† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: President Barack Hussein Obama’s job-creation agenda - meant to quell voter discontent in an election year – is dead in the water, because Tea Partiers have convinced much of the electorate that adding to the $12.8 trillion national debt will kill more jobs than the administration can ever create, reports The Associated Press:

The idea of a jobs agenda arose late last year when the unemployment rate hit 10 percent and Democrats voiced concern that the majority party wasn't doing enough to spur job creation. …

In the Senate, Majority Leader Reid, D-Nev., handed the issue over the Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. They devised the $83 billion plan, focused on small business, infrastructure projects, energy efficiency and support for public sector jobs.

The plan absorbed a critical setback when the Senate Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., came out against using bailout funds to pay for it.

Since then, the measure has languished. The election of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., robbed Democrats of their filibuster-proof 60-vote coalition. Concerns about the rising national debt also sapped momentum.

† Obama Doctrine Taking Shape: The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone takes issue with a World Affairs article by historian Mark Mazower applauding liberals for abandoning humanitarian intervention:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberals appalled by violations of human rights called for intervention in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. …

As Mazower notes, there's a tension between humanitarian intervention and traditional state sovereignty. After Iraq, liberals showed, in Mazower's words, "a new maturity in international relations" by upholding "the stability of international borders" rather than intervening to uphold human rights.

This seems to be the view of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy has shown a cold indifference to human rights that contrasts vividly with those of his five predecessors. …

[T]he Obama approach of kicking our friends and groveling to the unfriendly heads us in the wrong direction. Our relations with India, Japan and the Eastern European democracies are distinctly chillier than they were under Bush. Our outstretched hand to Iran still meets a clenched fist.

All of which certainly makes humanitarian intervention unlikely in the near future. Historians of Europe may consider a chastened and unventuresome America a good thing. Victims of oppression with no aid in sight may take a different view.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: It’s a cruel Catch-22: Trying to stretch unemployment benefits and loans from family and friends, an unemployed worker maxes out credit cards to pay for groceries and other necessities. As the months of joblessness drag on (s)he starts prioritizing which bills to pay and which to put off. As the job-seeker’s credit becomes increasingly tarnished, the likelihood of being hired becomes vanishingly small as many employers equate a poor credit history with untrustworthiness - or worse. The New York Times reports:

In defending employers’ use of credit checks as part of the hiring process, Eric Rosenberg of the TransUnion credit bureau paints a sobering picture.

Retailers lose more than $30 billion a year because of employee theft, he says. Workplace violence costs employers $55 million a year in lost wages. A third of employees provide bogus information on their résumés. …

Trouble is, researchers say there is no evidence showing that people with weak credit are more likely to be bad employees or to steal from their bosses, a fact that Mr. Rosenberg himself later admitted. …

Legislators in more than a dozen states have introduced bills to curb the use of credit checks during the hiring process, and three states have passed such laws. …

Supporters of such laws say they are necessary because an increasing number of employers are doing credit checks even though there is no proof that bad credit is a marker of risky employees.

Furthermore, they say the practice unfairly tars the huge pool of people whose credit was damaged by layoffs, medical bills or other factors beyond their control. They also say it disproportionately screens out minorities. …

Even so, the industry that sells credit checks has remained firm, mounting a counterattack against legislation with some success.

Bills introduced in California, Maryland and Connecticut, for example, have been stalled amid opposition from credit bureaus and other businesses.

† The Media Love Obama, But He Doesn’t Love Them Back: Over the weekend, The Associated Press noted that President Barack Hussein Obama “quietly breached years of protocol” by ditching the White House press corps to attend a soccer game in Northwest Washington that one of his daughters was playing in (“The White House press corps traditionally travels with the president anywhere he goes, inside and outside the country, to report on the president's activities for the benefit of informing the public and for historical record.”).

According to Time magazine, there was a mad scramble to catch up with Obama:

The president left the White House at approximately 9:20 to attend one of his daughter's soccer games at 40th and Chesapeake NW. A pool was hastily called at around 9:35 and drove north at 9:43 to catch the president before the game ended. We didn't make it. The President returned to the White House at 10:17. The pool returned at 10:30.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled pool call time.

But now American Thinker suggests that whatever it was that Obama slipped out to do, it wasn’t to attend a soccer game:  

[T]here were no scheduled soccer games for Sidwell Friends April 10, as evidenced here. The second is that the area reported that the game was played at appears to be one of high crime, as documented here and here. …

Another problem is that when the press pool got close to the reported location, they were told that Obama was leaving and to turn around. The press pool complied, but why? Wouldn't they have wanted a photo of him, even leaving the event, to formally document his whereabouts? …

What's more concerning is that no one can confirm if the Secret Service even accompanied Obama on his adventure. Furthermore, let's look at the elapsed time. If the president left the White House at 9:20AM as reported, according to Mapquest, it takes about sixteen minutes to get from the White House to 40^th and Chesapeake NW, bringing his arrival time to the field at 9:36AM or so. But then he would have had to leave the field at the latest at 10:00AM to return to the White House at the documented time of 10:17AM. So he spent about twenty minutes at the game? When did the game end? That time is vague as well.

American Thinker marvels, “[w]ith all of the technology that people have -- iPhones, Blackberries - not one person took a photo of Obama? The Stiletto agrees that the entire incident makes you go, “hmmmm.” Unless you’re the MSM, in which case you go “meh.”

For his part, The Washington Post’s often droll but not always original (last item) Dana Milbank complains that “[w]orld leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow” because “Obama - occupant of an office once informally known as ‘leader of the free world’ – [put] on a clinic for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.”

† Toyota President’s Congressional Testimony Canned, Panned: Already facing the biggest regulatory fine imposed by the federal government on an automaker, Toyota got more bad news when Consumer Reports magazine put the 2010 Lexus GX 460 SUV on its "do not buy" list because of a potential rollover risk, prompting the company to temporarily suspend sales of the vehicle while its engineering teams replicated the methodology used by Consumer Reports to see whether they could also detect the problem, reports the Los Angeles Times:

Consumer Reports said its testing staff found that "when pushed to its limits on a handling course" on the magazine's test track, the rear of the Lexus GX "slid out until the vehicle was almost sideways" before the vehicle's electronic stability-control system was able to regain control. All four of the magazine's test drivers experienced the problem.

The magazine said that such a situation could happen in "real-world driving" and that it could lead to a rollover accident.

The phenomenon, known as "lift-off oversteer," could occur "when a driver enters a highway's exit ramp or drives through a sweeping turn and encounters an unexpected obstacle or suddenly finds that the turn is too tight for the vehicle's speed," Consumer Reports said.

"A natural impulse is to quickly lift off the accelerator pedal. If that were to happen in the GX, the rear could slide around far enough that a wheel could strike a curb or slide off the pavement," the magazine said. …

Consumer Reports, which tested a Lexus that it had purchased to review, said no other SUV it had tested in recent years slid out as far as the GX 460. It found the same problems in a second vehicle it obtained to double-check its findings. The Lexus has a $51,970 sticker price.

The magazine's test drivers also tested the Toyota 4Runner. Although it shares the same platform as the GX, it did not display the same problem.

The GX 460 has been on the market for about three months and about 5,000 vehicles have been sold, according to Consumer Reports.

The magazine said it was not aware of any injuries or accidents resulting from the alleged flaw.

† What It's Like To Kill Your Child: Among The Washington Post’s four Pulitzer Prize winners is Gene Weingarten, who received the feature writing award for his story on parents who accidentally killed their children by leaving them in cars – which he says he himself almost did to his daughter 25 years ago. If you haven’t read his article, The Stiletto urges you to do so.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Obama’s Judgment On Judges): Commenting on the impending retirement of 89-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens,  Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus predicts that “it's entirely possible that a more conservative court could be Obama's paradoxical legacy - particularly if he serves only one term:

It reflects less about him than it does the identity of the departing justices, one liberal followed by another. The next oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77. Conservatives are reaping the benefits of Bush father and son having selected justices who were relatively young. Justice Clarence Thomas was 43 when tapped, Chief Justice John Roberts was 50 and Justice Samuel Alito was 55.

It would probably only be in the case of a departure by 74-year-old Justice Antonin Scalia - not likely to occur voluntarily during Obama's presidency - or Justice Anthony Kennedy, 73, that this president would have an opportunity to dramatically alter the court's ideological makeup. …

[I]t's likely, although not certain, that a Stevens replacement will be more conservative than the retiring justice. If so, this would be largely in line with history. In an interview with Jeffrey Rosen for the New York Times Magazine in 2007, Stevens noted, "including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell (chosen by Richard Nixon in 1971) has been more conservative than his or her predecessor." Stevens excepted Ginsburg, who replaced the more conservative Byron White.

Marcus sees “little in Obama's record as president to suggest that he would expend enormous capital to secure the most liberal possible justice.” For its part, The Wall Street Journal agrees that Obama will not opt for a “full-throated liberal,” but only because he has already spent all his political capital on ramming healthcare “reform” through Congress:

Mr. Obama's progressive admirers will insist he use the "stature" gained from passing health care to press leftward on the Court. Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice interpreted the Stevens retirement as "an opportunity to name a worthy successor who will stand up for equal justice for all, not just the wealthy or powerful."

The party's senior leadership may not share this bet-the-Congress exhilaration. When Senator Chuck Schumer's view of the Stevens retirement is that Americans are "yearning for bipartisanship," the message is that the Democratic Party may be carrying all the liberal baggage it can bear this election year.

Apart from the political calculus of the confirmation process, Lyle Denniston makes the case on Scotusblog that the high court could drift a bit to the right because Justice Anthony Kennedy’s propensity to cast the tie-breaking vote will become even more consequential than it has already been. When Stevens retires, Kennedy will be second in seniority only to Justice Antonin Scalia, which means he “moves into position to become a frequent ‘assigning Justice’:” 

That is a role not well known beyond Court-watchers, but it is quite important, and can make a difference in how ambitious, or cautious, the Court is in ruling on major, hard-fought cases. …

When the Court is divided on any case being decided on the merits, the senior Justice in the majority gets to select a colleague (or take on personally) the task of writing the opinion for the majority.  …

If the Chief Justice is in the majority when the Court divides, the Chief always has the assigning function ...

In any divided Court with Kennedy and Scalia on the same side, Scalia would always be the assigning Justice should the Chief Justice not be on that side. …

But … [h]e would outrank, in seniority, all of the Justices in [the liberal] bloc.  He thus will be able to shape even the Court’s more liberally inclined outcomes, by the way he chooses the opinion authors. And, if he thought any of the other four might use an assignment to write an opinion more sweeping than he would want, he could assign the task to himself, and keep it within whatever bounds he chose so long as it did not drive off one of the four other votes he would need to keep a majority.

Denniston posits that Kennedy may be inclined to vote with the liberal bloc more often so that he can rein his more liberal colleagues in.

In any case, as with healthcare “reform” - Dems agonized over the political risk of passing it and inciting the wrath of moderate and independent voters vs. killing it and proving they are unable to govern (Obama’s reverse Midas touch is not limited to the economy, so Dems ended up doing both) - the timing of the Senate confirmation process is problematic. Hold meetings before the July 4^th recess and invite accusations of strong-arming Repubs; wait until the fall, and risk having the nomination shot down by newly-elected Repub Senators. As The Journal puts it, “[m]any Democrats knew they could pay a political price for the size of ObamaCare and the methods used to pass it. With Justice Stevens's successor, that price may have arrived earlier than expected.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): As expected, the AZ House of Representatives joined the state Senate in passing a law that “takes the handcuffs off of law enforcement and lets them do their job,” as the bill's author, State Sen. Russell Pearce, puts it. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The bill, known as SB 1070, makes it a misdemeanor to lack proper immigration paperwork in Arizona. It also requires police officers, if they form a "reasonable suspicion" that someone is an illegal immigrant, to determine the person's immigration status. …

Citizens can sue to compel police agencies to comply with the law, and no city or agency can formulate a policy directing its workers to ignore the law - a provision that advocates say prevents so-called sanctuary orders that police not inquire about people's immigration status.

The bill cements the position of Arizona, whose border with Mexico is the most popular point of entry for illegal immigrants into this country, as the state most aggressively using its own laws to fight illegal immigration. In 2006 the state passed a law that would dissolve companies with a pattern of hiring illegal immigrants. Last year it made it a crime for a government worker to give improper benefits to an illegal immigrant.

Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates tougher immigration enforcement, said the legislation was a logical extension of the state's previous enforcement efforts.

"It makes sense that they would be the first to do it since they're ground zero for illegal immigration," he said.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Tucson Weekly writer Leo Banks notes that “Americans who do not live along the Mexican border often assume the antipathy to illegal immigration arises from racial or cultural concerns”:  

[T]alk to people on the ground, and what they fear most is the loss of personal security. They are angry that the federal government is unable to provide them with this most basic of human rights. …

"It's worse than anybody knows," rancher Ed Ashurst told me. "There are outlaws roaming around with guns, and if you jack with them they'll kill you."

Most illegal immigrants enter the country to work, not to commit serious crimes, and even hard-hit ranchers say some crossers treat property respectfully. But the bad guys are winning. Many of the worst are "south-bounders" - coyotes who have dropped loads of people or drugs and are heading home. They kick in doors looking for food, water, guns or cash. …

In a Douglas gun shop after the shooting [of 58-year-old rancher Rob Krentz, apparently by a drug smuggler], I watched customers stream in to buy safes and pistols. Even bird-watching ladies from Portal are arming up - they see the threat clearly and understand they face it alone.

The spectacle reminded me of the comment Barack Obama made during the presidential campaign about bitter, small town Americans clinging to guns and religion. Now his administration is reducing Border Patrol's budget, cutting the number of agents, and denying requests for more vehicles and equipment. The disconnect between Washington's priorities and the border lawlessness creates a sense of abandonment here, leaving many to feel that yes, God and guns are what they have left.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Sicko Healthcare Prescription Causes Adverse Side Effects For Dems): Britain's National Health Service Blood and Transplant organization said that a programming error dating back to 1999 that affects 800,000 of the 14 million people on its organ donor list may have resulted in a couple of dozen cases in which the wrong organs were donated, reports The Associated Press, based on an article in The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, which broke the story:

The mistake came to light late last year when the Blood and Transplant organization wrote to new donors thanking them for joining the register and outlining what they had agreed to donate.

Some respondents wrote back to complain that the information was wrong.

An official at the National Health Service insists that everyone on the register was a willing donor of some kind.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on 18-year-old Tyki Nelworth, a fatherless senior at Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles, who “focused on his academic goals” even though he was born a “crack baby,” his mother is currently incarcerated on a drug offense and he spent his childhood bouncing between relatives and foster care ("I always use past experiences as motivation … not as an excuse not to do something"). The Los Angeles Times reports:

Last week, he got his wish: He was accepted and received a four-year scholarship to the United States Military Academy.

"For me to make it to West Point, that's a big statement," said Nelworth, who plans to study engineering at the academy in upstate New York. "It means the sky's the limit."

On Thursday, members of the high school's alumni association joined a group of current students, faculty, parents and other guests at a special "Principal's Breakfast" to honor Nelworth.

"We've watched you display amazing resilience, strength and determination," alumni board member LaQuitta Cole told Nelworth. "You have been an inspiration to everyone you come in contact with, and your efforts have not gone unnoticed."

The soon-to-be cadet was then presented with donations totaling several hundred dollars to pay for his Advanced Placement tests, his senior dues and transportation to West Point.

He also received two prom tickets, a prom tuxedo, gift cards, clothes and shoes - donated by alumni, community groups and local churches, among others.

"I'm just overwhelmed," said Nelworth, tears streaming down his cheeks. "I honestly didn't know that there were so many people that cared for me. It's something I definitely won't forget."

Nelworth took Advanced Placement classes in English, calculus, biology, chemistry and physics - maintaining a 4.23 grade-point average is captain of the football team and was elected president of the student body last year.