Roughly five minutes into Shutter Island, I knew more or less how it would end. For a film that invests another two hours and fifteen minutes in building to an ostensibly shocking twist ending, this is not a particularly good thing. All the more so when the film in question is the work of someone who many cinephiles (and I count myself one of them) consider to be the world’s greatest living filmmaker. Shutter Island is most certainly not a bad film, but from the likes of Martin Scorsese, it cannot be considered anything other than a disappointment.

When we consider the nature of the problems to be solved in our day, it seems–to many of us, at least–that these un-English arrivals are correct, that intelligence is the virtue we particularly need. Courage and steadfastness we cannot do without, so long as two men dwell on the earth; but it is time to discriminate in our praise of these virtues. If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world has got into a kind of prison, and what is needed is the key to the lock. If none of the old virtues exactly fits, why should it seem ignoble to admit it? England for centuries has got on better by sheer character than some other nations by sheer intelligence, but there is after all a relation between the kind of problem and the means we should select to solve it. Not all problems are solved by willpower. When England overthrew Bonaparte, it was not his intelligence she overthrew; the contest involved other things besides intelligence, and she wore him out in the matter of physical endurance....

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backs off of building new housing developments in East Jerusalem, his government will fall.

Because the Prime Minister doesn’t want to have his government fall, he won’t back off in response to the Obama Administration’s public denigration efforts.

If the Obama Administration wants to convince the Prime Minister to back off, they will have to use private diplomacy, and throw a sweetener into the deal in order to make it easier for the Prime Minister’s government to survive.

Eric Cantor seems to know this, which is why his advice to the White House to back off in public ought to be listened to. Whether it actually will be listened to is an open question; as the Obama Administration has made clear in a little over a year in office, its actual ability to do foreign policy right is not nearly as great as was advertised during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:

Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

About the value of China’s currency: we all know it’s undervalued. The Chinese know it’s undervalued. They can see it in consumer-price inflation, which is now up between 2 and 3 percent after being negative for much of 2009. They can see it in a 15% jump in housing prices in some cities. And they can see it in the growing concern among ordinary Chinese about the falling real value of their savings and their ability to keep up their headlong dash to prosperity.

For all the talk about China powering a global recovery on a flood of government-driven investment, Chinese authorities have been steadily preparing the country for some tightening in bank lending and monetary conditions. They overstimulated, and they have to get this inflation under control. People are even starting to mutter darkly about a Chinese financial crisis caused by terrible credit quality among the (rampantly corrupt) local government authorities who borrow heavily against land to finance investment, using the central government’s credit.

Against this backdrop, we had one of the mainstream media’s patented story clusters this past week, complete with heavily-publicized statements by favored pundits, innocently timed to coincide with statements by policymakers. Of course, none of...

Dan Twining rips the Administration both for its Asia policy, and for misrepresenting the Asia policy of the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration’s Potemkin pretensions to concern and interest in Asia policy ought to be exposed by more pundits and observers. Here’s hoping that Twining started a trend.

The tea party activists took to DC today in a big way, in person and on the phone. And a lot of their frustration seems to be tied to the so-called “Slaughter strategy,” which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says is great “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill,” which the Washington Post calls “dodgy,” and which makes Robert Gibbs duck. The whole thing has served to put Democrats on the defensive for adopting the parliamentary strategy, which has been used on occasion in the past, but never for a sweeping social reform of this magnitude, which will effect so many Americans.

The interesting part is that in reaction to opposition to the approach from within his own party, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) acknowledges this is a tactic that is only taking place because they don’t have the votes for the Senate bill as an “up or down” matter. But that’s been a talking point for the bill’s supporters since day one, and the American people clearly understand it. Does Hoyer really believe they won’t respond?

Paul Krugman is calling for war — a trade war on China, that is. He proposes to impose up to a 25% tariff on imports from China to force them to revalue their currency against the dollar, and start chipping away at their $30 billion/month current account surplus.

Trade war flies against everything we know about free markets, comparative advantage and all the rest. On the other hand, there have been instances where the US has held the dollar overvalued, creating contractionary effects in the economy that persisted until the overvaluations ended. Krugman mentions a 1971 episode, but dollar (and sterling) overvaluation was persistent throughout the Sixties. There was also the second half of the Twenties. Most of the world suffered through a recession and banking panics in 1930 following the US stock market crash, but recovered pretty quickly. The US, on the other hand, entered the Great Depression and didn’t really do anything good to start fixing things until the dollar was devalued by 40% during 1933 and early 1934.

Something really quite different is going on now, however, and it’s unclear exactly what it means.

So we have the Chinese that have roughly a $30 billion per month current account surplus against us. (Never mind how remarkable it is that this number is about 3% of GDP.) That surplus has to find its way into US assets somehow. That accounts for perhaps a third of the bid for Treasury debt that represents new issuance rather than rolls of existing debt.

The new issuance amounts to something like a trillion and a half dollars a year. That’s the real amount of the federal budget deficit, shorn of the various bullshit stories that the president tells to make it sounds a little better than it is. This is the amount that is added to our public debt, which needs to be financed permanently (at unpredictable interest rates) or get paid off someday.

That trillion-plus dollars also represents spending in the overall economy. You can’t deny that it’s pumping up nominal GDP. You can very well deny (and I do) that it represents money well-spent or efficiently spent, on goods and services that actually improve people’s lives or (God help me, but this sounds old-fashioned) reflect people’s free choice as to what they want to spend money...

Robert Samuelson demolishes them:

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

An ACORN by any other name, should arouse just as much suspicion.

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the health care reform debate? Well, think again:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.