“For me, the Specter race of 2004 is really ancient history,” says Senator Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) in an interview with National Review Online. “I do think it was a significant moment for the conservative movement, certainly in Pennsylvania, maybe beyond. I think Santorum made a mistake; he was on the wrong side. But I got over that a long time ago. I actually campaigned for Rick Santorum in 2006.”

“Having said that, Governor Romney was correct, pointing out one of the consequences of Senator Santorum’s decision. But that’s a distant memory now. I’m happily engaged in my work. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. I don’t have to be looking in the rearview mirror.”

Freshman senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania tells National Review Online that he supports Mitt Romney’s tax plan, and he predicts that its framework would boost GOP candidates in a general election, should Romney lead the ticket. “This is a winner,” he says. “It’s a more dramatic, more sweeping reform than anything he has proposed before on the tax side. Republican primary voters, I think, will almost universally see it as very pro-growth.”

Toomey adds that Romney’s proposal is a better option than Rick Santorum’s tax plan, which eliminates the corporate tax for manufacturers. “Senator Santorum’s plan has some constructive elements,” he says. “But my own view is that it’s best for the government to not be picking winners and losers. When you say that one sector will have a lower tax rate than another sector, you really are playing favorites. And I prefer a tax code that is neutral in that respect.”

To win in November, Toomey, who has not endorsed a presidential contender, says Republicans must have a strong, simple tax-reform message. Romney’s 20 percent across-the-board cut on individual tax rates, he says, provides a snappy, “supply side” blueprint. “I think having a bold, sweeping plan that people can understand in a moment is really important,” he says. “This could be part of that. There is a lot to still be disclosed. But this combines, as I did with my supercommittee plan, simplicity with fairness and lower marginal rates.”

“Simplicity, and fairness, and stronger economic growth, that’s a great combination,” Toomey says. “As you long as you explain it that way, and you stress how you achieve those three goals in one tax reform, I think that will play very well in the Philadelphia suburbs and many other places.”

As Katrina noted earlier today, last night, Rick Santorum’s campaign suggested that there may be a covert alliance between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, especially in view of their behavior at the debate in Arizona. Such a deal would presumably involve Ron Paul attacking Santorum, as he has quite frequently, especially on Santorum’s spending record, so that Romney can avoid further lowering his own favorability ratings.

Paul’s spokesman denies this, noting that they have spent millions on four television ads attacking Romney, but there does seem to be something, prima facie, to their conduct during debates, if one assumes that the alliance would preclude Paul from criticizing Romney in debates. In the previous seven debates, going back to the January 7 New Hampshire debate, Ron Paul has only attacked Mitt Romney once.

In the NBC debate on January 23, after Romney had explained that he considered Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz an act of war, and would respond appropriately, Ron Paul eagerly broke in to offer his opinion. He said:

But I wanted to get involved in the discussion. Because the question was, you know, would you go to war? And Mitt said he would — he would go to war. But you have to think about the preliminary act that might cause them to want to close the Straits of Hormuz, and that`s the blockade. We’re blockading them. Can you imagine what we would do if somebody blockaded the Gulf of Mexico? That would be an act of war. So the act of war has already been committed and this is a retaliation.

Paul’s argument aside, he does, unprompted, directly take on and criticize Romney’s bellicose response.

Interestingly, though, Paul was also offered another chance in the debate to attack Romney, and decided not to: Moderator Brian Williams asked Romney if he was worried about being considered “insufficiently conservative,” and then, later, asked Paul if “the two men in the middle [Romney and Santorum] [were] insufficiently conservative for you.” Rather than attacking either of them, Paul responded, “I think the problem is, is nobody has defined what being conservative means,” and then didn’t deign to mention either of them for the rest of his answer.

Paul’s kid-gloved treatment of Romney in the debates so far doesn’t necessarily say anything about their relationship, but it seems like, of late, Paul has been notably kind to the race’s front-runner.

Specter, for his part, disagrees:

Specter also scoffed at the notion that Santorum’s backing helped him turn aside the primary challenge from then-Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). (Toomey again ran for and this time won Specter’s seat in 2010, when Specter switched parties but lost the Democratic nomination.)

“His support was hardly determinative, hardly that important,” Specter said, echoing comments he made after his 2004 win. He noted that his campaign ran ads featuring Bush’s endorsement rather than Santorum’s. Bush’s “support was a lot more important,” he said.

UPDATE: Specter also denies making a pact:

“He is not correct. I made no commitment to him about supporting judges,” Specter said. “I made no deal.” 

Having an ultrasound is now considered rape, according to the latest talking points from the largest abortion chain in the nation, Planned Parenthood, over the controversy about the Virginia ultrasound bill.

If this sounds illogical and absurd, that’s because it is.

In a 2003 study of Planned Parenthood and other independently owned abortion facilities, 99 percent of these clinics admitted that they either “always” or “sometimes” perform an ultrasound in association with a surgical abortion. Further, it was stated that vaginal ultrasounds were “always” performed before the early surgical abortion at 83 percent of these sites, 16 percent “under certain conditions,” and only 1 percent “never” did them.

Additionally, the study revealed that after an abortion was performed, vaginal ultrasounds were also “always” performed at 26 percent of these sites, “under certain conditions” at 66 percent of these sites, and “never” at 8 percent.

Planned Parenthood even admits they do ultrasounds before an abortion: “That’s just the medical standard,” said Adrienne Schreiber, an official at Planned Parenthood’s Washington, D.C., regional office. “To confirm the gestational age of the pregnancy, before any procedure is done, you do an ultrasound.”

Requiring an ultrasound to take place before an abortion is performed makes sense since it ensures that the mother is actually pregnant, determines the age and size of the baby, and aids in determining the location of the unborn child for either the vacuum machine or a needle used to end its life, if in fact a surgical abortion is decided upon. And in many abortion procedures, ultrasounds are used during the surgical abortion to ensure that the abortionist doesn’t physically harm the mother while they dismember the unborn child.

Abortion clinics do ultrasounds, but many don’t tell women what’s on the screen — their living baby.

Pro-choice advocates — rather than asking questions about how to ensure that abortion is “safer” for mothers and whether or not women are fully informed about the development of their child before they make the most irrevocable decision in their lifetime — are resorting to disrespecting actual rape victims and utilizing silly scare tactics.

If a woman has decided to undergo a surgical abortion, this decision requires an abortionist to force instruments into her vagina in order to rid the woman of her child. Unfortunately that’s part of the package you get with abortion. How is this any less invasive than the ultrasound?

After decades of legal abortion and scientific studies done on when life begins and the age at which unborn babies feel pain, the pro-choice advocates and lobbyists still cling to outdated, untrue, and frankly ridiculous lies to convince women that abortion is not the taking of their child’s life.

It’s about time that women be told what abortion really is. Ultrasounds can make abortion “more emotionally difficult,” but is it really better to leave a mother uniformed that there is a little tiny human growing inside her? Are pro-choicers saying that women are too “emotionally weak” to handle the truth?

If performing a vaginal ultrasound is equal to the violence, invasiveness, and vulnerability of rape, then Planned Parenthood, which performs more than 200,000 abortions a year through procedures more invasive than a simple ultrasound, is without question the largest rape practitioner of rape in our country. Why isn’t anyone rushing to arrest Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s proud president, for raping millions of women and then profiting billions of dollars from it?

— Kristan Hawkins is the executive director of Students for Life of America. 

During last night’s debate, Rick Santorum said, “As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things.”

Is that true? In 1995, Santorum did sign onto welfare reform legislation introduced by Phil Gramm in 1995 that would have axed Title X funding. “Expand grants to states for adoption services, and offset the cost by termination of Title X of Public Health Act,” was a provision in the legislation, according to a press release from Santorum’s office.

And in 1999, Santorum introduced legislation in the senate to give $85 million a year to crisis pregnancy centers and other organizations that helped pregnant women. “Supporters of the existing federal family program, Title X of the Public Health Service Act, noted that while that law requires federal grantees to counsel women with unintended pregnancies on all their options, grantees under the new program would be barred from providing counseling on abortion or contraception,” reported Reuters at the time.

But as far as directly speaking out against Title X funding, Santorum seems to have been publicly mum. His campaign did not respond to a request for examples of past statements he had made opposing the program.

As Santorum said, he did back Title XX, which funded abstinence education. “What I did, because Title X was always pushed through, I did something that no one else did. Congressman Paul didn’t. I said, well, if you’re going to have Title X funding, then we’re going to create something called Title XX, which is going to provide funding for abstinence-based programs, so at least we’ll have an opportunity to provide programs that actually work in — in keeping children from being sexually active instead of facilitating children from being sexually active,” Santorum argued. But looking through old news stories, I couldn’t find any statement from Santorum explicitly stating that he was promoting Title XX as a counter-measure to Title X.

During the debate, Romney charged that Santorum had touted his support for Title X in recent days:

I just saw a YouTube clip of you being interviewed where you said that you personally opposed contraceptives but that you — you said that you voted for Title X. You… But you used that as an argument, saying this is something I did proactively. You didn’t say this is something I was opposed to; it wasn’t something I would have done. You said this — you said this in a positive light, ‘I voted for Title X.’

It’s not clear which interview Romney is referring to, but Santorum has been citing his votes for Title X in recent days in order to argue that his personal stance against contraception doesn’t mean he would act to ban or block contraception as president, something he faced another round of questions about after Foster Friess’ aspirin joke. In a Fox News interview, Santorum does not say he opposes Title X funding after mentioning he voted for it. From his interview with Greta Van Susteren:

SANTORUM: Well, good. I — you know, just look at my record. I mean, I have been criticized by — by — I think it was Governor Romney or maybe it was Congressman Paul’s campaign for voting for contraception, that I voted for funding for it, which is — I think it’s — I think it’s Title 10, which is — which I have voted for in the past, that provides for free contraception through organizations, even like Planned Parenthood.

And so, you know, it’s funny that on the conservative side, I’m getting ripped for having voted for this. And now all of a sudden, the left is trying to make me out that somehow I — you know, I want to stop women, or men for that matter, from getting — you know, doing things and taking things for contraception.

Earlier in the interview, Santorum said, “I’ve had a consistent record on this of supporting women’s right to have contraception. I’ve supported funding for it.” In 2006, Santorum struck much the same note, saying that “from a governmental point of view I support Title X, I guess it is, and have voted for contraception, although I don’t think it works. I think it’s harmful to women.”

On his website, Santorum does not say he will work to eliminate Title X funding, although he does want some changes made:

Repeal Clinton-era Title X family planning regulations, and will direct HHS to restore the separation of Title X family planning from abortion practices and restore a ban on referrals for abortion

You need a subscription to Time, but here’s the money quote:

Rick and Karen decided to fight for Gabriel’s life, which nearly cost Karen her own, and they passionately embraced the child during his two hours on earth. They have spent the past three years caring for their daughter Isabella, whose genetic defect, trisomy 18, is an early-death sentence. “Almost 100% of trisomy 18 children are encouraged to be aborted,” Santorum told Schieffer.

I am haunted by the smiling photos I’ve seen of Isabella with her father and mother, brothers and sisters. No doubt she struggles through many of her days — she nearly died a few weeks ago — but she has also been granted three years of unconditional love and the ability to smile and bring joy. Her tenuous survival has given her family a deeper sense of how precious even the frailest of lives are.

All right, I can hear you saying, the Santorum family’s course may be admirable, but shouldn’t we have the right to make our own choices?

Yes, I suppose. But I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society—that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state—and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.

The London Telegraph reports that the “50p tax rate,” by which individuals pay 50 percent of their income after the first £150,000 in individual income, is not raising revenues, despite the fact that “most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period”:

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

According to Arlen Specter’s 2004 campaign manager, Rick Santorum gave Specter more than an endorsement that year — he happily shared his political organization.

“The Santorum political machine in Pennsylvania, from top to bottom, was incredibly helpful to Senator Specter in that campaign at every level, from things large to things small,” says Christopher Nicholas, a veteran GOP consultant and longtime Specter adviser. “I’ve never been in a campaign where another elected official was so helpful.”

“Little things, they helped us with events; big things, they did a TV ad for us,” says Nicholas, who steered Specter’s 2004 and 2010 campaigns. “[Santorum] was there. Those two had each other’s backs. Jewish, Catholic; eastern, western; moderate, conservative. Specter helped Santorum with wings of the party that he needed help with and vice versa.”

Nicholas adds that the Specter-Santorum political alliance goes far beyond 2004. “What people often forget is that the first round of the story was in 1994 when Specter loaned [then-aide Patrick Meehan], who had run his 1992 reelect, to Santorum — to run Santorum’s general-election campaign after the 1994 primary,” he says. “Specter helped at the beginning.”

That early gesture — from an incumbent to a newcomer — was greatly appreciated by Santorum, Nicholas says, and cemented a strong working relationship that continued on Capitol Hill. “There is a long history and political observers and national conservative groups frequently forget that their history started before 2003,” he says. “They always made a good team. You’ve got to remember, this is a partnership that began before Santorum was elected to the Senate.”

There is a breathtaking display of unvarnished bias as abortion advocates and their allies in the national press try to kill legislation in Virginia requiring that an ultrasound be performed prior to a surgical or chemical abortion. Ultrasound laws are currently in effect in 22 states, with five of those states requiring exactly what Virginia is considering. Why? Because, simply put, ultrasound laws save lives.

Performing an ultrasound before an abortion should be a commonsense standard of care for abortion providers. Ultrasound assists an abortion provider in determining gestational age. The farther along in pregnancy that a woman is, the greater the risk that abortion poses. Ultrasound also serves an essential medical purpose by diagnosing ectopic pregnancies which, if left undiagnosed, can result in fallopian rupture and life-threatening bleeding. For example, the FDA has reported that at least two women have died from ruptured ectopic pregnancies following use of the abortion drug RU-486.

However, the abortion lobby doesn’t want women to receive these life-saving exams if the images produced by the ultrasound could sway women away from abortion. And the media seems to be assisting in the misinformation campaign by repeating the distortion by abortion advocates that this bill requires an “invasive ultrasound.”

For example, ABC News reporter Serena Marshall wrote in her story, “Many women receive abortion very early in their pregnancies, which would mean that, in some cases, a trans-vaginal ultrasound would be required.” Ed Schultz on MSNBC stated that the bill “would require women seeking abortions would require a highly invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound first.” The issue has also come up on Rachel Maddow, The Daily Show, and even Saturday Night Live.

This is the propagation of a malicious misinformation campaign, plain and simple. The truth is that the original bill requires that the ultrasound “shall be made pursuant to standard medical practice in the community.” In other words, abortion providers must follow a basic standard of care. They shouldn’t conduct the ultrasound haphazardly. They shouldn’t fling the abdominal inducer over the woman’s stomach and claim to have “performed” an ultrasound. They simply must conduct the ultrasound in good faith, with professionalism and in a manner that will ensure the woman’s welfare should she choose abortion.

In the meantime, Governor McDonnell has voiced his support of ultrasound legislation, while saying that he would ask state legislators to “clarify” the bill so that abdominal ultrasounds would be the focus of the pending law. On Wednesday, the House passed an amended version that attempts to shut down the unfounded attacks of pro-abortion forces maliciously seeking to destroy the bill which provides life-saving tests for women facing abortion.

Ultrasound is standard medical care. Even Planned Parenthood clinics in Virginia state on their voice message that they perform an ultrasound before an abortion. If women going into Planned Parenthood deserve this level of care, don’t all women who enter any abortion clinic in the state?

The use of false information in the pro-abortion attacks against the legislature and the pro-life governor is unprecedented and seem politically timed. It is one thing to oppose legislation on the merits. But to employ such scare tactics about the impact of life-saving medical exams goes well beyond simple policy disagreement. It is unforgivable.

— Daniel McConchie is Vice President of Government Affairs of Americans United for Life. Mailee R. Smith is a staff attorney for AUL

The New York Times has done a long article about how tea-party types actually rely on government benefit programs, extensively and increasingly. This is a key progressive political argument, and it has engendered a lot of blogospheric commentary. (Some of the best is Will Wilkinson from a libertarian perspective, and Mike Konczal from a progressive perspective.)

Much implicit fun is had in the article at the expense of people who own small businesses or work construction, and self-identify as conservative and as self-reliant — but nonetheless get large government payments for disability support, school lunches, and expensive surgical procedures. Wilkinson is much more humane than the NYT reporters in his reaction to what he calls “ordinary folks who would rather go without government assistance, but are anxiously baffled about how they would manage without it.”

Partially, of course, this bafflement is willful blindness. Like all of us, the people in this story justify their receipt of benefits by focusing on those conceptual parts of these programs that they feel they have earned, without focusing on all of the implicit transfers going on beneath the surface. But these bundled, subterranean (or really, just very complex) transfers of value make this avoidance of reality far easier to do. The various programs of the welfare state serve, purposely or not, to baffle people in just this way. 

This unease is evidence of a problem with the programs, not the people. I think it might be valuable to unbundle these programs in order to enable us to reform and modernize them.

I argue in an upcoming book that each of the major programs of the welfare state — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, unemployment insurance, welfare, etc. — is actually composed of up to five theoretically independent components. First, they often provide a true safety net: a fail-safe provision of consumption of important goods that represents some roughly agreed-upon minimum baseline of existence for any member of the society. Second, they incorporate some element of risk-pooling. Third, they may redistribute wealth beyond what the first two goals require. Fourth, these programs also may require recipients to behave prudently. Fifth, the government may provide relevant goods or services directly. 

Take Social Security as an example. It combines the first four elements: (1) guaranteed provision of some old age income; (2) protection against unforeseen setbacks that might prevent any one of us from having enough money or relatives for subsistence in old age; (3) redistribution through implicitly progressive benefit schedules; and, (4) the requirement that recipients behave prudently by avoiding some consumption today to provide funds for retirement.   

Why not have three separate programs?

First, have a government-sponsored defined-contribution pension program, within which individuals must contribute a reasonable proportion of income (though some flexibility even in amount should be allowed) to an array of retirement investment vehicles to which they hold property rights. As I’ll argue at length in the book, worrying about whether we want to call these highly-regulated private savings accounts, or Social Security accounts within a flexible government program, is mostly a question of semantics. 

Second, much as it does for people of all ages, the government should offer a separate program that provides a safety net for those who end up penniless or nearly so in old age without either private savings, savings under this defined-contribution version of Social Security, or relatives who will offer support. Unlike such a safety net provided to those during working years, it should not have a work requirement. It should also not attempt to replicate the income of those who have prudently saved for retirement, but instead be a true minimum safety net.

Third, if desired, there should be a separate explicit income-redistribution program for the elderly. Whether the government should engage in pure redistribution of wealth for reasons of equity, justice, or other moral concepts beyond the requirements of welfare-system programs is an enormous philosophical question. In practice, the answer partially depends on the specific beliefs and attitudes of the people in any given society. Certainly in contemporary America support for such an idea is limited — this is part of the unease that the people in the NYT story express. But to the extent such redistribution is desired, it should be done explicitly, and outside the vehicle of the welfare system. 

I believe that the same basic approach can be taken to each program in the welfare state. My hope is that this would help to redesign them to be appropriate for the world of 2012–2042, rather than the world of 1935–1965.

Animal rights advocacy taken to a murderous extreme:

(CNN) — A self-proclaimed animal rights activist in Ohio has been charged with soliciting a hit man to kill a random person wearing fur, either by shooting the individual or slitting his or her throat.

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, is accused of creating a phony Facebook profile with the intention of contacting a would-be killer, according to the affidavit filed in an Ohio district court.

Lowell allegedly posted on the social media website the following request: “I would like to create an online community on facebook which would allow me to find someone who is willing to kill someone who is wearing fur toward the end of October 2011 or early November 2011 or possibly in January 2012 or February 2012 at the latest.”

An undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman reached out to the woman and built a case around the ensuing contact. The particulars are grisly. Ms. Lowell wanted the kill to take place at a local library so she could hand out literature on animal cruelty after the fact. She allegedly requested that the hitman bring a knife  “at least four inches long” and “sharp enough to stab someone with and/or to slit their throat to kill them.” But she is not without . . . scruples? Lowell insisted the victim be at least twelve years old and “preferably 14 years or older”. And she emphasized that the victim should be dead “in less than two minutes.”

Disturbing stuff.

The Daily News has more about Lowell’s apparent beliefs about animal liberation:

Reprinted emails also say Lowell wrote that she sees nothing wrong with “liberating” animals from fur factory farms and laboratories since “soldiers liberated people from Nazi camps in World War 2.”

She also criticized a new aquarium in Cleveland – saying “it is wrong for animals to be taken against their will and put into their (equivalent) of a bathtub” – and research by the Cleveland Clinic, where she said animals should be “liberated and put somewhere where they are not tortured.”

The administration’s contraception rule, and subsequent “accommodation,” has been a case study in how to violate the Constitution not with stealth, but with cynicism. But there’s more we can do than simply express outrage. Congress can — and should — kill the rule.

The Congressional Review Act (CRA), which I authored while serving in Congress, gives legislators 60 days to introduce Resolutions of Disapproval to nullify a rule after it has been published. The Resolutions of Disapproval enjoy expedited procedures and therefore serve as the perfect tool for Congress to move expeditiously to make Team Obama’s unconstitutional rule history. The law allows 30 senators to discharge any committee action and bring it to the Senate floor, where it can be passed with a majority vote after no more than five hours of debate.

The House should utilize the CRA to vote on contraception rule immediately, and the Senate should get busy gathering the 30 signatures.

So far, however, congressional leaders have not used the CRA as a way to confront the rule, which is unfortunate. The debate the Obama administration has started with the rule has now moved into the presidential race, and the media is doing its best to focus on the whole thing as the latest installment of culture war they love to cover — and caricature. Meanwhile, Congress has largely avoided making direct contact with what many perceive as a toxic issue that will make achieving other priorities more challenging.

It’s not toxic, though. And we’re not actors in the cartoonish culture war the media wants to talk about. We are rather individuals directly affected by an unconstitutional act by the executive of the United States. That’s what the debate should be about. Congress is in the best position — because of the authority the Constitution gives it, after all — to refocus the debate, and to conduct it swiftly.

— David McIntosh was an Indiana congressman from 1995 to 2001. He is currently running in Indiana’s new 5th congressional district for the U.S. House of Representatives.

First, a correction: In my debate Impromptus today, I cite RMN, whose habitual preface to a statement was “Let me be perfectly clear.” Often, politicians, and other people, have such a preface — a sentence or phrase that allows them to gather their thoughts. In my column, I say, “Another great one was, ‘Let me say this about that.’ I think that was Nixon, too.”

Several readers have written me to say, “Yo, Jay, that was JFK!” Quite right.

I make many points, in these Impromptus, but not as many as I could, because I had a little DVR malfunction — leaving me with my own 18-and-a-half-minute gap (speaking of Nixon). Actually, more like an hour’s gap.

I have since watched some videos, of what took place during that gap, and have a few more points to make. Gluttons for punishment can have them, after the “jump” . . .

Keep reading this post . . .

A couple of notable scientific anniversaries this year:

The Michelson-Morley experiment, the decisive one, was conducted in the spring and summer of 1887, just 125 years ago this year. By any reckoning one of the most important scientific results ever (and replicated many times since), Michelson-Morley established that the speed of light in vacuo is the same in any direction regardless of one’s motion through space, and therefore that there is no such stuff as space. As one of my own professors explained the new understanding to us very helpfully: “Space is what stops everything from being in the same place.”

Alan Turing’s centenary falls on June 23. I shall have much, much more to say about that in a review of George Dyson’s new book in an upcoming issue of National Review.

Well, New Republic senior editor Noam Scheiber is coming out with a book criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the recovery, and one of the apparent revelations is that Christina Romer, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, wanted a much bigger stimulus than they recommended. This is a bit interesting because this isn’t new information. Romer admitted in interviews when she left the White House that she wanted a bigger stimulus; the economic team simply didn’t think Obama would accept a stimulus package that big.

While I haven’t read Scheiber’s book, given he writes for TNR, I’m betting he thinks the $1.8 trillion upper bound Romer really wanted to recommend (about the size Paul Krugman was pushing at the same time) would have pulled the economy out of recession faster. If only politics didn’t get in the way, then perhaps . . . While he admits in his TNR article that the larger number wasn’t going to be adopted, nothing in the tone or discussion even hints at the ineffectiveness of the $800 billion that was spent to no avail.

It should be pretty clear to most practical economists that the $800 billion stimulus didn’t work, and the reason it didn’t work wasn’t because it wasn’t big enough. The spending side of the stimulus equation was designed to expand government and lock state and local governments into higher long-term spending, either by funding new government jobs or expanding programs like Medicaid. The stimulus failed because it was the wrong policy directed at the wrong problems and siphoned through an inept mechanism for implementing anything — government. (See Veronique de Rugy’s critique here and mine here.) Even Obama admitted that nothing was really shovel-ready in government.

The lesson from the failed stimulus is that the economy is not a set of levers that technicians simply need to pull to get the machine rolling again. It doesn’t matter if their name is Krugman, Summers, Romer, or Friedman. The economy is simply too complex to expect that a massive dumping of cash into its gears is going to set everything right again.

Romney today on Santorum’s debate performance last night: “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a politician explain in so many ways why it was that he voted against his principles.”

Old Soviet joke:

Two prisoners are talking in the cattle-wagon headed to Siberia.

Prisoner 1:  What’s your sentence?
Prisoner 2:  Twenty-five years.
Prisoner 1:  What did you do to get twenty-five years?
Prisoner 2:  Nothing!
Prisoner 1:  You’re lying! You expect me to believe that? Everybody knows: For nothing, the sentence is only ten years.

So it is in New Jersey. Dharun Ravi faces ten years’ porridge for having done . . . nothing. Or at worst, if you want to stretch a few points, for having been mildly jerkish. His parents must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars already, and his life has been totally derailed. For nothing.

They’re wrapping up jury selection at New Brunswick. The great engine of the law rumbles on; to what purpose, in this case, I’m damned if I know.

The best explanation I can come up with for this sick farce is that our nation is now so infested with lawyers, the authorities feel they have to find something for them all to do or else they’ll be breaking windows and overturning garbage bins; so every inharmonious incident, at every level, must be litigated to death.

Will the person who ran off with the principle de minimis non curat lex please return it to the front security desk? Thank you.

I agree with much more in E. J. Dionne’s Washington Post column today than I usually do (yes, that’s quite a low bar), but I would like to highlight his gross distortion of what is at stake in the battle over the HHS contraceptive mandate.

Dionne complains that “Republican presidential candidates want to take a disagreement over whether and how contraception should be covered in plans issued under the new health-care law and turn it into a war against religion itself.” That bland description obscures what the actual disagreement is about. It’s not about whether and how contraception should generally be covered in health-insurance plans. It’s about whether employers who have religious objections to providing such coverage — including of contraceptives that also operate as abortifacients and of sterilization — should nonetheless be compelled to.

The HHS mandate, both in its original form that has now been made final as a rule and in its supposedly-to-be-modified-in-some-vague-way-somewhere-down-the-road version, is a patent violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. There simply is no good reason why the Obama administration insists on dragooning employers to facilitate the provision of services they object to on religious grounds, when it could so easily arrange for those services to be provided directly to affected employees.

Obama’s support for the mandate is, to be sure, not “a war against religion itself.” But it is an attack on faithful Catholics and on other Americans who have religious objections to facilitating access to contraceptives, abortifacients, or sterilization. And, as law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen explains, the

whole point [of the attack], it seems, is to override religious objections to such a policy to the maximum extent politically possible, out of an intense ideological commitment to contraception and abortion as “preventive health care.” It is vital, the ideologues say, to prevail over religious objections precisely in order to advance, and permanently entrench, this particular ideology and, further, to vindicate the power of government to impose such policies on everyone. Religious objections must be overcome, in part for the sake of overcoming religious objections.

No American president has ever before waged such an attack. As Paulsen points out, perhaps the best precedent is the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ 2nd-century B. C. decree that all Jews should be forced to publicly eat pork.

Dionne faults Mitt Romney for stating that the Obama administration has “fought against religion.” Again, to be sure, the Obama administration has not fought against all religions. (I suspect that Rev. Jeremiah Wright feels secure.) But it would be churlish to read Romney’s charge so broadly. What the Obama administration has been doing is fighting against traditional religious beliefs and believers.

The HHS mandate is part of a very ugly broader pattern. Take, for example, the Obama administration’s extraordinary claim, rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna-Tabor case last month, that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment afford religious organizations no protections against governmental interference in choosing their faith leaders. Consider also the Obama administration’s initial sabotage of the Defense of Marriage Act and then its outright abandonment of its duty to defend DOMA — all part of a broader effort to stigmatize supporters of traditional marriage as irrational bigots. Add to that the Obama administration’s reduction of religious freedom to a privatized right to worship. And its ideologically driven decision to discontinue funding a Catholic program for victims of sex trafficking. And so much more.

In a recent NRO essay, my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague George Weigel lamented that liberal Catholics, so eager “to play court chaplain to overweening and harshly secularist state power,” have abandoned their own “intellectual patrimony: the truth of religious freedom as the first of human rights.” Dionne, alas, provides a paradigmatic example.

The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?

Take energy. We were long ago lectured by hot-house administration plants, including the president himself, about the desirability of high-cost energy in curbing fossil-fuel use and making subsidized wind and solar power and electric transportation competitive. By midsummer, the technocrats may get their wish with $5 or even $6-a-gallon gas (not quite as high as Secretary Chu may once have wanted). Will they say, “But $7 or $8 would have been more truly European”?

And if we were to go back to the “Clinton tax rates” as the president repeats as a daily mantra, then what? The deficit would not drastically be cut, given the huge rates of borrowing, and the budget would not even come close to being balanced. Would the president then come back with, “We need to raise taxes a lot more than just those pay-your-fair-share Clinton-era rates”?

And Obamacare? Once it passed, there were new taxes leveled to pay for it; health-care premiums are rising; the latest squabble with the Catholic Church reminds us that few Americans had any idea about what was in the 2,000-plus-page bill; and soon Medicare will be trimmed to pay for it. In reaction, will the administration say, “We need a truly comprehensive Obamacare II bill?” or “Next round we will offer you a single-payer plan”? or “We had too little government control the first time around”?

Abroad, what comes after “reset” and “outreach”? Outreach 2.0 in which we issue another four to five deadlines to Iran? Reset 1A in which we reapproach Putin from a different direction, or reopen again the reopened and reclosed embassy in Damascus? Leading from way, way behind?

What comes after “the most transparent” administration in history? No more super PACs or a return to public financing of campaigns — in 2016? The revolving door for only ten departing officials, but not 15? Will there be post-class-warfare with fatter cats, corporate-jet fleet owners, “the 10 percenters,” and lots of points at which you need to stop making money? Alligators, moats — and piranhas? Punish all of our enemies?