Here’s Bret Stephens, and yet another read the whole thing:

Sometimes it takes “South Park” to explain life’s deeper mysteries. Like the logic of the Obama administration’s policy proposals.

Consider the 1998 “Gnomes” episode — possibly surpassing Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” as the classic defense of capitalism — in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.

What’s the big idea? The gnomes explain:

“Phase One: Collect underpants.

“Phase Two: ?

“Phase Three: Profit.”

Lest you think there’s a step missing here, that’s the whole point. (“What about Phase Two?” asks one of the kids. “Well,” answers a gnome, “Phase Three is profits!”) This more or less sums up Mr. Obama’s speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.

The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . .

It was also in his Prague speech that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to “confront climate change by ending the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, by tapping the power of new sources of energy like the wind and sun.”

Never mind that neither the wind nor the sun are new sources of energy. It so happens that the U.S. gets about 2.3% of its energy resources from “renewable” resources of the kind the president advocates while fossil fuels account for about 70%. The reason for this, alas, has nothing to do with the greed of the oil majors. But it has much to do with something known as “energy density”: Crude oil has almost three times as much of it as switchgrass, supposedly the Holy Grail of our green future. A related problem is that heat invariably dissipates, meaning that it will always be difficult to turn diffuse sources of energy, like wind, into concentrated ones.

In Gnome-speak, then, Mr. Obama’s energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of “green” energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality!

Take any number of Mr. Obama’s other initiatives. Rescue Detroit? Phase One: Set a national mileage standard for passenger cars of 39 miles per gallon and force auto makers to make the kind of cars that drove them to bankruptcy in the first place.

Reduce the deficit? Phase One: Approve $3.5 trillion in government stimulus, and then await the mythical Keynesian multiplier.

Pay for a $1.2 trillion health-care reform? Phase One: scrounge around for about $60 billion in new “sin tax” revenue.

Actually, we can easily guess how Mr. Obama intends to make up the difference on this last item: To wit, by taxing health benefits. Taxes, subsidies funded by taxes, regulations and mandates will also fill in many (though not all) of the other blanks. Underpants gnomes: meet Phase Two. Say, what happened to profits?

Here’s James Taranto (another read the whole thing):

The New York Times now seems a bit confused as to the religion of the suspects in the terror plot revealed earlier this week:

Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. [Laguerre] Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. [James] Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation.

In the same article, however, is a detail that may bear on David Williams’s confessional leanings: It seems he “lately had grown a beard and taken to reading the Koran on slow nights at a steakhouse job.” Another article from today’s Times quotes Wanda Cromitie, James’s sister:

She added that as far as she knew, he was not a Muslim, but said “they do a little time in jail and they don’t eat pork no more.”

We could just call them “cafeterians” and be done with it. But the sister’s observation that “they do a little time in jail” is an important one. If it is difficult to identify the suspects clearly as Muslim, it is because their involvement with Islam is a recent development. But it seems that at least three of the four suspects were introduced to a violent supremacist strain of Islam while serving time in prison.

The Times article that quotes Miss Cromitie is titled “Suspects in Terror Bombing Plot: Drug Arrests and Prison Conversions.” It consists of a thumbnail profile of each of them. The Times flatly states that Payen converted to Islam while in prison and strongly suggests that James Cromitie and Onta Williams did as well. (For David Williams, according to Williams’s mother, Islam was “a religion he got from his father.”)

The use of prisons as recruiting grounds for violent jihad is a problem of which mainstream Muslims are aware. The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., interviewed Hamin Rashada, who encountered Payen while Rashada worked as a “life coach” at the Orange County Transition Center, “a program that helps reintegrate parolees such as Payen”:

[Rashada] also encouraged [Payen] to attend Friday prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh where Rashada is an assistan imam. Payen had told him he was Muslim, and Rashada figured he must have been introduced to Islam in prison. Misunderstandings of the teachings can occur in places such as prison, Rashada said, because educated teachers may be rarer. Rashada said at the Newburgh mosque, they worked to put teachings in their proper context. Payen attended only occasionally, however, he said. . . .

When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements [that] Rashada would have to correct him in front of people.

Incredibly, even as this story was developing, President Obama was delivering a speech in which he proposed to import hundreds of the most violent Islamic extremists into America and house them in our prisons:

Our courts and juries of our citizens are tough enough to convict terrorists, and the record makes that clear. Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center–he was convicted in our courts, and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prison. Zaccarias Moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker–he was convicted in our courts, and he too is serving a life sentence in prison. If we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons, then we can do the same with detainees from Guantanamo.

Just a day earlier, Politico reports, Obama’s own FBI director, Robert Mueller, testified before the House Judiciary Committee, where he “raised concerns about bringing prisoners to the U.S. and holding them in maximum security prisons, noting that in some gang leaders have run their organizations while in prison.”

In his speech yesterday, Obama declared that “the American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology.” Importing hard-core Islamic supremacists into U.S. prisons is an insane policy. If Obama’s proposing it is not an example of an official being driven by rigid ideology, then the phrase has no meaning.

It would be comical were it not our national security.

Democrats have a lot of rhetoric denouncing Bush-era War on Terror policies these days. Just one thing: They seem to be keeping all of the Bush-era War on Terror policies.

Saying earlier today that the United States “went off course” with it’s post 9-11 actions President Obama promised to pursue new policies that sound exactly like what was already occurring:

Obama contended that the record is clear: Rather than keep Americans safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. Turning to detainees who remain, the president will announce this framework:

–When feasible, try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts.

–When necessary, try those who violate the rules of war through Military Commissions.

–When possible, transfer to third countries those detainees who can be safely transferred.

Indeed, the Bush administration already prosecuted several War on Terror suspects in our federal court system, including Zacarias Moussaoui and Jose Padilla. The military commissions act was already established by Congress a couple of years ago (not that FDR ever bothered asking Congress for powers he already had from the U.S. Constitution), and would have been used more if not for the liberals now advocating… military tribunals. And, to retort point three, hundreds of detainees have been released to date, mostly transferred to other countries. (Of the remaining couple hundred detainees our allied countries are justifiably asking why we won’t take them if they’re really not dangerous — the answer is, of course, because, you know, they’re actually dangerous.)

So, what’s changed? Just the amount of Obama rhetoric is all. Maybe we need more HopeNChange?

Meanwhile Democrats like Senator Michael Bennet are protesting ANY attempt to transfer Guantanamo detainees to their home states. Indeed, the hypocritical Democrat Senate voted 90-6 today “to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future and forbid the transfer of any detainees to facilities in the United States.” (Associated Press) Oh, be sure to read James Taranto’s satire making fun of those Senate Democrats.

But, wait, there’s more:

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole.” His campaign claimed last summer that “court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists.” Upon entering office, he found out they aren’t.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate “consequences” for “a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones” on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now’s he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a “quagmire” and ordered more troops to that country. He isn’t calling it a “surge” but that’s what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president, he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50,000 Americans troops there.

Karl Rove, of all people, calls Obama’s reversals “praiseworthy.” That they may be, but don’t expect him to be honest about the actions not matching the rhetoric.

House Democrats were worried that their Republican counterparts would “stall” the vote on an amendment to Rep. Henry Waxman’s “climate change” bill, which doesn’t actually change the climate, even if you believe in that sort of nonsense, by forcing it to be read aloud first. So the Democrats countered by — and here’s your tax dollars at work — having a Congressional clerk skilled at speed-reading do so.

Mary Ham notes the real joke (hint: it’s on we consumers):

Heaven forfend! Who would want to make the committee, which is supposed to understand the bill, actually listen to the contents of all 900 pages of it?

Even if the reading of the bill is a partisan “stall tactic” on the part of the Republicans, intellectually honest folks who want government to function responsibly would have to admit it’s a pretty benign one—beneficial, even. The brouhaha over reading the bill is an implicit, disturbing admission that—yes!— your Congress will enact a 900-page bill heavily regulating the fundamental engine of the American economy and your life in unprecedented ways without ever having read it. Feel good about that?

No, not at all. Such shananagans would get you or me reprimanded at our job. But it’s just another day in Congress.

In light of the Obama administration’s decision to ram down the throat of the American consumer Utopian fuel-efficiency standards I found the following excerpt from Mark Levin appropriate:

The modern liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the order of the civil society, in whole or part. For the modern liberal, the individual’s imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objective of a Utopian state. And this, modern liberalism promotes what French historian Alexis de Toqueville described as a soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism.) As the word “liberal” is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the modern liberal as a Statist. The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many.

Levin additionally quotes James Madison in Federalist #51: “you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ”

And so here we are now, where the Statists pursue legalized theft in the name of “public good, public interest, fairness, equality, safety,” etc. But who decides what is good for the public or in the best interest of the consumer?

As Levin reminds us, “there are nearly 1000 federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce them”:

“The Statist as also constructed a fourth branch of government — an enormous administrative state — which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over $3 trillion a year. It turns out a mind numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, business, labor, employment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc. even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention: clothing labels on women’s dresses, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating showerhead flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets.”

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, at 1400 pages, is just 1/53rd the size of the Federal Register. But the point isn’t just the size of the federal government so much as how it ignores the United States Constitution and abuses its power.

And so the last reminder from Levin: the point of the American Revolution was to diffuse and decentralize authority among many imperfect men who ran government by enumerating federal power, separating powers both within the federal government in between it and the state and local governments.these were the very basis of the Constitution, he signed to isolate and limit the possibility of even soft tyranny.

The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in — if not taking over entirely — America’s health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government’s track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

That’s from John Steele Gordon. Problem #1? Private companies spend and invest their own money. Not so with government. Read the rest.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

President Obama’s endorsements of Bush-Cheney antiterror policies are by now routine: for example, opposing the release of prisoner abuse photographs and support for indefinite detention for some detainees, and that’s just this week. More remarkable is White House creativity in portraying these U-turns as epic change. Witness yesterday’s announcement endorsing military commissions.

White House officials insist that their tribunals will be kinder and gentler, stressing additional due-process safeguards for terrorists on trial for war crimes. But the debate that has convulsed the political system since 9/11 isn’t about procedural nuances. It has been over core principles, with Democrats decrying a “shadow justice system” and claiming that “Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

The latter quote is from a speech by Senator Obama in 2007 denouncing “a legal framework that does not work.” He also referred to the civilian criminal justice system and courts martial that Democrats then claimed, and many still claim, are the right venues for antiterror prosecutions. After the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision gave terrorists habeas rights, Mr. Obama again laid into the Bush Administration’s “legal black hole” and “dangerously flawed legal approach,” which “undermines the very values we are fighting to defend.”

At least some people in the White House must now be embarrassed by their boss’s switcheroo, though you can’t tell from Friday’s declaration. Part of the tribunal face-lift is that “the accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel.” Say what? Enemy combatants already have better access to attorneys — white shoe and pro bono, no less — than nearly every criminal defendant in America. Perhaps this means Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 90 Yemenis and the rest will now be able to choose lawyers from both Shearman & Sterling and Covington & Burling, instead of one or the other.

Another red herring is supposedly tightening the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Tribunal judges already have discretion to limit such evidence, and the current rules are nearly indistinguishable from those of the International Criminal Court. The sensible exceptions involve evidence obtained under combat conditions or from foreign intelligence services, which are left untouched by Mr. Obama’s nips and tucks.

In any event, Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that the civilian courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney — and which, contrary to the narrative that Democrats promulgated for years, will be the fairest and most open war-crimes trials in U.S. history. Meanwhile, friends should keep certain newspaper editors away from sharp objects. Their champion has repudiated them once again.

Here’s Michelle Malkin:

I think it’s time we applied the same advertising standards to Washington’s legislative products that the feds apply to breakfast foods. The Food and Drug Administration rapped General Mills this week for making misleading claims about the benefits of Cheerios. The food manufacturer says the whole-grain O’s are “clinically proven to lower cholesterol.” The FDA demanded packaging changes to ensure truth-in-labeling.

Well, how about the bogus marketing of the fiscal “stimulus?” President Obama and the Democrats promoted the trillion-dollar package as job creation salvation. The White House claims 150,000 jobs have been “created or saved.” But since February, the nation has lost more than 1.3 million jobs. The current 8.9 percent unemployment rate in the wake of stimulus passage is worse than the 8.8 percent unemployment figure Obama’s economists darkly predicted if Congress didn’t immediately adopt their recovery plan.

The water gets deeper for Nancy Pelosi. Boy, if you’re a Democratic politician you know you are in trouble when even liberal outlets like the St. Petersburg Time’s Politifact or Jon Stewart are calling you a liar.

For all his faults Barack Obama isn’t a dummy, and can certainly tell when the tide is turning. Today, the O-Team announced that they would not release photographs of military abuse of detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis that it would “not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by small number of individuals.” Yowza. That’s been the Bush defense for years, and much to the media and Left wing kookhouse’s chagrin, it defies the (false) notion that the Bush teams legalese created an environment of abuse.

“In fact,’ he [Obama] said, “the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

And, he added, distribution of the photos could also have a “chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”

Now, this is all true, and well and good, but, let’s not kid ourselves. Obama is reversing course because he knows he’s in a politically unpopular fight with the mass public, and one that if followed through will indeed bring down key Democrats including Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, both whom were intelligence committee leaders who quietly endorsed the very CIA tactics they later attacked Bush for permitting.

Want more proof the Democrats are in a losing fight: they’ve resorted to the “CIA is out to get us” defense. Well, if the CIA wasn’t before they will be now that they see the Democrats as using them as scapegoats.

Here’s Robert Samuelson debunking President Obama’s myth that the tax rules are “full of corporate loopholes that makes it perfectly legal for companies to avoid paying their fair share.”

Like it or not, ours is a world of multinational companies. Almost all of America’s brand-name firms (Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Caterpillar) are multinationals, and the process works both ways. In 2006, the U.S. operations of foreign firms employed 5.3 million workers. Fiat’s looming takeover of Chrysler reminds us again that much business is transnational.

For most people, the multinational company is a troubling concept. Loyalty matters. We like to think that “our companies” serve the broad national interest rather than just scouring the world for the cheapest labor, the laxest regulations and the lowest taxes. And the tax issue is especially vexing: How should multinationals be taxed on the profits they make outside their home countries?

Listen to President Obama, and the status quo seems a cesspool. Pervasive “loopholes” engineered by “well-connected lobbyists” allow U.S. multinationals to skirt American taxes and outsource jobs to low-tax countries. So the president proposes plugging loopholes. Some jobs will return to the United States, he said, and U.S. tax coffers will grow by $210 billion over the next decade.

Sounds great — and that’s how the story played. “Obama Targets Overseas Tax Dodge,” headlined The Post. But the reality is murkier; the president’s accusatory rhetoric perpetuates many myths.

Myth: Aided by those overpaid lobbyists, American multinationals are taxed lightly — less so than their foreign counterparts.

Reality: Just the opposite. Most countries don’t tax the foreign profits of their multinational firms at all. Take a Swiss multinational with operations in South Korea. It pays a 27.5 percent Korean corporate tax on its profits and can bring home the rest tax-free. By contrast, a U.S. firm in Korea pays the Korean tax and, if it returns the profits to the United States, faces the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate. American companies can defer the U.S. tax by keeping the profits abroad (naturally, many do), and when repatriated, companies get a credit for foreign taxes paid. In this case, they’d pay the difference between the Korean rate (27.5 percent) and the U.S. rate (35 percent).

Myth: When U.S. multinationals invest abroad, they destroy American jobs.

Reality: Not so. Sure, many U.S. firms have shut American factories and opened plants elsewhere. But most overseas investments by U.S. multinationals serve local markets. Only 10 percent of their foreign output is exported back to the United States, says Harvard economist Fritz Foley. When Wal-Mart opens a store in China, it doesn’t close one in California. On balance, all the extra foreign sales create U.S. jobs for management, research and development (almost 90 percent of American multinationals’ R&D occurs in the United States), and the export of components. A study by Foley and economists Mihir Desai of Harvard and James Hines of the University of Michigan estimates that for every 10 percent increase in U.S. multinationals’ overseas payrolls, their American payrolls increase almost 4 percent.

Myth: Plugging overseas corporate tax loopholes will dramatically improve the budget outlook as multinationals pay their “fair” share.

Reality: Dream on. The estimated $210 billion revenue gain over 10 years — money already included in Obama’s budget — represents only six-tenths of 1 percent of the decade’s tax revenue of $32 trillion, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office. Worse, the CBO reckons that Obama’s endless deficits over the decade will total a gut-wrenching $9.3 trillion.

Whether Obama’s proposals would create any jobs in the United States is an open question. In highly technical ways, Obama would increase the taxes on the foreign profits of U.S. multinationals by limiting the use of today’s deferral and foreign tax credit. Taxing overseas investment more heavily, the theory goes, would favor investment in the United States.

But many experts believe his proposals would actually destroy U.S. jobs. Being more heavily taxed, American multinational firms would have more trouble competing with European and Asian rivals. Some U.S. foreign operations might be sold to tax-advantaged foreign firms. Either way, supporting operations in the United States would suffer. “You lose some of those good management and professional jobs in places like Chicago and New York,” says Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute.

Including state taxes, America’s top corporate tax rate exceeds 39 percent; among wealthy nations, only Japan’s is higher (slightly). However, the effective U.S. tax rate is reduced by preferences — mostly domestic, not foreign — that also make the system complex and expensive. As Hufbauer suggests, Obama would have been better advised to cut the top rate and pay for it by simultaneously ending many preferences. That would lower compliance costs and involve fewer distortions. But this sort of proposal would have been harder to sell. Obama sacrificed substance for grandstanding.