Big Government

Besides, neither of these guys (or their writers) will ever remind anyone of Bob Hope or Rodney Dangerfield. But Paul Ryan, with his knowledge of budgets and how they work and the consequences when they don’t work, might open the conversation everyone says he or she wants but so far nobody will seriously engage in.

Economics is rightly called “the dismal science,” and boring economists have been known to put their lady loves to sleep during marriage proposals. But Paul Ryan is that rare economist who makes a discussion of price signals, third-party payers and premium-support systems actually understandable and even interesting.

He has the first tool of every successful salesman: he knows the territory. The last man in Washington with a similar understanding of numbers and how to crunch them was Wilbur Mills, the small-town Arkansas banker who was once suggested as the running mate to lend gravitas to Teddy Kennedy. Mr. Mills actually kept a copy of the budget on his bedside table for bedtime reading. “Sparkle Plenty and the bag man,” one wag famously described the duo.

No one has yet described Mitt Romney as Sparkle Plenty, and Paul Ryan is a serious and sober family man but no less addicted to numbers and crunching. If American voters who go on at length about yearning for a campaign about serious stuff actually mean it, they’ve finally got it. This is the opportunity wrought by crisis that must not go to waste.

R&R, as they’re already being called, must forego the distractions and diversions the mainstream media, with their attention span of fruit flies, is eager to supply. Gaffes, even when they aren’t gaffes, are what most campaign correspondents most readily understand.

The Obama campaign is furiously at work to define Mr. Ryan as Darth Vader, given to invading nursing homes by night to kidnap 90-year-old ladies in wheelchairs to push them off cliffs, often with the connivance of the media. Candy Crowley of CNN, announced Monday as the moderator for a presidential debate, says the Ryan choice “looks a little bit like some sort of ticket death wish, that, oh my, do we really want to talk about these things?”

Yes, we do, because we must. All the pols, beginning with Barack Obama and Joe Biden and including all the little Democrats, agree that we should, and talk about “these things.” Mr. Romney and his new running mate are equipped to keep the discussion focused precisely where the president, despite his boilerplate assurances, does not want the discussion to go. The Republicans could adopt as mantra that their campaign is precisely about “saving Medicare.”

If they play defense, politely reminding voters that Republicans are not as bad as they think, they lose. The choice of Paul Ryan suggests loud and fairly clear that Mitt Romney, heretofore the usual timid Republican, understands that. “There’s only one president I know of who robbed Medicare,” he told CBS News on Sunday, “$716 billion to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare.”

He repeated the assurance to seniors, a reassurance that must be repeated a thousand times between now and Nov. 6 to allay the fears of the fragile. and sometimes greedy, that the reforms crucial to saving Medicare won’t apply to anyone over 55. Mr. Ryan took pains to say to CBS that his mother “is a Medicare senior in Florida.” (CBS, for whatever reason, edited this out of the broadcast.)

He also took pains to remind everyone that the reforms would be his, his budgets would be his. He even sent out a senior aide to remind reporters that “President Romney will be putting forward his own budget.” Just so. But there can be no running away from the point of the reforms and innovations of the Ryan budget. Mr. Romney will be tarred with that brush, anyway.

Everyone knows the inevitable awaits. Mitt Romney put down his bet that he, with Paul Ryan’s help, can persuade Americans to put aside, if only briefly, the trivia of a culture obsessed with celebrity and entertainment and drunk on entitlement. Greece lies at the bottom of that cliff, and there is no love among the ruins.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

If his new aggressiveness lasts, it's a sign of good things to come in November. Defense wins football games, but only offense wins elections. Republicans, who instinctively prefer drawing-room niceness, often have trouble getting their heads around that.

Instead of continuing to playing the sucker in the Bain blame game, endlessly trying to explain away his success in making money - which has always been the national pastime - the Republican challenger is finally taking the fight to the president, taking due note of what a new campaign commercial calls “a perverted form of crony capitalism during his first 3 1/2 years in office - to the detriment of the American middle class.”

“This is a tough time for the people of America,” Mr. Romney told a Fox television interviewer. “But if you are a campaign contributor to Barack Obama your business may stand to get billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from the government. I think it's wrong. I think it stinks to high heaven, and I think the administration has to explain how it is they would consider giving money to campaign contributors' businesses.”

This burst of aggressiveness followed one of his best speeches so far, to the national convention of the NAACP, telling the delegates bluntly why he intends to repeal Obamacare. Nevertheless, he said, he and not Barack Obama is really the One they have been waiting for. “If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him.” No cheers, but when the scattered booing subsided, he pressed on: “You take a look.”
This beats by a mile repetition of trivia, reprising stale talking points and, most of all, it beats repeating demands for apologies for the assorted libels, defamations and slanders that are the standard fare of political campaigns. Nobody this side of state prison likes being called a felon (and felons don't like it much, either) and when an Obama campaign aide said that Mr. Romney was “either a liar or a felon” for his explanation of how he filled out certain reporting documents about his employment at Bain, Mr. Romney was right to call her out on it. But then it was time to let it go. Apologies are for sissies and they’re rarely sincere, anyway.

We’re becalmed in the midsummer doldrums, when political speech rarely impresses voters, if indeed any are listening. But fighting speech fires up the troops that Mr. Romney must count on to win.

Tom Davis, the former congressman who is an honorary chairman of the Romney campaign in Virginia, observes that the doldrums are the time to fill up space because “if you don't fill it, the other campaign will.” Kenneth Cuccinelli, the attorney general of Virginia, tells David Sherfinski of The Washington Times that the change in Mr. Romney may reflect not tougher, but smarter. “I think Gov. Romney is by nature a nicer guy than you're used to seeing in politics.” Perhaps, but nice guys, as baseball legend Leo Durocher famously said, finish last.

There will be time later for speech more substantial than name-calling. The president's proposed cuts in defense spending will be one of them; Mr. Romney promised during the primary campaign that he intends to reverse “the hollowing out of the Navy.” When crisis calls, every president first dispatches the Navy's carriers, which now number 11.

Not only is the Navy being “hollowed out,” but, like the other services, its fighting spirit is being crippled by politically correct admirals ever ready to retreat at the first sound of grunts and squeaks by feminists, gays and powder-puff warriors.

Only this week, the Navy announced that it would not outfit its newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, with urinals. “Heads,” as the Navy calls shipboard latrines, must be redesigned to accommodate the ladies. “Gender-neutral bathing,” the Navy says, will insure “comfort” aboard the carriers. The sight of a urinal on the wall might offend feminist delicacy. The chief of naval operations must make sure the swabbies put down the toilet seat before they leave the gender-neutral head, and the only solution might be an order, backed by threat of drumhead court-martial, for everyone to take a seat. Hollowed-out Navy, indeed.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

We’re all terrorists now.

The Department of Homeland Security, ever on the scout for opportunities to blow taxpayer money, commissioned one of those “studies” so popular among college professors, to find clues that would identify prospective terrorists before they blow up airplanes, bring down skyscrapers and otherwise wreak havoc.

The “new studies" show that just about everybody must be dreaming of terrorism, plotting mayhem and chaos and teaching others how to do it.

Something called the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (learned professors dream of being paid by the word) went to work at the University of Maryland and produced a $12 million magnum opus called “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008.” And not a moment too soon.

Islamic terrorism, the scourge of the civilized world, like bubonic plague in an earlier time, largely gets a pass; the study does not even mention the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993 in the name of Allah. But the professors have got the number of the rest of us.

The NCSTRT, to use the popular acronym for the consortium, took definitions from a study it did last year called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism.” (Professors never tire of quoting themselves.) You might never guess who the perps who populate professorial dreams might be. These are some of the characteristics the feds at the Department of Homeland Security can use to identify terrorists: anyone who thinks his “way of life” is under attack, anyone “fiercely nationalistic,” “anti-global” or “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” or “reverent of individual liberty.”

These categories include, at one time or another, nearly all of us – liberals who continue to rail at how George W. Bush intended to do wicked things to dissenters, and conservatives who are saying similar things now about Barack Obama. Railing, some of it on target and some of it not, is what Americans do. Robust speech frightens the Department of Homeland Security and its minions, who are not, after all, necessarily steeped in the history, traditions and habits of the republic.

Some of this has made it into the mainstream press, so called, but much of it hasn’t, and the task of reporting it has often been left to Internet sites like prisonplanet.com and infowars.com that monitor the fine print of government regulations and handouts. “The most flagrant example,” reports prisonplanet.com, “was the infamous 2009 report published by the Missouri Information Analysis Center and first revealed by Infowars, which framed Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumperstickers, people who own gold or even people who fly a U.S. flag, as potential terrorists.

"The rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes, or even mundane behaviors, by insinuating they are shared by terrorists, has accelerated in recent months. Under the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism program, the bulk purchase of food is labeled a potential indication of terrorist activity.”

Who could have guessed that Costco or Sam’s Club, where everybody loads up hot dogs, pizza, sides of beef, fruit, vegetables and toilet paper by the ton and fruit juice and root beer in 60-gallon drums, are hotbeds of terrorist scheming. One program, under the aegis of the FBI, even calls using cash to pay for a cup of coffee suspicious, even though most coffee-shop cashiers frown on a customer paying for a $1.50 cup of coffee with a credit card.

Junk like this is of a piece with the continuing campaign to cast conservatives as nuts. It’s nothing new, there’s just more of it. A decade ago, a study by professors at California at Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Maryland, done for the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, concluded that “social conservatives” suffer from “mental rigidity,” “dogmatism,” and “uncertainty avoidance,” together with “associated indicators of mental illness.” President Obama only said it more succinctly and more colorfully, that some Americans won’t vote for him because “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”

We’re all tempted sometimes to think those who disagree with us are crazy, but now comes the federal government to classify dissenters not merely nuts, but terrorists. Such is the new civility the president and his liberal friends commend to us.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

They’re determined to increase that number, and to do that they must eliminate the “mountain pride” of certain Americans, who value personal responsibility and independence above all else, and get them on the government dole.

It’s something like ethnic cleansing, or would be, if the feds mocked the pride and culture of any other ethnic group, whether in the mountains, valleys, flat lands or somewhere else.

By “mountain pride,” they’re talking about the descendants of the Scots-Irish settlers who pushed the frontier from the Atlantic coast into the hills and mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and the Carolinas, and later into the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. These are the Americans that Jim Webb, the Democratic senator from Virginia and author of the much-acclaimed book, “Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” calls “poor but proud – and stubborn as hell.”

They arrived on the continent desperately poor, as described by the historian Vernon Louis Parrington. “So armed with axes, their seed potatoes and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic, thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the material out of which Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned, the creators of that western type which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type.”

Just the sort of material, you might say, to frustrate a community organizer with illusions of hauteur. Nevertheless, community organizers don’t quit easily. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, of the Agriculture Department gave “a Gold Award” recently to the local social workers in tiny Jefferson, N.C., between Husk and Deep Gap and not far from the Tennessee border, for bravely confronting “mountain pride” and increasing food-stamp participation in Ashe County by 10 percent.

“Hearing from the outreach worker that benefits could be used to purchase seeds and plants for their gardens turned out to be a very important strategy in counteracting what they described as ‘mountain pride’ and appealed to those who wished not to rely on others,” SNAP explains. “Eventually, many accepted assistance from the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP), the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB) program, and others, in some cases doubling a household’s net income. In 1 year, SNAP participation increased over 10 percent.” There’s enough alphabet soup there to feed a medium-sized multitude.

SNAP has put out a brochure it calls a “toolkit,” which is shamelessly insensitive since a toolkit suggests “work,” and this goes athwart the pride of the dole which the feds are attempting to substitute for pride in the mountains. A section of the toolkit called “Common SNAP Myths” tells how important the feds think it is to reach people who have “beliefs” and subscribe to “myths” that make them reluctant to live on relief with charity from strangers.
“Millions of low-income people are not accessing the nutrition benefits for which they qualify,” the myth sheet explains. “To be effective, it is important that our national and local outreach counter myths . . . among those who . . . have beliefs that discourage them from enrolling.” Food stamps, argue the food-stamp pimps, help local business and create jobs by pumping money into the local economy. The dole a job creator? Who knew?

The Daily Caller reports that the food-stamp agency has dispatched agents to overcome mountain pride with parties and games, and CNN reports that over the past four months the agency has spent nearly $3 million on radio commercials soliciting Americans to sign up.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Republican who represents thousands of constituents afflicted with mountain pride disease (as the feds might describe it), is particularly concerned that the Department of Agriculture focuses on trying to reform “culture” by eliminating long-held cultural beliefs which are none of the government’s business. “I think it’s a deep problem,” he tells the Daily Caller, “when [federal] officials think it is their duty to overcome ‘mountain pride’ or the American sense of independence and individual responsibility.”

Neither the senator or anyone else begrudges helping the hungry or helpless; indeed, it’s a Christian’s duty, as a Scots-Irishman would readily concede. But destroying the culture that tamed the frontier and shaped America will be beyond the power and ability of a messiah from Chicago.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times

Chief Justice John Roberts is a clever surgeon, and he left a bloody mess to prove it. He’s in the Mediterranean now, on the island of Malta, lecturing to European lawyers about how to “grow” in office, basking in the applause of fans of the welfare state.

Some of our most intellectually resplendent pundits and academics are applauding, too. They’re calling him the dancing master of “finesse,” the lord of the “physics of American politics,” the genius of the conservative attempt to move judicial review back to the center.

What they’re not saying is that John Roberts has bequeathed to the rest of us a monstrosity of a health-care system, now embedded in the law, where it will only grow, fester and metastasize. Worst of all, Mr. Justice Roberts has given Congress, and all the Congresses to follow, the unrestrained power to rob, plunder and pillage and call it a “tax.”

The damage is likely to be catastrophic. The voters, we’re confidently told, can fix the damage in November if they elect a new president. That’s an enormous “if,” and absent a George McGovern or Walter Mondale there’s never a slam dunk in presidential politics. Despite his promise to “repeal and replace” as the first act of his presidency, Mitt Romney could have a compliant House but he’s unlikely to inherit a Republican Senate. Without enough congressional allies all the new president can do is shake his fist while Obamacare grows, festers and metastasizes.

Mr. Roberts is said by friends to have wanted most to enhance the “reputation” of the court by avoiding a “partisan” 5 to 4 decision overturning Obamacare. But he would write a passage to restrain Congress from doing bad things in future in the name of the commerce clause. He could have put his restraint of the commerce clause into a decision overturning Obamacare – the four conservatives on the court were eager to do it – but that would have meant no applause from the left. So the rest of us are stuck with Obamacare, the elites console themselves with a moral victory, and Mr. Roberts has established the reputation of the court as a lap dog for every Congress from now on, “moving forward” in cheerful disregard of enumerated powers.

“Justice Roberts's opinion,” writes John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal, “provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts's tortured reasoning . . . the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress's power to tax.”

Mr. Roberts, writes Mr. Yoo, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and a Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, “may have sacrificed the Constitution's last remaining limits on federal power for very little – a little peace and quiet from attacks during a presidential election year.”

His friends say that criticism in the newspapers and on television gets easily under his skin, that he has been for so long the golden boy – Harvard Law, top-of-the-line Washington law firm (Hogan and Hartson), a clerkship for a chief justice (William Rehnquist) – that he imagines he was put where he is now to bask, and buff and burnish the reputation of the court all the better to reflect a shine and sheen on his own image.

The formula for ending partisanship in Washington – a city founded as the designated arena of partisanship – is simple: Republican and conservative deferral to the greater wisdom and higher nobility of Democrats and liberals. There’s never a suggestion that Democratic and liberal deferral would accomplish this as well. The president who appointed him to the court, and the conservatives who stood up to the media smear machine to help him win confirmation, quaintly reckoned that he would be less concerned with public relations and image-buffing than concern for the Constitution.

Instead Mr. Roberts, faced with one of the most important decisions of his career, took a walk into the wilderness [Wall Street Journal], or strolled into the land of the sophists [Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito]. The betting here is that, seduced and embraced, he’ll never return.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The justices sent a message loud and clear in their decision upholding Obamacare and the requirement that everybody has to buy a health insurance policy, or else. That’s a tax, the court held, and the power to tax is the holiest of holies for any government. It’s the first rule of politics as well. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the father of the big government that runs everything today, famously described his four-term success as “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”

Some people expected Obamacare to be upheld, but nobody expected it to be upheld as an affirmation of the power to tax. We just weren’t paying attention. Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the majority opinion, is first a corporation lawyer, and a lawyer is always looking out for the client. The U.S. Government is the biggest corporation of all. Twisting, manipulating and torturing the law is what corporation lawyers do, and Justice Roberts is very good at his job. We’re a nation not of laws, as the law-school cliché has it, but a nation of lawyers. Big difference. So who should be surprised?

President Obama, who once taught the constitutional law he seems to know so little of, called the decision “a victory for everyone,” and reached deep into the bowels of his teleprompter for something suitably trite to say. The decision, he said, upholds “the fundamental principle that in America – the wealthiest nation on earth – no one should fall into financial ruin because of an illness.”
The president couldn’t say where that “fundamental principle,” as nice as it sounds, came from, since nothing remotely like that is found in the Constitution. Justice Roberts in his majority opinion said nothing like that, either. “Because the Constitution permits such a tax,” he wrote, “it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”

The message, writ large between the lines of Justice Roberts’ prose, was clear: “If you don’t like the legislation, change the legislators who wrote the law.” A remedy will be available on Nov. 6 at a polling place near you.

Mitt Romney set the order of battle with the eloquence of simplicity: “What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day, if elected president of the United States.” His promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is abundantly clear, and as unequivocal as if he had invited one and all to “read my lips.” The pith and pulp of the promise – “repeal and replace” – should be the mantra of the Republicans this year. It’s a word shorter and just as persuasive as Bill Clinton’s famous reminder that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Despite President Obama’s declaration of victory, Obamacare (a term he detests) is the one achievement he doesn’t want to talk about. The very word “tax” is toxic, and nobody knows this better than the Democrats. Mr. Obama emphatically denied that Obamacare is a tax, telling George Stephanopoulos that he “absolutely rejects” the notion that it’s a tax.

Conservatives who are disappointed that the court didn’t knock down the law for its intrusion into the rights of both individuals and the several states, should resist the temptation to waste their time chasing after a notion of what should have been. Obamacare is a fraud, which Justice Roberts seems to be saying, and the way to correct it lies beyond the power of the lawyers.

Americans have grown soft and lazy over the past few decades, fattened on the notion that the lawyers on the Supreme Court know what’s good for us, that they will see that we live happily ever after, to feed on the soup they make from whatever emanations and penumbras they can find in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court gave Barack Obama his law and his “legacy,” such as it may be, but they gave Mitt Romney and the Republicans a cause beyond price. Running against the tax collector and the biggest tax increase in history should be so easy even a cave man could do it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The results of a referendum on whether to recall Gov. Scott Walker will say whether it’s possible for a politician to confront greedy government unions, to make the cuts in government services that the economists (and common sense) say are inevitable, and live to tell a survivor’s tale.

The governor, a Republican, angered labor bosses by eliminating the collective-bargaining rights of the government unions to bargain with the state – in effect, eliminating the right to sit on both sides of the table and bargain with themselves.

Mr. Walker and Tom Barrett, the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, are on the ballot against each other in this unusual race. If Mr. Walker wins nothing changes. If Mr. Barrett wins he will be the new governor (and safe from a reprisal recall for a year). The latest polls make Mr. Walker a slight favorite to keep his job.

Nearly all the wiseheads in Washington, eager to translate a local race into something about the presidential campaign, argue that the prospects of both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, if not the men themselves, are on the ballot, too. If Mr. Walker prevails and the recall fails, it’s more bad news for the president. The governor will become an overnight rock star for a Republican future.

Many of the wiseheads, including lots of reporters and pundits, have decamped to Milwaukee and Madison for the big night. The usual carnival barkers are here, too: the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in Milwaukee for a rally in a lawdy-how-gaudy two-car caravan, a Mercedes S550 for himself ($125,000 at a dealer near you) and a Cadillac Escalade ESV (only $80,000) for his fetchers and go-fers. Bill Clinton, just in from his smash appearance with stars of the porn epic, “Farm Girls Gone Bad,” in Monte Carlo, dropped in last week for a riverfront rally with plainer folk in Milwaukee to tell Cheeseheads that the recall is “about much more than the state of Wisconsin and what’s best for them.”

America is watching, he said, and the states recovering from the Obama recession have embraced something he calls “creative co-operation,” not the “constant conflict” that Mr. Walker delivered to Wisconsin with his elimination of collective bargaining for public employes.

Bubba is the nearest thing to the heavy hitter that Mr. Barrett and the Democrats yearned for, though his track record since his White House days in converting charisma to actual results is not good. President Obama, sensing more bad news after last week’s “horrible days of hell,” has been the notable no-show. He actually got within five miles of Wisconsin last week, but too bad for the Democrats he passed over, five miles above the battleground where he could lounge comfortably in Air Force One on his way to a rally in quieter, happier Minnesota.

The bang and clatter of politics has become as high-decibel elevator music in Wisconsin. “Protests. Lawsuits. Recalls. More lawsuits. More recalls,” complains the Madison State Journal. “Is this the ‘new normal’ for state politics?" In fact, yes. The governor is not even the only target of the recall. The Republican lieutenant governor and four Republican state senators, all paired against Democratic challengers, are also subject to recall. If the Democrats win only one of the state Senate seats they’ll regain the majority and the ability to obstruct the Walker agenda, presuming he wins.

Some of the wordsmiths put together a manual for agents who track the Internet, looking for evil-doers and those who aspire to evil-doing. These agents are assigned to pick up suspicious words for further investigation. Some of the worst of the evil-doers have been caught after their schemes, plots and intrigues were detected in e-mails intercepted by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.

Long lists of words the innocent should never use were acquired by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy watchdog group that obtained the lists through a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. It’s clear that federal agents who conduct Internet searches for offending words can succeed only if they have a lot of time on their hands.

Some of the words, like “attack” or “terrorism” or “dirty bomb,” are so obvious that a cave man could detect them. Others, like the words cops, police, riot, emergency landing, powder (white), swine, pork and 'flu, do not seem so obviously dangerous. Your Aunt Evelyn in West Gondola, scribbling an affectionate note at the bottom of a birthday card, could invite federal scrutiny without intending to harm anyone.

Other words suspicious to the feds include airplane, subway, Port Authority, grid, power, electric, port, dock, bridge, delays, cocaine, marijuana, border, Mexico, kidnap bust, Iraq, Iran, nuclear, tornado, tsunami, storm, forest fire, ice, snow, sleet, Cain, Abel, China, worm, anthrax, cloud, North Korea, and "lightening," presumably meaning "lightning."

The suspicious words are included in something called the Analyst’s Desktop Binder, used by agents at the National Operations Center to identify "media reports that reflect adversely on [Department of Homeland Security] and response activities."

The existence of the verboten list emerged from the bowels of bureaucracy only after a hearing before a House subcommittee looking into how analysts monitor newspapers, magazines, Internet sites and social networks. They’re looking for “comments that ‘reflect adversely’ on the government.

This covers a lot of ground, sinful, criminal, harmless and otherwise, but the Department of Homeland Security reassures one and all that it is not looking for disparaging remarks about the Obama administration, the government or the bureaucrats who work for the government. They’re not looking for signs of “general dissent.” Of course not. Who would suspect the government of poking its nose into the business of private citizens? Would Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, do that?

The government can nevertheless be dull and dim-witted. An investigator for one of the many government security agencies, a young man with the requisite 1950s haircut and polite manner, one day called to ask whether I would vouch for the character of a young man, just out of Harvard Law, who had applied for a position with a Senate committee. I knew him to be exactly what the government should be looking for, Harvard trained or not, and said so.

“Well,” the agent replied, “we have information that he lived abroad for several years. Do you know why?”

I looked at the dates he had indeed lived abroad, in a large European capital famous for its spies, furtive nocturnal liaisons and dark diplomatic intrigues. “Yes,” I said, “that is roughly the time his father was the American ambassador there, and the young man would have been between 2 and 6 years old.”

The agent was not persuaded. “Still, that is a long time to live abroad. He may have had a good reason to spend so much uninterrupted time in a foreign capital, but we would like to know why.” The young was finally cleared for duty several months later, the stain on his baby character overlooked.

Jimmy Carter, who has mercifully all but disappeared down the memory hole, called the U.S. tax code “a disgrace to the human race.” Hitler, cancer, and the designated hitter follow closely, but we take Mr. Jimmy’s point. How the government confiscates our money, like a root canal without anything to kill the pain, is not very nice. But like a village dentist armed with only a pair of greasy pliers, the government gets the job done.

This is not a good year for a taxpayer to cut corners in calculating how much he owes, because the new director of the Internal Revenue Service decreed no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Rarely has a case before the court attracted so much attention as this week’s arguments about Barack Obama’s health-care scheme. Everybody is studying transcripts and accounts of which judge wiggled his eyebrows at whose lawyers, looking for hints, allusions, implications and insinuations, like Las Vegas oddsmakers searching for inside dope from the training camps on the eve of the Super Bowl.

The spectacle before the court brought out the sportswriter in every reporter, pundit and editorialist. Some think the game is over. The Los Angeles Times, designed for southern California readers who wouldn’t mind running the country if they knew where the country was, reported flatly that “the Supreme Court’s conservative justices said Wednesday they are prepared to strike down President Obama’s healthcare law entirely.” Not “suggested,” but “said.”