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Dick Morris analyzes polls.

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

But 2008 was no ordinary election. Blacks, for example, usually cast only 11% of the vote, but, in 2008, they made up 14% of the vote. Latinos increased their share of the vote by 1.5% and college kids almost doubled their vote share. Almost all pollsters are using the 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples. Rasmussen, more accurately, uses a mixture of 2008 and 2004 turnouts in determining his sample. That’s why his data usually is better for Romney.

But polling indicates a widespread lack of enthusiasm among Obama’s core demographic support due to high unemployment, disappointment with his policies and performance, and the lack of novelty in voting for a black candidate now that he has already served as president. …

More on polls from Pajamas Media. 

In most all things, I try to follow Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

This is particularly important to remember when looking at polls, Sometimes, however, one must wonder.

As I pointed out yesterday, the result of Romney’s “really bad week” was that Romney had gone from 5 or 6 points behind in Gallup, to essentially tied. Even so, a number of people have noted that there are some odd assumptions in that poll, and others. Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen talked about it recently. Asked if the polls were, in his opinion, a fair representation of the electorate, Schoen said:

“The simple answer is no John. The bottom line is there were seven percent more Democrats in the electorate in 2008 than there were Republicans. That’s from the exit polls and that’s about as accurate as you can get….President Obama won by about seven points. Given 90 percent of Democrats vote for the Democrat and 90 percent of Republicans vote for the Republican, every time you reduce the margin between the parties by one point, roughly it’s about one point off the margin.”

Schoen pointed out that the Pew poll was based on Democrats sampled for having an 11 percent voters registration edge over Republicans. He further added, “saying that America has gotten more Democratic than 2008, which is a questionable assumption.” …

Andrew Malcolm tracks the administration’s shifting story about Benghazi.

You know that act of terrorism in Benghazi last week that saw four Americans killed on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 and the consulate shelled, burned and destroyed and fleeing Americans killed in a nearby safe house that turned out to be unsafe and the Obama administration, alone in the world, said it was all clearly a spontaneous reaction to an old anti-Islam YouTube video?

Remember that? They said it for days. Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, was sent out as sacrificial lamb on no less than five Sunday shows to peddle the same hooey about spontaneous Muslim anger.

Because if the attack wasn’t spontaneous, then it was by definition planned.

And if it was planned, why wasn’t Barack Obama, who’s skipped so many daily intelligence briefings to campaign for reelection, doing his real job?

Being, oh, say, forewarned and forearmed to protect these valiant Americans serving abroad whom he later lauded as so brave? But they couldn’t hear the presidential praise because they were dead far from home. Then, totally tone-deaf to tragedy, Obama dashed off to a Vegas fundraiser.

This administration was too clever by half. On Wednesday, when Obama was up in the Big Apple chatting with Dayyyy-vid Letterman and hobnobbing with Beyonce at $40K per head, the administration sent the director of the NationalCounterterrorismCenter to Capitol Hill. There, Matthew Olsen testified that, yes, the Benghazi attack was an act of terrorism.

Here’s the clever part of that. At first it appeared Olsen disagreed with the White House. But the next day Obama press secretary Jay Carney was able to consult his notes, agree with Olsen and baldly tell reporters: “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

Wait! What?! Now, it’s obvious and self-evident? …

The Washington Examiner has produced a series of pieces about the background of Barack Obama. Mark Tapscott has the introduction.

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation’s highest ideals at home and abroad.

Above all, as America’s first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

But after nearly four years in office, Obama has become a sharply polarizing figure.

His admirers believe he deserves a special place alongside Wilson, the Roosevelts and LBJ as one of the architects of benevolent government.

His critics believe he is trying to remake America in the image of Europe’s social democracies, replacing America’s ethos of independence and individual enterprise with a welfare state inflamed by class divisions.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of Obama — his shaping influences, his core beliefs, his political ambitions and his accomplishments — The Washington Examiner conducted a four-month inquiry, interviewing dozens of his supporters and detractors in Chicago and elsewhere, and studying countless court transcripts, government reports and other official documents. …

 

Part One of the Examiner series covers the falsehoods about the president’s background.

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that “Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions.”

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

The facts aren’t nearly so clear-cut.

Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes.

Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young Obama.

He abandoned Obama Jr.’s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.

Obama’s mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.

In Indonesia, the family’s circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography “Dreams from My Father,” Lolo’s brother-in-law was “making millions as a high official in the national oil company.” It was through this brother-in-law that Obama’s stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.

The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside. …

WSJ OpEd provides update on Scott Brown’s race against the harpy.

With polls putting the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in a statistical dead heat, supporters of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren eagerly awaited Thursday night’s first head-to-head debate between the Harvard Law School professor and incumbent Sen. Scott Brown.

It was inevitable, their oft-heard reasoning went, that the frequent Wall Street critic would use her superior intellect and unimpeachable moral standing to vanquish Mr. Brown, who for more than two years has held the seat occupied for decades by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

But like the overall campaign so far, the debate did not go the way Ms. Warren must have planned. Mr. Brown attacked during the opening minute and kept her on the defensive for most of the hour-long exchange.

Now, with a little more than six weeks to go before the election, Democrats fighting to keep control of the U.S. Senate find themselves scrambling in a state where President Barack Obama is expected to trounce former Gov. Mitt Romney, and where Democrats hold every U.S. House seat, every statewide office, and an overwhelming majority in the state legislature. …

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Charles Krauthammer reflects on the foreign policy debacles of this administration.

… It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.

The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.

What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?

Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.

“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”

Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America. …

… At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”

Noemie Emery has more.

… Most of all, he gave the back of his hand to the Iranian dissidents in 2009 who came so close to deposing their leaders, trusting instead in his mythical powers to coax the fanatics in power to reason. Now that he’s failed — and who could have guessed it? — his refusal to stand with Israel in the face of Iran’s threats to destroy it make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran that much more likely. And when violence broke out on Sept. 11, Obama’s response was to arrest an American citizen who had made a tacky film about Muslims, not much worse than those made about Catholics by many Americans, transgressing the man’s constitutional right to free speech.

Disliked and distrusted by those in his world, he isn’t respected by those in the other, who express their contempt without reservation. A “Barack Obama” with his name and his skin who was in his heart more like Reagan or Kennedy might have won these worlds over.

He wasn’t. He didn’t. He had his chance, and he blew it. And now he should go.

And Mort Zuckerman covers Obama’s domestic debacles.

How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation’s “recovery” has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that’s adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.

At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week’s revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week’s average of 371,750.

These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July’s 8.3 percent. That’s a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That’s roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month. …

John Kass says welcome to stagflation.

… QE3 will not have much of an effect on the real economy, but it will raise inflationary expectations. (It already has, as since June 2012, the implied inflation rate imbedded in TIPS is up by nearly 50 basis points.)

Inflation is taxation without legislation. It is not market-valuation friendly. …

… Economic bellwether FedEx’s (FDX) announced yesterday that the company is reducing its EPS guidance for its May 2013 year from a range between $6.90 and $7.40 to a range between $6.20 and $6.60. …

… demand from Chinese consumers “is not increasing at a significant rate, contrary to everybody’s hopes” and he is “somewhat amused” by observers of China who “completely underestimate” the impact of China’s export slowdown.

Stagflation is at our door.

Obama says he can’t change Washington from inside. David Harsanyi reminds us of 2008 campaign promises.

Today, at a Univision forum President Barack Obama said this: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

That’s quite the change from what he’s said before, in fact, in many ways it was the core of his argument in 2008.

In 2008, in Bristol, Va., for instance, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.”

In the 2008 Obama campaign guide, Blueprint for Change, feel free to turn to the section titled (page 17): “BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO CHANGE WASHINGTON.”

Here is again in 2008: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

And, at a rally in April 30, 2008, the president said: ”I do not believe change will happen unless we change our politics in Washington.”

The Right Scoop likes Romney’s rapid response to the latest Obama excuse.

Fantastic Romney response to Obama’s claim that he can’t change Washington from the inside, that it can only be changed from the outside. Romney tells the crowd that Obama has already thrown in the white flag of surrender on changing Washington from the inside so we’ll give him a chance to change it from the outside in November. BAM!

Yale prof David Gelernter writes about the election in PowerLine. He writes along the line of Pickerhead’s thoughts which are that Romney will win, but the really discouraging thing is the election is close. What is wrong with this country? The worst president ever and he has a chance? He should be at just 15 percent in the polls; supported by bigoted blacks and fools from the criminal class that makes up the education industry.

… Remember that Obama has demonstrated the competence of Carter with the integrity of Nixon. He has given us persistent unemployment and a pathetic recovery, Obamacare people don’t want, a pipeline project knifed in the back without explanation while money disappears down the great Green sinkhole, a staggering debt and huge yearly deficits, poisoned relations with Congress, an incompetent Department of Justice, states and cities wrestling with financial collapse across the country, schools that keep getting worse—not to mention calamitous security leaks, the Middle East in flames and Iran’s terrorist government closer to nuclear weapons every day.

Carter for all his sanctimonious incompetence had a certain humility.  He announced that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had opened his eyes to the evil of Communism–sad but honest.  And Carter was never suspected of personal corruption.  Of many contenders, the White House leaks will most likely emerge as the biggest Obama scandal.

Romney will win this election.  But the wacko-left Culture Machine won’t fall silent; the schools and colleges won’t suddenly become patriotic, serious, politically neutral.  The entertainment industry won’t discover open-mindedness regarding Judeo-Christianity and the Bible.  Nor will mainstream churches and liberal synagogues suddenly catch on to the moral and spiritual greatness of America. Unless conservatives start taking education and culture seriously, an election day will arrive in which the outcome is never in doubt, because at least 51 percent of the electorate has been trained which way to vote.  At which point the GOP might as well close shop and take the rest of the century off.

Gateway Pundit does a job on the creepy new Obama flag.

… If the image looks familiar it could be because the red stripes resemble the bloody Benghazi hand prints.  The bloodstained walls at the US consulate revealed that the US  officials were dragged to their death by   terrorists. …

James Taranto has more on the flag.

… It seems we have a president who thinks the national symbol is the bald ego. Bier notes that the campaign previously used the “no red states, no blue states” slogan on Twitter, to promote a T-shirt. It shows a colorful map of the 48 contiguous states–well, of some of the 48 contiguous states. Obama’s face blocks Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota; almost all of Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota and North Dakota; about half of New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming; and the southeast corner of Montana. If his head gets much bigger, it will eclipse the entire country.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes on Islamic faux outrage.

It is a strange and bitter coincidence that the latest eruption of violent Islamic indignation takes place just as Salman Rushdie publishes his new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about his life under the fatwa.

In 23 years not much has changed.

Islam’s rage reared its ugly head again last week. The American ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members were murdered by a raging mob in Benghazi, Libya, possibly under the cover of protests against a film mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

They were killed on the watch of the democratic government they helped to install. This government was either negligent or complicit in their murders. And that forces the U.S. to confront a stark, unwelcome reality.

Until recently, it was completely justifiable to feel sorry for the masses in Libya because they suffered under the thumb of a cruel dictator. But now they are no longer subjects; they are citizens. They have the opportunity to elect a government and build a society of their choice. Will they follow the lead of the Egyptian people and elect a government that stands for ideals diametrically opposed to those upheld by the United States? They might. But if they do, we should not consider them stupid or infantile. We should recognize that they have made a free choice—a choice to reject freedom as the West understands it.

How should American leaders respond? What should they say and do, for example, when a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s newly elected ruling party, demands a formal apology from the United States government and urges that the “madmen” behind the Muhammad video be prosecuted, in violation of the First Amendment? If the U.S. follows the example of Europe over the last two decades, it will bend over backward to avoid further offense. And that would be a grave mistake—for the West no less than for those Muslims struggling to build a brighter future. …

… And the defining characteristic of the Western response? As Rushdie’s memoir makes clear, it is the utterly incoherent tendency to simultaneously defend free speech—and to condemn its results.

I know something about the subject. In 1989, when I was 19, I piously, even gleefully, participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. I had never read it.

Later, having fled an arranged marriage to the Netherlands, I broke from fundamentalism. By the time of Sept. 11, 2001, I still considered myself a Muslim, though a passive one; I believed the principles but not the practice. After learning that it was Muslims who had hijacked airplanes and flown them into buildings in New York and Washington, I called for fellow believers to reflect on how our religion could have inspired these atrocious acts. A few months later, I confessed in a television interview that I had been secularized.

The change had consequences. …

… Rushdie felt particularly aggrieved that many of the attacks came from people whose worldview he shared. His leftist credentials were undisputed, given his positions on apartheid, the Palestinian question, racism in Britain, and Margaret Thatcher’s government. What’s more, Rushdie considered himself a friend, not an enemy, of Islam. He believed that his roots in Islam—though his family was not particularly religious—gave him credibility. His previous book, Midnight’s Children, had been a hit in India, Pakistan, and even Iran. He had no clue that Verses would trigger a hostile reaction among Muslims.

How wrong it was to accuse him of provoking those who sought to silence him—and for the British government to urge him to apologize as a way of accommodating Muslim leaders. In the past 23 years, we have learned a lot about the danger of giving in to the demands of extremists. We now know all too well how it incites them to demand more and to refuse reason and a peaceful settlement.

Or at least some of us know it. …

… We must be patient. America needs to empower those individuals and groups who are already disenchanted with political Islam by helping find and develop an alternative. At the heart of that alternative are the ideals of the rule of law and freedom of thought, worship, and expression. For these values there can and should be no apologies, no groveling, no hesitation.

It was Voltaire who once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As Salman Rushdie discovered, as we are reminded again as the Arab street burns, that sentiment is seldom heard in our time. Once I was ready to burn The Satanic Verses. Now I know that his right to publish it was a more sacred thing than any religion.

Jennifer Rubin tracks 15 media certitudes about the Romney campaign.

It is remarkable that anyone pays attention to the mass of pundits, both left and right, who have gotten so much so wrong in this election cycle. You’d think after three or five or even 10 goofs, the pundits would be more sheepish and the readers and viewers more wary.

Here’s a brief recap of some of the media assertions, delivered with great certitude, which proved to be dead wrong.

1. Romneycare would prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination.

2. Romneycare would prevent Romney from making an argument against Obamacare.

3. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was a sure thing.

4. The GOP would pick a tea party favorite as its nominee.

5. Romney’s $10,000 “bet” in a primary debate was going to wreck his campaign. …

… You do have to wonder if anything the media have propounded as political wisdom has been right. No one gets everything right in a campaign, but if a pundit or reporter got most of these wrong, why pay any attention?

Here we sit with Romney as the presidential nominee. Ryan energized his ticket, was a hit with the base and has put Wisconsin in play. None of the supposed “gaffes” have changed the course of the race. Romney never released more tax returns than he initially promised. Eastwood’s “empty chair” was a hit with the base. The DNC bounce is gone. One of the most effective arguments the Republicans have made is that Obama took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Obama fell in foreign policy approval in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, and attention is now turned to whether the administration was lying when it said the attacks were spontaneous and all about an anti-Muslim movie.

So when the media mavens on the right and left are in hysterics over Romney’s 47 percent remarks, think how accurate the media’s judgment has been. Consider whether the pundits think everything is a disaster for Romney and just don’t like him.

You might say the biggest inaccuracy the media have come up with is the notion that they matter. They have proved to be more tone deaf and irrelevant than most conservatives even imagined.

Toby Harnden also wonders what the big media Obama fuss in about.

Mitt Romney’s presidential bid has been gleefully portrayed as doomed after a series of supposed stumbles that have delighted Democrats. 

Voters, however, apparently view things rather differently. 

Romney has closed to just one point behind Barack Obama – a drop of six percentage points in a week for the President, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. Obama is now on 47 points and Romney 46. 

 

The survey was taken before the current furore over comments made by the Republican nominee in a fundraiser at Boca Raton, Florida in which he said that 47 per cent of Americans were dependent on the government and ‘it’s not my job to worry about these people’.

But the poll, and another by Rasmussen that puts Romney two points ahead, strongly indicate that Obama’s Democratic convention ‘bounce’ has all but evaporated and the 2012 race is wide open. …

Similar thoughts from Jonathan Tobin.

So while some of us were celebrating the Jewish New Year and taking the last couple of days off from politics, it appears a video has more or less decided the election. That’s the assumption of much of the mainstream media about the impact of the release of the video of Mitt Romney speaking back in May at a private fundraiser about the 47 percent of the country that doesn’t pay taxes. They think this means it’s time to put a fork in the Republican candidate. They believe the pile-on from both the Democrats and their media allies will be enough to effectively push Romney far enough behind the president that he will never be able to make it up in the weeks remaining to him. This is, to understate matters, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy since the reason the video is considered to be such a big deal is because it has been covered as an earth-shaking gaffe that ought to spike Romney’s hopes of ever winning the presidency.

As much as I’ve taken a dim view of some of the pie-eyed optimism on the right that wrongly discounted Barack Obama’s advantages, the assumption that Romney has been fatally damaged is incorrect. …

David Harsanyi weighs in too.

All we’ve heard these past two weeks is how much Mitt Romney is “struggling.”

Apparently, he’s struggling to keep President Barack Obama’s poll numbers from falling too quickly. It seems that voters have the temerity not to be particularly interested in what pundits are telling them to think about the race. Obama has dropped six percentage points in a week, allowing Romney to close to within one point of the president, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. …

Finally, we here from Andrew Malcolm.

Forget the Republican doom and gloom drumbeat peddled elsewhere in the media this week.

A new Gallup Poll out this morning finds President Obama’s convention bounce fading and the 2012 presidential race reverting to its previous tight margin. What a bummer for the preferred media narrative of recent days!

The poll, of 1,096 registered voters in 12 key swing states, finds Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied at 48% for the Democrat and 46% for Romney with less than seven weeks to go.

Gallup’s Daily Tracking of registered voters nationally finds the margin even closer with Obama at 47% and Romney at 46%.

The crucial swing states polled were: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Obama handily won all 12 states over John McCain in 2008, but at this point this time the race is much closer. …

There is disappointment in MA as Brown is dropping in the polls. Seth Mandel fills us in. 

The disconnect between the polls that show Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in a dead heat and the media conventional wisdom desperately pronouncing Obama the easy victor is being turned on its head in the Massachusetts Senate race. There, it is Republican Scott Brown that seems to be running the better campaign, yet the polls are starting to show a consistent lead by his challenger, Elizabeth Warren.

Though Brown’s approval rating is no longer the stratospheric 73 percent it was only last year according to a Democratic committee poll, he is still above water at 55 percent among registered voters and 57 percent among likely voters. A new poll shows Massachusetts voters think Brown is running the more positive campaign, 35 percent to 21 for Warren. And Brown’s strong ties to the state are not lost on voters, nor is Warren’s lack of same; only 13 percent of voters think she has a strong connection to the state. Brown’s approval rating among independents is 67 percent and 30 percent among Democrats. So what’s causing Brown’s poll slide? …

However, the Boston Herald touts a poll that finds Brown in the lead. 

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has moved into a narrow lead over rival Elizabeth Warren while his standing among Massachusetts voters has improved despite a year-long Democratic assault, a new UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll shows.

The GOP incumbent is beating Warren by a 50-44 percent margin among registered Bay State voters, a turnaround from the last University of Massachusetts Lowell/Herald poll nine months ago that had the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Among likely voters, Brown is leading the Harvard Law professor by a 49-45 percent margin, just within the poll’s 5.5 percent margin of error.

“I wasn’t too sure of him at first, but he’s been very independent,” said Jo Ann Dunnigan, a longtime Democrat and President Obama supporter from Fall River who participated in the poll, conducted Sept. 13-17.

Brown and Warren face off Oct. 1 in a debate sponsored by the Herald and UMass Lowell.

The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, shows nearly one in three Brown backers say they could change their mind before Election Day, compared to just 19 percent for Warren. But the poll, which started a week after the Democratic National Convention, finds no evidence of a “bounce” for Warren.

There also is some troubling news for the well-financed Warren campaign. Despite spending millions of dollars to tarnish Brown’s image, the GOP incumbent’s popularity has actually increased in the past nine months. …

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IBD Editors wonder if the president will ever take the job seriously.

The Mideast is in turmoil, the economy is faltering and the president opts to spend precious time with David Letterman, Beyonce and Jay-Z. Are we the only ones to wonder if Obama’s suited to be president?

Last week, Michelle Bachmann had it partly right when she said that “President Obama needs to get his priorities straight.”

There’s no question that Obama should, as Bachmann recommended, cancel his appearance on the Letterman show and agree to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the idea that Obama’s problem is a mixed-up priority list is giving the president more credit than he deserves. Time and again, Obama has proved that he is simply incapable of taking the job of president seriously. And the repercussions of this grow by the day. …

… If all Obama wants to do in life is golf, take fancy vacations, crack jokes on late-night TV and offer meaningless policy proposals, he should go run a nonprofit and leave running the country to someone who’ll take the job seriously.

Jennifer Rubin picks up the theme.

President Obama’s argument for reelection seems to be: 1) the economy is getting better, and 2) if I win I can work with Republicans.

The first argument has been essentially eviscerated by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed doesn’t come up with a super-charged printing press to flood the economy with dollars, push down bond yields and light a fire under the stock market if we are on the right track. QE3 is an emergency response to an economy that is headed for zero growth or contraction.

As for the second, the idea that if Obama is given four more years he could unlock the stalemate in Washington has been dealt a death blow by Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics.”

The bulk of the book is a step-by-step account of Obama’s unique ability to frustrate, annoy and blindside both Democrats and Republicans throughout the search for a grand bargain to address the debt. By contrast, VP Joe Biden comes across as responsible, digging for spending cuts with Republicans and trying to keep the process on track. (He came up with over $1 trillion in cuts both sides could live with.)

Several aspects of the failed grand bargain negotiations are illuminated: …

… And that really is the powerful message of Woodward’s book. The president doesn’t know what he is doing. He is buffeted by events. He commands neither trust nor respect from either party.

For reasons not clear to me, the Romney campaign has failed to grasp the central thread running through Obama’s presidency, from passivity in the Green Revolution to fumbling a debt deal to insisting the embassy attacks have nothing to do with anything but a movie. In all these instances a vacuum created by non-leadership, confusion and inexperience allowed events to get out of hand. In all these instances the United Sates came out the worse for it. Do we really think a second term would be any different?

So does Andrew Malcolm.

OK, let’s just pull a few things together from recent days:

1) Before a wild protest mob storms the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to remove the Stars and Stripes, the embassy tweets an apology for an anti-Islam video it had nothing to do with but finds no time to defend or explain freedom of speech, even hateful speech.

2) In Libya three days after a warning of upcoming violence, the American ambassador is allowed to go to lawless Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 with hardly any security where some five dozen terrorists catch them in the bungalow consulate, engage in a prolonged firefight involving rocket-propelled grenades and mortars that just happened to be at hand, resulting in the death of four Americans, including the much-respected ambassador.

3) President Obama expresses appreciation for their sacrifice, urges calm and says some Libyans helped get the dead ambassador to a hospital. He says now after such unanticipated violence on the anniversary of 9/11, he’s ordered U.S. embassy security beefed up in lots of places because you can’t be too careful after four people are dead. He takes no questions.

4) To demonstrate his grief, executive expertise and concern for appearances at such a sad, tragic time,, Obama flies to Vegas for some campaign fundraising.

5) Later, his obedient ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, maintains on four different television shows that the deaths and Cairo riot on 9/11 are all attributed to the anti-Islam video, which has been on YouTube most of the summer, and she knows from her best information they have no connection to 9/11 or terrorism. (Watch those weasel words; her best information could be the worst available.) …

Rubin also covers Woodward’s book as it shows Ryan never had a chance to make a deal because the administration never wanted one.

Unfortunately for the president and the legion of media spinners who insist on portraying the Republicans as the sole problem in reaching a debt reduction deal, Bob Woodward in “The Price of Politics” pretty much points the finger at President Obama. Along the way, to the surprise of some conservatives, he paints a picture of a rather amiable and flexible speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio) and a dogged Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who, he notes, had been laboring for years on real budget reform and put together the first budget to tackle our entitlement programs.

In Chapters 10 and 11 Woodward gives the ticktock in Obama’s response to Ryan’s 2011 budget that included real Medicare reform. Obama is portrayed as peevish. Rather than wait, for example for the Gang of Six, Woodward reports: “ ‘We’re not waiting,’ the president said in exasperation. He wanted to rip into Ryan’s plan.” So much for trying to reach out to the other side.

Woodward also details Obama’s now-infamous speech on April 13, 2010 at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity, in which — with Ryan sitting in the first row — the president launched into a nasty partisan, assault. …

And Jennifer Rubin defends Ryan from the attack this weekend from Maureen Dowd.

Others have already written on the shockingly anti-Semitic tropes that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd chose to weave into her bizarre attack (“Neocons Slither Back”) on vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and one of his advisers, Dan Senor, who is Jewish. I suppose the left is so drenched in the language of “Israel firster” and “Israel lobby” and images of a hanging Jew, this rhetoric has become a reflexive writing tic, like framing columns as conversations with taxicab drivers.

But for now I’ll turn my attention to the grossly inaccurate portrayal of Ryan as an empty vessel into which neocons supposedly pour their toxic brew. Aside from being grossly insulting that a man seeped in conservative thought, widely read and traveled and a 14-year veteran of the House wouldn’t have his own views it contradicts the other elite line that Romney-Ryan have no foreign policy views at all or they are muddled. …

Elsewhere Dowd has taken a lot of hits for her column. Noah Rothman of MEDIA-ite summarizes.

Long-time New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd is facing a significant backlash over her latest column in which she uses a number of medieval, anti-Semitic stereotypes to describe neoconservatives and, specifically, Dan Senor, a close advisor to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

In Dowd’s latest column, Neocons Slither Back, she describes Ryan’s senior advisor as snake-like. Dowd also describes Senor as the “puppet master” behind Ryan’s supposed lurch towards a neoconservative foreign policy critique of President Barack Obama. This, too, is a trope used for centuries to villainize Jews.

Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin savaged Dowd’s column as “creepy” and says that this episode should not be swept under the rug:

“Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times. This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, responded immediately to the slurs printed in the Times on the eve of the Jewish new year holiday. In Happy New Year, Puppet Masters, Goldberg goes after Dowd for her liberal use of offensive slurs to attack Ryan.

“Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews,” Goldberg wrote. …

Instapundit notes Romney is compared to Thurston Howell, but Obama is more like Gilligan. Good Photoshop here.

But Obama’s more like Gilligan — the skinny guy with big ears who screws things up every time it looks like they’re going to be rescued. Kinda like he’s done with the economy . . .

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WSJ finds some adults like George Shultz, Michael Boskin, etc. to outline our dire financial straits.

Sometimes a few facts tell important stories. The American economy now is full of facts that tell stories that you really don’t want, but need, to hear.

Where are we now?

Did you know that annual spending by the federal government now exceeds the 2007 level by about $1 trillion? With a slow economy, revenues are little changed. The result is an unprecedented string of federal budget deficits, $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and another $1.2 trillion on the way this year. The four-year increase in borrowing amounts to $55,000 per U.S. household.

The amount of debt is one thing. The burden of interest payments is another. The Treasury now has a preponderance of its debt issued in very short-term durations, to take advantage of low short-term interest rates. It must frequently refinance this debt which, when added to the current deficit, means Treasury must raise $4 trillion this year alone. So the debt burden will explode when interest rates go up.

The government has to get the money to finance its spending by taxing or borrowing. While it might be tempting to conclude that we can just tax upper-income people, did you know that the U.S. income tax system is already very progressive? The top 1% pay 37% of all income taxes and 50% pay none.

Did you know that, during the last fiscal year, around three-quarters of the deficit was financed by the Federal Reserve? Foreign governments accounted for most of the rest, as American citizens’ and institutions’ purchases and sales netted to about zero. The Fed now owns one in six dollars of the national debt, the largest percentage of GDP in history, larger than even at the end of World War II.

The Fed has effectively replaced the entire interbank money market and large segments of other markets with itself. It determines the interest rate by declaring what it will pay on reserve balances at the Fed without regard for the supply and demand of money. By replacing large decentralized markets with centralized control by a few government officials, the Fed is distorting incentives and interfering with price discovery with unintended economic consequences.

Did you know that the Federal Reserve is now giving money to banks, effectively circumventing the appropriations process? To pay for quantitative easing—the purchase of government debt, mortgage-backed securities, etc.—the Fed credits banks with electronic deposits that are reserve balances at the Federal Reserve. These reserve balances have exploded to $1.5 trillion from $8 billion in September 2008.  …

George Will says some of the FED’s governors are not very happy with current policy.

Fortunately, not everything is up to date in Kansas City. Esther George, president of the regional Federal Reserve Bank here, is refreshingly retrograde regarding what less circumspect people welcome as the modernizing of the nation’s central bank into a central economic planner. She has concerns, both prudential and philosophical, about the transformation of the Fed in ways that erase the distinction between monetary policy, which is the Fed’s proper business, and fiscal policy, which is inherently political.

The basic interest rate — i.e., the federal funds rate minus the inflation rate — was negative during about 40 percent of the disastrous 1970s and the 2000s, which ended disastrously. Because today’s rate is negative, the Fed’s stimulus repertoire is reduced to “quantitative easing.” That phrase, which is how government speaks when trying not to be understood, means printing money. Except printing is so 20th century. Nowadays, the Fed gives banks digital transfusions of money to lower long-term interest rates, which result in . . .

Not much bang for trillions of bucks. With corporations holding upward of $2 trillion in cash, and 30-year mortgages at 3.5 percent, George, speaking several weeks before this week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, asked: “Is there anyone not borrowing today or purchasing a house because interest rates aren’t low enough? Do we expect that businesses will hire if their long-term rates are lower?”

Very low interest rates discourage saving, punish retirees living off interest-bearing assets and, George says, “incent people into riskier assets.” These include commodities, farm land (for the first time on record, prices of cropland in George’s district have risen more than 20 percent for two consecutive years) and equities. …

Glenn Reynolds on the Obama generation of twenty somethings stuck in their parents’ homes.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in these pages about the way senior citizens are being squeezed by rising costs for food and gasoline on the one hand, and reduced income from abysmally low interest rates on the other.

That “senior squeeze” is real enough, but seniors aren’t the only ones being squeezed. At the other end of the demographic spectrum, young workers are having a dreadful time of it, too. Call that the “junior squeeze.”

Young people younger than 30 are “desperate for jobs,” as their cohort faces the worst unemployment prospects in decades. According to The Atlantic, last months’ jobs report was an awful jobs report for young people because it demonstrated that new jobs just aren’t being created at a sufficient rate to absorb all the young people entering the jobs market from high school and college. Wrote The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann, “In short, there are a lot more young adults still sitting at their computers scrounging around jobs boards for work than there should be at this point in the year.”

There are. And it gets worse. Because of the senior squeeze mentioned earlier, older “gray-collar” workers are staying in, or re-entering, the jobs market to make up for the income they’re losing due to lower interest rates, and to offset higher costs of living. These older workers, because of their already established track records, might be out-competing younger workers even in such entry-level areas as food-service jobs. …

You would think Washington got the message about the mistaken policies of forcing banks to make mortgages to sub-prime risks, but not Eric Holder’s department. WSJ Editors have the story. 

Banks have been widely castigated for causing the housing bust by lending too much to borrowers who couldn’t repay, but now Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has taken its antidiscrimination campaign to new lengths by whacking a bank for having been too prudent.

In a complaint filed Wednesday and settled the same day, Justice claimed that California-based Luther Burbank Savings violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act by setting a policy that had a “disparate impact” on minorities. Between 2006 and mid-2011, 5.2% of Luther’s single-family residential mortgage loans went to African-Americans and Hispanics, compared to an average of 41.7% for other lenders in the area. The complaint doesn’t cite evidence of intentional discrimination because there wasn’t any. …

Debra Saunders on college affordability.

“No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money,” President Obama told the Democratic National Convention as he accepted his party’s nomination in Charlotte, N.C., this month.

That sentence – key in Obama’s “college affordability” agenda – says everything about this administration’s approach to selling itself to the American voter.

What’s wrong with the message? Let me count the ways.

– It ignores reality. There is no reason a qualified poor kid cannot get into college in the United States simply because of money. Richard J. Vedder, director of Ohio University‘s Center for College Affordability and Productivity, told me that Obama is correct, “people might get an acceptance at a relatively expensive private school that they can’t afford to go to.” But if students are accepted into one college, they can get into another, more affordable college, such as a community college, where Pell Grants cover tuition. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says he’ll win reelection if the turnout is anything like it was in 2008. While voters said he’d win reelection if he was anything like he was in 2008.

Fallon: 7-Eleven is trying to predict the election results with blue coffee cups if you support Obama and red cups for Romney. Both will be filled with coffee brewed during the Reagan administration.

Fallon: A South Carolina man says his dog walked 500 miles home after being left in Virginia. His dog responded, “Don’t flatter yourself — I’m just here to get my stuff.”

Fallon: A new survey finds 34% of Americans do not have a Facebook or Twitter account. There’s even a name for these people: “Productive.”

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Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reacts to the “interview” of a film maker.

Here’s the key bit: “Just after midnight Saturday morning, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Muslim world.”

When taking office, the President does not swear to create jobs. He does not swear to “grow the economy.” He does not swear to institute “fairness.” The only oath the President takes is this one:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.

But Obama’s behavior — and that of his enablers in the press — has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.

Related thoughts from Ann Althouse:

“That’s a scarf wrapped around his face, not a “towel.” Is the L.A. Times nudging us to think of this man as a “towelhead”? And look at this headline in the Daily Mail: “The man who set the Middle East ablaze hides his face in shame….” Shame? If I were imputing a motivation to this man, I’d say he has a fully justified fear of becoming a recognizable face.

But I think our government is delusional if it thinks the people who are rioting in Africa and killing our diplomats would — if they knew the facts — see individuals like Nakoula as the proper focus of their rage. They don’t believe the necessary premise: freedom as the superior value. As long as they favor a system in which blasphemy is outlawed and severely punished, they will continue to blame the American government for standing back and allowing blasphemy to flourish and flow everywhere. What good does it do to ask them to please understand our system? They hate this system.

Meanwhile, our government would scapegoat a free citizen. It’s not even effectual scapegoating.”

Note Althouse’s strikethrough. You are not “free” when police can come to your door after midnight and demand that you “come downtown and answer a few questions” over a film you’ve made. Voluntarily, of course. . . .

It’s the deputies who should be covering their faces out of shame, but the real shame is on the man at the top of the hierarchy. …

Lee Smith at the Weekly Standard says it wasn’t the film that caused the Mid-East riots.

It was bad enough, two years ago, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates called fringe Florida pastor Terry Jones to ask him not to burn copies of the Koran, or last week, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey took his turn to call Jones to ask him to stop publicizing a YouTube video, The Innocence of Muslims. But then on Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney told the world that the violent protests in Cairo and Ben­ghazi and elsewhere were a “response not to United States policy, and not obviously the administration or the American people,” but were “in response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” Carney repeated the point for emphasis: “This is not a case of protests directed at the United States at large or at U.S. policy, but in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.”

Carney’s comments lie outside the range of plausible spin, even by Obama administration standards, and if his bosses believe them—as we fear they do—are simply delusional. But they are not without consequence. Nor are Gates’s and Dempsey’s phone calls. They all send the message to America’s enemies that if you kill our diplomats and lay siege to the our embassies, the first move the American government will make is to denounce .  .  . Americans. Our leaders apparently believe that the way to protect Americans from extremists and terrorists abroad is to tell other Americans to shut up.

What’s next? Where does it go from here? There are more than 300 million ways in which Americans expressing themselves might give offense to those who make it their business to be offended. Maybe it’s some other film, maybe it’s a book or even just a tossed-off phrase that our enemies might seize on to galvanize support for their causes. Is the White House going to put every American crank on speed-dial so it can tell them to shut up whenever a mob gathers outside a U.S. embassy or consulate? …

Mark Steyn is on the case.

… When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible – that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian Consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen, asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press. …

… In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice-president staggers around, pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.

Michael Barone on what causes riots.

In the summer of 1967 I worked as an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit, and therefore was an eyewitness to the six-day riot that occurred in July and the official response thereto. Things got so bad that at one point I was, improbably, the third person in a meeting between Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Governor George Romney.

From that experience I drew the following conclusion about why people riot when they do: they riot when they expect other people to do so. You only go out and loot and burn buildings and attack the unfortunate people in your way when you expect that you will have impunity because so many other people will be doing the same thing. The Detroit riot occurred soon after a riot earlier that month in Newark. Riots occurred, as predicted by my theory, in multiple cities after the murder of Martin Luther King in April 1968. After 1968 people stopped expecting riots, and there were none for many years. Rhetoric and news coverage prompted blacks in Los Angeles to expect a riot after the policemen accused of assaulting Rodney King were acquitted by a jury. But that riot lasted only 36 hours, and stopped after Governor Pete Wilson and Mayor Tom Bradley announced they had requested and would bring in 25,000 federal troops—far more than any mayor or governor considered asking for during the riots of the late 1960s. …

Ben Stein with a great essay.

… How I wish that someone that Mr. Obama respects (I have no idea if there is such a person) would look him in the eye and say, “Look, Mr. President, those Muslim terrorists in al Qaeda are not our friends. They have done terrible things to us. They have just done something brand new and horrible to us: they murdered our ambassador to Libya. No matter how much you kiss up to them, they will not be our friends. Maybe you think they’ll be your friends because you have so many Muslim friends in the black community in Chicago.

“But they won’t. They hurt us whenever they can. They are blood brothers to the people who run Iran. THEY ARE NOT REASONABLE PEOPLE. You cannot appease them into peace any more than Chamberlain could appease Hitler.

“The only thing they respect is strength. That’s it. Their guru, Osama bin Laden, put it well. ‘Between a strong horse and a weak horse, people will favor the strong horse.’

“That’s what we have to learn, Mr. President. We have to be the strong horse. Not the buttering up horse. The strong horse. Get it?”

The big problem is that there is no one Mr. Obama really respects to tell him the truth and we will all have to pay for it.

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Washington Examiner catches the president sounding like Jimmy Carter. 

“Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,” President Obama said in a CBS interview last night, criticizing Romney’s reaction to the embassy attack in Cairo. Romney criticized the Obama administration’s ‘apology’ in response to the attacks on the embassy and subsequent failure to condemn the attacks right away.

Obama’s remarks, however, echo frequent criticisms made by President Jimmy Carter of Ronald Reagan, then his opponent for the presidency.    

Carter criticized Reagan’s views on foreign policy during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, slamming Reagan for living in a “fantasy world” and noting his inability to understand the “complex global changes” in foreign policy.

“It’s a make believe world. A world of good guys and bad guys, where some politicians shoot first and ask questions later,” Carter said, …

However, that didn’t stop Carter from criticizing Obama. Fox News has the story. Says here Carter thinks Morsi is a peaceful democrat. Pickerhead compares that to the praise Carter had in 1980 for Robert Mugabe who laid waste to the country of Zimbabwe.

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke to students at DrakeUniversity in Des Moines today and was asked if he agreed with what Obama said about Egypt:

Carter: “Egypt is an ally of the US, we know Egypt well.”

President Obama had earlier stated during an interview, “You know, I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we do not consider them an enemy.”

Carter went on to talk about Egypt’s new President, Mohamed Morsi, saying that he knew him well and that they had met.  He added that Morsi was dedicated to peace and a democratic government.

Daniel Halper mines another nugget from Woodward’s book. Seems ex Budget Director Peter Orszag gave Valerie Jarrett a preview of one of his NY Times columns after he left the White House.

… Orszag sent his draft to Valerie Jarrett. It was about three days before the column was scheduled to run. Here’s a draft, he wrote in an email to her. Let me know if you have any comments.”

Jarrett did have a comment for Orszag, according to Woodward:

“Thanks, Jarrett wrote back. She offered no comments on the draft. The column ran as scheduled, unchanged from the draft Orszag had provided the White House.

Orszag was in an airport when he got Jarrett’s email. “How could you have done this? It’s ridiculous. You’re so disloyal.”

“You have got to realize the health care bill is wildly unpopular”, Orszag replied. “Every single speech I give, if I lead with this reflection on its imperfections, the dynamic changes. People will then listen. You can’t hold this law out as perfect. It won’t sell. People think it’s a piece of crap. The weaknesses must be acknowledged. Then it’s credible to say, here’s why it is good and why it is the only thing that will work.”

Jarrett’s answer was delivered with Politburo finality: “You have burned your bridges.” …

Ever hear of Norman Borlaug? Michigan Capitol Confidential tells how he saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Called “arguably the greatest American in the 20th century,” during his 95 years, Norman Borlaug probably saved more lives than any other person.

He is one of just six people to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And yet Borlaug, who died three years ago today, is scarcely known in his own country.

Born in Iowa in 1914, Borlaug spent most of his life in impoverished nations inventing, improving and teaching the “Green Revolution.” His idea was simple: Make developing countries self sufficient in food by teaching them how to use modern agricultural techniques that are easy to implement. Borlaug spent most of his time in Mexico, Pakistan and India, and focused on five areas: crop cultivars (seeds), irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides and mechanization. His successes were remarkable.

In 1950, Mexico imported over half of its food. Thanks to Borlaug’s efforts to convince farmers there to try his techniques, Mexican food production increased 10-fold by 1970, and the country had become a net exporter. …

… Shockingly, the Green Revolution was almost entirely funded by developing countries and private charities (notably the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), rather than by the governments of prosperous nations. At the time, the overwhelming view of academic and political elites in the wealthy countries was that it was already too late.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb” typified this attitude. Ehrlich wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He later said, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,” and “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Required reading at many colleges, Ehrlich’s book stated that it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself.

Ehrlich, who was wrong about several things, was ignorant of what Norman Borlaug was already in the process of accomplishing. …

… No good deed goes unpunished, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Borlaug was attacked by proponents of the trendy new faith of radical environmentalism because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Gregg Easterbrook quotes Borlaug saying the following in the 1990s:

“(Most Western environmentalists) have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.” …

The above piece mentioned the execrable Paul Ehrlich and this is a good place for another great writing effort by John Tierney. This time it is about the famous wager between the free market economist Julian Simon and Ehrlich, who was the darling of the bien pensants during the last half of the 20th Century. Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on the Tonight Show 20 times.

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more — a view of the planet’s ultimate limits, a vision of humanity’s destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era.

They lead two intellectual schools — sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters — that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain forests being decimated. But in 1980 these opponents managed to agree on one way to chart and test the global future. They promised to abide by the results exactly 10 years later — in October 1990 — and to pay up out of their own pockets.

The bettors, who have never met in all the years they have been excoriating each other, are both 58-year-old professors who grew up in the Newark suburbs. The ecologist, Paul R. Ehrlich, has been one of the world’s better-known scientists since publishing “The Population Bomb” in 1968. More than three million copies were sold, and he became perhaps the only author ever interviewed for an hour on “The Tonight Show.” When he is not teaching at StanfordUniversity or studying butterflies in the Rockies, Ehrlich can generally be found on a plane on his way to give a lecture, collect an award or appear in an occasional spot on the “Today” show. This summer he won a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant for $345,000, and in September he went to Stockholm to share half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize, the ecologist’s version of the Nobel. His many personal successes haven’t changed his position in the debate over humanity’s fate. He is the pessimist.

The economist, Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland, often speaks of himself as an outcast, which isn’t quite true. His books carry jacket blurbs from Nobel laureate economists, and his views have helped shape policy in Washington for the past decade. But Simon has certainly never enjoyed Ehrlich’s academic success or popular appeal. On the first Earth Day in 1970, while Ehrlich was in the national news helping to launch the environmental movement, Simon sat in a college auditorium listening as a zoologist, to great applause, denounced him as a reactionary whose work “lacks scholarship or substance.” Simon took revenge, first by throwing a drink in his critic’s face at a faculty party and then by becoming the scourge of the environmental movement. When he unveiled his happy vision of beneficent technology and human progress in Science magazine in 1980, it attracted one of the largest batches of angry letters in the journal’s history.

In some ways, Simon goes beyond Dr. Pangloss, the tutor in “Candide” who insists that “All is for the best in this best of possible worlds.” Simon believes that today’s world is merely the best so far. Tomorrow’s will be better still, because it will have more people producing more bright ideas. He argues that population growth constitutes not a crisis but, in the long run, a boon that will ultimately mean a cleaner environment, a healthier humanity and more abundant supplies of food and raw materials for everyone. And this progress can go on indefinitely because — “incredible as it may seem at first,” he wrote in his 1980 article — the planet’s resources are actually not finite. Simon also found room in the article to criticize, among others, Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Newsweek, the National Wildlife Federation and the secretary general of the United Nations. It was titled “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.”

An irate Ehrlich wondered how the article had passed peer review at America’s leading scientific journal. “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Ehrlich asked in a rebuttal written with his wife, Anne, also an ecologist at Stanford. They provided the simple arithmetic: the planet’s resources had to be divided among a population that was then growing at the unprecedented rate of 75 million people a year. The Ehrlichs called Simon the leader of a “space-age cargo cult” of economists convinced that new resources would miraculously fall from the heavens. For years the Ehrlichs had been trying to explain the ecological concept of “carrying capacity” to these economists. They had been warning that population growth was outstripping the earth’s supplies of food, fresh water and minerals. But they couldn’t get the economists to listen.

“To explain to one of them the inevitability of no growth in the material sector, or . . . that commodities must become expensive,” the Ehrlichs wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.”

Ehrlich decided to put his money where his mouth was by responding to an open challenge issued by Simon to all Malthusians. Simon offered to let anyone pick any natural resource — grain, oil, coal, timber, metals — and any future date. If the resource really were to become scarcer as the world’s population grew, then its price should rise. Simon wanted to bet that the price would instead decline by the appointed date. Ehrlich derisively announced that he would “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.” He then formed a consortium with John Harte and John P. Holdren, colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley specializing in energy and resource questions.

In October 1980 the Ehrlich group bet $1,000 on five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — in quantities that each cost $200 in the current market. A futures contract was drawn up obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich, Harte and Holdren these same quantities of the metals 10 years later, but at 1980 prices. If the 1990 combined prices turned out to be higher than $1,000, Simon would pay them the difference in cash. If prices fell, they would pay him. The contract was signed, and Ehrlich and Simon went on attacking each other throughout the 1980′s. …

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Nile Gardiner posts on Obama’s latest snub to Israel.

… It is hard to think of another item on the president’s agenda that week which is more important than talks with the Israeli prime minister against the backdrop of the rising threat on the horizon of a nuclear-armed Iran. Significantly the president has reportedly found time to make another appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman during the same time period.

The snub to the Israeli prime minister reflects both Barack Obama’s personal dislike of Benjamin Netanyahu as well as a broader lack of empathy on the part of the Obama administration for Israel. As I’ve noted in previous pieces, the Obama White House and State Department have a long track record of insulting Israel and its leaders amidst significant tensions between Washington and Jerusalem over a range of issues, from Israeli settlements on the West Bank to differences of approach towards the Iranian nuclear threat.

For a revealing insight into Obama’s sneering disdain for the Israeli PM, look no further than this report by  Israeli media outlet Ynetnews (based on French sources) following last year’s G-20 summit, which captured the unguarded private views of both the US and French presidents when discussing the Israeli leader: …

 Noemie Emery says there is one area where the president excels. 

Barack Obama is a wonderful salesman of a singular product: himself. His effect and biography make a spectacular package. Slender and graceful, with a remarkable speaking voice, his facsimiles stare at you from fashion spreads everywhere, while his life story — up from obscure and unlikely beginnings, black and white, Kenya and Kansas, the strange and the all too corny and familiar — is the story of how life should be.

Obama tells his story through his personal medium really well: writing best-selling biographies before he was 40, making himself a senator on the strength of these stories, and then president on the strength of a speech. The upside of this is that he portrays himself beautifully. The downside is that this seems to be all he can do.

In the Illinois state Senate, he voted “present.” In the United States Senate, he sponsored little in the way of real legislation. As president, he has failed so badly to do what he promised that he has been forced to downgrade his slogan from “Yes, We Can!” to “No One Could Have Done It,” to “Maybe We Can’t Do It Yet.” …

Lo and behold, a NY Times columnist thinks buying organic food is as wasteful as recycling. Pickerhead made up the thing about recycling. However, a long time ago John Tierney writing in the Times Magazine suggested recycling is wasteful.   

At some point — perhaps it was gazing at a Le Pain Quotidien menu offering an “organic baker’s basket served with organic butter, organic jam and organic spread” as well as seasonally organic orange juice — I found I just could not stomach the “O” word or what it stood for any longer.

Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.

An effective form of premium branding rather than a science, a slogan rather than better nutrition, “organic” has oozed over the menus, markets and malls of the world’s upscale neighborhood at a remarkable pace. In 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association, organic food and drink sales totaled $26.7 billion in the United States, or about 4 percent of the overall market, having grown steadily since 2000. The British organic market is also large; menus like to mention that bacon comes from pampered pigs at the Happy Hog farm down the road.

In the midst of the fad few questions have been asked. But the fact is that buying organic baby food, a growing sector, is like paying to send your child to private school: It is a class-driven decision that demonstrates how much you love your offspring but whose overall impact on society is debatable.

So I cheered this week when Stanford University concluded, after examining four decades of research, that fruits and vegetables labeled organic are, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts. The study also found that organic meats offered no obvious health advantages. And it found that organic food was not less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E.coli.

The takeaway from the study could be summed up in two words: Organic, schmorganic. That’s been my feeling for a while. …

And here is the 1996 John Tierney article on the wastefulness of recycling.

AS THEY PUT ON PLASTIC GLOVES FOR THEIR first litter hunt, the third graders knew what to expect. They knew their garbage. It was part of their science curriculum at Bridges Elementary, a public school on West 17th Street in Manhattan. They had learned the Three R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — and discussed how to stop their parents from using paper plates. For Earth Day they had read a Scholastic science publication, “Inside the World of Trash.” For homework, they had kept garbage diaries and drawn color-coded charts of their families’ trash. So they were primed for the field experiment on this May afternoon.

“We have to help the earth,” Natasha Newman explained as she and her classmates dashed around the school collecting specimens. Their science teacher, Linnette Aponte, mediated disputes — “I saw that gum wrapper first!” — and supervised the subsequent analysis of data back in the classroom. The students gathered around to watch her dump out their bags on the floor

Do you see any pattern as I’m emptying it?” Miss Aponte asked.

“Yeah, it stinks.”

“Everybody’s chewing Winterfresh.”

“A lot of paper napkins.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“They’re throwing away a folder. That’s a perfectly good folder!”

“It’s only half a folder.”

“Well, they could find the other half and attach them together.”

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile. “How does all this make you feel?”

“Baaaad,” the students moaned.

Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: “People shouldn’t throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn’t eat candy in school.”

Lily’s judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.

Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987 — the year they were born, back when the Three R’s had nothing to do with garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders’ trash, and its journey had a strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and they’re paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy recycled paper — a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic rivals. It’s the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.

But the press isn’t solely responsible for recycling fervor; the public’s obsession wouldn’t have lasted this long unless recycling met some emotional need. Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night. 

Leno: Bill Clinton says Obama inherited a deeply-damaged economy and if reelected, he’ll inherit an even more deeply-damaged economy.

Conan: President Obama’s campaign donors are promised exclusive access to Joe Biden. And for an extra $10,000, absolutely no access to Joe Biden.

Leno: President Obama moved his big convention speech indoors from a 74,000 seat stadium over the threat of severe weather. A weather phenomenon known as empty seats.

Leno: The good news is China has decided it will loan more money to the U.S. The bad news: The co-signer is Greece.

Leno: Democrat convention at Time Warner Cable Arena and tomorrow at the Bank of America Stadium. Great thinking–the two things Americans love most–banks and cable companies.

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Here’s a 9/11 recollection from Sarah Hoyt.

Has it really been eleven years?

It was a beautiful day.  I remember that.  I got up to check email, and the AOL homepage had something about a plane flying into a building.  I thought it was a goofy thing, like that idiot who had earlier flown into – was it the EmpireStateBuilding? – in a small plane.

It was a beautiful morning, and I had a kid to take to school.  His older brother could walk on his own the five blocks to elementary, but Marshall – in Kindergarten – went in an hour later, and at any rate was too little to walk alone. (And too sleepy.  I used to get him up, bathe him, shovel breakfast into his mouth and walk him to school and if I were very lucky, he’d wake up when we got there.)

So I walked him to school, waited till the teacher took him in and walked back home, under a cloudless sky, across our little mountain village, looking forward to our writers’ group meeting that Saturday, feeling financially stable for the first time in my adult life (I’d just sold my first book) and thinking “This is when we reached adulthood.  From now on, it’s the easy part.  Things will only get better.”

When I got home, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before going up to write.  And the phone rang.  It was Rebecca Lickiss and she was screaming for me to turn on the news. …

… And as an author to an Author I have to admire the plotting touch, where the three burly and brave guys who spearheaded the fight back in flight 93 were a born again man, a Jewish man, and a gay man.  Can you imagine any group designed to give more heart burn to the enemies that brought down the towers and who tried to use flight 93 as a weapon?

I can’t either.  But, more importantly, I can’t imagine any other culture, any other country, any other place where those three would have banded together, immediately – instinctively – putting aside any perceived differences, thinking only of trying to save the defenseless, laying down their lives for others.

Their lives were forfeit, but they died free men.  They died heroes.  More importantly, they died Americans.

Surely a nation that produces such men will not perish from this Earth.

We will not go quietly into that good night.

We’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.  And we will stand.

Rolling Stone, in an effort to trash the Romney campaign, rolled out Matt Taibbi. A Fortune editor outlines Taibbi’s errors.

Very few of my friends understand private equity, let alone care about it. But some of them wrote me this past weekend, after reading Matt Taibbi’s new cover story for Rolling Stone about Mitt Romney’s time with Bain Capital. For example, this was from my former college housemate Andrew:

“I read the Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Reading it you can obviously see that the guy has a fairly biased opinion on private equity and Wall Street dealings in general. What’s the industry’s defense of PE? I assume the truth is somewhere between Mitt’s version of Bain as a massive jobs creator and Gordon Gekko-esque corporate raiders.”

Andrew has good instincts. Taibbi took out the long knives for this one, which means he sacrificed a bit of accuracy for potency.

His overall thesis is correct: There is a fundamental hypocrisy in a former leveraged buyout investor railing against America’s ballooning debt. Leveraged buyouts, by definition, add debt to a company’s balance sheet — weighing it down in the short-term so that it can (hopefully) thrive in the long-term. Romney defenders point out that America is not the same as a private equity-backed company, a truism that only goes to underscore the flimsiness of using Romney’s Bain Capital experience as a singular qualification for the Oval Office.

Unfortunately, Taibbi also takes a lot of wild swings at the broader private equity market that don’t ring true. So many, in fact, that his valid critique of Romney’s candidacy gets lost.

Here is an accounting: …

Mark Steyn comments on Sandra Fluke’s star turn at the DNC.

… Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

So this is America’s best and brightest – or, at any rate, most expensively credentialed. Sandra Fluke has been blessed with a quarter-million dollars of elite education, and, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is entirely incapable of making a coherent argument. She has enjoyed the leisurely decade-long varsity once reserved for the minor sons of Mitteleuropean grand dukes, and she has concluded that the most urgent need facing the Brokest Nation in History is for someone else to pay for the contraception of 30-year-old children. She says the choice facing America is whether to be “a country where we mean it when we talk about personal freedom, or one where that freedom doesn’t apply to our bodies and our voices” – and, even as the words fall leaden from her lips, she doesn’t seem to comprehend that Catholic institutions think their “voices” ought to have freedom, too, or that Obamacare seizes jurisdiction over “our bodies” and has 16,000 new IRS agents ready to fine us for not making arrangements for “our” pancreases and “our” bladders that meet the approval of the commissars. Sexual liberty, even as every other liberty withers, is all that matters: A middle-school girl is free to get an abortion without parental consent, but if she puts a lemonade stand on her lawn she’ll be fined. What a bleak and reductive concept of “personal freedom.”

America is so broketastically brokey-broke that one day, in the grim future that could be, society may even be forced to consider whether there is any meaningful return on investment for paying a quarter-million bucks to send the scions of wealth and privilege to school till early middle-age to study Reproductive Justice. But, as it stands right now, a Cornell and Georgetown graduate doesn’t understand the central reality of the future her elders have bequeathed her. There’s no “choice” in the matter. It’s showing up whatever happens in November. All the election will decide is whether America wants to address that reality, or continue to live in delusion – like a nation staggering around with a giant condom rolled over its collective head. …

Conn Carroll says the Obama recovery is turning into the Obama depression. 

President Obama’s convention speech last week never mentioned “unemployment” or “unemployed.” Now we know why. Today’s Department of Labor monthly jobs report was an absolutely disaster for Obama and America. While U.S. employers did create 96,000 jobs last month, 368,000 Americans lost hope of finding a job and stopped looking for work entirely. Or as Paul Ryan said on CNBC, “For every net job created, nearly four people left the workforce.” Obama has now presided over a record 43 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

There simply was no good news in today’s jobs report. June and July job creation was revised down a total of 41,000. The manufacturing sector lost 15,000 jobs. If the size of the U.S. labor force rate had stayed the same as last month, unemployment would have risen to 8.4 percent. If the same number of Americans were looking for work today, as were looking for work when Obama came into officer, unemployment would have risen to 11.2 percent.

In fact, as the chart below shows, the U.S. economy actually lost jobs according to the survey the Labor Department uses to calculate the unemployment rate. And not for the first time. The U.S. workforce has declined for each of the last two months as has the number of employed Americans. The Obama recovery is rapidly descending into the Obama recession.

Ed Morrissey has more on Woodward’s book. This is a good read. Among other items you will learn Obama called Paul Ryan – Jack Ryan and you can see the White House try to lie its way out of the fact they trashed Ryan on purpose.

Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics might make a lot of political trouble for Barack Obama in this election.  The book looks at the leadership failures that led to the debt-ceiling and budget crises last year, and the historic downgrading of US bonds in August 2011.  One of the reasons for the intense polarization was a speech given by Obama earlier in the year that attacked the House Budget Chair’s proposals as un-American — while he sat in the (room).  In interviews conducted by Woodward for the book, Obama admitted that the attack was “a mistake“: …

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Rand Simberg on how Romney can fight the Democrat’s false narratives.

How Romney can fight back against “The Big Lie.”

We know what we’re going to hear from the Democrats this week at their convention, and for the next nine weeks until the election. They clearly are having trouble making the case for their tenure, not even being able to articulate a consistent and coherent answer to the question of whether we’re better off than we were four years ago.

So they are going to have to somehow make the voters fear the unknown over their recent bitter economic experience. We’ve already heard the talking point from the president himself: that Romney is proposing that we go back to the bad, old, failed Bush policies that created the mess we’re currently in. In fact (like much of the Obama campaign strategy), it is a retread from 2008, when (on zero basis) the theme was that a McCain victory would be a continuation of the Bush administration.

Accepting this argument requires that two premises be acknowledged: First, that it was the Bush policies that created the mess; and second, that Romney’s proposals are a return to them. Both of these premises are false, but the Republicans have done a poor job of pushing back against either of them. If they don’t do a better one, there is some danger that they will actually gain traction with swing voters.

The first premise is not just false, but actually turns things on their head. …

… The real cause of the current mess (ignoring the upcoming fiscal disaster caused by uncontrolled spending and deficits) was the housing boom and bust. The boom was caused by policies going back decades to encourage people to buy houses they couldn’t afford and to coerce and extort banks to lend them the money to do so. While this had some support from Republicans, it was a policy primarily driven by Democrats. It wasn’t just the free hand given to Fannie and Freddie, something that the Bush administration attempted to rein in, but to no avail thanks to corrupt Democrats like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. It was also the action of “community organizers” like Barack Obama, who himself sued Citibank in the 1990s to compel them to give out loans to people who couldn’t afford them. As The Independent pointed out four years ago, Democratic fingerprints were all over the housing crisis: …

IBD Editors lay the blame for the real estate bust at Clinton’s feet.

History has rarely seen anything as surreal as former President Clinton riding into Charlotte as a hero rescuing America and President Obama from failed Republican economic policies.

Clinton was the architect of the financial crisis, yet he was able to use the Democratic National Convention to polish his phony credentials as economic genius.

He brazenly warned that GOP challengers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would wreck the economy by going back to “the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place.”

“They want to cut taxes for high-income Americans even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit federal bailouts.”

This may be Clinton’s biggest whopper yet. Truth is, it was his own reckless housing policies that wrecked the economy.

Compared to his plan to nationalize the health care system, his housing policy seemed a small and rather innocuous plank in his domestic agenda, and few paid it much mind. But under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open.

First, using his executive order powers, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under the little-known Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending to enforce new “flexible” mortgage underwriting guidelines to combat “lending discrimination in any form.”

For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income minorities with spotty credit.

The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders abandoned prudent underwriting standards altogether. …

Jennifer Rubin lists 10 surprises at the conventions.

Political conventions are heavily scripted and hardly ever make news. But the Democratic and Republican conventions did have their share of surprises. Here are my favorites:

1. Clint Eastwood’s remarks were more memorable and more effective than President Obama’s. The empty-chair metaphor never seemed so apt as during the Obama drone-a-thon.

2. The press, even liberal commentators, admitted that Obama had bombed. Sure, there were bitter-enders who claimed all was fine, but the cable TV talking heads and the vast majority of columnists were brutally honest. MSNBC personalities were downright glum.

3. Knowing the president has a problem with pro-Israel voters, the Obama campaign made a mess for itself by fiddling with platform language and then allowed the matter to fester for two days. The display of booing and confusion when the language was reinstated may be the most memorable thing about the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Even more surprising, Obama did not mention Jerusalem and gave short shrift to both Israel and Iran in his speech. …

Peggy Noonan outlines the soft extremism of the Dems convention.

… Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn’t what you love if you’re American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don’t see all this the same way, and that’s fine—that’s what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge “No!” vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration’s own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn’t liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream. …

Tough week for Debbie WasserFace. Or, as the Free Beacon calls her – Debbie Disaster.

… It has been a tough week for Wasserman Schultz. She told an audience in North Carolina that Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, had told her Republican policies were “dangerous” for Israel—a claim that the ambassador called an untruth in a sharply worded statement. Then she said the reporter who broke the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had “deliberately” misquoted her—a claim proven false by Klein’s audio recording of her remarks. Wasserman Schultz told Washington Free Beacon senior writer Adam Kredo that she had no intention of apologizing to Klein for impugning his character.

Wasserman Schultz was also involved in the negotiations that led initially to the words “God” and “Jerusalem” being removed from the Democratic Party platform—a decision later reversed after presidential intercession and amid widespread boos and catcalls from Democratic Party delegates. …

Victor Davis Hanson says some Dems are giving lying a bad name.

All politicians lie, at least in the sense of exaggerating their opponents’ lapses and downplaying their own. But there are a few rules of politically lying: the most important being that one cannot insult the intelligence of the listener by saying something that is demonstrably untrue and/or refuted by the speaker’s own mutually contradictory statements. Do that and we enter Baghdad Bob territory.

Not long ago on national television, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, asserted that she knew no details of Democratic super-PAC commercial-prop Joe Soptic’s life story — although Cutter herself, as an audio clip revealed, had earlier hosted an Obama conference call where Soptic had outlined in detail his bio as part of a general complaint against Mitt Romney. Cutter, in other words, simply lied that she was unfamiliar with something she was very familiar with — as the two tapes demonstrated. …

Chicago is having real problems these days and Mayor Rahm is fundraising for Obama.  Contentions has the story.

The city of Chicago, the third largest in America, is crumbling into anarchy. The murder rate is so out of control that federal authorities have agreed to assist the Chicago Police Department in their efforts to curb soaring violence. The city has seen over a thirty-percent rise in its murder rate this year and in the last eight days of August, 82 people were killed or wounded by gun violence. With his city in a violent downward spiral, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been focusing on what’s important: banning Chik-fil-A from Chicago.

On Wednesday, during Bill Clinton’s address to the DNC in Charlotte, cameras panned to Emanuel, laughing in the audience. While he was enjoying his stay in Charlotte at least three people were murdered back home in Chicago just that night. What could be more important than taking charge of one of the most violent cities in America? Apparently, for Emanuel, it’s fundraising for his old boss President Barack Obama. …

Maybe if Rahm Emanuel took care of business, people who move to Chicago from Gambia would not be thinking about moving back. SunTimes has the story.

They came to the U.S. from Gambia — in search of a better life.

But two tough decades later, some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.

“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their WashingtonPark home. “What’s the point of staying here?”

Muhammed, 19, was sitting with his girlfriend when he was shot dead by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the 8100 block of South Ingleside shortly after 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Relatives say they had been especially worried about him ever since his 23-year-old brother Omar Kebbeh became Chicago’s 68th murder victim of 2012 back in February.

Muhammed moved out of the family apartment in the 5800 block of South Indiana — just a few blocks from the spot where Omar Kebbeh was killed as he walked home from work — soon after to stay with friends and wouldn’t come back, despite repeated entreaties, his brother Hajie said. …