Let’s dig in, shall we!

1. ‘Obama’s Immigration Reform Vision: Clouded by Cynicism‘, Mark Salter, Real Clear Politics

President Obama decries ‘politics’, regarding our nation’s immigration policy debate, in a purely political speech without any substance or chance of leading to actual reform:

Obama has never been serious about passing immigration reform. But he has been very adroit at using the unresolved issue to advance his own political interests.

In 2005, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain sponsored comprehensive legislation that would have made substantial improvements to border security, establish a guest-worker program, and give the 12 to 20 million immigrants now living here illegally a path to citizenship….

A bipartisan group of senators supporting the bill formed an informal caucus to help guide it successfully through Senate debate. They met every morning in a room just off the Senate chamber to discuss plans for defending the bill from amendments that would reduce its chances of passage. Then-Sen. Barack Obama asked to join in those discussions.

As an aide to McCain, I was in the room for every one of those meetings. It was my first opportunity to observe Obama closely. During those meetings, I never saw him engage in any discussion concerned with building a majority vote in favor of the legislation. In the meetings he attended, he would draw from his shirt pocket a 3×5 index card, on which he had written changes he insisted be made to the bill before he would support it. They were invariably the same demands made by the AFL-CIO, which was intent on watering down or killing the guest-worker provisions. Republicans and Democrats alike were irritated by his transparently self-interested behavior, but tried to negotiate with him. He remained adamant in his positions and unwilling to compromise.

2. ‘Syria: The Class Clash‘, Walter Raubeson, Foreign Policy Association

A colleague of mine who spent the last two years in Damascus has been covering the uprisings in Syria since they started. This particular piece discusses the role of classes in the current insurrection.

The ongoing coverage of the Syrian uprising has focused, mostly, on issues of sect, ethnicity, and political affiliation. “This is a sectarian issue! Sunnis vs Alawites vs Christians!!!” Or maybe…”It’s about Kurds vs Arabs!!!” Another favorite is…”It’s about Authoritarianism vs Islamism vs Liberalism!!!” Newspapermen seem to like fights.

The one issue that seems to be getting thrown under the bus, and what might just be most important in the Syrian context, is the issue of class.

3. ‘Mitt Romney: Obama’s Running Mate‘, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board rips into Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care program, delivering what could be a devastating strike to his presidential aspirations:

“There’s a lot to learn from the failure of the ObamaCare model that began in Massachusetts, which is now moving to impose price controls on all hospitals, doctors and other providers. Not that anyone would know listening to Mr. Romney. In the paperback edition of his campaign book “No Apology,” he calls the plan a “success,” and he has defended it in numerous media appearances as he plans his White House run….

The only good news we can find is that the uninsured rate has dropped to 2% today from 6% in 2006. Yet four out of five of the newly insured receive low- or no-cost coverage from the government. The subsidies will cost at least $830 million in 2011 and are growing, conservatively measured, at 5.1% a year. Total state health-care spending as a share of the budget has grown from about 16% in the 1980s to 30% in 2006 to 40% today. The national state average is about 25%.

The safety-net fund that was supposed to be unwound, well, wasn’t. Uncompensated hospital care rose 5% from 2008 to 2009, and 15% from 2009 to 2010, hitting $475 million (though the state only paid out $405 million). “Avoidable” use of emergency rooms—that is, for routine care like a sore throat—increased 9% between 2004 and 2008. Meanwhile, unsubsidized insurance premiums for individuals and small businesses have climbed to among the highest in the nation.

Like Mr. Obama’s reform, RomneyCare was predicated on the illusion that insurance would be less expensive if everyone were covered. Even if this theory were plausible, it is not true in Massachusetts today….

More immediately for his Republican candidacy, the debate over ObamaCare and the larger entitlement state may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible. If he does not change his message, he might as well try to knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.”

4. ‘Obama owes thanks, and an apology, to CIA interrogators‘, Marc Thiessmen, Washington Post

Just today, Attorney General Eric Holder said that he has “made a lot of progress” on the investigation of former CIA interrogators. Remember, all of these CIA officers have already undergone a federal investigation in which they cleanly passed.

On his second day in office, Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. His Justice Department then reopened criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators — inquiries that had been closed years before by career prosecutors who concluded that there were no crimes to prosecute. In a speech at the National Archives, Obama eviscerated the men and women of the CIA, accusing them of “torture” and declaring that their work “did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them.” Now, it turns out that the very CIA interrogators whose lives Obama turned upside down played a critical role in what the president rightly calls “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.”

It is time for a public apology.

5. ‘History Lessons for Obama and Other Liberals‘, George will, Washington Post

Will brings some welcome historical perspective to the entitlement program debate, among other topics.

Responding to Ryan’s budget proposal, Obama said it “would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.”

Well. It is unclear what “fundamentally” means to Obama, but consider some possible metrics of what is, and is not, different than what we have known “throughout our history.” Ryan’s plan would reduce federal spending as a percentage of GDP from the 2009-11 average of 24.4 to 19.9 in 10 years. It was not until the nation was 158 years old — in the Depression year of 1934, with the New Deal erupting — that peacetime federal spending topped 10 percent of GDP, and it did not reach 12 percent until the war preparations of 1941.

Ryan’s plan would alter Medicare. But Medicare has existed in its current configuration for only 46 of the nation’s 235 years.

The hysteria and hyperbole about Ryan’s plan arise, in part, from a poverty of today’s liberal imagination, an inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century. It is odd that “progressives,” as liberals now wish to be called, have such a constricted notion of the possibilities of progress.

Liberals think Medicare and Social Security as they exist are “fundamental” to the nation’s identity. But liberals think the Constitution — which the Framers meant to be fundamental, meaning constituting, law — should be construed as a “living” document, continually evolving to take different meanings under whatever liberals consider new social imperatives.

Please feel free to offer your own recommendations or thoughts on ours in the comments.

Here are this week’s top articles that GPP recommends highly.

1. Falling Between Two Stools – Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

Mead argues that the Obama team needs to get itself together and soon or it faces a failed presidency and a diminished United States:

Finally, there is a kind of temperamental caution that has not, so far, served this President well.  Unlike George W. Bush, who liked to place large and even reckless bets, President Obama likes to hedge.  If he puts four chips on black, he almost immediately wants to put three chips on red.  He surges in Afghanistan, but time limits the surge.  He bombs Libya, but vows to keep the boots offshore.  This can look like a prudent step to limit losses; in some cases it may make bigger losses inevitable.

2. Fleecing the Facebook Generation – Bill Frezza, Forbes

A brilliantly snarky take on the young adults of America’s stubborn support for the current entitlement system:

Let me get this straight. You kids from Generation Twit, or whatever they call 20-somethings these days, are rallying to keep Washington’s Ponzi-as-you-go entitlement systems alive despite the fact that you will never see a dime for yourselves. And, stupid me, I’m wasting my breath trying to talk sense into you.

Sitting here a mere eight years from sticking my snout into the public trough, maybe I need to rethink this. Perhaps I should back off criticizing all those liberal college professors who charged your parents $50,000 a year to fill your heads with mush. Maybe they did me a favor. You graduated so brimming with altruism that you’re willing to sacrifice your own economic well-being so my college buddies and I can keep ourselves in expensive wines and fine single malts until we’re sucking them down through feeding tubes.

3. US Must Stop Libya From Becoming a Farce – Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Cordesman, one of America’s most sober and sharp foreign policy analysts, finds much to worry about in the current US-France-UK led approach in Libya:

What is already certain is that the end result was a set of decisions that focused on short term considerations and bet on the come. French, British, and US leaders do not seem to have fully coordinated, but it is clear that they sought and got international cover from the UN by claiming a no fly zone could protect civilians when their real objective was to use force as a catalyst to drive Qaddafi out of power. They seem to have assumed that a largely unknown, divided, and fractured group of rebels could win through sheer political momentum and could then be turned into a successful government. They clearly planned a limited air campaign that called for a politically safe set of strikes again against Qaddafi’s air defense and air force, and only limited follow-up in terms of ground strikes against his forces. And then, they waited for success…

4. Obama’s Sophistry on the Budget Deficit – Jay Cost, Weekly Standard

When it comes to dissecting modern politics and politicians, no one is better than Mr. Jay Cost:

Obama regularly praises some value that is expounded mostly by conservatives, then turns around to qualify or balance it with a point made by the left. This is designed to create the impression that he is in the political center, or better yet at the final stage of a dialectical process: conservatism the thesis, liberalism the antithesis, Obama the synthesis.

However, this rhetorical move is inevitably a non sequitur, and always promulgated for the same, political purpose. In the case of the deficit, and what to do about it, the president’s “faith” in the free market is completely abstract and is unrelated to the real world of political debate. Sure, he’s pro-free market in the sense that he prefers it to socialism or communism, but that has nothing to do with the contemporary political divide. Most everybody in the mainstream political discourse agrees that free markets – of some sort – are good. The country is not debating whether to become a communist country. Instead, it is debating how much the government should involve itself in the free market.

Obama knows this, of course, and his speech is intended to confuse the issue, to make it seem like his policy proposals are not as liberal as they actually are. He starts out at 30,000 feet, above the political fray, to explain and praise our shared American values, some emphasized by conservatives and others by liberals, then he quietly zooms down to the ground level to stake out a position on the left hand side of the divide, arguing speciously that this final spot is consistent with where he started out. His hope is that you will not notice the transition, and thus assume that his decidedly left wing position is in fact the one that synthesizes liberalism and conservatism.

5. Union Busting, Massachusetts Style – Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

It appears that Wisconsin’s efforts to curb public union power is becoming more the norm, rather than the exception:

Pop quiz: What political party, in what state, this week passed a bill in the dead of night stripping public-sector unions of their collective- bargaining powers? Republicans in Wisconsin? The GOP in Ohio or Indiana?

Try Democrats in Massachusetts. Maybe the debate over public-sector benefits isn’t all that ideological after all.

What did you like? Hate? Feel free to offer your own recommendations in the comments.