Anne Frank

Amazing things turn up on YouTube.

Here is a fragment of July 22, 1941 film of a wedding in Amsterdam, which shows a 13-year-old Anne Frank leaning out of a second floor window to see the bride and groom. The movie was made about a year before the Frank family went into hiding.

0:20 video

Hat tip to Scott Johnson.

The government of the banana republic of Obamistan joined China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia in supporting a UN resolution calling for limits on free speech.

Bill Hobbs thinks there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. Maybe the Obama administration is dyslexic. They see “Free Speech” and think it says “Free Sheep”. Maybe not, too.

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. ...

For more than a decade, a UN resolution on the freedom of expression was shepherded through the Council, and the now defunct Commission on Human Rights which it replaced, by Canada. Over the years, Canada tried mightily to garner consensus on certain minimum standards, but the “reformed” Council changed the distribution of seats on the UN’s lead human rights body. In 2008, against the backdrop of the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, Cuba and various Islamic countries destroyed the consensus and rammed through an amendment which introduced a limit on any speech they claimed was an “abuse . . . [that] constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination.”

The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt—a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression. ...

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . .” which include taking action against anything meeting the description of “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” It also purports to “recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media” and supports “the media’s elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct” in relation to “combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador Zamir Akram, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, made it clear that they understand the resolution and its protection against religious stereotyping as allowing free speech to be trumped by anything that defames or negatively stereotypes religion. The idea of protecting the human rights “of religions” instead of individuals is a favorite of those countries that do not protect free speech and which use religion—as defined by government—to curtail it.

As I’ve previously observed, a lot of people on both the political left and right neglected to consider some pretty obvious aspects and details of the liaison between Roman Polanski and a certain young lady 32 years ago and simply accepted her Grand Jury testimony uncritically as a perfectly factual and objective version of events.

That acceptance of a less than complete, biased and self-interested account, combined with a liberal application of emotionalism and indignation, easily turned a tawdry Hollywood casting couch trist into a horrid sex crime with a child victim. Left or right, a surprisingly large number of people seem to find the editorial equivalent of participation in a lynch mob to be a gratifying form of self expression.

The probation officer all those years ago was in possession of a more accurate and complete understanding of the case, and his sentencing report, quoted by the New York Times, arrives at very different conclusions.

The report, submitted by acting probation officer Kenneth F. Fare, and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold, recommended that Mr. Polanski receive probation without jail time for his conviction on one count of having unlawful sex with a minor. In a summary paragraph, the report said: “Jail is not being recommended at the present time. The present offense appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgement by the defendant.” It went on to note that the victim and her parent, as well as an examining psychiatrist, recommended against jail, while a second psychiatrist described the offense as neither “aggressive nor forceful.”

Despite Ms. Geimer’s age and her testimony that she had objected to having sex with Mr. Polanski and asked to leave Jack Nicholson’s house, where the incident occurred, the probation report concluded, “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” and “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing.”

As we see, the authorities at the time, took the young lady’s testimony of her own reluctance with a very large grain of salt, doubtless concluding that both the circumstances of the encounter and many of her own actions signaled explicitly affirmative intentions.

The most interesting aspect of all of this is the fact that Roman Polanski’s flight thirty one years ago was precipitated by precisely the same sort of journalistic feeding frenzy which has been replayed all over again recently. A firestorm of sensationalized accounts of Polanski’s misdeed alarmed the publicity-conscious judge who intended to set aside the conventional processes of justice and overrule a plea bargain already agreed to by both the prosecution and the defense.

Polanski did not escape justice. He had already served a 42 day term of imprisonment, which was supposed to constitute his actual sentence. Polanski also settled privately with the young lady, paying her a sum of money of a specific amount never publicly disclosed. What Polanski escaped was injustice.

He escaped a breach of the normal, impartial, and objective processes of justice, which were in the process of collapsing due to official cowardice and unwillingness to resist a wave of public indignation, mischievously created by irresponsible journalism.

Long-standing cultural restraints on sexual expression and activity have been dwindling away in America for all of the last century, but one powerful prohibition not only survives, but continues to be able to turn ordinary Americans into something very much resembling belligerent Muslims bent on wiping out any stain upon the chastity of their females in blood: the issue of age.

Underage sex is still a kind of priapic third rail. And like Nabokov’s Humbert, Roman Polanski proved to be another sophisticated European gentilhomme d’un certain âge susceptible to the charms of the knowing nymphette. His sin happens to be relatively unique in being capable of getting Americans in general worked up into a lather of righteous indignation just as effectively in 2009 as in 1978 or in 1955 (the publication date of Lolita).

In exactly the same way that the idea of black sexual aggression directed at white women was once upon a time so horrifying an idea to the general community in certain American states that any close resemblance to that supreme phobia could suffice to set into motion the processes of storytelling which would fit the details of the actual case into the terrible archetype, frequently with lethal results, so too today is the idea of adult sexual aggression directed at children a compelling, and potentially dangerous, archetype.

Let’s try another literary trope. Picture Roman Polanski, not as Humbert Humbert, but as Tom Robinson, the black defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. Just like the Polanski case, To Kill a Mockingbird features a public frenzy of indignation at a defendant accused of being a sexual aggressor toward an innocent victim, who is supposed to be protected from the advances of anyone like the defendant by powerful social taboos. Just as in the Harper Lee novel, adjudication of the Roman Polanski case revolved around issues of just who was the actual initiator and whether female consent had been given. Fearful archetypes and framing narratives can work in exactly the same in either case, can’t they?

Law and order can easily be over-rated in a society with the abundance of laws criminalizing all sorts of things, even orchids, as Bryan W. Walsh explains in the Washington Times.

“You don’t need to know. You can’t know.” That’s what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris’ longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with – get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary – based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing’s topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.

Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about “overcriminalization.” Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal – but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: “Life sometimes presents us with lemons.” Their job was, yes, to “turn lemons into lemonade.”

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you’re an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.

Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, “What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans.” He’s right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.

The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had “abandoned” his fuel-cell materials – something he had no intention of doing – while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.

As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these “illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law.”

Patrick, at Popehat, describes how Britain’s police these days protect young thugs by arresting old ladies with walkers for confronting them.

Renate Bowling, a 71 year old widow who escaped to the free world from East Germany, is now a common criminal. She had the poor judgment to “poke” a 17 year old hooligan who was part of a gang throwing rocks at her house. While in America or any other sane country Ms. Bowling would have been let off with a warning, Ms. Bowling is not so fortunate.

She has the bad luck to live in the world’s worst nanny state.

The Crown Prosecution Service today defended its decision to take legal proceedings against a 71-year-old woman who prodded a 17-year-old youth in the chest.

Renate Bowling, of Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire, confronted the boy in the street after stones were thrown at her home. The disabled widow, who walks with a steel frame, said she thought it was a “joke” when police arrived at the scene and arrested her for jabbing the teenager with her finger.

While the Crown, which undoubtedly prosecuted this vicious criminal for the sake of the children, claims there was no evidence that the youth who received this vicious jabbing threw the rock, it ignores Ms. Bowling’s own account, in which she saw the boy standing in the street, in the direction from which the rocks had been thrown, and later hiding behind a wall. Ms. Bowling had to toddle out with her walker to confront the little monster. ...

What sort of country raises entitled young hooligans, who abuse old ladies by pelting them with stones and calling them “German whores”? Hooligans who run to the police when they’re beaten up by the old ladies? What sort of country tolerates, encourages, and condones this sort of behavior?

Hat tip to Will Wilson.

Evgeny Morozov challenges conventional wisdom on the efficacy of the Internet as a tool for democratizing dictatorships.

Morozov questions the significance of what he calls “iPod Liberalism,” and argues that the “Spinternet” and the use of the Net for “authoritarian deliberation” actually significantly aid authoritarian regimes.

11:51 video

There’s an old joke about the lazy man’s wife upon his decease having him cremated, then placing his ashes in an hour glass, an announcing, Now, you’re finally going to do some work!

Nadine Jarvis’s solution for cremated remains, called Carbon Copies, seems to me to be the perfect post mortem revenge upon the procrastinating writer.

Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.

Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.

Hat tip to Ambisinistral.

Martin Peretz, at New Republic, is pessimistic about the future of the politics of personal charisma.

If Obama could not get Chicago over the finish line in Copenhagen, which was a test only of his charms, how will he persuade Tehran to give up its nuclear weapons capacity or the Arabs, to whom he has tilted (we are told) only tactically, to sit down without their 60 year-old map as guide to what they demand from Israel.

What I suspect is that the president is probably a clinical narcissist. This is not necessarily a bad condition if one maintains for oneself what the psychiatrists call an “optimal margin of illusion,” that is, the margin of hope that allows you to work. But what if his narcissism blinds him to the issues and problems in the world and the inveterate foes of the nation that are not susceptible to his charms?

Chicago will survive its disappointments and Obama will, as well. It is the other stage sets on which the president struts—like he strutted in Cairo and at the United Nations—that concern me.

I know that the president believes himself a good man. My nervy query to him is: “Does he believe America to be a good country?”

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, detects signs that the Obama Administration preparing to cut and run from Afghanistan.

(A)s memories of 9/11 and the attackers’ training sites in Taliban Afghanistan fade, polls show American support for the war there melting, especially within Obama’s own party.

Only about a quarter support sending more troops—and many of that party of Yes are Republicans. They agree with Obama that it’s essential to deny Afghanistan to terrorists and keep Pakistan’s nukes out of their hands.

So what to do?

White House officials say privately no final decisions will be made today. But the thinking will be greatly shaped and the stakes are huge, making healthcare look like a sideshow.

Signs are growing that Obama will seek to change the war goals, to redefine what is success and divert the discussion away from the more-troops measure. It’s not defeat in Afghanistan; it’s victory of a different kind. The president used a similar strategic argument recently when abandoning the Bush administration’s missile defense shield in Europe: it’s not less defense, it’s defense done smarter and cheaper.

The Telegraph’s account of anger over General McChrystal’s speech supports the Malcolm thesis.

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Gen James Jones, the national security adviser, yesterday did little to allay the impression the meeting had been awkward.

Asked if the president had told the general to tone down his remarks, he told CBS: “I wasn’t there so I can’t answer that question. But it was an opportunity for them to get to know each other a little.

Delta 4-Heavy rocket launching at Cape Canaveral photographed by Ben Cooper

Getting this spectacular close-range shot of the launch cost a destroyed lens, but the well-secured camera actually survived and so did the trigger, despite it being knocked hundreds of feet away.

From Gizmodo via Karen L Myers.

Fort Oglethorpe cheerleaders with banner

When high school football players run through a banner with Bible verses on it, does that violate the US Constitution?

The school board attorney stopped them from doing that in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, telling them they were “violating federal law.”

2:15 video

It is remarkable how the Constitution’s prohibition of a federally established church (state established churches still existed when the Constitution was adopted) has evolved first into a wall of separation between church and state, and ultimately into widespread bans on public expression of religious sentiment.

Washington Post story.

America has not changed all that much from the days when Hester Prynne won her letter. We are still the same nation of boobs and Babbitts and blue-nosed Puritans which nearly a century ago used to drive H.L. Mencken right up the wall.

Leftwing or rightwing, you’d think the typical member of the American commentariat just fell off the turnip truck and came stumbling down the highway pulling hayseeds out of his ears for all the weeping and wailing over the generation-ago naughtiness of Roman Polanski.

Both sides of the political spectrum are making the elementary error of confusing rape in the statutory sense resulting from the female being too young lawfully to provide consent with the kind of rape which is a grave crime of violence and a terrible violation of a person’s will and sovereignty of person.

Read the Grand Jury testimony (Part 1 — Part 2) of the young lady (whose current privacy I propose to respect by referring to her as Dolores Haze) and one can easily perceive that it is a version of events particularly uncomplimentary to Mr. Polanski, collaboratively achieved by the prosecuting attorney and the sullen and inarticulate young woman who is bringing a complaint against him, while trying to put the best possible light upon her own conduct.

It requires only reading a little between the lines and paying attention to details to note that Miss Haze and her mother obviously sought out Mr. Polanski’s acquaintance with the young lady’s career advancement in mind. Her mother readily gave permission for her daughter to meet and to pose in private for Mr. Polanski.

Gosh, when an attractive young woman harboring entertainment industry ambitions agrees to “pose” alone and in private for a famous Hollywood director, is it possible to imagine that anyone involved would suppose for a minute that such a meeting could lead to hanky panky?

The famous director and the nymphette met twice for photography sessions featuring the young lady disrobing. When Miss Haze went with Mr. Polanski to Jack Nicholson’s house for the second photo session, even the simple people back where I grew up would have observed that they were not getting together to say the rosary.

Ex post facto protestations of reluctance aside, the philosopher is obliged to note that Miss Haze seems far from innocent and her overall behavior the opposite of unwilling. She was not a virgin at the time of her sexual encounter with Mr. Polanski. She had disrobed in front of him in private on two occasions. She implicitly recognized the social and convivial aspects of that private meeting at Jack Nicholson’s house by willingly drinking champagne with Mr. Polanski, and by sharing a Quaalude with him (which she identified for the uncertain director, who even consulted her about its likely effects on him).

After which festivities, Miss Haze willingly took off all her clothes, and hopped naked into a jacuzzi. Sexual activity ensued.

In her Grand Jury testimony, Miss Haze makes some effort to portray herself as startled and frightened by Mr. Polanski’s completely unexpected advances. To believe her testimony to be literally true requires supposing that the social connection between these two people was unrelated to the well-known Hollywood casting couch and to believe that anyone might meet an older man alone, drink and do drugs with him, disrobe for him, and hop naked into a jacuzzi while having no intentions of granting greater intimacies. If any particular editorialist actually believes that, I can only say, in the Irish manner: May God preserve your innocence!

The more cynical among us tend to suspect that, had some substantive career assistance (or even an appropriate gift) been forthcoming, no statutory rape complaint would ever have been lodged. Consequently, I tend to view the Polanski affair, not as an authentic case of rape, but as a payment dispute in which one side is able to whistle up the assistance of the criminal law.

Polanski, of course, was behaving unethically, using his fame and worldly position to obtain the sexual services of an indecently young girl, whom he evidently couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be able to repay with his patronage.

There is no doubt that the relations between Roman Polanski and Dolores Haze were against the law.

But, the “he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl” narrative is wildly inaccurate and inflammatory. In reality, Polanski cynically had exploitative sex with a much younger girl when she made herself available, with dubious intentions of repaying her in the manner she expected. They drank and did drugs together. You can hardly accuse a man of drugging a victim into submission by sharing a drug with her.

The plea bargain arrangement made (Polanski would plead guilty unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and be let off with the 42 days he served under psychiatric evaluation) indicates pretty clearly that the prosecutor took the same view of the Polanski case at the time that I do now. Polanski broke the law, doing something fairly shameful he ought not to have done, but it was not really rape at all. He deserved some legal penalty, but he did not deserve the gravest possible punishment.

What happened back in the 1970s is exactly the same thing which has happened again 30 years later. America’s psycho-sexual insanity was provoked by the Polanski affair the way a bull is provoked by a red flag. All the Christers and the wowsers began howling for Polanski’s blood, writing misleading hysterical jeremiads about drugging and raping poor little 13 year old maidens, and the next thing you knew, Judge Rittenband, who was sensitive to public opinion, expressed the intention of throwing out Polanski’s plea bargain, while keeping his guilty plea. Facing an exemplary penalty, Polanski wisely fled into exile.

The only things that seem to have changed in 30 years are: Roman Polanski has become a very old man and the middle-aged Dolores Haze says she has forgiven him. The American obsession with striking poses of self-righteousness has not changed, nor our intelligentsia’s penchant for inflaming mob opinion with misleading narratives.

Spider cloth displayed at the American Museum of Natural History

Wired:

“To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.”

The project was modeled on the work of a Victorian-era French missionary, Jacob Paul Camboué, who invented a machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at a time.

AMNH 3:29 video

Golden silk orb-weavers (Nephila madagascariensis)

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Win7 Launch Party video (Don’t watch it!)

Charlie Booker, at the Guardian, knows that Windows sucks, but explains that he still hates Mac and Mac users more.

Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table. ...

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host “Windows 7 launch parties” to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials.

Win 7 Launch Party video: A very serious contender for lamest (interminable at 6:14) video ever made.

Read the whole thing.

The proposed nationalization of America’s health is in serious trouble with public support shrinking and Congressmen running fir cover, so what do you suppose the Chosen One has in mind for his next major political initiative?

James Pethokoukis thinks he has identified the objective of the Obama Administration’s next major offensive: an American VAT.

There have been serious proposals from sensible people that the US should eliminate the Income Tax and replace it with a VAT. No need to worry about that replacement idea with Obama. He’ll be looking for both.

Does President Obama have a secret plan to raise taxes on middle-class Americans — and,well, pretty much everybody else — with a European-style, value-added tax? Actually, it’s not such a big secret. Connect the dots:

1) The joint statement from the just-concluded G20 Summit in Pittsburgh called for balanced global growth — which means Americans must spend less and save more and reduce its budget deficit.

2) That same weekend, John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team and an outside White House adviser, tells a Bloomberg reporter that a value-added tax is “more plausible today” than ever, adding that “there’s going to have to be revenue in this budget.” A VAT is a kind of consumption tax.

3) Yesterday, the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank with close White House ties, holds a conference on the rising national debt. While speaker after speaker — Paul Krugman, Roger Altman, CAP President Podesta (again), Laura Tyson — admits entitlement spending must be reduced, they also agree that taxes must be raised. Altman suggests $400 billion in new tax revenue is needed almost immediately to calm financial market fears, and a VAT would be a great way of doing it. That’s $400 billion a year, by the way, not over ten years.

4) Also, yesterday was the first meeting of President Obama’s tax reform panel led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. In a two-part interview with Charlie Rose airing yesterday and today, Volcker says that if Washington can’t get spending under control, either a VAT or a carbon tax would be effective revenue raisers. “Those are two big ones,” he says.

5) As they used to say in the Soviet Union, “It’s no coincidence.” This is also the conclusion of one Washington insider with ties to the White House economic team: “Does this all add up to a trial balloon? Of course, it’s a trial balloon. And I expect the administration will propose major tax reform, including a VAT.”

Obama’s campaign promise to not raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year was always considered a joke here inside the Beltway. It’s the economic “consensus” — and this was true even before the financial meltdown and recession — that rising entitlement costs would eventually mean a higher tax burden for the American people.

Maybe it was a joke inside the campaign, too. Since being elected, Obama has raised cigarette taxes and has advocated raising healthcare taxes, energy and small business taxes, in addition to corporate taxes. What’s more, economic advisers like Larry Summers seem eager to get rid of all the Bush tax cuts, not just those on so-called wealthy Americans.

And it’s also no secret that economists love the idea of a VAT. It promotes savings over consumption, and its hidden nature may mean it has less behavioral impact on taxpayers. Conservative economist Bruce Bartlet puts it this way, “As a broad-based tax on consumption, it creates less economic distortion per dollar of revenue than any other tax–certainly much less than the income tax.” Indeed, a VAT is part of cash-strapped California’s newly proposed tax reform.

Liberals love the idea of a VAT because it’s, well, so European — also because it does raise tons of revenue to expand government. And that is what Obama wants: more revenue to pay for bigger government. Is a VAT better than the soak-the-rich approach favored by Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel? Sure. Of course, the concern is that a VAT would be in addition to new soak-the-rich taxes.