Iowa, Almost

It is essentially the eve of the Iowa caucuses and it is quite possible that the difference between the winner and the fourth-place finisher will be as little as ten points.

Such a result benefits two candidates: Gov. Romney and Sen. Santorum.

For the former, a win, however small, will leave him having taken a state he had not invested his campaign in going into another state in which he has a commanding lead.  Two wins in the first two contests going into South Carolina and Florida will constitute a sense of inevitability the rest of the field will be hard-pressed to overcome.  Gov. Romney will be the winner in a party desperate to win come November.  That means a lot.

A third place/15-18% finish for Sen. Santorum will mean that, unlike the other anti-Romneys who have sizzled and then subsequently fizzled months before any votes were cast, he is peaking at just the right time.  I doubt it would be enough to launch him past the apparent Romney coalescence, but it would position him to be the beneficiary should there be a late, desperate movement among conservatives to stop Gov. Romney.  (It's much more likely that, at that point, Republicans will get in line and set their sights squarely on defeating President Obama next fall, but you never know.)

Payroll Tax Extension

Substantively the House GOP is right: a two month extension is impractical, non-stimulative policy.

Politically, they lose too much and gain nothing from holding out for a year-long extension, at least not without approving the two-month version first.

The best thing to do at this point is let Obama-Senate Democrats hang themselves with their own rope: adopting another piece of legislation that will do nothing to encourage recovery of a stagnant economy of which they are complete owners.

We tried to do the right thing. See you in November.

A More German Europe

Fears of a "Fourth Reich" are not commensurate with a desire to save the EU from impending implosion.  The only way to save said Union -- for a time at least -- is for a common assumption of the overly indebted members' obligations.  The country with the resources to do this is Germany, meaning a common assumption of everyone's debt is a German assumption.

Germany will not agree to this without Brussels first receiving a veto over members' budgets -- nor should they.  Berlin will dictate the terms by which Brussels will enforce austerity on Greece, Spain, Portugal etc. as a precondition to Berlin underwriting all their debt.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The state of affairs in Europe will thus be Germany both subsidizing other nations and determining what their budgets and finance policies are to look like.

A European Union hence will be a Europe dominated in every relevant facet by Germany.  It is either that or disintegration.

Those countries who would be so subservient must decide if a total loss of self-determination and sovereignty is a price worth paying for a common currency that does not even benefit them.

Egypt & the 'Arab Spring'

Popular unrest has once again boiled over in Tahrir Square, directed in like manner at Mubarak's successors as it was at Mubarak.

Indeed, the fundamentals beneath the facially disparate circumstances are the same and must cause any but the wildly optimistic (or delusional) to question whether the "Arab Spring" is not really just a continuation of a centuries-long Arab Winter.

In the Land of the Pharoahs, as with most of the Arab world, the condition is autocracy -- the strong leveraging their strength to both seize and retain power.  To such an end all means are necessary.

For Mubarak the means were the "emergency laws" enacted (then never rescinded) in the confusion following Sadat's assassination.  For the generals it was Mubarak's ouster, encouraged by their heartfelt promises to be a faithful caretaker until Egyptian democracy went online.

Unsurprisingly, they are now reluctant to cede power, or to step aside without at least a strong guarantee of their continued place of privilige within Egyptian state and society.

To expect the Muslim Brotherhood, or whatever name Islamists choose to call themselves, to behave differently if and when they do assume power is, at best, naive.

The hope for democracy and a pluralistic society along the Nile is frustrated by this culture of power -- of using the most power to gain power and to secure power. 

Not only is this the way it has always been done, but in their efforts to preserve their power Egypt's rulers have always suppressed any and all civic elements that could possibly challenge their autocratic hold.  The upshot is that any kind of meaningful civil society is absent, leaving the Egyptian people feckless before the power struggles between the military on one hand and Islamists on the other.

Democracy, pluralism, and rights of the minority simply have no weight with which to throw a punch or the wherewithal to counter those thrown by the powers that be.

If anything in the Arab world is changing, it is simply the tools of oppression changing from the hands of tyrants to those who wield Islam's sword.

The long winter continues.

OWS, Still

The public's tolerance for OWS, as measured in opinion polling, is running out.

Surprising, this is not.

Weeks after these occupations began, nothing new has really developed from them.  No cause to action, no demands, no political organization.  They are just there, camped out in their own refuse, angry at an abject percentile.  To the extent that there was a point to be made it has been made.  Now they are are just occupying space.

Also, a populace that has endured sustained economic hardship for years now is entirely likely to show some empathy towards a movement fueled by economic grievance, however Marxist and misdirected it may be.  But once that movement, comprised of people who are generally not in search of gainful employment, begins to interfere with people and the pursuit of their own, empathy, sympathy and any other residue of common-cause quickly evaporate, replaced in their turn by anger, contempt and intolerance.

This is what OWS is becoming: a pointless, obstructive social nuisance.

Soon may it wither under the weight of the coming winter cold and wet.

Taxing or Spending?

As everyone mourns the failure of the Super Committee to achieve a grand bargain that would have saved the republic (not that anyone could have plausibly expected them to succeed; they wail for partisan positioning), we must all ask ourselves a fairly simple yet impactful question: Are we on the road to bankruptcy because we do not tax enough or because we spend too much?

Newt Ascendant

Observers have been speculating for weeks whether Newt Gingrich would eventually get a second look (and a spike in the polls) from conservatives looking for an alternative to Romney.  That has begun to happen and it is not hard to see why.  As the ever-wise and sagely Charles Krauthammer poninted out, this race has been shaped more by the debates and less by traditional retail-politicking.

That is to Newt's strength, for he has dominated the debates -- or, better said, his comprehensive knowledge on seemingly every public issue has shone through.  (His shots at the mainstream media moderators have not hurt him either.)

This coupled with the fact that each of the would-be alternatives have wilted in turn as soon as they've ascended the polls and Newt's newfound strength is easily explained.

What might be harder to explain is if he holds up under the inevitable scrutiny better than those before him.

Palestinian Statehood

It is hard to imagine a more counterproductive act in the Mid-East peace process than granting the Palestinians statehood.  Since Oslo, the premise of the entire process has been "land for peace" -- in return for Israeli cession of land and autonomy the PA is to crack-down on the terrorist elements within its society.

Land and autonomy have been ceded -- on multiple occasions, as it happens -- without peace being provided in return.  The PA, in other words, has gotten more and more of what it has wanted without being compelled to hold up its end of the bargain.

Now they ask for statehood with much of the international community's endorsement.  It will not happen now or in the imminent future (the United States will veto the initiative in the UN Security Council), but that the idea has so much support speaks to how little those global actors interested in peace in the Holy Land know how to achieve it.

By mistakenly believing that peace is just one more Israeli concession away without holding the PA accountable for itself, Palestinians have come to understand that no change in the way they operate is really needed: international pressure will eventually compel the Israelis to make every concession they desire.  Terrorism thus continues and a lasting peace slips farther away.

The push for Palestinian statehood is just the latest, and how anyone can support the idea given the present state of affairs strains reason.  Having felt no compulsion to pacify its society, the PA hasn't.  The state created would thus be saturated, nay controlled by elements seeking to destroy the state next door.

That this is so little understood only means that peace is as far away as ever.  The ball is in the Palestinians' court and they are the ones whom the international community should hold accountable.  No one else.

Romney On a Limb

The hang-up conservatives have with Gov. Romney is the conviction that he will say, support, oppose anything advantageous to him politically.  The upshot is a fear that, however much he may espouse conservative principles at present, he will abandon them if and when they become politically inconvenient.

His cautious, low-risk campaign has done little to assuage these fears.  If anything, it has exacerbated them.  Witness the "anyone but Romney" efforts that are intensifying within the conservative movement, all because he has declined to outline or defend conservative initiatives that address the paramount issues confronting the republic.

To address this the governor must continue to do what he did on Saturday: propose entitlement reforms similar in kind to those that have been proposed by conservative luminaries like Paul Ryan.  This is by its definition risky, something by which President Obama and the Left will bludgeon him in the general.

Accordingly, it will earn him credit with the Republican base.  He will be going out on a limb for something bold and conservative, tying his political fate, in other words, to the fate of conservatism and its prescriptions for improving America.

To be the standard-bearer of conservatives, he must bear the standard.  On Saturday he began to do this.

The Consternation

The consternation of the Republican Party this campaign cycle is that all of its best talent is unripe: recently elected and not quite ready to assume the White House.  (We've all seen what happens when you put someone who isn't ready into the White House...)

In 2016 many of them should be seasoned enough, but by then President Obama will have done four more years of damage or a Republican will be seeking re-election.

Greece & the EU

David Pryce-Jones stops just short of declaring that Greece will soon be the author of the EU's downfall today:

Everybody with a head on their shoulders has been forecasting for years that the euro was certain to come to a crisis like this. The sovereignty of nations is stronger than the Brussels mob. Union was a historic mistake. The Greeks invented democracy, and it will be poetic justice if they save it now and free us all"

That Eurocrats have reacted so harshly to Prime Minister Papandreou's referendum plan is hardly surprising.  Having sought for decades to consolidate total-authority in Brussels, Greek popular will stands to bring the whole edifice down in a single plebiscite.

That is fine.  Greeks have every right to assert themselves in such a manner.  It is their future and they cannot be blamed if they don't want to leave it languishing in the hands of Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and their distant, would-be rulers in the capital of Belgium.

Rejection of the EU bailout is the only way to do this. As a consequence they would of necessity leave the Euro, reinstate and devalue the drachma, and slowly climb out of the huge catastrophe that is otherwise here to stay. Sure, Greeks will personally have to deal with the consequences of their recklessly-constructed and unsustainable social state, but in the long-run that is clearly preferrable to being stuck with a currency and economic model that prevents the country from embarking on a necessary restructuring.

Greeks would once again be their own masters, not the dictated-too subservients of their European neighbors. 

They defeated Xerxes -- they can and must do this.

Iraq Withdrawal

One can be forgiven for assigning political motives to the president's decision to withdraw from Iraq when scarcely anytime elapsed between his announcement and his campaign touting it to his base.

There are certainly no strategic reasons to justify it.

Iraqi democracy is real but fragile.  Next-door neighbor Iran has regional aspirations that hinge on both a nuclear program and influencing affairs in Mesopotamia.

American retreat makes this infinitely easier.  Coupled with the drawdown President Obama hopes to achieve soon in Afghanistan, America is on the verge of surrendering most, if not all ability to shape affairs in the Middle East towards our interests.  Not only are we declining to give support to incipient democratic elements but we are leaving a vacuum that Iran and other Islamist actors will not hesitate to fill.  This decision effectively gives those seeking to attack the United States greater latitude to do so.

As Frederick and Kimberly Kagan point out, America's retreat from Iraq is as shameful an abdication of responsibility and strategic sense as our retreat from Vietnam -- except that Iraq is at the center of the global region most pivotal to America's long-term national security.

For someone who has complained ad nauseum about the predicament his predecessor left him in, the president is inexplicably creating a mess that his successors will have to deal with for a generation or more.  All so he can keep a campaign promise he never should have made in the first place.

Hope No More

A President who came to office one way has decided to pursue re-election in quite another. "Hope," "Change," and post-partisanship replaced by cynically scapegoating every ominous force imaginable -- the rich, Republicans, events.

In fairness, he cannot run on much else. As a would-be he could run on promise. As an incumbent he must run with a record -- a record that isn't very good. The economy is as bad as the one he inherited (more Americans are out of work), he has expanded government beyond Constitutional limits and most American's comfort zones, our debt has increased exponentially and our credit decreased inversely, and we are slowly but steadily retreating from the world.

This or any president cannot win with popular focus fixed on such a record.

And so he tries to deflect the spotlight, redirecting it towards those nefarious Republicans and plutocrats who are the true culprits, the authentic masters of our present misery.

Not him. Not Barack Obama. Not the One.

Our chief executive, in other words, plans to win this election at the lead of an angry mob of sorts.

"Change we can believe in" gives way to "To the lanterns!"

Herman Cain

The problem with Herman Cain is that Republicans cannot do anything more than make an educated guess about him.  He is entirely likable, understands the need to dramatically reduce the federal government's footprint, and is a happy warrior akin to the Party's patron saint, Ronald Reagan.

But he struggles with specification.  He has failed to go in depth defending "9-9-9" or refuting the substantive concerns raised about it, nor has he given much indication that he has thought out his positions on other relevant issues like foreign policy or the judiciary.

Of less reassurance is the fact that he is just now beginning to assemble something approximating a campaign structure.  Heretofore it has been entirely ad hoc.

Going into an election we cannot afford to lose, Mr. Cain asks Republicans to make a large leap of faith.

Iowa & New Hampshire

The current presidential nomination process of both parties has justly received criticism for the dispositive roll it gives to the small, idiosyncratic states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

To be fair though, if you are going to have such an intensely flawed and unrepresentative system there is at least the minor consolation that the two states given such absurd preference are fairly distinct from each other ideologically.

On the Republican side, the rural social conservatism of Iowa is balanced in short-order by the individualistic, libertarian-conservatism of New Hampshire. The Midwest is countered by the Northeast, which is then countered by the South in South Carolina.

There are better ways to do it (a string of regional primaries perhaps), but the system does have some Madisonian logic undergirding it.

OWS

The naked, in-your-face sense of entitlement of the OWS protestors is of a certain kind with the recent rioters in London and the indignant hordes in the streets of Athens.

These are the children of the welfare state; a generation conditioned by state largesse to neither expect nor desire being masters of their own fate. It is to the state to provision for them, and it is upon the state to make some kind of restitution when they do not enjoy the standard they feel is their right. Thus the demand for the federal government to take actions such as taxing wealth to a greater degree or to forgive all student debt.

It is, in many respects, the reverse of JFK's inaugural exhortation: not what you can do, but what society is supposed to do for you.

The Charmed Campaign of Mitt Romney

National polls of Republican voters now place Herman Cain either dead even or slightly ahead of putative frontrunner Mitt Romney.

So continues Romney's charmed candidacy.

Cain's sudden and soaring ascension from fringe to front means one thing: the scrutiny the other contenders began to direct towards him in the last debate will increase exponentially in the next.

Not by Romney, mind you.  He has no political need right now to so much as cast a sidelong glance towards Cain, at least not when all the other would-be nominees have every need to do so.  It is Cain who now occupies the space the rest of them seek: tribune of the conservative movement and principle challenger to the establishment's favorite, Romney.  Unless and until they are able to assume the ground Cain now treads upon, they have no plausible path to the nomination.  Their political lives depend upon them attacking Cain and taking the support among movement conservatives he presently enjoys.

Romney could not ask for more.  As has been the case throughout this campaign, movement conservatives continue to attack each other and splinter that constituency.  His new nearest competitor Cain -- as with Perry before him and Bachmann before him -- will now face the preponderance of that scrutiny (the charge that his 9% national sales tax will provide the government a new avenue to raise taxes in the future has the potential to be especially damning).

To Romney's triple benefit he continues to enjoy a reprieve from heavy scrutiny, he is saved from having to dirty his hands attacking his nearest competitor and, in turn, his nearest competitor will be forced to spend his time defending himself instead of going after him and his heresies, principally "Romneycare."

It is as if the field is going out of its way to clear a clean and even path for Romney to the nomination.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

The President's Mess

At issue three years into Obama's presidency -- and as he begins his campaign to extend it -- is not whether he inherited this or any "mess," but whether he has done anything useful to remedy it.

He has not; quite the contrary, in fact.  Unemployment has rested comfortably at 9% for months, worse than the rate he inherited and greater than the ceiling he promised his "stimulus" would provide.  Neither is there much hope for a turnaround, with quarterly growth standing at a mere pittance of what any meaningful recovery should entail.

Much of the fault for this lies at the feet of the President -- or at least at the feet of the policies his administration has pursued and adopted.

This is so for the simple reason that the economy would be in better shape had President Obama walked into the Oval Office in January '09 and done absolutely nothing; no stimulus, no cap and trade, no Obamacare, nothing.  Instead the sum effect of these and other pursuits has been to load a recessionary economy with more debt, more regulation, more costs on employment and now, if he gets his way, more taxation.

Unsurprisingly, the state of the economy has failed to improve. Arguably, it has only become worse.

That is not your predecessor's fault, Mr. President.  It is your own.

Walking Backwards

President Obama's policies have not revived the economy for the same reason that you cannot move forward by walking backwards.

Romney’s Sword

Gov. Romney's single term in Massachusetts is a sword he will either be able to wield against his opponents (Rick Perry) or one that will be wielded against him.

If he can leverage the issue in his favor, that quadrennial will be a time when he made as good as he possibly could to instill conservative governance in perhaps the single-most hostile environment for conservatism.

Gov. Perry will spin it a different way, contending that Gov. Romney was not making good so much as accommodating himself to the predominant liberal ethos. That, he will add, is the last thing we need from someone going to Washington at a time when the republic is in dire need of inherent institutional reform.

No significant conservative achievement from Gov. Romney's time in Massachusetts comes to mind, so if he tries to emphasize that as an issue he will be playing right into Gov. Perry's hands. Any mention of Massachusetts is only an invitation to mention Romneycare, perhaps the single largest obstacle to Gov. Romney winning the nomination.

Gov. Romney's strongest card is his tenure in the private sector, the means by which he can say that he has experience turning around failing businesses (and the Salt Lake Olympics) that he will apply towards turning the federal government around. A business, bottom-line approach towards government is music to many conservative voters' ears, so that is the note he should play on his political violin.

Progressive Taxation

It is one thing to say, as most progressives do, that the wealthy should pay an increased proportion of income in taxes.

The problem most Americans have with this, wealthy or not, is that such a progressive taxation scheme entails the always revenue-hungry federal government deciding who is wealthy and who is not.

To most, this is an entirely discomfiting notion, and it should be.

Qadaffi's Impending Fall

If Qadaffi and his regime are indeed about to collapse, we will be exchanging a bastard we know for bastards we don't. It is dubious whether Libya can do worse, but it is uncertain (at best) whether they can do much better.

RE: ‘Corporations are People’

Mitt Romney arguing as he did that "corporations are people too" is as true as it is politically tone-deaf. The best argument against over-taxation of corporate America is not a kind of sympathetic declaration you'd expect to hear from Barney the Dinosaur – I seriously doubt "corporations are people too" will make the hearts of that many Americans bleed.

This is a bread-and-butter issue and should be presented as such. The dispositive argument is that whatever taxes you levy on corporations, they are not the ones that will ultimately pay them: individual Americans will. A greater tax burden will cause businesses to cover that cost by passing it on to the consumer in the prices they charge for their goods and services. Higher corporate taxes mean one thing and one thing only: higher prices on American consumers. Taxing corporate American only hurts Middle-America.

If Governor Romney wants to marshal public opinion against taxing corporations more than we do already (as he should), he should make this simple point, emphasizing that taxing corporate America more only makes corporate America the federal government's tax collector.

35 Yard-line Abomination

The most obnoxious aspect of the NFL's decision to move kickoffs from the thirty to the thirty-five yard-line is that, not only is it logically conflicting, but it fails to reach the natural conclusion of that logic.

The Competition Committee enacted this alteration to "improve" player safety. By moving the kicker five yards closer to the opponent's endzone, scintillating touchbacks will increase exponentially. Fewer kickoff returns means fewer returners being targeted for annihilation by coverage teams, who are usually comprised of back-end-of-the-roster types looking to earn their way up the depth chart through dogged pursuit and earth-shaking hits.

Setting aside the issue of whether the reduced risk of injury is worth drastically detracting from the game of football, this move fails to realize its own logic. If you are going to enact a rule that aims to take away kick returns why not do just that and take away kick returns? As it stands now, kickoffs will be pointless plays that will achieve nothing but an inevitable result: the offense starting their drive from the twenty. It's a charade that allows the Shield to continue its obnoxious practice of commercial break, followed by kickoff, followed by commercial break.

This failure to reach a logical endpoint only ends up confounding all logic -- indeed human reason altogether. By removing kickoff returns without removing kickoffs, the coverage team will be made to run down the field for a full-speed collision with the blocking team for no reason.

That's right: a "player safety" rule is going to make players run into other players – an obvious injury risk – only to watch the returner take a knee six or seven yards deep in the endzone. So concerned is the NFL with the physical well-being of its players that it is now asking them to risk injury for no reason whatsoever.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Roger Goddell's NFL.

Iowa

It is a curious system whereby the one who would be president of the United States must first campaign to be the mayor of Des Moines.

Unemployment

Liberals preoccupation with extending and extending unemployment is really the least they can do -- the only consolation they can offer to the millions of Americans out of work and unable to find any. It is, after all, their prescribed policies of spending, taxing and regulating that has preserved the current economic climate of stagnant growth and job creation.

Any plausible standard of decency dictates that a federal government that prevents the citizens it serves from finding work must make some kind of restitution.

Of course, to make that restitution it must take from the pockets of those with jobs...

What -- and with what -- restitution is to be made to them?

Immigration?

At a time when growth is stagnant, unemployment is  high, and every level of government is insolvent; the president is trying to resurrect the dead horse that is comprehensive immigration reform? He's really drawing attention to ANOTHER task the federal government is failing to perform and, what's more, inexplicably trying to persuade the polity to set that fact aside and add even more burdens to an overwhelmed and desperately over-stretched state?

Game 25: Bedard, Finally

Erik Bedard garners his first win in about two years and looks efficient for the first time...well, ever.  7 innings, 89 pitches.  Not 5 innings, 101 pitches.  Amazing.

What's more, instead of the litany of fly balls that he has been getting so far (half of which seem to have flown over the fence), he had a 52.4 GB%.

Bedard threw strikes early and often.  Bedard got outs early and often.

How much of this was Bedard and how much was the Tigers' lineup being surprisingly aggressive towards Bedard is an open question.  After the 4th inning (up until which Tigers batters had swung and put the ball in play within the first two pitches in a majority of their at-bats) they seemed to notice that they weren't following the tried-true-strategy of allowing Bedard to slowly asphyxiate himself and they started taking more pitches.

By then it was too late.  Bedard had made it through Four with a stunningly low pitch count and was within the first groove we've seen from him in quite some time.

* Miguel Olivo is really stinging the ball.  His LD% is above his career average so far and at long last he is finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield.  There is hope yet that he will elevate the Mariners offensive standards at catcher back to mediocrity.

Swept in TEX

The M's were simply out-classed. In each of the three ballgames they managed to come back from early deficits (the first and third the fruits of poor fielding) only to come up short late.

The pattern was evident. When the M's would get a runner or two on base they would do just enough to get one of those runners home. When the Rangers were in the same situation they would put the ball in the gap and drive home two or three. They are an elite offense with ability to turn any base-runner or two into a big inning – a competency the Mariners simply do not have.

Couple that with elite fielding and most days the M's are not going to be able to do more than simply stay competitive with the Rangers.

Fortunately, we do not see them again for another month.

For his part, Felix was much the same today as he was in his first start. Lack of command in the first two innings (3 bases on balls) plus Wilson's foibles at second led to elevated pitch-counts early on. After that though, he was able to buckle down and make it through another five innings while giving up only one run.

Pineda Tonight & Going Forward

What we saw from Pineda tonight is what we can reasonably expect to see from him for the next few months.

Right-handed batters are not an issue. His plus fastball and slider coupled with the command he has of them are more than enough to keep them off balance. Texas right-handed batters managed just two hits in fifteen at bats (.133). Ian Kinsler's lead-off at bat in the first (fastball up and in followed by a slider away; weak groundball to short) and Adrian Beltre's swinging strikeout in the fourth (slider low and away) are microcosms of the hell Pineda is to righties.

Pineda's problem in the spring was lefties, allowing them to hit .292 as opposed to the .179 right-handers batted.

That problem manifested itself again tonight. The three lefties in Texas' lineup went 3-7 (.429), with the largely pedestrian Mitch Moreland managing two hits (including an RBI triple) and Josh Hamilton leading off a two-run sixth with a double.

The problem, as has been oft-discussed, is inconsistent command of his changeup. Its potential is obvious (the strikeout of Josh Hamilton in the first), but until he develops the command of it he now enjoys with his other two pitches, lefties will cause him fits.

Accordingly, Mariners fans should prepare themselves for periods of dominance checkered by the kind of struggles we witnessed tonight.

Opening Day 2011

Felix was not dominating tonight – not in the overwhelming, I'm-just-plain-better-than-you manner that we are used to at least. Instead he was remorselessly effective; getting contact early in the count (after the first two innings, before which he averaged 5.14 pitches per batter faced, 3.18 after), allowing his defense to get outs, walking no one, not relying on pitch count-busting strike outs.

In exhibition was the superlative pitcher Felix has become: in his first start of the season, following a spring where he was deliberately given a diminished workload, he economized his approach in a manner that allowed him to pitch a complete game without going much above a hundred pitches against a team built to get on base. A month from now, when he is stretched out, he can pitch against the A's again and strike out ten in the dominating, perennial Cy-Young contending manner we are accustomed to.

Felix has matured to the point that he can basically choose how he wants to beat you.

Offensively, the six runs look nice but are qualified by a hot-potato A's defense that committed five errors.

With that said, they did the best with what they have, which is not much. Ichiro and Figgins wracked up their hits at the top of the order and everyone after them took pitches.

That's all they did – they took pitches.

As a result, Mariner batters earned a lot of walks and a lot of strike outs, many of them backward K's. (M's batters walked seven times, struck-out looking eight.) Both results compelled Cahill to run his pitch count up and give the ball away before he could complete five innings (105 pitches in 4.2 innings, 4.38 pitches per batter faced). After that the Mariners were able to exploit porous defense and A's middle relief. They won, in other words, by not swinging, flailing, failing and losing. They did not make outs, they got on base (.349 team OBP), put pressure on the Athletics, and earned some runs.

This might be the only approach offensively that has any hope of success this year. They may not be able to punch much themselves, but at the very least M's hitters can make their opponent's pitching and defense work harder than they would like to and (hopefully) buckle against the extra leverage.

The high-strain innings force the starter out and the soft-belly of Major League middle relief in. The extra base-runners that come with the bases-on-balls enervate the pitching even more and place more pressure on the defense. Couple that with some timely hitting here and there and you have the seeds of a team that will exact a degree of attrition on their opponents and thus be able to compete most nights. A team that approaches the game this way is a very obnoxious opponent for the usually superior teams they play.

At the very least this approach worked for one night and hope for a competitive, entertaining, near-.500 season lives on.

Notes:

• Miguel Olivo will probably never walk this season. He might not ever see a ball.
  
• Other than being superlative defensively, Brendan Ryan might be the perfect bottom-of-the-order hitter. Picking his punches and wreaking havoc when he gets on base, he will at least provide a level of pugnacity to the bottom three that Jack Wilson, Josh Wilson, Rob Johnson and whoever else we had there last year never provided.
  
• There was a swagger about Figgins tonight I do not remember seeing at any point last year.
  
• Dave Niehaus had been visibly and, as he was a broadcaster, audibly aging the past few seasons. But by-God was it unnatural to watch an entire game and not hear his voice. You are missed, Dave. My, oh my, are you missed.

DOMA

Revulsion to the cynicism of President Obama's announcement that his administration will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the federal courts is entirely appropriate. He is trying to have it both ways: registering approval with his base – the preponderance of which supports gay marriage – without alienating the majority of Americans who still oppose it.

(A man whose self-regard is such that he fancies himself on par with the Wisdom of Solomon has nonetheless elected to split the baby.)

Politics aside, there are constitutional concerns with DOMA that bring its validity into question – not that these played any role at all in the president's decision. These concerns are found in the Full Faith & Credit Clause of the US Constitution (Article IV, Section 1), which mandates that "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."

At first glance, the legal import of DOMA runs directly counter to this, immunizing the states from having to recognize a gay marriage – something that is a public act, record, and judicial proceeding – legally created and recognized in another.

This is a credible argument at least – one to which there are certainly credible rebuttals.

If, for example, a state does not recognize the institution itself – marriage between individuals of the same sex – can the relevant constitutional text be understood to compel it to recognize and make provision for it in the same way it would have to a driver's license issued in another state, an institution which every single state in the Union makes provision for?

Without question there are other arguments beyond this – arguments that will be fleshed out and deployed in the inevitable legal challenges to come.

The President & Libya

Republican leadership has universally criticized the president for tardiness in his decision to intervene in Libya and in his subsequent inability to define America's specific mission.

Both failures (they are certainly failures) go hand-in-hand and find their genesis in a single cause: the president does not want to do this.

To describe him as passive before his decision would be technically true (and characteristic of him as chief executive), but only thus.  He was active -- actively going out of his way to wrap his arms around American power and death-grip it from ever being used to influence the course of events.  It was only after lesser powers such as the French and British, followed by the Arab League, had called for intervention before America stood to be the only relevant actor refusing to act.

The president's continued distaste for American participation is manifesting itself still.  Ostentatiously unwilling to do what he has finally done, the president has done the bare minimum a commander-in-chief authorizing the use of force can do.  Orders were given, a statement was made to the American people -- and then nothing.  No subsequent declarations of the ultimate mission or, more specifically, whether coalition forces are simply trying to hem Qaddafi in or actually influence his ouster.

All anyone has really been given are assertions that America is going to "shape the battlefield" and then step back and let other components of the coalition take the lead.

President Obama did not want to be here in the first place and now that he is here he is leaving the impression that he is looking to get America out just as soon as it was in.

The Best of Styles, the Worst of Styles

Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is renowned most for its beginning dichotomy ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). Fortuitously enough, a similar device can be used to evaluate Dickens' manner of prose.

Indeed, it is the best of forms; it is the worst of forms.

Beneficially, his sentences are layered dissections of his subject. Foreign to the present Twitter generation that demands its literary material (and everything else) condensed and microwaveable, the bard of the Victorian Age slow-roasts his prose, dedicating time and ink to every nuance of the matter at hand. Take for example his description of the French peasantry at the time of the Revolution's outbreak, ground into misery and want by the aristocracy. Dickens portrays these poor masses as a

people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill… The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off… (Two Cities, 64, NOOKbook)

Dickens goes for sentences, paragraphs and pages more on the same train. The peasants of France were poor and miserable and he does not move on from this point until he has described each and every detail that makes it so.

This advantageously illuminates his subject for the reader in its complete totality while also penetrating it with a microscopic lens, revealing to them every nook and nuance therein. He does everything for the reader. The flow and course of events of the plot are given a firm foundation because he takes the time to illuminate the salient details that cause them. In Two Cities nothing can explain the extremely arbitrary and wanton brutality of the Revolution as well as the meticulous portrait Dickens paints of the equally extreme hunger, oppression and misery that precursors it.

Indeed, Dickens portrays the victims of revolutionary-French society in terms equally as pathetic as he portrays those of pre-revolutionary society. Witness his tragic description of the prisoners of La Force and the contrast between their present (low) and past (high) state:

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! the ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there. (282)

The mill that had ground the French peasantry into squalor and death had been given new grist, achieving the same result. Extreme circumstances bred extreme circumstances; Dickens masterfully depicts both.

There is a Paris to this London though. In dedicating such copious amounts of prose to totality and dissection, Dickens commits the occasional folly of dedicating copious amounts of prose to minimal expanses of plot. For this I have in mind the third chapter of Book the First in which Dickens digresses into philosophical ruminations about the secrets and mystery that each human life represents to each other. After this he moves on to the Tellson's messenger and his journey after he delivers his message to Mr. Lorry – the relation between the two being that since each human life is a mystery to each other "the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London" (47).

This is all well and good but non- germane to the plot of Two Cities. To travel so deeply down this dead-end, and away from the central flow of Dickens' scintillating plot, is as frustrating as it would have been had Shakespeare followed the soothsayer after Caesar's boast that "The Ides of March are come" (Act 3, Scene 1) and not followed Caesar himself, directly documenting the fate that awaited him.

At the very least such lateral movement is ungenerous to all but the most patient, devoted reader who is willing to indulge Dickens' in his reflective flights of fancy.

If he is to be credited for doing everything for his reader, as he must be, Dickens must also then be debited for perhaps doing too much.

No ‘Unity’

In response to President Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to cede power after losing elections in the Ivory Coast, the editors of the Economist warn against the African Union trying to foster a "unity" government to diffuse the crisis. "It is essential that Africa as a whole gets used to the idea that ruling parties bow out when they are rejected at the ballot box. So-called unity governments, installed with the apparently good intention of preventing further chaos after blood has already been shed, are as likely to lead to paralysis and patronage as to creative compromise."

Correct as far as this analysis goes, condoning such government "compromises" proliferates pernicious fruits. Praying on the naiveté and good-intentions of external influences, despots booted from power by the vox populii can cling to that power through the effusion of blood in the full expectation that it will make those influences so desperate to end the carnage that they will permit them to retain at least some semblance of the place in government they have lost any rightful claim to.

The upshot is bad precedent and the inception of a vicious cycle. Seeing that one entity booted from power by plebiscite was able to retain that power through this method, other entities are all the more likely to employ the same method – shedding the blood of their people – when placed in the same predicament.

Additionally, as the Economist begins to hint at, "unity" governments confound representative government in the sense that they terminate in utero the development of the norms and habits an organic society needs to internalize to ultimately become both ordered and free. Giving thugs like Gbagbo a free pass to disregard election results only makes the people of the Ivory Coast and Africa at large accustomed to government by those willing and able to utilize power in the bloody suppression of the masses.

The Wages of Self-Immolating Pretence

The atrocities transpiring in Libya have been permitted to do so through the Obama Administration's pretence that the United States is just another member of the society of nations; no more special or important than any other.

Quite contrary to this affectation, America is and has long been – if not the only, then certainly the major – bulwark of international security. In scores of examples since the end of World War II, America's global reach has been dispositive in influencing events away from economic, social and/or political catastrophe and towards human liberty.

Such a catastrophe is presently escalating in Libya, and despite the unique power to serve the role America has traditionally fulfilled, the administration has instead elected to do nothing. Libyans standing up to the despotism of an insane autocrat are thus subject to the airborne slaughter of his warplanes.

In moments such as these the notion that America is a destabilizing force in the world is demonstrated to be the utter nonsense it always has been.

The United States is the world's lone superpower. Not only is it almost exclusively responsible for underwriting the security of the free world, but it is (still) the last and only hope for mankind's eternal quest for freedom. People already free can rest secure in the preservation of that happy state only in the global involvement of the United States – people yearning for freedom must place their aspirations in the same thing.

As more of these oppressed multitudes fall beneath the sword of Muammar Gadaffi this truth becomes increasingly evident. When the United States shrinks from its role in the world not only does the world become less safe, but the shining flame of liberty becomes dimmer to every desperate life seeking to grasp it.

If the United States has the ability to preserve human life and further its quest for freedom it cannot stand down because of some pathetic and misplaced humility. It must act.

A Future of Growth or Government?

The Left snickers now that while the public favors spending restraint in the abstract it abhors (and will abhor Republican) reductions in the specific. President Obama is staking his re-election on this – that voters will recoil from the GOP and turn back towards him when Congress tries to do something it has not done in generations: pass a budget smaller than the previous one.

That may be. Existential spending cuts may very well cost Republicans (and the republic) another long term of Obama, possibly their House majority.

But that does not change the substantive reality that the ruinous course for us and especially the next generation of Americans is to do what President Obama and the Left propose: nothing. For decades we have indulged ourselves not with our own money but with that of our children and grandchildren. Now we face the upshot of that irresponsibility, that generational theft.

It presents us with a choice. One is to select a future of growth and prosperity, a choice that entails the shared sacrifice of spending cuts and entitlement reform that will permit tax levels to remain low, alter the incentives in the health-care industry to improve its pricing and provision, and free future Americans from what Jefferson once called "the dead hand of the past."

The other is to do nothing, to sullenly limp towards a future suffocated by a ubiquity of red. Debt levels approaching GDP will necessitate even more exponential growth in government as Uncle Sam has no other recourse but to completely grab onto the billfolds and checkbooks of Americans. The need for such an overweening state will choke out even the faintest hope of economic growth and bring us closer, if not in lockstep, with the stifled economies of Europe. Having stuck our children with the tab, we will have also ungraciously denied them the means to pick it up.

Hoping only for political gains in the next election, this is the option President Obama and his party of unions and special interest payouts have selected. For those who seek another course, "have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Stasis in Wisconsin

Those forces in Wisconsin opposing the governor's budget reducing proposals ought to answer a simple question: why is compensation greater than what those with comparable employment in the private sector receive sancrosanct when the state cannot afford that excessive compensation and it is paid on the backs of Wisconsin taxpayers?

This is simply an exercise in an entitled class of people fighting to preserve their preferential, market-immune sinecures.

Point, Counterpoint

Leadership having been abdicated by the president, House Republicans have indicated that they will include entitlement reforms in their forthcoming budget proposal. Whatever shape these reforms take, Democrats will scream that the GOP is gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and that unquantifiable suffering by the American people will ensue.

The counter to this is simple: the unquantifiable suffering will only occur should Republicans adopt the Democrats' position of cowardice and inaction. These programs cannot meet their long-term obligations. Left alone massive increases in taxes or austerity cuts will be inevitable. Comprehensive reform as Republicans propose is the only manner through which these entitlements can be made viable into the future. This is plain and simple – the conclusion of the president's own debt commission.

Through sheer inaction, Democrats simply plan to watch the entitlement car drive straight off of the cliff.

Obama, Condemned

Charles Krauthammer pens a devastating condemnation of President Obama's abdication on the debt crisis, managing, in a mere collection of paragraphs, to illuminate the manifold problems with his budget.

If accepted on its own terms, the budget fails to trim discretionary spending in any meaningful sense. The $1.1 trillion in savings it claims to instill would not be enough to balance the budget this year, let alone the federal government's long-term structural deficit.

The preponderance of spending "reduction" it does contain consists mostly in tax increases, abolishing many tax loopholes in the corporate tax-code while leaving the rate itself alone. The actual spending reductions it does contain barely set spending back to the baselines he inherited in 2009. "Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add another $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you've got $1 trillion of debt reduction."

All of this ignores the fact that the foundation upon which this budget plan is built are absurdly, shall we say optimistic economic-growth predictions coupled with cheap accounting gimmicks. When these are swept away, as they will be, the president's budgetary proposals would lead to additional federal outlays of nearly $1 trillion per annum.

President Obama's most egregious transgression is not one of commission but omission: he completely ignores the major debt-creating monster – the self-indulgent largesse of current and previous generations that is entitlements. For the federal fiscal house to be put back in order these unsustainable leviathans will need to be reformed or they will utterly fail to meet their obligations.

Cognizant of this, the president has nevertheless refused to do anything. On the single largest challenge that menaces his country at the time he is its president, he has shirked leadership in a cynical political ploy to force the opposition to fill the void – fully intending to attack as soon as they put one toe out on the branch. "A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans — for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault — and sets Obama up perfectly for re-election in 2012."

As a cruel mockery of his newest slogan, President Obama is forfeiting America's future for his own political advantage.

To Demure & Bequeath

Since his State of the Union address the president has been fond of talking about "winning the future" by revving the engine of government to invest in all facets of the country. Such rhetoric willfully ignores the reality that the combination of increased outlays from his first biennium coupled with desperately insolvent entitlements promise a future consumed by debt. Far from "winning the future," further government "investment" akin to what the president is calling for promises to steal the future from present and successive generations.

As our cumulative national debt approaches GDP levels, action – both drastic and immediate – is required.

The president pays some lip service to this but is derelict in deed. Before Congress last month, he refused to acknowledge the issue (and the reason that dozens of new members from the other party were sitting in his audience) and called for billions more in new spending on light-speed rail and other sundries.

His budget, released today, does not cut even half of what Republicans are proposing and does virtually nothing to ameliorate the red ink crisis. As Fred Barnes points out, the president's budget would cut $1.1 trillion over the next decade – a sum that does not even exceed the projected deficit for this year.

President Obama and his apologists came into office fancying him as the next FDR: the long-awaited heir who would create a social welfare system for the twenty-first century. This is clearly the presidency he and they still envision.

It is not the presidency that history, or what Machiavelli called fortuna, has designed for him.

The defining issue of this political generation is debt, the single matter that we cannot shirk without being entirely consumed in a sea of insolvency. For other generations it was slavery and civil war, Nazism or communism. Debt is ours.

The president refuses to either recognize or accept this, and so he demurs, creating a leadership void others will be compelled to fill. Only by that time the problem will be even greater than it is now. As Noemie Emery writes, "The mess he claims he inherited from President George W. Bush (which was made in large part by Obama's friends and his party) will be as nothing compared to the one he'll pass on to his heirs."

A long snake of debt – made of zero after zero – ready to squeeze and suffocate present and future generations: such is the bequest the president will leave for his successors.

Kidnapped Conservatives

It was another harmless day in 8^th grade U.S. History when my teacher dropped the bomb. "Yes Lincoln was the first Republican president, but it is pretty obvious that were he alive today he'd be a Democrat." Dumbfounded, this was my first experience with an odious phenomenon: when a conservative is dead and buried (and has been vindicated by the course of history) the Left engages in a concerted effort to claim him as one of their own and/or use that revision against living, breathing conservatives. As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The only good conservative is a dead conservative… It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes, and mopers."

Lincoln is the first example of this. The man who declared that the chief "purpose of the Republican party is eminently conservative" and who sought nothing save the restoration of "this government to its original tones…and there to maintain it, looking for no further change" was no liberal (no modern liberal). A believer in free markets, individual liberty and the rule of law, Lincoln would have loathed the large administrative state and social welfare regime Democrats envision today. These initiatives create quasi-permanent subclasses of government dependents and instill a disincentive to labor, the surest means Lincoln envisioned to self-perfection and social advancement. His opposition to slavery was predicated not only in his belief in the natural rights of man but in the knowledge that, as Allen C. Guelzo writes, "allowing one man to own the fruits of another man's labor…discouraged hard work in both."

Lincoln never spoke of leveling down the playing field or "sharing the wealth." Instead "the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men" allowing "the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else."

Lincoln's top hat simply will not fit the head of today's Democratic donkey.

Now it is Ronald Reagan. The man who declared that "government is the problem" as he sought massive reductions in its size and scope was apparently a moderate pragmatist, in sharp contrast to the conservatives of today who are….well, saying and trying to do the exact same thing. Liberals from Andrea Mitchell to Eugene Robinson to TIME have alleged an affinity between Ronald Reagan and the center-left that the world somehow failed to notice since his days as a New Dealer in the Screen Actors' Guild.

Regrettably, liberals who try to pull this stunt ignore two items, one being that pretty much everything he stood for in his public life was (and still is) inimical to the Left's creed. Not only did he come to the White House pursuing aggressive spending cuts (and would leave it lamenting that he had not cut more), but the abolition of entire cabinet-level departments. He sought cuts to Social Security and Medicare (rebuffed by Congress). He exponentially increased defense spending. He cut taxes (and when he had to raise them as part of a compromise with Congressional Democrats he lamented that his heart "wasn't in it"). He was firmly and vocally pro-life. His Justice Department aggressively promoted originalism to counter decades of the judicial left amorphously interpreting the Constitution to mean whatever they wanted it to. In a deliberate departure from détente, he pursued a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union that could lead to one thing and one thing only: "We win, they lose."

Today's liberals not only ignore all of this in alleging that Reagan was a moderate (or even a liberal), but they also disingenuously ignore the stubborn little reality that they opposed him in all of these things in forms every bit as passionate, ranging-on-hateful as they did George W. Bush. When alive the Left labeled him a "dunce," an "ideologue," a "right-wing extremist," and a "cowboy." At one point Tip O'Neill went so far as to say that there was "evil…in the White House…And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America." Praising his diplomacy in ending the Cold War now, liberals howled when he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire." (To call Reagan himself "evil" was apparently kosher, but damn the man who dared label a regime responsible for the death and oppression of millions in such terms.)

Had there been blogs or cable news the Kos' and Olbermanns would have treated forty every bit as vituperatively as they treated forty-three.

Ronald Reagan was no squishy moderate or liberal, and as Steven F. Hayward writes, those on the Left who now contend otherwise "should be made to explain why they appreciate the virtues of conservatives [especially Reagan] only after they are gone from the scene."

One suspects that, placed on the wrong side of history, they are not so much trying to pull Reagan towards themselves but themselves towards Reagan and away from the fact that he was right and they were wrong. (They are not above scoring cheap political points over conservatives in the here-and-now either.)

If the metaphor above may be strained a little, Reagan's top hat does not fit the heads of liberals today any better than Lincoln's.

Mubarak's Address

Prior to Hosni Mubarak's national address today the masses gathered in Tahrir Square were in high spirits and absorbed in chants tinged with a sense of triumph. Buoyed by reports Mubarak would be announcing his resignation, they also had no other logical conclusion to come to. With what purpose would Mubarak come before his people again unless something in the plans he laid out in his last speech had changed?

No apparent one.

Instead of announcing what everyone planned to hear though, he simply reiterated that he would stay until September, that he was transferring some powers to his vice president, and that he would pursue some constitutional reforms.

Unsurprisingly Egyptians are furious and some sort of violence is expected tomorrow.

One has to wonder what exactly Mubarak was hoping to accomplish. He has long since lost credibility with his countrymen and so nothing he could say short of resignation would placate them. In fact, the only motive that would fit the import of his address today is a desire to see the country he pretends to be the champion of burn, which it quite possibly could now.

The Meaninglessness of ‘Judicial Activism’

Adjectives used pejoratively in the political lexicon tend to lose their original meaning the longer their currency is. After awhile they transform from something specific you disagree with to anything and anyone you disagree with or view negatively. Such became the case with "fascist", "neoconservative" and (liberals would argue) "socialist."

Such has now also become the case with "judicial activist." Used originally by conservatives to pejoratively describe the Warren Court and what they alleged to be its departures from the traditional (and constitutional) role of the judiciary, the moniker has now evolved into the designation both spectral sides employ on judicial acts they do not agree with.

To wit, the ink had barely dried on Judge Vinson's decision invalidating the entirety of last year's health-care reform as unconstitutional before the Obama Administration lashed out at it as a clear case of "judicial activism."

The term has now graduated into the pantheon of its aforementioned predecessors, which is to say it has floated into the realm of utter meaninglessness. No longer applied to a specific type of judicial behavior, and instead used to describe quite disparate ones by disparate sides, to say that an act of the third branch is an example of "judicial activism" is now to say no more than that you disagree with said act.

1099 Repeal

This week the Senate repealed the 1099 provision of the recent health-care law which would have required all businesses to file tax forms each and every time they spent $600 on a single vendor. The extra financial burden this would place on small-business (at a time when we are putatively trying to encourage job growth) is self-evident.

That such an odious example of the federal government's insatiable desire to regulate everything in American life made it into the health-care legislation serves as yet another condemnation of both the legislation itself and the manner in which it was enacted.

Woefully unpopular with the American people, the Democratic super-majorities in control of Congress had to ram through the legislation (through greasing the skids in a manner that defines "corruption") before further scrutiny exposed the bill even more. As a result, final legislation that exceeded a thousand pages in length was shoved through in a matter of days before anyone, including those voting on it, had a chance to actually read and adequately understand what they were voting on.

In consequence, provisions such as this – which no one could rationally vote for after mature deliberation – became the sovereign law of the land.

This state of affairs makes a mockery of President Obama's/Congressional Democrats' claim that the debate over the health-care act is over. The final legislation that was passed and signed was never discussed or debated in any meaningful sense prior to passage, begging the question how anything can be concluded that has never actually begun?

Besides, elected officials are not the ultimate arbiter of what is settled and what is not – the American people are. If you put it in the most charitable terms possible, Americans have deep-abiding reservations about this legislation, especially its most significant provisions. Distinct pluralities to clear majorities favor comprehensive repeal while even more simply 'oppose' the legislation. When you think about it, it is appalling that Democrats forced this 'reform' upon the American public in the dead of night and are now responding to their further objection with a blithe shrug and declaration that the debate is over.

Ultimately the moral of this specific story is that Democrats would have saved themselves time, anguish and embarrassment if they had allowed enough time to scrutinize the entirety of the bill prior to its passage. If you actually read something before acting on it you tend to have an understanding of exactly what it is your acting upon and you are saved from having to repeal something you were the author of a few months prior.

On Affairs in Egypt

The United States has called Hosni Mubarak a friend for thirty years under the postulate that his presidency was the lone bulwark preventing Islamist control of one of the strategically pivotal countries in the region.

Perhaps this was correct. Perhaps it was either Mubarak as he has always been or the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps we were never able to utilize Mubarak as a stopgap while simultaneously taking steps to encourage the development of Egyptian civil society – the precondition to a sustainable system of representative government. There are, after all, real limits to the influence of the most powerful superpower the world has ever known.

Regardless, Egypt, the Middle East and the United States are in the moment they are in now because of the choice we made to sustain Mubarak since the assassination of his predecessor. He has always ruled absolutely over his country and by the same means that he repressed violent Islamist elements he repressed any and every viable democratic element.

That combined with the eruption of popular disgust leads to a dynamic where he stands on the precipice of being driven from power, leaving a gaping void in his wake. Because he has spent his time in power quashing democratic development there is no such component that can step in and fill that vacuum when he is gone, leaving the very real and terrifying possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever name radical Islam calls itself will be able to assume control without challenge. (Mubarak repressed both Islamists and democrats, but as the sword of Mohammed has a head start of a few centuries and so better organization than democracy in the broader Middle East it is exponentially better prepared to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.)

The American decision to prop up Mubarak might have prevented an Islamist takeover of Egypt for thirty years – perhaps this was our only choice, the least-worst choice – but it has left us in a particular vexing bind now. Mubarak's tenure has been a bulwark heretofore but has conversely decimated the one societal element that can permanently prevent the Islamist takeover long feared. Now we are left, seemingly helplessly, watching the one entity (Mubarak) that we needed to prevent another entity (Islamists) from taking control lose power after he has spent decades decimating the only other entity (democracy) that can prevent the second entity (Islamists) from taking power now that his sclerotic regime is crumbling.

All our eggs have been put in one basket and that basket is about to be crushed.

Rewarding Syrian Malfeasance

The Obama Administration appointed Robert Ford to serve as American ambassador to Syria this week, the first time the United States has had such a representative in Damascus since 2005. Answering criticism that this will reward the country for bad behavior, the Washington Times reports that the Administration believes the move will "help persuade the country to change its policies regarding Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and its support for extremist groups."

This rationale is utter nonsense and it exhibits the same ass-backwards understanding of the nature of rogue regimes that led the Clinton and Bush administrations to make their respective nuclear agreements with North Korea.

To wit, sending an ambassador to Syria to cause that regime to change its behavior cannot fail to fail because we have already conceded to them prior to any change in behavior.

If anything the Administration's action will only encourage Damascus to persist in its perfidy. Having garnered a concession without having had to make one themselves, they will take away from this only the knowledge that only the hope of a change in their behavior is required to get carrots, no actual change necessary.

Washington can follow one line of conduct if it wants Syria to desist its antics in the Middle East: make it known to Assad that rewards will be given for positive changes in behavior when, and only when, those changes in behavior actually occur. Until that moment nothing will be forthcoming.