Freedom

That's when the value of the Chinese economy will reach $19 trillion annually, shading ours by a few billion in petty cash. A decade ago, the Chinese economy was only a fraction of the size of America's. That was before we shipped our factories to China and the Democrats and Republicans in Washington discovered they could borrow money with abandon from the Chinese to finance FDR's famous formula of "spend and spend, elect and elect."

This news of imminent Chinese economic superiority -- the triumph of Adam Smith over Karl Marx -- should arm the old men in Beijing with the confidence to tolerate the growth of religious faith in their midst. But on Easter Sunday, the government turned the observance of Easter into the Chinese fire drill of yore and lore.

The banging and clanging of public debate, particularly over President Obama’s attempt to impose a welfare state with the gassy bloat held so dear on the Continent, makes European teeth itch. And not just the Europeans actually in Europe.

It’s the way Americans make free with free speech – rich, robust and occasionally over the top – as if they were armed with a Constitution that guarantees them the right to say whatever pops into their heads, nice or not.

Juan Williams, once a distinguished commentator for National Public Radio and now a distinguished flinger of opinions for Fox News, learned this when he made the commonsensical observation that he gets nervous when he sees a group of men in Muslim regalia follow him aboard an airliner. A sense of self-preservation, after all, is the strongest human impulse, stronger even than hunger. Why should we expect Mr. Williams to react any differently than any other American in such a situation? But he was fired nonetheless for making free with his free speech.

What we suffer in America, observes Michael Kinsley in Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily, is an excess of umbrage, the demand for apology when someone is insulted, thinks he has been insulted, or when someone says something he doesn’t like. “Umbrage,” Mr. Kinsley writes, “is the engine that moves election campaigns and the fodder that feeds the media’s politics maw.”

The fixers here are pursuing something called “net neutrality,” which will change the way certain Internet providers pay for privileged rights to the Web, and charge their customers accordingly. “Net neutrality” sounds good to anyone not paying attention, but it must be accomplished by a seizure of authority to do so, a seizure not by Congress (which would be scary enough), but by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Anyone paying attention can see how this would be a first step toward revival of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, sought by Barack Obama and the Democrats since he first arrived in Washington. The Fairness Doctrine would require broadcasters, definitely including the cable-TV networks, to provide air time for anyone criticized by someone else on the air. That, too, sounds good to the inattentive and the well-meaning. What could be nicer than never having to hear anyone say discouraging things about you?

Some of the true believers in Arabia say the mosque is a conspiracy hatched by the Jews to set out a clear and permanent connection between Sept. 11 and Islam, a constant reminder of an attack on America led by devout Muslims. Dr. Abd al-Muti Bayumi, a prominent fellow of the Islamic Research Academy of Al Azhar, sometimes regarded as "the Vatican of Sunni Islam," says the construction of a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero is the child of a "devious mentality" to connect the dots of Sept. 11 and Islam, to stoke memories of barbarism in the name of Islam.

Another Arab notability, Dr. Amna Nazir, a professor of doctrine and philosophy at Al Azhar, calls "building a mosque on this rubble indicates bad intention — even if we wished to shut our eyes, close our minds and insist on good will." These are not the empty sentiments of good will and sensitivity so beloved of the girly men of the West. They're statements of concern that "Zionist conspiracy" aid in construction of the Ground Zero mosque will ultimately damage Islam. Dr. Bayumi, for one, preaches suicidal jihad to demonstrate that his heart is in the wrong place: "I say in all honesty that we recruit the people of Islam, and instill in them the spirit of the true jihad, which is death for the sake of Allah, for the sake of our faith."

Here he was on Friday night last, speaking about the Ground Zero mosque to a dinner at the White House celebrating Ramadan: “Let me be clear: As a citizen and as president I believe that Muslims have the same right . . . to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan . . . This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

Who argues with that? But here he was the next day, when reporters accompanying him to his dip in the Gulf of Mexico asked him about his Ramadan remarks: “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.”

His assistants with the big knives no longer try to disguise what they’re about. No more empty assurances that they’re merely taking out a swollen appendix or tightening a droopy eyelid. It’s time to carve, slash and slice.

Dr. Obama had to use a little presidential sleight of hand to get his surgeons in place, to appoint Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services before even the dopiest Democrat in the Senate figured out who Doc Berwick really is, and learn that he’s got the itch to issue a rationing book to one and all as the first order of government health care.

You can't blame Mzz Kagan for playing possum. Anyone with a hint of judicial savvy has done it since the Democrats treated Robert Bork to a low-tech lynching in 1987 for his politically incorrect view of the Constitution. This was followed four years later by the attempted high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas, who wouldn't tug his forelock like a grateful field hand as the liberal Democrats expected as their due. Playing possum - pretending to be dead when the hounds come baying - is the only survival strategy available to nominees.

The Bork hearings were the last to resemble even a semblance of the original intent to use the hearings to discuss the Constitution and the nominee's views on law, procedure and the philosophy of a constitution written in plain English. (It's the plain English that stumps lawyers.) The Thomas hearings quickly descended into a comedy about uppity black Republicans, feminist sexual fantasies and pubic hairs on a Coke can. Mr. Bork's name became a verb, as in "to bork a nominee with malicious irrelevancies," which is useful for compilers of dictionaries but, like the tarred-and-feathered man being ridden out of town on a rail in Lincoln's famous homily, an honor Mr. Bork would have been happy to decline.

Bringing back the good times, a fantasy not so long ago, won't be easy, but the community is taking baby steps on a long journey to prosperity. The past, like a long, sleepy summer's afternoon, hangs heavy in Helena. Seven men from Helena became Confederate generals, and from Graveyard Hill you can sometimes hear the ghosts of a fierce two-day battle for Helena and control of the river in July 1863. The traffic on the river mostly passes Helena by now, and boarded-up shop windows and vacant lots line the downtown streets. More than a third of Helena's residents live below the poverty level. Every schoolchild is enrolled in the discounted or free school lunch program, and for many it's the best meal of the day.

Helena's woes are not unique in the Delta, where the blues, after all, were born. (Helena, population 15,000, comes to life for a boisterous weekend in October with the Delta blues festival, which sometimes attracts 100,000 visitors.) The region has all but emptied of whites, who followed the blacks who struck out for St. Louis and Chicago and other places decades ago. The poorest of the poor, nearly all black, are left in towns deep in the embrace of poverty, despair and kudzu, only shells of what they once were.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was their ability to write the Constitution in the plain English that everybody could understand. Lawyers can employ entire boring paragraphs to say "good morning;" many young women have dozed off while their lawyer swains were on their knees with a proposal of marriage.

A good lawyer, or even a bad one, can put loopholes in any proposal. To wit, Elena Kagan's explanation of the First Amendment. It's perfectly OK, she wrote in the University of Chicago Law Review, for the government to restrict free speech as long as it means well. The word "restrictions" sounds bad, like an uncomfortable leather restraint, but Mzz Kagan's "redistribution of speech" sounds benign, like free cheese. Who doesn't like cheese? She argued that the government can employ Orwellian restrictions on certain speech if it thinks such speech might "harm" others, either by direct action or inciting someone else to take direct action. Who gets to decide when such restrictions are imposed for the greater good? Why, the government, of course.