From the Economist, describing a recent study by a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside:

Parents claimed more positive emotions and more meaning in their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis revealed that this enhanced enjoyment came from activities which involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone, or cooking) that did not.

It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological mechanism to keep them in the family. At first sight, it is strange that women do not share this mechanism, but perhaps they do not need to. They know, after all, that the children are theirs, whereas the best a man can do is hope that is true.

The assertion that fathers are happier strikes me as entirely understandable.  (Just to run a little personal experiment, I stopped and thought for a moment just now about my happiest moment over the last few days.  Easy.  Watching my 15-year old at bat in a Babe Ruth game this past Saturday morning.  He quickly got into a hole, 0-2.  Then he took a deep breath, and with a sense of calm that struck me as almost preternatural, stared the pitcher down.  Four pitches later, he was walking to first.)  Come to think of it, "happier" isn't quite the right word--nor is it the word that seems to have been used in the study.  Children bring all kinds of worries--and, often enough, if temporarily, unhappiness.  What they provide unfailingly, though--at least in my experience--is a sense of meaningfulness.

But the second finding?  That mothers report no more positive emotions than non-mothers?  This runs so entirely counter to all that I myself have observed--my nephew's wife just gave birth to their second child, and there it was, in all the hospital photos on Facebook, that look in his wife's face that she had just done something that made her feel a kind of cosmic contentedness--that I find it utterly baffling.

Ricoteeers?

Ed Driscoll worries that he's being a curmudgeon compared to Emily's positive take on the new trailer. As for me, I think it is a tinsel-strewn cinematic abortion.

The Luhrmann pop-lit aesthetic had its moment. Romeo+Juliet hit right smack in the middle of the teenage years for a generation of Millennials, and it’s enjoyable and certainly unique (though I’ve never liked that play). Now, coming off a critical failure in his last movie, Luhrmann’s trying to recapture that old mid-Nineties DiCaprio magic. Gatsby has always been difficult to film – there have been six adaptations, and while I have not seen them all, none of them have been heralded as "good". But I’m willing to bet none of them are this obviously horrible.

I’ve never seen a trailer in which you can tell so many people are so clearly miscast within ten second increments. Carey Mulligan may be a decent actress, but her clumsy attempt at a Southern accent speaks to ruination of one of the true feminine characters in the entirety of American literature. Luhrmann’s rumored fave for the role, Blake Lively, couldn’t be worse, and that’s saying something. There is not a single actor in the thing who looks comfortable in the role, and the glitz and glam shrieks of this being an Occupy Wall Street take on American capitalism, which Gatsby never was. The CGI New York looks more like Tron. I can’t tell if I prefer the terribleness of Tobey Maguire’s non-acting to that bearded fellow’s overacting. And DiCaprio, poor DiCaprio, simmers with the confused emotion of a man who has just tasted plain yogurt when he thought it was vanilla. Here, toss some shirts.

Katherine Miller writes: “I really do think there's something to the cultural divide. As showcased in the trailer and the general aesthetic of the film, which of course is Luhrmann's usual aesthetic, it's like the gaudiest American thing possible. Which is showcased in parts of that book, but that's not what the actual story is about. It's like what a foreigner would note about an American.” She’s right. Perhaps this is the problem with getting an exaggerated music video director from Australia, once the toast of Hollywood hip (that scene with Radiohead!) but now fresh off a Nicole Kidman disaster and closing in on fifty, to handle a story that’s full of American apotheoses.

I’m not even a Fitzgerald fan, but Gatsby is as quintessentially American as you get: the architectural structure of a story, within which the reader is left to his or her own devices to take ideas. Instead Luhrmann is asking for your money to vomit sparkly things in your face and call it art.

I am sure when you first read it, you thought: "This Gatsby thing is pretty great, but what it really needs is dubstep and 3D." Am I right?

While President Barack Obama talks incessantly about his commitment to giving all Americans a "fair shot," there always seems to be a nagging exception for children in failing schools (see the story of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program).

In a major education speech today, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney promised to put the needs of these students over the demands of teachers unions. He spoke about giving every child a "chance," and his proposals matched his rhetoric. Here is a taste:

As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school.  For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted.  And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it. 

To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice.  In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited.  And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.

Instead of eliminating the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program as President Obama has proposed, I will expand it to offer more students a chance to attend a better school.  It will be a model for parental choice programs across the nation.

Whenever you see a group of people persistently behaving in irrational behavior, Milton Friedman used to say, you can be pretty sure a government program is involved. 

Which brings me to Americans' expanding waistlines.  According to the Economist, one-third of Americans are obese while another one-third are overweight.  We're so overweight that we're about to reverse one of the most remarkable achievements in human history, our extended lifespans, with the rising generation now projected to die younger than did their parents--entirely because of diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments related to obesity.

What's to blame?  In very large part, conservatives will not be at all surprised to learn, the federal government:

To support farmers, the government used to pay them not to grow crops when there was an abundance and prices too low to earn a living. Then, in the 1970s, agricultural subsidies switched to encourage farmers to grow as much as they could. Meanwhile, the green revolution, along with technological improvements to farm equipment, made agribusiness more productive than ever. Inevitably, food prices plummeted.
Lower prices meant people started eating out more often. Portions increased in size as the proliferation of pizza parlours, quick-food joints and family restaurants vied for customers. “The number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day,” Dr Chow told the New York Times recently.

On top of that, food itself has become more calorific. One particular effect of the subsidy regime was to make high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener manufactured from maize, much cheaper. Corn syrup is used as a substitute for table sugar (sucrose), and is equally rich in calories. The result has been that the American food industry has added it to a wider selection of products than ever before. Moreover, Richard Wrangham, a researcher at Harvard, has built up a body of evidence that the way modern food is processed (heavily cooked, and often made from finely ground ingredients) makes more of its calories available for digestion, so even those who are not consuming more by weight are actually consuming more by calorific value.

First the federal government taxes and regulates us to ensure the overproduction of food.  Then it gives us ObamaCare, socializing our entire medical system to cure us from the ills of overeating--and Michelle Obama, hectoring us all to eat more tomatoes.

Honestly, there are moments these days when I find myself wondering whether the Tea Party is angry enough.

ObamaCare delenda est.

Many Ricochet readers, I suspect, are not aware of a trust that has been set up for the children of Andrew Breitbart.  Donations can be sent to:

Breitbart Children's Trust

149 S. Barrington Ave., #735

Los Angeles, CA 90049

Hats off to the Bruin Standard, a monthly newspaper written by some conservative students at UCLA, through which I learned of the trust.  Many of the student writers at the newspaper knew Breitbart personally.  The latest issue,  a touching memorial to Breitbart, noted "Andrew Breitbart was a hardworking, prominent, successful man but not a wealthy one.  He left behind four children, and a trust has been set up to help provide for his family in their time of need."

I have donated.  I hope others will too.

The Obama Administration seems to be quite happy over this MarketWatch story in which it is claimed the Obama budget expansion never happened.  

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%.

There has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.

NPR reports that Obama campaign officials are delighted.  The problem is, the article uses data that has been unduly influenced by one-off events, and charges the 2009 impact of the Obama stimulus to the Bush Administration.

There's little doubt that Bush's 2nd administration spent more than otherwise expected, but it's worth noting that the numbers rose dramatically in that last year. 

The first thing to know is that when we say FY2009 -- which the MarketWatch writer charges to the Bush Administration -- it measures spending for the dates 10/1/2008 to 9/30/2009.  Obama's stimulus package added $185 billion to the FY 2009 deficit, all of which the writer is assigning to Bush.

TARP added $368 billion to the deficit in 2009 that did not happen in 2010.  Jed Graham wrote in 2010 that the Obama Administration had overstated the cost of TARP by $100 billion, which also then gets charged to the Bush Administration by the MarketWatch piece.  And TARP in general put all of its costs in 2009 then adds revenue as loans are repaid and assets sold off later on.  TARP distorts the data used in the story.  These data are from CBO, in billions.

FY 2005 $2,472.0

FY 2006  $2,655.1  (+7.4%)

FY 2007  $2,728.7  (+2.8%)

FY 2008  $2,982.6  (+9.3%)

FY 2009  $3,518.2  (+18.0%)

The MarketWatch story assigns the spending on stimulus correctly to Obama, but leaves the TARP on Bush, while crediting Obama for recovery of assets from TARP loans and asset sales. 

Thus the story uses a distortion of the data caused by a temporary large spending program to tell a story that just ain't so.  If you're going to charge Bush for TARP, you have to put back the repayment of TARP to Bush's credit, which the MarketWatch story fails to do.  This will not be an easy story for the Romney campaign to tell, in my view.  Far simpler it is to say:  "The Bush Administration chose to create a one-time loan program that expected repayment of TARP funds.  The Obama Administration has continued instead to keep spending at that elevated level in the names of stimulus and Solyndra, something the Bush Administration would never have done.  Had they had a third term, the number would properly have been negative as TARP was repaid and debt retired, something a Romney Administration intends to do."  I'm sure Peter or Rob or James could make this sing.

... May be coming soon thanks to House Republicans. Here's how Politico reports it:

Republicans have a new ultimatum: If Eric Holder doesn’t deliver a trove of Fast and Furious documents to Capitol Hill by mid-June, the House will vote to hold him in contempt of Congress.

A contempt vote would not only represent a dramatic escalation in the long-running investigation into the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, it would be a crowd-pleaser for conservatives who believe GOP leaders have been dragging their feet on the aggressive push from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the lead investigator, to bring a contempt vote on Holder.

The feet-dragging, in case you're wondering, has owed to election-year anxieties:

A contempt resolution — especially spearheaded by Issa — could be viewed as overly political, coming a mere five months before Election Day. But Republicans in states like Arizona, Texas and South Carolina have been questioned constantly by constituents — thanks to heavy coverage by conservative media outlets — about the GOP investigation.

Perhaps years in exile from the Beltway have dulled my strategic insights, but anxieties about a showdown with Holder generating blowback come November strike me as too clever by half. It's not as if congressional Republicans are embarked on some wild-eyed, thinly-sourced exercise in character assassination, whereby they're trying to establish that Eric Holder murdered Vince Foster just prior to forging Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate.

The Attorney General of the United States and his subordinates in the Justice Department have consistently obstructed efforts by the United States Congress to determine the extent to which incompetence on the behalf of the Executive Branch contributed to the death of innocents, including at least one American citizen. Declaring such conduct unbecoming of the nation's highest law enforcement official is not the sort of task that requires consulting the polls.

This week on Uncommon Knowledge author and television host John Stossel discusses his new book No, They Can't: Why Government Fails—but Individuals Succeed. Also, an Uncommon Knowledge first: a guest with a prop. 

The first trailer for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has just been released, and there's already been a lot of buzz and speculation that Fitzgerald lovers, purists, and traditionalists will be less than pleased with it (you can, and should, watch the trailer here. It's amazing). 

The Huffington Post tweeted this morning that "The first trailer for 'Great Gatsby' has arrived. Avert your eyes, Fitzgerald fanatics!"

Further:

"The Great Gatsby" trailer has arrived with the familiar and era-appropriate tones of the Jay-Z and Kanye West collaboration, "No Church in the Wild." You crazy for this one, Baz Luhrmann!

Based on the famed F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular great one, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Joel Edgerton as her husband, Tom.

If you needed further proof that this isn't your father's "Gatsby," -- beyond the anachronistic music cue, of course -- try this on for size: Luhrmann's film will get released in 3D, since nothing needs an extra dimension like classic 1925 prose.

WSJ's Speakeasy blog chimes in to make a similar point:

“The Great Gatsby” is set during the Jazz Age, but a new movie version is adding a dose of hip hop. A trailer for the coming adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire has hit the web and it’s causing a stir with literature purists. The film, based on the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and directed by Baz Luhrmann, is scheduled for release this Christmas. The trailer opens in the proper setting of 1922 but the musical selection – Kanye West’s and Jay-Z’s “No Church in the Wild”– is awfully contemporary.

NYDN's Page Views blog notes that this is not your "high school teacher's F. Scott Fitzgerald," while adding "It certainly doesn't look like Luhrmann skimped on the costumes or set design, as both appear to be faithful to the Prohibition-era Long Island where the novel is set."

As a traditionalist and a lover of all-things-Fitzgerald, I was completely captivated by the trailer. The two-minute clip is lush, decadent, and sexy--three qualities that Fitzgerald was not unfamiliar with. Let's not forget that Fitzgerald was the consummate alcoholic who, with his wife Zelda, were glamourous socialites on the New York circuit during the twenties. As a testament to that, in 1929, Fitzgerald wrote "A Short Autobiography" for The New Yorker in the form of a catalog of cocktails:

In 1913, when Fitzgerald was seventeen, we have, “The four defiant Canadian Club whiskeys at the Susquehanna in Hackensack.” For 1920, the year he marries his southern belle, he writes, “Corn liquor by moonlight in a deserted aviation field in Alabama.” In 1921, following the success of This Side of Paradise, celebration is in the air with “Champagne in the Savoy Grill.” In 1925, when The Great Gatsby was published, there is fruit brandy and a hint of sadness: “Kirsch in a Burgundy inn against the rain with E. Hemingway.” The theme (and fear) of emotional bankruptcy was important to Fitzgerald, which is something to keep in mind when reading his 1929 entry: “A feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced, and yet—”. . . and yet, he continues in French, some more wine, please. Here, the reader begins to sense that as the decade of jazz and flappers and liquor comes to a close, Fitzgerald’s honeymoon with life is ending.

In other words, Fitzgerald embodied the excesses of the Jazz Age, excesses that Luhrmann's trailer captures perfectly. And even though Luhrmann opts for hip hop rather than jazz as background music--which has already become a source of comment and consternation--the two are close substitutes: jazz, in the twenties, was considered hot, morally degenerate, and libertine. And, to a certain audience, the same can be said of hip hop today.

The movie is scheduled to hit theaters on Christmas Day. I, for one, cannot wait.

Mitt Romney is clearly not President Obama's kind of businessman. Romney's wealth, as Obama sees it, was built on cutting jobs and liquidating companies. As he said on Monday:

And there are times where they identify the capacity for the economy to create new jobs or new industries, but understand that their priority is to maximize profits.  And that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers. ... When you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits.  Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.  Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.

But what if a different sort of CEO were the Republican nominee? Imagine if Steve Jobs a) were alive and b) somehow nabbed the 2012 Republican nomination. What would the Democrats be saying about this beloved American entrepreneur and success story? When he passed, President Obama had this to say:

Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it. By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. The world has lost a visionary.

Indeed, liberal pundit Paul Begala has made the Jobs-Romney comparison:

Yes, we Americans admire financial success; we don’t hate the rich. But we resent folks who got rich by rigging the system. Romney made millions in part by loading companies with debt, driving them into bankruptcy, and laying off their workers. The workers who lost their jobs had their health benefits canceled as well—but Romney and his partners made millions. That’s not how Steve Jobs got rich.

But if Jobs, or some other similar tech CEO, were the 2012 GOP standard bearer, I imagine we would be hearing this sort of thing:

1. Jobs is out of touch. Jobs, with a fortune of around $7 billion, was way richer than Romney.

2. Jobs is anti-U.S. worker. All those iPads aren’t being made in America, after all. (Of course, they would cost more than twice as much if they were.) And you certainly can’t compare the “App Economy” with an economy based on manufacturing, right?

3. Jobs uses slave labor. See point #2.

4. Jobs is a tax dodger. As a recent NYTimes story describes Apple’s tax strategy:

Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.

5. Jobs is a ruthless capitalist. As he told biographer Walter Isaacson, “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

6. Jobs is anti-consumer. Imagine the field day the DNC would have with the antitrust suit accusing Jobs and top executives at five major book publishers with illegally conspiring to raise the prices of e-books, costing consumers tens of millions of dollars.

You get the picture. The Left is uncomfortable, to say the least, with the innovation and creative destruction generated by market capitalism and how it upsets the best-laid plans of government. Recall the president’s comments about job-killing ATMs. A tech CEO would be treated no better by liberals than a private-equity CEO. And Jobs would quickly go from entrepreneurial saint to capitalist sinner.

While politicians in Washington debate the impact of tax increases on economic growth, an interesting experiment is shaping up in the surrounding suburbs.

With Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley shepherding another tax increase through the legislature last week, even Democratic politicians in the state's wealthy Montgomery County have begun worrying that higher-income earners will flee across the Potomac to lower-tax suburbs like Fairfax County in Virginia.

Delegate Benjamin F. Kramer from Montgomery County recently told The Washington Post that he worried about a tipping point. “I’m concerned there’s a lack of understanding about the implications. Are we making Montgomery County uncompetitive with Fairfax?"

According to numbers that The Wall Street Journal provided in an editorial today, the answer appears to be yes. Here's an excerpt:

A family of four earning $250,000 a year will be able to save money by moving to Washington, D.C., arguably the most liberal city in America. The same family can save $6,000 a year by relocating across the Potomac River to Virginia, where the top tax rate is 5.75%, according to the Tax Foundation.

Last month Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein wrote a lengthy op-ed headlined "Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem." It had as much subtlety as one might expect from that headline but inside-the-beltway wags loved it and were really upset that more people didn't buy into the argument. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent thought the piece was so definitive that he got mad at the Sunday talk shows for failing to push it.

Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard looks at the Mann-Ornstein proposals for how to cure Washington gridlock and finds them wanting.

But at any rate, here are their four ideas for alleviating partisanship.

1. Campaign finance reform to increase disclosures and cut down on coordination between parties and candidates.

2. Independent commissions for redistricting.

3. “Restoring majority rule” to the Senate by reforming the filibuster.

4. Boosting turnout through things like automatic registration.

What a terrible list. After going full bore on the Republican party for all the evils of partisanship, this is all they can come up with? Four ideas that have been bouncing around ill-attended, dull-as-dishwater Beltway panels for decades? Talk about a letdown!

The whole thing is a great read, but he expounds on the point here:

Mann and Ornstein have accidentally reminded me of something that I occasionally forget: Much of the liberal  establishment class in Washington does not understand what is happening to our country. It was an utterly tone-deaf and just plain incorrect idea to blame the GOP for all the ills of D.C. last week, but then to come back with this milquetoast list of reforms is unintentionally illustrative.

The American political process is starting to break down because of major changes to the political economy of this country. For half a century after World War II, the economy grew at such an incredible pace that we could have low taxes, high social welfare benefits, and a low deficit. This was one of the major reasons why there could be bipartisanship. Economic growth bankrolled these “great” compromises. It had very little to do with the foresight, courage, or moderation of the pols in Washington. They were just riding the wave generated by the private sector.

But all that seems to be over now. For more than a decade (not just the Great Recession but going back to 2000), economic growth has been far below its postwar average, and too low to keep the old regime afloat. You can’t have low taxes, high spending, and low deficits when the economy can’t break 3 percent growth.

That’s why the Beltway establishment has fundamentally misunderstood the Tea Party, he explains. That's why they thought battles over the debt ceiling were ridiculous. That's why tired ideas such as Mann's and Ornstein's keep getting trotted out. It's because they don't understand that they're living in the past.

They'll figure it out some day.

I never really thought it would happen but we've reached a point where a few brave souls in the media are willing to point out that the promise of a brilliant Obama presidency hasn't been realized. The latest example is this piece of "analysis" (I hate that word when tied to news stories -- just go ahead and call it an editorial) by Matt Negrin at ABC News, headlined brutally:

In Memoriam: The Old Obama, Who Wanted to Bring People Together

Ouch. The article does that thing where it lays blame on partisanship for people not named Barack Obama, but the takeaway is still harsh and it says something about how the Democratic campaign is playing among some in the media:

The 2004 version of Barack Obama, who captured the nation with a dazzling speech about unity and went on to win the presidency on a message of hope, died on Monday. He was 8 years old.

The cause of death appeared to be a bitter realization that he needed to win reelection in an increasingly partisan political environment, a cancer that he had been battling for months if not years.

The article contrasts his 2004 speech where he said there was no conservative America or liberal America with his current mode of dividing Americans precisely on such lines (and others).

The article says that Obama has become one of those political peddlers he once warned us about and admitted as much in his recent defenses of the Bain attack ads as the basis for his campaign against Mitt Romney:

Obama's admission was in some ways the completion of a metamorphosis that began even during the 2008 campaign, as it became likely that he would be elected. After promising to throw out so-called politics as usual, Obama broke his first promise by rejecting public funding for his campaign because he could raise millions more on his own. He also ran negative ads against his opponent, John McCain, in that race, too.

I love a media that just now notices something the rest of us noticed four years ago, don't you? We learn about the similar hypocrisy regarding super PACs. It's not entirely his fault, we're reminded again. He had to be partisan on account of how the minority party so aggressively opposed his stimulus, auto bailout and health care overhaul:

At some point, his friends said, Obama realized that he couldn't hold Republicans' hands and govern with them. He started his own executive order campaign designed deliberately to run around Congress.

But the ending is so mean:

Some believers are in denial and insist that Obama of 2004 lives, perhaps muted or constrained by the newer version. They say he still serves as a symbol of hope to many followers, even if his campaign has adopted a decidedly negative approach. ...

Obama is survived by a president who will spend most of the next six months on the stump, railing against his Republican opponent as he tries to retain political power. A memorial service will be held at a fundraiser today in Colorado. In lieu of flowers, donations are being accepted at the Priorities USA Action super PAC.

If a story this mean were about President Bush, it wouldn't have stood out among all the other news analysis stories. But this is about President Obama! And it's super mean. I hope Mr. Negrin doesn't get disappeared.

With the news that Ambassador Ryan Crocker will leave his post in Afghanistan this summer, tributes to America's indispensable man abroad will begin flowing. The accolades will be all deserved.

President Barack Obama made one of his finer personnel decisions last year when he asked Crocker to represent America in Kabul. While Crocker had more than earned the retirement that he had recently begun, no one who has followed his remarkable career could have been surprised that he accepted the assignment.

Crocker has always gone where America needed him most, and America never needed him more than in the years after September 11, 2001. In January 2009, President George W. Bush awarded Crocker the Medal of Freedom. We often think about diplomats in back rooms, but as this excerpt from President Bush's speech makes clear, Crocker spent his career on the front lines.

The man has never run from danger. As a young officer during the late 1970s, Ryan catalogued Saddam Hussein's murderous rise to power. In 1983, he survived the terrorist attack on the American embassy in Lebanon. In 1998, as the Ambassador to Syria, he witnessed an angry mob plunder his residence.

After any one of these brushes with danger, most people would have lost their appetite for adventure -- not Ryan Crocker. In the years since September the 11th, 2001, I have asked Ryan to hold numerous posts on the front lines of the war on terror, and he has stepped forward enthusiastically every time.

When the American embassy in Kabul reopened in the beginning of 2002, Ryan Crocker was our first envoy. When we liberated Iraq and removed the thug Saddam Hussein from power in 2003, I sent Ryan to help lead the reconstruction efforts. When the American embassy in Pakistan needed new leadership, Ryan Crocker was put in charge. In 2007, I asked Ryan to return for a final mission to Iraq as America's ambassador.

Two years later, Iraq is becoming a rising democracy, an ally in the war on terror, an inspiring model of freedom for people across the Middle East. When the story of this transformation is written, historians will note the extraordinary partnership between two exceptional men: General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

What Ronald Reagan understood is that the cause of free enterprise rests not just on material arguments but on moral truths.

As I type this--it's a few minutes past 6:30 here in California--Congressman Ryan is still at the lectern, taking questions from the audience.  To watch live, click here.

The teachers--or rather, the California Teachers Association--is responsible.

From "The Worst Union in America," our own Troy Senik's most recent article in City Journal, about which Troy is too modest to post:

In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization’s 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). “The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,” Corey told the crowd. “You can’t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.”

Five decades later?

[In] May 2011, when the CTA—now the single most powerful special interest in California—organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for higher taxes in one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week’s centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the building’s hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100 demonstrators for trespassing, including then–CTA president David Sanchez. The protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were undergoing important statewide tests that week.

How much worse must it get before we Californians can find our own Scott Walker?

By the way, I'd be particularly interested to hear from teachers among the Ricochetti.*  Has the profession itself become--well, I'm not sure how to put it.  Coarser?  Or does the trouble lie entirely with the teachers' unions?

*I used to prefer "Ricochetoise," but that was before the French elected a socialist president. 

On the latest Ricochet podcast, David Limbaugh argued that Romney may be able to outraise Obama in the run up to November's election.  That was the first I'd heard that possibility even mentioned, but others have since backed David's scenario up.  Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post writes,

In April, the first month in which Romney was untethered by concerns about the primary fight and in which he and the RNC linked up efforts, their combined haul was just north of $40 million — almost the exact amount the president and the DNC gathered in that time frame.

[...]

Add it all up — and throw in a pledge from the leading conservative super PAC to spend better than $200 million— and it becomes possible that Obama, the single greatest fundraiser in the history of American politics, might get outraised (and outspent) between now and Nov. 6.

So the good news for opponents of Obama is that no matter what, we won't end up seeing as lopsided of a race in terms of fundraising as we did in 2008.

But the bad news?  The bad news is that the President can and is using taxpayer dollars to support his reelection efforts.

The Hill reports that HHS has signed a $20 million PR contract to promote the ever unpopular Obamacare to a public that wants to see it repealed.

So no matter how much Romney raises in the next five months, it pales in comparison to Obama's advantage of being able to dip into a taxpayer funded slush fund.

This guy famously said he was an Indian:

So did this gal:

In his book, even this guy said he was Indian:

Oddly, although this guy might actually be Amerindian, the mainstream media loves to call him "white" because they think he may have done something not very cool:

 See these people?  Half of them are pretending to be Italian, but they are not...

...yet Iron Eyes Cody was Italian...

...as was one of my boyhood favorites, Chief Jay Strongbow:

Tanto was an Irish Guy:

It seems that it has always been thought of as pretty cool in America to be an Indian, even if you aren't.  However, pretending to be other ethnicities can get you into trouble.  Don't do what Ted Danson did, even if you are dating Whoopi Goldberg:

And don't get caught pretending to be an East Indian like Ashton did:

But if you are as loved as Billy Cyrstal - then blackface is OK:

Oh, and I have no idea what she is trying to accomplish:

The intertwine between sociology and political correctness is fascinating but so complicated that I feel more compelled to observe than analyze. Does anyone really know what the rules are?

We've all heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, yet it is often taken for unfair stereotyping. When is imitation flattery and when is it insult?  Is the standard by which to judge completely objective or do we give greater weight to the subjective opinion of those being imitated?  Is the "laughing with us/laughing at us inquiry" the proper standard?

Indians, it appears, do not like being imitated.  It is a stealing of their culture according to the complaints I've read.  We've all seen the objections to sport team names and Oregon just this week banned all school mascots from having Indian names. I admit I've never understood the objection. Our athletes are revered because of their strength, speed, fast thinking and abilities. I don't know why that is taken as insult.

How I would love it were there a team called the "New Jersey Italians" but HBO and MTV have already made those teams and they had nothing to do with the virtue of good sportsmanship.

I would imagine if we stopped imitating Indians, stopped naming sports franchises after them and removed their names from our various states, municipalities and streets, we would then be accused of burying their culture. 

I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be calling them Indians. I do believe a man should be called what he wants to be called, so I will use "Native American" if there is an insistence that I do.

So - is it reverence to imitate an Indian, or is it insult?  If you are 1/32nd Indian as Elizabeth Warren claims, is it insult to accentuate that?

Pew Research says Catholic support for Obama fell recently from 53 to 45%. Of course I'm always wondering why it isn't 0%.

On Monday, however, even Notre Dame joined the lawsuit against the Obama administration's healthcare mandates. Is this the result of our prayers and fasting? Or am I dreaming?

The university's leader, the Rev. John Jenkins, hosted President Barack Obama as the school's commencement speaker in May 2009 despite criticism over Mr. Obama's support of abortion rights. Father Jenkins initially applauded the administration's proposal in February.

But on Monday, he said talks with the administration on how to enact that proposal hadn't been encouraging, and that there was no firm timeline to resolve religious employers' lingering concerns. He said that left the school unable to change its health plans around the requirement in time to meet the August 2013 deadline.

It may seem like a cynical question, but I'm struck by what the junior U.S. Senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker (currently running for a second term), told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal earlier this week:

"If you have led a productive life, you have to wonder if it's worth your time being here..."

In recent years, I've seen a sharp upswing in people who are potential candidates for elected office talking themselves out of the endeavor with exactly this rationale. And my inclination is usually to tell them that their potential to do good (or at least to hold the line for our principles) is worth the sacrifice -- and that, absent them, we'll have to make do with those who have no qualms about offering themselves for office, a prospect I don't relish.

Still, on darker days, I sometimes find myself sympathizing with the cynics' point. How about you?

The writer and literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall has a new book out called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Like other books in the pop-science field--David Brooks' The Social Animal and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal come to mind--this work is the latest in an effort to understand some facet of the human condition that seems distinctively human, and to explain it in evolutionary terms by drawing on neuroscience and Darwin.

Gottschall has made his career thinking about these issues. In 2005, he edited a volume of essays called The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (with a foreword by E. O. Wilson) and in 2008 he wrote The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer. 

The evolutionary origins of stories is a theme in his latest book as well. From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the horror stories of Stephen King to our table talk at dinner, telling stories is something that is an innate part of the human experience:

Flip through the sacred scriptures of any society in the history of the world, and you will be flipping through an anthology of stories.  Religion is the ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our minds.  The heroes of sacred fiction swarm through the real world, exerting astonishing influence over life on earth.

In the preface to his new book, Gottschall writes:

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories. And now, tens of thousands of years later, when our species teems across the globe, most of us still hew strongly to myths about the origins of things, and we still thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens--murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up at night, telling itself stories.

This book is about the primate Homo Fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.

The question that The Storytelling Animal asks is this: Is telling stories so innate that it is literally hard-wired into our brains? Can science explain why human beings tell stories? Gottschall argues that it can.

We all have a set of left hemisphere brain circuits that force story structure onto the chaos of our lives.  When these circuits run amok we get schizophrenia, wild conspiracy theories and, sometimes, immortal works of poetry and fiction.

With that question answered (though perhaps not finally settled), he moves on to another one: Do stories make us more moral? He claims that “The only way to find out is to do the science,” and concludes, predictably, that the science confirms his hypothesis (although he does acknowledge, perhaps unwittingly, that maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than that: This book, he writes, is "about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to Neverland?")

But the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik is not convinced. Gopnik picks apart Gottschall's argument:

Do entertaining stories make us more ethical? “The only way to find out is to do the science,” Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that “the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems” and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don’t. He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn’t trade tales—or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn’t. Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn’t? Would a human-like society that had lots of food and sex but no stories die out? When has this happened? (It’s true that there are those who think that the “symbolic” revolution among our sort of people doomed the Neanderthals, but this is, to put it mildly, a very speculative story, more “Star Trek” than “Mr. Wizard.”)

And if these claims seem almost too large to argue, the more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

I think Gopnik is missing the point. First of all, college English departments hardly read stories anymore. They read literary theory. To the extent that they do read stories--like, say, Hamlet--it's through the dark veil of theory (i.e. was Hamlet gay?). Second, stories, by definition, make us more empathetic. They have to. The dictionary defines empathy as "the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another." This is exactly what a story does: It takes us inside another person's world and help us understand how that person is feeling and why they react to certain dramatic events in the way that they do or why the take action to achieve a certain goal.

Empathy makes us more moral, then, by helping us identify and consider another person. As Gottschall writes, "Contrary to the claims of moralist and literary critics, most successful fiction—from folk tales to novels to TV dramas—is conventionally ethical. Far from degrading a culture’s moral fabric, fiction pulls us together around common values."

Jeffrey Toobin’s recent exposé in the New Yorker takes aim at the Roberts Supreme Court for its controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down the key provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act prohibiting “corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries.” To Toobin, Citizens United was the Supreme Court’s illicit gift to corporations; it recalls the worst excesses of the “Gilded Age,” a time when, Toobin claims (falsely), the Supreme Court “barred most attempts by the government to ameliorate the harsh effects of market forces.”

To Toobin, one unfortunate byproduct of the nineteenth-century Court’s worldview was its 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which held that corporations—railroads, no less—were “persons.” They are thus entitled to the protections of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. A second low point of that Gilded Age, Toobin insists, was the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, which, by his account, held “that most attempts to regulate the private marketplace, or to protect workers, were unconstitutional.”

Continue reading my column, in which I argue that Toobin plays fast and loose in his assault on Citizens United, over at Defining Ideas. 

Warning: Strong language advisory. The above video breaches all Ricochet's potty-mouth codes. But.....

It makes a good point very well. Here Penn Jillette calls President Obama on his outrageous hypocrisy, on his arrogance, on the counterproductivity of his political policies and the way he has trampled all over States' rights. So far you'll all agree with the great magician and exposer of snake-oil salesmanship. Where your opinions will diverge violently however - I know because we've been here many times before - is that the issue he's talking about is drugs.

Jillette thinks Obama's drug policies are outrageously extreme from a man who, himself, has freely admitted not only to smoking marijuana but dabbling with harder drugs in his youth.

President Obama mentioned that he had smoked "weed" and done "maybe a little blow" in his 1995 book "Dreams from my Father."

Here's the key passage (expletives deleted)

What troubles me about this... I think it's beyond hypocrisy. I think it's something to do with class. A lot of people have accused Obama of class warfare, but in the wrong direction. I believe this is Obama chortling with Jimmy Fallon about lower class people. Do we believe, even for a second, that if Obama had been busted for marijuana -- under the laws that he condones -- would his life have been better? If Obama had been caught with the marijuana that he says he uses, and 'maybe a little blow'... if he had been busted under his laws, he would have done hard [expletive] time. And if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his 'weed' and 'a little blow,' he would not be President of the United States of America. He would not have gone to his fancy-[expletive] college, he would not have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of dollars, he would not have a beautiful, smart wife, he would not have a great job. He would have been in [expletive] prison, and it's not a god damn joke. People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.

Seems to me Jillette has hit the nail on the head. What say you, Ricochet?

I still can’t believe that I'm 65 years old. Half a century has passed since I was in high school; it feels like a decade ago. In my mind the images of the ‘60s are still vivid – the assassination of a President, a man walking the moon, a war in southeast Asia, the civil rights movement, a band from Liverpool, a California girl, the discovery of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. I am one of 80 million born between 1946 and 1964 in Canada and the United States. I am a baby boomer.

My generation changed the modern world. Our values refused to accept injustice. We protested against war, discrimination, and censorship. Without us, America would never have elected a black-skinned President with a foreign name. England and Germany would never have elected female Prime Ministers. Canada would not have welcomed all creeds and colors to their land of liberty. Encouraged by parents who suffered the hardships of a world war, we worked hard to do better, to make a success of ourselves. 'Doing better' meant making a good living. So, making money became our modus operandi. But along the way, we contemplated that notion and others; we grew independent and blazed our own trail of social change.

Today, we represent a marvelous business opportunity. We dig in our heels and fight the advance of old age every inch of the way. We operate by the mantra of “use it or you lose it.” Sure, we have our insecurities. “Aha,” say the savvy marketers. The theme is familiar. As a young Brand Manager, I pounced on consumer insecurities to pump products that solved bad breath, armpit odor, yellow teeth and bad skin. Those were the heyday of problem/solution brands such as Scope Mouthwash, Ban Deodorant, Ultra Brite Toothpaste and Clearasil Cream. Our insecurities of today are thinning hair, droopy skin, wrinkles around the eyes and dysfunction below the belt. The world’s best marketers are on to us. Harley-Davidson wants us to relive the two-wheel freedom of the sixties on their iconic Fat Boy. They know we can well afford it. So do Pfizer and Eli Lilly, the makers of Viagra and Cialis.

So here's my advice to marketers. Go ahead, make a boomer's day. Help us fulfill our lifestyle aspirations. Give us the ways and means and you will have a loyal customer keen to pay premium prices for your products and services. But never, ever, mention old age in your persuasion.