With the Texas state primary just days away, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst is in the lead to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in the U.S. Senate, and according to some observers, one of the factors he has working in his favor is fear.

In Texas, the lieutenant governorship is a hugely powerful position. Its occupant is the leader of the state senate, meaning he appoints committee chairmen and members, determines the order in which bills are taken up, and decides which committees get to handle specific pieces of legislation.

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If you listen to those on the political left, you will think that the ongoing meltdown in the euro zone proves that spending cuts are driving the world into another Great Depression. Paul Krugman called the fiscal retrenchment "criminal folly," while the famous British journalist Polly Toynbee affirmed that "the great austerity experiment has failed." Adopting this view, at their recent Camp David summit meeting, leaders of the G8 nations agreed to pursue growth and job creation ahead of deficit reduction.

On the other side of the ideological divide, there are those who say that austerity did not fail, because it was not tried in the first place. That's because to date we have seen very little in terms of absolute cuts in public spending. Rather, due to automatic stabilizers, spending has increased in absolute terms since 2008, although probably not by as much as it would have without some of the deficit-reduction programs.

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It's one of the clearest, easiest-to-understand provisions in the Constitution. And Harry Reid's Senate flouts it routinely.

The Origination Clause in Article I, Section 7 states: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." In addition to clarity, this provision has an even greater virtue: It serves a very good purpose.

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Two weeks ago, the Obama campaign quietly edited its website to highlight the president's support for "clean coal." In place of a section for "energy efficiency" with no mention of coal, BarackObama.com now boasts that the stimulus package "invested substantially in carbon capture and sequestration research."

The administration's position on coal has, shall we say, evolved. In 2001, the EPA released an endangerment finding stating that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide threaten public health and the environment by contributing to climate change and that therefore they could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Since then, as Bryan Walsh noted in Time magazine, the EPA has "embark[ed] on what could be the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history."

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You have probably seen the "coexist" bumper sticker. It implies that we should all just try harder to get along. Wherever we turn, it seems, we are assured that efforts to embrace differences will result only in harmony, although the bargain often entails that we abandon our core cultural principles and our Western soul. For too long we have failed to comprehend that the cost of coexistence can be high.

Finally, though, the pursuit of tolerance at any price is being assessed realistically. The British have now been forced to confront — and finally judge — the actions of some minority Muslims who have embedded themselves in a counterculture hostile to British society. Forty-nine men, predominantly from Pakistan, were convicted (or are still wanted) for luring 47 underage British girls to lairs for serial rape. At least one victim was forced to have sex with 20 men in one night, according to the police. Two girls became pregnant and a 13-year-old reported aborting a baby conceived by rape. Nine of the Muslim men were found guilty last week. Authorities expect to charge four more, and up to 40 additional suspects remain at large.

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Joe Biden is performing a public service, God love him. Out on the stump, he renders the case for President Barack Obama's reelection in all its populist crudity.

No dulcet tones. No faux sophistication. No charm. C'mon, man! There's no time for that when Mitt Romney is descending on America promising to commit the most heinous acts in the history of vampire capitalism.

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What's green and blue and grabby all over? President Obama's new pressure campaign for Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).

The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that "no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to the Third World." According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the treaty's "central, and abiding, defect" was "its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states — and most especially the United States."

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Jack Andraka, a 15-year-old kid from Maryland, just won the world's largest high-school science competition by creating a new test for pancreatic cancer, one of the nastiest and most lethal forms of the disease.

According to various news reports, the winning submission at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is "28 times cheaper" than existing tests and far, far more accurate. Andraka received $75,000 for his efforts, and he's applied for a patent as well. That will probably earn him far more in the years to come.

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If you were a child in the District of Columbia school system (51st in state rankings for academic achievement, first for school violence), you and your parents probably greeted the election of Barack Obama with great joy. If someone had suggested to you then that the president would attempt to torpedo the scholarship program that permits some District kids to attend the private schools of their choice, you might have thought you were hearing racist smears.

But that is what happened. As he did in previous years, President Obama has once again attempted to zero out funding in 2013 for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a small federal outlay that provides scholarships to some 1,600 students to attend private or parochial schools. Since the program's inception in 2004, more than 10,000 families have applied to participate. The average income of OSP participants is $24,000.

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It was our much-anticipated quarterly lunch with Tim Kurkjian, baseball analyst extraordinaire, wherein George Will and I bathe in a constant flow of obscure statistics, Kurkjian oddities, and ribald anecdotes, like the one about the Red Sox beat writer who accidentally walked in on a players' prayer meeting and was greeted by the burly right fielder, newly born-again and not yet practiced in the language of Christian fellowship, bellowing "Hey! Can't you see we're having f—— chapel here?"

After which, Kurkjian asked us about our daily reading habits. I confessed that during baseball season I give the front page of the morning paper about 90 seconds before going right to the box scores.

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In this Tuesday's Texas Senate primary, Ted Cruz has one objective: Force a runoff.

A primary runoff would allow Cruz to directly square off with lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, who is currently leading in the polls. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two contenders will face each other in a runoff on July 31.

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We have argued before that the Supreme Court should strike down Obamacare. While the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states, and to make all laws necessary and proper to execute that power, Obamacare's command that all Americans purchase health insurance cannot be justified under either grant.

Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps there are better arguments for the law's constitutionality than those we have so far seen from its defenders. But some of those defenders now seem to be dispensing with such arguments altogether. Instead they are threatening dire consequences for the reputation of the Supreme Court and especially for Chief Justice John Roberts if he joins a majority of the justices to strike down the individual mandate.

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Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn't been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.

And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a remote area of northern Russia called Yamal.

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The two people least surprised by Sarah Palin's endorsement of Senator Orrin Hatch this week are Palin and Hatch. In the Twitter and Facebook era, they became political allies the old-fashioned way: through handwritten letters and personal phone calls.

It's an unlikely, politics-fueled friendship that's fit for a Robert Caro book. Hatch, a soft-spoken grandfather, is one of Palin's top outside mentors. He encourages her and cheers her. They share family stories, they discuss history, and they talk about legislation.

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Dziga Vertov, one of the world's first and finest documentarians, defined the goal of documentary film as showing "life as it is." Ami Horowitz's U.N. Me accomplishes this and more — it is a detailed exposé of the failures of the United Nations. This film could have sunk into a dreary, depressing recital of the various horrors perpetrated under the U.N.'s watch (Darfur, Rwandan genocide, etc.), but Ami Horowitz skillfully weaves a narrative that strikes a careful balance between humor and information.

Horowitz is not your typical documentary filmmaker, and his regular, unpretentious charm sets the tone of his film. He began his life as a banker, until one night he had an epiphany. He was drifting off to sleep while watching Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine when he suddenly realized that this was the medium for him. The result was U.N. Me.

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As the K–12 school year draws to a close, school boards and superintendents will have to decide about tweaking student assignments for the fall. As they do so, they will also have to decide how much weight to give to the Obama administration's "Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity and Avoid Racial Isolation in Elementary and Secondary Schools," which was released jointly late last year by the Education and Justice Departments.

School districts would be well-advised to ignore this twelve-page document, since it is bad policy — and will only get them into legal trouble.

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It's no longer possible to pretend we don't know the intentions of Iran's rulers. They are telling us — candidly, clearly, and repeatedly. Most recently last Sunday: Addressing a gathering in Tehran, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, vowed the "full annihilation of the Zionist regime of Israel to the end."

A few days earlier, José Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, during a presentation at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a respected Israeli think tank, recalled a "private discussion" in Tehran in October of 2000 with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who told him: "Israel must be burned to the ground and made to disappear from the face of the Earth."

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Appearing on The View, President Obama was asked whether this year's election would be tight. He said, "When your name is Barack Obama, it's always tight." The View's Joy Behar, instantly grasping his meaning, I believe, chimed in, "Barack Hussein Obama."

To me, it could hardly be clearer that Obama was in self-pitying mode: "I am too different for white-bread America. It's so hard to win these elections." During the 2008 campaign, he laid great stress on his name. Over and over, he said, "They're trying to scare you about me. ‘He's got a funny name, you know. He doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.'" He gave some variation on this line at stop after stop.

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It's comfortable living in a cocoon — associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.

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Who could not despise the tottering Bashar Assad dictatorship?

The Syrian strongman has killed some 10,000 protesters over the last year; thousands of Syrians are now refugees.

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New Jersey governor Chris Christie has certainly earned his fair share of enemies over the years — corrupt politicians whom he indicted as U.S. attorney, Democrats in the state legislature, teachers unions, and liberal activists across the country. Among conservatives, though, Christie has become a rock star. Well, among some conservatives. He's taken a beating on NRO lately.

Andrew McCarthy argues on the Corner that Mitt Romney should not choose Chris Christie as his vice-presidential candidate. He is probably correct that Romney would be best served by selecting someone other than Christie, but his characterization of Christie as a "tough-talking moderate" is unfair to the governor. Christie has proved himself a tough-talking conservative.

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When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have to deal with Predator drones ("But boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming."), the liberal crowd roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Obama, in fact, has increased those judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But apparently, the combination of Obama's postracial "cool" and the video-game nature of such airborne death — no CNN clips of charred torsos and smoldering legs, no prisoners with their ACLU lawyers in Guantanamo, no Seymour Hersh exposé on a Waziristan granny who was vaporized for being too near her terrorist-suspect grandson, no American losses for Code Pink and Moveon.org to demonstrate against — earned general exemption for that new liberal way of war. What bothered us about the Predator strikes in 2006-2008 was not the kills per se but the uncool nature of twangy Texan George Bush, who ordered them.

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The World Wildlife Fund, the posh flagship of the global environmentalist movement, has just released its biennial publication assessing "the state of the planet." Entitled "Living Planet Report 2012," the publication bemoans alleged catastrophic effects that humanity is inflicting upon the Earth, and calls for drastic curbs on civilization as a necessary corrective measure.

According to the WWF, the human race is currently consuming at a rate that would be sustainable only if we had 1.5 Earths. Since we do not, overall human activity needs to be reduced by 33 percent to put mankind "in balance with the Earth's biocapacity."

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Middletown, N.J. — It takes Joe Kyrillos, a 52-year-old state senator, 15 minutes to reach his table at the New Monmouth Diner. It's late in the afternoon and the crowd has thinned, but two silver-haired grandfathers want a word, and a young mother with a child at her knee has a question. Waitresses hoisting heavy trays of burgers and Cokes brush past Kyrillos as he moves from booth to booth, talking politics.

Kyrillos is running for the U.S. Senate against Senator Bob Menendez, the Garden State's junior senator and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. As a Republican in a deep-blue state, Kyrillos faces many challenges. Menendez is better financed, he's better known, and he will benefit from the Obama campaign, which was able to sweep New Jersey four years ago.

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