Freedom Line Blog

Following on our observations last week about Paul McCartney’s shameless dig at former President Bush during a recent White House concert and Elton John’s brave decision to defy calls to boycott Israel (and Rush Limbaugh’s wedding), it seems the two British rockers are still showing their respective stripes.

In an interview in today’s edition of the British tabloid The Sun, McCartney puts the environmental left’s most poisonous arrow in his quiver:

The Beatles legend said: “Sadly we need disasters like this [the BP oil spill] to show people. Some people don’t believe in climate warming – like those who don’t believe there was a Holocaust.

We’ll leave it to Sir Paul to tell us exactly how an explosion on an oil rig is supposed to provide compelling proof of the reality of global warming.

A better example from amongst the knights of the realm comes from Sir Elton John. While Sir Elton has been known to wander off the sanity reservation from time to time (he famously blamed opposition to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid on sexism and, on another occasion, fantasized about outlawing the Internet), his recent performance in Tel Aviv wasn’t the rocket man’s only principled stand in the region.  Just a few weeks before, Islamists in Morocco were calling for Elton to be banned from performing in Rabat at the country’s largest musical festival because of his homosexuality. Despite the threats, he refused to cancel his appearance. The audience reportedly ate it up.

At a time when Comedy Central curls into a ball everytime the jihad machine starts warming up, here’s to hoping for more stars with the courage of Elton John.

While no one in the vast right-wing conspiracy is going to outdo CFIF’s own Timothy Lee for principled and prolonged resistance to the FCC’s attempt at a backdoor takeover of the Internet, we appreciate the assist from the folks at Reason. Here, Nick Gillespie lays out three reasons to oppose Washington’s proposed conquest of cyberspace:

The press is abuzz today with rumors that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will be leaving his West Wing post in the near future, likely after the midterm elections. While the White House denies the allegations, the UK Telegraph lays out the following rationale:

It is well known in Washington that arguments have developed between pragmatic Mr Emanuel, a veteran in Congress where he was known for driving through compromises, and the idealistic inner circle who followed Mr Obama to the White House.

And it’s equally well known that Rahmbo has consistently lost. As Jonathan Alter relates in his new book “The Promise” (which, in its lust for Obama, would be better titled “The Gospel According to Jon”), Emanuel vigorously fought the Administration’s plan for a comprehensive transformation of health care in favor of smaller, more incremental victories. For all of his bravado, Emanuel — who, along with Chuck Schumer, engineered his party’s takeover of Congress by embracing moderate and conservative Democrats — is indeed a pragmatist, not a liberal True Believer unable to brook compromise.

This staff shakeup, should it happen, will put the White House on a dangerous trajectory. Emanuel’s incrementalist views have been steamrolled during most of his tenure in the administration. If, even in that position of weakened power, he can’t be accomodated in the halls of the West Wing, then we can expect the “idealists” to be running the show in the second half of Obama’s term. That means that in the aftermath of what will likely be at least a partial Republican takeover of Congress, Obama will be moving further and further towards liberal purity.

If you think the administration is out of touch now, wait until they banish even internal dissent.

Why bother editorializing when — as lawyers and Romans would say — Res ipsa loquitur.

From President Obama’s Oval Office address last night:

When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses

Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy – because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

From an article in today’s Ventura County Star about California’s draconian greenhouse gas regulations:

Californians need to acknowledge the full consequences of the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accept the reality “that the net result of green policies may be negative for the economy,” says a report released today by the California Lutheran University Center for Economic Research and Forecasting…

The report examines economic studies in Europe, where the movement toward green jobs began. It finds the government costs of subsidizing jobs in the renewable energy sector have been excessive.

“In Germany, as in Spain, there is considerable belief that the job creation afforded by investment in renewables has been more than offset by the impact of more expensive energy, which has slowed consumption and investment elsewhere in the economy,” the report says.

In the U.S., it says, “Even as energy prices have increased, the growth of green jobs has been slower than expected. The evidence shows that green jobs and the regulations needed to spur them are expensive and hurt the economy.”

So, Mr. President, how long-term were you thinking exactly?

More on the economic lunacy in my new column reviewing the President’s speech last night.

With apologies to John Derbyshire, that’s the conclusion it’s difficult to avoid reading the latest from Derb’s National Review colleague, Kevin Williamson. In a piece entitled “The Other National Debt“, Williamson looks at all of the extra liabilities that don’t make their way into the conventional tally of a $14 trillion national debt. His conclusions are hair-raising.

On state and local debt:

Beyond the official federal debt, there is another $2.5 trillion or so in state and local debt, according to Federal Reserve figures. Why so much? A lot of that debt comes from spending that is extraordinarily stupid and wasteful, even by government standards. Because state and local authorities can issue tax-free securities — municipal bonds — there’s a lot of appetite for their debt on the marketplace, and a whole platoon of local special-interest hustlers looking to get a piece. This results in a lot of misallocated capital: By shacking up with your local economic-development authority, you can build yourself a new major-league sports stadium with tax-free bonds, but you have to use old-fashioned financing, with no tax benefits, if you want to build a factory — which is to say, you can use tax-free municipal bonds to help create jobs, so long as those jobs are selling hot dogs to sports fans.

On exploding public pensions:

States aren’t going to be able to make up those pension shortfalls out of general tax revenue, at least not at current levels of taxation. In Ohio, for instance, the benefit payments in 2031 would total 55 percent of projected 2031 tax revenues. For most states, pension payments will total more than a quarter of all tax revenues in the years after they run out of money. Most of those pensions cannot be modified: Illinois, for instance, has a constitutional provision that prevents reducing them. Unless there is a radical restructuring of these programs, and soon, states will either have to subsidize their pension systems with onerous new taxes or seek a bailout from Washington.

And — the death shot — entitlements:

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare— in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)

These numbers underscore the need for real change, quickly advanced. Keep your eyes fixed to CFIF, where we’ll soon be unveiling a campaign to corral the runaway spending.

… comes from the Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery writing in today’s DC Examiner:

He’s the sleek, splashy sports car that sits in the driveway, that looked so cool in the showroom, and handled so well on the test drive, but has a bad habit of stalling in traffic, and just doesn’t take to the road.

How fitting. The president Americans chose to get us out of an economic crisis fed by excessive consumption has turned out to be an impulse buy.

Lest Freedom Line readers sink too far into despair over Jeff’s earlier post about the EPA’s transformation into a People’s Commissariat, it turns out there’s good news: it’s all to stave off the coming carbon wars. At least that’s the diagnosis of California’s taxpayer-financed parody of liberalism, Senator Barbara Boxer:

Here’s to hoping that Boxer’s opponent, Carly Fiorina, brings this up the next time she finds herself on an open mic.

With Barack Obama’s presidency at one of its undeniable low points, the commander-in-chief’s booster club in the beltway media is tying itself in knots attempting to locate blame anywhere but Pennsylvania Avenue.

The last time we saw the press corps engaged in this sort of intellectual yoga it was to push the notion that Obama’s “failures” were rooted in communication — that he was making prime rib arguments to a country that could only digest apple sauce. This line of reasoning has reached its apogee with Jonathan Alter’s recent hagiography of Obama, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One”, which practically drools over the president’s intellect and regularly laments the country’s refusal to comprehend the profundity of his liberal vision quest.

Lately, a new form of hand-wringing is taking center stage. It’s exemplified by journalists like the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, who writes on the Post’s Plum Line blog today:

… the Gulf oil spill may pose a serious threat to one of the most important aspects of Obama’s presidency: his effort to restore public confidence in government as competent, as a trustworthy agent of genuine and lasting reform.

Note Sargent’s peculiar phrasing, which frames the spill as a hurdle to Obama’s unified theory of government, not a refutation of it. Yet as Ron Fournier noted in an Associated Press column earlier this week:

While there were surely crises of faith during the Civil War, the Progressive Era and others times of tumult, the early 20th century was marked by a reflexive sense of trust in the nation’s institutions. Even as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal vastly expanded the government safety net, a new breed of private charities and social reformers didn’t bother waiting on government to help the poor, infirm and abused.

But things started to change in the mid-20th century, when polls showed a steady decline on the question of whether Americans trusted government in Washington to do what is right.

From 1958, when more than 70 percent said they trusted government most or all of the time, the trend line steadily drops until it hits the mid-20s in the post-Watergate era.

Looking at those figures closely, it’s hard to miss the trend. As American government ballooned during the 20th century, the public progressively lost faith in it. The decline starts when the expansion of the welfare state begins to showcase government incompetence and compounds when Watergate adds malevolence to the mix. Could it be that Americans don’t trust the government because it has appropriated responsibilities it can’t fulfill?

Consider the functions that all but the most staunch libertarians believe government should be responsible for: defending the nation, collecting taxes, developing infrastructure, securing the border, delivering the mail. In these areas, the government is intermittently competent at best, but benefits some from the fact that its inefficiency isn’t being spotlighted by private-sector competition. When it steps over the line into smothering civil society, the evidence of government waste and stupidity becomes nearly impossible to deny.

Does President Obama have a growing problem with Americans’ faith in government? Yes. But the culprit is not the fates conspiring against him. Rather it’s the root of so many of his problems: he’s beginning to suffer the wages of making promises it’s impossible for him to keep.

A few months ago, I noted how Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is shaping up to be one of the most impressive stars in the GOP’s 2012 firmament. Though Daniels has gotten some literary love from a wonky contigent of Washington’s columnist corps, he’s never received quite as extensive a profile as in Andrew Ferguson’s cover story in the new Weekly Standard.

The whole (very lengthy) piece is worth reading for its portrait of Daniels as an unpretentious midwesterner, aggresive manager, and possible antidote to the Age of Obama (the piece — coming close on the heels of his PAC’s first high-profile Washington fundraiser — is an obvious attempt to rollout a campaign narrative). Among the nuggets that make a Daniel’s candidacy worth consideration:

He’s quicker on his feet than a garden-variety pol:

We were having lunch one day at a favorite spot, the St. Louis Street Soda Shop in Vincennes, on the Wabash River. Having resisted the Fried Bologna Sandwich ($3.49, with chips, pickle extra), Daniels was washing down a quarter-pound Coney Island dog with a large butterscotch milkshake—“the best in the state,” he assured Dolly, the delighted owner—when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.

“What would you say to those people?” she asked.

He visibly flinched, just as he had on MitchTV.

“I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.”

He has an economic record about as sharply in contrast to Obama’s as is imaginable:

When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest.

And — most astonishingly — he’s such an effective governor that he even got the DMV (actually BMV in the Hoosier State) transformed into a customer-centered operation:

The state Bureau of Motor Vehicles, another patronage sump that was routinely ranked one of the worst in the country, was drastically reorganized. “He likes metrics,” [Indiana OMB Director Ryan] Kitchell said. “He likes to measure outcomes.” Every line item in the state budget has at least one objective formula attached to it to indicate how well each service is being delivered. Regulatory agencies track the speed with which permits and variances are granted. The economic development agency has to compare the hourly wage of each new job brought to the state with the average hourly wage of existing jobs. In the case of the BMV, the two most important metrics were wait times and customer satisfaction. Now each receipt is stamped with the time the customer arrives and the time his transaction is completed. Wait times have dropped from over 40 minutes to under 10 minutes. Surveys put customer satisfaction at 97 percent.

A new generation of reformers is beginning to develop outside of Washington. Dare we hope for a Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie ticket in 2012 (in either order)?

From the Australian Comedy duo of Clarke and Dawe. Sadly this may be more accurate and succint than anything you’ll see on network news:

Apparently trying to contain the damage from last week’s blowup over allegations that the White House used President Clinton as the middleman in an attempt to bribe Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania senate race, the Obama Administration is now leaking that they did something similar in Colorado. From the AP:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration dangled the possibility of a government job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

These officials declined to specify the job that was floated or the name of the administration official who approached Romanoff, and said no formal offer was ever made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not cleared to discuss private conversations.

Romanoff is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Michael Bennet in the Centennial State’s Democratic primary, which won’t be held until August 10. By leaking this information now, the Obama Administration looks to be cynically trying to avoid a repeat of the Sestak controversy as the Colorado race progresses. With two months left and a candidate who has thus far been more tight-lipped than Sestak, the odds are against them. And while this may feed widespread notions of administration corruption, it also has the potential to divide Democrats who resent the White House choosing sides within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned: this could get interesting.

You may not know his name (though you’ve seen it here at CFIF before), but you probably know his work. O’Keefe is the 25-year old renegade conservative filmaker whose undercover exposes of groups like Planned Parenthood and ACORN have revealed institutional corruption on the left.

Well, he’s back. And this time his target is the U.S. Census Bureau. Are the results as damning this time? Judge for yourself:

More from America’s best governor:

In an absolutely chilling piece at RealClearPolitics today, Dr. Hal Scherz examines an Obama nominee who otherwise may have escaped public scrutiny: Dr. Donald Berwick, who’s been tapped by 44 to run the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The picture that emerges is of an individual who makes even the most wall-eyed health care fears seem credible. Here’s Scherz, quoting Berwick in the first and third paragraphs:

“Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional”.

Indeed, lest there be any doubt about the range of Dr Berwick’s schemes for “redistribution” – code for transferring power to the government — he makes clear how grand his vision for statist health care.

“There needs to be global budget caps on total healthcare spending for designated populations (ie-rationing)” Dr. Berwick says. “The simplest way to reach these goals is with a single payer system.”

The whole thing has to be read to be believed, but Scherz wraps it up with a nice injection of humanity:

But if Dr Berwick leaves little doubt who is going to be in charge of the redistribution, global caps, and the single payer systems, he shows with his use of words like “politically accountable” or “democratic”, the sort of verbal tic that betrays his own understanding. He seeks not broad-based, bottom-up decision-making but top-own edicts from elite panels of enlightened and, of course, “global” thinkers like himself that preempt decisions now made by doctors and their patients.

And that is what those of us who are practicing physicians find so troubling about Dr. Berwick’s nomination. We see him as a White House Rose Garden, photo-op doctor with a borrowed white coat; an academic who runs a $58 million institute, who analyzes numbers and reports and theories about populations but is now totally out of touch with his former peers and the patients that they treat every day. And this is the sobering point– Dr Berwick will not be there with us at the patient’s bedside looking them in the eye and telling them that the life saving treatment that they need is not approved because they don’t fit into the right demographic.

… can be found in the pages of today’s USA Today. Behold four of the clearest, most incontrovertible, and most horrifying paragraphs you’ll ever read in print:

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.

Let’s review: you cannot have a welfare state without a private sector vibrant enough to fund it. You cannot have a private sector vibrant enough to fund it unless government allows the market to function relatively unimpeded. And the market can’t function relatively unimpeded unless the welfare state stays modest in scope. What exactly don’t the folks in Washington, Sacramento, and Athens understand?

That’s the result of a new Rasmussen poll out today that shows 63 percent of voters would like to see the crown jewel of the Obama legacy relegated to the ash heap of history. Per Rasmussen:

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.

While opposition to the bill has remained as consistent since its passage as it was beforehand, this marks the first time that support for repeal has climbed into the 60s. It will be interesting to see whether this marks a brief bounce or indicates a trend of growing opposition.

Perhaps this owes to the growing public awareness of some of the facts that Peter Suderman points out at Reason:

Already, businesses small and large are warning of the ill effects of the law’s changes to the tax code. In order to generate the nearly $1 trillion necessary to pay for the law, its authors scoured the tax code looking to squeeze out more money whereever possible. And sure enough, within a few days of its passage, a handful of big companies took tax write downs in response to changes in the tax treatment of an existing drug subsidy. An estimate by Credit Suisse puts the total damage across the economy at around $4.5 billion—with $1 billion coming from AT&T alone.

The change involved the tax treatment of a subsidy that never should have existed, but it suggests the extent to which America’s health care system is already reliant on government meddling, and how costly expanding the government’s role in the system can be. And, perhaps more importantly, a planned investigation into the write-downs revealed that many big corporations are considering dropping their health care coverage and dumping employees onto the public dole.

When Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) heard about the write-downs, he called a hearing with AT&T and other companies claiming big hits. But soon after the subpoenaed corporate documents were turned in, the hearing was canceled. Why? Likely because, as Fortune magazine reported, the documents showed that the companies were considering dropping coverage for many employees—directly contradicting one of the president’s key promises, that, under ObamaCare, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Even with penalties in place for employers who decline to provide health insurance, documents showed that Caterpillar could reduce its health care costs by as much as 70 percent and AT&T could save as much as $1.8 billion by shifting their employees into public programs.

If this sounds like a plan that only a bureaucrat could love, that’s because it is. Check out this underreported nugget from the Rasmussen poll:

The Political Class continues to be a strong supporter of the plan, however. While 67% of Mainstream voters believe the plan will be bad for America, 77% of the Political Class disagree and think it be good for the country.

The political class is about to get knocked on their heels. And to show how it can happen (warning: incoming teaser) , later this week I’ll be looking at a couple of little known-provisions in the health care bill that could prove its ultimate undoing.

No, I’m not referring to the recent precipitious decline in global stock markets (though there may be a connection). Instead, I’m talking about the tidal wave of state pension obligations that threaten to put the country’s entire economic infrastructure in peril. From a story in today’s Financial Times:

Joshua Rauh, associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University said that, without reform, some state pensions might run out within the decade. By 2030, as many as 31 states may not have the money to pay pensions. And, if these funds exhaust their assets, the size of payments for the benefits they have promised will be too large to cover through taxes, putting pressure on the federal government for a bail-out that could potentially cost more than $1,000bn, he says.

For those of you not accustomed to the British rendering, that last number would normally be referred to stateside as a jaw-dropping “trillion” .

But how could this scenario have ever gotten this far? The FT piece explains:

Estimates put the unfunded liabilities at between $1,000bn and $3,000bn after years of states promising benefits but not contributing enough in both good times and bad to cover them.

Many states base their calculations on an 8 per cent annual return and use an accounting method called smoothing, which staggers gains and losses over several years, two factors that some observers warn could mask the size of the shortfalls. The problem has come to the fore with the financial crisis and recession. Pension funds, like most money managers, suffered losses. The tax revenues that fund annual contributions to pensions, along with essential services such as healthcare and education, have plummeted, leaving little room to reimburse the losses.

Assuming that governments can get themselves out of this morass before it’s too late, the only way to prevent a reoccurence is to switch public-sector pensions from “defined benefit” plans to “defined contribution” plans. Mort Zuckerman did a good job of showing why over at U.S. News and World Report earlier this week:

[New York City] pensions are “defined benefit” plans, which are more expensive since they guarantee specific benefits on retirement.

On the other hand, private sector workers in the survey were mostly in “defined contribution” plans, which means that, unlike their cushioned brethren in the public sector, they do not have a pre-determined benefit at retirement. If New York City were to require its current workers to pay contributions toward health insurance equal to the amounts paid by the employees of local private sector firms, the taxpayer savings would approximate $628 million a year. In New Jersey, [Governor Chris] Christie says government employee health benefits are 41 percent more expensive than those of the average Fortune 500 company.

We know when the next bubble is coming.  But with the coming attractions provided by belligerent bureaucrats in Greece, which American politician will be the first to throw himself in front of the union gravy train?

… comes courtesy of the Heartland Institute’s Ross Kaminsky over at Human Events.

In a piece with the wonderfully direct title “Can Kagan be Trusted to Defend the Constitution?”, Kaminsky takes the would-be justice to town on her record as Solicitor General and as a legal academic.

The whole piece is worth reading (especially for two extended quotes in which Chief Justice Roberts excoriates Kagan’s legal reasoning from the bench). But what may be most provocative is this little nugget:

Kagan’s hostility toward the plain meaning of the 1st Amendment is nothing new. In a 1996 paper (PDF) for the University of Chicago Law Review (she was a professor at the University of Chicago at the same time that Barack Obama was a lecturer there), Kagan suggested that the government’s motives in restricting speech should be important factors in whether those restrictions are upheld by a court. She wonders aloud, in eye-opening Socialist language “what view of the 1st Amendment accounts for the court’s refusal to allow, by means of restrictions, the redistribution of expression?”

You read that right; she said “redistribution of expression.”

She continues: “The question remains, however, why the court should treat as especially suspicious content-neutral regulations of speech—such as the regulations in Buckley—that are justified in terms of achieving diversity.” You can already hear her ruling in a sure-to-come challenge to the re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine meant to muzzle talk-radio conservatives in the guise of increasing “diversity of opinion”.

Similar to her argument in Stevens which implies a government arbiter of speech, Kagan makes this remarkable statement in her paper: “If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action—which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate—then action disfavoring that idea might ‘unskew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.”

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

That’s how Samuel Johnson defined a second marriage. But it applies with equal force to nearly every pronouncement that the international diplomatic community makes about Iran.

With news that the Islamic Republic has struck a fuel-swapping deal with Turkey, the hallelujahs are coming fast and furious. However, the subtle undercurrent for those who pay attention to such things is that this will only chink away at UN efforts to impose harsh sanctions (not that there’s much hope there — but even failure on such an incremental step redounds to Iran’s favor).

The less subtle upshot, however? Well, I’ll let the Iranians tell you themselves:

“There is no relation between the swap deal and our enrichment activities … We will continue our 20 percent uranium enrichment work,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation.

On a good day, the West’s diplomatic strategy towards Iran is “pray”.  On a bad day, it’s “duck and cover”.

Come next January, a bevy of new Republicans in Washington are going to face the question that dogged Bill McKay, Robert Redford’s character in “The Candidate”, after finally winning office: “What do we do now?”

The Obama agenda leaves so little room for compromise with the center-right that the GOP has found it both politically expedient and ideologically consistent to throw up a wall of opposition. But when they have at least partial control of the reigns of power, that dynamic will change.

Conservatives searching for a role model when it comes time to lead should look to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who in only a few months has demonstrated the precondition of effective leadership in this age of runaway government: a spine of steel. Per a story in today’s edition of the Hill:

As the United States watches a debt crisis in Greece like a fiscal oil spill, waiting to see where it will spread first and when it will make landfall on our shores, Christie is tackling the nation’s worst state deficit — $10.7 billion of a $29.3 billion budget. In doing so, Christie has become the politician so many Americans crave, one willing to lose his job. Indeed, Christie is doing something unheard of: governing as a Republican in a blue state, just as he campaigned, making good on promises, acting like his last election is behind him.  

Upon taking office Christie declared a state of emergency, signing an executive order that froze spending, and then, in eight weeks, cutting $13 billion in spending. In March he presented to the Legislature his first budget, which cuts 9 percent of spending, including more than $800 million in education funding; seeks to privatize numerous government functions; projects 1,300 layoffs; and caps tax increases.

Much like Rudy Giuliani’s quest to rescue New York City from its own excess in the 1990s, Christie’s crusade shows a politican willing to sacrifice his career in order to save his constituents.  It’s a model for politicans from Greece to California. And soon it will be a model for the entire nation.