The Week

• But it worked so well for Yugo.

• Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita abortionist, was shot and killed at his church on a Sunday, in the presence of his wife. The pro-life movement almost unanimously condemned the deed. The abatement of anti-abortion lawlessness — murders, bombings, mob scenes at abortion mills — has contributed to the measurable public turn against abortion since the early Nineties, for without distraction, the evil of abortion is plainer. A few pro-life zealots weaseled. “There is a Christian scripture that would support this,” said one Dave Leach of Des Moines. There is a Christian scripture that would support anything, if misread by wicked idiots. No Christian can condone murder, as a tool of political action, in a nation of laws. Abraham Lincoln spoke about another holy murderer, John Brown, 150 years ago. “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.” The pro-life movement cannot have a pro-death wing. Tiller’s profession will be put out of business by hard work, votes, and peaceful witness.

• Government Motors? The name has the proper initials, but the connotation is imprecise. It implies that GM became a government-run company only when the feds acquired a 60 percent stake in it as a result of its bankruptcy filing. In fact, Detroit has been a government project for some time now. It is the government that has tasked the Detroit automakers with two expensive missions: a) provide health care, benefits, and high-wage employment to the United Auto Workers union, and b) build the little green cars that President Obama and the Democrats want them to make, and that the American people do not want to buy (at least not from Detroit, while Japan makes them better, for less). In exchange, the government has guaranteed that the Big Three will continue to enjoy implicit and explicit taxpayer support. (Even Ford, the only company that did not take bailout money, is expected to help itself to some of the $25 billion in loans that Congress set aside last year to assist Detroit in retooling for its green future.) The reality is that GM will remain a government-sponsored enterprise even after the government divests itself of its formal ownership stake: Fannie Motors might be a better nom de ridicule.

• Ted Olson, President Bush’s solicitor general and a Federalist Society mainstay, has found a new legal cause: same-sex marriage, which he believes the Constitution requires all states to recognize. He has filed a lawsuit to that effect in federal court with David Boies, his nemesis from Bush v. Gore days. Left-wingers are saying that Olson and Boies are pushing too far too fast, given the state of public opinion. If the Constitution really said what Olson thinks it does, public opinion would have to yield. But he is not correct. Treating marriage as by its nature the union of a man and a woman does not discriminate against homosexuals any more than it discriminates against people who want to form unions of three people. Nobody who ratified the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection meant to keep states from making these distinctions. Olson is a sincere and formidable advocate, but on this issue he ought to lose.

• The Obama administration’s fiscal incontinence has awakened the “bond vigilantes,” investors around the world who are driving up the yields on ten-year Treasuries. They are doing this because they calculate, not without reason, that the current spending spree will aggravate inflation, enfeeble the dollar, and diminish the U.S. government’s creditworthiness. The term “bond vigilante” was coined by economist Ed Yardeni, who wrote, “If the fiscal and monetary authorities won’t regulate the economy, the bond investor will. The economy will be run by vigilantes in the credit markets.” Bonds normally rally during recessions, but the quadrupling of the U.S. deficit has spooked bond buyers, who are wondering where, precisely, President Obama plans to get the $3.25 trillion he will need to cover the budget shortfall this year, and another $1.38 trillion in 2010. Along with the government’s borrowing costs, higher Treasury yields will drive up rates on mortgages and corporate bonds, complicating the recovery in the housing market and the broader economy. The Fed currently is conjuring money out of the vasty deep, and that must have consequences. President Obama came into office believing that he could make the world anew, but he cannot repeal the laws of economics.

• In his speech at the National Archives, President Obama indulged his penchant for rebuking his predecessor even while adopting his counterterrorism policies. The president decried Bush’s policies as an “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.” But the basic principles of Bush administration’s counterterrorism campaign were not designed on the fly: Detaining combatants has been a staple of warfare in every armed conflict America has fought. The strategy, furthermore, was extraordinarily effective (no domestic terror attacks in almost eight years), and it is entirely sustainable — indeed, Obama has sustained its major elements. The real war right now is between Obama’s rhetoric (increasingly hollow repetitions of the Left’s mantra about “torture,” indefinite detention, and the betrayal of “our values”) and his actions (which include targeted assassinations in Pakistan, indefinite detention, and, now, military commissions for al-Qaeda war criminals). Calculatedly, Obama chose to give his speech on the same day the less popular Dick Cheney gave a long-scheduled national-security speech at the American Enterprise Institute, defending the Bush strategy. That Cheney is winning the public debate is not a surprise; that he appears to be winning it within the Obama administration is a welcome one.

Recession Blues

Yale economist Ray Fair has studied the impact of the economy on presidential elections and found that bad economies tend to hurt incumbent parties. Republicans, still smarting from the wounds of last November, know exactly how that process works. Democrats successfully convinced voters that President Bush and his party were to blame for our economic collapse.

Bush certainly deserves some of the blame, but there is plenty to go around. One of the ironies of the last election cycle, in which so much of the map went blue, is that the states that have done the most to hurl the nation into recession have been blue historically. The nearby chart adds intriguing “color” to that observation.

The chart plots the average unemployment rate in April for different categories of blue and red states. The first bar gives the average unemployment rate in April for “reliably” Democratic states, defined as those that have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the 1980s. The average unemployment rate in these states was a whopping 9 percent. The remaining bars show that unemployment is less severe in states that only recently began taking Democratic medicine.

The next three bars tell a strikingly different story. The first red bar shows the average for states that switched to the Republican side in the 2000s. Unemployment in these states is a tad below the national average.

The second red bar shows the average unemployment rate in states that switched to red in the 1990s. Unemployment in these states is now well below the national average. The third red bar shows the average for states that have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s. Think of these as the “super reliable” red states. The average unemployment rate in these states stood at only 6.7 percent.

States that are traditionally Republican have avoided the worst of this recession. The longer a state has been taking Republican medicine, the better off it is. The contrast between the two patterns could hardly be more noticeable. If Republican policies have been vitamins, Democratic policies have been poison.

The economic data suggest that Democratic policies effectively spread human misery. President Obama now has the political power to do for the nation what Democrats have done to California.

The only consolation is that Professor Fair’s model will quite reliably predict political and policy reversals as the economic misery spreads across our nation.

— KEVIN A. HASSETT

• The timing was regrettable (or fortunate, depending on your perspective), but just as President Obama, in his National Archives speech, broached the possibility of transferring terrorist detainees to U.S. prisons in order to achieve his goal of closing Gitmo by year’s end, the FBI in New York announced the arrests of four Muslim men, at least some of whom had been radicalized during stints in American jails. They were charged with engaging in a terrorist conspiracy to fire missiles at the U.S. Air National Guard base in Newburgh and bomb synagogues in the Bronx. The government can try to purge terms such as “jihad” and “Islamofascism” from our lexicon, but the threat is not going away — something we would understand better if we spent more time focusing on the hate ideology that drives it and less time on Gitmo and other “symbols” over which the Left, in its determination to blame America first, obsesses.

• Jon Corzine’s governorship of New Jersey has veered from one crash to another (sometimes literally, as when his state-trooper-driven SUV hit a guardrail going 90 miles an hour). As he runs for reelection, he seems eager to change the subject from his tax-and-spend record to his opponent’s alleged resemblance to George W. Bush. That opponent will be former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, a moderate conservative who just won the Republican primary against a more conservative rival. That rival, former Bogota mayor Steve Lonegan, was more specific in his indictment of the effects of decades of misgovernment on the state economy. Christie should borrow some of his lines, which would help unify the party and put the race into focus for independent voters. Christie’s platform is vague, but to the right of previous Republican governors such as Christine Todd Whitman. If he wins in New Jersey, the effect will be seismic.

• California has historically been a good place to start a tax revolt. The 1978 passage of Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and contained language requiring a two-thirds majority for any tax increase, prompted similar measures in other states and heralded the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But we doubt the defeat of Proposition 1A last month signifies a similar sea change. Californians have voted down a tax increase, but that won’t mean much if the state simply borrows the money from Washington, which in turn borrows it from all of us. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after years of his own overspending, has proposed a list of deep spending cuts, including the elimination of 5,000 state jobs and a 5 percent pay reduction for the remaining employees. But he faces recalcitrant Democratic majorities in the state legislature that refuse to stand up to government-employee unions. If California cannot resolve its budget impasse by July, it will run out of cash, and the Obama administration will not likely allow it to default. Californians want low taxes, but they also seem to want a government they can’t afford.

• Sen. Roland Burris (D., Ill.) wants you to know that he did not pay for his seat, and he didn’t, but is that enough? Burris was taped by feds investigating former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (who has since been indicted) on corruption charges. The aspiring solon had a seven-minute conversation with Robert B., the governor’s brother and fundraiser, last November, in which he made a number of points. First: “I want to help Rod.” Second: If he held a fundraiser, “then Rod and I [are] both going to catch hell.” Third: “I might be able to do this in the name of [Burris’s law partner].” Fourth: “I hope I get a consideration to get that appointment.” Senator Burris says he did not in fact hold or inspire any fundraisers, so what’s the problem? Only that he testified, early this year, to the Illinois legislature that he had not talked with Blago’s minions about paying for the seat, or even about the seat itself. Which could be perjury, which is certainly par for the course in Illinois.

• Maryland has discovered that you can try to soak the rich, but the rich know how to swim across the Potomac. Faced with a budget shortfall, Maryland’s state legislators enacted a higher tax bracket for millionaires — 6.25 percent on top of federal and local taxes. One-third of Maryland’s millionaires vanished from the tax rolls, many seeking haven in Virginia, Delaware, and Florida. The result: Even with the higher rate, Maryland is now collecting $100 million a year less from the guys in monocles and top hats. Capital is mobile. So are capitalists.

• The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reports that America’s out-of-wedlock birthrate hit a record high in 2007, when nearly 40 percent of all births were to unmarried women. In 2002, the rate was about 33 percent. The recent increase has been particularly sharp among Hispanics, America’s largest and fastest-growing minority group. In 2007, more than 50 percent of all Hispanic births were out of wedlock. Republican advocates of open immigration frequently tell us that Latinos are a “natural constituency” of the GOP, given their religious faith and conservative values. But the NCHS figures suggest they are adopting the worst cultural habits of the American underclass. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that “69 percent of first-generation Latino children live in married-couple families, compared with 73 percent of second-generation children and just 52 percent in the third generation or higher.” Make no mistake: Nonmarital births are concentrated in the bottom half of the income scale. If the trend continues, American society could become alarmingly polarized.

• The Obama Justice Department filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to let stand a ruling that denies 17 Uighurs — Muslims from Chinese Turkestan — a right to be released into the United States. Human-rights activists howled that Obama was betraying his commitment to close Gitmo by year’s end. The move nonetheless heartened much of the public — the great majority of which recoils at the notion of trained jihadists’ living in their midst. But the Justice Department’s brief studiously avoided mention of the immigration statute that prohibits granting entry to aliens who have been affiliated with terrorist organizations or have received terrorist training. That is, it declined to acknowledge any limitations on the administration’s power to admit jihadists into the United States. The plan to close Gitmo hinges on persuading other countries to take some of the detainees off our hands — which, the administration reasons, will not happen unless we are willing to resettle some here. Maybe those left-wing activists have not been betrayed after all.

• Career prosecutors at the Justice Department went after some Obama supporters in the New Black Panther Party following shocking allegations that those supporters had intimidated voters with threats, racial epithets, and a nightstick. The Washington Times reported that Justice even secured an affidavit from poll watcher Bartle Bull, a former Bobby Kennedy aide and longtime civil-rights activist, who witnessed three uniformed NBPP members confronting and intimidating voters with that nightstick. Bull related that one Panther told a white poll watcher, “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.” In all his experience, Bull added, he had never seen “another instance in the United States where armed and uniformed men blocked the entrance to a polling location.” Justice won the case because the defendants ignored the complaint. Then Obama’s political appointees stepped in. Shortly after career prosecutors began seeking penalties based on the default, Attorney General Eric Holder’s subordinates directed that the cases against two of the defendants be dropped. A third was merely ordered to refrain from displaying a weapon near a polling place for the next three years. Where is Congress? Can it be roused only by imaginary politicization of the Justice Department?

• “We expected broken promises,” writes Ted Rall, left-wing cartoonist. “But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory.” Rall cites a number of examples, from not recognizing the Armenian genocide to holding on to Gitmo detainees, then concludes that Obama “ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.” Laugh if you like. But remember that the late R. W. Apple called Afghanistan, in October 2001, a “quagmire.” The Left rarely sees a problem it will not flee, if flight brings difficulty or discredit to America. They are single-minded, and tireless — as Obama, a former trouper, must know.

• “From behind a burning bus barricade Saturday night comes the gunfire of soldiers advancing toward Tiananmen Square.” So 20 years ago Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal began her account of what is now remembered in China as “June 4.” “People snatch up bricks and bottles, their only weapons against the guns of their country’s own army. . . . Bullets ricochet off the stone walls that line the road.” Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms had been accompanied by a measure of free speech, but by the spring of 1989, students, workers, and ordinary people had taken it to levels the regime could not tolerate. “As the crowd falls back again, a man in thick spectacles stops a Western reporter. . . . ‘Terrible,’ he says. ‘Very terrible.’” The final target of the crackdown was Tiananmen Square, in the heart of Beijing, with its makeshift statue of the Goddess of Democracy. Perhaps 2,600 people died that night; hope for political reform died with them. “If China’s democratic uprising has achieved nothing else, it has at least flushed into view the naked shape of China’s Communist Party.” It did; it still does. Remember.

• North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon and test-fired long-range missiles, shattering more than two years of U.S.-led diplomacy. This was Pyongyang’s second nuclear test; the first occurred in October 2006. The Bush administration responded to that first blast by softening its approach to Kim Jong Il and embarking on protracted negotiations, which yielded a massive new aid package for the Communist regime, an easing of sanctions, and North Korea’s removal from the U.S. blacklist of state terror sponsors. This approach exasperated the Japanese, and has now failed utterly. Rather than rely on China to cajole its client (an approach that has been tried without result), the U.S. should squeeze North Korea’s finances and boost inspections of its ships. We hope that President Obama will also rethink his decision to slash funding for the Missile Defense Agency. The Hermit Kingdom remains as inscrutable as ever, but there is evidence that a political transition is under way. Clamping down on Pyongyang’s cash flow remains the best way to maximize our (admittedly limited) leverage.

• The Parliament expenses scandal in Britain has claimed victims in all the major parties, yet David Cameron and the Tories seem to have been the least affected — in part because Cameron cracked down hard on malefactors in his own ranks, in part because the stink of the status quo clings to Labour, the party in power for twelve years. European Union elections shortly after NR goes to press will show which way the wind is blowing; one last-minute poll, for the Times of London, had the Tories first at 30 percent and the UKIP (an anti-EU party) second at 19 percent, with Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Greens trailing. However the parties do this month, they will field many new faces for the next parliamentary election, which must be held before June 2010. Britain, wrote journalist Amir Taheri, “may not experience a classical revolution with barricades. . . . However, it is certain to witness a major re-shuffle of the political elite with a new prime minister, new government, and a House of Commons where, for the first time since 1945, a majority of members will be newcomers.”

• President Obama has led many to think that he would favor the Palestinians at the expense of Israel, and sure enough, here comes evidence for it. According to Hillary Clinton, Obama is asking for a total stop to every kind of Israeli settlement on the West Bank. About 300,000 Israelis live there, and they are now supposed not to build so much as an extra room on their houses. Weakness or indecision could bring down the fractious Israeli coalition government, and Obama is happy to be putting prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the spot. West Bank Israelis look to Netanyahu for support; the electorate by and large would not stand for stringent measures to contain the settlers’ presence (not to speak of measures to reduce it, as in the Gaza Strip). Obama is treating West Bank settlement as the cause of Middle East unrest, when in reality it is only a minor symptom. Netanyahu is putting forward the alternative proposition, that Iran’s nuclear development is the issue that will determine the future of the region, and that Obama should not allow himself to be distracted from the threat emanating from Tehran. Either way, a storm is on the horizon.

• The Pakistani army has driven the Taliban out of the Swat Valley and recaptured Mingora, the one sizable town there. Some Taliban leaders have been killed, and others have fled to the mountains of Waziristan, where they may still be pursued. Critics liked to maintain that the Pakistani army was trained only for warfare with India, but it evidently has adapted well to this insurgency, losing few men and killing some 1,200 Taliban fighters (out of an estimated 5,000). The Taliban has made the same mistakes in Pakistan as it did in Afghanistan. It murdered in the name of sharia law, blew up schools, terrorized women and girls, and press-ganged young men and even boys. Many hundreds of thousands of refugees — some say 2 million or more — took to the roads to escape, and are now in refugee camps. Threatening to extend its campaign to the whole country, the Taliban has sent suicide bombers into Lahore, Peshawar, and Islamabad. Public opinion has now set massively and even violently against it. Pakistanis have had enough; just in time, too.

• Years ago, Rep. Nancy Pelosi was a high-profile advocate of human rights in China. She is from San Francisco; there are Chinese Americans there. Now she is Speaker Nancy Pelosi — exalted. And she has bigger fish to fry. At the beginning of the new administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that human rights in China would be on the back burner, if there. Speaker Pelosi is following suit. Recently she was in China to talk up global warming. The Associated Press had a headline that said, “Pelosi Dodges Human Rights on China Visit.” Pelosi retorted, “Protecting the environment is a human-rights issue.” Which will certainly be comforting news to Chinese democrats in dungeons and camps.

• As the Associated Press informed us, “Fidel Castro criticized former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for defending American interrogation methods against terror suspects, saying . . . that torture should never be used to extract information.” That’s right: It should be practiced for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it.

• One by one, the lights have gone out in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela; there is almost none left. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and politician, has tried to provide some light. He traveled to Venezuela to participate in a pro-democracy forum. He was detained at the airport for over an hour, and told that, as a foreigner, he had no right to make political comments while in the country. Vargas Llosa retorted that “nobody can put limits on free thinking.” Later, Chávez went so far as to challenge Vargas Llosa and other critics to a debate — and then backed down. At a summit in April, President Obama called Chávez his friend — “mi amigo.” But Chávez is no friend to democracy, freedom, or dignity.

• Ayman Nour is a brave man, and as a democrat and opposition leader in Egypt he needs to be. A lawyer, and the founder and head of the al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party, he ran in the 2005 election against Hosni Mubarak, who has been running Egypt by emergency decree for over 20 years. In the circumstances, Nour’s bid was hardly more than a symbolic gesture, but Mubarak made sure to send him to prison for four years. Released this February, Nour has petitioned Mubarak to lift restrictions on his civil and political rights. Then he declared that he would run for president again in 2011. The very next day, someone on a motorbike rode up to him in the street, identified him by name, and fired an improvised flame-thrower. Nour’s forehead, the side of his face, and much of his hair were burned. The attack was probably timed to coincide with President Obama’s much-heralded June visit to Cairo. “In an authoritarian regime like ours you cannot know the reasons why things like this happen,” says Nour, giving proof that his courage has not been even lightly singed.

• Benno Ohnesorg was a model young German in the legendary Sixties: a hippie, pacifist, and poetry lover, naturally antifa (the lingo of that day for “anti-fascist”). The poor fellow went to a demonstration in Berlin in 1967 against the visiting shah of Iran, then a villain for everyone like Benno. Nobody quite knows whether by accident or on purpose a policeman named Karl-Heinz Kurras shot him dead. Two tribunals exonerated Kurras. The Left, including the Baader-Meinhof gang and other terrorists, came to believe that Benno was a victim of the capitalist state, revealed in all its ugliness. But researchers have just discovered from the archives that Kurras was not a lackey of the West German ruling class after all, but beginning in 1955 a clandestine member of the East German Communist Party, and more than that, an agent of the Stasi, their secret police. Eighty-one now and still a resident of Berlin, Kurras is unashamed, asking, “What if I did work for them?” Well, for one thing, the Stasi manipulated public opinion and the Left was royally duped; and for another, without it post-war Germany might have been less troubled in finding its identity.

• Tens of thousands died in Buchenwald, one of the most infamous Nazi concentration camps, and it is right for President Obama, or indeed anyone, to go there in commemoration. But it is not all right for anyone in an official or representative position like the president’s to visit Dresden during the same trip and for the same purpose. In February 1945, Stalin asked for a large-scale air raid on Dresden and its railheads, to relieve the pressures on the Red Army held up in Hungary. The Dresden firestorm followed. Something like 20,000 people died; for propaganda purposes Goebbels built this figure up by a factor of ten. The indiscriminate targeting of civilians, though practiced to one degree or another by all of the belligerents in World War II, is wrong, and we should be glad the civilized nations subsequently abandoned and condemned this tactic. But the president’s itinerary, implying as it does an equivalence between the Nazis and the Allies who saved the world from them, is a failure of diplomacy, intellect, and morals.

• Queen Elizabeth was not invited to the ceremony marking D-Day this year — it is the 65th anniversary. The snub, as you doubtless have guessed, was thanks to France. According to reports, the lady was quite miffed at her exclusion. May she find consolation in Great Britain’s healthy relations with another nation that did not surrender to Germany — and by the inspiring speeches its president so thoughtfully placed in the iPod he gave her.

• There are few sounds more pleasing to the conservative ear than the clang of colliding liberal pieties. Consider the recent case of Michaëlle Jean, governor-general of Canada, which is to say, viceroy under Queen Elizabeth of England, Canada’s head of state. Jean incarnates an unusual quantity of politically correct essences, being black, female, and an immigrant (from Haiti to Canada when aged eleven). On an official tour of a far northern region inhabited mainly by Eskimos, she participated enthusiastically in a traditional folk ceremony associated with the main source of local income. Unfortunately that source is seal hunting, and the ceremony involved eating a sliver of raw meat from the heart of a young seal Jean had just helped to butcher. We wish we could tell you that she had personally clubbed the seal to death before gutting it, preferably in front of a platoon of keening Greenpeace activists; but alas, this is not recorded. We’ll take what we can get, though, and wait with interest to see how Sarah Palin will react to having been upstaged like this.

• Pastor David Jones and his wife, Mary, hold a regular dinner and Bible study in their Bonita, Calif., home. One day, Mrs. Jones found the fuzz on her doorstep. “Do you say ‘Amen’?” asked a San Diego County code-enforcement officer. “Do you pray?” “Do you say ‘Praise the Lord’?” Mrs. Jones pleaded “guilty” on all three counts. Someone visiting a neighbor had complained of the cars on the street. The Joneses were later notified that they would have to “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit” — which could cost them tens of thousands of dollars. Religious-rights lawyers stepped up to support the Joneses. One blasted the county’s “KGB tactics” and said, “Government agents have no place questioning American citizens about how they choose to worship in their home.” Another said, “If the county thinks they can shut down groups of ten or fifteen Christians meeting in a home, what about people who meet regularly at home for Poker Night? What about people who meet for Tupperware parties?” and so on. We imagine that, in San Diego County — one of the most beautiful and serene places in America — there is not a lot of major crime. But surely the county’s fuzz have something better to do than harass David and Mary Jones.

• Elizabeth Dean was nine weeks old when the Titanic, which was taking her and her family to America, sank off Newfoundland. The infant, her two-year-old brother, Bertram Jr., and her mother, Georgetta, were saved. Her father, Bertram, died. Miss Dean (who used the first name Millvina) led a quiet life, working as a secretary in Southampton, the port from which the Titanic sailed. She never made much of her link to the disaster until James Cameron’s blockbuster movie came out, and she used her history to pay her modest bills. She would not watch the film all the way to the end, however, lest it provoke sad thoughts about her father’s death. Dead now herself at 97, the wreck’s last survivor. R.I.P. So time sinks even pain, deeper than the great ship.

• We always welcome encouraging signs on the pop-culture front, and the new ABC series from Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, is one such sign. Called The Goode Family, the show lampoons an upper-class liberal household. The premiere featured obvious gags about organic food and racial sensitivity, but there were plenty of Judge’s trademark subtler jokes, too: A briefly seen reusable grocery bag bears the moniker “An Inconvenient Bag,” and the family dog’s name is Che. TV series come and go, but Judge has a history of keeping his shows interesting — Hill stayed on the air for 13 seasons, and its recent cancellation drew many protests from die-hard fans. We hope and expect to laugh at the Goodes for a long while.

• Do blondes have more fun? Not when brunettes have more money. That’s the lesson to be learned from the news that Archie Andrews, of Archie comics fame, now in his twenties and a college graduate, has plighted his middle-class troth with wealthy Veronica Lodge instead of flaxen-haired girl-next-door Betty Cooper. The choice was a difficult one, though it is a dilemma we suspect most bachelors would gladly face: Both women are beautiful, spirited, and shapely as only a comic-book siren can be; and both have, with inexplicable loyalty, remained stuck on the decidedly nebbishy Archie through half a decade of Kierkegaard, cigarettes, and college boyfriends. We feel sorry for Betty, but she should have seen this coming: Push comes to shove, you can make a brunette blonde a lot easier than you can make a poor girl rich. Yet somehow it seems unlikely that the last panel of the Archie/Veronica/Betty story has been written, so we await further developments. Our advice to Archie: Find a posher place to take her than Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe. And to Veronica: Get a pre-nup.

• The self-taught intellectual used to be an American type. Now the country has one fewer. Richard Nadler, 60, was a high-school dropout and musician. In the 1980s he became a conservative activist, working to promote school choice, phonics, and low taxes. He wrote books on Phil Gramm, Pat Buchanan, and feticide in Jewish law. (He had turned Orthodox.) In his last years he developed theories about how the conservative movement could find new recruits among blacks, Hispanics, and small investors, and worked to put those theories into practice. He also occasionally contributed to NR. His wife, Barbara, indulged him in all of these “unremunerative hobbies,” as he once called them. He died suddenly, working at his computer. R.I.P.

Consent Denied

The case for confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is nearly as damning as the case against her. Listen to her defenders. They say that she would be the first Latina justice, and that Republicans should therefore tremble before voting against her. They point to no flashes of brilliance in her legal opinions, presumably because there are none. They do not claim that she has distinguished herself by her fidelity to the law, presumably because neither she nor they think in these terms.

Identity politics has not proven an unalloyed boon for this nomination. The White House had to do damage control following a controversy over Sotomayor’s claim, made in a speech and a law-review article, that the richness of Hispanic women’s experiences could help them make better decisions than white male judges would. Her language was imprecise — for example, she described impartiality as an “aspiration” before questioning whether it was either possible or desirable — yet her meaning was clear. Obnoxious in theory, her claim was also untrue in practice. We doubt that there is a single decision Sotomayor has made that could be better explained by her ethnicity and sex than by her conventional liberalism.

Conventional liberalism these days sees the judge’s task as the imposition of the most left-wing policies he can get away with. It is that judicial lawlessness that ought to be the main topic of hearings on Sotomayor’s confirmation. The Constitution binds all of us, judges no less than citizens, because it is duly enacted law. When judges twist its provisions to mean something other than what they were enacted to mean, they abuse their office and weaken the rule of law. They also, not infrequently, damage our economy, endanger our national security, and undermine our values. Those effects of judicial self-aggrandizement ought to be on the senators’ agenda as well.

Republican senators should press for a long debate. They should show Sotomayor procedural fairness at every turn, and examine her record and her views with civility. Barring some shocking revelation, she is going to be confirmed. Let it be without conservatives’ consent.