Booker did exactly that during an appearance this Sunday on “Meet the Press” in which he rebuked the Obama campaign for its ongoing efforts to attack Mitt Romney by targeting his experience working at private equity firm Bain Capital. Ads condemning Bain have become the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign, but Booker would have none of it:

“I have to just say, from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this to me, I’m very uncomfortable with.”

Booker went on to add that the attacks on private equity were “nauseating.” If that wasn’t embarrassing enough for the White House, Booker likened the anti-Bain smear campaign to conservatives’ attacks on Obama’s incendiary pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright – that is, a diversion that had no place in the presidential race.

For the Obama campaign and its left-wing surrogates, this was too much to stomach. Reprisal came fast and furious. First to lash out against Booker was Obama’s chief political strategist David Axelrod, who scolded that Booker had been “wrong” to make his remarks and added that the attacks on Bain were justified because “there are specific instances here that speak to an economic theory that isn’t the right economic theory for the country.” Axelrod didn’t specify which theory he had in mind, but presumably he was referring to the administration’s strained attempts to cast Romney as a corporate raider who left gutted companies and pink-slipped workers in his wake – even if it means distorting Romney’s actual record at Bain, and the whole purpose of private equity investment, to the point of caricature. Obama-friendly media also piled on, with Chris Matthews condemning Booker’s candor as a “an act of sabotage” and a “betrayal of Obama.” So intense was the blowback that MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough speculated that Booker was now “fighting for his political life.”

While that may have been overstating it, Booker was clearly feeling the heat. After being raked over the coals by the Obama campaign all day Sunday, he released a four-minute video clip at the end of the day expiating for his crime think on Bain. Gone was his earlier rebuke against attacking capitalism and private equity. Now Booker insisted that he had been misunderstood and that, actually, it was “reasonable” for the campaign to target Romney’s business record. All he had meant to say, Booker explained, was that he was against negative campaigning in the presidential race. That explanation made little sense, inasmuch as the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain were part of a negative campaign by Obama, but it signaled that the upstart politician had been brought to heel by the administration.

That now-famous mental block apart, Perry’s most notable contribution during his brief time in the running was to target Romney’s tenure at Bain. In a series of ill-fated snipes, Perry condemned venture capital firms like Bain as “vultures” who wait for companies to “get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton.” The populist line earned Perry some deserved scorn from critics, who pointed out that venture capital takeovers of the kind Bain specialized in frequently offered a lifeline to moribund companies that would have gone out of business absent outside investment.

If Perry’s untimely political demise serves as an object lesson about the perils of crude populism and anti-capitalist demagoguery, the Obama administration seems determined to ignore it. This week, the Obama reelection campaign unrolled a television ad to run in five swing states that essentially recycles Perry’s attacks on Romney and Bain. The ad, called “Steel,” features interviews with former employees at GST Steel, a Kansas City, Missouri, steel mill that was taken over by Bain in the 1990s and filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The employees in the ad unanimously condemn Romney and Bain for causing job losses at the mill. “It was like a vampire,” one worker laments, referring to Bain. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” Rick Perry would have approved.

Whether voters will is far from certain. Among other flaws, the ad is in desperate need of fact checking. For instance, the ad suggests that Romney was in charge when GST Steel filed for bankruptcy, when in fact he had left Bain two years earlier, in 1999, to oversee the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s not to say that no one in Bain’s leadership from the time is relevant to the election. The current managing director and chief investment officer at Bain is one Jonathan Lavine, who joined Bain in 1993. But Lavine has another distinction, as well: According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks federal campaign contributions, Lavine is a leading bundler of campaign contributions for Obama’s campaign and has raised between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama’s reelection effort. Conveniently, the “Steel” ad omits that detail.

The bigger flaw in the ad is the false premise that Bain was primarily responsible for the job losses at GST Steel. Obama’s ad makes the charge directly, through a negotiator for the workers at GST Steel who says, “Bain Capital was the majority owner. They were responsible.” That might be a damning criticism if it were true, but it isn’t. The fact is that GST Steel was already going out of business, which is why it was taken over by Bain in the first place. At worst, Bain delayed the mill’s day of reckoning.

The differences between Barrett and Falk are small but politically significant. Though they both pledged to eliminate Walker’s restrictions on collective bargaining for most state workers, they disagreed on the methods. Falk took the more union-friendly approach, assuring her supporters that she would veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That promise earned her the endorsements of the state’s leading public-sector unions, including the state chapter of the AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union.

Barrett refused to go as far as Falk. While he is also committed to restoring collective bargaining, he has said that he would do so by introducing the issue in a special legislative session. The latter is particularly unattractive to unions because it would require Republican support for the legislation. Barrett’s victory in the Tuesday primary means the unions’ dreams of restoring collective bargaining through gubernatorial fiat have been shattered.

Yet another setback for the unions is that their efforts to turn the recall into a referendum on collective bargaining appear to have failed. While union activists and organizers still see collective bargaining as the dominant recall issue, Wisconsin’s voters, among them many Democratic primary voters, disagree. Polling of primary voters conducted by Marquette University found that over half of those who voted in Tuesday’s primary favored Barrett’s compromise-seeking approach on collective bargaining over Falk’s and the unions’ demands that it be reinstated without debate. Collective bargaining has also faded as a galvanizing issue. Increasingly, the recall has come to resemble a general election, where the main focus is on standard issues like jobs and unemployment. Doom-saying from Democrats and their union allies notwithstanding, challenging the unions over collective bargaining has not fatally diminished Walker’s political prospects.

If all this weren’t bad enough, there are also growing divisions in the state left’s ranks. Those divisions came to the fore this week with news that the Wisconsin Democratic Party was canceling a “unity rally” this Wednesday in the state capitol to support the winner of the Democratic primary and to bring together Barrett and Falk’s respective supporters. It was not to be. Barrett declined to attend the rally, fueling rumors that he didn’t want images of him commingling with union organizers to be used against him by Walker. Still others speculated that the cancelation was a dirty trick by Falk intended to make embarrass Barrett. Whatever the explanation, this was not the kind of infighting that Democrats and unions had anticipated when they made Walker their target.

The rift between rhetoric and reality aptly sums up the legacy of Putin’s rule, which has seen a rapid erosion of democratic government and the rule of law in Russia. Putin’s third term promises more of the same. Even before Putin’s inauguration ceremony began on Monday, Russian police beat up and arrested over 400 people taking part in anti-government demonstrations. Some of the younger demonstrators were reportedly handed military draft notices upon their arrest.

Police continued the crackdown on Monday, arresting hundreds and clearing the main thoroughfares completely so that Putin’s motorcade could proceed. One Russian blogger posted images of totally deserted streets, with the sarcastic caption: “Joyous crowds of Muscovites greet the new cleanly elected president!” Dissent is alive and well in Russia, as the 20,000-strong weekend demonstrations suggest, but Putin’s idea of democracy means that those who disagree with the government are neither heard nor seen.

Emptied streets cannot hide the fact that Putin’s new term has not been welcomed, particularly in major urban hubs like Moscow. The prospect of Putin resuming the office that he never really surrendered has proved a galvanizing force in Russia over the past year, awaking a previously dormant middle class, and sparking the largest street protests in Russia since the dying days of the Soviet Union. Not powerful enough to prevent Putin’s reelection – largely a formality in Russia’s fraud-plagued elections – the protests have revealed what the state-run media has long managed to suppress: widespread distrust of the political system and popular contempt for Putin.

Hollande campaigned on a platform of class warfare, and all indications are that he will govern that way. While Europe’s mainstream left parties have made peace with capitalism, Hollande remains an unreconstructed tax-and-spend socialist. Showing little regard for the country’s debt problems, he has promised a government spending splurge to the tune of $26 billion over the next 5 years; this even as he improbably claims he will lower the deficit to 3 percent by next year. A self-confessed hater of the wealthy – “I don’t like the rich,” he once declared on television – he has also pledged to enact a confiscatory 75 percent income tax on the highest earners, as well as a separate “wealth tax” on assets and a bevy of new taxes on estates, banks and big corporations. Where president Obama has dressed up his redistributionist schemes in the guise of “shared sacrifice,” Hollande is upfront about his intent to soak France’s shrinking share of high-income earners. “If there are sacrifices to be made, and there will be, then it will be for the wealthiest to make them,” he announced in the days before the election.

While that message clearly resonated with Hollande’s leftist supporters, a new war on wealth is the last thing France needs. The hard truth is that France has lost its competitive edge in recent years. Symbolic of the decline is France’s rigid labor market, a persistently high rate of unemployment rate that stands at a 13-year high of 10 percent, and a yawning trade deficit that topped $91 billion last year. Debt is a major drag on economic growth. French public debt has spiked to 90 percent of the country’s annual output, with the consequence that interest payments are now the second highest government expenditure after education. France’s finances are now in such perilous shape that in January the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s took the drastic step of stripping it of its triple-A rating. Against this bleak background, Hollande’s plans to penalize businesses and other wealth producers with crippling taxes is a disaster in the making.

The most charitable take on Hollande’s agenda is that it is a gimmick rather than a political roadmap. Some of his advisors have already said that the 75 percent tax, for instance, is mostly a “symbolic measure” that Hollande would not pursue once in office. But that is a dangerous gamble because Hollande and the Socialists could soon have a chokehold over French politics. Socialists already control all but one of France’s 22 administrative regions, and the upcoming June parliamentary elections may seal their majority status for some time to come. At that point, there would be few restraints on Hollande’s ambitions.

Reuters‘ report provides a complexity to the story that has been so sorely missing until now. Among other things, it calls into question the notion that white racism was the motivating factor in Martin’s shooting. That narrative was never entirely convincing, and not just because the mixed-race Zimmerman never fit into the media’s neat white-gunman-black-victim allegory. The New York Times‘ designation of Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” was only the most strained attempt to impose a racial framework on the shooting.

Reuters‘ report muddles the racial element even further. It points out that Zimmerman was not only half-Hispanic but he also had black roots, tracing back to his Afro-Peruvian great grandfather on his mother’s side. So far from harboring anti-black racial resentments, he appears to have sought out the company of black friends and colleagues. In 2004, for instance, Zimmerman, an insurance agent, teamed up with a black friend to start up an insurance office.

Even more significant, perhaps, Reuters’ report makes clear that much of the media has simply failed to present the context in which the shooting took place. Yet that context is critical to understanding, if not justifying, why the shooting happened as it did. One would never suspect if from most media accounts, but Zimmerman had good reason to be suspicious of an unknown young black man walking through his neighborhood – and racism had nothing to do with it.

That Portman’s is being seriously considered for the GOP ticket is no fluke. His status as a first-term senator belies an impressive political resume. For starters, he is a veteran of two presidential administrations, having served under President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He also spent 12 years in Congress, before being elected to the Senate in 2010. Just as significant is Portman’s experience on budget and spending issues, on which he is considered a respected authority. A former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, he also served on the deficit-reduction “super committee” that last fall unsuccessfully tried to craft a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion.

Despite that failure, Portman has emerged as an effective critic of the Obama administration’s fiscal stewardship. In February he released an analysis showing just how fiscally irresponsible the administration is. Portman estimated that the administration’s budget increases would lead to the government reaching the debt ceiling once again by October, meaning that it would have slashed through last year’s $2.1 trillion increase in just 14 months. “This is an unfortunate but clear signal to the American people that Washington is spending too much, borrowing too much, and putting our nation’s fiscal stability at risk,” Portman noted at the time.

Due to his command of budget issues, Portman has also been an effective critic of the Obama administration’s budgetary gimmicks. When the administration recently touted the so-called “Buffet Rule,” a minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires, Portman was among the first to point out that it was little more than political posturing. After calculating that the high-profile tax would bring in less than $5 billion per year, Portman observed, “That represents 0.4 percent of annual individual income taxes paid — or enough to pay one week’s interest on the national debt.” The Obama administration subsequently shifted course, insisting that the tax was not intended to bolster the country’s finances but rather to promote “fairness.”

Last week, Chen slipped away from his heavily guarded farmhouse in rural Shandong province, where he has been a prisoner for nearly two years. He made his break at night, taking advantage of the darkness with which he lives permanently. Although his current whereabouts are unknown, he is reportedly under the protection of U.S. diplomats in the capital of Beijing, some 350 miles away.

That a blind man was able to dodge his heavily guarded confinement was discomfiting enough for the government. But the timing of Chen’s escape is also a major black eye for China. It comes just days ahead of a major economic summit in China this week. Where attention was supposed to focus on China’s economic growth, Chen’s escape has trained it instead on its continued suppression of human rights.

It is only the latest embarrassment Chen has inflicted on the government. What made him the target of domestic persecution and international acclaim was his work exposing the Chinese government’s brutal population control methods under its notorious “One-Child” policy. Chinese leaders have denied that such a policy even exists, but Chen, a dogged and meticulous lawyer, collected overwhelming evidence showing not only that the policy exists but the government has employed horrific measures like forced late-term abortions and compulsory sterilization to enforce it. It was a shocking confirmation that, for all its vaunted economic success in recent years, China remains a deeply repressive and backward country.

Government retaliation was quick to follow. In 2006, Chen was “disappeared” for three months in an undisclosed detention center, only to be released just in time to face a trial on charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disrupt traffic” – this despite the fact that he had been detained when the crimes supposedly took place. After just two hours of jury deliberation, Chen was handed a four-year prison sentence. When he later attempted to challenge the verdict at a subsequent retrial, key witnesses for his defense disappeared, one at a time, yet the court upheld the verdict anyway.
 After being released from prison in September 2010, Chen and his family were sentenced without charge to house arrest.

Today, Chen is effectively a prisoner in his own home. Guarded by a battery of police and security thugs, he and his family are subjected to regular beatings and forbidden to leave their home, even to seek medical treatment. No visitors are permitted to meet with him, as “Batman” star Christian Bale discovered when he was forcibly turned away from Chen’s home.

It speaks to Chen’s indomitable will that none of this has stopped him. Despite the devastating conditions of his house arrest, he has remained an outspoken critic of the communist government and its human rights abuses. Already, he has used his brief time in freedom to reveal the full brutality with which he lives daily, releasing a video address to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

Arizona’s law requires state police to enforce federal immigration law by confirming the legal status of criminal suspects and detaining them if they are illegal immigrants. Despite that seemingly modest goal, it has been in legal limbo since July 2010, when the Obama administration’s Justice Department filed suit to block it from going into effect. Arizona has always maintained that it had the authority to enact the law. Now the Supreme Court will step in to referee who is right.

At the heart of the case, as in the recent hearings over ObamaCare, is the balance between federal and state authority. The Obama administration argues that the Arizona law cannot be allowed to stand because the Constitution gives the federal government jurisdiction over immigration laws, and the Arizona law conflicts with federal enforcement efforts. Arizona’s law is invalid, in other words, because it is “pre-empted” by federal laws. On the basis of similar reasoning, several federal courts have already blocked sections of the Arizona law from going into effect.

Arizona frames the issue differently. The state argues that, rather than conflicting with federal law, SB 1070 is complimentary with it. That is a significant distinction because the Supreme Court has in the past affirmed the right of states to have concurrent immigration laws. Attorney Kris Koback, who helped draft the Arizona law before moving on to his current post as secretary of state in Kansas, has pointed out that “the Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that states have spheres of activity where they can operate to discourage illegal immigration. It’s an area of shared authority.” Koback points out that the Arizona law should fall under this sphere because there is nothing legally novel in it. For instance, contra the Obama administration, Arizona’s requirement that immigrants carry registration has already been federal law since the 1950s.

But if the Arizona law and the federal law are essentially the same, why is the former even needed? Arizona’s argument is clear: The federal government is not enforcing its own law. It’s a strong argument, made all the more compelling because the Obama administration has essentially conceded as much. When it comes to illegal immigration, the administration has followed a policy of what it calls “prosecutorial discretion.” In practice, that means that most illegal immigrants who do not have a criminal record are allowed to remain in the country. Last summer, for instance, the administration announced that it would indefinitely delay deporting illegal immigrants without criminal records and give them a chance to apply for a work permit.

Whatever one’s view of the policy, it lends credence to Arizona’s claim that the government is not enforcing the laws against illegal immigration. Since federal law makes no distinction between different categories of illegal immigrants, the administration’s policy amounts to selective enforcement at best and effective non-enforcement at worst. By contrast, the Arizona law is rooted in the policy of maximal “attrition through enforcement.” The underlying idea is that enforcing existing immigration laws can gradually reduce the illegal immigrant population. Given that premise, Arizona could plausibly argue that a state anti-illegal immigration law that enforces existing federal law cannot be in conflict with it.

Five years on, that crossover appeal seems like a distant memory. While opinions of Sarkozy still cross party lines, what binds them now is popular dissatisfaction with his tenure. Thus Sarkozy’s disappointing showing in the first round of presidential voting this Sunday, which saw him come in second behind his Socialist challenger, Francois Hollande. With the deciding May 6th runoff looming, Sarkozy’s days may be numbered.

No small share of the damage has been self-inflicted. For instance, much of the early goodwill was sacrificed immediately after Sarkozy’s 2007 election, when he chose to celebrate his win in the company of an exclusive entourage at a ritzy restaurant on the Chaps Elysées. The choice of venue, for which Sarkozy later expressed regret, earned him the moniker of being the “bling bling president” and an attendant reputation for flash and opulence, a particularly radioactive combination at time when the country faces tough economic times. It hardly bolstered Sarkozy’s common-man appeal that, soon after, he went through a high-profile divorce, leaving his wife Cecelia Ciganer to marry the Italian-born super model Carla Bruni. In recent days, he has struck a remorseful pose, apologizing for not “understanding the symbolic dimension of the president’s role and not being solemn enough in my acts.” But that may be too little too late.

If Sarkozy did not live up to the symbolic demands of the French presidency, neither did he make good on many of his policy promises. Elected on what by French standards was a relatively free-market, conservative platform, Sarkozy has not governed that way. Despite modest reforms like raising the retirement age from 60 to 62, Sarkozy has largely broken promises to grow the economy, trim France’s bloated public sector, and embrace fiscal discipline.

To the contrary, he has launched a number of dubious and expensive spending programs. Rather than reforming the country’s generous welfare system, he has relied on debt to sustain it. He also passed a $26 billion stimulus to prop up the French car industry and fund projects like high-speed trains. That was preceded by a $25 billion strategic investment fund to “protect” French industry from foreign takeovers. And the debt goes on. Sarkozy has promised to take out an additional $52 billion “grand loan” that would be invested in green technologies and a “gigantic campus” for a new university in a Paris suburb.

FP: What message or messages do you think were sent by the judge’s decision to dismiss your case – and especially by his decision to chastise for you giving offense to Muslims?

EP: In my opinion, the message sent by the judge is that Muslims now have the absolute right to defend their religious beliefs, even if by means of force.

FP: In the course of berating you, the judge claimed that the American Founders did not mean for the First Amendment to be used to give offence but rather to speak one’s mind. Among other problems, that would seem to be a contradiction, since speaking one’s mind is liable to give offence. What did you make of his reasoning in this regard?

EP: At first, I didn’t believe what I was hearing. When I marched in the Halloween parade, it was in support of the right of free speech. I believe I have the right to tell the followers of Islam that, in this country, their religion can be mocked, and that the law protects that right. That is why we have a First Amendment. I believe the founders intended to protect speech that some – including the followers of Islam – may find offensive.

FP: Your case has certainly generated a great deal of media attention. What do you make of the discussion that it has generated, including the many defenses of your First Amendment rights from bloggers, journalists and law professors? Were there any reactions that stand out in your mind?

EP: The discussion that was and is generated was overwhelming. On the one hand, the death threats I received, and the vitriol from some of the bloggers, was insane. At the same time, I was encouraged by the fact that many people who understand the law, including many law professors, were on my side.  Most of all, I took heart in the fact that I knew I was not breaking any law when I dressed up as Zombie Mohammed. In fact, I believe I was saying what many Americans wanted to but maybe were afraid to say: no religion is above mockery.

In response to speculators’ supposedly sinister machinations, Obama this week urged Congress to crack down on speculation by stepping up surveillance of energy futures traders and increasing the penalties for those convicted of manipulating Congress. No doubt the move will convince Obama’s supporters that he is “doing something” to bring down gas prices. In truth, the crackdown on oil speculation, not unlike Obama’s recent campaign for a “Buffet rule” tax on millionaires, is little more than a cheap political ploy. Laws are already in place to regulate market manipulation, making Obama’s crackdown largely symbolic. The bigger problem, though, is that there is little connection between rising oil and gas prices and speculation in energy futures markets.

That’s not to say that oil speculation has no effect whatsoever on gasoline prices. But since those prices are ultimately determined by the laws of supply and demand, the only way that oil speculation can influence gas prices is by impacting the supply of oil and gasoline available. Thus, if oil producers expect prices to rise in the future, they may keep oil from the market in the hopes of selling it at a premium. That in turn could lead to diminished supply and increased prices at the pump.

Unfortunately for Obama’s anti-speculation crusade, there is no evidence that this scenario is actually happening. Cato Institute scholars Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren observe that if speculation were having the effect on gas prices that Obama claims, we would see a buildup of inventory among crude oil producers. Instead, crude inventories have remained within the normal range. Even more significant is that gasoline inventories, rather than increasing, have actually been decreasing at a faster-than-average rate. Consequently, Taylor and Van Doren note, “there’s no evidence that speculators are reducing the supply of crude or gasoline through increased storage.” To be sure, inventory rates might not be a meaningful indicator if producers were instead curbing production in anticipation of future price increases. Yet there is no evidence that this is happening, either.

As it happens, there are external factors limiting the supply of oil on the global market. But the true culprit is not oil speculation but geopolitics. Oil analysts point out that due to disruptions in production in strife-torn countries like South Sudan, Yemen and civil-war-engulfed Syria, at least a half a million barrels of oil a day are being withheld from the global market. A precipitous drop in crude oil production in Libya following a complete shutdown last year has cut the global supply by another 2 percent. Combine that with a fall in spare oil capacity and the result is a 20 percent increase in oil prices just since December. Prices may rise even more as a policy that President Obama (along with most Republicans) has supported – new sanctions on Iran intended to curb its nuclear weapons program – goes into effect.

That morally stained history has not prevented SDS veterans, led by the document’s principal author, Tom Hayden, from periodically celebrating the Port Huron Statement as something it never was: a reformist treatise that succeeded in spirit even as it failed to transform America in line with SDS’s radical vision. Hayden has been the leading propagandist of the Port Huron Statement’s supposedly lasting cultural importance, penning and delivering near-annual tributes to the document while divulging little about its troubling history. The latest of these commemorative efforts occurred last week at New York University in New York City, which hosted a two-day conference on the Port Huron Statement to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and to reflect on its historical impact.

Headlined by Hayden, who delivered the keynote address, the conference was a class reunion of sorts of 60-era radicals. The audience was full of aging activists, their nostalgia for the political currents of the sixties betrayed by their graying ponytails, Che Guevara T-shirts, and well-thumbed copies of The Nation. Several said they had been present when the Port Huron Statement was issued in 1962.

Their goal seemed to be to convince themselves that the Port Huron Statement still mattered. Hayden touched on the point directly in his keynote remarks, when he suggested that the document remained historically relevant. “To understand history, you can’t leave it to the historians,” he said. Instead, Hayden left it to himself, and the resulting account was woefully incomplete. Rather than revisit the past, Hayden preferred to rewrite it.

Hayden stressed that the major contribution of the Port Huron Statement was introducing the world to the notion of “participatory democracy.” Hayden described the term in bland terms to mean a call for greater social and economic participation. But as an honest reading of the Port Huron Statement confirms, “participatory democracy” was never a call for democracy at all, but rather a coded prescription for a radical insurrection against established democratic institutions. Thus, it’s not surprising that all of the movements that have embraced “participatory democracy” – from Mexico’s anarcho-communist Zapatista guerillas, to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinistas, to most recently the street thugs and hooligans of Occupy Wall Street – have been unabashedly radical.

Hayden could not bring himself to be more honest about another aspect of the Port Huron Statement, namely it’s opposition to “anti-communism.” As Hayden told it, SDS came under criticism in the 60s for being insufficiently supportive of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. “We were on trial because our views were not anti-communist enough,” Hayden explained ruefully, to sympathetic agreement from the audience.

But that too was a historical whitewash. Not only did the Port Huron Statement reject liberal anti-communism but it embraced its converse, “anti-anti-communism.” The Soviet Union might have been totalitarian and repressive, the authors’ conceded, but it was wrong to “blame only communism” for the Cold War given that the United States, with it’s “monstrous” military structure, its “corporate economy,” and its “imperialist” foreign policy, was not clearly better – and in any case had “done a great deal to foment” Soviet suppression and aggression.

It will be a difficult fight for the embattled governor. That stems in large part from the boldness of Walker’s 2011 budget reforms, which made him a hero to conservatives even as they turned him into a hate figure for unions and the left. First, Walker ended the unions’ automatic collection of dues from members’ paychecks, cutting off a major source of union funds. Next he required state workers to contribute a modest 5.8 percent of their salaries toward their pensions and to cover 12.6 percent of their health insurance premiums, thus bringing Wisconsin closer in line with private sector and national averages and giving the state a chance to get a grip on its spiraling finances. Most controversially, he restricted most public unions’ collective bargaining to salaries, canceling a corrupt and fiscally unsustainable cycle that saw unions negotiate generous perks with the same politicians they helped elect.

None of this has gone down well with the unions. If early signs are any guide, they will do everything they can to paint the reforms as a failure. As they push ahead with the recall, Walker’s opponents claim that he has presided over the “destruction of public education;” that he has forced thousands of teacher layoffs; and that he has triggered a “political and governing crisis.” The evidence, though, shows otherwise. Not only have Walker’s reforms not brought calamity upon Wisconsin, but there is a growing body of data that they have succeeded in precisely the policy areas that unions charge them with destroying.

Public education is a prime example. So far from being destroyed, the state’s public school districts have benefited from a wealth of savings made possible by Walker’s reforms. By limiting collective bargaining, Walker freed school districts to set contracts without union pressure for the first time in decades. The benefits have been significant. As the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s Christian Schneider points out in City Journal, collective bargaining produced contracts that forced the state’s school districts to purchase health insurance from WEA Trust, a non-profit tied to Wisconsin’s largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. But after Walker’s reforms limited collective bargaining, districts could strike that requirement from their contracts and put the provision of health insurance up for bid in a wider market.

The result was savings. Schneider notes that when the Appleton School District put its health insurance contract up for bid, the WEA Trust “suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price.” Thanks to the lower costs, Appleton is expected to save $3 million in the current school year. Appleton is not an anomaly. According to a report by the MacIver Institute, a free-market Wisconsin think tank, following the reform of collective bargaining, at least 25 school districts in Wisconsin reported switching health care providers or plans or opening insurance bidding to outside companies. The institute found that the measures will save the districts $211.45 per student. And the savings were not hypothetical. The institute found that, as of last September, certain school districts already had savings of $162 million dollars, or approximately $507 per student, as a result of Walkers’ reforms. If more school districts followed their example, the institute calculated, Wisconsin could see savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

On April 14, UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States, along with Germany, will hold the latest round of talks with Tehran over its nuclear program. As in previous versions of these negotiations, the goal will be to convince Iran to scale back its uranium enrichment program, and with it its drive for a nuclear weapon. As in the past, too, there is little evidence that Iran has come to the negotiating table in good faith.

The last time that the so-called P5+1 powers held talks with Iran, in January 2011, the talks collapsed in an impasse. Despite a warning from President Obama that the upcoming talks represent “perhaps the last chance” for diplomacy to succeed, early signs suggest that this outcome is likely to be repeated. Not only did Iran reject “preconditions” for the talks, but it could barely bring itself to agree on a venue for holding them.

Substantively, too, Iran is offering little in the way of compromise. Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, recently announced that Iran could eventually stop its enrichment of uranium to the 20-percent level, the highest level acknowledged by Iran, even as it would continue to enrich uranium to lower levels of about 3.5 percent for the purpose of generating power. On the surface at least, this is supposed to address international concerns that Iran could continue to increase its enrichment toward the more than 90-percent level required for a nuclear warhead.

Yet there is less to this concession than meets the eye. Iran’s insistence on keeping some level of enriched uranium is already a hardening of its negotiating stance from 2009, when it agreed “in principle” to export most of its low-enriched uranium in exchange for foreign-made fuel rods. Today, Iran has reneged on that position, refusing to transfer enriched uranium out of the country. Not only that but last month it made a defiant display of inserting its first domestically made fuel rod into a research reactor in northern Tehran. The point was to show that Iran is fully capable of carrying out the cycle of nuclear production on its own and in the face of international pressure and sanctions.

Iran has also spurned demands that it shutter its underground enrichment facilities. Just this week, Iran announced that it would not close its heavily fortified Fordo nuclear site. The site is built in tunnels deep inside a mountain located about 20 miles from the city of Qom, thus making it less vulnerable to destruction from bomb strikes. Recent revelations that Iran has begun enriching uranium at Fordo have further heightened concern that, left unchecked, it could become the birthplace of Iran’s nuclear bomb.

Khairat al-Shater, Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s American charm offensive got off to a rough start this week. Members of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Brotherhood’s political wing, arrived in Washington D.C. this week for a series of meetings with U.S. officials, media, and think tanks, with the purpose of presenting a moderate image of the Brotherhood and allaying fears that it will impose Sharia law and threaten Egypt’s minority groups, including secularists and Coptic Christians. Instead, the Brotherhood’s delegation was confronted with news that, back in Egypt, those fears were being confirmed.

Over the weekend, the Brotherhood announced that it would field a candidate in May’s presidential election, breaking an earlier pledge not to do so. Given the Brotherhood’s political and organizational clout, the candidate, businessman and Brotherhood bigwig Khairat al-Shater, is now considered the frontrunner, reinforcing concerns that the Islamist group wants to completely dominate the Egyptian parliament. Worse still for the Brotherhood’s supposedly moderate image was that al-Shater made it expressly clear that his “first and final project and objective” would be to impose Sharia law on the country. Already, he has stirred controversy in Egypt by lobbying for the support of Egypt’s hard-line Salafist clerics, offering them effective approval over all legislation to make sure that it is compliant with Sharia.

That left the Brotherhood’s delegation scrambling to sanitize al-Shater’s statements.  Asked to account for its political about-face, and one that seemed likely to bring to power a committed proponent of Sharia law, the Brotherhood’s visiting delegation tried to make light of the news. Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, one of the lawmakers in the delegation, insisted that the Brotherhood was committed to a “civil state” and was only seeking to implement the “principles” of Sharia law rather than its strict application. “The principles are universal: freedom, human rights, justice for all. This is the priority of the Freedom and Justice Party,” Dardery said at an event at Georgetown University. Sharia, in short, was not the Brotherhood’s primary concern in post-Mubarak Egypt.

But that dubious pretense became virtually indefensible on Wednesday, when an Egyptian court sentenced a 17-year-old Christian boy to three years in jail for the crime of publishing cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed on his Facebook page. The Sharia-inspired sentence came in the aftermath of a wave of attacks on Christians by Muslim mobs, in which Christian homes were burned and Christians were injured. The violence highlighted the pressing worry that Egypt’s Christians could lose their rights under a Brotherhood-led regime. Christians have already been shut out of the political process, and Christian parties have responded by quitting a working group drafting the country’s new constitution, saying that their concerns were being ignored. Their departure represents a growing political disenfranchisement that gives the lie to the Brotherhood’s claim of seeking “justice for all.”

“What drags down our entire economy is when there’s an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else,” Obama claimed. He went on to insist that addressing inequality was not only an important moral cause in its own right but also an economic priority, since “research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.” It was a theme Obama has sounded repeatedly in his first term, most famously last December in his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in which he claimed that “breathtaking greed” in America was the cause of America’s economic woes and belied America’s national promise that “this is a place where you can make it if you try.”

Obama is not completely wrong. America’s rich have indeed gotten richer. A 2011 report by the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that between 1979 and 2007 after-tax income for the highest-income households grew more than for any other group. Altogether, between 1980 and 2005, 80 percent of the total increase in incomes went to the top 1 percent of American households. But before enlisting in the nearest “Occupy” protest, it’s worth considering some of the complications with the inequality picture presented by Obama.

Authors Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel have done just that in a new essay in the public policy journal National Affairs. One problem with focusing on the increase of wealth at the very top, the authors note, is that it is misleading. The reality is that the income of individual households is not static. People have always moved up and down on the scale of income distribution, and that remains true today. Thus the CBO points out that the population with income in the lowest 20 percent in 1979 was not necessarily the population in that quintile in 2007. Similarly, the authors report, about half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 had moved up to a higher income category by 2005, even as 30 percent of those in the top income group in 1996 had fallen down to a lower quintile by 2005. Contrary to what Obama suggests, income distribution is not etched in stone.

Further, an exclusive focus on the rise of incomes among the highest earners ignores the disparate effect of taxes on the rich. Even as the top 1 percent has seen a significant rise in their wealth, they have also paid a disproportionate share of the country’s taxes. The top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, according to the CBO, more than double the less than 20 percent that they paid in the 1970s. While the point is often lost in Obama’s appeals for “fairness” and higher taxes on the rich, the fact is that among the world’s richest nations, America already imposes the largest share of income taxes on its rich, exceeding even socialist countries like Sweden.

The key to Romney’s victory in Wisconsin, as it has been throughout the primary season, was his massive funding advantage. Restore Our Future, Romney’s super PAC, sank some $3 million into television ads in the state; Santorum had to make due with a comparatively modest $850,000 ad buy. The advertising blitz proved decisive, helping Romney to overturn an early deficit in the polls and swinging the race in his favor in the closing days. Of the 51 percent of Wisconsin voters who made up their minds in the last week, 51 percent ended up voting for Romney. High-profile endorsements, including backing from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a favorite of Wisconsin Republicans, also helped Romney’s cause in the Badger State.

Ads and endorsements aside, there were also signs that Romney benefited from the growing perception that he will be the last man standing. In Wisconsin, early exit polls showed that an overwhelming 80 percent of voters expected Romney to become the eventual nominee, even if they didn’t support him personally. In Maryland, nearly half of primary voters believed the same. The fact that Romney is increasingly drawing more support from Santorum-friendly constituencies like Tea Party members and evangelical Christians may be another indication that Republicans are ready for the race to be over.

So too is the Obama administration. New ads launched by the president’s re-election campaign in six swing states are now targeting Romney by name, and the president is now referring to him in his speeches, a clear sign that he considers Romney his likely opponent. Romney has responded in kind. In his victory speech last night, he hit out at “Barack Obama’s government-centered society,” a possible preview of his theme in the general election. Romney is also slated to form joint fundraising committees with the Republican National Committee, a sign that he has begun to shift focus to the major battle ahead. Even as he continues his quest for the nomination, Romney has begun acting like the nominee.

The Internet now teems with death threats against Zimmerman, many of them explicit. A Twitter account called “KillZimmerman” has been active for nearly a week. The page shows a mug shot of Zimmerman, a bull’s-eye around his head, and reads: “This Page Is 4 Da Ppl Who Believe Zimmerman Should Be Shot Dead In The Street.”

The site features messages like the following:

“Every1 is going to die one day sum ppl deserve to die today.”

Calls for Zimmerman’s murder also appeared on other twitter sites. One, since taken down, read:

“Ima get a group of niggas to KILL George Zimmerman ( the fat ass racist ass white man who killed Trayvon Martin ) ! He deserves to DIE !!!!— Couldnt Care Less (@Simply_Reiona) March 24, 2012″

Black militant groups have also tried to incite Zimmerman’s murder. The New Black Panther Party made news for offering a $10,000 bounty for Zimmerman’s death and has circulated a “Wanted: Dead Or Alive” poster to inspire someone to commit the act. The message is apparently intended in earnest. Mikhail Muhummud, the group’s self-identified leader, has warned, “God dammit, he should be fearful for his life.” Yet another group, calling itself the New Black Liberation Militia, has announced that it will send its members to Orlando next week to “attempt a citizen’s arrest” of Zimmerman. A t-shirt has been marketed emblazoned with Zimmerman’s mugshot and the word “Pussy Ass Cracker.” Not surprisingly, in light of such threats, Zimmerman and his family have gone into hiding.

Even those with no connection to Zimmerman have become targets of the revenge mob. After director Spike Lee retweeted the home address of an elderly couple in Zimmerman’s home town of Sanford, Florida, apparently confusing their son William George Zimmerman with George Zimmerman, the couple was barraged with hate mail and harassed by the media, eventually having to flee their home to a hotel for safety. Although Lee has since apologized, the violent immediacy with which the couple became the victim of the Tayvon revenge seekers is revealing of the ferocity of the persecution.

Drowned out by the bloodlust is the due process to which Zimmerman is still entitled. While his self-appointed executioners don’t seem to care, he hasn’t been charged with anything yet. That may or may not change, depending on the facts of the case, but until these become known there is no justice in passing judgement on Zimmerman’s guilt, let alone in demanding his death. The fact that 70 percent of Americans now believe that Zimmerman should be arrested is a troubling commentary on the extent to which passions have been able to trump evidence.

Not the least of the tragedies of the Trayvon Martin shooting is that it has engendered exactly the kind of vigilante violence against which it was supposed to provide a cautionary tale, only this time Martin’s shooter may become the victim. “I just hope at one point everyone will go beyond the hate that they have,” Zimmerman’s father recently said of those screaming for his son’s murder. At that point maybe justice – the legal, not the mob variety – can take over.

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Kim’s expertise is in health policy, so little is known about his views on economic development, the World Bank’s primary purpose. What is on the public record, however, is deeply troubling. A case in point is a collection of studies that Kim co-edited in 2000, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. The grim title accurately reflects the book’s radical central premise, namely that capitalism and economic growth is bad for the poor across the world. The introduction, which Kim co-authored with several other academics, states the point bluntly: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

In this vein, the authors go on to dismiss “neoliberalism” – the preferred left-wing academic pejorative for free trade and free markets – as a failure, particularly for the world’s poor. “Even where neoliberal policy measures have succeeded in stimulating economic growth, growth’s benefits have not gone to those living in ‘dire poverty,’ one-fourth of the world’s population,” the authors assert.

If economic growth hurts the poor, especially in the Third World, what helps their cause? The book answers that question with a chapter touting what it considers a true success: communist Cuba’s health-care system. As the chapter’s author tells it, Cuba’s health care is supposedly on par with that of the United States, an achievement made “possible because of a govern­mental commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice.” Relying on bogus statistics from the Cuban government and distorting the extreme inequities of Cuban health care, where few of Cuba’s poor can either afford or obtain either medicine or doctors’ treatment, the study is revealing mostly of the ideological extremism of its author. Indeed, it might well have been written by Chomsky, which in fact it was: the author is Aviva Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s eldest daughter. Noam Chomsky himself is quoted in the book’s conclusion, which cites his dismissal of economic growth as “efforts to make people feel helpless.” The book’s authors, including Jim Yong Kim, seem to agree.

They could hardly be more wrong. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that economic growth raises income levels, which in turn reduces poverty and improves the lot of the global poor. Much of that evidence has been documented by the World Bank, the very institution that Kim has been tapped to lead. Earlier this month, for instance, the World Bank released a report documenting a decline in the poverty rate of the poor in all the regions of the developing world. The finding is especially striking because it comes amidst a global downturn. Economic growth accounts for much of this astounding progress.