The Herzliya Conference—a high-level powwow—is taking place right now in Israel. Shimon Peres, once Israel’s prime minister and now its president, gave a speech in Hebrew that was simultaneously translated into English. A friend at the conference reports that, according to the simultaneous translator, Peres referred to the day when Moses came down from Sinai and “found the people building a golden veal.”

Look what’s back in the budget, according to the Wall Street Journal:

As in last year’s budget, Mr. Obama proposed Monday to go further by limiting the value of those benefits, which include deductions for mortgage interest and some charitable deductions, to 28% of the deduction. The highest-income earners under current law could lower their taxes by up to 39.6% of those deductions.

The limit on itemized deduction faced strong resistance from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and is opposed by a battery of interests from realtors to charities.

The shocking foolishness of this proposal and its ideological components were exposed by COMMENTARY’s David Billet in his article last summer, “The War on Philanthropy,” which you can read here.

My friend Philip Terzian just posted the following obituary parody on Facebook:

Holden Caulfield, Attorney, Dies at 75

By Carl Luce

NEW YORK—Holden Caulfield, a founding partner of the Manhattan real-estate law firm of Ackley, Caulfield and Marsella PPC, died Monday in North Conway, New Hampshire. He was 75.
Mr. Caulfield, who had a vacation residence in New Hampshire, suffered massive internal injuries after slipping and falling over a cliff in the White Mountains on Saturday while trying to save a young girl, and died at a nearby hospital, according to his son, Allie Caulfield II. He lived at the Edmont Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

An attorney and litigator in New York since the mid-1960s, Mr. Caulfield joined two onetime classmates to form Ackley, Caulfield and Marsella in 1971, specializing in real-estate litigation and property management in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “Holden was a great lawyer and a great friend,” said partner Maurice Ackley in a statement released by the firm. “He loved the majesty of the law, and he hated phonies.” The other partner, Edgar Marsella, died of colon cancer in 2002.

Mr. Caulfield, a native of Manhattan, was born in 1935 and attended a series of preparatory schools before entering Brown University, from which he graduated in 1957. After a brief period of military service he obtained his law degree at New York University and began practicing in 1962. A period as counsel to the Antolini Group, property developers on Long Island, led to Mr. Caulfield’s interest in real estate litigation and property management. In 1996 his firm won a record judgment of $118.5 million in a landmark case involving development rights, Spencer vs. Stradlater.

Mr. Caulfield was a longtime board member of the Central Park Conservancy and a trustee of Pencey Preparatory School in Agerstown, Pa.

Mr. Caulfield’s marriage to Sally Hayes ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Jane Gallagher Caulfield, of Manhattan; their son Allie II, of Brooklyn; and three grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, the writer D.B. Caulfield of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and a sister, Phoebe Caulfield-Madoff, of West Hartford, Conn.

The news that J.D. Salinger, since Greta Garbo’s passing the world’s most notable silent-by-choice person, has died comes as a bit of a shock even though he has hardly been seen and barely been heard from in 45 years. Perhaps that is because one doesn’t think of Salinger as Salinger, but rather as Holden Caulfield, the most famous fictional American teenager. Catcher in the Rye was published, think of it, 59 years ago. Reading it now, the novel certainly shows its age — what teenage boy would take a teenage girl to have hot chocolate by the Rockefeller Center Skating Rink? — but the brilliant conversational voice with which Salinger imbued Holden can be heard in every single effort by an adult to render the sensibility of adolescence.

But perhaps what is most interesting about the shock of Salinger’s passing is how his very long life reveals the philosophical weakness at the heart of his work. He was concerned almost exclusively with the travails and wounds of the very young, notably the children of the Glass family. And it was clear that his sympathy lay entirely with them, with their moods and despairs and fears and sense of the world’s impurity and falsity. To that end, Salinger was guilty of the worst kind of romanticism, with his idealization of suicide in particular.

To be sure, the wounds of youth are “sensitive as a fresh burn,” to quote the writer Isaac Rosenfeld, and therefore very powerful. But Salinger’s continuing concern with those wounds may well have been the reason he fell silent as a writer when he himself hit middle age. The life of an adult is actually so much more complex and interesting, and so much the better source of material for a writer as supernaturally gifted as Salinger was (as his own masterful youthful story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” demonstrates), that his evident refusal to grapple with it and his continued emotional investment in the increasingly distant ways of the not-yet-adult may have been what silenced him.

Perhaps there is gold to be mined in his New Hampshire home in the form of the manuscripts he was said to labor over. Maybe they will reveal the maturity that eluded him, that they will show he was a pure artist who did not need an audience to explore the deeper truths available to those who grow as they age. That would be a wonderful capstone. It’s doubtful, but just think of it — Salinger with a happy ending, at long last.

One liberal trope after the speech, voiced by Chrystia Freedland of the Financial Times on Charlie Rose, is that Obama is putting Republican politicians on notice he will go after them as the do-nothing impeders of progress. Republicans should pray this is the case, and it may be the case. The model here would be Harry Truman’s 1948 war on the “Do Nothing Congress.” The problem is that Truman was running against a Republican Congress. Obama will be asking the country to believe that some weird amalgam of a minority party in the House and Senate and the Fox News Channel is mystically interfering with the will of the people. The delusion that a the president in charge of a party with a 50-seat majority in the House and a nine-seat advantage in the Senate can successfully claim that the minority is in charge  is just that—a delusion. You don’t have to be following these matters closely to know that Democrats won a blowout two years ago and that this is their political moment. If Obama cannot get what he wants, everybody will know it will be due to his inability to convince the country of the rightness of his policy aims. That liberals like Freedland and Andrew Sullivan can’t see this, because they too are fogged over by their rage with a conservative vitality they did not expect, offers up the tantalizing possibility that the White House will be similarly blinded to reality, and will march with authority and vigor right over a political cliff.

The very early consensus in the mushy mainstream is that, yes, Obama did himself good tonight. (Not so in National Review’s The Corner, whose writers heard a far more acidic, petulant, and nasty speech than I did.) Given that the only memorable passage was his lovely invocation of American optimism and toughness, I’m not sure how it will. There wasn’t much to rally behind, or toward, or about. And he gave his own party no cover. Indeed, he seemed to ask them to shoulder a lot of the blame for America’s anger and cynicism, in effect offering them as a sacrificial lamb for his own standing.

I have to say, Jen, this is a pretty good debut on the national stage for Bob McDonnell, especially compared to the egg laid by Bobby Jindal last year. In fact, I can’t think of a better response.

The more I think of it, the more I think Obama made a disastrous mistake tonight by saying he wanted to forgive student college debt far more quickly if debtors went into “public service.” This could well be considered another version of the Louisiana Purchase or the Cornhusker Bribe—an effort to privilege one class of workers above another. Of course, it will never happen, as it would be impossible to effect (how long would a student have to work in “public service”? how would the term be defined? etc). But even suggesting it makes it easy to advance the populist case that Obama has made it clear he sides with government workers over private-sector workers, and that can very easily be used as a weapon against him, and deservedly so.

David Brooks makes the point that much of the policy mentioned here—tax cuts, pay-as-you-go, nuclear power, offshore drilling—was far more moderate than his administration has been thus far. So was it a pivot? Almost certainly not. He was claiming that the mantle of moderation had characterized his administration thus far. And it’s hard to believe that he’s going to mention nuclear power or offshore drilling ever again, or pay-as-you-go. Tax cuts you’ll hear.

His concluding peroration was pretty dazzling:

In the end, it is our ideals, our values, that built America – values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every corner of the globe; values that drive our citizens still.  Every day, Americans meet their responsibilities to their families and their employers.  Time and again, they lend a hand to their neighbors and give back to their country.  They take pride in their labor, and are generous in spirit.  These aren’t Republican values or Democratic values they’re living by; business values or labor values.  They are American values.

Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions – our corporations, our media, and yes, our government – still reflect these same values.  Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper.  But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people’s doubts grow.  Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith.  The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates into silly arguments, and big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.

No wonder there’s so much cynicism out there. No wonder there’s so much disappointment.

I campaigned on the promise of change – change we can believe in, the slogan went.  And right now, I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change – or at least, that I can deliver it.

But remember this – I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I can do it alone.  Democracy in a nation of three hundred million people can be noisy and messy and complicated.  And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy.  That’s just how it is.

Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths.  We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation.

But I also know this:  if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight.  The only reason we are is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and grandchildren.

Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved.  But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year.  And what keeps me going – what keeps me fighting – is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism – that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people – lives on.

That’s good speechifying.

He wants us to “reject the false choice”!

….”that’s how budgeting works.” But he’ll take credit for it now, thank you.

At least one can say this: This is the best-delivered speech he’s given in months. He’s crisp and fluid and comfortably informal.

And let me say this: If you’re having trouble getting onto the site, yes, we’re having some problems here.

He’s still claiming that adopting a plan that will cover 30 million more people will lead to $1 trillion in savings. That’s the crux of the political crisis he faces on health care. Ordinary people know this is a lie.

…in 20 years’ time, and only 10 percent of income to be paid to cover student loans. So why would anybody actually pay when they know in 20 years they’ll have their debt forgiven?

And the notion that the debt forgiveness should be accelerated to 10 years if you go into public service is a particular outrage. So government work is given taxpayer privilege?

…no school choice, nothing that will anger teachers’ unions. Money for community college.

…for the United States of America. He will not allow America to be second place when it comes to statist measures!

Why? Didn’t he just say he was going to create or save 2 million more jobs this year? Two million. That’s a lot. Hard to top that.

Really? Why? Didn’t he just say it pulled us back from the precipice? That he saved the country? Why wouldn’t he be proud of it? You don’t get it both ways. Oh, wait, he made it “more transparent” and “more accountable.” So now it’s good.

“America moved forward because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people.” He cites the Union loss at Bull Run in the Civil War and the landing at Omaha Beach as examples of this. But of course Bull Run was about unifying the nation by force, not about a “choice” to move forward. And the victory in World War II had nothing to do with it. Sounds nice; has the substance of cotton candy. That is Obama’s greatest problem.

…for a minute and say that it remains an extraordinarily moving thing to see a black man standing at the podium as president of the United States. Not for what it says about Obama, but what it says about the United States.

All day today at National Review Online’s The Corner, posters have been denouncing the State of the Union speech. Boring and pointless, they say. Not until the media age did it occur to anyone to deliver the constitutionally-mandated “message” as a speech. Too long. Too boring. Not enough memorable is said.

The truth is, the State of the Union is a grand American event—a moment of specific ceremonial pomp, with traditions of announcement and greeting and rhetorical patterns dating back nearly 100 years. It is true that the speech has become a boring laundry list over the past 30 years or so, but that is the fault of the permanent government system of the modern Washington, where executive agencies all but demand their moment in the sun with a paragraph or two of their wish lists.

What we learn from States of the Union is what the temperature of the American polity is—whether the minority party, or the party that is not the president’s, feels it must behave with utmost respect and decorum or whether it can show its displeasure and discomfort and disrespect. In that way alone, it is an important indicator of a president’s perceived power and standing in a way that few events outside of, say, a special election in Massachusetts can be. That’s one of the reasons I like them and am fascinated by them, and think the attack on the SOTU is little more than attitudinal snark.

Jennifer Rubin and I will be live-blogging the State of the Union, beginning at 9 pm Eastern time. Join us, won’t you?

David Brooks, today:

Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

Read the whole thing.

How did Barack Obama grow so politically tone-deaf? Could it be due to his choice of reading material? Note this detail from a Washington Post story today: “As for what Obama reads online, his advisers said he looks for offbeat blogs and news stories, tracking down firsthand reporting and seeking out writers with opinions about his policies. Obama was particularly interested in Atlantic Online’s Andrew Sullivan’s tweeting of the Iranian elections last year.”