After days of vehement denials and indignant claims that NATO's recent attack on Pakistani outposts was unprovoked and deliberate, a "senior Pakistani defense official" has admitted that it was the Pakistanis who started the firefight with "mortar and machine gun fire."

His words come a bit too late to stop the firestorm of anti-Americanism and the damage to the Afghan war effort, but may prove useful if they prompt Washington to take a sober look at our "alliance" with Pakistan.

The stark reality is that ten years after we forced Islamabad into a shotgun wedding in the aftermath of 9/11, Pakistan is no more of an ally (let alone a "strategic" ally) than before, but an adversary with interests often diametrically opposed to our own.

A survey of the Pakistani press in the days since the border incident reveals a society that is in serious trouble. Hysterical anti-Americanism aside, stories included:

The U.S. Department of Education was created with the primary stated goal of increasing students' test scores, but test scores for 17-year-old American students have remained essentially flat since 1970. The department's budget has grown to a whopping $107 billion this year. Per pupil, taxpayer-financed education spending (adjusted for inflation) has risen by more than 200 percent since 1970 (and 150-plus percent since 1980). Clearly and unambiguously, the department deserves a grade of F.

The employees and bureaucrats at Education have been rewarded for failure each year by ever-increasing budgets, which give them more control of state education departments and local school boards. If you reward failure, you tend to get more of it, and if you reward success, you tend to get more successes. Thus, it is no surprise that test scores have not improved.

Suppose Congress said to the department, "We are going to cut your budget and payroll by 20 percent per year until test scores start improving, and if they have not substantially improved within five years, the department will be dust." What do you think would happen to test scores?

"We should do what we can to wake people up, but reality is far more eloquent than we can ever be."
-- Dagny on the TTP Forum

I'm afraid Dagny is right. America probably won't wake up until the OPM (Other Peoples' Money) suddenly runs out, quite possibly with the dollar blowing up and all the drastic consequences (how do we then import oil?) thereof.

Although we don't know yet which candidate will win the Republican nomination or whether that candidate will replace BO, we already know enough to foresee some near future consequences that will occur whoever wins.

Whether BO wins another term or one of the plausible Republicans wins, the five most important existentially threatening problems and their outcomes will be the same.  These are the shapes of things to come.

Well, he had to crack under the pressure sooner or later, and thank heavens it's sooner.  Everyone on Capitol Hill this morning can't stop talking about it.  Boehner and Reid have just been told to expect a momentous announcement from the White House. 

At 9pm EDT this evening, the President will announce on national television that, due to the overwhelming difficulties the nation faces which have proven impossible for him to solve because Republicans refuse to cooperate, he is resigning the presidency effective immediately.  Good luck, America, he will say, you'll have to solve your problems without me.

And yes, today is April Fool's Day.

*  *  *  *  *  * 
So let's talk about fools - and their luck.  Zero just might pull Libya off.  He'll have David Cameron to thank for it, and MI6, which is disintegrating Gaddafi's regime via defections.

Conservative contempt for Zero is so bottomless that many don't want him to succeed even when it's in our clear interests that he do so.  He was right in saying the US could not stand by while Gaddafi perpetrated genocidal slaughter upon his own people, and wrong in not solving the problem immediately by an assassination strike on Gaddafi.

So now he owns this war which has to be won - for if Gaddafi stays in power he will "return to international terrorism and resume his nuclear weapons program," warns John Bolton who is nobody's fool.  When asked about the rebels fighting Gaddafi and if they might be radical Islamists, John responded,

"Yes, there is uncertainty about them - but when there is Muammar Gaddafi on one side and uncertainty on the other, you pick uncertainty."

How many times have you heard the president and the congressional Democrats say Americans who make less than $200,000 a year have not had, and will not have, any of their taxes increased? Unfortunately, it is not true, and it is likely to become a whole lot worse.

The 111th Congress has already enacted $352 billion in net tax increases and may, in the upcoming lame-duck session, enact the largest tax increases in history, which will hit every man, woman and child - as well as every business in America.

The president and most congressional Democrats have been claiming they will make sure no one making less than $200,000 per year will face a tax increase when all of the "Bush tax cuts" expire on midnight Dec. 31. Given they have not been truthful about the tax increases they already have enacted, why should anyone believe these new claims?

During a workout last weekend, I watched and listened as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan bemoaned our "crumbling schools." Sorry, but it's not our schools that are crumbling, Mr. Secretary: It's our values. 

But we can't even discuss the problem honestly and have to trim the conversation to keep it within politically correct patterns. Well, when yet another survey trumpets that the U.S. has fallen to sixth place in teaching math or science, or that we're fifteenth in education overall, my reaction is "Okay, break those scores out by specific school locations." 

Generally, our suburban and many small-town schools still deliver competitive (if less than optimal) educations. Our statistics skew sharply downward because of the appalling conditions in the inner-city and barrio holding pens and teacher's-union bunkers we pretend are real schools.

The left, for political advantage, has written off poor blacks and browns educationally-confining them in schools that are now about the unionized teachers, not the students.  And let's be honest: Conservatives have made no serious attempts to reform those schools, either.

If Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their fellow members of Congress were children, what might they have done?

Children like to spend other people's money on themselves and their friends without thinking about how it was earned and the hard work that went into earning it. A childlike mind might believe in the fantasy that you can take money from the pocket of someone who worked hard to earn it, give it to someone who didn't earn it and that, magically, everyone will be better off. A fully developed, mature brain would understand that voting to enact laws without having read or understood them was irresponsible and likely would lead to bad consequences

Free-market democracy cannot succeed if those who hold elective office act and vote like children. We can do better.