All those Republicans grousing about the president's attacks on private equity might instead be seizing on this beautiful point of contrast. Mr. Obama, after all, is no mere mortal president. Even as he's been busy with the day job, he's found time to moonlight as CEO-in-Chief of half the nation's industry. Detroit, the energy sector, health care—he's all over these guys like a cheap spreadsheet.

Like Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama has presided over bankruptcies, layoffs, lost pensions, run-ups in debt. Yet unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama's ...

Once again Kimberly Strassel is worth ponying up your email address for the Journal's 8 week free giveaway. You will never look back on the small change invested if you wish to continue your conservation reading. If the cash is a hardship, we will charge it to us. Just furnish us your email address in the comment section of this article and consider it a done deal. - DSMW 

Of course, recoveries always go in the right direction—that is, things get better over time. But merely going in the right direction is an incredibly low performance standard. Moreover, since deep recessions are generally followed by more robust recoveries, this should have been one of the strongest recoveries ever.

So what went wrong? Harvey Golub - Wall Street Journal - Click To Read More...

Mr. Golub, a former chairman and CEO of American Express, is the chairman of Miller Buckfire and serves on the executive committee of the American Enterprise Institute.

At age 19, I dropped out of school to pursue a career as a French horn player. After a few twists and turns, I wound up in the Barcelona Symphony, which was a Spanish government job.

Even as a foreigner, I had the same lifetime work status as a clerk at the water department. Nobody ever left these jobs, except with lavish disability packages. (One colleague who injured his lips moonlighting at a dance-hall gig ended up spending the next 20 years collecting a full salary to stay home.)

I loved music—but the life of a government functionary wasn't my cup of tea. And so my Spanish wife and I decided to pull up stakes and start over in America. Neither of us had a college degree, and my wife's English was limited. Arthur C. Brooks - Wall Street Journal - Click To Read More

"Each country has a soul and France's soul is equality." Francois Hollande

Francois Hollande in a 51.7% win over the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected President of France proving once again the French Revolution is alive and well.

Running on a Socialist platform of raising the top tax bracket to 75% for people earning more than 1 million a year from 44%, Mr Hollande has shown that his party's view of equality is somewhat one sided. In a country where the unemployment rate is 62.8% and the debt to GDP ratio has risen from 59% a decade ago to 90% this year, the French have shown to themselves and the world that the financial stability of France simply does not matter and the bitter pill of austerity will not touch their lips.

Appeasing the French by a pledge to withdraw troops by the year end, Mr. Hollande also is promising to force banks to increase corporate taxes on lenders.

Hollande's rival Nicolas Sarkozy was able to limp out of France's 2000 economic recession but left France saddled with debt. Sarkozy reliance on government debt, bank and industry intervention and preserving the country's generous social welfare system will only be enhanced under Hollande's tenure.

The French chose Mr. Hollande amid an election fueled by concerns over national sovereignty. He is the first Socialist in 17 years to win a mandate to challenge Germany's Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank's ideas to impose spending cuts to repair indebted European countries.

It was vaguely menacing, and it garnered broad criticism. In the press it was characterized as a "brushback"—when a pitcher throws the ball close to a batter's head to rattle him, to remind him he can be hurt. Peggy Noonan's remarks about Obama's veiled treats to the Supreme Court on their upcoming healthcare decision.

If you do not subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan's Op-Ed piece on how Kennedy handled a Supreme Court decision is worth giving them your e-mail address for a free subscription. If you give us your e-mail address, we will buy a 6 month subscription to the Journal for you.

John Kennedy, when handed a decision from the Supreme Court regarding the sensitive subject of denying prayer in school, explained that the American people would now have to "pray at home." Kennedy, at that moment, expressed to all Americans the intelligence, grace and respect for the judicial system these few well crafted words brought. It elevated him in the eyes and hearts of Americans everywhere. - DSMW

"He gets his shirts straight from Paris

Cigarettes from the Nile

He talks like a highbrow

But he plays Chicago style..."

I've no idea where President Barack Obama gets his shirts and smokes, but he certainly talks like a highbrow, sufficiently so to persuade presidential historian Michael Beschloss to pronounce him the day after the 2008 election "the smartest president ever." Yet, in the end, he plays Chicago style. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can't take the Chicago out of the community organizer. Or as the Agence France-Presse headline put it, "Combative Obama Warns Supreme Court On Health Law." Mark Steyn - Orange County Register - Click To Read More...

Socialism and the Democratic party have deep roots in this country. Spread the wealth under the guise of social programs is their platform. After listening to the Supreme Court last week fight for your rights as a citizen, do not forget this very simple fact, that there is a very real battle for your freedom going on. What you have you will not be entitled to keep if this President and his liberal administration have their way. - DSMW

This reckoning has also been a marvelous public education. The oral arguments have detailed the multiple ways in which the individual mandate upsets the careful equilibrium of the American political system. The Obama Administration's arguments in favor of the mandate to buy health insurance or pay a penalty stand exposed as a demand for unlimited federal power. Wall Street Journal - Click To Read More...

Now Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder want to play the race card in an election year, at the expense of the education of black students. Make no mistake about it, the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect. - Thomas Sowell

There have been many frauds of historic proportions -- for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff's hoax has made headlines.

But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong -- namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.

The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the "promise" of "equity." Real Clear Politics - Click To Read More...

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

A friend who is prone to conspiracy theories of all kinds suggested that Newt might be hanging in because he has a secret deal with Romney whereby Romney would put Newt in Romney's cabinet if he wins in November. "Follow the money," he counsels.

In Newt's case I would counsel to follow the psyche. A more likely explanation is that Newt is staying in out of spite and an acute case of self-centeredness that is impressive even for a politician Larry Thornberry - American Spectator - Click To Read More...

Barack Obama's Job Approval Average by Subgroup

GALLUP 2012

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election. Jim Rutenberg - New York Times - Click To Read More...

Perhaps it is because the liberal view of religion and Republicans is so reflexively negative that they see no practical difference between those who oppose higher taxes and those who would chop off a woman's fingertips for wearing nail polish. Whatever the reason, liberals continue to do so freely because they know the civility police will never be coming for them. William McGurn, columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

I happened to be listening to Rush Linebaugh the now infamous day he spouted off about Sandra Fluke. I must say, as a women, I considered Rush's comments highly entertaining and good radio. 

If Ms. Fluke finds if appropriate to take to a nation platform to discuss her need and others at Georgetown Law School for contraception to be paid by by taxpayer money she should not be so thin skinned. As the taxpayer that will ultimately be paying for Ms. Fluke and her friends contraception, I want to know the details and form my own conclusions much like Rush did. But this is not what it's all about is it?

The Obama administration is low on ideas that will appeal to the national voter. The more the left stirs up superficial comments and take offense, the more time is chewed up until the election. Birth control and women's rights are the only hot button quivers in Obama's arsenal. It's amusing to hear the likes of Bill Maher taking offense in Linebaugh's remarks when his own show is liberally peppered with slurs, snide and sexist remarks about everyone. It's patently absurd that Maher has his back up.

What the Democrats do not realize is the voters have made up their minds and have moved on. All the hubbub, the Flukes, the 99 Percenters, the Linebaugh lawsuits, unions and Acorn wont change the realty of the situation and that is the really important things we face as a country. The people who will show up at the polls this November won't be concerned about the entertainment static or even really birth control. My fear, as a voting American, and I feel a can speak for other Americans, is we are loosing this great country to a uncontrolled sprawling government who is taking my rights and your Liberty away. That's what this election is all about. Tell the left to stop wining. - DSMW

If the previous paragraph makes no sense to you, I am very sorry, but I simply have no time to explicate. You see, by 9AM Thursday EST, my NCAA “brackets” must be “filled out.” A bracket is a game-by-game breakdown of who will win each tournament contest. Trying to explain the obsessive-compulsive attention I place on “picking” each bracket (a rigorous, esoteric, low-brow pseudo-science known as “bracketology”) will only further sink my standing in the eyes of those who look to me as an evangelist for higher academic pursuits. Moreover, revealing the depth and breadth of my obsession (ten websites, four daily newspapers, many hours of TV and radio speculation) will surely damage my fragile stature as the business of education commentator for the illustrious Forbes brand, er, “platform. James Marshall Crotty - Forbes - Click To Read More...

Follow @DSMWcom and retweet "DSMW + twitter = Apple TV contest. Follow @DSMWcom and retweet #dsmwplusappletv"

A winner will be chosen at random on July 01, 2012. Good luck!

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the administration is "not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases," but that's certainly what he's implying when he bleats on about the "fundamental unfairness" of the situation. "The undeniable truth," said Mr. Duncan in a press call this week, "is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise." Of course, if racial animus toward blacks explains higher black discipline rates, what explains the fact that white kids are disciplined at higher rates than Asian kids? Is the school system anti-white, too? Jason L. Riley - Click To Read More...

It may not have been the only factor in his victory last week, but it put him squarely in the voter zeitgeist. And it may be apocryphal on Super Tuesday in Ohio, where he has come back to dead even after being down double digits.

Now, if former Sen. Rick Santorum had stayed on economic message with his tax-cut plan, he would have swept Michigan. But he unnecessarily wandered off the reservation. Women serving in the military; JFK's church-and-state speech; the threat of ruling out contraception --  by veering in these directions, he completely undermined his economic message. And he lost because of it. Larry Kudlow - Real Clear Politics - Click To Read More...

"Die, die, foreigners!"

And foreigners do die. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a "secure room" that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan "intelligence officer." Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues. Mark Steyn - The Orange County Register- Click To Read More...

This is Mark Steyn at his very best. - DSMW