Big Government: The Grand Experiment Has Failed
Bernie Marcus, IBD
Since the financial crisis and throughout the sluggish economic recovery, working families and small-business owners have watched as the federal government has engaged in a grand experiment in government-led economic engineering. That experiment has failed. The latest jobs report underscores the need to change our country's direction. April's unemployment rate was 8.1%, but if you include those who are underemployed, that rate shoots to 14.5%. 

Obama Campaign’s Off to a Shaky Start
John Podhoretz, New York Post
So how good is the Obama reelection campaign going to be?By "good," I mean competent, able to plan elaborate events and respond quickly and effectively to fast-breaking news. Obama supporters have every reason to be concerned "” which is not to say Romney supporters have any reason to be complacent.

The Boom on the Farm
Robert Samuelson, Washington Post
MARION, Iowa — Sitting in the cab of a $350,000 John Deere tractor pulling a $150,000 Deere corn planter, Greg Carson embodies modern American agriculture. It's capital-intensive, high-tech, efficient — and now immensely profitable. Looking for a bright spot in the U.S. economy? The farm belt is it.Driven by high grain and soybean prices, farmers' cash income hit a record $109 billion in 2011. Land values have followed high crop prices. Since 2006, an average acre of Iowa farmland has doubled. Last year, the increase was 33 percent to $6,708, reports Michael Duffy of Iowa State…

The Amateur: Book Offers Withering Portrayal of Obama
Ed Lasky, AT
Edward Klein's new book on Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, is a withering portrayal of a radical adrift, in over his head, drowning in his own incompetency — while being weighed down by a small circle of “advisers” who are compounding the problem of the Amateur in the White House.Klein's book begins with a talisman-like quote uttered by Barack Obama when his recently appointed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tried to boost Obama's ego by telling him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” …

The Big Flip: U.S. Parties Have Switched Roles
Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair
In July 1854, a man by the name of Erastus Haven, a professor of English and Latin at the University of Michigan, dared to speak up at the first state convention of a new American political organization. For his trouble, he was hotly denounced by the Detroit Free Press, which condemned the event as an exercise in “fanaticism and political charlatanry” and called for the professor’s ouster. Haven’s sin was to address the just-born Republican Party, founded on a platform of stopping the spread of slavery, and while he might not recognize the…

We Don’t All Wish to Be California
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
If Greece’s economic woes are not a flashing red light for U.S. policy makers, perhaps they will take California’s example to heart. This weekend California Gov. Jerry Brown broke the news to his state: What was projected in January to be a $9 billion budget deficit is now $16 billion.How does that happen, exactly? It’s mind-boggling unless you understand that California has the worst business climate in the country and its revenue projections turned out to be wildly over-optimistic. Reuters explains: “The deeper deficit forecast reflects the…

After Decades of Borrowing, Europe Faces Hard Choices

Book: Bill Clinton Calls Obama “Amateur”
Carl Campanile, New York Post
Bill Clinton thought so little of President Obama — mocking him as an “amateur” — that he pressed his wife last summer to quit her job as secretary of state and challenge him in the primaries, a new book claims,  “The country needs you!” the former president told Hillary Clinton, urging her to run this year, according to accounts of the conversation included in Edward Klein’s new biography of Obama.  The title of Klein’s explosive, unauthorized bio of Obama, “The Amateur”…

Chris Christie’s Remarkable Popularity
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
Chris Christie is really, really popular — by New Jersey standards.Christie’s 56 percent approval rating in a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll this week may not seem all that remarkable, but when it comes to New Jersey, it is.The reason: New Jersey voters are notoriously tough on their politicians. Consider this:* President Obama hasn’t gone higher than 56 percent approval in Quinnipiac polling of the state since June 2009 — slightly after he took office on a high note.

Mitt’s Troubling Incidents From Prep School
Jason Horowitz, Wash Post
Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t…

What Has Made Congress More Polarized?
Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics
Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein ignited a bit of a firestorm with their column describing Republicans as main drivers behind Washington's problems. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has made some excellent points with regard to Mann and Ornstein's qualitative arguments, and other thorough responses abound. Rather than revisiting these points, I would like to focus my attention on the quantitative arguments made at the end of the article. Mann and Ornstein note that:"[P]olitical scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in…

Why the Right Really Hates Obama
Theo Anderson, In These Times
How much influence has the Tea Party really had in American politics?The movement scored real successes in the 2010 election, when the GOP won control of the House and narrowed the Democrats’ majority in the Senate. That success bolstered the GOP’s budget-cutting fervor and set up the debt-ceiling showdown last summer. And wins by Tea Party candidates at the state level have helped create the wave of abortion restrictions recently passed by state legislatures. 

How Obama Played the Press on Marriage
Richard Benedetto, FOX News
Little happens by accident in the Obama White House, or the Obama reelection campaign for that matter — if there even is a difference between the two. And the dramatic decision by the president to come out Wednesday in support of same-sex marriage is no exception. Contrary to what many in the news media would have us believe, the decision was carefully planned and timed.

Dems Have Real Chance to Hold Senate Majority
Paul Kane, Wash Post
Republicans need to pick up four more seats to take control of the Senate, and a year ago they had many plans for how to do so — none of which envisioned a battle to hold on to Indiana.But Tuesday’s landslide victory in the GOP primary by Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a staunch conservative who beat longtime Sen. Richard G. Lugar, gave Democrats hope for claiming a seat they have not seriously contested in three decades.

Long, Hard Slog Ahead in Presidential Race
Michael Barone, DC Examiner
Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama's re-election — we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence — in come some poll numbers showing him behind.Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by 1 point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.

Romney Saved Detroit Only in His Dreams

Fanatical GOP Could Cause Constitutional Crisis
Jon Chait, NY Magazine
The defeat of Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican Senate primary is the kind of event that would have been shocking just a half-dozen years ago, and has since grown routine. Incumbent Senators used to have almost no fear that they might be deposed by members of their own party for ideological or partisan deviations, and now that threat has become the most powerful disciplinary tool available to activists. And it's a tool, moreover, that is being deployed asymmetrically "“ the homogeneously conservative Republican Party has winnowed out virtually all its moderates,…

Larry Summers vs. the Long-Termers
Ezra Klein, Washington Post
In August 2005, Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, predicted the financial crisis. And he did it at possibly the least friendly of venues: a conference of high-powered economists who had convened in part to honor Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rajan presented a paper titled “Has Financial Innovation Made the World Riskier?” His answer, put simply, was “Yes.” He was dismissed by the assembled masters of the universe. “Misguided,” said Larry Summers. But Rajan was…

2012 Grads Must Tone Down Egos & Shape Up Minds
Bret Stephens, WSJ
Dear Class of 2012:Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you…

The Academic PC Mob Silences a Blogger
Naomi Schaefer Riley, WSJ
Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called “Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'” in which the reporter described how “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The “5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates” described in the piece's sidebar “are rewriting the history of race.” While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter…

The Cleveland Five: Occupy’s First Terrorists
Rich Lowry, NRO
The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.

Where Are Mitt Romney’s New Ideas?
Paul Waldman, American Prospect
Karl Rove's signature contribution to campaign politics was the insight that the most effective way to defeat an opponent was not to attack his greatest weakness, but to attack his greatest strength. (There's some vivid detail from Joshua Green's classic 2004 article on Rove's history as a campaigner. Sample: Your client's opponent volunteers to help abused children? Spread rumors that he's a pedophile!) There's no doubt that at the moment, Mitt Romney's greatest strength is the idea that as a successful businessman, he will do a good job stewarding the…

Bill Keller & the Real Poison in Journalism
Jonathan Tobin, Commentary
The New York Times’ former reputation as the nation’s objective newspaper of record was always a façade that covered up a persistent liberal bias that skewed its coverage of both politics and the world. But during the eight years that Bill Keller served as executive editor, the Times accelerated its descent into the partisan and hyper-liberal biased reporting and unbalanced opinion pages that we now take for granted as the paper’s calling card. Keller’s liberal prejudices were never a secret while he was the paper’s editor and in…

Obama’s Liberal Experiment Has Failed
Victor Davis Hanson, PJ Media
By Victor Davis HansonBioThe temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling. Fake, but Accurate Identities?The trivial Elizabeth "high cheek-bones" fraud nonetheless offered a draw-back-the-curtain look into the gears and levers of our national race industry. The real story is not that the multimillionaire blond liberal, one-percenter Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the…

A Revealing Look at Obama-Era Liberalism
Ross Douthat, New York Times
A WEEK ago the Obama re-election campaign unveiled a slogan for the fall campaign — its answer to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century,” and other successful re-election pitches. There were reports that the slogan-writing process had been a struggle for the White House, and the final product bore those rumors out. “Forward,” the Obama campaign will be declaiming to Americans, which feels like a none-too-subtle admission that a look backward at the Obama…

Reviving the Obama Race Canard
Jonathan Tobin, Commentary
Race is the original sin of American history. To deny its influence on our society is as futile as it is illogical. Nevertheless, the attempt to cast President Obama’s re-election campaign as the focus of a racial backlash seems to be more about obfuscating the issues that are animating the vast majority of voters than providing any insight into public opinion.

Joy of French Socialists Will Be Short-Lived
Ben Brogan, Daily Telegraph
Fear of the mob drives French politics, and has done since 1789. Tomorrow night the French Left will gather in their thousands at the Bastille to celebrate what they are certain will be another revolution. They will wave banners and red roses, sing the Internationale, and tear around the streets, horns blaring, to celebrate a socialist capturing the presidency for the first time in nearly 25 years.

Obama Targets a Party as Romney Aims at a President
Erin McPike, RCP
President Obama and Mitt Romney are talking around each other these days, and it's easy to see why: The former's message is rooted in party ideology while the latter's is based on his opponent's leadership style.The difference demonstrates how crystallized opinions have become as the election season begins in earnest. What's more, it shows how badly the Romney campaign wants the election to be a referendum on the president, thus making the incumbent's management style a focal point of the race. Team Obama, however, wants the sharpest contrast before voters to be…

Plutocracy, Paralysis, and Perplexity
Paul Krugman, New York Times
Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Bailing Out Bad Choices Isn’t Academic
Charles Hurt, Washington Times
Once again, this town has ground to a halt in another one of its interminable squabbles about how to spend even more of our money that we do not have.The only thing everyone can agree upon is that they do want to spend $6 billion on yet another indefensible bailout.That’s right, years after this town turned the word “bailout” into a dirty word by bailing out banks, car companies, Wall Street, credit card companies — all while we were struggling to pay the light bill and buy groceries — they’re right back at it. 

Obama Reveals New Details of Bin Laden Raid
George Condon, Natl Jnrl
President Obama returns a salute as he steps off the Marine One helicopter upon his arrival on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday. Obama was returning from an unannounced trip to Afghanistan.