NB Columns

Last week, in a much-discussed, open, live, televised forum, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the $64 trillion question. While most commentators focused on the apt question, it was Bernanke's answer that shocked me when I heard it — and ought to shock the nation much more than it so far has.

Question: "Now we're told there are going to be even higher capital requirements, and we know there are 300 (financial regulatory) rules coming, has anyone bothered to study the cumulative effect of these things? And do you have a fear — like I do — that when we look back and look at them all that they will be the reason that it took so long for our banks, our credit, our businesses and most importantly, our job creation, to start going again? Is this holding us back at this point?"

The same congressional panel that launched a preliminary inquiry into Weiner-gate this week has been diddling around with several other Democratic ethics scandals for years. These aren't foxes guarding the henhouse. They're sloths guarding the foxhole.

The House Ethics Committee is now reportedly probing into Twitter-holic Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's possible abuse of government resources while sending pervy messages and photos to young women across the country. The latest batch of Weiner's leaked social-media self-portraits — more cheesecake than beefcake — showed him in various states of undress at the congressional gym. From what other public buildings has Ick-arus tweeted his junk? And how much time on the public's dime did his government staff spend coaching Weiner girls to assist with damage control?

The art of jujitsu is to use an opponent's weight and strength to your advantage. I believe this is what the conservatives must do in the coming 2012 presidential election.

President Barack Obama's "weight and strength" is that by next year, he will have a surplus of $1 billion in campaign money and the mainstream media supporting him. He also has ACORN (or whatever it calls itself now) and other community organizers rallying the liberal troops to make sure he gets re-elected. Add to that his slick-willy youth charm and pseudo-charisma, with which he has bamboozled a large part of the American public, which neither follows politics nor understands how he has unraveled the very fabrics of our republic. Tailor that with Obama's unique ability to make one believe he means what he says from a teleprompter and you have a formidable foe.

"Every man, by the nature of his being, is called to generate love."

So the Rev. James A. Wehner tells his seminarians, from his perch as rector of the Josephinum, a pontifical college and seminary in Columbus, Ohio. His is a message necessary to the training of priests to a calling that has been marred by scandal, but also to a society that has been afraid to talk frankly about how essential the unique masculine gift of fatherhood is to our lives, our families and our culture.

President Obama campaigned this week for "new and innovative approaches" to America's economic crisis. So naturally, the futurist-in-chief filched his fresh, bold ideas straight from ... the 1930s. The grand new solution to the jobs deficit, according to the White House, is more FDR-style federal job-training spending.

Sounding every bit like the whiteboard eggheads who keep spinning around the Ivy League-Washington revolving door, Obama announced breathlessly: "If we could match up schools and businesses, we could create pipelines right from the classroom to the office or the factory floor. This would help workers find better jobs, and it would help companies find the highly educated and highly trained people that they need in order to prosper and to remain competitive."

They call it BCS, Bill Clinton syndrome, and it has broken out anew in New York and here in Washington, where it was first discovered. As elaborated upon in scholarly detail in the now famous "Starr Report: The Official Report of the Independent Counsel's Investigation of the President," BCS strikes powerful figures, usually male, who experience lewd compulsions of an overpowering nature, generally in the presence of technology — often the telephone, occasionally a smartphone or even a computer — and usually when they are alone or behind closed doors with a woman of inferior rank. The first victim of the syndrome was, of course, President Bill Clinton, but it has struck a growing number of powerful individuals, most recently Rep. Chris Lee, International Monetary Fund chieftain Dominique Strauss-Kahn and now Rep. Anthony Weiner (pronounced VY'-nehr — at least by him).

I had the honor of speaking last weekend at the Faith and Freedom Conference, at which most of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were the star attractions. The conference, led by Ralph Reed, brought together the nation's leading (what is called) social conservatives.

Politico's reporting of the two-day event typified the tone. "The day after Haley Barbour implored the crowd not to put ideological purity over pragmatism for the general election as they pick a 2012 GOP candidate, Rick Santorum took to the podium at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington to make a different case. In a strong pitch to the mostly evangelical crowd on Saturday morning, the former Pennsylvania senator cast social conservative issues as the defining ones for the country — and for the Republican Party."

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The extinct political slogan "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," may be supplanted by what is happening in the United Kingdom. There is a form of functional political illiteracy here that does not bode well for the United States should it follow Britain's very bad example, particularly on matters involving immigration and health care.

For several years, the British media have been full of horror stories about failures in the National Health Service (NHS). "Thousands of Elderly at Risk in Care Crisis" screamed the front-page headline in the Times of London last week. This is nothing new, because a headline in The Daily Telegraph nearly two years ago warned, "Cruel and Neglectful Care of One Million NHS Patients Exposed." Is anyone listening?

In the classic movie "The Great Escape," a cluster of Hollywood manly men from yesteryear (including my friend Steve McQueen) played Allied POWs who escape from a German camp during World War II.

Today the great escape may be played out by more than 33,000 incarcerated inmates in California who don't escape the state's 33 prisons but are released by a computer error and the U.S. Supreme Court itself.