They are not unconnected. They are not unconnected at all.

Now, presumably the president didn't want to provoke the rage of the Palestinians. (Although, then again, he might just have anticipated it.) But Palestinian rage is very easy to provoke. Snap your fingers and, there, you have it. You don't even have to rent a mob. It comes free will, so to speak.

The fact is that Obama did more than snap his fingers. He sent out very top members of his administration to beat up on Israel and they did.

The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.

Democrats appear likely, though they haven't fully decided, to pass health care reform via something called a "self-executing rule." Instead of passing the senate health care bill and then passing the changes to it in a separate reconciliation bill, they'd pass a reconciliation bill with a "rule" that deemed the Senate bill to have been passed. So, one vote instead of two. The tactic is called "deem-and-pass."

Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party.

Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell have a Washington Post op-ed urging the Democrats to abandon health care reform out of their own self-interest:

Pollster Scott Rasmussen and pollster Doug Schoen have an anti-health care reform op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The premise is that President Obama's sales efforts have utterly failed to budge stubborn public opposition:

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial page has one of those sentences that make the Wall Street Journal editorial page such a daily delight: "Last week President Obama sanctioned 'reconciliation,' a complex tactic that would jam ObamaCare into law on sheer power politics." The beautiful thing about this sentence is that it has no argument (nor is there any support for the argument in the sentences that surround it.) It's sheer hand-waving, an attempt to muster every adjec

Bruce Bartlett reports that David Malpass is "exploring" a Senate run in New York, presumably as a Republican. Malpass is an unusual character, a die-hard supply-sider and an economic forecaster. Like most economic forecasters, Malpass is wrong a great deal of the time, though particular brand of his wrongness tends to correspond to the Republican Party agenda in general and the status of upper-bracket tax levels in particular.

There were moments--long moments--during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture like this in the Arab world turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

Of course, Iraq hasn’t turned out that well. Sunni jihadniks are still routinely murdering pious Shi’a on pilgrimage to Karbala. Still...

The conservative hysteria over the prospect of using budget reconciliation to approve relatively minor budget-related changes to the health care bill has been a bizarre spectacle. The rhetoric is near-apocalyptic (Wall Street Journal editorial headline: "Abuse Of Power") yet the effects of this legislation are so minor. It's not like conservatives think the Senate bill is just fine, but the reconciliation changes would be Socialism.

This bonus season, with encouragement from the White House, Wall Street firms have been paying their employees less in cash and more in stock. The idea is that vast cash bonuses encourage reckless, short-term decisions—while stock awards incentivize long-term planning that creates lasting value.

Congressmen Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling co-author a Wall Street Journal op-ed today proposing a new Constitutional amendment to limit federal spending to 20% of the economy, on the grounds that spending is bad.

“With the passage of time,” former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes today, “President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy, including sending 30,000 additional troops to Iraq when most Americans were bone-weary of the war, will be seen as one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” Wehner may turn out to be right.

James C. Capretta, a former Bush administration budget official, has a post at National Review entitled "The Myth of 'All Or Nothing.'" The purpose of the post is to entice Congressional Democrats to vote against health care reform by enticing with the possibility of a smaller, less controversial reform bill they could pass.

On one end of Pennsylvania Avenue yesterday, administration staffers were busy making preparations for an event that will likely determine whether comprehensive health care reform goes forward. And on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, their counterparts in Congress were busy making the case for why it should.

If you think lending his name to a fallacy is Pete Wehner's only contribution to public life, you're oh so mistaken.

As a longtime fan of the Wall Street Journal editorial page's promiscuous use of scare quotes, I enjoyed this passage in today's column by Kimberly Strassel:

In the Wall Street Journal today, there's an op-ed by a senior's rights activist: 

Glenn Hubbard, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, has an op-ed on the budget in today's Wall Street Journal. The good news is that, in addition to demanding spending cuts, Hubbard sorta-hypothetically concedes that tax increases might be needed. The bad news is that, like any good movement conservative, he insists such tax hikes must be regressive:

Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.

A couple months ago, the New York Times reported on changes at the Wall Street Journal:

 Still, I've long understood that in extremis I am a "tax and spend" Democrat--unhappily so, but still so. 

But I would not have cut NASA or the C-17 air transport, Joint Strike Fight components or the Army Corps of Engineers.  

Friday’s economic news warranted only lukewarm to cold comfort for those of us hoping for a sustainable, broad-based economic recovery with steadily spreading opportunity.

Top line, the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in six years in the last three months of 2009, expanding at 5.7 percent yearly rate over the previous quarter, as businesses accelerated their exports and began to replenish drawn-down inventories and invested more in equipment and software.

Consumer spending was up a bit and exports were up a lot. In fact, exports grew at an annual rate of 28 percent in the fourth quarter, which the National Association of Manufacturers said was the fastest increase and the largest contribution to economic growth in 30 years. Of the 5.7 percent rise in gross domestic product, in this connection, trade accounted for 0.5 percent of the growth, since while exports added 1.9 percent of the growth imports subtracted 1.4 percent. At this rate, the economy probably won’t slide back into a recession and it might even hit President Obama’s State of the Union goal of doubling exports over the next five years.