Freedom Line Blog

With the Ground Zero Mosque raising the hackles of some of the loudest and most cloying voices on both sides of the political aisle, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a pundit of any ideological persuasion who can put together a reasoned position on the proposed house of worship.

A glaring exception comes courtesy of Christoper Hitchens’ piece on Slate today, where he highlights some of the darker views of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the head of the group looking to build the mosque. Foremost among them is Rauf’s unapologetic embrace of the radical regime in Iran — a position that Hitchens rightly notes can’t be squared with any authentic belief in democracy or liberalism.

That’s particularly ironic when you consider how much Rauf and company have wrapped themselves in the flag of tolerance as they push forward on the mosque project, a tactic brilliantly dissected by Hitchens:

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

In recent days, many critics of the mosque have been tarred by liberals who use the most extreme examples of opposition to Rauf’s plans to indict the nearly2/3 of the public who are opposed to it (see Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times this weekend for an example). With spokespeople as eloquent as Hitchens, however, that line of attack will ultimately prove fruitless.

For decades, philosophy buffs have argued over whether Adolf Hitler’s appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche was a logical extension of the German philosopher’s work or a bastardization of his core themes. Now, a new wrinkle in the debate about how philosophy informs international affairs comes courtesy of the Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes (full disclosure: Dr. Pipes was a professor of mine in graduate school) writing in today’s Jerusalem Post.

In a piece titled “Lion’s Den: Immanuel Kant vs. Israel”, Dr. Pipes argues that the post-nation state ideology advanced by the legendary Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 work “Perpetual Peace” is now being used to advance a new paradigm of perpetual war against Israel. In relevant part:

Under the old nation-state paradigm, the lesson of Auschwitz was “Never again,” meaning that a strong Israel was needed to protect Jews.

The new paradigm leads to a very different “Never again,” one which insists that no government should have the means potentially to replicate the Nazi outrages. According to it, Israel isn’t the answer to Auschwitz. The European Union is.

That the old-style “Never again” inspires Israelis to pursue the Western world’s most unabashed policy of self-defense makes their actions particularly appalling to New Paradigmers.

Need one point out the error of ascribing Nazi outrages to the nation-state? The Nazis wanted to eliminate nation-states. No less than Kant, they dreamed of a universal state. New Paradigmers mangle history.

The lesson — in Israel’s case, as in all others — is simple. As the monopoly of legitimate force, government is a necessary evil requiring the vigilance of free citizens to keep it in check. In order to protect human liberty and maintain responsiveness to the citizenry, that means government should be as limited and decentralized as possible. And nothing is more threatening to that goal than the “benevolent” internationalism envisioned by Kant, the United Nations, and all their fellow travelers on the post-nationalist left.

Nearly 25 years ago, Thomas Sowell wrote “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”, perhaps the single best volume on the fundamental philosophical differences between modern liberals and classical liberals (the progenitors of today’s libertarians and most conservatives). If your summer schedule doesn’t allow time for Sowell’s 350-page treatise (and it should), then you could do worse than turning to today’s Wall Street Journal.

Today’s edition of the Journal’s opinion section carries a piece entitled “A Tea Party Manifesto” by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe (authors of the new book “Give us Liberty”). Contained therein is the best concise distillation of how Sowell’s conflict is playing out in Tea Party America:

The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds. This is beautiful chaos—or, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put it, “spontaneous order.”

Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge. Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues. In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.

The big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge—someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.

It’s a war of voluntarism and freedom on one side against coercion and statism on the other. The Tea Party crowd should prepare for battle. Armey and Kibbe will provide the ammunition (as will other Tea Party authors, like CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis). Come November, it will  be time to take to the field.

I’ve been writing in this space for months now that Western policymakers who believe Iran can be contained or deterred by conventional methods once it goes nuclear are deluding themselves. As I wrote in a commentary nearly a year ago:

In the 1930s, Winston Churchill – virtually alone – called for swift action to remove Hitler before he could wreak havoc.  What was the source of his clarity? Churchill simply understood that Hitler meant what he said in “Mein Kampf” and was developing the capacity to act on it. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s political sophisticates believed that Hitler’s rhetoric was purely for domestic consumption – a tool used to exploit the grievances of the demoralized Weimar Republic.
 
Today, a similar debate rages over Ahmadinejad and the mullahs whose regime he leads.  But the sincerity of their beliefs should be in doubt to no one.  The Iranian President is a man who, during his tenure as the mayor of Tehran, ordered the city’s streets widened in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, a figure who accompanies the apocalypse in Shiite Islamic theology. The American left would call for the head of any mayor in the United States who wanted to widen Main Street to prepare for the return of the Christ. Yet they apparently think a similar figure in the world’s biggest hotbed of religious fundamentalism can be expected to be a benign wielder of nuclear launch codes.

In the new issue of Commentary, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, in a piece entitled “Iran Cannot be Contained”, comes to the same conclusion from a different angle, rebutting those who think that because containment worked on the Soviet Union it can work on the Iranian regime:

… The most important difference between the Soviet Union and Iran may be ideological. A credible case can be made that Communism is no less a faith than Islam and that Iran’s current leadership, like Soviet leaders of yore, knows how to temper true belief with pragmatic considerations. But Communism was also a materialist and (by its own lights) rationalist creed, with a belief in the inevitability of history but not in the afterlife. Marxist-Leninist regimes may be unmatched in their record of murderousness, but they were never great believers in the virtues of martyrdom.

That is not the case with Shiism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.

The martyrdom mentality factors into Iran’s nuclear calculus as well. In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man often described as a moderate and a pragmatist in the Western press—noted in his Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

We are, quite simply, running out of time.  We can try to ignore reality, but reality won’t return the favor.

Back in March, after his speech to AIPAC, I offered the notion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the last statesman left in the Western world.

Unfortunately, nearly six months later, nothing much has changed. Iran continues to develop its nuclear capacity, the United States continues to toothlessly chide the mullahs, and Israel continues to gird itself for a task that is only palatable in light of the alternative: to attack the regime in Tehran rather than to risk annihilation at its hands. Throughout all the world, only one man is treating this threat with the gravity it deserves. That man is the Prime Minister of Israel.

Netanyahu is tough, smart, and morally courageous: three things that you don’t see much of in politics these days. He deserves your respect and should gain even more of it in light of George Will’s profile of him in today’s Washington Post. From the coda of a piece that begs to be read in its entirety:

Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.

The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of “the confirmed unteachability of mankind.” Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu’s office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old — 200 years younger than Jerusalem’s role as the Jewish people’s capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.

No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: “You live in Chevy Chase. Don’t play with our future.”

Last week, CFIF’s Timothy Lee did a terrific job laying out the justification for President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago this month to bring about the end of World War II.

As I mentioned in this space during President Obama’s visit to Japan back in November, the President doesn’t seem to appreciate the significance of that historical moment. At the time of his Asia trip, Obama was unwilling to close the door on attending an anniversary ceremony to commemorate the bombings — something no previous American president had even considered.

While we can be thankful that Obama himself didn’t make the trip (Michelle probably couldn’t get a connecting flight from Spain), the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, is attending as a member of the official delegation — another unprecedented display of undue deference. Translation: same groveling, less press stateside.

Writing in the Korea Times, former Scripps Howard editor Dan Thomasson gives blistering rebuke:

The military-industrial complex that brutalized much of Asia for more than a decade, killing millions, had loosed the furies that in the end brought about the horror that was visited on these two cities and their residents. The dead and dying there were victims of their own government, not the United States.

No matter what revisionists would have us believe, without that ultimate retribution, America and its allies faced the loss of up to a million men and women in the invasion of the Japanese home islands where the fanatical leaders were prepared for whatever it took to resist, including the immediate murder of prisoners of war. President Harry Truman had little choice other than to give the order that ultimately would change the world and its balance of power.

There might have been some justification for the appearance of an American official at these ceremonies had there ever been such an official presence from the Japanese at any Pearl Harbor memorial or any admission of guilt in the horrendous atrocities committed on the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and Burmese.

The mass beheadings and rapes at Nanking are only one small example. As far as I know, no official Japanese wreath has been laid at the tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona where American sailors rest, true victims one and all.

It’s bad enough that the president is abandoning American greatness in the here and now. But it’s entirely intolerable for him to dishonor the memories of those who have secured it in the past.

Over at the American Conservative, Associate Editor W. James Antle III (apparently they pay by the number of letters in the byline over at the AC) has an insightful piece up today about the shift in foreign policy thinking on the right.

Antle’s key insight is that, as the war in Afghanistan increasingly comes to be defined as a creature of the Obama Administration, many conservative foreign policy hawks are managing to stay aggressive on national defense while divorcing themselves from the nation-building pretensions of the Bush Administration (this author is among that group, which Antle — taking a page from Rich Lowry — calls the “to hell with them hawks”).

As Antle notes:

There have long been three main foreign-policy tendencies on the American Right: old-style conservatives who agree with Randolph Bourne that war is the health of the state and therefore favor less military intervention abroad; neoconservatives who want to preserve the United States’ global hegemony and engage in armed proselytizing for democracy; and defense-minded conservatives who believe the U.S. should strike forcefully at its enemies whenever it perceives itself, its interests, or its allies to be threatened.

Roughly speaking, these groups can be described as the Jeffersonians, the Wilsonians, and the Jacksonians. Among rank-and-file conservatives, the Jacksonians are by far the largest group. In the postwar era, the Jacksonians have tended to align with the Wilsonians. But there is no reason why that conjunction is inevitable.

For the record, Antle and the folks over the AC (the foreign policy followers of Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul) consider themselves Jeffersonians, a term that deserves some criticism (this is, after all, the man who aggressively promoted the French Revolution and went after the Barbary Pirates). But on the broader point, Antle is right. The grand nation-building associated with counterinsurgency theory is basically liberal domestic policy extrapolated abroad. And as George Will has perceptively noted, the very idea of “nation building” makes about as much sense as “orchid building”.

In an age of microwavable punditry, Antle has done a great job of thinking long and hard about the foreign policy divisions on the right. Anyone who cares about the future of the conservative movement and international relations would do well to read his piece in its entirety.

After observing the 2008 death-match between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, you would think that any political mandarin in his right mind would want to avoid a similar war of intraparty attrition. But since the Republican National Committee is in the business of failing to meet even the lowest of expectations these days, you’d be wrong.

Hotline profiles the RNC’s recent resolution to change the way the party of Lincoln picks its presidential candidates. The gist:

The proposal will move the earliest nominating contests — in IA, NH, SC and NV — back from early Jan. to Feb. It will also require states that hold nominating contests in March to award delegates based on the proportion of votes candidates win, eliminating the prospect of an early winner-take-all state that would effectively end the nominating process.

Proponents said the measure would avoid the calamity of a national primary. Already, nearly 40 states have primaries scheduled for the first possible day in the nominating calendar.

Let’s stipulate that there’s no such thing as perfect primary process (a point that New Hampshire GOP chairman — and former White House Chief of Staff — John Sununu makes in the Hotline piece). This is a political Rubik’s Cube to rival Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

That being said, proportional allocation of delegates is one of the worst of many bad ideas. One of the reasons that Republicans had a presidential nominee three months prior to Democrats in 2008 was because the winner-take-all system is centripetal. The proportional model used by Democrats is centrifugal, creating a party that can be just as fractured coming out of a primary season as going in. This is a road to a long and divisive primary season.

2008 should have permanently killed proportional allocation for both parties. But in professional politics, an idea’s worth is ofter inversely proportioned to its recurrence.

You know that obnoxious college undergrad who tries to prove his worldliness by being overly deferential to any foreign culture he comes across? He won the electoral college.

Buried deep in a report by ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour on the White House’s diplomatic engagement with Iran comes this little nugget:

A senior U.S. official said the administration is waiting to see if Iran comes back to the negotiating table after Ramadan as it has publicly indicated in the past, but there have been no direct contacts with Iran about engagement.

In politics, as in romance, deadlines mean something. And apparently Iran is busy washing its hair on Ramadan.

Let’s be clear: Iran blows us off when we ignore them and blows us off when we try to engage them. They’re irascibale when there are sanctions in place and irascible when there are none. They hate us on Ramadan and they’re not wild about us on Hanukkah.

Mr. President: They’re just not that into you.

Regular Freedom Line readers know well my affection for the two men I consider to be America’s best governors: Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey.

Stylistically, the two couldn’t be further apart. Daniels is a quiet, avuncular midwesterner who, through some sort of charisma jiu-jitsu, makes it incredibly hip to be square. He’s also turned Indiana into an economic powerhouse and one of the best-governed states in the nation.

Christie, by contrast, is an Irish-Italian tornado, possessed of the sort of everyman bravado that you’d expect from the best elected official to come out of the land of Bruce Springsteen and Tony Soprano. It’s as if Rudy Giuliani woke up one day with a full head of hair and a passion for philly cheesesteaks.

With congressional Republicans understandably locked into opposition mode, Daniels and Christie are great examples of proactive GOP leadership that works. And Rich Lowry does a nice job of summarizing why in today’s New York Post.

On Daniels:

… The skinflint second-term governor has slimmed down and improved his state’s public sector. He inherited a $200 million deficit in 2004, which he turned into a $1.3 billion surplus – just in time for it to act as a cushion during the recession. He has reformed government services and rallied his administration around one simple, common-sense goal: “We will do everything we can to raise the net disposable income of individual Hoosiers.”

On Christie:

Christie has just concluded a six-month whirlwind through Trenton that should be studied by political scientists for years to come. In tackling a fiscal crisis in a state groaning under an $11 billion deficit, he did his fellow New Jerseyans the favor of being as forthright as a punch in the mouth. And it worked.

Christie traveled the state making the case for budgetary retrenchment, and he frontally took on the state’s most powerful interest, the teachers’ union. He rallied the public and split the Democrats, in a bravura performance in the lost art of persuasion. At the national level, George W. Bush thought repeating the same stalwart lines over and over again counted as making an argument, and Barack Obama has simply muscled through his agenda on inflated Democratic majorities. Christie actually connected.

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have done a terrific job souring the public on liberals. Daniels and Christie may just have what it takes to get them excited about conservatives.

It gets a little tiresome having to read columnist Fareed Zakaria’s senate floor speeches masquerading as opinion pieces in Newsweek every seven days. Dr. Z has a tendency to write columns with grandiose titles such as “How to Salvage Afghanistan” and “Defusing the Debt Bomb”.  While it’s admirable that he’s at least trying to offer solutions, most of Zakaria’s bigthink is pretty small — conventional Washington wisdom masquerading as divine revelation.

Zakaria’s gift for analysis is not nearly as deep as he thinks and nothing proves it more than his new piece in Newsweek, entitled “Raise My Taxes, Mr. President”. Taking a page out of the Obama playbook and fashioning himself a centrist who can rise above the fray, Zakaria writes:

[The Bush tax] cuts are set to expire this year. The Republicans say they want to keep them all, even for those making more than $250,000 a year (less than 3 percent of Americans). They say that higher taxes will hurt the recovery. But for months now they have been arguing that the chief threat to the economy is our gargantuan debt and deficit. That’s what’s scaring consumers, creditors, and businesses. Given a chance to address those fears by getting serious about deficit reduction, though, they run away.

Fareed is making a mistake that should be recognizable to anybody who’s ever watched an episode of “House”. He’s making a diagnosis based on symptoms rather than an underlying cause. Yes, America’s debt is horrible. But let’s keep one of Milton Friedman’s key insights in mind: all spending is a form of taxation — it has to be paid for sooner or later, one way or another.

Balancing the budget through tax increases only moves the government’s burden on the private sector from debt to taxation. Think of it this way: if you want to get your personal finances in order, does it make more sense to simply pay for your reckless spending with cash instead of a credit card or to actually buckle down and stop spending as much? If you realize that the first can save you a few bucks here and there, but only the second can provide financial salvation, you’re on the right track. You’re also smarter than Fareed Zakaria.

Following on from my column last week, Steven Greenhut, editor-in-chief of CalWatchdog.com, sits down with Reason to explore the excesses of public pensions and public-sector workers in general, especially in California. Enjoy, if you can stomach it:

As CFIF’s own Ashton Ellis chronicled last week, we’re living in an era where developments in British politics hold many salient lessons for those of us slogging it out in the new world.

But whereas Brother Ellis found inspiration for the Tea Party Movement in the Cameron-Clegg coalition, the UK Telegraph’s Janet Daley sees a more insidious trend heading stateside: the unity of liberalism with class snobbery. In a few brilliant passages:

What is [startling] is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) “enlightened” class with the poor and deprived.

America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for “not the right sort”.

Ms. Daley’s analysis is as accurate as it is insightful. Among the many lessons Barack Obama has failed to take from Bill Clinton, this may be among the most politically relevant: alienate the middle class, scoff at its sensibilities, and kiss your mandate goodbye. And that’s what will happen if the Democrats don’t manage to break free of the grip of the Berkeley-Cambridge wing of their party.

It certainly looks that way. Back when he was Speaker of the Florida House, Rubio pioneered “idearaisers” — a format where he solicited the best public policy ideas from citizens of the Sunshine State. The result was a book entitled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. All of those 100 ideas were passed by the Florida House, and, by Rubio’s accounting, 57 are now Florida law.

Now on the hustings as a U.S. Senate candidate, Rubio has now unveiled “23 Simple Ways To Create Jobs, Grow Our Economy And Help The Gulf Coast Recover.” You can read the full list via the link, but here are a couple of the choicer items:

 Fundamentally Reform The U.S. Tax Code. The current tax code hinders economic growth. Too many years of special interest lobbying and class warfare politics have cemented it as anti-family, anti-jobs and anti-competitive. The U.S. should have a tax system that is simpler, fairer and promotes economic growth.  We should start moving toward being able to pay our taxes with a single rate on paper the size of a postcard.

Make Claims Checks Tax Exempt. The Gulf Oil Spill Relief Fund is designed to help those whose economic well-being and revenue has been impacted. Similar to legislation after September 11, the federal government should act immediately so that Floridians and the people of the Gulf Coast receive a full gross relief check. BP should cover any tax losses.

See Rubio talking about the linkage between ideas and action below:

The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Here it goes: my name is Troy and I geek out at the intersection of sports and economics.

Today’s example — catnip for conservatives — comes from NBA superstar LeBron James’s much-anticipated announcement of where he’ll be playing next season now that he’s a free agent.

Apart from the option of staying in Cleveland (which won’t be habitable until the folks at Reason are through with it), Lebron’s two most prominent options look to be the New York Knicks or the Miami Heat. But even if both teams offer him identical contracts, his take-home pay will look dramatically different. As a New York Post blog posting notes:

If LeBron James goes to the Miami Heat instead of the Knicks, blame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida.

Total state taxes on a 5-year, $96 million contract? $12.34 million in New York; $0 in Florida.

If LeBron ends up in Miami (and the influence of joining Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in the Heat’s starting lineup shouldn’t be underemphasized), this blogger may be one of the only sports fans in America who traces the development to a rather obscure, short-lived economist from the Eisenhower era.

Charles Tiebout’s greatest contributions to economics was the “Tiebout Hypothesis” — which in essence stated that federalism matters because citizens vote with their feet. If a state wants productive people (and make no mistake, LeBron is an economic dynamo), they create the conditions that will bring them there. Thus, Florida has a recipe for fostering entrepreneurship, while New York has a recipe for disaster.

Of course, there are mitigating factors. Kobe Bryant stays in Los Angeles despite California’s confiscatory tax rates because of the prestige of playing with a successful legacy franchise like the Lakers. But for those of us with a more conventional cut to our jibs, the calculation is simpler.

If you have a business you can run from anywhere, would you rather do it at New York’ s 12.85% rate or for free in one of the nine states that don’t have income taxes (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming — just in case you’re looking to flee blue state insanity).

By the way, take a look at the business climates in these states and you’ll notice which model works and which model doesn’t.

As we mentioned earlier today, Dr. Donald Berwick has received a recess appointment from President Obama to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. You’ll hear a lot in the next few days from the conservative press about Berwick’s radical affection for rationing and his distaste for the free market system. Lest you think any of it hyperbolic, let the man tell you for himself:

Last week, I wrote that even as august a figure as David Petraeus may not be enough to save the American military endeavor in Afghanistan given that country’s poor suitability for a counterinsurgency strategy.

Writing in today’s D.C. Examiner, Byron York looks at what General Petraeus’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee reveals about the war’s shortcomings:

“For example, nearly seven million Afghan children are now in school as opposed to less than one million a decade ago under Taliban control,” Petraeus said. “Immunization rates for children have gone up substantially and are now in the 70 to 90 percent range nationwide. Cell phones are ubiquitous in a country that had virtually none during the Taliban days.”

It was an extraordinary moment. Americans overwhelmingly supported the invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In eight and a half years of war there, 1,149 American servicemembers have died. And after all that sacrifice, the top American commander is measuring the war’s progress by school attendance, child immunization and cell phone use.

Petraeus is a military hero, deserving of every accolade that has been heaped upon him for the success of the surge in Iraq. But defining victory in Afghanistan as erecting a functional civil society overseen by a competent government is a “boil the ocean” strategy that may not be achievable in 18 years, let alone 18 months. And it’s relation to our legitimate national security interests in Central Asia is tangential at best.

Rather than letting the current strategy atrophy into withdrawal, it’s time for the administration to start developing an approach in Afghanistan that protects our legitimate security priorities without indulging in nation-building that has neither the domestic support nor the timeframe necessary to succeed.

It’s the latest in a series of improbable questions to emanate from the Garden State since Chris Christie took over as governor earlier this year. But Joe Scarborough raises it here and after watching his interview with the big man, you may begin to understand how Christie inspires the gypsy sentiment in conservatives’ hearts.

Answer: quite possibly, the margin of victory for Republicans in the United States Senate.

According to a new report from Public Policy Polling today, the largely unknown Johnson (a plastics manufacturer from Oshkosh) is within two points of the Badger State’s liberal stalwart, Senator Russ Feingold.  If the Wisconsin seat flips, it puts Republicans very close to retaking the Senate. Here’s the succint explanation.

Republicans currently have 41 seats in the Senate. Since the tie-breaking vote in the Senate belongs to the Democratic Vice President, Republicans would need a net pickup of 10 seats to retake the majority — an extremely high threshold.

To start with, that means having no Republican incumbents get beat. That shouldn’t be too hard. There aren’t many GOP incumbents around these days, and the ones that are are fairly safe. Only North Carolina’s Richard Burr looks vulnerable this year and he’ll probably be able to ride it out.

The next step is hanging on to the seven open GOP seats: one due to a Republican primary in Utah, the other six owing to retirements in Kansas, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Florida, and New Hampshire. Utah, Kansas, and New Hampshire look very safe right now. Kentucky will be close and will likely hinge on how cautious Rand Paul can learn to be. Florida has scrambled into a three-way race with Charlie Crist’s decision to run as an independent, but look for Marco Rubio to make a strong showing as the year continues. Ohio and Missouri will likely stay tight up through election day.

Assuming a perfect defense, then, Republicans will still need to pickup 10 seats on offense. There are a few pieces of low-lying fruit: North Dakota Governor John Hoeven will almost certaintly win the seat being vacated by Byron Dorgan. The odds also look quite favorable for Dan Coats in Indiana and Mike Castle in Delaware to pick up open seats, and for John Boozman in Arkansas to defeat incumbent Blanche Lincoln.

Factor in those wins and Republicans still need six seats for a majority. And with the Wisconsin race competitive, they now have seven prospects. In addition to Johnson’s challenge to Feingold, there are also serious threats to Democratic incumbents in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Washington. With Republicans competitive for open seats in Illinois and Pennsylvania, the Wisconsin race actually gives the GOP an ever-so-slight margin of error for taking back a majority come election day.

And who is this great white hope of the upper midwest? George Will’s profile in the Washington Post last month provides some insight. If he’s right, this may be one more member of an exceptional senate class in 2010. To wit:

The theme of his campaign, the genesis of which was an invitation to address a Tea Party rally, is: “First of all, freedom.” Then? “Then you’ve got to put meat on the bones.” He gets much of his meat from the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. And from a Wisconsin congressman, Paul Ryan, whose “road map” for entitlement reform Johnson praises. Health care? “Mitch Daniels has the solution.” Indiana’s Republican governor has offered state employees the choice of consumer-controlled health savings accounts, and 70 percent now choose them.

“The most basic right,” Johnson says, “is the right to keep your property.” Remembering the golden age when, thanks to Ronald Reagan, the top income tax rate was 28 percent, Johnson says: “For a brief moment we were 72 percent free.” Johnson’s daughter — now a nurse in neonatal intensive care — was born with a serious heart defect. The operations “when her heart was only the size of a small plum” made him passionate about protecting the incentives that bring forth excellent physicians.

This sounds like a conservative who nows how to connect first principles to daily governance. Dare we dream such a thing?

… comes from a non-candidate. Sic Semper Tyrannis: