It is still premature for any government to accuse North Korea of sinking the South Korean warship Cheonan before it reviews the detailed findings of the complete investigation.  For many South Koreans, however, the conclusion is already inescapable that North Korea did it. That’s my hunch, too. Let me start by explaining the basis for my own speculation (please see these posts for additional citations):

- The extensive history of North Korean provocations that are as bad as this, or worse.

- The extensive history of North Korean provocations in these very waters — North Korea dispute  the most recent of which was a defeat for the North Korean Navy that would have created a motive for revenge.

Well, among other things, they allow former leaders to travel freely, involve themselves in international conferences, and engage in non-official diplomacy that bolsters the standing of their country.

Iran’s government, it would seem, is not a smart one:

Moderate former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has been barred from traveling abroad, the pro-reform Parlemannews website reported on Thursday.

“Mohammad Khatami was barred from leaving Iran to attend a conference in Japan,” an unnamed source told the website. The source did not give details.

“Khatami was supposed to leave Tehran for Japan Thursday night … to take part in a conference on nuclear disarmament in Japan.”

There was no immediate comment from Iranian authorities, or from Khatami’s allies.

The administration has patted itself on the back for identifying nuclear terrorism as a major threat and Obama went so far as to claim that the risk of a nuclear terror attack “has gone up.” As a straining-to-be sympathetic reporter put it: “Coming from Dick Cheney, words like that had a way of sounding like a scare tactic. Coming from Obama, they are genuinely scary.” What the reporter didn’t say, is that for nearly eight years critics have complained that the Bush-Cheney administration took the threat of nuclear terrorism too seriously (see the One Percent Doctrine). There is even a cottage industry devoted to pooh-poohing (see here and here) the entire matter as hype. Perhaps that industry will now direct its fire at Obama or perhaps it will find itself suddenly able to split the hair between a “scare tactic” and “genuinely scary.”

–Peter Feaver on the nuclear summit that took place this past week.

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We know it’s time for your weekly dose of Coffee and Markets, but this week we’re taking a break for part one of a special two-part Rum & Politics session from Costa Rica, featuring a chat with Brad Jackson, Ben Domenech, David Bufkin, and Josh Trevino. The conversation covers the concept of tying government pay to the voting franchise, the stratification of class, and the unintended consequences of Obamacare.

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I have a piece at the Huffington Post today responding to the White House and others on Elena Kagan and the blowback for my post last week:

I erroneously believed that Ms. Kagan was openly gay not because of, as Stein describes it, a “whisper campaign” on the part of conservatives, but because it had been mentioned casually on multiple occasions by friends and colleagues — including students at Harvard, Hill staffers, and in the sphere of legal academia — who know Kagan personally. And as the reaction from Julian Sanchez and Matt Yglesias shows, I was not alone in that apparently inaccurate belief.

Look, it’s 2010 — no one should care if a nominee to any position is gay. The fact that conservative Senators John Cornyn and Jeff Sessions have recently expressed openness to confirming an openly gay nominee to the Court is a good thing. Senators should look at things that actually matter — evaluating a nominee’s decisions, approach to the law, their judgment and ability — to see whether there are actually good and relevant reasons to oppose the nomination.

Texas politics ain’t your usual run off the mill hand shaking and baby kissing. It can get down right tough. Rick Perry, fresh off a stunning comeback victory in the March GOP primary, is now facing the Democrats best hope of taking the Governor’s Mansion since Ann Richards, former Houston Mayor Bill White. Perry is ready, guns blazing, for the challenge.

White is a popular figure in the Texas liberal network. He has a great story – the son of two schoolteachers, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, and a law degree from the University of Texas. White was mayor of Houston for six years, where he garnered a lot of attention for being at the helm of the nation’s fourth largest city during some good times in Texas. He’s everything the liberal elite in Texas want as a candidate, and he’ll receive plenty of backing from the Democrats national fund raising and grassroots base.

One of the objectives of financial reform is to make crises less damaging when they occur. An important way of achieving this is missing from the financial reform now being debated in Congress.

The only simple and reasonably effective approach is to increase the size and stability of the capital reserves held by financial institutions. A thicker capital cushion always allows you to sustain larger losses, and to maintain your positions in strong asset classes, in the midst of a panic.

This is critically important, because the general nature of modern financial panics is to suddenly and simultaneously undervalue nearly every asset class except US Treasury debt. Nothing is safe, even the assets that are supposed to be safer than the ones in which the crisis originates. How can that happen?

For nearly two decades, we’ve lived in an era of historically low risk-adjusted real returns on financial assets. This leads financial institutions (banks, Wall St. firms, hedge funds) to try to hold more assets (and make more money) with a given amount of capital.

One way they do that is to construct sophisticated maps of the risk covariance of the many different asset classes. It’s a more involved...

Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to avoid President Barack Obama’s much-hyped Nuclear Security Summit has been met with irritation and dismay by many. Given that Netanyahu’s motivations are reasonable enough, namely the fear that the Arab and Islamic nations attending would turn the conference into a public referendum on Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status, one would expect that his absence would not have raised many eyebrows, especially among the ostensibly worldly chattering classes.

That this was not the case, however, says a great deal less about Netanyahu and the issue of Israel’s decision to avoid a confrontation over its nuclear ambiguity, and far more about the rather desperate lengths to which Obama’s supporters will go in order to maintain the aura of transformative omnipotence that they have built around their hero. The intensity with which they do so would seem to indicate that they are not only trying to prop up the faith of others, but also their own.

In the case of Israel and the nuclear conference, this is particularly apparent. As mentioned above, Netanyahu’s misgivings were both reasonable and obvious: Israel considers its ambiguous nuclear status to be the cornerstone of its security. If the nukes...

The Library of Congress alerted the world today via Twitter, that all your tweets are now theirs. That’s right. Those annoying updates about the miracle of the Pizza Cone (oh wait, that was me), or those taunting updates from your friends that they’re at the concert you couldn’t get tickets too (and drunk), all of that and more is about to be memorialized for all time in the Library of Congress.

Why am I not excited about this?

Twitter’s head guru, Biz Stone, said, “It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research.” Research? From Twitter?

The Library of Congress cited several “important tweets” in their announcement of the event including Obama’s “Yeah we won!” moment from the 2008 campaign, which of course sounded more Obama-like and uber-important. “We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks”.

Thank you Twitter. Now we can have moments like this recounting of Darth Vader’s bed time routine, or this guy’s marriage proposal via Twitter engraved in...

No, this is not a joke. A new Rasmussen poll shows that in a race between Barack Obama and perennial GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul, that the nutty Texas Congressman would come within one point of the current President. According to Rasmussen, “42% of likely voters would vote for Obama and 41% would vote for Paul. This, despite the fact that Paul gets lower support from Republicans (66%) than Obama does from Democrats (79%).”

That’s right, Obama and RON PAUL would be practically tied. Now of course, Ron Paul will not be the GOP nominee, but this has to look bad if your in Camp Obama and surveying 2012. If you’re neck and neck with the local looney, God knows how you’ll fair against a serious contender.

Some people have a natural affinity for conspiracy theories. The fact that the number of Birthers on the right and 9/11 Truthers on the left is roughly equivalent provides some nice bipartisan symmetry, the yin and yang of whackadoo. Birther idiocy will hopefully evaporate when Obama leaves office, while the Truthers will be with us always, to the end of the age — yet the silliest conspiracy theories have to be those overwhelmingly irrelevant to worldview formation.

Such as stories about whether President Obama ditched his press pool for a nonexistent soccer game.

Sparked by an admittedly odd pool report over the weekend, this little weird rumor expanded based on the fact that Sidwell Friends doesn’t list any soccer games for April 10th, and not at the Fort Reno location (which despite the American Thinker post is no more noticeably crime plagued than any other city park).

But pool ditching is hardly unheard of, especially on a fine spring morning in D.C., and Sidwell does have teams in the DC Stoddert spring soccer league, including those in the Obama daughters’ age ranges. Anyone at that field on Saturday can tell you: POTUS showed.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how senior staff on committees and in leadership offices were likely exempt from the requirements of Obamacare, thanks to carveouts within a provision of the bill. As I noted at the time, the problem with the mashed-up version of a bill like this is that it’s so vast and complex, no one really knows everything that’s in it — as Nancy Pelosi acknowledged.

Now the New York Times reports that Congress has unintentionally done away with its own health care coverage by passing the plan (whoops!). The problem is with the same section of the legislation I mentioned earlier — this one requiring as follows:

(i) REQUIREMENT- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are

(I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or

(II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by

...