials, former counsel Harriet E. Miers and former Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, were held in contempt by the chamber earlier in 2008, also in connection with the U.S. attorneys scandal.

After Miers and Bolten were found in contempt by the Democrat-led House in February 2008, House leaders asked the Justice Department to prosecute them. Then-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey refused, and Democrats turned to the courts to try to obtain more information from the two aides.

A trial judge sided with the House, but the dispute eventually subsided as the Bush administration left office and the Obama administration took over.

Two points worth making:

• There's a fundamental difference in importance between the two investigations. No one seriously disputes that a president has a right to fire any U.S. attorney at any time, for any reason, because they are political appointees. In Fast and Furious, there is actual wrongdoing and a body count.
• There is a chance the dispute will subside if Obama is defeated in November, because it would be my guess that Mitt Romney wouldn't want to pursue the matter any further. And why do you suppose that is? Back to Rubin:

Principled Democrats who may soon face a Romney administration had better pipe up. Otherwise the precedent will be there for vast expansion of executive power and squashing of Congress’s proper role in our system of government.

Exactly right. This is the reason that I've always had misgivings about the Patriot Act. When you are in power, you should be careful not to claim any power that your political opponents would then be able to use against you when you are out of power.

My guess is that the documents that Congressman Issa is seeking are embarrassing as hell to Holder and to the administration. I don't know that there's any straight-up criminal activity involved and I'd actually be surprised if there were. But as we've learned over and over, the coverup is always worse than the crime. Unless there's something in those documents that implicates the administration in criminal activity, it would be a lot better for everyone if Holder just forked over the documents. That he refuses to do so makes the matter a lot more problematic.

The Veepstakes - Early Edition

You can tell we've reached a slow moment in the election cycle, because talk of Vice Presidents seems to be in the news. The buzz yesterday started when a report from Jonathan Karl at ABC suggested that Marco Rubio, the wunderkind senator from Florida, was not being "vetted" as a potential Mitt Romney running mate. Romney's camp denied this was the case, but frankly it's inside baseball.

I would guess that Rubio will get consideration, but not a lot. If he were the veep choice, the immigration issue would become either Matsu or Quemoy in this cycle and Romney intends to make this election about the economy.

The Veepstakes is always an amusing thing, especially since no one outside of the candidate really knows. In the last cycle I guessed right on John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, but I claim no special insight in the matter. What is amusing, looking back on what happened four years ago, is that a fair number of the same names seem to be in the running, including:

• Tim Pawlenty, our former governor
• Rob Portman, a senator from Ohio
• Paul Ryan, the high-profile House Budget Committee chairman from Wisconsin

You heard rumors on all of these gentlemen last time. I think we can safely rule out Sarah Palin for this cycle, but is there another potential woman in the mix? If so, I'd suggest three possibilities:

• Kelly Ayotte, a senator from New Hampshire
• Susana Martinez, governor of New Mexico
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a congresswoman from the Spokane, WA area

Who will Romney pick? My guess is that they line up in the following order:

1. Pawlenty
2. Portman
3. McMorris Rodgers
4. Ryan
5. Martinez
6. Ayotte

We'll certainly talk more about this in the coming days, but for now I'd be curious to get your guesses on what Romney is thinking.

The Clemens Case

Roger Clemens fought the law and Roger Clemens won. That's what we can conclude from yesterday's verdict. But what happens now?

The next question facing Clemens is the Baseball Hall of Fame. Up to this point, anyone who has had any association with the steroids scandal has had great difficulty getting any votes. I think it's safe to say that unless there's a significant change of heart among the baseball writers, you'll never see Mark McGwire or Rafael Palmeiro in the HOF. That's understandable, as both McGwire and Palmeiro certainly enhanced their careers quite a lot through steroid use.

Roger Clemens is a different matter, as is Barry Bonds. At this point neither has faced the voters, but both will soon. Clemens will be able to argue, as he has from the outset, that he is innocent. He also has a verdict to prove his point. Bonds was found guilty of obstruction of justice, but not of the underlying claim of steroid use. The other issue for both players is this -- both may have used steroids to extend careers that were likely good enough to make the Hall of Fame before they are alleged to have begun using the substances.

So what do you do about these things? It depends, I suppose, on how much the Hall of Fame means to you. I've long believed that the HOF is, like baseball itself, morally compromised in various ways. Anyone who claims to worry about performance enhancing drugs has to come to terms with the nearly universal use of amphetamines in baseball in the postwar era, well into the 1970s. Certainly players used greenies to help enhance their performance. Baseball has always been about getting an edge.

A blogger whose opinion I respect quite a lot said this on Facebook:

Roger Clemens almost certainly did steroids, we can be 99% sure of it. The result of using PEDs was an extenuation of Clemens' career. That extenuation cost someone a Major League job. No conundrum, Clemens should never get in the HOF. Nor should anyone from the steroids era.

When I questioned this, the blogger responded:

 No one who played from 1988 to 2002 should be elected to the HOF. Even if they did not do it themselves, through their silence they allowed others to cheat with impunity.

As a practical matter, using that 14-year period really means that nearly every modern player whose career began after 1980 should be ineligible for the HOF. For that matter, there are a great number of players already in the HOF who ought to be ineligible under this standard. Do you want to tell Cal Ripken that he needs to forfeit his membership? How about Ryne Sandberg, or Tony Gwynn?

We need to deal with the larger meaning of the steroid era in sports, but we're still too close to see things clearly. And yesterday's verdict only makes things less clear.

UPDATE: My friend Brad Carlson, ace blogger and talk show host, also wrote about the case here. As always, his thoughts are worth your time. He makes an especially good point about Clemens and Bonds, who are both eligible for the first time in 2013.

March Like an Egyptian

So much for the Arab Spring:

Egypt’s military leaders issued a constitutional decree Sunday that gave the armed forces sweeping powers and degraded the presidency to a subservient role, as the Muslim Brotherhood declared that its candidate had won the country’s presidential runoff election.

The bold assertion of power by the ruling generals followed months in which they had promised to cede authority to a new civilian government by the end of June. Instead, activists and political analysts said, the generals’ move marked the start of a military dictatorship, a sharp reversal from the promise of Egypt’s popular revolt last year.

What continues to surprise me is that anyone really believed that the "Arab Spring" would turn out any differently than it has. Modern-day Egypt has never been a particularly enlightened place. Even the oft-sainted Anwar Sadat had plenty of blood on his hands. The world is, in the main, a nasty place. Still, the dream dies hard, as we learn from a "prominent human rights activist":

“With this document, Egypt has completely left the realm of the Arab Spring and entered the realm of military dictatorship,” said Hossam Bahgat, a prominent human rights activist. “This is worse than our worst fears.”

It could be worse. Bahgat could live in Syria.

Obama and the Illegals

The President goes with a narrative-changer:

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants will get a chance to stay in the United States and work under a new policy announced Friday by the Obama administration.

President Obama's action removes the threat of deportation for as many as 800,000 immigrants nationally -- including hundreds in Minnesota -- who are under 30 and came to the United States as children. It does not offer them citizenship or permanent residency.

As a practical matter, it doesn't really change things that much. Most people who are in this country illegally haven't had to worry about getting deported anyway. The idea that you can simply deport millions of people is absurd on its face.

Mitt Romney didn't take the bait:

Some Republicans in Congress — and the governor of Arizona, whose state has been at the center of enforcement controversy — strongly criticized the Obama action. But the response from Romney was more muted.

Romney said Obama's decision will make finding a long-term solution to the nation's immigration issues more difficult. But he also said the plight of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children is "an important matter to be considered."

That's about the only response you can offer. An executive order is only as binding as the executive who enforces it. Obama is president and gets to be president until January 20, 2013, perhaps longer. This will not be the issue that determines the election.

Another Home Truth

John Hinderaker goes a-fisking:

Next Obama becomes even more disingenuous than ever:

Now, Governor Romney and his allies in Congress believe deeply in the theory we tried during the last decade, the theory that the best way to grow the economy is from the top down.

No Republican of modern times has ever argued that “the best way to grow the economy is from the top down.” Rather, it is fundamental to conservatism that growth comes from the bottom up. Conservatives believe that innovation comes from small businessmen, not Washington lobbyists and big-company CEOs. Conservatives believe that decisions made top-down–”I know, let’s invest billions of taxpayer dollars in Solyndra!–are likely to be bad. Obama, here, is taking on a straw man; but it is a straw man that looks a lot like Barack Obama.

Exactly. Really big businesses don't much care who is in the White House, because, in the main, they can find ways to protect themselves from the depredations of government. In fact, some big-company CEOs prefer a large, intrusive government, especially when regulatory compliance hampers the efforts of smaller, more nimble competitors.

A lot more at the link, as you'd expect, and all of it is worth your time.

Home Truth

Mitch Berg rings the bell:

[I] personally support legalizing pot.  Making this cheap commodity the focus of a federal prohibition has contributed to untold deaths and incredible misery in America’s inner cities. Decriminalizing pot would at least remove some of the expense and dislocation that our failed “war on drugs” has caused.

But with all that out of the way?  Stoners annoy me.  There is nothing in the world more annoying that numbed, hemp-reeking munchy-grubbing cackling drone of the Chiba Monkey set.   I’ll sit in a chair and listen to Shakira’s fingernails on a chalkboard all weekend before I listen to stoners babbling in Shaggy-Doo cant without forcing bongs down peoples’ throats.

Peace Prize Prez

Peggy Noonan, discussing the problem of national security leaks, makes a sensible point for the second week in a row:

There's something in the leaks that is a hallmark of the Obama White House. They always misunderstand the country they seek to spin, and they always think less of it than it deserves. Why do the president's appointees think the picture of him with a kill list in his hand makes him look good? He sits and personally decides who to kill? Americans don't think of their presidents like that. And they don't want to.

National security doesn't exist to help presidents win elections. It's not a plaything or a tool to advance one's prospects.

And she shares this anecdote:

After the killing of bin Laden, members of the administration, in a spirit of triumphalism, began giving briefings and interviews in which they said too much. One of the adults in the administration, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reportedly went to Mr. Donilon's office. "I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend," he said. What? asked Mr. Donilon.

"Shut the [blank] up," Mr. Gates said.

Seems like good advice. Wonder how the folks on the Nobel committee are feeling right about now.

Take It From the Man Who Knows

You might recall the other day that President Obama said the following:

The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. "I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!" he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, "just as you're sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab."

Which brings us to this hanging curve ball:

Celebrating Father’s Day early, the president had lunch with two service members and two local barbers at Kenny’s BBQ on Capitol Hill.

As the group chatted about fatherhood, the president enjoyed a steaming plate of pork ribs with hot sauce, collard greens, red beans and rice and cornbread.

The bill for the president and his four guests was $55.58, but was left unpaid at the point of sale, according to pool reports.

Actually, I'm most surprised that there's a place on Capitol Hill where you can get lunch for 5 people for $55.58.

Suing Your Way into St. Anthony

St. Anthony is one of the best-kept secrets in the Twin Cities. It's a small community of less than 10,000 people that is nestled into an area north and east of Minneapolis. It has its own school district and the city contracts out its police force to provide service to a number of other small, neighboring communities. It's a friendly, tidy place without a lot of traffic or trouble. I live on the border of St. Anthony and New Brighton and spend time in St. Anthony nearly every day.

That may be changing, however, now that the St. Anthony City Council has rejected a proposed Islamic center, as the Star Tribune reports:

St. Anthony's rejection of a proposed Islamic center marks the first time in seven years that a new Muslim house of worship has been blocked by a local government in Minnesota.

City leaders said the decision was solely a land-use issue, but Muslim leaders expressed fears that Minnesota may be joining the ranks of other states where proposed mosques and Islamic centers have been blocked by government amid anti-Islamic rhetoric and intense community resistance.

These Muslim leaders are approaching the matter in a thoroughly All-American sort of way -- they are trying to sic the federal government on St. Anthony:

"This is the first one [in Minnesota] where we're seeing so much anti-Muslim hate involved," said Lori Saroya, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The Muslim advocacy group asked the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday to investigate allegations of anti-Muslim bias in the rejection of the proposed Abu-Huraira Islamic Center, planned for the basement of the former Medtronic headquarters.

So what exactly is the anti-Muslim hate in St. Anthony?

During a City Council meeting Tuesday night, several residents disparaged the Muslim faith and said the Islamic center was not welcome in the small bedroom community north of Minneapolis. At least one resident said Islam is "evil" and embraces violence.

Following the vote, the imam, Sheikh Ahmed Burale, said his congregation of nearly 200 is still interested in using the St. Anthony space and is considering a court challenge of the council's decision.

A few thoughts:

• The location for this Islamic center is not likely to be problematic for anyone. I drive by the facility every day during my commute and I would doubt that most St. Anthony residents would have even realized it was there if it weren't for the recent publicity.
• It's often typical that religious congregations set up, at least initially, in non-traditional venues. I've attended religious services in old movie theaters and strip mall store fronts. You go where you can find space, so setting up shop in the basement of a suburban office building isn't particularly unusual.
• I don't know if the stated reasons for stopping the center are legitimate or not, but I do think the St. Anthony City Council does have the right to make that determination.
• Having said that, municipal governments are often hostile to proposed projects for any number of reasons. Based on what I know of St. Anthony, I doubt that religious hostility was a factor.
• Should you hold the St. Anthony government responsible for disparaging remarks made in a public forum? I don't think so. I also dislike the notion that Islam, or any religion, cannot be criticized. As a Catholic, I hear my faith criticized quite often. While I dislike such criticism and find it unfair, I'm not inclined to sue those who disparage my faith. I would hope that the imam and his congregation would think hard about getting the federal government involved. I think St. Anthony would, in the end, welcome the congregation, but suing your way in isn't likely to help that happen.

Maps and Legends

Writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Craig Walker crunches some of the numbers of last week's recall election. He also provides a really useful map/graphic:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

What this map shows is that Walker really kicked butt in the parts of the state that aren't Madison and Milwaukee. Tom Barrett never had much of a chance, especially when it appears that northeastern Wisconsin, the area where I grew up, is reverting back to deep red.

Gilbert offers the following thoughts:

Barrett improved on his 2010 performance in just a handful of places. The two most important were Milwaukee and Dane Counties. He won these two counties combined by a little more than 200,000 votes (40,000 more than he won them by in 2010). But he lost the rest of the state by almost 380,000 votes (90,000 more than he lost it by in 2010).

In other words, Democrats ended up dangerously over-reliant on the Milwaukee and Madison vote Tuesday.  That vote materialized, but it couldn’t come close to compensating for Barrett’s weakness in much of rural and suburban outstate Wisconsin, especially when the GOP base was also turning out en masse. 

To try to explain this in Minnesota terms, Milwaukee County behaves rather a lot like Hennepin County -- the City of Milwaukee, much like Minneapolis, is heavily Democratic, but the rest of the county tends to be moderate and conservative the further out you go. Dane County behaves a lot like Ramsey County, with the dominant capital cities (Madison and St. Paul) going heavily Democratic, while the rest of the county is less so. Waukesha County, to the immediate west of Milwaukee, behaves a lot like Dakota County does here, although it's even more conservative.

The one county to the north on this map that went heavily stronger for Walker in this cycle is Outagamie County, which is where I grew up. The main city in Outagamie County is my hometown of Appleton, which is about the size of St. Cloud in the city proper, and Rochester when you add the surrounding township. Appleton had long been a bastion of conservatism -- we sent Joe McCarthy to Washington. Things had changed in recent years and Appleton, as well as the rest of the Fox River Valley, has been trending left. That stopped in this cycle.

There's a lot more to say about this, but if this map has any predictive value, and I think it does, two things are clear:

• The supposedly strong support for Obama in Wisconsin might be chimerical; and
• Rep. Tammy Baldwin, the Madison-area Democrat who is the functional equivalent of Betty McCollum, is going to have a very difficult time winning the open Senate seat. 

We'll talk more about these things anon.

Dana Canary

No, not Dana Carvey. We're looking at the canary, a fella by the name of Dana Milbank, who is as reliable an indicator of conventional wisdom as any Washington-based pundit you might name. And he's suggesting that the smart set is headed for the exits:

In Washington, there is a creeping sense that the bottom has fallen out and that there may be no second term. Privately, senior Obama advisers say they are no longer expecting much economic improvement before the election.

Milbank relates the difficulties that White House press secretary Dana Carvey Jay Carney had yesterday in executing his usual pirouettes:

Thus did Jay Carney, the oft-besieged White House press secretary, have another briefing carjacked by bad news. And Carney, who either didn’t know the details of the bizarre episode or wasn’t at liberty to divulge them, had to execute a full range of defensive maneuvers.

“I can simply tell you that he was engaged, as has been reported, in a couple of traffic incidents,” Carney began, as if the secretary, John Bryson, had been photographed by a speed camera or two. Bryson “suffered a seizure, was hospitalized. But beyond that I’ll refer you to Commerce for the details.”

“Is the secretary healthy and fit to serve?” inquired Ben Feller of the Associated Press.

“I would refer you to the Commerce Department.”

Ann Compton of ABC News asked whether the White House chief of staff, who spoke to Bryson, considers the incident serious.

“I don’t have a specific response to give you,” Carney said.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar asked about “the timing of the seizure in relation to the accident.”

“I would refer you, as I said in the past, to the Department of Commerce,” Carney answered.

“I’ve been asking them for hours,” Keilar protested.

“I think I would refer you to the Commerce Department,” was Carney’s rote reply.

The former journalist informed the questioners that he “was not a presiding doctor on this case” and could confirm only that “the commerce secretary was alone, he had a seizure, he was involved in an accident.”

“He was involved in several accidents,” called out April Ryan of American Urban Radio.

“Thank you for the correction,” Carney said. He did not sound grateful.

I'll bet. The discussion concerned the strange case of Commerce Secretary John Bryson, the one Obama cabinet member who had, up to this point, not managed to scare the horses. Bryson had a series of traffic accidents in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Carney has a tough job, because he often has to defend the indefensible. In the case of Bryson, I think it's wise to withhold judgment, since it sounds to me like he has a medical issue -- based on the reports I've read it doesn't seem likely that this was just a garden-variety DWI.

The larger point is that things continue to get worse for Obama. Milbank totes up the scoreboard for this month, which has 18 days and a major Supreme Court decision to go:

Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a “cascade” of national-security leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that the “private sector is doing fine.”

Could it get any worse?

Of course it could. Syria has been imploding for months now. The Eurozone remains on the brink. There's increasing evidence that China's economy might be the mother of all bubbles. Iran and Israel are still doing their little thermonuclear tango. Illinois has no clue what to do about its financial problems. Neither does California.

Hey, but have a nice day.

I love a good conspiracy theory. . .

. . . and Thomas Lifson has a good one at The American Thinker. He's positing that the Clintons and their allies are trying to force Barack Obama to pull an LBJ and get out of the race:

It's already leaking into the smarter corners of the media world: Obama is killing the Democratic Party.  The tipping point is here.

This, not coincidence, is why several brainy Democrats, including Cory Booker, Deval Patrick, Ed Rendell, and Lanny Davis, have been providing sound bites that can be used by the Romney campaign to destroy the effectiveness of Obama's attacks on Mitt Romney.  The biggest damage has been done by Bill Clinton, whose barrage includes providing the title for the current number-one bestseller about Obama, Ed Klein's The Amateur, calling Mitt Romney's business track record at Bain "sterling," and stating that the Bush tax rates should not be increased, disagreeing with Obama.

I have wondered about this, but the problem with all conspiracy theories is that it's damn near impossible to keep everyone on the same page, even in a small group, so coordinating something like a campaign to get rid of a sitting president would be almost unimaginable. Still, Lifson makes some really interesting observations:

It would have to be a covert op.  No Democrat who ever wants to carry a black precinct can be seen as slipping in the stiletto.  It has to have the appearance of Obama voluntarily announcing that he will not be a candidate for re-election.  Just as LBJ did on March 31, 1968.  For the good of the country, his family, maybe his for his health.  His medical records have never been released, after all.

Ah, the medical records thang. But wait, there's more:

It has to be a multi-phase, multi-front strategy.  Right now, we are in the softening up phase.  The highly public defection of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, calling the attacks on Bain "nauseating," certainly got Obama's attention.  So much so that enough pressure was exerted on the mayor that he issued a self-repudiation video that might as well have had the mayor blinking S-O-S in Morse code.  Follow this with respected people and allies like Deval Patrick, and Hillary enthusiasts Ed Rendell and Bob Shrum, and most of all employ the biggest gun of all, Bill Clinton.  The denials and clarifications don't matter at all.  The message to Obama is unmistakable: it is war.  We don't have your back.

Senator Dianne Feinstein truly cares about national security.  But I also know that she can read the handwriting on the wall.  Last week, she came out and made the leaking of national security information into a scandal with bipartisan support for an inquiry.  This is criminal behavior.  She is far from the only powerful Democrat who sees the wisdom of disentangling herself from the Obama disaster.

And at this point Lifson is just getting warmed up:

The signal also has been received by the mainstream media allies of the Clintons.  Many of them are already fed up with the high-handedness, venality, incompetence, and amateurishness of the Obama crowd.  But now that they see that it is okay to notice when the emperor has no clothes, they can breathe the intoxicating air of honesty and start to include some of the obvious warts on the idealized image.  Obama is starting to realize that his media invisible shield is starting to fall apart.

All of these factors paint a bleak picture for the Obama campaign's prospects, but unless there is a smoking gun about the national security leaks, nothing that would actually force a narcissist to put the interests of party and country ahead of his own.  So there may be something else, something which Obama fears so deeply that he would see his own interests best served by withdrawing from his re-election bid.

So how is it gonna go down?

We do not know what the operative issue would be, but we do know that Barack Obama is an international man of mystery, and that he has gone to great lengths to hide his documentary record.  There is on the record his claim of Kenyan birth to his literary agency.  It may well be that he was born in Hawaii, but used a claim to Kenyan or Indonesian nationality to gain scholarships and admission advantages at the series of elite and expensive schools he attended, starting with Punahou, the St. Grottelsex of the mid-Pacific.

Perhaps by coincidence, last week Stanley Kurtz was able to write about newly revealed evidence that in 2008 the Obama campaign lied about his membership in the radical socialist New Party.  I have no knowledge of the specific circumstances of the document in question becoming available, but I would note that the offices of the federal bureaucracy, state and local bureaucracies, academic bureaucracies, and nonprofit bureaucracies are largely staffed with lifelong liberals, who were Democrats before the Obama craze hit the party, and who want the party to survive, and who may even be a little nostalgic for a president with the last name Clinton.

So, hypothetically, if someone in one of these bureaucracies happened to notice a document that proved something embarrassing about Obama, something that exposed a serious biographical lie, serious enough to put him out of the running, she might consider it worthwhile letting others know.  Word gets around.

The New Party membership documentation might well be a warning shot.

But what's the endgame?

But what about Hillary, you may be asking.  Look at her hair!  She's given up.

If you imagine that the secretary of state is so weary that she lacks the energy to do her own hair, you do not understand the realities of her life.  She has staff who do all the mundane tasks at her convenience, to her specifications.  Or else.  Her current down-and-out look is just another hairstyle, one calculated to provide political cover.  Hillary knows that she will need the black vote once she heads the ticket, so she absolutely cannot be seen as scheming to bring about the sudden surprise announcement from President Obama that her allies are greasing the skids for right now.  The worse she looks, the more convincing will be her "surprise," the more sincere her willingness to step forward and save America from a disastrous Romney presidency.

Ah, it's the trick hair! But why would the Clintons play such a dangerous game? Our man Lifson has the answer:

If you imagine that Barack Obama's playing of the race card against the Clintons in the 2008 South Carolina primary battle has been forgiven or forgotten, you do not understand Bill Clinton.  As a Southern liberal, a big part of his personal identity is wrapped up in his anti-racism.  Not just his political posture -- his sense of his own self-worth is linked to his crusade to overcome the legacy of racism.  It is one of the ways he excuses the cruder aspects of his life choices.  His racial virtue justifies his life.

Bill Clinton, for all his bonhomie in public, is a bitter man -- first for his impeachment, and second for the humiliation he and his partner were dealt by the Obama forces in 2008.  A man prone to purple rages in private, following his heart surgery, he may be taking his revenge slowly, a moderate blood pressure, as it were, smiling when walking back the latest diss.

Maybe all this is true. I'm reasonably certain that the Clintons harbor lingering frustrations about the way the Obama campaign comported itself in 2008. But trying to torpedo a sitting president? I kinda doubt it.

What makes a conspiracy theory good is that it has to be plausible. And in this case, there are plausible elements. The Clintons are smart enough to realize that disaster could be imminent, especially in the financial markets. The Eurozone is going down and it's likely that Obamacare is going down, too. I think the statute of limitations has run on blaming George W. Bush for what is happening in 2012. The president doesn't have much else to run on, so things could get grim for the Democrats soon. And if the Obama administration is the face of the Democratic Party, it could have repercussions way down the ticket.

But while I enjoy conspiracy theories, I strongly prefer Occam's Razor. And in this case, the explanation is simple -- the Clintons and their allies have concluded that Obama doesn't have his act together and they're not willing to take marching orders from his campaign. They don't have to be at war with Obama, but they can certainly keep their distance.

If Romney wins, he's going to accept a bit of a poisoned chalice. It won't be easy sledding for anyone in the next four years. If things go badly, the Clintons may be back in 2016.

In any event, one thing is clear. Getcha popcorn. It's going to be a very interesting election.

Home Truth Number Two

Kenneth R. Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, writing in the Wisconsin State Journal, offers this advice:

You lost. Nobody expects you to be happy about it. But you get another chance in a few months.

Stop blaming the American Legislative Exchange Council, or Super PACS, or the Koch Brothers, or Citizens United. Stop insisting that the only reason you lost was you were outspent 3-to-1, or 5-to-1, or 10-to-1, or that democracy has ended because billionaires can buy elections.

Arguing that you lost because people were too stupid to see the brilliance of your position is not a good way to get more people to conclude that your position is brilliant.

Yep. And he says this to Republicans, which is true as well:

Stop gloating, and enough with the jokes about how delicious the tears of Democrats are. You'll get your turn in the barrel eventually.

(H/T:  Kevin Binversie)

Home Truth

Writing at Reason, Steven Greenhut gets to an important point:

Collective bargaining has made it nearly impossible for agencies to fire bad workers or pursue cost-saving alternatives. Although California leads the way in most absurd trends, the vast expansion of government compensation and special privileges is a nationwide problem, and in Tuesday’s election voters across the nation said they have had enough.

How did it get this bad?

The technical answer is the economic notion of “dispersed costs and concentrated benefits.” If we imposed a one-cent annual tax on every American to benefit the Greenhut family, no one would get mad and few people would notice, but I would have a great incentive to keep that tiny tax alive and plenty of money to hire the best lobbyists. All special interest groups work that way—they push for small concentrated benefits, and figure that the rest of us don’t have the time or incentive to fight back given the costs are spread out.

Eternal vigilance, people. It's always about eternal vigilance.

One Fine Day

The words the president had to walk back:

The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government — oftentimes, cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

The private sector is doing fine, he says. Millions disagree, including one who is running for president:

“Is he really that out of touch? I think he’s defining what it means to be detached and out of touch with the American people,” Romney told supporters in a park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “Has there ever been an American president who is so far from reality?”

Obama quickly had to walk it back:

 Listen, it is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine. That’s the reason I had the press conference. That’s why I spent yesterday, the day before yesterday, this past week, this past month, and this past year talking about how we can make the economy stronger.

The economy is not doing fine. There are too many people out of work. The housing market is still weak and too many homes underwater. And that’s precisely why I asked Congress to start taking some steps that can make a difference.

A couple of thoughts:

• The problem for Obama is that while there have been a few improvements here and there, it's not enough.
• "Fine" means something different than "better." You can argue better, but fine won't work when millions remain out of work.
• Obama is especially concerned about cuts in local government, but he doesn't really get to the reason the cuts are happening. State and municipal governments cannot print money. Government at the local level has to rely, in the main, on what it can collect from its citizens, especially those who work in the private sector. 
• That money isn't there, so something has to give. 

And if you look at what local governments spend their money on, sometimes you understand why the money isn't there. Consider the story of the Vadnais Sports Center:

The Vadnais Sports Center, controversial from the start, has sunk into a financial morass that has city leaders faced with the choice of cutting ties with the arena and defaulting on $26 million in bonds or assessing taxpayers $1 million to keep it running.

Revenues have fallen short of projections. Expenses have exceeded budget. And the center that officials promised Vadnais Heights residents would be able pay its own way without their help has been delinquent in remitting a year's worth of sales taxes to the state.

"I'm not sure we can afford this facility," said Council Member Joe Murphy. "It will be expensive to keep."

With two sheets of ice and the state's second-tallest dome covering a 100,000-square-foot turf field, the complex was supposed to become a destination that spurred economic development along Hwy. 61 and the surrounding area in the city in northern Ramsey County.

There were a number of problems here. First of all, while Vadnais Heights is lovely this time of year, it's one of the more obscure suburbs in the Twin Cities. Most people west of the Mississippi River and south of the Minnesota River would have a difficult time finding Vadnais Heights without using a map. Second, Vadnais Heights only has a population of about 12,000 people and while there are some businesses in the area, it's mostly a middle-class area. The idea that a community of that size could afford to sink over $100 million in a civic building without any real assurances of help from Ramsey County or the state is amazing. And trust me on this -- if you are willing to make certain assumptions, you could project revenue assumptions of !ELEVEN1TY!! million dollars, but it wouldn't mean the assumptions are true.

Would you support the City of Vadnais Heights receiving federal assistance to bail out their facility? How about similar municipal buildings? Just about every suburb around the Twin Cities has built a Xanadu of some sort. If you drive east on 694 through Ramsey County, you can easily reach New Brighton's Eagle's Nest indoor playground,  Shoreview's Dells-style water park and the facility in Vadnais Heights. And there are dozens more. These are nice things to have, I suppose. But are they worth permanent support? And if you have to choose between paying for police officers or debt service on optional municipal amenities, what would you choose?

Most of us have to make these choices. Barack Obama and his friends still don't seem to understand that we have long since reached the point where choices need to be made at all levels of government.

Home Truth

David McCullough Jr. lays it out for you in the Boston Herald:

“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection! Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!” And I don’t disagree. So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it... Now it’s “So what does this get me?” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans. It’s an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune... one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School... where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.

More, a lot more, at the link.

Line of the Day

From the inconsistent but sometimes brilliant Peggy Noonan, a brilliant observation:

Most ominously, there are the national-security leaks that are becoming a national scandal—the "avalanche of leaks," according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that are somehow and for some reason coming out of the administration. A terrorist "kill list," reports of U.S. spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen, stories about Osama bin Laden's DNA and how America got it, and U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet computer virus, used against Iranian nuclear facilities. These leaks, say the California Democrat, put "American lives in jeopardy," put "our nation's security in jeopardy."

This isn't the usual—this is something different. A special counsel may be appointed.

And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour's house. He's busy. He's running for president.

But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be.

Pique Oil

I remember watching a series of special reports on the WCCO evening newscasts in 2006, in which Don Shelby dolefully informed us about the theory of "Peak Oil," which posited that we were reaching the end of our supply of oil and that things would begin to dwindle quickly, soon.

It was a big deal at the time. Of course, it wasn't true:

Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.

Now a million barrels a day is only small portion of what the world consumes each day; current estimates range up to 85 millions barrels a day. So maybe Shelby has a point. The problem is, we keep finding more:

But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.

And how much oil would that be?

If Harold Hamm is convinced the Bakken will give up 24 billion barrels, a play 80 times bigger like the Bazhenov would imply 1,920 billion barrels. That’s a preposterous figure, enough oil to satisfy all of current global demand for 64 years, or to do 5 million bpd for more than 1,000 years. Rosneft, says Clint, has already estimated 18 billion barrels on its Bazhenov acreage. Either way, it looks like they’ll still be working the Bazhenov long after Vladimir Putin has finally retired and the Peak Oil crowd realizes there’s more oil out there than we’ve ever imagined.

Harold Hamm, by the way, is an oil tycoon who runs Continental Resources. He probably has at least as much credibility on the issue as Don Shelby does.

Just throwing that in there

From an article about California's disastrous high-speed rail boondoggle that appears in the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph, an amusing observation:

Construction is expected to begin later this year in the middle of California's Central Valley near Merced, a town of 80,000 people known for having one of the highest home foreclosure rates in America.

I have heard that Merced is lovely this time of year, though:

Welcome to Merced. Mind the gap.

Actually, the high speed rail line is a real innovation, as the article points out:

Ambitious plans for a fast track linking Los Angeles and San Francisco at speeds of up to 220mph in just over two-and-a-half hours were slimly approved by 53 per cent in a statewide ballot in 2008. 

I'll admit -- 220mph is pretty darned fast, and it would be nice to get from L.A. to San Francisco in 2 1/2 hours. That would be nifty. You might ask, what is the flight time between the two cities? It varies, but generally it's about an hour. Just throwing that in there, too.

Oh, and the cost of this high speed rail line? Oh, about $68 billion. But it will be worth it to see Merced.

The Day After

You may have heard: Scott Walker is still the governor of Wisconsin. If anything, he's now stronger than he was before all the drama, because he's had a mid-term reaffirmation of his standing with the voters of the state. We've witnessed a 16-month tantrum that led up to yesterday's election. And to the eternal credit of the citizenry of Wisconsin, we've seen that tantrums are rejected.

So what to make of this? Let's put on the ol' amateur pundit hat. First, remember the face of the protesters from last year? Here is a sample, in full throat. Attractive group, right? We'll get back to that:

Pay attention to MEEEEEEEEE!!!

• As you could have predicted, challenger Tom Barrett won Dane County and Milwaukee County pretty easily, which gave him a 200,000 vote advantage. Nearly everywhere else, Walker crushed him. The visual map at the link gives you a pretty good look at the state of play. Walker won 62 of the 72 counties in Wisconsin, and in most of them ran up a 60-40 advantage.
• As usual, Waukesha County was a huge factor in this race, It went 72-27 for Walker. The plan for Democrats, both in Wisconsin and elsewhere, has been to limit the impact of suburban voters. They certainly didn't yesterday.
• If you scan around the web and look at the lefty websites, you hear a lot of complaining about the Citizens United decision and how it was Big Money that won this election. You can believe that if you'd like, but it's silly. This electorate didn't need campaign ads to see what was happening. People outside of Dane County don't have a lot of affection for the street theater and self-indulgence that was on display, day after day after day after day. . . well, you get the idea. There was a lot of revulsion with the tactics. If you are a Democrat today, you can blame the money and Emanuel Goldstein the Koch brothers all you want. But a better place to look might be in the mirror. Especially if you look like the people in the picture.
• Anger is self-limiting and usually counterproductive. Riddle me this -- when you see people with the facial expressions you see in the picture, what is your reaction? Do you think highly of them? A lot of people who don't get down to Madison much didn't think very highly of them, then or now. And they were able to register their views yesterday.

• Walker is a cool customer. His victory speech last night was very good and sounded all the right notes: let's put this behind us, let's work together, let's go have brats and beer. I hope that the Democrats take him up on the offer, but I'm skeptical.
• Public sector unionism is in trouble now. Now that Walker has survived, it's highly likely that Act 10 will survive as well. It's difficult to imagine that the unions in Wisconsin will be able to keep people on the membership rolls if they can't forcibly extract dues from their paychecks. The fundamental corruption of having unions buying the team on the other side of the bargaining table is now over in Wisconsin. And other governors are going to take notice.
• Take another look at the picture, which dates back to March, 2011. If you look in the background, you see a sign that says "Where is Obama?" Well, he certainly wasn't in Wisconsin recently. Of course, who wants to hang out with angry people?

Benster uncovers Democratic election rigging in Wisconsin

Hi, just wanted to uncover news that an auto union is sponsoring a convoy of Michigan residents to go and vote illegally for Tom Barrett. No, I'm not kidding you. The fact that these unions are taking advantages. They are on I-90 when this call took place and may have gotten in WI right now. I found it out because my Uncle Paul posted this on Facebook. I encourage you to pass this on to law enforcement in Wisconsin. This is the tip of the iceberg as the unions in other states might be doing the same thing.

I passed on this information to the Walker  campaign and am posting this here to get more attention. I would encourage you to report this to local news stations and other information places. I thank you for standing up with me to spread the word about this fraud and protecting the clean election going on today.

Ben out!

Election Day in Wisconsin

Finally, it's here. The day before Tom Barrett disappears from our television screens:

Two public opinion polls show Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker with a lead of three and six percentage points heading into Tuesday's election to recall him because of a new law reducing the power of public sector unions.

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, said Sunday that Walker was leading 50 percent to 47 percent over Democratic challenger Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in its final survey. Angus Reid polling had Walker ahead 53 percent to 47 percent. Both findings were within the margin of error so the results could be even tighter.

Or not:

Those surprising results would project at a 56-44 final win for Walker. HOWEVER, while Walker continues to lead Barrett, we once again caution readers that this is an extremely difficult election to predict. 

That has to be the most cautious reading of a 12-point spread that I've ever seen. I think the best way to read the polls is this:  if you look at the Real Clear Politics average, you could throw out the 12-point spread that We Ask America came up with, and the 3-point spread that PPP delivered. That leaves an average margin of victory for Walker at about 6 percent. Which sounds about right.

I've thought Walker was going to win today for a long time now. The invaluable Kevin Binversie at Lakeshore Laments calls our attention to a Politico piece that serves as a reminder of just one problem the Democrats face:

For Democrats, who are admittedly playing catch-up in the final days of the Walker recall, education remains a big part of their get-out-the-vote effort. An unknown percentage of those who signed a recall petition back in late fall aren’t accustomed to voting regularly, let alone in the middle of the year.

“Definitely they need a reminder that that didn’t finish this, that they need to go to the polls,” said Heather Colburn, a Wisconsin-based Democratic consultant who served as state director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Binversie makes the right point about all this:

If you’re still edu­cat­ing your vot­ers at this stage of the game, you have to won­der their level of ded­i­ca­tion to the cause.  We’ve been at each oth­ers throats now for 16 months thanks to Mike Tate’s inabil­ity to take a loss like a man, who the hell still needs edu­cat­ing on when and how to vote exactly?

But that rev­e­la­tion — that Democ­rats are still reach­ing out to peti­tion sign­ers just to remind them to vote — is pretty telling.  Both in who signed the peti­tion and those who the Democ­rats are hop­ing to help turn the tide tomorrow.

Yep. And I can tell you this -- based on what I've seen from my friends back home, the Walker supporters are significantly more motivated this time around. By the way, for those who aren't sure, Mike Tate is the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, who is building a won/loss record in Wisconsin politics that rivals former Badger basketball coach Steve Yoder for futility.

If you live in Wisconsin, please vote today. Your nightmare will end after today, for approximately 17.4 minutes. Then you get to think about the Senate race. And if you're tired of the politics, be sure to thank Mike Tate.

Tenement Slum!

You think that we don't feel great
But what we feel for Scott is real hate
In other's eyes I see reflected
A hurt, scorned, rejected


AFSCME! WEAC! Never meant to be
Walker, society!
AFSCME! WEAC! Always second best
Walker, bastard to the left!

The things you learn on the internets, I tell ya. First, I had no idea that one of the songwriters responsible for "Love Child" by the Supremes is one R. Dean Taylor, who gave the world the gloriously cheeseball "Indiana Wants Me." That was a revelation to me.

Of course you learn lots of things on the internets. Including things that aren't true. Ann Althouse shares the deep thoughts of something called the "Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-Op":

What follows is one woman's account of the Scott Walker she knew at Marquette University. To the extent possible we have verified its accuracy, including the accuracy of details not printed here in order to protect the identities of the people involved. All of the elements are consistent: the principals were at Marquette University when the incidents recounted here allegedly happened, and "Ruth" did have a baby shortly thereafter. However, attempts to reach "Ruth" and her first husband have been unsuccessful, as phone numbers listed for each have been disconnected, and so far we have not been able to independently verify Bernadette's account.

Scott Walker fathered a LOVE CHILD! !!ELEV!ENTY!!! ZOMG!!! Score!

Turns out they had the wrong Scott Walker, according to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer Daniel Bice, who had to send this note to calm down the Kos kids:

I am getting a lot of emails because of this post. Two things: (1) I tracked down and talked to Dr. Gillick’s freshman-year roommate at MU yesterday, and she adamantly denies that Walker is the father of her child. Yes, she got pregnant as a first-year student, but she believes Dr. Gillick is mixing up stories; and (2) I Can Read CCAP has taken a family court suit involving Scott Alan Walker and mixed it up with the governor, Scott Kevin Walker."

Oh well. They've got more. Just ask them. Back to Althouse:

There's a lot of desperation and maybe all the desperados went there at once. Well, this is the link, if it works. The article is called something like Legal Cloud Gathers Over Scott Walker, and it purports to have sources that say that Walker is the target of a criminal investigation. Ah! The site is back. It's "Legal cloud gathers over Scott Walker as recall election approaches":

And so we learn the following:

With the recall election only two days away, federal prosecutors are closing in on Governor Scott Walker, according to veteran political reporter David Shuster, former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and former district attorney Bob Jambois.

In a conference call organized by state Democrats on Saturday evening, June 2, Shuster, Lautenschlager, and Jambois laid out evidence that Walker is a target of a federal investigation.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Communications Director Graeme Zielinski added that there is evidence of wrongdoing after Walker's time as Milwaukee County Executive, and that the investigation includes criminal activity during his time as governor.

For those of you keeping score at home, Peg Lautenschlager is a former Wisconsin Attorney General because she got bounced out of office following a DWI. She might be more reliable than David Shuster, however. Back to Althouse:

Quite the "legal cloud," no? It's less of a cloud of law than a swarm of Democrats. Desperate Democrats. Embarrassing. You just had a former President appear on behalf of your candidate. Why not a little grace and dignity as you approach the end?

For Wisconsin Democrats, grace and dignity left the station a long time ago.


I taught high school, in a worn, torn, dress that Scott Walker threw out
I knew the way it felt, to always live in doubt
To be without the simple things
So afraid my clinic would charge me a copay

Wednesday can't come fast enough.

MoDo: No Go to BHO Mojo

Man, when you lose Maureen Dowd:

On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen.

Eventually everyone gets the memo, I guess. But she's just getting warmed up:

The legendary speaker who drew campaign crowds in the tens of thousands and inspired a dispirited nation ended up nonchalantly delegating to a pork-happy Congress, disdaining the bully pulpit, neglecting to do any L.B.J.-style grunt work with Congress and the American public, and ceding control of his narrative.

Now, that's only partially true. There were plenty of people who didn't find this guy particularly inspiring, and the problem with controlling the narrative is that, at least at some points, the narrative needs to bear some resemblance to reality. The part about delegation is spot-on, though.

But wait -- there's more:

Cook told Maraniss that she thought Obama’s desire to “play out a superhero life” was “a very strong archetype in his personality.”

Cook would be Genevieve Cook, the apparently non-composite girlfriend that Obama had while he lived in the New York in the 1980s, while Maraniss is David Maraniss, the biographer of Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente, who has now written a biography of the president, which will come out later this month. We talked a little about that last week. Back to MoDo:

But superheroes and mythic figures must boldly lead. Obama’s caution — ingrained from a life of being deserted by his father and sometimes his mother, and of being, as he wrote to another girlfriend, “caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me” — has restrained him at times.

In some ways, he’s still finding himself, too absorbed to see what’s not working. But the White House is a very hard place to go on a vision quest, especially with a storm brewing.

So why are the long knives coming out now? It's pretty simple, really. It's awfully hard to defend the indefensible and Dowd recognizes that. Barack Obama, like Tom Barrett in Wisconsin and Patrick Quinn in Illinois, has no answers to the myriad financial crises that are coming at us. If you look at Quinn's website, it's a hilarious crazy quilt of logos and links that read like a series of impulses more than a coherent vision.

More importantly, Dowd recognizes that there's a pretty good chance that Obama is going down and she intends to keep her perch. She can always go back to snarking on Republicans, which she prefers to do anyway:

Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging.

Yep -- a little W bashing is just what a dispirited press corps needs. It's always more fun to throw turds in the punchbowl than to carry water. And I don't doubt for a minute that Mitt Romney will make a hell of a good piñata.

Heh

From the talented pen of Michael Ramirez:

Update: John Hayward brings up some additional inconvenient truths.

Big Greater Wisconsin Political Fund Is Watching You

Ann Althouse opened her mail and got a surprise:

I obscured names and addresses, but be assured, this was a list of real names and addresses of people who live near me, with the information about whether they voted in the last 2 elections. This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. 

You can see the letter she received at the link. The verbiage reads as follows:

Dear Registered Voter:


Who votes is public record!


Why do so many people fail to vote? We've been talking about the problem for years, but it only seems to get worse. This year, we're taking new approach. We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and who does not vote.


We need to all pull together. The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.


After the June 5th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn't.


Do your civic duty -- vote.


The sender was the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, which has been an active participant in the recall election. Althouse is not amused:

Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and an harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant. 

As it should be. So why would this lefty organization send this note? Besides the reasons Althouse mentions, I can think of two more:

• You can do a lot with database management tools these days and it would certainly interest the public employee unions if they were to cross-check their membership records with the voting rolls to find out who has been, ahem, naughty or nice.
• It would also be handy for an enterprising individual who wanted to, ahem, extend his franchise a bit, to know which households don't participate in voting, especially if (a) you have same-day registration, (b) you don't ask for i.d., (c) you allow vouching, and (d) you don't have a provisional ballot procedure in place. That would be the state of play in Wisconsin at the moment, since judges have ruled against the voter i.d. laws that passed earlier. And by the by, it's the same state of play we have in Minnesota.

I would disagree with Althouse on one point. It's always worth understanding that while you can claim a right to privacy, you really don't have any privacy any more, especially if you participate in any way in the electronic, interconnected world that we inhabit. All manner of people are keeping dossiers of you and they can tell rather a lot about how you live your life based on the records you generate every day. Most of these people are simply trying to sell you stuff. And that would include the politicians, for the most part. But there is something especially creepy about this little missive. You don't always have to imply a threat. And in this case, the threat is pretty overt.

Lightning Round - 060112

Not much time this morning, but a few thoughts:

• From what I can tell, Tom Barrett didn't do anything to move the needle in last night's debate with Gov. Scott Walker. The unions are facing their Waterloo, so they won't go quietly, but from what I can tell Walker's supporters are equally motivated. While I don't think Tuesday's election will be the end of the story in Wisconsin, I'd be very surprised if Walker lost the election.
• John Edwards is likely to skate on the federal charges, now that he's been found not guilty on one charge and there is a mistrial on the others. I think that's okay. Edwards is pond scum and now everybody knows it. His political career is over, too. That's probably punishment enough. I look forward to his upcoming appearances on "Celebrity Apprentice" and the "Real Gigolos of Raleigh-Durham." Meanwhile, here's video of Edwards in action as he pursues his next Bunny Mellon.
• Tell me you didn't see this one coming. Morrie Lanning, the Moorhead "Republican" who helped ram through the Vaseline Dome, announced he won't be running for reelection. Gov. Dayton also mentions that he thinks Lanning would be "extremely well qualified" to be part of the new bureaucracy in charge of running the new Wilf family pleasure dome. Yes he is, Governor. Yes he is.