France has been convulsed by violent demonstrations against modest pension reforms. Britain is imposing a tough fiscal “austerity” regime to plug a cavernous budget gap. Crisis-torn Greece is struggling to avoid a sovereign-debt default. Ireland, Portugal, and Spain are grappling with their own major-league financial woes. Is it fair to say that the much-ballyhooed European model is crumbling?

That depends on which “European model” you’re referring to. Though Western Europe is often lazily portrayed as a monolithic bastion of welfare-state sclerosis, it is in fact robustly heterogeneous. France has a brittle pension system and rigid labor markets, but the Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss pension systems are considered to be among the soundest in the world, and Danish labor flexibility rivals that of the United States. The aggregate tax burden is punishingly heavy in France, Germany, Italy, and the Nordic countries, but it is relatively light in Ireland and Switzerland. As for health care, the government-run systems in Britain and Scandinavia are much different from the consumer-driven Swiss model and the market-friendly Dutch approach, not to mention the French and German schemes.

#ad#Doesn’t Western Europe exhibit lackluster innovation prowess? And isn’t the region losing its global competitiveness? Some countries -- such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain -- are innovation laggards, but others are innovation leaders. Indeed, a 2009 Economist Intelligence Unit report classified Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden as three of the five most innovative countries on earth, with Germany placing sixth. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum reckons that Switzerland and Sweden have the planet’s two most competitive economies.

According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom (compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation), three Western European countries -- Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden -- offer greater business freedom, trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, and property-rights protection than does the United States. In terms of overall economic freedom, Denmark (ninth) is virtually tied with America (eighth), which trails Switzerland (sixth) and Ireland (fifth). All of these countries -- plus the United Kingdom (eleventh), the Netherlands (15th), Finland (17th), Sweden (21st), and Germany (23rd) -- score well ahead of Portugal (62nd), France (64th), Greece (73rd), and Italy (74th).

Just as there is no uniform socioeconomic model in Western Europe, there is no uniform political culture. Transparency International’s 2010 CorruptionPerceptions Index ranks Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Norway among the world’s ten least corrupt societies, with the Danes sharing the top spot. By comparison, France (25th) ranks behind Uruguay; Spain (tied for 30th) and Portugal (32nd) rank behind the United Arab Emirates; Italy (67th) ranks behind Rwanda; and Greece (tied for 78th) ranks behind El Salvador.

Not surprisingly, there is tremendous variation in the efficiency of individual Western European governments. Despite the massive size of their bureaucracies and the lavish generosity of their welfare benefits, the Nordic countries stand out for having some of the best-performing institutions.In its 2010 global competitiveness survey, the Swiss business school IMD calculates that the public sector operates more efficiently in Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Ireland than it does in America. But IMD also reckons that the French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek governments function less efficiently than those in Jordan and Russia.

As these findings indicate, there are stark economic and political disparities between Scandinavia and Mediterranean Europe, as there are between Anglophone Europe and Franco-German Europe, which makes it problematic to generalize about the “European model.” A fascinating new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study helps crystallize Western Europe’s diversity and illuminate its uneven embrace of structural reform.

MGI divides the original 15 members of the European Union (the “EU-15”) into three separate clusters: Northern Europe (Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), Continental Europe (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), and Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Northern Europe is characterized by high labor-utilization rates and productivity levels “in line with the EU-15 average,” though Danish productivity has recently declined, and Irish unemployment has skyrocketed since the global financial crisis triggered a calamitous housing bust. Continental Europe (Austria excepted) boasts strong productivity but suffers from low labor utilization, though the Dutch have made extraordinary progress in reducing structural unemployment. Southern Europe is plagued by anemic productivity, and its record on labor utilization is a mixed bag; in Spain, for example, the utilization rate was barreling upward until the Great Recession pushed it back down.

#page#Speaking of Spain, it currently has the highest jobless rate in Western Europe, followed by Ireland. Small wonder: Both countries have been walloped by disastrous property meltdowns and painful deleveraging. According to a San Francisco Fed analysis of real house prices between 1997 and 2008, the pre-crisis bonanza saw prices jump by 172 percent in the Irish Republic and 118 percent in Spain, compared with 89 percent in Denmark, 75 percent in the Netherlands, and about 50 percent in America.

The Danes and Dutch are now enjoying impressively low unemployment, as they were before the recession. In many ways, they have been harvesting the fruits of ambitious, market-oriented labor reforms. Denmark has garnered widespread attention (and bountiful praise) for the “flexicurity” model it implemented during the 1990s, which helped the country slash its adult-unemployment rate from 8.9 percent in 1993 to 2.5 percent in 2008. The Dutch initiatives, while less celebrated than Danish flexicurity, have also proved remarkably successful. Between 2004 and 2008, MGI observes, the Netherlands had both the lowest average adult-unemployment rate (3.3 percent) and the lowest average youth-unemployment rate (6.8 percent) in the EU-15, and its rates were well below those of the United States (4 percent and 11.4 percent, respectively).

#ad#No discussion of recent European labor reforms would be complete without citing the neoliberal policy adjustments made by German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat who held power from 1998 to 2005. Thanks in part to his efforts, which substantially boosted labor flexibility, “the number of unemployed in Germany decreased by one-third” between 2005 and 2008, notes MGI. Prior to the global crisis, Europe’s largest economy did not experience a housing bubble. While Germany fell into a deep cyclical slump when world trade plunged, the strength of its export-led recovery has made it the envy of governments throughout the West. In October, German unemployment hit an 18-year low.

The extent of Western Europe’s reforms over the past two decades -- in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and beyond -- is not sufficiently appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. Consider the transformation of Sweden, a famously “socialist” country that has undergone dramatic liberalization since the early 1990s, when it was pulverized by a banking crash and a brutal recession. Fiscal retrenchment, deregulation, increased competition, and significant tax cuts have spurred huge productivity gains. Indeed, between 1995 and 2005, Swedish manufacturing became 60 percent more productive, according to MGI. Over that same time span, retail productivity grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the United States and 4.6 percent in Sweden. By 2005, America’s retail sector was 14 percent less productive than its Swedish counterpart.

“Sweden has shown on a national level how to turn a crisis into an opportunity for far-reaching structural reforms as a basis for long-term sustained growth,” says MGI. The Swedish revival, along with muscular economic growth elsewhere in Scandinavia and the British Isles, lifted Western Europe’s per capita–GDP growth between 2000 and 2008. Over that period, such growth was slightly faster in the EU-15 (1.3 percent) than it was in America (1.2 percent). For that matter, from 1995 to 2008, the EU-15 outpaced the United States in total new job creation (23.9 million to 20.5 million), even though its population growth was slower.

On the other hand, per capita GDP is still 24 percent greater in America than it is in the EU-15, and the productivity gap (which favors the United States) has gotten bigger since the mid-1990s (after narrowing from the 1960s onward). Most Western European countries still need to trim marginal tax rates, curtail public spending, and enhance labor flexibility. Moving forward, sluggish population growth -- and, in some countries (such as Germany and Italy), population shrinkage -- will present a raft of daunting challenges. But certain governments are much better positioned than others to address those challenges. In 2007, for example, the average age of Swedish and Dutch workers exiting the labor force was 63.9, while the corresponding age in France was 59.4.

Here’s how MGI sums up the root causes of the transatlantic per capita–GDP gap: Northern Europe’s problem “is mostly one of productivity; Continental Europe faces a gap in hours per employee; Southern Europe faces simultaneous challenges on productivity, participation, and unemployment.” In other words, the EU-15 economic landscape is kaleidoscopic, just like the policy frameworks of individual member states. Remember that the next time you hear a journalist or politician casually pronounce the death (or laud the virtues) of the “European model.”

-- Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.

Pres. Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both signaled their hope that the Senate will ratify New START during the lame-duck session, before a larger Republican minority can be sworn in. It is vital to our national security that the Senate disappoint them.

The president’s priorities on nuclear arms should be the pursuit of comprehensive missile defense, the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal, and the prevention of rogue states from acquiring WMD. New START does nothing on the last two goals and is actively hostile to the first.

#ad#Instead, what the treaty does is limit the number of deployed “delivery vehicles” -- missile silos, aircraft, submarines -- to 700 per side, approximately the level the aging Russian nuclear infrastructure is already struggling to maintain. But it does nothing to limit the Russians’ massive stockpile of undeployed warheads -- by one estimate, some 8,000 of them -- or to cut into their advantage in tactical nuclear weapons designed for use on the field of battle. Meanwhile, it encourages the Russians to “MIRV” their platforms, packing multiple warheads onto a single vehicle, at the same time the Obama administration has unilaterally discontinued that practice in an effort to “to increase stability.”

Unlike the original START, New START leaves whole classes of delivery vehicles, from rail-launched ICBMs to nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, undefined and thus uncontrolled by the treaty. An “understanding” included in the U.S. ratification document presumes that rail-based missiles are covered under the treaty, but such presumptions lack the force of international law. Worse, the Russians are already threatening to back out if the rail-launched “understanding” is not matched by similar language that would prevent us from expanding anti-ballistic capabilities.

This on top of the treaty’s explicit constraints on American missile defense, including a prohibition on the conversion of ICBM launchers into ABM launchers, and language in the preamble that implies the creation of new defensive capabilities is henceforth equivalent to the creation of new nuclear arms. Any one who doubts the Russians will use this as pretext to withdraw from the treaty should the United States improve its defensive posture need only listen to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said New START “can be viable only provided there are no quantitative or qualitative increases in ABM capabilities.”

Even if New START’s substantive provisions were worth endorsing, its verification regime would not be. It represents a significant step backward from its predecessor in areas such as on-site inspections and information sharing -- and that’s just what we know about. On the eve of the September committee vote that sent New START to the full Senate, Sen. Kit Bond (R., Mo.), vice chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a classified letter to the Foreign Relations Committee detailing yet further objections to the treaty’s verification components, and Sen. James Risch (R., Idaho) warned that new intelligence prompted him to question Russian intentions.

Which leaves President Obama’s admirable if naïve commitment to non-proliferation and eventual disarmament as the sole virtue of ratification -- in other words, it leaves precisely nothing. Proliferators such as Iran and North Korea will not find the moral force in the president’s example, nor will their strategic imperatives be altered a bit by even a substantially smaller U.S. nuclear arsenal. The former will continue seek a deterrent to the massive conventional superiority of the Great Satan, and the latter will continue to reap the benefits of its plutonium-powered extortion racket.

It goes without saying that Senate Democrats are overwhelmingly behind the president’s pet treaty. Unfortunately, some Senate Republicans, including Sen. Richard Lugar (Ind.), have also indicated their support. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) has signaled he will follow Lugar’s lead and that of Republican whip Jon Kyl (Ariz.), on the ultimate ratification vote. Kyl doesn’t share Lugar’s estimation of New START and has doggedly pressed the administration to commit to nuclear-force modernization and to open New START’s negotiating record to Senate scrutiny in advance of a vote. While Senator Kyl’s demands certainly would constitute improvements over the treaty as it stands, they would not be sufficient to salvage this fundamentally defective accord. And, in any case, ramming the treaty through a lame-duck Congress is reckless and unnecessary; the Russians will still be there in January. Senator McConnell should exercise restraint.

At the top of his Thursday cabinet meeting, President Obama said that the debate over the ratification of New START “is not a traditionally Democratic or Republican issue, but, rather, an issue of American national security.” That’s quite right. But it will take a unified Republican caucus to stop New START.

Daily Caller - With the House now firmly in Republican hands, some on the left have and are voicing concerns that the GOP will attempt to impeach President Barack Obama. While liberals, such as MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, and various bloggers wring their hands over the sinister hypothetical, the Republican leadership is denying that they have even considered the possibility.

Daily Caller - They got behind like-minded candidates and crafted an agenda. Now it’s time to govern, those involved in the Tea Party movement say.

Do Americans share President Obama’s desire to impose redistributive social justice on the well-off? In liberal Washington State, of all places, voters gave a definitive answer this Tuesday: No! The resounding rejection of a punitive “Robin Hood” initiative shows that it’s not just red-state Republicans who oppose extreme tax hikes on the nation’s wealth generators.

As Capitol Hill resumes debate on whether to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts, the White House should pay special heed to the fate of little-noticed Initiative 1098. Its defeat by a whopping 65–35 margin doesn’t bode well for Team Obama’s class warriors still clinging bitterly to their soak-the-rich schemes. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner insisted this summer that saddling higher earners with higher taxes was “the responsible thing to do.” Given the chance to weigh in at the ballot box, a diverse majority of voters in the other Washington determined otherwise.

#ad#The Evergreen State is just one of seven states in the nation without a personal income tax. The ballot measure, which would have enacted a state income tax on the wealthiest 1 percent of Washington residents to raise $2 billion for bankrupt public schools, was sponsored by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his father, a left-wing corporate lawyer. Top donors? The Service Employees International Union, whose state and national chapters threw in a combined $2.5 million of its members’ hard-earned dues money, and the National Education Association, which pitched in nearly $760,000.

Hiding behind kiddie human shields, the I-1098 campaign assailed the wealthy for “not paying their fair share” and plastered their campaign literature with sad-faced students and toddlers. Big Labor has been pushing a punish-the-wealthy movement for months. According to Forbes magazine, “six of the 10 states with the highest income-tax rates -- Oregon, California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina -- raised their levies on high earners, at least temporarily,” last year.

But business owners large and small, representing companies from Bartell Drugs to Amazon.com, successfully fought back against the job-killing measure in Washington State. Disavowing the Gateses, Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer also joined the opposition. The software company’s senior executives expressed grave concern “about the impact I-1098 will have on the state’s ability to attract top tech talent in the future.” Liberal newspaper editorial boards including those of the Seattle Times and the Tacoma News Tribune added their objections, citing I-1098’s reckless targeting of wealth creation in the middle of a recession and the inevitable extension and increase of income taxes to the middle class. And economists at the independent, nonpartisan Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University found that I-1098’s tax burdens would lengthen and deepen the current economic downturn by destroying private-sector jobs, reducing residents’ disposable income, and prolonging the state’s high unemployment rate.

Amber Gunn of the free-market Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Wash., gave the bottom line on I-1098’s unreality-based advocates: “Initiative proponents like to operate in a Keynesian world where higher tax rates and their effects on human behavior and competitiveness among states don’t matter. But those effects are present in the real world and must be accounted for.”

I-1098’s promoters tried to disguise their wealth-suppression vehicle as tax “relief” by tossing in a few stray targeted cuts. But they were called out by a judge and slapped with a court order to make the income-tax burden explicit in the ballot title.

If only the taxmen in Washington, D.C., were required to do the same. Obama’s budget proposal is a soak-the-rich scheme adorned with a few business tax breaks that would -- for starters -- impose nearly $1 trillion in higher taxes on couples making more than $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000. Some “relief.”

On Thursday afternoon, still smarting from the nationwide “shellacking” the Democrats received on Election Day, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs signaled that Obama would be willing to “entertain” temporary -- not permanent -- tax relief for the nation’s highest earners. But a time-limited reprieve in prolonged economic hard times is expedient politics and bad policy. Tax relief should be all or none. The new House majority should force the Democrats to choose.

Republicans must stop allowing the White House to demonize America’s entrepreneurs and producers. By continuing to allow Democrats to refer to them as beneficiaries of the “Bush tax cuts” instead of as the besieged victims of Obama tax increases, the GOP cedes the moral high ground. It’s time to make the White House own its noxious war on wealth.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The Daily Beast - Is Sarah Palin a quicker GOP than George W. Bush? Can Diddy run 26.2 faster than Alanis? The Daily Beast gathered a group of celebrity non-athlete marathoner runners to see who had the best times. Find out who’s No. 1!

Politico - Republicans gained at least 60 seats in this week’s election — but they are in position to win up to five more.

Daily Caller - His wife may have been number one on Forbes magazine’s 2010 List of World’s Most Powerful Women, but President Barack Obama only takes the second slot on the recently released Forbes 2010 list of Powerful People, putting him a spot below of where he placed on the list last year.

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

When I was down in Guantánamo a few months ago, a veteran German journalist let it slip that she didn’t much care for the place.  “This,” she confided in me, and many of the other journalists there as well, “is the worst place I have ever visited in my entire career.”

It’s not hard to see why my superlative-loving friend felt this way: We were covering the case of Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian captured after a firefight with U.S. forces outside Kabul in July 2002, tortured and interrogated for a few months at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, then transported to Guantánamo.  He just reached a plea agreement that will avoid a trial before a military commission at Gitmo for five “war crimes.”  Four of them, freshly invented for the occasion, are not recognized as war crimes in any other court on the planet.  (Khadr pled guilty to all charges and will get at least one year more at Gitmo -- in solitary -- then perhaps be transferred to Canada for a remaining seven years.)

Aside from Khadr and about 130 other prisoners who may one day see a trial, Guantánamo also holds 47 more War on Terror prisoners who are expected to be “detained” indefinitely without being tried at all.  This was one of the radical policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that is now cheerfully defended by the human rights grandees in Barack Obama’s State Department.

Gitmo and all other places without habeas corpus rights are indeed dismal places -- and there is certainly something disgusting about the first conviction of a child soldier since World War II.  All the same, I couldn’t help but wonder if my vehement Kollegin had ever visited a homegrown federal prison like the one in Terre Haute, Indiana (whose maximum security wing was copied down to the smallest detail at Gitmo’s Camp 5), or even your run-of-the-mill overcrowded state lock-up, the kind you pass on the highway without even noticing that you’ve done so, or one of the crumbling youth detention facilities in New York State which, as we lawyers who have represented youth offenders know, are hellish.

Such prisons may lack the exotic setting of Gitmo’s Camp Delta, but they should not be forgotten.  At the risk of sounding boosterish, it so happens that a great many of America’s unsung domestic prisons also routinely abuse inmates, Guantánamo-style, are unable or unwilling to prevent inmate rape, employ long-term, sustained solitary confinement (which gives waterboarding a run for its money), and in actual practice are often beyond the rule of law.  Confessions, true or false, obtained through violence and threats, aren’t restricted to Guantánamo either.  They are not all that hard to find in our contiguous 48 states.  And for the rest of our prison system, where are the outraged German journalists?  Why are no British “law lords” calling the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado, a “legal black hole” as law lord Johan Steyn termed Guantánamo?

Alas, in so many ways Guantánamo is not the exception but far closer to the rule of our criminal justice system, and the case of Omar Khadr, rather than being an anomaly of the War on Terror, is in all too many ways positively all-American.  To be sure, taking a child soldier you’ve captured in a foreign land, whose interrogation entailed stringing him up half-naked in a five-foot-square cell with wrists chained to the bars at eye level and a hood clamped tightly over his face, then prosecuting him for “murder” because he allegedly tossed a grenade on a foreign battlefield, does present some legal issues that don’t ordinarily come up in Spokane or Chillicothe.

But Gitmo, a “betrayal of American values”?  Would that it were!  Alas, for nearly every grisly tabloid feature of the Khadr case, you can find an easy analog in our everyday criminal justice system.  In a sense, much of our War on Terror has proven a slightly spicier version of our “normal” way of doing criminal justice.  Using the case of Omar Khadr, let’s take this step by step.

Child Soldiers and Juvenile Offenders

The Khadr case should have been a bit queasy-making for us Americanos.  Hasn’t there been a surge of concern for child soldiers in book clubs and church groups across the land?  Turns out, however, that this long-distance compassion goes up in smoke at closer range.  The second a child soldier points his gun at an American, not another African, it’s adiós victimized child, hello hardened terrorist.

The hypocrisy in all this is less flaming than it may appear.  After all, clemency for youth offenders, be they child soldiers or just local kids, runs against the American grain these days.  If we routinely prosecute children even younger than 15 as adults -- and we do -- why should a foreign child soldier be any different?

In fact the U.S. even has a few dozen inmates doing life without parole for acts committed when they were 13 or 14, and most of these sentences were mandatory rather than the prerogative of a particularly nasty judge.  (Some small progress: last May in Graham v. Florida the Supreme Court decided that juveniles can get life without parole only if there’s homicide involved.)  Overall, the U.S. has in recent years had precious little mercy for its children, or anyone else’s. 

Coercive Interrogation of Minors

Back in May, the Gitmo press corps gasped when Khadr’s “Interrogator Number One,” Joshua Claus, described the veiled threats of rape he wielded at Bagram Prison to try to break the young prisoner.  If Khadr should fail to cooperate, Claus told him, he would meet the same fate as another young (and imaginary) Afghan detainee who was supposedly sent to a U.S. penitentiary and raped to death in a shower room by “neo-Nazis, and four big black guys.”  Claus, a court-martialed detainee abuser, had been the leader of the final interrogation of a mistakenly imprisoned Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American guards at Bagram in 2002.  Before receiving a rather light sentence in the case, Claus pledged his full cooperation with the Khadr prosecution, and he kept his part of the bargain with visible enthusiasm.

As it happens, Claus’s veiled threats of rape and violence to a minor would not have been that uncommon in domestic interrogation rooms.  “From the stories I’m familiar with, threats like that are a pretty garden-variety police interrogation tactic,” says Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University.

With youths, it’s not that much of a challenge to get a false confession, even without the threat of or actual physical violence being brought to bear, as the case of Marty Tankleff in Long Island shows, not to mention the seven- and eight-year-old boys from the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago who, in the summer of 1998, “confessed” to murdering a girl for her bicycle.  Even after DNA evidence from semen found on the corpse was matched to an adult serial sex offender, the Chicago Police Superintendent at first refused to exonerate them.  The State’s Attorney might well have prosecuted the boys, too, if the entire South Side of Chicago hadn’t threatened to explode.

Torture

Okay, but what about torture?  We bemoan with great feeling that America has “become” a state that uses torture.  Alas, this, too, is not so new, nor has it ever been limited to foreign insurgents (be they Comanche, Filipino, or Vietnamese) or suspected terrorists.  Take, for example, the former high-ranking Chicago police detective Jon Burge who, over a 20-year career, enhanced his interrogations with mock executions, suffocation, electroshocks, pistol-whipping, and yes, a form of waterboarding.  All this was uncovered in 2002 in an epic special investigation which led to the reexamination of more than 100 cases, several overturned convictions, multiple Governor’s pardons and the usual massive lawsuits against the Chicago Police Department.  Because the statute of limitations for Burge’s crimes had run out, the disgraced police officer was convicted this past June for perjury and obstruction of justice.  He currently awaits sentencing.

Routinized Prison Abuse

As for routinized prison abuse, Bagram and Abu Ghraib have regularly been described as one-off aberrations, but the origins of such brutality are not hard to spot in our treatment of prisoners at home.  This continuity is personified by Charles Graner, the ringleader of the Abu Ghraib torture.  He had fittingly been a guard at maximum-security State Correctional Institute-Greene in southwestern Pennsylvania, itself subject to a major prisoner-abuse scandal in the late 1990s which got several guards fired, though not Graner.

Fact is, the abuse and/or torture of prisoners, though far from systematic, is not all that uncommon in many American prisons.  What came out in the Abu Ghraib photos is, according to the (increasingly busy) United States program of Human Rights Watch, not so different from the abuse and brutality of many of our own stateside lock-ups.

In New York, for instance, a state task force convened by Governor David Paterson in 2008 deemed the entire youth detention system “broken.”  The official report found that guards throughout the system regularly used “excessive force” on youth inmates, sometimes breaking bones and shattering teeth.

Prison abuse here at home can be just as fatal as at Bagram.  In New York, an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old died in 2006 after corrections officers pinned him face down on the ground.  (Remember, at Bagram the interrogators tried to make young Khadr talk by threatening to send him to an American prison, which they apparently considered at least as threatening as anything Afghanistan had to offer.)

This is not lost on lawyers representing Gitmo detainees.  “I might well advise a client to take ten years in the communal wing of Guantánamo over three years in solitary at the supermax in Florence,” says Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights.  Attorney Joshua Dratel, who took part in the very successful defense of Gitmo detainee David Hicks, told me recently that he thought the worst American-run prison is not Guantánamo’s Camp Delta, but rather the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. And yet, somewhat mysteriously, New Yorkers are more likely to know about the brutality of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib than the fatal abuse and abysmal prison conditions in their own state.

To be sure, in significant ways Gitmo and the CIA’s various global “black sites” were significantly worse. First, the use of torture has been far more widespread at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the other secret prisons established in the Bush years than at home.  In addition, the government has also made the decision to imprison some detainees without trial for the duration of what has often been described as a “multigenerational” global war on terror.  Even those prisoners with habeas rights have had trouble getting release orders granted by the judiciary enforced.  Half a dozen Guantánamo prosecutors -- prosecutors, mind you, not defense lawyers -- have quit in disgust with the whole process, offering harsh words about the structural flaws which tilt the system towards securing convictions at the expense of impartial justice.

In important ways, however, our domestic justice system is no better.  Darrell Vandeveld is a former Guantánamo prosecutor.  He resigned in a crisis of conscience in 2009.  He was also once a public defender in San Diego where he found that many defendants were able to get only a semblance of justice.  “Most of the defendants’ rights were honored only in the breach.  It’s an overburdened system that has only become worse.  Comparable to Gitmo?  No doubt.”  Vandeveld, who now heads the public defender office in Erie, Pennsylvania, stresses that, while the outrages are not identical, they are comparable.

Legal Black Holes, At Home and Abroad

Gazing into Gitmo’s black hole can also easily provoke disturbing reflections on the rule of law in wartime America.  As another lawyer remarked 2,000 years ago while his republic was degenerating into empire, “Inter armas silent leges” (in time of war, the laws fall silent).

Keep in mind that the Global War on Terror -- a name the Obama administration has demurely dropped without dropping the war that went with it -- is by no means the only war deforming our justice system.  For the past three decades, the War on Crime and the War on Drugs have been in full fury, becoming ever less metaphorical as budgets for police and prisons skyrocket, and then skyrocket some more.  These domestic crackdowns have come with much martial rhetoric and political manipulation of fear and anger, clearing a wide path for the excesses of that Global War on Terror.  By overburdening the criminal courts and prison system to a hitherto unimaginable degree, these “wars” also created legal black holes where the rule of law is notional at best.

Take the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which made it nearly impossible for inmates to sue prison authorities, and has put thousands of Americans beyond the reach of any kind of juridical authority.  According to Bryan Stevenson, a peerless capital-defense litigator and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama:

U.S. prison officials have obtained greater and greater discretion to send someone to solitary confinement for years; to force people into their cells naked, without meals; to inflict punitive measures without any possibility of outside intervention.  It’s often a closed system whose managers have all the authority, especially at our supermax facilities.  They function in many ways like Guantánamo.

Gitmo and Bagram were well within our capabilities before 9/11.  Yes, it’s true that Bush administration officials and pundits told us with excitement about how, in our counterattack on al Qaeda, “the gloves were coming off.”  For a great many Americans already in U.S. prisons, however, those gloves had never gone on to begin with.  This raises some vexing questions about how we budget our indignation.  It is not at all clear why violent interrogations, abuse, and torture should be more scandalous when they happen overseas than in Chicago.

What explains this collective Jellybyism?  Is it because so many of our domestic inmates, especially in the regions where national opinion is produced, are African American and Latino, whereas most of our professional social reformers in the nonprofit sector are white and Asian?  Is it because most of our elite public-interest lawyers and white-shoe pro bono advocates come out of a top half-dozen law schools where they most likely got a nice taste of well-tended federal courts, but little if any exposure to our overburdened state criminal courts?  Is it just too depressing to think about our crumbling, overstrained criminal justice system in Guantánamo-like terms?  Does compassion fatigue for those atrocities closest at hand always set in first, and hardest?  Whatever the reasons, the gaping legal black holes in our domestic justice and penal system have acquired the seamless invisibility of an open secret.

It is no coincidence that most of the American intellectuals who have pointed out these domestic precursors to the Global War on Terror -- journalists like Margaret Kimberley and Bob Herbert, and law professor James Forman, Jr. -- are African American.  Black Americans, whose overall incarceration rate today is probably higher than that of Soviet citizens at the peak of the gulag, have had ample reasons over the centuries, and now as much as ever, to doubt the fundamental fairness of American justice.  When advocates compare the military tribunals unfavorably to “the Cadillac version of justice” that U.S. citizens supposedly get (which was how one Gitmo defense attorney described America’s domestic courts), it is simply baffling to those aware of how our system actually works.

In fact, the ho-hum familiarity of much of the War on Terror’s nastiness may help explain why so many Americans view what’s gone on at Gitmo with a shrug, and often respond to the liberal shock and horror with exasperation.  This has been going on right here for decades, where have you been?

Prosecuting a 15-year-old for “murder” with the help of a little torture and some threats of rape may not be the kind of thing we want show German journalists.  They’ll just get upset.  They lack the context.  But we Americans really have no right to claim that we’re shocked.  We got used to this kind of thing a long time ago.  The prosecution of former child soldier Omar Khadr has been nothing, in other words, if not all-American.

Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York.  He reviews and reports for the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, the American Conservative Magazine and CounterPunch.  A Timothy MacBain TomDispatch video interview with Madar on why Guantanamo has not betrayed American "values" can be seen by clicking here or downloaded to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Chase Madar

Daily Caller - The 2010 midterm elections are over, so that means it’s time to focus entirely on the 2012 presidential race. For likely Republican voters, that would mean, as of now, a match-up between Barrack Obama and … Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin.

Daily Caller - The Republicans gave the Democrats a historic spanking election night in the House of Representatives — netting over 60 seats, taking the majority, and leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to contemplate a variation on Charlton Heston’s “from my cold dead hands” declaration.

Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it’s slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda.

Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with greater confidence to the 2012 elections? Yes and no. Yes, objectively speaking the next electoral cycle should be even more favorable than the one that just ended. A large number of red-state Democratic senators will have to defend their seats; and since Obama will be at the top of the ballot that year, they won’t be able to hide from the fact that their party leader is a detached liberal with a destructive tax-and-spend agenda. Whether Republicans will do as well as they did in this cycle depends on whether they learn the lessons from the 2010 election.  

#ad#The first lesson is simple: Set the narrative. This year it wasn’t too difficult to tell the story of the election: It was about stopping an out-of-control Congress and an out-of-touch White House. In races across the country, Republican candidates ran on the message that the Left was bankrupting America with budget-busting spending bills that mortgage our children’s future, burden the private sector with uncertainty, and cripple our much-needed job growth.

The story of the next cycle, though, remains to be written. Its content depends on what Republicans do next. Just as in the 1980s, there are today millions of conservative-leaning Democrats and independents who are ready to join our cause. They gave us their votes, now we must earn their trust. And we do that by showing them that a vote for us will not be a vote for the big-spending, over-regulating status quo. The 2012 story should be about conservatives in Congress cutting government down to size and rolling back the spending, and the Left doing everything in its power to prevent these necessary reforms from happening. In the next two years, if all we end up doing is adopting some tax hikes here, some Obama-agenda compromises there, and a thousand little measures that do nothing to get us out of the economic mess we’re in, the same voters that put the GOP in office will vote them out in the next election. If that happens, the story of 2012 may well be that of the GOP going the way of the Whigs. No, the American people are expecting us to be bold and big in our economic reform to allow the private sector to create jobs and soar!

In the coming weeks, there will be those who lament that some of us endorsed conservative Republicans over liberal ones in blue-state races. It’s a good debate, and one I’m willing to have. First, we must keep in mind that there is no guarantee that any Republican will win in a deep-blue state (as evidenced by the exit polls in Delaware showing that the liberal Republican would have lost too). But even more to the point, we saw in the last decade what happens when conservatives hold their noses and elect liberals who have an “R” after their names. Our party’s message of freedom and fiscal responsibility became diluted. In 2008, it was difficult to claim on the one hand that we were the party of fiscal responsibility and on the other hand that our fiscal policies work. It was clear to the electorate that the GOP had not adhered to fiscally conservative positions, and that the liberal positions they did adhere to didn’t work. If we go on in that direction again, we won’t have a base, let alone a majority. Certainly we can and should back sensible center-right candidates in bluer states, but I see no point in backing someone who supports cap-and-tax, Obamacare, bailouts, taxes, and more useless stimulus packages. If you think such a candidate will be with us when it comes time to vote down an Obama Supreme Court nominee, you’re living on a unicorn ranch in fantasy land.

#page#

In the coming weeks there will also be a debate about the viability of particular candidates. Anyone with the courage to throw his or her hat in the ring and stand up and be counted always has my respect. Some of them were stronger candidates than others, but they all had the courage to be “in the arena.” The second lesson of this election is one a number of the candidates had to learn to their cost: Fight back the lies immediately and consistently. Some candidates assumed that, once they received their party’s nomination, the conservative message would automatically carry the day. Unfortunately, political contests aren’t always about truth and justice. Powerful vested interests will combine to keep bad candidates in place and good candidates out of office. Once they let themselves be defined as “unfit” (decorated war hero Joe Miller) or “heartless” (pro-life, international women’s rights champion Carly Fiorina), good candidates often find it virtually impossible to get their message across. The moral of their stories: You must be prepared to fight for your right to be heard.

#ad#Another important lesson is that we will need the mother of all GOTV efforts if we wish to win in 2012. Sending donations isn’t enough when push comes to shove. Millions of boots on the ground are needed, and voter-fraud prevention must be addressed before election eve.

The last, and possibly most important, lesson is that a winning conservative message must always be carefully crafted. If candidates are going to talk boldly on the campaign trail about entitlement reform and reducing the size of government, they must be prepared to word it in such a way as to minimize the inevitable fear-mongering accusations of “extremism.” We are quickly approaching a fiscal turning point where these crucial reform discussions will be mandatory. We need to speak about them in a way that the public will embrace. During his first run for the presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan found out that election campaigns aren’t necessarily the best settings for quasi-academic discussions about issues like Social Security reform. So for his next campaign, he resolved to build his platform out of tried and tested policies like tax cuts. Successful candidates in the next election cycle will have to test and develop similar policy platforms that address the crucial issues of entitlement reform and shrinking government in a way that the voters will find pragmatic and even attractive.

If we manage to do these things, there is no reason why we can’t look forward with confidence to winning in 2012. I have said all along that this election must be seen in conjunction with the next. Ultimately 2010 must be viewed as just the first battle in a much longer fight that leads to November 6, 2012, and beyond. We cannot fully restore and revive America until we replace Obama. The meaning of the 2010 election was rebuke, reject, and repeal. We rebuked Washington’s power grab, rejected this unwanted “fundamental transformation of America,” and began the process to repeal the dangerous policies inflicted on us. But this theme will only complement the theme of 2012, which is renew, revive, and restore. In 2012, we need to renew our optimistic, pioneering spirit, revive our free-market system, and restore constitutional limits and our standing in the world as the abiding beacon of freedom.

Till then, I hope that commonsense patriots will join me in applauding the real heroes of this election year: the Tea Party Americans. In 2008, we were told that we had to “move beyond Reagan.” Well, some of us refused to believe that America chose big-government European-style socialism. American voters elected a politician who cloaked his agenda in the language of moderation. Once the mask was removed, Americans rejected his “fundamental transformation.” The Tea Party reminded us that Reaganism is still our foundation. I think the Gipper is smiling down on us today waving the Gadsden Flag.

— Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president.

Bill Clinton, New York Times
TODAY marks 15 years since an assassin’s bullet killed my friend, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister. Since his death, not a week has gone by that I have not missed him. I loved him and his wife, Leah, very much. On the occasion of the anniversary of his death, his yahrzeit, the world would do well to remember the lessons of his life: his vision for freedom, tolerance, cooperation, security and peace is as vital now as it was 15 years ago, when he happily spoke and sang for peace at a huge rally in Tel Aviv just before he was killed.

The Daily Beast - A loathed incumbent tied to an unpopular president in a terrible economy—just how did Reid beat back the Tea Party? Steve Friess on the keys to his victory, from Angle’s awful campaign to the senator’s rapid response.

Uncharted territory. Historic upheaval. The tallies are not all in as this is written. But it seems that the 2010 elections have produced results that are unprecedented in the lifetimes of most readers.

Some numbers are clear. In nine of the ten congressional election cycles between 1986 and 2004, no party gained or lost more than ten seats in the House of Representatives, the one exception being 1994, when Republicans gained 54. Otherwise, the numbers were pretty static.

Not so in the three most recent cycles. Democrats gained 31 seats in 2006 and another 23 seats in 2008. Now Republicans have won significantly more than the 39 seats they needed to regain the House majority they lost four years ago.

#ad#American politics has had no such sharp shifts to one party and then the other for more than half a century -- not since the elections of 1946 and 1948, immediately after World War II. And then, as now, very fundamental issues about the size and scope of government were at stake.

After World War II, the issue was whether the United States would move in the same direction that voters in Britain chose when they elected a Labour government that instituted national health insurance and a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Franklin Roosevelt laid out a similar program in his 1944 State of the Union, and labor unions, bulging with new members due to New Deal and wartime laws, became a mobilizing force for the first time in that year’s presidential election. They sought legislation to provide public housing, federal aid for education, and national health insurance.

The voting public had other ideas. Unions called more strikes in 1946 than in any other year in American history, and that fall voters elected a Republican Congress. That 80th Congress proceeded to abolish wartime rationing and wage and price controls, enact a record tax cut, and pass the Taft-Hartley Act limiting the powers of labor unions.

In 1948, Democrats won back control of Congress, in large part because of support from farmers (one quarter of Americans in the 1940s still lived on farms) and in tribute to Harry Truman’s vigorous response to Communist aggression in Europe. But the Democrats were unable to repeal the 80th Congress’s legislation and failed to pass major housing, education, or health-care legislation.

The Republican Congress thus put post-war America on a path very different from Britain’s. Its enduring public policies laid the groundwork for the generation of post-war prosperity.

For six decades, from the late 1940s until the election of Barack Obama and Democratic congressional supermajorities in 2008, Americans were not presented with a clear-cut effort to vastly expand the size and scope of government. Even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which gave us Medicare, was directed more at expanding welfare programs that were eventually rolled back in the 1990s.

On Tuesday, Americans gave their verdict on Obamacare and the Obama Democrats’ sharp increases in government spending. It was a “no” as resounding as the one their forebears delivered to the post-war Democrats’ welfare-state vision in 1946.

In particular, voters in the industrial heartland, states which trended Democratic in the post-war recession years of 1958, 1970, and 1982, this time trended Republican. They evidently now see government spending programs as the problem, not the solution, to a stagnant economy.

In 2008, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats won with a top-and-bottom coalition, carrying voters with incomes over $200,000 and under $50,000, while losing those in between. In 2010, that coalition has contracted. Turnout among low-income voters was down, while Democratic support among the affluent seems confined to those on public-sector and university payrolls.

Democrats and their cheerleaders in the press will trot out alibis and rationalizations, blaming the result on ignorance, selfishness, or racism. But voters this year were better informed about the intentions of the Obama Democrats than they were in 2008 and no more racist than the electorate that gave Barack Obama 53 percent of the popular vote, more than any other Democratic nominee in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The implications for public policy and for the 2012 presidential election remain unclear. Republicans could fail to offer attractive policy alternatives or a viable presidential nominee.

But one thing seems difficult to deny. The policies of the Obama Democrats are not the kind of change Americans hoped for.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 The Washington Examiner

On Tuesday, voters rejected President Obama’s attempt to remake America in the image of an imploding Europe -- not just by overwhelmingly electing Republican candidates to the House, but by preferring dozens of maverick conservatives who ran against the establishment.

Why the near-historic rebuke? Out-of-control spending, unchecked borrowing, vast new entitlements, and unsustainable debt -- all at a time of economic stagnation.

#ad#So what is next? Like the recovering addict who checks himself into rehab, a debt-addicted America just snapped out of its borrowing binge, is waking up with the shakes, and hopes there is still a chance of recovery.

It won’t be easy. Obama and his Democratic Congress ran up nearly $3 trillion in new debt in just 21 months -- after running a disingenuous 2008 campaign that falsely promised to rein in the fiscal irresponsibility that had been rampant during the spendthrift Bush administration.

So the voters intervened and sent America in for rehab treatment. In our three-step road to recovery, we, the sick patient, must first end the denial, then accept the tough medicine, and finally change the entrenched habits that caused the addiction.

First, voters did not reject Obama’s agenda because he was too centrist, borrowed and spent too little money, or did not more vigorously pursue unpopular agenda items like cap-and-trade and blanket amnesty. Nor did the Democratic meltdown happen because of Obama’s inability to articulate his agenda. The vision itself -- not the talking points -- was the problem.

Obama failed miserably to keep the nation’s trust. After just 21 months, the country concluded that he was an extremist and that his attempts to manage the economy through massive borrowing, rapid growth in government size and spending, assumption of private enterprise, and serial harangues against business and the rich had turned a recession into a crisis of confidence and a near-depression. For some strange reason, Obama thought the cure for Republican big spending was European-style socialism, when in fact voters wanted an end to Bush-era borrowing and waste.

Second, not being Obama will no longer be enough for the ascendant Republicans, many of them political novices or Tea Party mavericks skeptical of both parties. These outsiders told outraged voters that America will have to step up and start controlling spending in a manner Republicans never did as a majority in Congress from 2001 to 2006. Perhaps a good symbolic start would be to cut back on popular pet programs -- agricultural subsidies, for example -- whose end the Republic will survive. This would be iconic proof of congressional willingness to alienate powerful special interests. Social Security, Medicare, and some defense programs all have to be on the table.

If conservatives plan to cut taxes, they will no longer be able to convince the public that the resulting supply-side growth in the economy will eventually bring in more money and balance the budget. Instead, right from the start, the new House majority will have to demand that we pay as we go -- every dollar lost in revenue will require a commensurate dollar cut in federal spending.

#page#Republicans should be willing to be demagogued by a weakened Obama as heartless and cruel budget cutters -- even if the president may well be the ultimate beneficiary by being able to run on the new theme of fiscal responsibility and a recovering economy in 2012.

Third, voters want their Congress and their president to end the pathological value system that got us into this mess. Instead of barnstorming the country handing out borrowed cash to favored constituencies and playing one identity group against another, the president had better stay in Washington, keep off Comedy Central and The View, and not come out to brag until he has cut unsustainable spending for all of us.

#ad#It should also be an embarrassment, not an honor, for members of Congress of either party to put their names on the latest pork-barrel projects. Instead of weekly newsletters from Washington that boast of bringing home the bacon, voters now prefer hard proof that their government spent only what it took in. Any politician can promise a new project, an expanded entitlement, or a special-interest tax break paid for with someone else’s money, but only a statesman can explain exactly how it is all to be paid for.

So for now, voters have said that they are sick of profligate Democrats. But if Republicans do not get that message regarding fiscal restraint, in two years it will be their turn -- again.

--- Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Momentous events this week -- the Republican House sweep and the Fed’s QE2 -- moved the stock market needle only a little over Tuesday and Wednesday, although the net impact was a gain of about 90 points.

Obamanomics was repudiated at the polls and the Republicans inflicted a crushing defeat on the Democrats in the House. However, tea partiers disappointed in several Senate elections, leaving Harry Reid & Co. in charge of the upper chamber.

#ad#The real meaning of the new Senate-House-Obama triangle is not yet clear. The bad stuff will be stopped. That’s good. But how much good stuff can be legislated remains to be seen. This might be what’s slowing down the stock market. (Though again, I note, a 90 point rise is not nothing.)

Two key Senate races produced supporters of extending all the Bush tax rates. This could be the key. Democrat Jim Manchin in West Virginia and Republican Mark Kirk in Illinois will be seated immediately to fill the Robert Byrd and Barack Obama vacancies. This raises the probability that a full extension of the Bush tax cuts will go through the Senate. I’m going to assume that the people have spoken, even to the lame ducks in the House. And a conciliatory and compromising Obama at his news conference today suggests that the president will sign a temporary full extension of the Bush tax rates. That’s a pro-growth development.

On the Fed side, the central bank is going to pump $600 billion of new money into the over $14 trillion economy in the next eight months. The Fed held back on a shock-an-awe program that could have been over $1 trillion. But it’s going ahead with the money stimulus.

This middle-ground action was already discounted by the market. The dollar did fall today, but so did gold. Of course, I would have preferred no QE2 at all. Similarly, to protect the dollar, I would replace the Fed altogether with an ounce of gold. But that’s my problem.

Here’s a question, though. Is the Fed stimulating into an improving economy? Today’s ISM for services came in above expectations. The same is true for Monday’s ISM manufacturing report. September factory orders rose 2.1 percent. And monthly car sales near 12.4 million at an annual rate are the best since September 2008.

It wouldn’t be the first time the central bank is a lagging indicator. Commodity indexes have been booming. Bond market inflation expectations have been rising. And now the economy seems to be improving in the early part of the fourth quarter.

To me, the Fed is at least doing minimal harm, although I continue to fret about the outlook for the dollar. But the possibility of a pro-growth fiscal policy coming out of the lame-duck Congress -- a large budget continuing resolution that extends the Bush tax rates and is stingy on spending -- is a good thing.

Regarding the future triangulation between Obama, Reid, and Boehner, we will all have to puzzle though this. But surely stopping the bad stuff is a plus.

– Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

Daily Caller - Prominent Jewish voices are speaking out against the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s (ADC) decision to honor former White House reporter and harsh critic of Israel, Helen Thomas, with their Mehdi Courage in Journalism award.

Over the past several years, we’ve had the honor of working with millions of free-market activists across the country through our organization, Americans for Prosperity. These activists have taken time away from their families, their work, and their lives to get involved in the public-policy process in an unprecedented way. Washington has ignored their concerns and pushed forward with a big-government agenda of out-of-control spending, regulation, and taxes. Voters decisively rejected that agenda in this election.

We caution Republicans, however, against interpreting this election as an endorsement of their recent performance, which has too often fallen short of their professed principles. This election provides an opportunity for Republicans to prove themselves worthy of the support of grassroots free-market activists. Indeed, this may be the best opportunity they will have for a generation.

#ad#The American people are still angry about the reckless fiscal policies of the Bush-Hastert years: pork-barrel earmarks such as the Bridge to Nowhere, vast new entitlement programs such as the Medicare Part D prescription-drug benefit, and the galloping growth of government spending across the board.

The first test for the new Republican House majority will come the week of November 15, when they vote, in conference, on extending their existing earmark moratorium. If they allow earmarking as usual to return, it will tell the American people that their talk of fiscal responsibility was just an empty election promise. Conversely, extending the moratorium will show immediate determination to chart a different course.

If defeated congressional Democrats try to pass a pork-barrel appropriations bill or other major big-government legislation in the lame-duck session, against the wishes of the American people, Republicans must use every procedural tactic at their disposal to stop them. The Democrats had their chance; they’ve been decisively rejected. In the lame-duck session, Congress should simply extend all of the current tax rates and pass a clean, short-term continuing resolution to fund the government until the new Congress is sworn in. Anything else would blatantly disregard the election’s results.

The marching orders for the new Congress and for the Obama administration come January are clear: Washington cannot and should not try to control our lives. Washington cannot and should not tax and regulate away our economic freedom. Washington cannot and should not spend trillions of dollars we don’t have on programs we don’t need.

President Obama should learn the same lesson from Election 2010 that Bill Clinton did from Election 1994: The era of big government is over. Only this time, we need an end that will last.

Congressional Republicans should take seriously the possibility of bipartisan action to address voters’ top concerns and offer to work with the president to cut spending and balance the budget, like the historic balanced-budget deal of the 1990s. They should complete welfare reform by replacing the remaining federal welfare programs with block grants to the states, based on the successful 1990s model. They should move forward on trade liberalization and pro-growth tax reform. And they should seriously pursue de-funding and repealing Obamacare while moving toward real health reform that empowers patients and gives them control of their own health-care dollars.

If the president rejects the opportunity to work in a bipartisan way toward fiscal responsibility and instead continues to pursue a far-left agenda, Congress must step up and stop him.

There are some frightening indications that he intends to do just that; even in the face of obvious public opposition, he has been pursuing an extreme regulatory agenda including EPA global-warming regulation, NLRB union giveaways, and FCC regulation of the Internet. More than ever, Congress must exercise a robust oversight power and assert itself against regulatory overreach.

#page#As we see in the Tea Party, Americans who worked hard, played by the rules, paid their mortgages, paid their taxes, and took care of their own lives are now engaged in the political process on a massive scale. They are not going away. The political landscape has changed, and Washington will now be held accountable for everything it does.

#ad#Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “Trust but verify.” When it comes to Congress -- and, yes, that includes the new Republican majority -- our free-market movement says, “Forget trust, let’s just verify.” Republicans must keep that in mind and use the opportunity created by this election to prove themselves worthy of the support they received.

-- Tim Phillips is president of, and Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at, Americans for Prosperity, a grassroots network of 1.6 million free-market activists that has been attacked by President Obama by name at least 18 times.

Daily Caller - Leaders of the Tea Party Patriots organization declared Tuesday’s election results “a victory for liberty,” but blamed a rival Tea Party organization for Senate losses in Nevada and Delaware, saying the group shouldn’t have intervened in those elections by making endorsements in the primary.

Peter Beinart, Daily Beast
Last night’s biggest loser was not the Democratic Party. Democrats will rebound. In fact, the GOP’s victories probably improve Barack Obama’s chances of reelection since he can now position himself as a check on Republican radicalism, as Bill Clinton did in 1996. The real loser is Keynesianism: The idea that when businesses and individuals stop spending, government must. That idea will not rebound; it’s over for this period in economic history.

Sen. Evan Bayh, New York Times
DEMOCRATS can recover from the disappointments of this election and set the stage for success in 2012. But to do so we must learn from Tuesday’s results.Many of our problems were foreseeable. A public unhappy about the economy will take it out on the party in power, even if the problems began under previous management. What’s more, when one party controls everything — the House, the Senate, the White House — disgruntled voters have only one target for their ire. And the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.

Nile Gardiner, Daily Telegraph
Tonight’s emphatic conservative House victory in the US midterms is a powerful rejection of President Obama’s handling of the economy and his Big Government agenda, including his controversial healthcare reform plans. The conservative revolution has been largely spurred by disenchantment with the federal government, and a strong belief in limited government, lower taxation, and reduced public spending, as well as a desire to return to America’s Founding principles.

Mark Halperin, Time
The time for presidential talk is over.Republicans didn’t win everything they hoped for Tuesday night. But they took enough seats from the Democrats to gain control of the House, pick up Senate slots, wrest control of several state legislatures, create a solid gubernatorial stronghold in the Midwest and send an unmistakable message to Democrats: Much of the American public wants a check on the policies of Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.