Culture Still Matters

By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 31, 2012

RUDESHEIM, Germany -- This week I am leading a military history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe's current economic crises by just ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.

Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.

Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and make it nearly impossible to immigrate there.

So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?

 
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.

Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later Renaissance Venice and Florence.

Instead, culture explains far more -- a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back Southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers save and produce like workaholic Germans to even out the playing field of the European Union.

But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, in comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.

I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard -- but often accurate -- politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.

Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 p.m.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?

To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic -- or is it better characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism and tribalism?

The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.

There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the postmodern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.

A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany -- and do not believe that they should have to -- take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.

Obama Campaign May Be Fooling Itself

By Michael Barone
Thursday, May 31, 2012

"Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic." So reads a sentence in John Heilemann's exhaustive article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New York magazine.

Heilemann is a fine reporter and was co-author with Time's Mark Halperin of a best-selling book on the 2008 presidential campaign. While his sympathies are undoubtedly with Obama, he does a fine job of summarizing the arguments and tactics of both sides.

And he's capable of directing snark at both candidates. Samples: Romney "seems to suffer a hybrid of affluenza and Tourette's." "A cynic might say that the liberation Obama feels is the freedom from, you know, actually governing."

Heilemann's article is well-sourced. It's based on interviews with David Axelrod, the former White House aide now back in Chicago, David Plouffe, the 2008 manager now in the White House, and Jim Messina, the current campaign manager.

The picture Heilemann draws is of campaign managers whose assumptions have been proved wrong and who seem to be fooling themselves about what will work in the campaign.

One assumption that has been proved wrong is that the Obama campaign would raise $1 billion and that, as in 2008, far more money would be spent for Democrats than Republicans.

Heilemann reports the campaign managers' alibis. Obama has given donors "shabby treatment," he writes. This of a president who has attended more fundraisers than his four predecessors combined.

As for the Obama-authorized super PAC being $90 million short of its $100 million goal, well, it was late getting started and some money-givers don't like negative ads.

A more plausible explanation is that big Democratic donors don't trust the political judgment of super PAC head Bill Burton -- who was passed over for promotion to White House press secretary -- the way big Republican donors trust Karl Rove.

Here's another: A lot of people like the way Obama has governed less than they liked the idea of Obama governing.

A second assumption is that the Obama managers "see Romney as a walking, talking bull's-eye" and have "contempt for his skills as a political performer."

You can find some basis for this in Romney's performance in the primaries. But you can also find evidence to the contrary. In my own experience as a political consultant, I found it dangerous to assume your opponents will screw up. Sometimes they don't.

As for fooling themselves, I have to wonder whether the Obama people were spoofing Heilemann at points. He quotes Plouffe as saying. "Let's be clear what (Romney) would do as president," and then summarizes: "Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He's far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage."

These claims don't seem sustainable to me. No one seriously thinks there's any likelihood of criminalizing abortion or banning contraception. Romney brushed off that last one in a debate.

Nor is there any chance an anti-same-sex marriage amendment would get the two-thirds it needs in Congress to go to the states. Opposing legalization of illegal immigrants is not a clear vote-loser, particularly now that, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, a million have left the country.

Also, the Obama managers' explanations about why it's really not inconsistent to attack Romney as a flip-flopper during the primaries and then flip-flop to attack him for "extreme right" views do not ring true. It sounds as "thoroughly tactical" as Axelrod's description of Romney.

Heilemann quotes Messina as saying Obama has "a distinct advantage" in battleground states. He envisions the campaign as a long, hard slog through the target states, like George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004.

That's what it looks like now. But there are other possibilities. Bush was running in a 10-year period in which partisan preferences were very steady. In five straight House elections from 1996 to 2004, each party got about the same percentage of the popular vote every time.

We're in a different setting now. Obama won the popular vote by 7 points in 2008. Republicans won the House popular vote by 7 points in 2010. Many more voters have been moving around than had been eight years ago.

The strategy of rallying currently unenthusiastic core Obama voters -- Hispanics, young voters, unmarried women -- risks alienating others who may be more moveable than their counterparts were in 2004. The Obama managers seem unaware of that risk. Could be a problem for them.

“Tolerant” Dems Think It’s OK to Insult Black Republican Women

By Crystal Wright
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Liberals have created an unspoken code of conduct that says it is condoned and encouraged for Democrats to insult black Republicans, particularly black female Republicans. Black Republicans must be effectively blowing up the stereotype all blacks are not liberals because I’ve noticed a rash of Twitter accounts have been created by Democrat operatives with the sole purposes of attacking me to silence me.

Unlike some blacks who call themselves independents in order to be more palatable to the mainstream media establishment, I don’t straddle the center. I call myself a Republican and this really BOTHERS Democrats because I’m not black like they want me to be.

Not a day goes that I’m not bombarded by an arsenal of crude names on Twitter or via email because I’m a black Republican and don’t worship Barack Obama or think his being elected as the first black president of America is the greatest thing he should be expected to achieve as president.

Because I refuse to bow to a grotesque stereotype, liberals think it’s permissible to say things to me on the Internet most would never have the guts to say to my face. Granted I have strong opinions, which I’m not afraid to express but when liberals can’t argue against my points or I refuse to agree with them, they generally resort to profanity or vulgar sexual references.

I wanted to share a string of ugly tweets from last to demonstrate the kind of ugliness I subjected to daily. Over the Memorial Day weekend, I tweeted about several topics: Mitt Romney having a black voter outreach strategy while Obama had none because he like Democrats take the black vote for granted and how ironic when his policies have disproportionately harmed blacks; and Obama’s 2008 race speech when he refused to denounce Rev. Wright’s racist sermons.

I also tweeted about Democrats flawed argument that voter ID laws harm minorities. If whites can manage to get proper ID to vote in states with photo ID laws and minorities can’t, Dems are saying one of two things. First, blacks and other ethnic groups are intellectually inferior and therefore incapable of acquiring Photo IDs to vote or second they believe more minorities, who vote Democrat, commit voter fraud and that’s the only way Democrats can win. This kind of rhetoric should be insulting to blacks or any minorities because it implies that we’re the lesser people. (By the way, when Georgia and Indiana passed voter ID laws, minority voter registration increased. The Brennan Center found majority of people, 89% of Americans have the proper ID to vote so perhaps the 11% who don’t need to get the proper ID.)

Who knows what set the liberals off May 26, 2012 but this is what ensued.

A man whose handle is Axle the Great launched a series of insulting tweets directed at me May 26, 2012:

@GOPBlackChick is hittable so I wouldn't care what comes out her mouth. Id just be thinking what could go in.

@GOPBlackChick I said I would **** her. Don't get me wrong, politics aside. Since when does a man cares what a women says

@GOPBlackChick okay. fine. you ****ing sally hemmings want to be. good bye

@GOPBlackChick so the **** what. go away you self loathing attention whore.

On Memorial Day @younggrumpy didn’t agree with my comments about some DC councilmembers and Mayor Vincent Gray so he jumped in my Twitter feed with these unsavory tweets:

Younggrumpy: “u self hating porch monkey,” and “you dumb c***.”

It’s ironic males who call themselves Democrats and belong to the so called “party of tolerance” don’t practice the tolerance they preach but rather daily wage a misogynistic war on Republican women. Equally outrageous is when Democrats can’t defend themselves against Republicans’ counter arguments, they immediately resort to name calling or profanity.

A good example is my appearance May 7th on CNN with liberal leaning political pundit Goldie Taylor. Taylor didn’t like my pointing out the holes in her comments about Biden’s support of gay marriage so she insulted me like a child on the playground, “I don’t respond to anything Crystal Wright says on TV or Twitter.” Then she told me on air to “Stuff it and hold it.” I don’t know what that means but it sounds unsavory like the Tweet she wrote May 26th:

”RT@Iluvbp @goldietaylor Would you spit on Crystal Wright if she were on fire? << I'd get a hose, put put the fire and smack her senseless.”

Liberals need to learn rules of civility rather than insults in debate with their political opponents; otherwise, they look like crude, unmannered bullies void of arguments and full of fear and loathing.

The Secret Kill List

By Judge Andrew Napolitano
Thursday, May 31, 2012

The leader of the government regularly sits down with his senior generals and spies and advisers and reviews a list of the people they want him to authorize their agents to kill. They do this every Tuesday morning when the leader is in town. The leader once condemned any practice even close to this, but now relishes the killing because he has convinced himself that it is a sane and sterile way to keep his country safe and himself in power. The leader, who is running for re-election, even invited his campaign manager to join the group that decides whom to kill.

This is not from a work of fiction, and it is not describing a series of events in the Kremlin or Beijing or Pyongyang. It is a fair summary of a 6,000-word investigative report in The New York Times earlier this week about the White House of Barack Obama. Two Times journalists, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, painstakingly and chillingly reported that the former lecturer in constitutional law and liberal senator who railed against torture and Gitmo now weekly reviews a secret kill list, personally decides who should be killed and then dispatches killers all over the world -- and some of his killers have killed Americans.

We have known for some time that President Obama is waging a private war. By that I mean he is using the CIA on his own -- and not the military after congressional authorization -- to fire drones at thousands of persons in foreign lands, usually while they are riding in a car or a truck. He has done this both with the consent and over the objection of the governments of the countries in which he has killed. He doesn't want to talk about this, but he doesn't deny it. How chilling is it that David Axelrod -- the president's campaign manager -- has periodically seen the secret kill list? Might this be to keep the killings politically correct?

Can the president legally do this? In a word: No.

The president cannot lawfully order the killing of anyone, except according to the Constitution and federal law. Under the Constitution, he can only order killing using the military when the U.S. has been attacked, or when an attack is so imminent and certain that delay would cost innocent American lives, or in pursuit of a congressional declaration of war. Under federal law, he can only order killing using civilians when a person has been sentenced lawfully to death by a federal court and the jury verdict and the death sentence have been upheld on appeal. If he uses the military to kill, federal law requires public reports of its use to Congress and congressional approval after 180 days.

The U.S. has not declared war since World War II. If the president knows that an attack on our shores is imminent, he'd be hard-pressed to argue convincingly that a guy in a truck in a desert 10,000 miles from here -- no matter his intentions -- poses a threat to the U.S. so imminent and certain that he needs to be killed on the spot in order to save the lives of Americans who would surely die during the time it would take to declare war on the country that harbors him, or during the time it would take to arrest him. Under no circumstances may he use civilian agents for non-judicial killing. Surely, CIA agents can use deadly force to protect themselves, but they may not use it offensively. Federal laws against murder apply to the president and to all federal agents and personnel, wherever they go on the planet.

Since 9/11, the United States government has set up national security systems that function not under the Constitution, not under the Geneva Conventions, not under the rule of law, not under the rules of war, not under federal law, but under a new secret system crafted by the Bush administration and personally directed by Obama, the same Obama who condemned these rules as senator and then extended them as president. In the name of fighting demons in pick-up trucks and wars that Congress has never declared, the government shreds our rights, taps our cellphones, reads our emails, kills innocents abroad, strip searches 87-year-old grandmothers in wheelchairs and 3-year-old babies in their mothers' arms, and offers secrecy when the law requires accountability.

Obama has argued that his careful consideration of each person he orders killed and the narrow use of deadly force are an adequate and constitutional substitute for due process. The Constitution provides for no such thing. He has also argued that the use of drones to do his killing is humane since they are "surgical" and only kill their targets. We know that is incorrect. And he has argued that these killings are consistent with our values. What is he talking about? The essence of our values is the rule of law, not the rule of presidents.

AP Textbook Angst

By Mona Charen
Tuesday, May 29, 2012

After several cries of pain from my 16-year-old son, I finally got around to reading his Advanced Placement world history textbook. Not a way to spend a placid weekend.

Paging through the "World Civilizations: The Global Experience" by Peter N. Stearns et al. is flabbergasting. The authors lean so far backward to be neutral about various cultures and nations that the text fails utterly as reliable history.

In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union -- with all of the copious records that have been exhumed from the Soviet archives and other sources -- one might have thought that the sheer human catastrophe caused by communism ought no longer to be in question among serious people, far less eminent historians. (Actually, there has been no doubt since the 1930s, but the evidence has become even more voluminous since 1989.) Yet throughout this 900-plus-page tome, the brutal body count of communism's victims is given only glancing notice. Like Soviet apologists during the Cold War era, the authors provide generous interpretations of communist dictators motives, along with dry, forgettable descriptions of their atrocities.

"World Civilizations" tells some of our most advanced 10th graders that Josef Stalin's collectivization of agriculture "had serious flaws." That's one way of describing a deliberate policy of starving the peasantry into submission. In "Harvest of Sorrow," Robert Conquest estimated that the "terror famine" of 1932-33 caused the deaths of at least five million Ukrainians, and Stalin's agriculture collectivization, which included the war on "kulaks," (slightly more prosperous peasants) took the lives of 14.5 million people in all.

You won't find those deaths mentioned in "World Civilizations." No, the text instructs students that "after the messy transition period" had ended, "the collective farms did ... allow normally adequate if minimal food supplies ... and they did free excess workers to be channeled into the ranks of urban labor."

Later, "World Civilizations" mentions that Stalin's totalitarian regime resulted in one of the "great bloodbaths of the 20th century." But the very next sentence misleads the reader completely. "During the great purge of party leaders that culminated in 1937-38, hundreds of people were intimidated into confessing imaginary crimes against the state and most of them were put to death. Many thousands more were sent to Siberian labor camps."

Hundreds? Thousands? The Black Book of Communism, published in 1999, estimated that the USSR was responsible for 20 million deaths (this is exclusive of the losses in World War II). More recent estimates have put the total far higher. By mentioning the bloodbath but then immediately citing examples involving only hundreds killed and thousands imprisoned, the text distorts the historical record almost beyond recognition.

Mao Zedong, perhaps the greatest butcher of the 20th century in terms of sheer numbers, is treated as a tarnished idealist -- one who "clung to his faith in the peasants ... as the repository of basic virtue." Mao's Communists, reads the text, were aided in their rise to power by World War II. But they "won the mandate to govern China because they offered solutions to China's fundamental social and economic problems."

The Communists seized power in China though violence and terror -- just the same way communists achieved power everywhere else in the world. Was there an election in which the Chinese endorsed the Communists' "solutions" to China's problems? Of course not. As for Mao's faith in the peasants -- God protect us from such faith. Mao presided over the worst famine in recorded history -- estimates of the number killed range between 20 and 43 million. The famine grew directly out of Mao's Great Leap Forward -- a series of dictates that included farm collectivization and applying the crackpot genetic theories of Stalin's favorite "scientist" Trofim Lysenko. Mao, like Stalin, also used famine as a political tool to eliminate his adversaries.

"World Civilizations" baldly endorses the notion that communist central planning was successful in modernizing the economies of the USSR and China. As Martin Malia wrote in "The Soviet Tragedy," Stalin's Five Year Plan was "the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history."

There is much more along these lines. The Hitler/Stalin Pact was the fault of Britain and France. Castro was an impatient reformer. It's quite staggering that this long-since discredited benevolence about communism is being offered in the 21st century. Our kids would be far better served learning from Wikipedia.

Our Nation's Future

By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Our nation is rapidly approaching a point from which there's little chance to avoid a financial collapse. The heart of our problem can be seen as a tragedy of the commons. That's a set of circumstances when something is commonly owned and individuals acting rationally in their own self-interest produce a set of results that's inimical to everyone's long-term interest. Let's look at an example of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon and then apply it to our national problem.

Imagine there are 100 cattlemen all having an equal right to graze their herds on 1,000 acres of commonly owned grassland. The rational self-interested response of each cattleman is to have the largest herd that he can afford. Each cattleman pursing similar self-interests will produce results not in any of the cattlemen's long-term interest -- overgrazing, soil erosion and destruction of the land's usefulness. Even if they all recognize the dangers, does it pay for any one cattleman to cut the size of his herd? The short answer is no because he would bear the cost of having a smaller herd while the other cattlemen gain at his expense. In the long term, they all lose because the land will be overgrazed and made useless.

We can think of the federal budget as a commons to which each of our 535 congressmen and the president have access. Like the cattlemen, each congressman and the president want to get as much out of the federal budget as possible for their constituents. Political success depends upon "bringing home the bacon." Spending is popular, but taxes to finance the spending are not. The tendency is for spending to rise and its financing to be concealed through borrowing and inflation.

Does it pay for an individual congressman to say, "This spending is unconstitutional and ruining our nation, and I'll have no part of it; I will refuse a $500 million federal grant to my congressional district"? The answer is no because he would gain little or nothing, plus the federal budget wouldn't be reduced by $500 million. Other congressmen would benefit by having $500 million more for their districts.

What about the constituents of a principled congressman? If their congressman refuses unconstitutional spending, it doesn't mean that they pay lower federal income taxes. All that it means is constituents of some other congressmen get the money while the nation spirals toward financial ruin, and they wouldn't be spared from that ruin because their congressman refused to participate in unconstitutional spending.

What we're witnessing in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other parts of Europe is a direct result of their massive spending to accommodate the welfare state. A greater number of people are living off government welfare programs than are paying taxes. Government debt in Greece is 160 percent of gross domestic product. The other percentages of GDP are 120 in Italy, 104 in Ireland and 106 in Portugal. As a result of this debt and the improbability of their ever paying it, their credit ratings either have reached or are close to reaching junk bond status.

Here's the question for us: Is the U.S. moving in a direction toward or away from the troubled EU nations? It turns out that our national debt, which was 35 percent of GDP during the 1970s, is now 106 percent of GDP, a level not seen since World War II's 122 percent. That debt, plus our more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, has led Standard & Poor's to downgrade our credit rating from AAA to AA+, and the agency is keeping the outlook at "negative" as a result of its having little confidence that Congress will take on the politically sensitive job of tackling the same type of entitlement that has turned Europe into a basket case.

I am all too afraid that Benjamin Franklin correctly saw our nation's destiny when he said, "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

A Case For Governor Scott Walker

By Susan Brown
Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Name-calling is the coward’s way to avoid intelligent discourse. Liberals are notorious for responding to just about anything or anyone with whom they disagree using ad hominem rebuttals to discredit their opponents. Rather than exercising brain cells to engage in scholarly debate, most liberals will leapfrog over the subject at hand and conjure-up a baseless and unrelated charge that makes about as much sense as calling Bill Maher a patriot.

If you are a pro-capitalist, you are a fascist. If you are a Christian, you are an extremist. If you are a Mormon, you are a polygamist. If you reject Obama’s liberal policies, you are a racist. And, if you are Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, you are a liar.

Liberals are so busy trying to get their way they fail to see the yearning for fiscal integrity rumbling across the highways and byways of this great country. They have no idea this real and present dissatisfaction is non-partisan in nature. In this unstable economy, many Americans have lost their appetites for labor unions and the ginormous government budgets they inspire.

Liberals would love to blame this dissatisfaction on those right-wing nut jobs, but they cannot. A good example is what happened in South Florida in March 2011 when Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, a Republican, was shown the door for doing for doing the opposite of what Walker is attempting to do in Wisconsin. Alvarez raised property taxes by 13 percent to fund public-sector union expenses.

In an attempt to discredit him, liberals label Walker as “too extreme.” I partially agree with them; Walker is extremely effective. Wisconsin was drowning in debt until the governor’s fiscally conservative measures erased Wisconsin’s $3.6 billion deficit. Rather than adopting the Democratic Party’s “cure-all” prescription of raising taxes, Walker lowered them, signing a property tax freeze and lowering school property taxes. Wisconsin is expected to have a budget surplus by 2013.

Governor Walker made tough decisions during tough economic times. Walker’s proposal allowing union participation to be voluntary and requiring union workers to contribute to their generous benefit plans sent Wisconsin state senate Democrats reeling – literally. Once they realized Walker wasn’t going to back down, they absconded to a neighboring state in a childish display of political theatrics.

Once it was enacted, the bill President Obama once described as “an assault on unions,” became a pathway to independence. Wisconsin schools and local governments were given the freedom to live within their means when they were granted the ability to hire, fire and compensate based upon performance. The nonpartisan group, Wisconsin Taxpayer’s Alliance, reported that the savings from employee benefits “allowed districts to reduce costs” allowing districts like the Kaukauna school district to control their own destiny and convert a $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus.

Walker’s success in Wisconsin is a threat to labor unions, Progressives and the Democratic Party. According to the New York Post, New York unions are sending resources “to oust the union-busting Walker on June 5 and stop the anti-union movement from spreading to other states.”

For political zealots, truth is a wonderful thing to twist, spin and slant – especially if it means discrediting a sitting governor prior to his recall election. Why debate an issue when you can call your opponent a liar? To no surprise, Walker has been accused of misrepresenting the truth over a variety of issues for the actions he’s taken to regain fiscal stability. Nevertheless, the best defense for Walker is the truth, which has manifested itself in Wisconsin’s economic recovery.

A win for Walker will be a win for the rest of us because his policies could serve as an antidote to the economic contagion spreading across this country. No matter who wins in Wisconsin on June 5th, or in Washington this November, our economy will not improve without making tough choices. Either way, the job requires a strong leader and skillful surgeon, and Governor Scott Walker has proven he is up to the task.