Four Border Patrol officers patrolling near Rio Rico, Arizona last December 14 spotted five men they thought were illegal immigrants.  The suspects opened fire when the lawmen identified themselves.  Officer Brian Terry, 40, was killed. The illegals dropped their weapons and fled when the Border Patrolmen returned fire.  Two of those weapons were AK-47 assault rifles purchased by a certain Jaime Avila at a gun store in Glendale, Arizona Jan. 16, 2010. Agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) deliberately permitted the sale, and 2,000 others, as part of of its Project Gunwalker, also codenamed Operation Fast and Furious.  The question now is, how many ATF and high Obama officials will end up in jail over this?

Emails from Sarah Palin's time as Alaska governor "show a double-fisted Blackberry user fully comfortable with handling nearly every aspect of state government," wrote the McClatchy Newspapers. The emails paint "a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics, said the London Telegraph." "She comes across as practical and not doctrinaire," wrote Molly Ball in Politico.  "She was hands-on and adverse to partisan politics." This was not what journalists expected to write.  "If critics were hoping to see Palin revealed as a hypocrite, they're out of luck," said Ms. Ball.  "Her private statements are in line with her public ones."  Instead of a disaster, the Palin emails are a triumph.  She's now politically stronger than ever.

The House of Representatives passed a resolution June 3 chiding President Barack Hussein Obama for failing to comply with the requirements of the War Powers Act with regard to the U.S. military intervention in Libya. If Congress doesn't explicitly approve the military action within 90 days, the War Powers Act says the troops committed to it must be withdrawn.  The 90 days runs out this weekend. The House resolution gave the president until Friday (6/17) to comply with the law.  He hasn't yet.  Who'll win this shoot-out?

Jack Wheeler has been tied up in Saudi Arabia and is now on his way to Bulgaria, so he asked me at pretty much the last minute to throw the Half Full Report together. I hope that's not too evident. It's been an eventful week for Jack to be away.  Lots of stuff has been happening. Let's begin with the Weiner roast. House Democratic leaders began an orchestrated effort on Wednesday to force Representative Anthony D. Weiner of New York to resign his seat, saying his sexually explicit Internet messages and subsequent lies about them were making him, and the party, the subject of ridicule, the New York Times reported. But Weiner is unwilling to go quietly into that good night.  He's resisting because his wife wants him to stay in Congress, CNN reported Thursday (6/09). Ah, yes, the Weiner wife. Huma Abedin is a Moslem of South Asian descent (her father was Indian, her mother Pakistani) who is a senior aide to Hillary Clinton.  (She wasn't at her husband's side this week in part because she's in Africa on a trip with Hillary.)  Huma grew up in Saudi Arabia and speaks Arabic. There have from time to time been rumors that Ms. Abedin's relationship with Ms. Clinton has been more than professional.  Jack Wheeler is among those who think Hillary swings both ways, as he wrote in The Washington Times in 2004.

President Barack Hussein Obama visited the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio last Friday (6/03) to tout the alleged economic benefits of his bailout of Chrysler. The bailout kept the Jeep plan open, the president told workers there.   Not only that, "This plant indirectly supports hundreds of other jobs right here in Toledo," he added. "After all, without you, who'd eat at Chet's or Inky's or Rudy's?" This week Richard Lawrence, co-owner of New Chet's restaurant, announced it was closing its doors after 90 years. So much for indirect benefits.  What Mr. Obama said at the Jeep plant  "is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have found in a short presidential speech," wrote the Washington Post's fact checker, Glenn Kessler.  "Virtually every claim made by the president concerning the auto industry deserves an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan."

The dimwit ditz has struck again.  The anchors on the cable news shows could barely contain their glee as they reported on Sarah Palin's latest gaffe. As the former Alaska governor emerged with her family from a visit to the Old North Church in Boston, reporters asked her if she knew who Paul Revere was. "He who warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms," Ms. Palin responded. "Of course, Revere was in fact trying to warning Samuel Adams and John Hancock about the approaching British army," snarked Sheila Marikar of ABC News. Ms. Palin is a "ninny pretending to be a leader of this country without having much understanding of history," snarked Rick Ungar of Forbes magazine. Liberal snarking was interrupted when historians said Sarah Palin was right.

The tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri May 22 was the deadliest since modern record keeping began in 1950, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  The destruction was truly horrific, as these satellite photos show. According to NOAA, the yearly average number of tornadoes in the US for the past decade is 1,274.  In the less than five months of this year, 2011, here have been approximately 1,314 tornadoes so far.  Last month, April, there were 875 tornadoes, a record for that month. The upsurge may be due to global warming, speculated the usual suspects in the news media, among them Newsweek, USA Today, NBC anchor Brian Williams, and Diane Sawyer of ABC. Yet back in April of 1975, Newsweek claimed that more tornadoes signal global cooling.  Newsweek was more nearly right then.  Here's why.

While many Republicans are unhappy with their current choices for president, the ideal GOP candidate was on display in Washington this week. He has experience in executive positions in both government and private business, and an impressive military record.  As a graduate of both Harvard and MIT, his Establishment credentials are impeccable.  But his strong conservatism has a populist strain.  He connects with ordinary folks. A champion debater at Cheltenham High School in the Philadelphia suburbs, he is an inspiring orator.  He gets under Barack Hussein Obama's skin.  Plus he's a member of a minority group.  There's just this one problem...

The walkback -- unspoken acknowledgment from the White House that it had blundered -- began within hours after the president left the podium, and continued through the weekend. Most of Barack Hussein Obama's ballyhooed speech at the State Department last Thursday (5/19) was an effort rhetorically to get out in front of the turmoil in the Middle East that caught his administration by surprise. The effort was spectacularly unsiccessful. "Rarely has a U.S. president caused such a stink with no prospect whatsoever that anything could possibly come of it," said Rick Moran of the American Thinker. So what was Mr. Obama thinking?

The war in Libya has gone poorly since Mr. Obama turned its conduct over to NATO, an alliance headed by the United States.  One of the president's aides told Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker Mr. Obama was "leading from behind." A strategy more politically correct than militarily sound is chiefly to blame.  But absent the active participation of the United States, NATO has been nearly punchless.  Our European partners lack both the combat power and the logistics base to fight by themselves even this minor war.  To say nothing of the political will, which clearly has begun to flag. A ceasefire which leaves Mr. Ghadafy in power would be a humiliation for NATO, for the UN (at whose behest NATO claims to be acting), and for the United States. A larger question is why is NATO, an alliance whose purpose is to protect Western Europe from invasion, intervening in a civil war in North Africa?  Mr. Ghadafy is an evil mean nasty rotten guy, but he isn't a threat to Europe. There was a good reason why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949.  The Soviet Union and her satellites were threatening to invade Western Europe. NATO did its job.  There was no war in Europe.  That job is long since over.

In one of those oops moments, the Associated Press sent out a story last Sunday (5/15) with the headline: "Minnesota congressman Paul Ryan mulling Senate bid." Rep. Ryan is from Wisconsin. To the AP, those states in flyover country are pretty much the same. If you're like whoever was on the AP's news desk last Sunday, you may not know much about Paul Ryan, and would therefore be puzzled why some prominent conservatives think he should run not for the Senate, but for president.  One reason is that Mr. Ryan ate Mr. Obama's lunch in their interchange during the White House summit on the deficit a year ago February.  That got under the president's thin skin, as he demonstrated with his churlish behavior toward Mr. Ryan during his speech at George Washington University last month. And now Mr. Obama likely is splenetic again after Mr. Ryan's masterful address to the Economic Club of Chicago yesterday (5/16).  "Class warfare may be clever politics, but it's terrible economics," Mr. Ryan said.  "Redistributing wealth never creates more of it."

Due to his extraordinarily heavy travel schedule, Jack Wheeler asked me to do the HFR this week.  Here goes: In the presidential campaign political news, it looks as if the party’s over for Donald Trump.  You’ll remember that last month, Public Policy Polling (a Democrat firm), had The Donald out in front, with 26 percent of Republicans supporting him.  But in a poll released Tuesday (5/10), the first since President Obama released his long form birth certificate, Trump has fallen into a 5th place tie with Rep. Ron Paul. Meanwhile, the Permanent Campaigner was in Texas Tuesday.  The primary purpose for his visit was to attend a $1,000 a plate fund-raiser in the liberal enclave of Austin, which had been scheduled for at least a month.  But last week Thursday (5/05), the White House announced there would also be an “unspecified” official event in El Paso.  Mack Mackowiak of the Daily Caller explained why.f In a column this week, I assert the double game Pakistan has been playing is over.  Americans won’t stand for it in the wake of evidence the Paks sheltered Osama bin Laden all these years.The Paks don’t grasp this.  They seem to think they can still smack us around and, like a battered spouse in a dysfunctional marriage, we’ll keep giving them money. Sometimes even some of his supporters think our scofflaw president has gone too far.

Mark Siegel is scrambling to keep the dysfunctional couple together, but the shotgun marriage of a decade ago is doomed. Mr. Siegel parlayed service with President Jimmy Carter and several Democrats in Congress into a partnership at Lord Locke Strategies, the lobbying firm the government of Pakistan pays $75,000 a month. That's been a bargain for Pakistan, which since 9/11 has received more than $20 billion in U.S. aid.  President Obama plans to send them another $3 billion next year. Pakistan needs the money desperately.  But foreign aid for Pakistan has become a harder sell since the world has learned Osama's hideout was a safehouse provided by Pakistani intelligence.  Without that aid both Al Qaeda and the Taliban would die.

Once and probably future Harvard Prof. Michael Ignatieff deserves a footnote in the history books for making what was the one of the most bone-headed moves in the history of electoral politics. You probably haven't heard of Mr. Ignatieff and his blunder because he's a Canadian politician.  Americans are about as interested in developments in our neighbor to the North as we are in synchronized swimming. News coverage of Canada reflects that. The excitement last week over Osama bin Laden reduced news coverage of Canada's national election May 2 "from 0 percent of network airtime to 0.0000 percent of network airtime," noted Canadian expatriate Mark Steyn. That's too bad, because we missed a helluva show that may have profound implications.

The White House has botched the rollout of the greatest success of Barack Hussein Obama's presidency. The screwups began last Sunday (5/01) when we learned U.S. Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden in his million dollar "hideout" in the resort town of Abbottabad, Pakistan. The White House asked the networks for time at 10:30 p.m. EDT.  But it was more than an hour later before Mr. Obama spoke.  By then the news had leaked out, and many people had gone to bed. We're told the delay was because the president was still working on his remarks.  If so, it wasn't worth it. "The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten," said Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter.  "The adjective-bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self indulgent." The awkwardness of the delivery of the news was little noticed in our euphoria over the substance of it.  But subsequent White House screwups are fraught with consequences.

Osama bin Laden is dead.  President Barack Obama deserves much of the credit. Most of the credit, of course, belongs to the Navy SEALs who assaulted bin Laden's compound; to the intelligence officers who traced him to that compound, and to the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay who extracted the first critical lead from a captured al Qaeda terrorist. But it was President Obama who ordered the risky assault, despite the diplomatic repercussions that would have accompanied failure, and may accompany success.  He had to have been aware of what happened to Jimmy Carter -- a president to whom he's been compared a lot lately -- after the botched rescue mission in Iran. And it was President Obama who had the good sense not to inform the Pakistani government of the raid, even though the SEALs launched from a base in northwest Pakistan, and were attacking a target virtually within the shadow of the capital.

Born poor in 1847, Thomas Alva Edison was a wealthy man when he died in 1931.  I suspect President Barack Hussein Obama would have disapproved of Mr. Edison, because he made his money -- great gobs of money -- in the private sector. Thomas Edison's inventions made him a rich man.  I don't begrudge him that, because he enriched my life, and the lives of hundreds of millions of others. Barack Obama does.  He says people who want to keep most of what they earn are "greedy."  But aren't the truly greedy those who think they've a right to stick their hands into other people's pockets, to live well at the expense of their neighbors?  It is Mr. Obama's redistributive greed that is destroying wealth creation and impoverishing us all.

The contrast between the speeches they gave last week suggests that when the 2012 presidential campaign begins in earnest, the news media will have difficulty maintaining the story lines they've been pushing about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. His opponents agree Mr. Obama is a better speaker than he is a president.  But the fiscal policy speech he made at George Washington University last Wednesday (4/13) -- during which Vice President Joe Biden nodded off -- indicates he's not that terrific an orator, either. The speech "was not just weak, but pitiful,' a "waste of breath," said Clive Crook, editor of the Atlantic magazine.  And he's a staunch supporter of the president. Barack Obama these days speaks only before friendly audiences.  On Saturday (4/16), Sarah Palin journeyed to Madison, Wisconsin where she braved snow, cold, and union protesters who tried to disrupt her Game On! speech by beating drums and blowing whistles. "Sarah Palin rides to the sound of the guns," noted Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis.  Barack Obama doesn't have the courage to.  Which is why their respective poll numbers will be changing dramatically.

So many bad things are happening all at once that it's hard to decide what to worry about most. Inflation.  In February, we had the highest monthly increase in the price of food since 1974.  In March the price of corn set a record high.  The price of gasoline has doubled since Barack Hussein Obama became president, and is expected to reach its record high by Memorial Day. The government says the risk of inflation is low, but it doesn't count the cost of food and fuel -- the stuff we have to buy -- in its measure of "core" inflation.  Under the old method of calculating inflation, the annualized rate for February was 9.6 percent. With wages flat, those who have jobs will lose ground.  And for those poor souls without jobs... Yes, there'a unemployment, lack of economic growth, massive debt... the list goes on.  What could be the sum of all these problems?

The Department of Health and Human Services has so far granted more than a thousand waivers to Obamacare.  Most have gone to labor unions and to other organizations which support the administration. The law Congress passed contains no language authorizing anyone in the Executive Branch to grant waivers.  The Obama administration claims the authority is implied by the broad powers the legislation grants to the HHS Secretary.  The Founding Fathers beg to differ. Prior to the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 (in which James II was deposed in favor of  his daughter Mary and her first cousin William of Orange), English kings asserted the right to exempt favored subjects from the provisions of a particular law (called a dispensation) - or to suspend the law entirely (called non obstante:  the law "notwithstanding").  Kings claimed this because of their "divine right" to rule as they pleased, Parliament be damned. This was not a popular view with Parliament.  James II was deposed in large part because of his many dispensations.

The most fatuous proposal (so far) for ending the war in Libya has come from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA.  We should get a warrant for Libyan dictator Muammar Ghadafy from the International Criminal Court, and "go in and arrest him," Ms. Feinstein told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. Sen. Feinstein opposes putting in U.S. ground troops.  So who does she imagine would serve the warrant? The US Military ended conscription ("the draft") 28 years ago, moving to an All Volunteer Force that has proved so vastly superior it would be insane to go back.  But in this life, there is a downside to everything. When we had a draft, most of our political leaders got some military experience.  The number of veterans in Congress has fallen by two thirds since the end of the draft in 1973, says the Military Officers Association of America. Thus the only thing clear about our policy in Libya is that it's being made by people who haven't a clue about what works and what doesn't in war.

A week ago Friday (4/1), a mob stormed the UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif in northeastern Afghanistan.  Seven UN employees -- four Nepalese security guards, a Norwegian, a Romanian and a Swede -- were killed. The murders were in retaliation for the burning of a Koran more than a week before by obscure Florida pastor Terry Jones. Until the riot, Americans were unaware the publicity hound in Gainesville had torched the Moslem holy book, because most in our news media ignored the despicable stunt.  How, then, did the mob in Mazar-e-Sharif learn of it?  Through Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who provoked the protests on purpose.

Donald Trump is a highly successful businessman and a reality show star.  He has a flair for self promotion which few approach and none exceed.  So many people take him seriously. As Mr. Trump flirts with running for president, I think this is, on balance, unfortunate.  The Donald has never held public office or served in the military.  Since 1990, Mr. Trump has contributed to as many Democrats as he has Republicans. But Mr. Trump is a smart guy, and he's being advised by Roger Stone, a shrewd GOP operative who cut his teeth working for Ronald Reagan, but who has since shown a preference for more moderate candidates, especially those with big checkbooks.  They've hit on a way to warm the hearts of many conservatives. In an appearance on ABC's "The View" March 23, Mr. Trump said:  "I want (President Barack Obama) to show his birth certificate.  There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like." This provoked outrage among the very liberal hosts of The View, but was music to the ears of the so-called "birthers."

In his belated address to the nation Monday (3/28), President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. explained why, after nearly a month of dithering, he chose to intervene militarily in Libya's civil war. "We knew that if we waited even one more day -- Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could have suffered a massacre that could have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world," the president said. Well and good, but the military bottom line is that the U.S. Army teaches 9 Principles of War, and Mr. Obama already has violated them all. The restraints he's imposed on military action makes a bloody stalemate the most likely outcome. "Dynamite in the hands of a child is not more dangerous than a strong policy weakly carried out," said Winston Churchill.

The oddest thing about President Barack Hussein Obama Jr.'s South American trip is that he went on it at all.  To leave for a foreign tourist junket immediately after plunging his country into war isn't the sort of thing Americans expect their president to do. "Here was the country entering yet another military operation, and there was the president in Brazil.  The contrast was jarring -- as if he was quite literally distancing himself from the consequences of his own policy," wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Some will say my description of the trip as a "junket" is harsh.  But the facts support it. Mr. Obama traveled with a huge entourage which included his wife, two daughters, and his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson. First stop was Brazil, where BrazzilMag described the visit as "lots of ceremony, little else."

Soldiers know it is dangerous to attack a prepared position without reconnoitering it first, or softening it up with artillery. And soldiers know it is folly to abandon a flanking attack which is working for a banzai charge instead. These are bad things to do in politics, too.  Yet a group of kamikaze conservatives in Congress seems determined to do them anyway.

The day after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill sharply limiting collective bargaining for public employee unions in Wisconsin, there was a massive protest.  Capitol police estimated the crowd at 50,000.  The Madison police department put it at 85,000. "Gov. Walker's overreaching has brought us to this moment to talk about jobs," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.  "This is the debate we wanted to have...In your lifetime, have you ever seen this much solidarity, this much excitement, this much activism?" Wisconsin is shaping up to be the Republicans' Waterloo, said E.D. Kain, a liberal who blogs at Forbes magazine, referring to the famous battle in which Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington (June 18, 1815, just south of present-day Brussels in Belgium).  Maybe so, but who will be Wellington and who will be Napoleon?

LtCol. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, said on Fox News last week: "Obama loves the idea of being president, but he can't make a decision." "In the case of Libya, Obama has seemed almost Shakespearean in his public musings about whether to be or not to be," agrees military historian Victor Davis Hanson.  "Nobody in the United States is as intent on reminding his fellow citizens just how awesome he is than Barack Obama," political scientist Jay Cost writes in the Weekly Standard.  "But that seems to be about it.  The sense of awe he has cultivated has not been used for any great purpose... This is more of a clerkship presidency, with a commander in chief either unwilling or unable to take the lead on the most challenging issues of the day."

The country is falling off a fiscal cliff.  The world is on fire, and Zero’s dithering and incompetence is pouring gasoline on it. And I’ve still got the flu. But the hero governor of my home state has won a victory that will reverberate through the nation, and perhaps through the ages.  So this week my stein is filled to the brim with Leinenkugel’s Red, the sophisticated Wisconsinite’s choice to accompany bratwurst and cheese on celebratory occasions.

The U.S. budget deficit for February was $221 billion, 14 percent larger than the deficit in February a year ago.  The primary reason for the deficit was a 17 percent increase in government spending.

This was the largest monthly deficit in history.  It was substantially larger than the deficit for the entire 2007 fiscal year ($161 billion).

The current law funding the federal government runs out March 18.  And very soon the government will bump up against the debt ceiling -- $14.29 trillion, equivalent to the value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year.  So Ron Schiller picked a very bad time to embarrass his employer.

The key thing about student achievement in the United States is there isn’t much of it.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative education statistics for the OECD’s 34 members and selected other countries.  The latest was in 2009.

In reading, U.S. students ranked 17th of 70 countries, at about the OECD average.

In mathematics, U.S. students ranked 30th, at a level significantly below the OECD average.

In science, U.S. students ranked 23rd, at about the OECD average.

We cannot maintain our standard of living if our students lag behind our international competitors for a prolonged period.  And our kids have been mediocre, at best, for quite some while.  In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1995), high school seniors in the U.S. ranked 19th out of 21 in math, 16th in science.

This isn’t because of a lack of resources.  In 2006, per pupil expenditures in the U.S. were 41 percent higher than the OECD average.  Measured in dollars per student, only Switzerland spent more.)

The Swiss may be getting their money’s worth.  Their students outperform ours in reading, math and science. 

But we’re not.

There is, I suppose, no more appropriate way to begin this week’s Half Full Report than with a report that is half full.

The good news, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that the unemployment rate has fallen to 8.9 percent.

The not so good news is that the number of persons unemployed (13.7 million) is essentially unchanged from January, and the civilian labor force participation rate (64.2 percent) is the lowest its been in 27 years.

John Podhoretz is puzzled.

Protesters have left the state Capitol building in Madison.  It'll cost Wisconsin taxpayers about $7.5 million to clean up after them.

My hero of the week is Judge Roger Vinson, the U.S. District Court judge in Florida who ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional.  The Justice Department asked him to tell the 26 states that brought the suit that they must begin implementation of it anyway (Alaska and Florida have said they will not).  I bet Holder is sorry now that Justice did.

The putz of the week is Kenneth Vogel of the Politico.

In the prologue to the second of his autobiographies, “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama said: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Being a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views” is a good way to be elected president…especially when the incumbent is saddled with an unpopular war and the stock market melts down two months before the election.   But after two years in office, that blank screen can look more like an empty suit.   “For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president,” wrote Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who is normally a supporter.   “There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action – unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment,” Ms. Marcus said.  “He is, too often, more reactive than inspirational, more cautious than forceful.  The dots connect to form an unsettling portrait of a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ presidency.”

When he was a guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Feb.13, House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, wanted to talk about the federal budget deficit and creating jobs.  But host David Gregory wanted to talk about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Mr. Boehner said he thinks Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, and is a Christian.  But Mr. Gregory wanted the Speaker to denounce those who have doubts. “As the Speaker of the House, as a leader, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?” Mr. Gregory asked. It was not his job to tell Americans what to think, Mr. Boehner responded. “Why isn’t it your job to stand up and say: ‘No, the facts are these?’” Mr. Gregory persisted. You remember how Mr. Gregory urged then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal, to denounce the “truthers” who believed President George W. Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks? You don’t remember?  Could that be because it never happened? The resurgence of the “birther” controversy is primarily due to Hawaii’s new Democratic governor, Neil Abercrombie, who on Christmas Eve pledged to settle the controversy over Mr. Obama’s birth once and for all.

THERE’S A BAD MOON RISING. The Middle East is on fire, and the only thing the President of the United States is signaling is weakness. The bloodshed mounts in Libya, but Muammar Gadhafi is finished. Out of approximately 50,000 regular troops, only a hardcore of about 5,000 soldiers and special forces can be considered reliable, and it's simply impossible to retain dictatorial control over a population of almost 7,000,000 people with only a single brigade of soldiers. It is now out of the question as to whether the government can retake the entire country. It can only hold out for as long as possible.   In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “spiritual leader,” Yusuf al Qaradawi, an unrepentant Islamist, has returned from exile, and is drawing enormous crowds.   In Iraq, radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr has returned from exile in Iran.

The violent imagery and uncivil rhetoric journalists have searched for in vain at Tea Party rallies are in evidence in the protests in Madison, Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to trim the power of public employee unions. The New York Times likened the protests in Madison to those against Arab dictatorships. Wisconsin is a democracy, not a Middle Eastern autocracy.  Those who subvert democracy are those who would shut down the government to keep the will of the people, as expressed at the polls in November, from being enacted. The primary reason why public employee unions are a bad idea is because politicians pay them off with our money.  These unions receive billions from taxpayers, who in return contribute millions to the politicians who gave them those billions. President Barack Obama has called the Wisconsin plan "an assault on unions."  But Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have stood with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer wondered if the much ballyhooed speech President Barack Obama gave in Cairo in June of 2009 had something to do with the massive protests that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign. The short answer, Wolf, is no.  But you knew that. In his Cairo speech, Mr. Obama explicitly rejected President Bush’s “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. Mr. Obama reinforced that message when he gave the back of his hand to the masses of people who protested the dictatorship in Iran that summer, and when he cut in half the funds President Bush had budgeted for support of democracy movements . Mr. Obama did make a nice speech in support of democracy in Egypt...after Mr. Mubarak resigned.  He’s had less to say on behalf of those protesting dictatorial regimes in Libya, Iran and China, and who are being violently suppressed. Liberals have little interest in popular uprisings if those uprisings are against anti-American regimes.  This would be odd -- if liberals really cared much about human rights -- since anti-American dictatorships treat their people more harshly than do authoritarian regimes allied with the United States.

The glass could be filled to the brim this week, or nearly drained, depending on how events in Wisconsin play out. Because as Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation.  Neither the blatant hypocrisy nor the low comedy should divert our attention from the high stakes.  If Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority in the legislature hold firm, public employee unions will suffer a major blow, and the chief funding mechanism for the Democrat party will be disrupted.  If they cave, all hopes of fiscal responsibility with collapse with them. Walker’s plan has sparked massive protests from state employees, many of them Madison schoolteachers who illegally took time off from work, forcing schools to close.  The protests are organized by the unions, but are receiving assistance from the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America, Zero’s perpetual campaign committee.

President Obama has presented his budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.  It'd drawn flak from normally friendly places.

The Republican presidential field for 2012 is the weakest that anybody has seen in our lifetime, thinks John Heilemann of New York magazine. Jay Cost, who I think is the best psephologist out there, thinks the nominee will be someone who gets into the race late. Gov. Christie denied again Wednesday any interest in running for president in 2012.  But he continues to flirt with the conservative base. Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC is, alas, typical of television journalists today – a nincompoop who imagines herself to be among the best and the brightest.  Harvard historian Niall Ferguson took her to school about Obama’s handling of the crisis in Egypt.  Enjoy

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We can “Win the Future” if, within 25 years, 80 percent of Americans have access to high speed rail, President Barack Obama said in his state of the union address. The president wants to spend $53 billion over the next six years on high speed rail.  That’s on top of $10.5 billion already spent since Mr. Obama became president, but is a tiny fraction of the $500 billion Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood said is required. The actual cost almost certainly would be higher.  The project furthest along is California’s, which in 2008 was projected to cost between $33 and $37 billion.  The current estimate is $65 billion. If we weren’t broke and deeply in debt, and we were building an intercity transportation network from scratch, high speed rail -- at least east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio -- might make sense.  But we are broke and deeply in debt, and we already have an extensive network of highways and airports.  “What’s disheartening about the Obama administration’s embrace of high speed rail is that it ignores history, evidence, and logic,” said economics writer Robert Samuelson.  “High speed rail is not ‘an investment in the future,’” he said. “It’s mostly a waste of money.” But what Zero proposes is worse than a waste of money.

Aside from the man who appointed him, the most dangerous incompetent in our government today is James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

Mr. Clapper, you’ll recall, was the guy with the deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face when ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked him about the arrest in London of 12 terror suspects in London Dec. 21.  It was plain Mr. Clapper knew nothing about them, though the arrests had been the lead story on the news for many hours.

Testifying before the House Intelligence Committee last Thursday (2/10), Mr. Clapper said:  “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements.  In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al Qaida as a perversion of Islam.”

“There are two possibilities, and they are both appalling,” said Judith Levy.  “One is that Clapper knew everything he was saying was a gross distortion of reality but said it anyway, thereby deliberately misleading the American people and giving aid and comfort to a group whose interests are completely antithetical to those of the United States.  The other is that Clapper is genuinely ignorant of the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, a thought that is just about as unnerving as can be imagined.”

In either case, Mr. Clapper is unfit for the job he holds.  But he’s only the tip of the iceberg.