12-year-old Cody Green has always admired the strength and courage of the marines. At 12:35 Saturday afternoon, it was the Marines admiring the strength and courage of Cody.

Cody had leukemia since he was 22 months old, but beat the disease three times. Although he was cancer-free, the chemotherapy lowered his immune system and Saturday afternoon, he died from a fungus that attacked his brain. Members of the Marines decided to step in and do something.

"They decided Cody, with the strength and honor and courage he showed through the whole thing, he should be a Marine," said Cody's father David Snowberger.

Cody was given Marine navigator wings and was made an honorary member of the United States Marine Corps. For one Marine, that wasn't enough, so he did even more.

"The night before Cody passed, he stood guard at Cody's door at the hospital all night long for eight hours straight," said Snowberger.

Cody was a fifth grader at Carroll Elementary School and, if you asked anyone, could only be described in one way.

"He was a comedian all the time," said Snowberger. "I mean, nothing was ever negative. He was just always happy, always worried about everybody else."

There is something worth noting here. The anniversary of my nephew's death from leukemia fell a few weeks ago. Like Cody, he had a long battle with the disease. What his life was like during those years is hard for me to imagine, and yet no matter what was thrown at him, he seemed unfailingly calm, upbeat, and more concerned with others than he ever was with his own struggle.

We read a lot these days about how everything - even challenges our parents and grandparents accepted as part of normal life - is too hard; how no one can succeed without help, how it's understandable for people to simply give up unless the world rewards them for every positive thing they do. The idea of developing character - that quiet form of courage that makes a person rise up every time life knocks him down, that focuses on the positive, that rejects self pity and envy - has mostly given way to the notion that we are fragile spirits, easily crushed or dispirited by even the smallest obstacles: a harsh word, an encounter with someone who isn't convinced of our ineffable wonderfulness, a dearth of praise for our actions.

And then you look at children with cancer, and see how they respond to an adversary with the power to end life. At a time when all seems darkest, the power of the human spirit shines forth brighter than the sun.

No wonder these Marines - themselves renowned for their ability to keep fighting, even against overwhelming odds - honor such courage. That refusal to give up is a quality they recognize, and one that could be said to define the United States Marine Corps.

In contrast to Obama, Vice President Biden has from $2,000 to $30,000 in two savings accounts and $2,000 to $32,000 in four checking accounts, the forms show. The Bidens also had income of $21,000 from a residential property in Wilmington, Del.

The forms also underscore that while Democrats may be united in their 2012 campaign focus on “economic fairness,” for Obama, it pays to be a president who has penned several best-selling books.

The Obamas in 2011 held total assets ranging from $2,566,000 to $8,265,000. That’s more than ten times the total assets reported by the vice president and his wife, Jill, in 2011. The Bidens reported assets ranging from $233,000 to $776,000.

The range of the Obamas’ total reported assets is changed – although not necessarily down — from 2010, when the first couple’s disclosure forms showed assets from $2.8 million to $11.8 million. The lack of a specific dollar figure stems from the fact that the forms require only that assets be reported within broad ranges.

Hmmmm.....

"Stick out your tongue."

I did so, and the dentist wrapped some gauze around it and said, "I need to explain myself about the public option."

Stunned, I raised myself up in the chair and looked. It was Barack Obama.

"I'm both for it and against it," the president said. I tried to bolt but he had me by the tongue. I squirmed and cursed like Rahm Emanuel, and finally he had to let go. I ran from the exam room, pausing in the outer office to make my next appointment but the receptionist looked a lot like Barack Obama and so I kept on moving. Hitting the street, I jumped a cab. "The Washington Post," I said, "and step on it."

"You got it, buddy," the driver said -- and turned around. It was Barack Obama. "Let me tell you something," he said. "The public option is not what it sounds like. It’s not socialism. This is what I tried to explain on "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "State of the Union," "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Jorge Ramos on Univision and, I think, "Sesame Street," although I may not have done that one yet.”

The cab stopped for a light and I opened the door and ran. I did the couple of blocks to my office in record time, and when I got there I switched on my favorite public affairs show, "The View.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. ...I grabbed for the remote control and desperately searched for something else.

I flipped past Barack Obama standing hip high in water doing a stand-up for the Weather Channel, and then someone named Cesar Obama who was whispering to a Mexican Chihuahua about single-payer programs, and then I saw -- I swear I did -- Barack Obama in the arms of Tom DeLay on “Dancing With the Stars," and he was singing a soft song about the uninsured.

Fast forward to 2012. Seemingly not content with overexposing himself in the present, the Campaigner in Chief has discovered a mysteriously underserved venue that has yet to be permeated by Obama Everywhere...

...the past:

I’m sometimes amazed at the depth of the narcissism this President suffers under, but this particular example has to take the cake:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

This might seem a bit... oh, I don't know... excessive? Until you recall that we're talking about a guy who wrote not one but two autobiographies during his twenties, before he had actually done anything worth writing about.

The first female/black/gay/Hispanic President is now the first President in history to go back in time and insert himself into the records of his predecessors. It truly *is* all about 'Bam.

Alert readers will no doubt recall that just a few short months ago, Jeff Rosen was madly flogging the Constitution-in-Exile Conspiracy.

The fiendish members of this plot took the backward view that judges ought to try reading the actual verbiage penned by our Founding Fathers instead of haring off to nations like, say... France in search of a hand-rolled Gauloise and a Derrida primer (the better to deconstruct the Commerce Clause whilst staving off that annoying sense of anomie that comes from eating one too many confits).

Membership in this clandestine Brotherhood must have been an awfully well-kept secret, for the arcane and conspiratorial nature of the plot was such that the rank and file apparently went about their business for decades, blissfully unaware they were engaged in a desperate struggle to overthrow the Republic. But Evil will brook no delay. The Cause marched on. Sans soldiers, sans leader, even...until Gonzalez v. Raich reared its ugly head:

The most radical dissenting opinion was written by Thomas. Thomas has proved to be the most reliable ally of the movement to resurrect what some conservatives call the Constitution in Exile, referring to limitations on federal power that have been dormant since the New Deal. In his dissent, Thomas said that courts should take it upon themselves to decide whether congressional regulations are "appropriate" and "plainly adapted" to executing powers explicitly listed in Constitution. Thomas's logic would uproot more than a century of Supreme Court cases, including the 1942 wheat case, [Ed. Note: 'SWounds!... not the wheat case!] and could paralyze the government's effort to enforce myriad regulations, including environmental and labor laws. As Stevens pointed out, Thomas's reasoning would also call into question Congress's power to regulate the possession and use of pot for recreational purposes, an activity that all states now prohibit.

Thomas. Mein Gott Im Himmel, who would have guessed it! That pudgy, avuncular-looking little man, suddenly rising up in his black robes like the Lord of the Nazgul. Stooping to pick at the flesh of a Woman's Right To Choose and grabbing welfare dollars from the hands of baby-Daddies all over this great nation! Sure, he may look like a teddy bear, but he's [[[shudder]]] worse than Scalia!

Via the highly suspect Walter Olsen, we learn that Justice Thomas is joined in his perfidy by none other than perennial VC fave Judge Janice Rogers Brown and one Michael Greve, Person of Pallor. But perhaps more importantly for those of you who long fervently for that glorious day when the Berobed Nine once more scrutinize the Constitution and discover a wondrous new set of rights lurking beneath a penumbra, the intrepid Jeff Rosen has unmasked the final impediments to our beautiful and natural right to seize and redistribute our neighbour's wife, cabana boy/girl, ox, or ass for the common good:

Jeff Rosen has also found out and now named my recently acquired co-conspirators. Randy Barnett, for example. Rosen’s indictment contravenes the Yale conference’s consensus, reported here, that Randy Barnett does not actually exist but was invented by the New York Times. I can and should clear this up: besides the Times’s made-up Georgetown Law Barnett, there is the real Exile Barnett, who sells mortgage insurance in Dale City, VA and resents Obamacare’s discriminatory mandate for health but not housing (Motto: “Everyone needs a mortgage some day.”).

The other named conspirators are judges Janice Rogers Brown, David Sentelle, and Thomas Griffith, all of the D.C. Circuit. In an April 13 decision, a panel consisting of those judges unanimously, and easily, upheld a New Deal-era scheme that raises the price of milk for consumers.

.... As for Judge Brown, she and I have occasionally met in dark corners of Washington steakhouses. Usually, to avoid detection, we dress as Lillian Hellman and Yosemite Sam respectively. However, the judge has been awful at disguises:

Janice Rogers Brown has long been sympathetic to these [Constitution in Exile] goals. A daughter of sharecroppers, she denounced the New Deal in a series of speeches before her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit in 2005. She called 1937—the year the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal—“the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” In the same speech, she argued that “protection of property was a major casualty of the revolution of 1937.”

She somehow escaped detection by the Senate Judiciary Committee; but

Then, in her April 13 [2012] opinion, she dramatically unmasked herself.

And so did I, in that Yale talk a few days later. It’s over.

Perhaps we shall finally be able to sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we will soon awake to a new America - one in which women are finally free of oppressive gender stereotypes and men are invisible.

Most women would agree that there’s no such thing as the perfect man, and that true love is all about chemistry and the art of compromise. But there are some things nearly all of us desire in a man — that’s if a survey of 2,000 British women is to be believed. So what actually constitutes Mr Perfect?

According to the research by clothing store Austin Reed, there are 30 boxes a man must tick to be a modern-day Prince Charming. The 2,000 women questioned agreed Mr Right eats meat, drives an Audi and earns around £48,000 a year. He’s also 6ft tall, has short, dark hair, brown eyes and stylish dress sense. He is clean-shaven and has a smooth, hair-free chest.
Mr Perfect also has a deeply sensitive side — he rings his mother regularly, tells you he loves you only when he means it, and will admit it when he eyes up other women.

Are there actually women out there who think this way? Below the fold, I ticked off the items on their list that seem desireable to me and then created my own list.

What struck me most was how superficial most of the items were. Who cares how long it takes a man to get ready to go out, or what kind of car he drives, or how big his paycheck is? And while I will admit that I'm more attracted to some physical types than others, the specificity of some of these things is just nuts. And some things (requiring a smooth chest, for instance, or wanting him to confess when he checks out other women) strike me as just downright weird.

More and more these days I feel like I'm completely out of touch with the world. The fact that people in committed relationships are still attracted to other people seems so obvious to me as to not require further comment. Everything else is just good manners.

I've always thought I had pretty high standards, but my list is a *lot* shorter!

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

The solution was obvious. Young Romney, showing early signs of the sociopathic tendencies breezy leadership style that would one day shower him with undeserved race, gender, and class privileges, grabbed a pair of scissors, rounded up a few classmates, and...did Lauber's hair. Sadly, this was not to be Young Mitt's last foray into the wild and woolly world of non-consensual makeovers, though the obvious connection to Barack Obama's startling evolution on gay marriage may require a bit of explaining:

It turns out Mitt Romney probably wasn’t discriminating against John Lauber for being gay when he cut his hair off in high school. Romney says he doesn’t remember the incident but it looks like cutting hair was just something he liked to do. Almost like a sick hobby.

From a Washington Post story published in April:

As a kid in Michigan, Sidney Barthwell Jr., a high school classmate, recalled Romney as a prankster driving doughnuts in snowy parking lots. At Stanford, he lured rival University of California students into a trap in which his buddies “shaved their heads and painted them red,” according to a 1970 speech at Brigham Young University by his father, George Romney.

What are we to make of this sudden metamorphosis from socially awkward, goody two-shoes/humorless automaton to seething, homophobic gang leader? To put it mildly, there seems to be a bit of a dispute about which narrative we're to believe this week. Is Romney more like Melanie Wilkes or Scarlett O'Hara? Wendy, or Peter Pan? Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

A more appropriate question might be, why do we feel the need to oversimplify news stories to the point of absurdity; to shoehorn them into a one size fits all mold that explains everything from a candidate's Weltanschauung to where he comes down on the all important boxers-vs-briefs debate?

It’s not an easy task for a presidential candidate to decide when and how to criticize the incumbent on national security matters. No candidate wants to cede ground to the president, especially one with as troubling a record as this one. But neither should a challenger be excessive in ripping the commander in chief or refuse to acknowledge success.

Now some just want the president’s rival to shut up. President Obama rapped critics of his Iran policy for purportedly engaging in “loose war talk.” Last week, to the shock of some foreign policy hawks, Bill Kristol harshly scolded Mitt Romney for criticizing Obama’s handling of the Chen Guangcheng situation, which Romney had done in terms similar to most every conservative foreign policy guru who has spoken or written on the issue. (Dan Senor, the most prominent foreign policy surrogate, was also dispatched to critique the president’s performance.) Interestingly, on Friday, Chen’s lawyer remarked on the efficacy of public criticism of the president, “I knew Obama would sooner or later have to say something. How was he going to fight a campaign and respond to attacks by Romney? By sitting in silence?”

So what is a candidate like Romney to do?

We know what Candidate "Do as I say, not as I did" behaved when he was in the same situation

It's hard to make sense of President Obama's super secret trip to Afghanistan today without looking back to the 2008 election when President Bush was trying to negotiate a similar agreement with the government of Iraq. Back then, Candidate Obama did everything within his power to undermine the Strategic Framework agreement - up to and including personally interfering with ongoing negotiations between the Bush administration and the Iraqis and then bragging about it...

We also know what President Obama did once elected: continue the very policies he once furiously denounced as morally bankrupt and shameful. It is nothing short of bizarre to see this President claiming credit for having doubled down on Bush-era policy decisions:

President Obama campaigned on a scorched earth critique of the foreign policy he inherited from President Bush. He promised to undo all of it. Some of those promises (withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq in 16 months) barely survived the first few days, while others (unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad or closing Gitmo) were only jettisoned after months of failed efforts. The correlation is almost perfect: the longer Obama hewed to his campaign critique, the less well it has gone in foreign-policy. And, by the way, the supposedly hyper-partisan Republican opposition actually has chalked up a record that compares very favorably with the recent past: where Obama has pursued a genuinely bipartisan policy, he has enjoyed strong bipartisan support.

But when it comes to this President and his performance as Commander in Chief, grading on a steep curve seems to be the new normal. In a stunning display of post hoc apologetics, David Ignatius inadvertently highlights Obama's incoherent and oddly passive performance as Commander in Chief:

President Obama finally seemed to reach his comfort level as commander in chief during his visit to Kabul yesterday — and it probably wasn’t a coincidence that he was signing an Obamesque document that at once mandates the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops — and also allows the continued presence of a counterterrorism force to kill al-Qaeda terrorists.

This is the outcome that Obama probably wanted all along, which was favored back in 2009 by Vice President Biden and other political advisers. The president let himself be talked into a more ambitious counterinsurgency strategy, and a surge of 30,000 troops, but he never seemed happy with it. Indeed, he undercut the surge strategy from the outset by announcing that he would begin withdrawing the surge troops in July 2011 — practically inviting the Taliban to wait him out.

Obama has sometimes seemed a distant, passionless commander, much more comfortable making decisions in secret about covert action than in the flag-waving public role of leading the troops. But that didn’t seem true yesterday, especially during his unscripted, shirt-sleeve speech to troops at Bagram Air Base. He sounded like the military’s advocate and leader, looking fit and youthful as he strode striding the stage. Surely this comfort level was a reflection of the fact that he was outlining a strategy he finally believes in.

Here the Editorial Staff will pause to allow the assembled villainry to pick their jaws up off the floor. Let's walk through what Ignatius just told us:

1. Obama "allowed himself to be talked into" sending 30,000 young men and women into a battle he didn't believe in?

2. Having stepped up the war effort against his better judgment, our Commander in Chief proceeded to support the men and women he had sent into harm's way by "undercut[ting] the surge strategy from the outset"?

Stop and think about that one for just a moment. Think about the American lives - and American families - who paid the price for a change their leader didn't believe in:

Of course, David Ignatius isn't the only Obama admirer whose moral compass points in all directions at once. In an even more inexplicable column, another David (Maraniss, this time) proudly trumpets "Obama's Military Connection":

Obama is the first president to whom Vietnam is ancient history. He carries none of the psychological baggage of that war, for better or worse. Every young man in the baby-boom generation of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had to deal with Vietnam somehow, but by the time Obama came of age, the war and the draft were over. His liberal mother felt at home in the peace movement, and he took many characteristics from her, but he also chafed at her idealistic naivete, which he viewed as a relic of the ’60s. From an early age he wanted to be harder and cooler than his mother, less Pollyannaish, more pragmatic. His use of the military option in his foreign policy reflects that dual sensibility. Clinton grew up wanting to be JFK, but Obama thinks more like him.

It was no accident that, during his surprise visit to Afghanistan a few days ago, the president referred to the military men and women there as the new “greatest generation,” skipping over Vietnam again. Obama feels more affinity toward his grandfather’s generation (Stan Dunham fought in Europe during World War II) than to his mother’s, or he at least finds it more culturally appealing. He is an avid viewer of the television show “Mad Men” and told me that some of the characters remind him of his grandparents, with whom he lived as a teenager.

The cultural geography of those formative years also shaped his perspective. Obama was in Honolulu then, surrounded by military installations. Hickam Air Force Base, Schofield Barracks, Fort Shafter, Pearl Harbor Naval Station and Hawaii Marine Corps Base were all part of his adolescent environment. He grew up comfortable with the military culture, not alienated from it. Some friends came from military families. One of his buddies dated an admiral’s daughter, and they would borrow the old man’s car to tool around the island.

"Some of his best friends were military". Now where have we heard that one before? During the Bush years, serving in the National Guard was viewed as insufficient experience for a Commander in Chief. Fast forward to 2012 and a man who may have known some military juniors in high school - who couldn't find the time to meet with his senior commander in Afghanistan - is being lauded for his deep understanding and comfort level with all things military. Of course to him, Vietnam is ancient history. Tens of thousands of Americans died there, but that need not be mentioned (much less remembered). Certainly not praised.

Back in 2009 when her husband was serving in Afghanistan, this Marine wife argued that Obama doesn't get the military he commands:

...where was our Commander in Chief when his top commander in Afghanistan was being viciously attacked? Did he step in and defend his subordinate for doing the job he was ordered to do? Of course he didn't. Harry Truman was obviously no community organizer: the brouhaha over McChrystal ensured that the buck wouldn't stop in the Oval Office this time. The McChrystal leak was followed by the revelation that our stalwart Commander in Chief had only met with his top commander in Afghanistan once. Stung by the implication that his "war of necessity" was very much on the back burner, Obama scrambled to find a mere 20 minutes to spare as he idled on a runway in northern Europe. He spent more time than that conducting a beer summit.

Now the Army's largest base has suffered a devastating attack by a deranged Islamist. And how does our Commander in Chief respond? He gives a "shout out" to Joe Medicine Crow, that noted Congressional Medal of Honor winner.

Tell me something: in a moment of national tragedy is it really too much to expect the President of the United States to forego the "shout outs"? Is it too much ask that he learn the difference between the Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Medal of Honor? What we require from our leaders at times like this is not much, really. No one expects them to actually care. What we want is precisely the kind of thing that comes so effortlessly to Barack Obama: honeyed words and a reassuring show of compassion from a man who thinks that quality is the most important attribute a Supreme Court judge can possess. A public acknowledgment that something grave has happened. But for some reason, asking the Commander in Chief of our armed forces to give even the appearance of empathy was a bridge too far.

We lost one of our own in the attack on Fort Hood: Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman. That connection can never be severed. The sense of loss can never be forgotten.

I wish I were convinced that our Commander in Chief - or even pundits like David Ignatius - understood one tenth of the pride military families feel in our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. How can anyone praise the "Commander in Chief" for sending 30,000 of America's finest to war for a cause he not only doesn't support but actively tries to sabotage?

Easy. They are, after all, expendable to him (if not to us). They should not be.

On the positive side, I now know why John Milton wrote Paradise Lost (and why I was forced to read it 4 times in HS and college).

I am sure he was trying to get an ortho appointment in Fredneck... Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

D'oh! That's Dante. Another ortho patient from the People's Republic of Maryland, presumably.

Saturday morning, the Spousal Unit Princess bagged a bat (!) in the grille of her black Subaru WRX.

The Batmobile

Later that day the Spousal Unit and I were enjoying a glass of wine on the patio when the birds started going crazy. We looked over in our neighbor's yard and there was a 4 foot black snake shimmying (or whatever it is that tree climbing snakes do) up a tree trunk.

I have pictures but need to get them off the camera.

But the grand finale was Sunday morning, when the Dorkitorial Staff somehow managed to take a nasty fall and break her collar bone and ankle.

So now you all know that my real name is definitely not "Grace". Not sure how much posting there will be this week. Am taking a few days off from work for dr.'s appts, etc. We'll see how it goes.

So.... what did you all do this weekend?

'I am saddened that Vietnam has yet again been inserted into the campaign.'

- John Foregainst Kerry

We realize that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but couldn't Teh One have found fresher material?

Speaking in Iowa in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama said, “I’ve had enough of using terrorism as a wedge issue in our politics.” He said the war on terrorism "isn't supposed to crop up between September and November of even-numbered years."

But as president, Obama and his reelection campaign have consistently raised the issue -- repeatedly referring to a 2007 comment by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to suggest that Romney would not have ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden as Obama did one year ago.

Such preening always seems so shameless and self serving... until suddenly, it becomes downright useful.

Our results show evidence of considerable improvement in material well-being for both the middle class and the poor over the past three decades. Median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009. In addition, the middle 20 percent of the income distribution experienced noticeable improvements in housing characteristics: living units became bigger and much more likely to have air conditioning and other features. The quality of the cars these families own also improved considerably. Similarly, we find strong evidence of improvement in the material well-being of poor families. After incorporating taxes and noncash benefits and adjusting for bias in standard price indices, we show that the tenth percentile of the income distribution grew by 44 percent between 1980 and 2009. Even this measure, however, understates improvements at the bottom. The tenth percentile of the consumption distribution grew by 54 percent during this period. In addition, for those in the bottom income quintile, living units became bigger, and the fraction with any air conditioning doubled. The share of households with amenities such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer also rose noticeably.

We consider several possible explanations for these patterns in material well-being. Our analyses indicate that tax and transfer policies have played an important role. Changes in tax policy have raised the resources of both the middle class and the poor. The impact of taxes is particularly noticeable for the poor, a substantial share of whom have been lifted out of poverty by more generous tax credits. Social security also accounts for some of the improvements at the bottom as the real value of benefits has grown. However, noncash transfers such as food stamps or housing and school lunch subsidies can account for only small improvements in well-being for the middle class or the poor over the past three decades. While we find that rising educational attainment accounts for some of the decline in poverty over the past three decades, in general, changing demographics account for only a small fraction of the overall improvement in well-being for the middle class and the poor. Together, this evidence suggests that other factors, perhaps most importantly economic growth, played a critical role in the improved living standards of the middle class and the poor.
Accurate measures of economic well-being are essential for evaluating existing policies and for determining the need for policy changes. The extent of economic progress for both the middle class and the poor is an important factor in the debates over key economic policy issues, including income tax policy, immigration, and globalization. Official poverty is frequently cited by those evaluating the need for and consequences of social programs, which account for a substantial amount of government spending. Programs such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), as well as food stamps, housing benefits, educational grants and loans, energy assistance, and job training, cost more than $522 billion in 2002. In his opening comments in the debate on what became the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation, former House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Archer said, "Government has spent $5.3 trillion on welfare since the war on poverty began, the most expensive war in the history of this country, and the Census Bureau tells us we have lost the war."

When you're in a hole...

Watch the U.S. "population distribution by age" change over time in 5-year intervals from 1950 to 2050 in the animated graphic above, from the Calculated Risk blog. At around the year 2035, the age distribution will make it obvious why the Social Security System is headed for insolvency.

I find these moving charts fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that they provide insight into the complex forces driving societal change. My earlier post dealt with aging and shifts in the sex ratio (the balance of males to females):

It's hard enough to balance legitimate competing interests without demonizing everyone who doesn't belong to the target demographic. But when we see someone try to pin every social problem on a single cause, we can't help thinking "confirmation bias". Of all the implications raised by the following chart (affordability of entitlements, changes to the tax base, effects on education, the housing market, marriage, and the labor market come to mind) one of the most interesting is the literal feminization of America:

...The following chart tracks the overall sex ratio in America (past, present, and projected) over nearly two centuries:

As the population ages and the center of mass shifts from younger to older people, females begin to outnumber males. It's amusing to entertain the notion that perhaps some of the societal changes we're seeing are due to changes in the underlying demographic mix of society over time.

The end result may well be the same regardless of whether you believe it's all a wicked conspiracy (i.e., a tiny cabal of feminists swiped the collective corn flakes of the patriarchal hegemony whilst they sat rooted to their BarcoLoungers, transfixed by the scantily clad charms of the Dallas cheerleaders) or are willing to consider the possibility that more benign/organic forces may be at work as well (possibly, changing proportions of men and women in the general population?).

Nah... it's so much more fun to identify an Enemy and blame him (or her, depending on your political persuasion). Speaking of interesting alternative explanations, here's another one that examines the possibility that big government is a natural byproduct of technological advances:

Thanks to the half dozen people who sent me copies of Cowen's "Does Technology Drive the Growth of Government?" The paper's even better than I remember...

I start with what Gordon Tullock (1994) has called the paradox of government growth. Before the late nineteenth century, government was a very small percentage of gross domestic product in most Western countries, typically no more than five percent. In most cases this state of affairs had persisted for well over a century, often for many centuries. The twentieth century, however, saw the growth of governments, across the Western world, to forty or fifty percent of gross domestic product... I'd like to address the key question of why limited government and free markets have so fallen out of favor.

Cowen's paper, which I'm still digesting, is well worth your time. I've long believed that big government was an inevitable result of increasing population density. To me, it makes perfect sense that the closer people live to each other and the more they interact, the greater the need for laws and an infrastructure for enforcing them. When families live in relative isolation and are fairly self sufficient (think the family farm), relatively few forces bring them into conflict/competition with other human beings. An individual can, for instance, blast Megadeth CDs at earsplitting volume or play strip poker with the sheep and one's neighbors will be ne'er the wiser.

Transport the same families to cities where they live in apartments, specialize, and participate in an economy that is highly interdependent, and the opportunities for conflict - as well as the impact one person's acts have on another - grow exponentially. Is it really any wonder that government has mushroomed too?

Cowen's paper takes on various theories that purport to explain government growth before pointing out something that meshes well with our discussion about the likelihood of a transformative, re-aligning election. Given that politicians are well known for saying whatever they think will get them elected, how likely is it that we've had big government foisted upon us by malignant forces who hate Amerikka, freedom, and cute puppies? Is it possible that the problem really is us?

No matter how incomplete it may be, there clearly must be something to the voter hypothesis. That is, there must be some demand for big government. If all or most voters, circa 2009, wanted their government to be five percent of gross domestic product, some candidate would run on that platform and win. Change might prove difficult to accomplish, but we would at least observe politicians staking out that position as a rhetorical high ground. In today's world we do not observe this. Voter preferences for intervention are therefore a necessary condition for sustained large government. Democratic government cannot grow large, and stay large, against the express wishes of a substantial majority of the population.

How we change these wishes - or whether such change is even possible given other forces pushing us in the direction of steadily increasing government intervention - is a different question.

What fascinates me in all of this is just how much of what we think of as human nature, may in fact be a complex interaction between human tendencies that are far more mutable than we think them to be and culture, affluence, education, population density....

... and a small but determined cohort of radical, man hating feminists who, despite being stupid, ugly, and incompetent have somehow managed to control every facet of American life over the past 50 or so years.

I caught a very small piece of a TV program talking to Jerry Brown (yes, Governor Moonbeam) in the last day or two and he, of all people, has the best answer to what we need (other than either a bloody revolution or a (hopefully peaceful) secession/split): a definitive election, one that firmly and unmistakably ushers one side or the other into power in the both the Executive and the Legislative branches.

I would also add that such an electoral sweep has to hold for a number of subsequent elections both so long-term initiatives can come to fruition and so the Supreme Court can be re-made in the image of whichever side achieves this electoral victory. Given the Senate seats up in November, it is mathematically possible for either the Democrats or the Republicans to achieve a veto-proof majority in the Senate.

The question I want to address is, "How likely is this to happen?", by which I mean, how likely is it that conservatives will control all three branches of government long enough to make a substantial dent in an 80 year trend of steadily increasing federal scope creep? Back in 2009, shortly after we lost the 2008 election, I looked at this very question from a different perspective. Back then, disappointed conservatives were blaming Bush for what - in the light of history - was an entirely predictable turnover of power. Indeed, when looked at in light of the historical recod, it would have been downright odd if Obama had not won that election:

...I decided to take a look at the history of Presidential power sharing over the last century or so:

Our own history can provide valuable perspective on our present difficulties. Over the last half century or so, Republicans have controlled the White House by a 3-2 margin. But more importantly, over the last half century there has been only one case in which the same party held the White House three terms in a row. Why are conservatives feeding the frankly hysterical notion that a typical and not unexpected turnover of power justifies the abandonment of our principles?

Jim Lindgren has an interesting post up in which he points out that while there's nothing new about the urge to blame the ruling party when the balance of power shifts, election data provides a much more plausible explanation: a phenomenon he calls The Lightening Rod effect.

In the summer of 2006, when some legal scholars feared that President Bush and the Republicans were so powerful that Bush had a king-like status, Steve Calabresi and I published a comment in the Yale Law Journal that pointed out that the existing political science literature had understated the degree to which there typically was a backlash against the party of the president. We showed that the usual erosion of support extended, not just to seats in the House and Senate, but to the states.

When one adds all gubernatorial races to the analysis, as we do in Figures 1 and 2, backlash against the President’s party in state races during a President’s term is actually stronger overall than the coattail effect in the presidential election year. To be more specific, we find that four years after a party wins a presidential election, it holds on average three fewer statehouses than it had before it won the presidential election. Perversely, winning the presidency seems to lead very shortly to losing power in the states. Since 1932 there have been eight changes of party control of the White House (1933, 1953, 1961, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1993, and 2001). In every instance but one, the party that seized the White House held more governorships in the year before it took office than in the subsequent year it lost the presidential election. The only exception is that in 1980, Republicans held four fewer governorships than they held in 1992, immediately before the Republicans were voted out of the White House. Similarly, of the eleven Presidents since 1933, every one except two, Kennedy and Reagan, left office with fewer governorships than his party had before he took office, and Kennedy served less than three years. Figure 1 shows this pattern.

During the Clinton administration, Clinton was criticized for losing so many seats in Congress and losing so many governorships. Yet that was more or less par for the course. And Calabresi and I were not at all surprised to see large Republican losses in the 2006 election (the normal losses had been avoided in 2002 by 9/11, much as the normal losses were avoided in 1962 by the Cuban missile crisis).

Now the process seems to be repeating today. President Obama's drop in popularity may be slightly larger than for most Democratic presidents early in their terms, but the process is a normal one. Further, while the contests for state governorships may be decided by local issues, the atmosphere is one in which the Democrats will be blamed for the perceived faults of Obama, yet this process is entirely normal.

...

I believe his study shows something I've long suspected: that the popular support for Republicans or Democrats is counterbalanced by a healthy suspicion of handing either party too much power. When one party has held sway for too long, we instinctively try to "balance" the equation by voting in a counterweight from the other party. This is an intelligent hedge against what we all know of human nature: that unchecked power corrupts.

The consolation for the out-of-power party is that in time, the pendulum will swing back their way. I don't believe the vast majority of Americans are either intellectually consistent or rabidly ideological. Both parties encompass a wide spectrum of political beliefs, and moreover I think that the center of mass in the middle - the political uncommitted or swing votes - provides a natural adjustment to changing political conditions.

I've argued many times that ideological purists are unelectable under normal conditions. Our founding documents were less the result of intellectual uniformity than rational compromise: the ability to negotiate agreements under which neither party got everything they wanted but both parties got something they wanted.

Two points from this post bear repeating:

1. [from my research] ...over the last half century there has been only one case in which the same party held the White House three terms in a row.

2. [from Lindgren's study] Perversely, winning the presidency seems to lead very shortly to losing power in the states. Since 1932 there have been eight changes of party control of the White House (1933, 1953, 1961, 1969, 1977, 1981, 1993, and 2001). In every instance but one, the party that seized the White House held more governorships in the year before it took office than in the subsequent year it lost the presidential election. The only exception is that in 1980, Republicans held four fewer governorships than they held in 1992, immediately before the Republicans were voted out of the White House.

Now let's look at how many times a single party has controlled all three branches of government over the past 65 years:

Contrary to popular belief, most of the time (in modern political history) Congress and the President are at odds; that is, most of the time the same political party does not control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Only 13 times (26 years) since 1945 have both branches of Congress and the Presidency been controlled by the same party; the Democrats have held this advantage more often than Republicans (11 to 2).

At the same time, Congress has usually been controlled by the same party. The “odd man out” has literally been the President.

So while a sweep of the White House and Congress can happen, it is the exception rather than the norm and perhaps more importantly, that unusual state of affairs (with the exception of the 1960s, which gave us LBJ's Great Society and the War on Poverty) usually doesn't last long. There's a great visual guide at the link.

All of this raises the highly entertaining possibility (be quiet, spd) that the best thing for conservatives would be to cede the White House to the Democrats for the next decade. Release the hounds, as they say...

It's not just Amir Taheri pushing the Logan Act story. Before he ever went to Iraq, Obama's bragging about his meddling in U.S. foreign policy made the pages of the NY Times:

Among the issues being discussed with the two presidential candidates is the long-term security accord between Iraq and the United States. [Ed.note, because this will become important later: this is the strategic framework agreement referred to later in the post] While the Bush administration would like to see an agreement reached before the summer’s political conventions, Mr. Obama said today that he opposed such a timetable.

So it seems The One had already commenced unsanctioned telephone negotiations with Iraqi Foreign Minister Zebari back in June. His goal was to prevent the White House from successfully concluding negotiations for a long term security agreement with Iraq. Bizarrely, Obama not only admitted what he was doing, but bragged about it repeatedly over the next few weeks:

“My concern is that the Bush administration, in a weakened state politically, ends up trying to rush an agreement that in some ways might be binding to the next administration, whether it’s my administration or Senator McCain’s administration,” Mr. Obama said. “The foreign minister agreed that the next administration should not be bound by an agreement that’s currently made.”

Fast forward to 2012. Here we are in the middle of another presidential election season and President Obama is doing exactly what he tried to prevent his predecessor from doing: negotiating an agreement that will bind whoever wins in November. Back then, not content with conducting unsanctioned negotiations with a foreign power, Candidate Obama openly suggested the Bush administration was trying to circumvent Congress:

Obama and Biden believe any Status of Forces Agreement, or any strategic framework agreement, should be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment by the U.S. to begin withdrawing its troops and forswearing permanent bases. Obama and Biden also believe that any security accord must be subject to Congressional approval. It is unacceptable that the Iraqi government will present the agreement to the Iraqi parliament for approval—yet the Bush administration will not do the same with the U.S. Congress. The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support here at home and makes absolutely clear that the U.S. will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

In a series of intriguing posts on the Foreign Policy blog last fall come these observations:

... where Obama has continued along policy lines laid out by Bush, he has achieved success, but where he has sought to make dramatic changes, he has failed. The bigger the change, the bigger the failure. Not surprisingly, Friedman presents this as a critique of Bush ("Obama and his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the "adults" they replaced. It isn't even close, which is why the G.O.P.'s elders have such a hard time admitting it."). Friedman's sneer about the "adults" is unmistakable and it causes him to miss the obvious: where Obama has embraced that "Bush adult" worldview, it has gone well for him and for America. Where he has not, it has not. Indeed, where he has listened to Friedman and other bien pensant types, it has gone very poorly indeed (cf. Israel-Palestine peace process). And where he attempted a major shift in American grand strategy (elevating climate change to be a national security threat co-equal with WMD proliferation and terrorism) he has made almost no progress whatsoever.

President Obama campaigned on a scorched earth critique of the foreign policy he inherited from President Bush. He promised to undo all of it. Some of those promises (withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq in 16 months) barely survived the first few days, while others (unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad or closing Gitmo) were only jettisoned after months of failed efforts. The correlation is almost perfect: the longer Obama hewed to his campaign critique, the less well it has gone in foreign-policy. And, by the way, the supposedly hyper-partisan Republican opposition actually has chalked up a record that compares very favorably with the recent past: where Obama has pursued a genuinely bipartisan policy, he has enjoyed strong bipartisan support.

Back in 2008, despite all the fulmination about an arrogant, unilateral, secretive Bush White House, the negotiations between the US and Iraq took place in the open. I know, because I wrote about it several times. Now, from a man who excoriated his predecessor and then proceeded to double down on policies he had assured us were morally indefensible, we get yet another demonstration of Obama's real position on bipartisanship and transparency. Peter Feaver again:

... the Obama team has been especially loathe to note any parallels with its predecessor ... except in one particular area. In public and private settings, Obama supporters have taken pains to remind people that it was President Bush who negotiated and signed the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) Strategic Framework Agreement that obligates U.S. forces to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Indeed, some have claimed that this is an inconvenient fact of its own, at least for Republican critics who want to charge that Obama is being reckless in his Iraq policy.

The implicit message is obvious: "we can't be criticized for ending the war in this way because, after all, we are just following the treaty obligations that Bush agreed to. If they were good enough for Bush, they are good enough for us."

That's not quite fair to the Bush policy, however. The Bush team viewed the 2008 SFA, and in particular the 2011 sunset, as a least-worst deal that they could strike with Maliki in advance of Iraqi elections. It was widely understood - and this understanding was directly encouraged by Iraqi interlocutors - that the SFA would be renegotiated after the Iraqi elections, when the new Iraqi government would have a bit more freedom to take necessary but unpopular decisions like allowing a follow-on stabilization force. Bush officials disagreed amongst themselves as to how forthcoming the Iraqis would be in a follow-on deal, but most agreed that it was imperative that a serious attempt be made to renegotiate the SFA at the earliest possible moment.

You don't have to take my word for it. If the plan all along had been simply to implement the 2008 SFA, why did President Obama send a team to Iraq to negotiate a new agreement? Why did the military plan on leaving a residual force? Indeed, as Tom Ricks quotes a colleague as asking, if that was really the plan then why the heck didn't the military plan on leaving at the end of 2011?

In other words, it sure looks like Obama supporters are trying to hide behind the Bush policy, trying to share credit (blame?) for a policy that might be problematic and in need of a little bolstering.

Now I ask you: does this sound like the Obama we all know and love?

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UPDATE: Welcome Blackfive readers!

Check out the great video at the link above!