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Charles Krauthammer turns his attention, and ours, to the growing storm in Iran.

… What to do? The sagest advice comes from Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman is a hardheaded realist — severely critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, skeptical of the “war on terror,” dismissive of the strategic importance of Afghanistan, and a believer that “multilateralism and soft power must still be the rule and not the exception.”

He may have found his exception. “There are times when the best way to prevent war is to clearly communicate that it is possible,” he argues. Today, the threat of a U.S. attack is not taken seriously. Not by the region. Not by Iran. Not by the Israelis, who therefore increasingly feel forced to act before Israel’s more limited munitions — far less powerful and effective than those in the U.S. arsenal — can no longer penetrate Iran’s ever-hardening facilities.

Cordesman therefore proposes threefold action.

1. “Clear U.S. red lines.”

It’s time to end the ambiguity about American intentions. Establish real limits on negotiations — to convince Iran that the only alternative to a deal is preemptive strikes and to persuade Israel to stay its hand.

2. “Make it clear to Iran that it has no successful options.”

Either its program must be abandoned in a negotiated deal (see No. 1 above) on generous terms from the West (see No. 3 below), or its facilities will be physically destroyed. Ostentatiously let Iran know about the range and power of our capacities — how deep and extensive a campaign we could conduct, extending beyond just nuclear facilities to military-industrial targets, refineries, power grids and other concentrations of regime power.

3. Give Iran a face-saving way out. …

Andrew Ferguson says Romney is an acquired taste.

Now that he’s officially the Republican nominee for president and has an excellent chance of becoming the most powerful man in the world, I feel free to admit, in the full knowledge that nobody cares, that I never liked Mitt Romney. My distaste for him isn’t merely personal or political but also petty and superficial. There’s the breathless, Eddie Attaboy delivery, that half-smile of pitying condescension in debates or interviews when someone disagrees with him, the Ken doll mannerisms, his wanton use of the word “gosh”—the whole Romney package has been nails on a blackboard to me.

Evidently not many of my fellow Republicans agreed. I assumed I was missing something and resolved to dive into the Romney literature, which I soon discovered should post a disclaimer, like a motel pool: NO DIVING. By my count the literature includes one good book, The Real Romney, by two reporters from the Boston Globe. That’s the same Globe with the leftward tilt to its axis and a legendary anti-Romney animus—which lends authority to their largely favorable portrait. The flattering details of Romney’s life were so numerous and unavoidable that the authors, dammit, had no choice but to include them. …

… The Real Romney adds other traits that will continue to grate—he’s a know-it-all and likely to remain so, and his relationship to political principle has always been tenuous. Which makes him a, uh, politician. But now I suspect he’s also something else, a creature rarely found in the highest reaches of American politics: a good guy.

Toby Harnden has a great article on Obama’s ‘joyless slog’ to November.

Barack Obama was swept to the White House in 2008 by a wave of idealism and inspirational campaigning in which he encapsulated the mood of the nation with his slogans of ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Yes we can’.

Then, his message was a fundamentally positive one. Americans wanted an end to the Bush era but that almost went without saying. Obama pointed to his own vision of the country; a post-partisan, post-racial America in which gridlock in Washington was ended and common-sense centrist solutions were adopted.

What a difference four years makes. Obama is campaigning ferociously for a second term – and he is a candidate who would have probably have been disdained by the Obama of 2008.

Obama is waging a relentlessly negative campaign of changing the subject from the one that, overwhelmingly, most Americans care about – the economy. Every week there is a new issue his campaign seizes on, preferring to talk about something, anything other than jobs and 8.3 per cent unemployment.

While Obama is still drawing sizable crowds, they are nothing like the size of those who flocked to see him in 2008. …

Yuval Levin says the Dem strategy is to lie their way to November.

Last week I spoke with a journalist who covers health care who was marveling at the trouble the Democrats had allowed themselves to get into on Medicare — thanks to Obamacare on the one hand and the Romney-Ryan plan on the other, it’s suddenly Democrats who would cut the program for current seniors but would fail to save it from collapse and Republicans who would leave current seniors protected and stand a real chance of saving Medicare (and the federal budget) in the long run. In their attempt to run away from this new reality, the Democrats have found themselves pushed into a series of increasingly implausible and unserious defenses and seemed to be losing ground on Medicare, which they had hoped might be their strongest issue this year. “So what will they do?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate: “They’ll just lie.” He thought they would revert to the same story they have told for years — Republicans will increase seniors’ costs and destroy Medicare and Democrats won’t — and assume that people will just believe it.

That certainly made sense, and we now know he was right. On Saturday, the Obama campaign released this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of lies from top to bottom.

The ad’s most significant claim is that “instead of a guarantee, seniors could pay $6,400 more a year” under the Romney plan — a claim attributed on the screen to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As the Obama campaign well knows, since it has been called on this particular deception before, this claim of $6,400 in cost shifting is from a 2011 CBPP analysis based on a 2011 CBO analysis of an older version of premium-support, and simply does not apply to Romney’s plan. A similar calculation applied to Romney’s plan would show cost shifting not of $6,400 but of zero dollars. …

Lots of good news out of Massachusetts. Legal Insurrection thinks Liz Warren is going the way of Martha Coakley.

… Earlier this week PPP released a poll showing Brown ahead by 5 points, and people were stunned particularly on the left.

For the first time in their adult lives, the progressive movement is wondering out loud whether the “nice guy” Brown is beatable at all, and whether Warren is up to the task.  Demands that Warren “nationalize” (how fitting a word!) the race are increasing.

Warren herself seems desperate to lash out on the war on women theme so much so that she is becoming a caricature.

All in all, there is a sense in the air that resembles what took place in early January 2010 when the political world collectively came to the realization that the Democrats had nominated a seriously flawed candidate, and were up against a guy with a unique political talent and ability to connect with the folks.

Make no mistake, Warren’s bizarre handling of her false claim to Native American ancestry has compounded if not caused the problem, as it revealed a personality defect which is not very becoming.

PPP’s results now have been confirmed by a second poll just released which shows Brown up by 6 points (via Weekly Standard): …

Michael Barone says things are not so great at GM.

… Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it’s one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he’s probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.

GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount and, while it’s making money in China — and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere — it’s bleeding losses in Europe. It’s spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer team uniforms — and just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.

It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders but which got lousy reviews. And it’s selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama’s goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor-in-Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is about $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells. …

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In Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball posts on Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek article and the following firestorm of left-wing invective.

… Ferguson writes:

Welcome to Obama’s America … nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return — almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation — half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

We are fast becoming a two-tier nation, a small band of makers and an increasingly large band of takers.

This is just the beginning of the bad news which Ferguson has assembled. He goes on to marshal the facts about Obama’s profligate spending, U.S. debt, the true cost of ObamaCare, and more. What Ferguson has to say about Obama’s handling of the foreign policy challenges facing America is especially sobering:

Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed — perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize — that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

Bottom line on the foreign policy front: “America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement.”

I said that I found Ferguson’s analysis damning. So, I gather, did the Left. For out of those mephitic swamps of “progressive” animus has risen a great cloud of anguished repudiation. It’s a violent, unpleasant, and ultimately unconvincing display, but it is certainly full of angry pathos.

It has already elicited from Ferguson a long, detailed, and utterly deadly point-by-point reply, which is as entertaining as it is authoritative. Ferguson begins with a splendid quotation from the historian Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay had not had the experience of witnessing the left-wing commentariat tie itself in moralistic knots in its hapless attempt to answer facts with name-calling. Connoisseurs of futility will find it as entertaining as psychologists will find it alarming.

Ferguson shows in unanswerable detail that his critics adopt a three-pronged strategy of evasiveness. First, they avoid his central arguments. Second, they claim to be challenging the facts he has marshaled, when all they really do is purvey opinions masquerading as facts. Third, they nitpick and name-call. …

 Matthew Continetti’s take down of Jane Mayer’s latest in the New Yorker (“Schmooze or Lose” ) takes awhile to hit its stride, but then it is strong. Read this and see why the New Yorker is top Obama flack in the Northeast media.

I don’t know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win on November 6, but I do know what the MSNBC talking heads will say in the event that Obama loses. They will say that Republican billionaires bought the election; that Republican legislators suppressed the minority vote through onerous photo identification requirements; and that Romney frightened white working class voters into thinking Obama favored minorities over other groups. They will say the 2010 Citizens United decision allowed Republican billionaires to inject undisclosed “dark money” into American politics, and Democrats could not compete because they had no financial interest at stake, no Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson of their own.

I also know that every rationale uttered by Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz will advance their theological belief in the moral purity and benevolent intentions of modern day progressives. This foundational idea—that Republicans act out of self-interest while Democrats act out of the public interest—is the keystone to the self-conceptualization and self-idealization of your everyday Democrat. It’s simplistic and bogus. And it is the biggest myth of campaign 2012.

Take for example the left-wing activist Jane Mayer’s latest article in the New Yorker,…

… “Schmooze or Lose” had not been on newsstands for more than a few days when the New York Times came out with a blockbuster report on the administration’s relationship with the Exelon Corporation, an Illinois-based utility giant whose executives “were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House.” Rahm Emanuel helped create this energy beast. David Axelrod consulted for it. One of Exelon’s board members, Jim Rogers, is the chairman of another huge utility, Duke Energy, and a major backer of this year’s Democratic National Convention. “White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies,” the Times reported. I hasten to add that the Washington Free Beacon broke the story of how Exelon “won a 20-year contract to provide renewable energy to 10 State Department facilities, including its Foggy Bottom headquarters, as well as a portion of the White House campus” with solar panels manufactured in American prisons.

Does Jane Mayer read? This is not a rhetorical question. She quotes another anonymous donor who asks, “Where’s Penny Pritzker? Where’s George Soros?” Yet one does not need a GPS to discover that the Hyatt heiress Pritzker was on Air Force One with the president in late July, when the discussion no doubt was confined to how Pritzker “would like to be involved.” One of Mayer’s informants says that the hedge fund billionaire Soros, who like Pritzker has given the maximum individual contribution to Obama, “is not inclined to take an outsized role in the 2012 campaign.” Why? A “Democratic donor” says: “He feels hurt.” Aw. Or maybe he’s tied up with his twenty-something ex-girlfriend’s $50-million lawsuit; or planning his upcoming wedding to a 40-year-old video yoga instructor; or investing in Manchester United after the soccer team inked a $600 million endorsement deal with U.S. government-backed GM.

Or maybe Soros is busy with the Democracy Alliance, the secretive organization of Democratic donors that he helped organized in 2005 and in which he continues to participate. Mayer describes the Alliance as “a group of wealthy liberal donors led by Rob McKay, an heir to the Taco Bell fortune.” That is true, but Mayer does not mention Soros’s involvement in the organization. The ace reporter who exposed the secretive Koch brothers does not even deign to note that the Democracy Alliance refuses to disclose the identities of its members, let alone the organizations that receive their generous financial support. She focuses instead on shoe magnate Arnold Hiatt: “In November, Hiatt asked the President to speak to the group, but Obama declined; the White House said that he was too busy.” Ah, well. I guess that settles it. No Democracy Alliance for Obama.

Except here, too, Mayer omits inconvenient truths. Joe Biden must not be busy at all, because he personally addressed a Democracy Alliance conference in November 2011, a few months before the Alliance made the strategic decision to focus more on electing Democrats to office and less on the utopian cause of the moment. Nor was Obama “too busy” in January of this year, when his motorcade spirited him to the St. Regis hotel near the White House, where he solicited funds at an event organized by McKay and whose attendees, according to Politico, were “mostly alliance members.” Neither solicitation appears in the New Yorker. Indeed, while Mayer goes on at length about McKay, she somehow fails to inform the elite readership of the New Yorker that the gordita-muncher sits on the board of Obama’s own secret money machine, Priorities USA, last seen accusing Mitt Romney of murder.

A similar cognitive blind spot must be responsible for the bizarre way in which Mayer handles Dreamworks CEO and Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of Obama’s biggest supporters and a multi-million-dollar donor to Priorities USA.

Mayer writes: “Katzenberg has been invited to a state dinner at the White House, but he has never met privately with the President.” No, not privately. Just publicly: Are we really to believe Obama had no meaningful interaction with one of his biggest donors during the White House event? Obama has called Katzenberg “an extraordinary friend,” and a “remarkable” man. Why does Mayer not report on the $15 million fundraiser Katzenberg co-sponsored at George Clooney’s home, where the president said,

I want to thank Jeffery not just for this evening but for his tenacious support and advocacy since we started back in 2007. He has just been consistently been there for me through thick and through thin. Sometimes the 2008 campaign gets romanticized and everybody says how perfect it was and I have to remind them, no, I was there. (Laughter.) And the only person I don’t have to remind is Jeffery, because he was there through all the ups and downs.  And occasionally he would call and say, Barack, I don’t think things are working the way they’re supposed to. (Laughter.)  But no matter where we were and what phase we were in, in that campaign, he stuck with us.  And over the last three and a half years he’s remained just an extraordinary friend.

So, Jeffery, thank you for everything you’ve done. (Applause.)

Earlier this year Katzenberg was among the guests at a private luncheon at Vice President Biden’s residence for Xi Jinping, who is presumed to become the next president of China this fall. Katzenberg required Xi’s personal approval for a major deal to open an animation studio in China. Dreamworks, meanwhile, is under investigation by the SEC for its dealings with China. Needless to say, none of this shows up in Mayer’s “report.” …

Andrew Malcolm catches President Narcissist with another jawdropper. Here’s the whole post.

Barack Obama has become accustomed to being the center of attention. For many like him, that’s one of the biggest appeals of politics, the television exposure it attracts and the power that seems to come with that instant recognition and fame. “As Advertised on TV”

When you walk into a room now where pre-screened people have paid sometimes $40,000 just to be in your earthly presence, people stand, heads turns, lips whisper and hands clap. That’s a heady experience, even if you weren’t raised by grandparents because your birth parents chose to be absent. A modest upbringing, it seems, does not guarantee modesty.

Although Obama’s school grades remain sealed secrets, he’s often been told that he’s intelligent and interesting and articulate.

To quote the 20th century American philosopher Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be king!”

Obama was in New York City again last night (yes, money). It seems he wants four more years of attention; never mind the doing nothing. So, he must appear to mingle and recognize and shine his large smile on donor faces.

While others cash the checks because, unexpectedly, Obama’s way behind now in the political popularity contest measured with dollars as the votes. Another reason to dislike that poised former governor fellow, who thanks people.

It’s one thing to play off the fame of Sarah J. Parker and Anna Don’t-Be-Late. In Obama’s world, they’re merely useful. But it’s quite another to be in the presence of Michael Jordan and other NBA brethren, who’ve accomplished real things in their life’s work that Obama could only dream of.

Even though, you know, friends and staff, tell the president that his basketball skills could have taken him well beyond Hawaii gyms.

Anyway, it seems all this struck the president of the United States at the top of his remarks to the Lincoln Center crowd filled with numerous basketball luminaries. He said no, it’s OK, he understands others getting the attention.

He didn’t say anything about liking it:

“It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person. Usually the folks want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. That has not been the case at this event and I completely understand.”

You knew Jennifer Rubin would have at this.

In any White House, it is easy to develop a siege mentality and reject not only criticism but the facts on which that criticism is based. This presidency is particularly susceptible to this malady because of President Obama’s acute narcissism.

Even, or maybe especially, his humor reflects his self-absorption. Where President George W. Bush was self-deprecating, Obama is self-satisfied. That’s how he winds up with cringe-inducing lines such as this at the NBA fundraiser: “It is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.” (He’s not interesting by the way. Clinton was interesting;Obama is drearily predictable.) The comment is so intellectually needy, you wind up admiring Bush and Ronald Reagan, neither of whom would dream of saying such a thing, even in jest. …

James Pethokoukis has the facts to counter the claim that Obama’s ‘recovery’ created more jobs than Reagan’s. That was from Stephanie Cutter. Or is that Gutter?

… Just how do the Obama and Reagan recoveries stack up in terms of jobs?

• From the end of the recession in June 2009 through July 2012 — the first 37 months of the Obama recovery — the U.S. economy has generated 2.7 million net new jobs. From the jobs low point in February 2010, the U.S. economy has generated 4 million net new jobs.

From the end of the 1981-82 recession through the end of 1985 —  the first 37 months of the Reagan recovery — the U.S.created 9.8 million net new jobs. And if you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the comparable figure is more than 12 million jobs. …

John Steele Gordon posts on the CU prediction of Romney romp.

Predicting the outcome of elections is big business. In the early days it was left to political professionals who would rely on their gut instincts to “feel” how  the campaign was developing. This is not dissimilar to Wall Streeters who can “read the tape” to sense which way particular stocks will move. In the mid-20th century scientific polling developed, but with occasional spectacular failures. The Literary Digest poll in 1936 predicted an Alf Landon victory over FDR. Landon carried only Maine and Vermont. Everybody was wrong about the outcome of the 1948 election, epitomized by the picture of a triumphant Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with its premature headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

In recent years, Intrade has allowed people to bet real money on the outcomes of elections, in effect measuring the gut instincts of the many. It currently has Obama’s chances at 57.3 percent and Mitt Romney at 42.3 percent.

And, of course, political science professors try as well to read the tea leaves. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia is probably seen more often on television than other professor. He currently has the race at 237 electoral votes safe, likely, or leaning to Obama, 206 to Romney, with 95 in the tossup category.

Two professors at the University of Colorado, Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, have developed a prediction model based not on polling or gut instincts, but on economic factors in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia:

According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties. . . .

“What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida,” Bickers said.

You can take this for what it’s worth, but I will point out that this model has correctly predicted the outcome for every presidential election beginning in 1980.

Salon notes Indiana pot growers are having a tough summer.

Police say marijuana growing operations in southern Indiana are easy to spot from the air because of the drought.

An airplane pilot guided troopers on the ground through browning forests and corn fields Tuesday to uncover grow sites in Clark, Scott and Harrison counties. The troopers cut down more than 100 marijuana plants.

Sgt. Jerry Goodin tells The Courier-Journal the resilient green marijuana plants “stick out like a sore thumb.”

Trooper Mike Bennett tells The News and Tribune that marijuana can flourish in harsh conditions, pointing out, “It’s not called weed for nothing.”

Bennett says the seized plants will be destroyed once a burn ban is lifted.

He says the owners of property where marijuana grows are rarely arrested, because most “have no idea that it’s growing on their land.”

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Time to look at the Obama presser on Tuesday. The Streetwise Professor Craig Pirrong is first.

If a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds, Obama must be very broad minded indeed, because his policies on Libya and Syria have been wildly inconsistent: the “responsibility to protect” logic that underpinned the Libyan intervention (as equivocal as it was) would certainly justify intervention in Syria.  But Obama has avoided even the suggestion of intervention in Syria like the plague.

Until now.  He has drawn a red line, but in so doing, he sows confusion rather than producing clarity:

Seeking re-election in November, Obama noted that he had refrained “at this point” from ordering U.S. military engagement in Syria. But when he was asked at a White House news conference whether he might deploy forces, for example to secure Syrian chemical and biological weapons, he said his view could change.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” Obama said. “That would change my calculus.”

“A whole bunch of chemical weapons”?  ”A whole bunch”?  Really?  WTF constitutes “a whole bunch”?  Is he saying to Assad that he can move around and use a few chemical weapons, as long as he doesn’t cross the “whole bunch” line?  Wherever that is.

Excuse me while I go pound my head on the floor.

OK.  Back now.

Look.  There is a principle often invoked in foreign policy, and politics generally, of “constructive ambiguity.”

Jennifer Rubin watched also.

In an effort to soothe the increasingly peeved White House press corps, the president appeared in the White House Briefing Room today to take a few questions. It was a remarkably ineffective performance, which the White House must hope that few people watched.

Among other untruths, the president insisted, “Nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon.” Well, other than deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. With regard to his super PAC ad claiming that Mitt Romney, in effect, killed a woman, President Obama maintained, “I don’t think Governor Romney is somehow responsible for the death of the woman that was portrayed in that ad. But keep in mind, this is an ad that I didn’t approve, I did not produce, and as far as I can tell, has barely run. I think it ran once.” Well, except the woman’s husband, Joe Soptic, was trotted out for an Obama campaign press conference.

Even more ludicrous was Obama’s answer on welfare reform. …

Rubin says if Obama’s claims he is not negative were true, he could do the following;

… So what could Obama do if he really wanted to raise the debate? He could fire Stephanie Cutter. (Throwing overboard aides who merely followed directions is a tried-and-true political tactic.) He could denounce the Soptic ad. He could introduce his own reforms on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He could even embrace Simpson-Bowles. It’s not too late for that. Certainly this would dispel the notion that he is unserious about the fiscal debt, is unwilling to take on his own party and is interested only in growing the size of government. He could even undo the damage wrought by his welfare maneuver. (Mickey Kaus has some good suggestions including, “Have Obama argue that the new waivers were justified, but regret that they weren’t adopted with the bipartisan consultation he thinks would produce a reasonable consensus around the need for a modest amount of state-by-state flexibility and experimentation. In keeping with this sentiment, have HHS secretary Sebelius withdraw the rules until they can be negotiated in 2013 with Congressional Republicans, which (Obama can say) will certainly insure that the work requirements are not, in fact, eroded.”)

But I don’t think Obama wants to or is capable of doing any of that. He has spent no time developing farsighted policies, and he is determined to prove that he can turn out his base with fire and brimstone speeches and attack ads. His sycophantic spinners will have to live with that reality. This is precisely the sort of pol whom Obama warned us about in 2008.

Andrew Malcolm says don’t believe this presser was a spur of the moment thing. 

“Looks like there’s a surprise guest here,” said Obama press secretary Jay Carney, sounding not the least bit surprised.

Indeed, his boss took the podium in the White House briefing room Monday to make a statement and then answer a few questions (scroll down for full text). But there was as much surprise to this abbreviated Q&A as the Chicago River turning green on St. Patrick’s Day.

Here’s how it works in this president’s communications strategy:

He hasn’t taken questions from Washington beat reporters in two months. Why? Because he doesn’t want to answer carefully-crafted questions about the economy, the lousy unemployment rates among key sectors of voters like women, blacks and youths, the stunning tastelessness of the ads supporting his candidacy and why he’s fallen so far behind the Republican ticket in recent money-raising. …

Tuesday we gleefully led with Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover piece titled “Hit the Road, Barack.” Well, the left blogosphere went nuts over the Harvard history prof’s treatment of St. Barack. Ferguson doubles down in the Daily Beast. The left crazies are going to wish they left him alone. It is better than his first effort. A nice way to start the weekend.

The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers.

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Lord Macaulay famously wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” But the spectacle of the American liberal blogosphere in one of its almost daily fits of righteous indignation is not so much ridiculous as faintly sinister. Why? Because what I have encountered since the publication of my Newsweek article criticizing President Obama looks suspiciously like an orchestrated attempt to discredit me. 

My critics have three things in common. First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in “fact checking,” whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women’s bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of “legitimate rape.”

Their approach is highly effective, and I must remember it if I ever decide to organize an intellectual witch hunt. What makes it so irksome is that it simultaneously dodges the central thesis of my piece and at the same time seeks to brand me as a liar. The icing on the cake has been the attempt by some bloggers to demand that I be sacked not just by Newsweek but also by Harvard University, where I am a tenured professor. It is especially piquant to read these demands from people who would presumably defend academic freedom in the last ditch—provided it is the freedom to publish opinions in line with their own ideology.

Let me begin by restating my argument. President Obama should be judged on his record in office. In my view, he has not only failed to live up to the high expectations of those who voted for him, but also to the pledges he made in his inaugural address. (In order to be fair, I deliberately did not judge his performance against his campaign pledges.) The economy has performed less well than the White House led us to expect, despite a bigger increase in national debt than it led us to expect (exhibit 1). …

… Now, we come to the third part of the strategy. First, duck the argument. Second, nitpick. Third, vilify.

First prize goes to Berkeley professor Brad DeLong, whose blog opened with the headline “Fire-His-Ass-Now.” “He lied,” rants DeLong. “Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.” My own counter-suggestion would be to convene a committee at Berkeley to examine whether or not Professor DeLong is spending too much of his time blogging when he really should be conducting serious research or teaching his students. For example, why hasn’t Professor DeLong published that economic history of the 20th century he’s been promising for the past six years? It can’t be writer’s block, that’s for sure.

Runner up is James Fallows of The Atlantic for his hilariously pompous post “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize.” Well, as an Oxford alum, I laugh.

In third place comes Krugman with his charge of “unethical commentary … a plain misrepresentation of the facts” requiring “an abject correction.” The idea of getting a lesson from Paul Krugman about the ethics of commentary is almost as funny as Fallows’s apologizing on behalf of Harvard. Both these paragons of the commentariat, by the way, shamelessly accused me of racism three years ago when I drew an innocent parallel between President Obama and “Felix the Cat.” I don’t know of many more unethical tricks than to brand someone who criticizes the president a racist.

And, finally, a consolation prize for righteous indignation goes to Dylan Byers of Politico (“ridiculous, misleading, ethically questionable”).

I could, of course, go on. By tonight there will doubtless be more. The art of the modern witch hunt is to get as many like-minded bloggers as possible to repeat and preferably exaggerate the claims until finally it becomes received opinion that you are on the brink of being fired and indeed deported in chains.

I don’t usually waste time on this kind of thing. In the Internet age, you can spend one week writing a piece and the next three responding to criticism, most of it (as we have seen) worthless.

But there comes a point when you have to ask yourself: has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent’s most ideologically committed supporters?

Now that really would be something to dislike about this country.

So how is Fauxcahontas doing in her campaign in Massachusetts? Michael Graham brings us up to date.

Does Liz Warren really believe that Scott Brown is pro-rape? Or wants to somehow “redefine rape” in a way that would hurt women or benefit racists?

Of course not.

But is Liz Warren willing to smear Scott Brown by suggesting he’d do all this — and more — as part of a “war on women?”

She already has.

The first Massachusetts Senate candidate to denounce Missouri moron Todd Akin was Scott Brown. Liz Warren’s denunciations, along with pretty much the entire Western world’s, soon followed.

Of course Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Scott Brown denounced Akin’s idiocy. There is no “legitimate rape” caucus anywhere in American politics.

“Scott Brown and other Republicans want to pretend Todd Akin is an isolated individual, but he is clearly in line with the Republican agenda,” Warren said in a statement.

And what, according to Warren, is that agenda?

“To limit access to health care. . . to select a vice presidential nominee someone who co-sponsored legislation with Rep. Akin to ‘redefine rape,’ ” Warren says.

Got that, ladies? Forget Brown’s record, forget his denunciation of this Akin dope, forget how he’s actually lived his entire life: Scott Brown hates women! He’s soft on rape! Run before he molests you himself!

This is how low Liz Warren is willing to go, how much of her own dignity she’s willing to destroy, just to — as her campaign put it in a fundraising mailer — “win back Ted Kennedy’s seat.”

Ah, yes, Ted Kennedy. The exemplar of the virtuous treatment of women . . .

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James Pethokoukis reacts to the claim by some hack that Paul Ryan is not serious.

Paul Krugman attacks Paul Ryan as an “unserious man” because, as Krugman does the math, the Ryan budget plan doesn’t add up. Using Tax Policy Center data, Krugman says Ryan’s tax reform would lose $4.3 trillion over the next decade while his budget cuts would only save $1.7 trillion. “Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars,” Krugman writes in his New York Times column today.

Now let’s recall that referring to this budget, the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the following:

As with last year’s budget, Chairman Ryan deserves a lot of credit for his proposals to get spending under control over the long-term. Even taking out any claimed savings from no doc fixes and leaving in the sequester, the House Republican budget still looks better than most other prominent plans out there by putting debt on a clear downward path — a very encouraging element of the plan.

But that’s an appeal to authority. Let appeal to math and economics instead. …

Commenter on Ace of Spades Blog lets fly.

As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn’t sign up for this shit. Y’all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.

I have seen more owners get out of the business or retire in the past couple of years than ever before and with the ACA on the horizon the jobs these businesses produced will not be replaced. The economics no longer work. This is why unemployment is always so high in socialist countries. What you have to go through to have employees is just brutal.

But here’s the thing about what Obama said — he has it exactly backwards. The government didn’t build any of that shit he is talking about — we built it. We are the ones who paid for it. Not only did we build our businesses we built the schools and the roads and everything else he thinks was generated out of thin air. If you want to get technical about it the businesses and taxpayers that came along before we did built it all and now we are building what comes next.

And not only that, but we did it with the albatross of a predatory, corrupt and overbearing government hanging around our necks at every juncture.

And now we have had enough.

I haven’t made more than $50k from my business but one or two years of the past 15. But now that it is time to cash out after providing literally hundreds of jobs I get the stink eye and get castigated for being a member of the 1%. Even though I can remember sitting on the edge of the bed and holding my head in my hands wondering what I had done risking everything I had to create a business and wondering how it would all work out when I had just finished working several days in a row with no sleep…

Breitbart post on how Valerie Jarrett runs the government.

During a presentation at the Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council” in November 2011, Democrat Erskine Bowles placed blame for the failure of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform on a “cabal” of Chicago politicians surrounding President Obama. Bowles said the group convinced Obama to stand aside and let Rep. Paul Ryan lead the way on budget reform in order to gain a political advantage over Republicans.

In November 2011, The Wall Street Journal assembled over 100 CEOs of top companies to hear from political leaders on a range of financial topics. There were dozens of featured speakers from both sides of the aisle including Eric Cantor, Timothy Geithner, Jon Huntsman, Jack Lew, Paul Ryan and both co-chairs of the Simpson Bowles commission. During their presentation, the two men were asked why their recommendations were not adopted or advanced by the President.

Bob Reynolds, Putnam Investments: Your presidential commission delivered your report in December. How surprised were you that your commission gave the president tremendous coverage to do something, and it wasn’t even mentioned in the State of the Union?

Erskine Bowles: If you think you were surprised, you should have looked at us. I negotiated the budget for President Clinton. And every investment banker will tell you the key to success is knowing your client and defining success up front. So, I knew what success was on his part, and I could go in there and negotiate the deal. I did not know President Obama, and neither did Alan. So, we spent a tremendous amount of time with him and his economic team up front defining success. And we negotiated a deal that got a majority of Republicans to vote for it, so he had plenty of cover on the other side. It also exceeded every single one of the goals that he had given us. I fully expected them to grab hold of this. If it had been President Clinton, he would have said, “God, I created this, this is wonderful. It was all my idea.” So we were really surprised.

My belief is that most of the members of the economic team strongly supported it. Like every White House, there’s a small cabal of people that surround the president that he trusts and works with, and I believe it was those Chicago guys, the political team that convinced him that it would be smarter for him to wait and let Paul Ryan go first, and then he would look like the sensible guy in the game. …

John Podhoretz on Todd Akin.

On Sunday, a six-term Congressman from Missouri running as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate went on a newsmaker program and, in defense of his pro-life views, reported that doctors say the body of a woman who has suffered a “legitimate rape” will somehow contrive to prevent a pregnancy: “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The moral, intellectual, and spiritual ignoramus who spoke those words is Todd Akin. He won the Missouri primary two weeks ago in a three-way race against two other conservatives, taking 36 percent of the vote—his two major rivals together won about 60 percent. He was supported in his bid by, among others, the Democrats who believed he would be the weakest candidate to face incumbent Claire McCaskill, widely viewed as the most vulnerable incumbent running for Senate this year. They ran ads attacking his rivals and helped him prevail.

Smart move. Akin is likely to join a list of Republican primary winners who have seized defeat from the jaws of victory …

In Contentions, Bethany Mandel says the Akin/Biden flaps highlight the difference between the parties.

This month two prominent politicians have said remarkably stupid things: Vice President Joe Biden warned that Republicans were going to put a largely black crowd “back into chains” and the Republican running for the Missouri Senate said that women who experienced “legitimate rape” could naturally prevent pregnancy. Both statements were incredibly stupid, even for politicians, and were the definition of offensive; but the responses of each party highlights their differences quite clearly. …

How about something important? Cincinnati Reds have a rabbit in the minors who’ll come to the Show in 2014 or maybe late 2013. In the meantime the NY Times says Billy Hamilton’s making waves.

… Tales of Hamilton’s incredible speed are collected and passed around the lower levels of the game the way folks used to tell stories of the great Negro leagues speedster Cool Papa Bell, who was said to be so fast he could hit a grounder through the box and be hit by the ball as he slid into second base.

In Bakersfield, Calif., Hamilton scored on a sacrifice fly — to the second baseman. He also scored from third when the catcher threw to first to complete a strikeout. In high school, Hamilton once made a fine running catch on the warning track. Not so unusual, except he was playing shortstop at the time.

If feats of prodigious strength are considered Bunyonesque, then deeds featuring incredible speed must be considered Hamiltonian.

“He did something every day that made me raise my eyebrows,” said Delino DeShields, the former Montreal Expos speedster who managed Hamilton at Dayton in 2011, when Hamilton stole a mere 103 bases.

When Hamilton strolls languidly to the plate, the whole ballpark takes note. Infielders move in, knowing they will have to hurry throws to get Hamilton on a grounder. Fans sit up straight. Even the broadcasters pay closer attention.

“The phrase I use is ‘heightened sense of awareness,’ ” said the Pensacola radio announcer Tommy Thrall, who has had to adjust to the buzz Hamilton provides with every at-bat.

During a recent inside-the-park homer hit by Hamilton, Thrall looked to second to spot the dashing player, only to find “he was already rounding third.”

Hamilton grew up in Taylorsville, Miss., roughly midway between Jackson and Hattiesburg. A superb all-around athlete, he nearly went to Mississippi State in the Southeastern Conference to play wide receiver, until his mother stepped in.

“That’s her baby, and she had seen those big dudes in the SEC,” said Hamilton, who talks almost as fast as he runs.

The Reds picked Hamilton, who taught himself to switch-hit upon joining the organization, in the second round of the 2009 draft. While he has fulfilled his promise on the basepaths, Hamilton has also been steady at the plate, hitting .303 through Sunday. He is purely a slap hitter at this stage — of his 40 hits with Pensacola, all but nine have been singles — but makes up for it with patience and a good eye at the plate, and his walk totals have added about 100 points to his on-base percentage, which is .406. He is on track to join the major league club by 2014. …

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Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom write on photo-ID laws.

Without a personal identification card issued by some level of government, you are a second-class citizen. You cannot board an airplane, ride an Amtrak train, buy a six-pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes, open a checking account, enter many public and some private office buildings or even attend an NAACP convention without proving that you are who you say you are. You cannot even qualify for means-tested public support programs such as Medicaid without valid identification.

These requirements have provoked strikingly little objection from the American public. No one argues that it is grossly discriminatory to deprive people without picture IDs access to this wide range of places, programs and activities.

But when it comes to voting, that is exactly the argument. The Democratic Party, the attorney general of the United States and a vocal chorus from the civil rights community are waging war on voter photo ID laws enacted recently in 10 states, laws they see as part of a new voter suppression movement.

In their view, measures ostensibly designed to limit the franchise to people who are U.S. citizens and legal residents of the jurisdiction in which they seek to vote have the real purpose of disfranchising poor people in general and especially poor African Americans and Latinos.

The charge leveled against photo ID requirements has a particularly nasty echo: …

John Fund says photo-ID laws have found favor with the public.

… The basic problem that opponents of photo-ID laws have is that the American people reject their view that these laws are a tool of voter suppression. The American people view these laws as common sense. In a time when everyone needs ID to buy Sudafed at a drug store, purchase beer, travel by plane or even train, cash a check, enter a federal building, or apply for welfare benefits or a marriage license, showing ID at the polls doesn’t strike the average person as burdensome.

In a new Washington Post poll, a majority in all but one of 37 demographic groups responded in the affirmative to the following question: “In your view, should voters in the United States be required to show official, government-issued photo identification — such as a driver’s license — when they cast ballots on election day, or shouldn’t they have to do this?” The sole exception among demographic groups was liberal Democrats, who gave the idea 48 percent support.

Among all adults, 74 percent supported photo ID, as did 76 percent of independents and even 60 percent of Democrats. Sixty-five percent of blacks and 64 percent of Hispanics backed requiring ID at the polls. Those who lack a high-school degree — the demographic whose members are probably the most likely not to be able to afford an ID –  registered 76 percent support.

The Post also asked those surveyed if they believed the supporters and opponents of voter-ID laws were acting out of genuine concern for fair elections, or that they were trying to gain some partisan advantage. Respondents were more likely to say that the opponents of these laws had political motivations than to say that proponents did. …

David Harsanyi counters 5 Dem Ryan complaints.

By naming Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket, Mitt Romney offered Democrats an opportunity to reject demagoguery and engage in a serious intellectual debate about the future.

Or so says conventional media wisdom. To this point, however, no such luck. The path of least political resistance, it seems, is to scaremonger the electorate with half-truths and outright lies. Mitt Romney might be running on his own budget—though he has embraced many of the components of the Ryan plan—but that hasn’t stopped Democrats.

1.  No, the Ryan budget isn’t extreme

Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager, who, among countless partisans has probably never actually read Ryan’s budgets, calls his plans “radical.”

A common distortion was forwarded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who not only claims that Ryan’s budget “would kill people, no question,” but that Ryan’s plan would “cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge.” Life under Calvin Coolidge–high growth, low taxation and peace–is nothing to sneeze at, but Ryan’s plan, alas, would only bring non-military discretionary spending back to 2008 levels. It would cut subsidies and federal bureaucracy by 10 percent and reform compensation plans of federal employees. …

Foreign Policy has a piece on the poor living conditions in China’s cities.

… Why are Chinese cities so monolithic? The answer lies in the country’s fractured history. In the 1930s, China was a failed state: Warlords controlled large swaths of territory, and the Japanese had colonized the northeast. Shanghai was a foreign pleasure den, but life expectancy hovered around 30. Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities largely governed themselves. When Mao Zedong unified China in 1949, much of the country was in ruins, and his Communist Party rebuilt it under a unifying theme. Besides promulgating a single language and national laws, they subscribed to the Soviet idea of what a city should be like: wide boulevards, oppressively squat, functional buildings, dormitory-style housing. Cities weren’t conceived of as places to live, but as building blocks needed to build a strong and prosperous nation; in other words, they were constructed for the benefit of the party and the country, not the people.

Even today, most Chinese cities feel like they were cobbled together from a Soviet-era engineering textbook. China’s fabled post-Mao liberal reforms meant that the country’s cities grew wealthier, but not that much more distinct from each other. Beijing has changed almost beyond recognition since Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, but to see what Beijing looked like in the past, visit a less developed part of China: Malls in Xian, a regional hub in central China famous for its row upon row of grimacing terracotta warriors, look like the shabby pink structures that used to dot western Beijing. Yes, China’s cities are booming, but there’s a depressing sameness to what you find in even the newest of new boomtowns. Consider the checklist of “hot” new urban features itemized in a 2007 article in the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, including obligatory new “development zones” (sprawling corporate parks set up to attract foreign direct investment), public squares, “villa” developments for the nouveau riche, large overlapping highways, and, of course, a new golf course or two for the bosses. The cookie-cutter approach is such that even someone like Zhou Deci, former director of the ChineseAcademy of Urban Planning and Design, told the paper he has difficulty telling Chinese cities apart.

This model of endless fractal Beijings wouldn’t be so bad if the city itself were charming, but it is a dreary expanse traversed by unwalkable highways, punctuated by military bases, government offices, and other closed-off spaces, with undrinkable tap water and poisonous air that’s sometimes visible, in yellow or gray. And so are its lesser copies across the country’s 3.7 million square miles, from Urumqi in the far west to Shenyang way up north. For all their economic success, China’s cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live. …

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Writing for Newsweek, Niall Ferguson says Barack has to go.

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits. …

… I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.

It remains to be seen if the American public is ready to embrace the radical overhaul of the nation’s finances that Ryan proposes. The public mood is deeply ambivalent. The president’s approval rating is down to 49 percent. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is at minus 28 (down from minus 13 in May). But Obama is still narrowly ahead of Romney in the polls as far as the popular vote is concerned (50.8 to 48.2) and comfortably ahead in the Electoral College. The pollsters say that Paul Ryan’s nomination is not a game changer; indeed, he is a high-risk choice for Romney because so many people feel nervous about the reforms Ryan proposes.

But one thing is clear. Ryan psychs Obama out. This has been apparent ever since the White House went on the offensive against Ryan in the spring of last year. And the reason he psychs him out is that, unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country.

Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.

The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.

Or they can opt for real change: the kind of change that will end four years of economic underperformance, stop the terrifying accumulation of debt, and reestablish a secure fiscal foundation for American national security.

I’ve said it before: it’s a choice between les États Unis and the Republic of the Battle Hymn.

I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win.

Charles Krauthammer says Romney’s Ryan pick has charted the course of the GOP for decades.

… And while Romney is the present, Ryan is the future. Romney’s fate will be determined on Nov. 6. Ryan’s presence, assuming he acquits himself well in the campaign, will extend for decades.

Ryan’s importance is enhanced by his identity as a movement conservative. Reagan was the first movement leader in modern times to achieve the presidency. Like him, Ryan represents a new kind of conservatism for his time.

Reagan rejected the moderate accommodationism represented by Gerald Ford, the sitting president Reagan nearly overthrew in 1976. Ryan represents a new constitutional conservatism of limited government and individual opportunity that carried Republicans to victory in 2010, not just as a rejection of Obama’s big-government hyper-liberalism but also as a significant departure from the philosophically undisciplined, idiosyncratically free-spending “compassionate conservatism” of Obama’s Republican predecessor.

Ryan’s role is to make the case for a serious approach to structural problems — a hardheaded, sober-hearted conservatism that puts to shame a reactionary liberalism that, with Greece in our future, offers handouts, bromides and a 4.6 percent increase in tax rates.

If Ryan does it well, win or lose in 2012, he becomes a dominant national force. Mild and moderate Mitt Romney will have shaped the conservative future for years to come.

The cunning of history. Or if you prefer, its sheer capriciousness.

Steve Hayward says the Dems are losing it again.

One way in which this election is starting to resemble the 1980 election is that Democrats are starting to lose their grip and lash out in ways that even the mainstream media find over the top—like TV ads calling Romney a murderer, or Slow Joe Biden letting fly with the maxed-out race card.  Today one of MSNBC’s commentators, Toure (I guess he doesn’t have a first name?) charged Romney with the “niggerization” of Obama.  Not even Ron Burgundy could say “stay classy liberals” with a straight face at this point.

In the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter’s wild charges that Ronald Reagan was a racist backfired badly on him, and propelled the media to start writing about Carter’s “meanness” factor (which had been there all along to anyone who followed Carter’s Georgia career closely).

A few samples from a certain great book (that everyone needs to have on their bookshelf):

The liberal columnist Richard Reeves wrote: “The Carter campaign is as mean-spirited as any you’ll see in American politics.  Where this meanness comes from is obvious to anyone who has watched Carter’s rise to the Presidency and the attempts to keep him there—it comes from the top, from Jimmy Carter.”  …

David Harsanyi on why the GOP might win the Medicare debate. 

You can crunch the numbers all day long, but in politics it’s perception that matters.

And though it’s still early, Republicans have a chance to turn the Medicare debate into a political advantage (or a wash,  which is as good as a win). The conventional thinking, the media thinking, and actually, the thinking (if we’re to believe Politico) of the entire hand-wringing GOP establishment, was that Paul Ryan’s vice presidential candidacy would make Medicare an issue and surely sink the ticket. Democrats, we were told in story after story, were just giddy over the prospect of facing the Wisconsin congressman.

The debate hasn’t exactly evolved the way we were told it should. Why?

One: It’s possible that voters have already priced-in the hysterical warnings from liberals about the GOP’s intent to destroy all entitlements. They’ve heard it all a million times, yet the programs’ price tag continue to grow exponentially, and often under Republican rule. Add to that increasing numbers of Americans who believe that Medicare is unsustainable and the issue has probably lost some potency for Democrats.

Two: …

Andrew Malcolm says the prez had a rocky trip in Iowa.

President Obama was back in Iowa for several days this past week. He has winning memories there. But the fact that an incumbent president feels it necessary to invest three of only 79 precious remaining days there says how close the presidential race now is.

Obama’s experienced advance team had a bunch of flubs. That farm family with all the windmills that President Quixote loves to laud turns out to be Republicans and informed reporters after Obama’s visit that he sure wasn’t getting their votes this time.

There was the state fair beer tent where Obama bought a round of Bud Lights for everyone, except the guy with the Mitt Romney sign. Great summertime photo op. Except it turns out the Secret Service closed down the guy’s tent long before Obama’s arrival and the small business owner lost thousands in sales.

Then there was the caterer who wore a “Government Didn’t Build My Business” T-shirt to work the president’s event. Our friend Tom Bevan at the must-read RealClearPolitics has all the details here.

But the moment that sticks out in our mind was something that didn’t happen during the president’s Iowa trip. …

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Noemie Emery says with their record of prognostication, it is a good sign the Dems are pleased with the Ryan pick.

Liberal pundits, liberals, the Obama machine and Obama himself all call Paul Ryan a disastrous pick for vice president. That looks like a good sign for the Mitt Romney ticket, given the multiple records Team Obama has set since 2009 for making bad forecasts, losing elections and in general getting things wrong.

They said Obama was a transformational leader who was about to ring in the next great liberal era; that the conservative movement was dead for the next quarter-century; and that the Democratic majority, “emerging” since the late 1990s, was now finally being born. They said a crisis was a bad thing to waste, and instead they got wasted. They said a crisis would make people turn to the state, but they turned against it. They said the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8 percent and voters would love it. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40-plus months in succession, and voters did not.

They said people would come to love health care (they didn’t), and that people wouldn’t resent or remember the way that they’d passed it (they did). They said the Tea Party was “Astroturf,” “racist” and would destroy the Republican Party. But it was authentic; it embraced and elected blacks, Hispanics and women; it gave the GOP a bumper crop of magnetic new leaders and led it to a succession of wins.

Meanwhile, Obama lost both his touch and his bearings, and every campaign he came near. He couldn’t sell the stimulus or health care to voters. He campaigned for Creigh Deeds (blown away by Bob McDonnell), for Jon Corzine (blown away by Chris Christie) and for Martha Coakley (blown away by Scott Brown.) His party was blown away in the 2010 midterms, losing the House and many statehouses, whose occupants began turning right. …

Roger Simon says this was the week of the dumb Democrat.

This is the week when Democrats have sounded dumb — or hard of hearing.

I’m not just talking about Joe Biden, who always seems that way, or Maureen Dowd, who yesterday opined Paul Ryan was the smiliest (read: most attractive) politician to be so “cruel.” We can put that down to projection on the part of Ms. Dowd, who has made her living for the better part of thirty years now by being cruel to as many people as possible.

No, I’m talking about Democrats in general who are doing their best to misunderstand everything Paul Ryan says or has said, so that they don’t have to acknowledge that he might make sense (or that he had a Democratic co-sponsor for his budget plan they continually excoriate as “radical” without delineating what it is). That way they also don’t have to admit that they don’t have a plan of their own to deal with the imminent entitlement collapse or anything else budgetary for that matter and that their ideology is in such a rapid decline that no one publicly supports it any more. …

Ed Morrissey says Romney’s Ryan bet has already paid off.

When Mitt Romney announced that Rep. Paul Ryan, the sometimes-controversial chair of the House Budget Committee would be his running mate, the media reaction was one of surprise.  Most gave Romney credit for boldness, which by itself contrasted with the received wisdom of Romney as a conservative-in-strategy, risk-averse politician.  The New York Daily News, not exactly known for its conservative point of view, called the selection a “boldly clarifying jolt,” while Bloomberg’s editors  praised Romney for “audacity.”  Both newspapers in Tampa, Florida, where Republicans will hold their convention and in the state where the election may well be decided, called the choice of Ryan “surprisingly bold” and “a powerful statement.”

That’s not to say that the media failed to notice the risks of being “bold.”  Most of the analysis focused on how Romney had put at risk swing states like Florida and Ohio by choosing a man best known for his plan to reform entitlement programs, which would scare seniors away from the Republican ticket.  Others wondered why Romney would risk distracting attention from jobs and the economy to make Medicare – a reliable Democratic issue – the main focus of the election.  Surely this would allow Barack Obama to take the high road, analysts concluded, and engage in a fight over the very vision of the American system of government, a fight Romney would almost certainly lose.

In other words, Romney took a big gamble with Ryan in two ways – in betting that Obama wouldn’t take the challenge for a substantive debate, and that voters will know the difference.  A few days later, it’s clear that Romney won the first bet, and is at least ahead on the second. …

Yuval Levin says Obamacare has changed everything.

… President Obama has put Democrats in the position of being the party that seeks to cut current seniors’ benefits (especially those in Medicare Advantage) and access to care (thanks to the IPAB) while still allowing the program to collapse in the coming years and so watching the deficit explode and bringing on fiscal disaster. And Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put the Republicans in the position of being the party that wants to protect current seniors’ benefits and make them available to future seniors while still saving the program from collapse in the coming years and so dramatically reducing the deficit and averting fiscal disaster.

Whether you’re now a senior and concerned about your health coverage, are younger and worry if you’ll have affordable coverage when you retire, or are most concerned about the nation’s fiscal health and economic future, the Democrats offer you a very bad deal on Medicare and the Republicans offer you a good one.

The Democrats still don’t see that, and think that turning to Medicare in the wake of Ryan’s selection will yield great political rewards. Perhaps Romney and Ryan should inform them of how the two parties actually stand on the issue. And they might think about informing some voters as well.

CBS affiliate in Roanoke tells us about the bakery owner who told the Vice President to take a hike.

Would you say no to the Vice President?

One New RiverValley business owner turned Vice President Joe Biden down. To see video of the story, click here.

This might happen more than you think from both political parties, most businesses just don’t talk about it. The owner of “Crumb and Get It” – did.

Chris McMurray’s bakery has been open only since May, barely three months.

Wednesday morning, advance teams for Vice President Joe Biden walked in. …

The Secret Service liked what they heard about the bakery.

Secret Service officers associated with Vice President Joe Biden bought a pile of cupcakes from the baker who refused to host Biden at his shop — and they did so out of gratitude.

It’s a startling news nugget at the bottom of a local report. “[S]hortly after Crumb and Get It told Biden’s advance people ‘no’ — the secret service walked in and told [owner] Chris McMurray ”Thanks for standing up and saying ‘no’ — then they bought a whole bunch of cookies and cupcakes,” according to the Valley Reporter (Va.).

McMurray refused to host the Biden entourage as a protest of Obama’s comment, made in the nearby town of Roanoke, that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”

The Secret Service’s purchase proved to be a herald of things to come, as Virginia locals rewarded McMurray with a rush of business this morning. The bakery ran out of food by 1:15 pm.

The Roanoke Times summed it up.

… Gary Harris, a Vietnam War veteran and commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 776 who lives in Radford, said he picked up some “freedom cookies” to support Crumb and Get It. Like Moore, it was his first visit to the bakery.

“He spoke up for what he believed in,” Harris said. “I heard somewhere that it may help or hurt his business. He shouldn’t be penalized for speaking his opinion, I’m going to help him out all I can.”

Ron Witt, an insurance agent from Pearisburg, said, “I saw the story on television and I thought, I have to stop by and support these people … It’s not political at all. It’s more a matter of principle. He just stood up for himself. It doesn’t have anything to do with the current administration or politics, at least for me.”

Eddie Boes of Blacksburg got the last batch of cookies before Crumb and Get It ran out of dough. Like Witt, Boes said he wanted to support a local businessman’s right to speak his mind.

“It’s a matter of not being afraid of the pressure,” Boes said. “A lot of people aren’t going to say what they think because they’re worried about retribution.”

But Boes said that because McMurray took a stand for his beliefs, he’s being rewarded with much more support from customers than he would have if he’d agreed to play host to Biden for a photo opportunity.

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John Fund says Joe Biden shows the White House has a tiger by the tail.

… The White House has to worry that for the next 82 days Joe Biden will be under tremendous scrutiny — especially given the fact that Paul Ryan has become such a media-attention magnet. Everyone is anticipating the October 11 debate between Biden and Ryan. Biden’s penchant for off-the-cuff remarks doesn’t inspire confidence that he won’t unintentionally blurt something out when facing Ryan. For example, he embarrassed the Obama administration recently by prematurely revealing he was “comfortable” with gay marriage — forcing his boss to suddenly endorse gay marriage on a timetable not of his choosing.

Biden’s erratic statements certainly should make Team Obama nervous. I’ve no doubt that some Democratic strategists would love for Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to swap jobs and bolster the Democratic ticket with a little Clinton magic. But there’s no evidence that Hillary would take that deal. If she wants to run, she is already the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination and would gain no advantage by being yoked to Obama, her old adversary, for the next three months if they lost or the next four years if they won.

So Democrats are stuck with Old Joe, who will turn 70 this November. It’s said that few people vote for a presidential ticket based on who is filling the No. 2 slot. But some do, and they may matter in a very close race. It’s likely that by the time this campaign ends, a lot of people will be more nervous about Joe Biden being a heartbeat away from the presidency than about Paul Ryan.

Joe Biden was the subject of Doug Wilder’s appearance on Neil Cavuto. Daily Caller has the story.

On the Wednesday broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” former Democratic Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder told Vice President Joe Biden: “Slavery is nothing to joke about.”

Wilder, who was the first black American governor since Reconstruction, referred to Biden’s remarks on Tuesday from Danville, Va., calling the rhetoric divisive.

“Well, first of all it is divisive and certainly uncalled for,” Wilder said. “I don’t think the Obama administration needs that at this time. And, as you know, I have not been the most strong supporter of Joe Biden. And yet, we all know he’s gaffe-prone. But when you make a statement that says ‘They are going to put y’all back in chains,’ which means ‘I’m OK — not going to happen to me.’” …

Clive Crook in a column on the Ryan selection put Biden in his place. The rest of the column was not that good and is not included here since we’re respectful of your time.

… So the risk in having a veep-to-be who makes a big impression, good or bad, is mostly on the downside. That’s why it’s traditional to look for a Joe Biden. …

John Kass sees the bigger Biden picture.

… Should Hillary Clinton come to Obama’s rescue? Why should she? When she and Obama faced off for the 2008 presidential nomination, Clinton and her husband, the former president, had the race card played against them by Team Obama. Bill had dared to suggest that Obama’s Democratic primary victory in South Carolina was similar to past victories there by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. For daring to state the obvious, the Clintons were savaged. Bill Clinton said it was Obama’s campaign that injected the race issue.

“I think that they played the race card on me,” a still furious Clinton said in a radio interview after the campaign was over. “And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything, that they planned to do it all along. I was stating a fact, and it’s still a fact.”

For all his vulgarity and faux-preacher dialect and smarmy pol tricks in Virginia, Biden showed the American people what they can expect from the Obama campaign in the months ahead. And he distilled the Obama re-election effort down to its basic elements:

Class war and race.

Y’all.

Good column from Debra Saunders on the Ryan pick.

… Last year, Newt Gingrich dismissed the Ryan plan as “right-wing social engineering,” then took back his words. Romney said he was “on the same page” as Ryan from the start. That’s not exactly a profile in courage, but in this weak-kneed political climate, it passes for fiscal responsibility.

Biden described the Ryan pick as giving “definition to the vague commitments Romney has made.” I think he’s right.

We know how Romney won the GOP primary game. He was disciplined. He was skilled. He was better than bumbling opponents. He wooed the base with his mantra of tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts.

The general election is a tougher contest. Obama and Biden are pros at promising something for nothing. They’ve convinced their base that the federal government can keep growing, and in a fiscally responsible way, if only Republicans would let them tax the top 2 percent of income earners just a little bit more.

Romney can’t beat the Democratic ticket at that game, but he can beat them by being the adult in the room. In picking the spending-cut-minded Ryan as his running mate, Romney has become more credible.

Thomas Sowell on the choice for voters.

… This election is a test, not just of the opposing candidates but of the voting public. If what they want are the hard facts about where the country is, and where it is heading, they cannot vote for more of the same for the next four years.

But, if what they want is emotionally satisfying rhetoric and a promise to give them something for nothing, to be paid for by taxing somebody else, then Obama is their man. This is not to say that the public will in fact get something for nothing or that rich people will just pay higher taxes, when it is easy for them to escape taxation by investing overseas — creating jobs overseas.

Even if most Americans do not have their own taxes raised, that means little, if they end up paying other people’s taxes in the higher prices of goods and services that pass along the higher taxes imposed on businesses.

There are no doubt voters who will vote on the basis of believing that Obama “cares” more about them. But that is a faith which passeth all understanding. The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who “care,” has ruined many a nation.

Kimberley Strassel on the VP pick. 

Mitt Romney did much more this weekend than announce a running mate. He unveiled a significant change in strategy. The 2012 election is now a choice, not just a referendum.

Conservatives have spent much of this summer reassuring themselves. They’ve pointed out the extraordinary sums President Obama has thrown at crippling Mr. Romney. They’ve noted how ugly and brutal those attacks have been. They’ve comforted themselves that, for all the smears, Mr. Romney is within a few points of the incumbent in national tracking polls.

Yet the same can be said on the other side. The economy is teetering, the deficit exploding, the nation unhappy with his signature legislation. Daily, Mr. Romney beats the White House with these failures. But he has barely moved the polling dial.

Mr. Romney’s choice of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, one of the party’s star reformers, is an attempt to break out of the stalemate, change the dynamic. It was foremost a shrewd acknowledgment on Mr. Romney’s part that his path to the White House is going to take more than pointing out the obvious. He needs to run on bold ideas, as Mr. Ryan has, and convince Americans those ideas are the way to prosperity. …

Fred Barnes on the Medicare trap set by the GOP.

President Obama and the Democrats have been ambushed. They blindly walked into the political trap Republicans set for them on Medicare.

Democratic strategists were certain that, with Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket, Medicare had become a better issue than ever for them. How do we know this? Democrats said so.

Ryan is the author of a Medicare reform plan that Democrats insist would “end Medicare as we know it.” That’s their mantra. Mitt Romney, who picked Ryan as his vice presidential running mate last week, has a similar plan of his own.

It didn’t occur to Democrats that Republicans might have devised, tested, and were ready to deliver a response that would put Democrats on the defensive. It’s a double whammy in which Obama and Democrats are held responsible for cutting Medicare spending and using the money to pay for the president’s unpopular health care plan, Obamacare.

Moving quickly, the Romney campaign packaged that two-step response into a crisp, 30-second TV ad that began being aired yesterday.  The campaign plans a large buy with the ad, particularly in swing states. …

Bret Stephens paid attention to one of Paul Ryan’s speeches on foreign policy.

… Most foreign-policy speeches by American politicians take the form of untidy piles of verities and clichés. Here, for example, is Barack Obama on China: “As we look to the future, what’s needed, I believe, is a spirit of cooperation that is also friendly competition.” Here he is on the U.N.: “The United Nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated differences or forge common ground.” Here he is to the British Parliament: “The time for our leadership is now.”

Mr. Ryan doesn’t have the president’s reputation for eloquence. Nor do his speeches ride on the windy drafts of “Yes We Can.” But unlike Mr. Obama, his speeches communicate ideas and arguments, not pieties and emotions.

Thus this speech begins not with a cliché but with a contention: “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course.” It proceeds, briefly, to demonstrate the point quantitatively: Defense spending in 1970 consumed 39% of the federal budget but takes only 16% today. In the proverbial guns-to-butter ratio, our veins are already clogged.

Next there is history. Why can’t the U.S. simply cede the cumbersome role of world policeman to somebody else? Didn’t Britain do as much in the 1940s? It did. Yet, “unlike Britain, which handed leadership to a power that shared its fundamental values, today’s most dynamic and growing powers do not embrace basic principles that should be at the core of the international system.”

That’s not a novel insight, exactly, but it’s something that needs to be said and is said only rarely. Similarly with Mr. Ryan’s next point: American exceptionalism isn’t a type of jingoism. Instead, it derives from the fact that it was the first nation born of an idea, and from an idea that is true not only for Americans. “America’s foundations,” he says, “are not our own—they belong equally to every person everywhere.” …

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Rare liberal media kudos for Romney. This from Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal.

Watching Mitt Romney on the campaign trail this weekend after he tapped Paul Ryan as his running mate, it was hard not to be struck by how significantly the candidate’s message and delivery improved.   Romney was newly energized, almost sounding like an evangelist preacher as he preached the merits of capitalism and the free market.   His rhetoric was sharp and specific as he contrasted his policy vision with that of President Obama’s.  With Ryan, he looked confident in his sit-down interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer.  It was as if the ghost of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie entered the cautious, often-awkward pol’s body, to great effect.   (Indeed, like Christie, he even challenged a heckler at last night’s event in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.)

This is the type of change that’s very tough to measure in even the best polls and focus groups.  Romney overruled his top consultants in picking Ryan; they wanted him to go with a more cautious choice, like Tim Pawlenty.  But Romney clearly felt a kinship with the younger Ryan, and the chemistry was undeniable on their first couple of days on the campaign trail.  Romney felt unshackled, and felt free to play to his biggest political asset — a fiscal conservatism that’s been the one consistent hallmark of his career, from working at Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Olympics to his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. …

… Even Christie, known as the blunt political truth-teller to his fans in New Jersey, was a much more cautious pol when he ran against Gov. Jon Corzine in 2009.  Indeed, his campaign was rapped for not offering specific plans, resorting to anti-incumbent generalities.  It wasn’t until he was elected that he developed his persona as a straight-talking reformer.   In a sense, Romney is one-upping Christie, and placing the even riskier bet that calling for major changes is a political winner in the middle of a heated presidential race.  High-risk, high-reward, indeed.

Mark Steyn on the money wasted by Barack Obama.

… There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America’s future, and left no more trace than if he and his high school “choom gang” had wheeled a barrow of five trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called “unfunded liabilities” that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but from which U.S. Government accounting conveniently absolves itself, and you’re talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain bike store. … There’s nothing holding the joint up.

Hmm. “There’s nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012″: How’s that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly “Morning in America,” is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here’s a headline from The Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” this very week: “More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.” Maybe that’s the slogan. “It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt.”

Half the country is entirely unaware of the existential threat Obama-sized government represents, and Mitt seems in no hurry to alert them to what’s at stake, save for occasional warnings that if we’re not careful America will end up like Europe. We should be so lucky. The more-likely scenario is something closer to the more corrupt and decrepit fiefdoms of Latin America. Look at the underlying assumptions of the Mitt-gives-you-cancer ad – that in America a businessman is somehow responsible not only for his employee’s health, but that of the employee’s family members years after said employee has left said employ. No Euro-socialist would even understand the basis of the attack: In its assumptions about the ever-more-tortuous and farther-flung burdens the state can place upon private business, it is quintessentially American.

This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral. …Obama has spent the past four years making things worse. More debt, more dependency, more delusion. For Act Two, he’s now touting the auto bailout as a model for … everything! “I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” In the past three years, he has “created” 2.6 million new jobs – a number that does not even keep up with the number of (legal) immigrants who arrive each month. Obama does not “create” jobs, he creates disabled people: In the same period as 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers, 3.1 million signed on at the Social Security Disability Office. Obama is the first president in history to create more disabled people than workers. He is the biggest creator of disabled people on the planet. He has disabled more people than the Japanese tsunami. More Americans have been disabled by Obama than have been given cancer by Mitt Romney. …

 

Andrew Malcolm reports on the president’s call upon the successful Mars landing.

Don’t you hate it when you get word from the White House that the president of the United States is going to call you shortly for a ceremonial conversation? So, you gather your entire science team in a room for the call on a speaker-phone?

And the phone rings? And it’s actually him, the big guy himself calling on his secure presidential phone aboard Air Force One on another campaign trip?

And he doesn’t have a clue who he’s talking with?

D’oh!

Obama’s been getting some deservedly bad press recently about his gutting of the American space program and its pioneering missions. Thousands of skilled space workers laid off in Florida, as in the crucial swing state of Florida. Space shuttle retirements. Nothing to replace them. Astronaut resignations. China’s ambitious space plans. Americans forced to rent seats on Russian rockets.

Last week, NASA and the skilled team at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab scored an amazing success, smoothly landing the largest, most complex robot rover ever on another planet.

Curiosity’s eight-month, 354 million mile journey had nothing to do with Obama. In fact, it’s been under construction for eight years. Which is to say it started under some previous president, who gets all the blame for bad things and none of the credit for successes. And Curiosity’s achievement was no exception. That would have taken grace. …

If you remember, August 2nd Pickings was dedicated to Milton Friedman. James Pethokoukis has a post that illustrates his wisdom. It concerns the failure of Obama’s stimulus package. A failure forseen by Friedman’s 1957 hypothesis that people’s consumption is controlled by their income expectations, not by how money is jiggling around in their pockets.

Embedded in the Obama stimulus plan was this idea: Give people a temporary increase in their income and they will spend that money — at least some of it — boosting the economy. But as many predicted, the temporary tax cuts didn’t provide much bank for the buck.

The reason those results are not surprising — at least to those familiar with the work of Milton Friedman — is that people’s consumption derives from their expectation’s of their permanent income. From the Library of Economics and Liberty:

 Keynesian economists once believed that tax cuts boost disposable income and thus cause people to consume more. But according to the permanent income model, temporary tax cuts have much less of an effect on consumption than Keynesians had thought. The reason is that people are basing their consumption decision on their wealth, not their current disposable income. Because temporary tax cuts are bound to be reversed, they have little or no effect on wealth, and therefore have little or no effect on consumption. Thus, the permanent income model had the effect of diminishing the expenditure “multiplier” that economists ascribed to temporary tax cuts.

Or as a new study from the St. Louis Fed puts it, ” … consumption should be weakly related to current income but strongly related to the discounted present value of the income that households expect to earn.” …

John Fund makes some good points about Olympian political correctness.

The London Olympics features 302 events. But this year there clearly is a new category: racial sensitivity. These Olympic Games are rife with examples of people taking offense, and it’s time to discuss some guardrails and guidelines before political correctness takes over completely.

First, some behavior on the part of athletes is clearly out of bounds. After Swiss footballer Michel Morganella’s team lost to South Korea, he said on Twitter that his opponents could “go burn” and were a “bunch of mongoloids.” That’s hardly sporting behavior, and he was sent home for insulting the dignity of the Korean team. Beyond that, it was just offensive speech.

And sometimes it’s the critics who are clearly out of line. NBC was deluged with criticism because it ran an ad that offended fans of gold-medal-winning U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas, who is black. NBC commentator Bob Costas had just finished a commentary in which he said that “much of America has fallen in love with Gabby Douglas” when a gymnastics-themed commercial appeared promoting NBC’s comedy Animal Practice. It featured a small, grinning monkey doing gymnastic tricks.

Because African Americans have sometimes been compared to simians by people trying to dehumanize them, many viewers complained the ad was racist. NBC responded with an apology and an explanation that the ad was placed in the lineup of commercials long before Douglas won her medal. That should end that story.

Then there are the cases in the middle. …

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Fareed Zakaria was lucky with the timing of the Ryan pick, but Pickerhead will not miss reminding readers of what a fraud he has become. Allahpundit does the honors for Hot Air.

Cam Edwards and Newsbusters caught him in the act; follow the link to read the offending passage from his new gun-control column side by side with a similar paragraph in a gun-control piece published in April by “The New Yorker.” Not the first time that Zakaria’s been accused of pinching stuff, either. The Atlantic remembers that Jeffrey Goldberg accused him of lifting quotes from Goldberg’s own interviews with Israeli officials. And just this afternoon, Michael Moynihan — who caught The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer making up Bob Dylan quotes just two weeks ago — noticed that a sentence in Zakaria’s column on China in the May edition of Time reads a lot like a sentence from a Time story on China published in 1968. If he were a lesser name, he’d probably already have been canned. As it is, I wonder how many lucky Time staffers will end up on the inevitable task force charged with going through his old stuff to see just how bad the problem is. …

Jim Sleeper from HuffPo has more.

A few hours ago Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore’s work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.

But the offense does not end there. Zakaria is a trustee of Yale, which takes a very dim view of plagiarism and suspends or expels students who commit anything like what he has committed here. If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.

Worse still: Lepore, whom Zakaria wronged by misappropriating her work, is herself a Yale PhD. If anyone knows what it means to steal another scholar’s work, it’s Zakaria, who holds a PhD from Harvard.

Zakaria is a busy man, of course. Although he’s been judged by The New Republic to be one of America’s “most-overrated thinkers,” …

Michael Rubin wonders when Yale will set Fareed free by kicking him off the board.

There is now little question that Fareed Zakaria is guilty of plagiarism. He has admitted copying a portion of a New Yorker essay and apologized. Time, where Zakaria works as a columnist, has suspended Zakaria for a month, and CNN—owned by the same parent company—has suspended him pending an investigation. This represents a mere slap on the wrist for someone whose standard speaking fee is $75,000.

As YaleUniversity lecturer Jim Sleeper notes, however, Zakaria has a perch not only at CNN and Time, but also at Yale University, where he sits on the Yale Corporation, the University’s governing board and policy-making body. There is no greater academic sin than plagiarism. Students can be expelled for plagiarizing papers, and professors can be fired. To let Zakaria off the hook on his own recognizance would be to eviscerate the principle of academic integrity for which Yale says it stands.

Whether Yale President Richard Levin will do the right thing, however, is another issue. While Levin has distinguished himself as a master fundraiser, he has also shown a disturbing willingness to undercut free speech (ironically, with Zakaria’s acquiescence), compromise academic integrity to foreign interests, and embrace fame over principle. Seldom is an issue as cut-and-dry as Zakaria’s plagiarism. Unless Yale seeks to demonstrate that cheating is acceptable and that there is no principle to which it will not turn a blind eye, then it really has no choice: It is time to give Zakaria the boot.

Erskine Bowles is the Dems go-to-guy for deficit reduction. Obama picked him to be the Dem co-chair of the deficit commission that the president ignored. Ed Morrissey has a great video of Bowles praising Paul Ryan and his budget.

Why is this important?  Erskine Bowles has a long pedigree as a Democratic budget thinker — and presidential adviser.  When Barack Obama needed to pick the co-chair for his deficit committee, which he roundly ignored in the end, he chose Bowles to represent his side on the panel.  Bowles served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and earlier ran the Small Business Administration for Clinton.  Ezra Klein predicted on Friday that Bowles would be the front-runner for Tim Geithner’s job at Treasury if Obama wins a second term. …

“Have any of you met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing, uh. I always thought that I was OK with arithmetic, but this guy can run circles around me. And, he is honest. He is straightforward. He is sincere.

And, the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion…just like we did.

The President came out with his own plan and the President came out, as you will remember, with a budget and I don’t think anyone took that budget very seriously. Um, the Senate voted against it 97 to nothing. …

Roger Simon likes Paul Ryan as much as Erskine Bowles does.

Mitt Romney did something that a lot of supposed wise men said he wouldn’t — pick a vice presidential candidate who is more charismatic than he. In choosing Paul Ryan, Romney took the risk he would be outshone, but he did America a favor. He selected the brightest young politician we have.

He also underscored his best line of the campaign so far, “It’s the economy – and we’re not stupid!” No one in Congress has thought more creatively or acted with more determination to solve the great economic problems we face than Ryan. He has virtually stood alone among higher elected officials in the battle for serious entitlement reform, being criticized by none other than Newt Gingrich for recommending remedies that were, if anything, too mild for the monumental fiscal crisis confronting us. But at least Ryan has tried to do something about it. Few others have had the courage to attempt it.

Through nominating Ryan, Romney has signaled that his campaign is going to be about the economy, the economy, and, yes, you guessed it, the economy (with healthcare thrown in as an aspect of the economy). It is not going to be about immigration, marriage, the legalization of marijuana, whether candidates cause cancer, who has a dog on his car, or even who was born where. It’s going to be about the one thing America is obsessed with, the one thing that if we don’t correct nothing else is possible…. Okay, I won’t say it again, but you certainly know. …

Toby Harnden agrees with Erskine Bowles too, and lists 10 reasons why Ryan could help Romney.

1. The image of Romney as a safety-first campaigner hoping to win the presidency by default as voters turfed out Barack Obama will now disappear. The Ryan pick indicates Romney is prepared to take a calculated risk and be decisive. He’s going big, rather than small. At a time when the US faces huge problems, that could be a major advantage.

2. Fears of the Republican base not turning out for Romney will now evaporate. In terms of unifying Establishment conservatives and grassroots activists, Ryan is a winner.

3. Ryan undoubtedly aspires to be president but at 42 he knows time is on his side. He quickly developed a good rapport with Romney – I saw the two of them together in Milwaukee, Wisconsin back in March when Romney clinched the nomination. There is every chance they’ll complement each other well and Ryan will be an assiduously loyal wing man. …

Jennifer Rubin likes the 10 ways the Ryan pick annoys the media.

The selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as Mitt Romney’s running mate blows up a bunch of phony story lines the media have been peddling.

1. “Romney has no ideas.” Actually, he and Ryan have the new policy ideas. Tons of them. If you doubt it, wait for the vice-presidential debate.

2. “Romney is excessively cautious.” Tim Pawlenty would have been the cautious pick. Ryan is young and vibrant and stands ready to battle for conservative ideas.

3. “The media are really important.” If Romney thought the mainstream media were critical, he’d duck the Mediscare fight. The pick is one that reflects confidence in the conservative agenda. …

Senator Blutarsky Blog says the administration’s admitted costs of the GM bailout are just the start.

Via Instapundit, the Treasury Department now estimates taxpayers’ losses on the auto bailout at $25 billion. This figure, however, relies on some optimistic assumptions; the reality is likely to be far worse.

One optimistic assumption is noted by the Detroit News in the linked article: GM’s stock price. The $25 billion figure (equal to 46.7 solyndras) is based on GM’s closing price at the end of May, $22.20. However, the stock has continued to decline through the Summer and despite rallying off its late July lows, the stock now stands at $20.47, at which price the loss on GM is $850 million (or 1.6 solyndras) greater than in May. Were the stock to retest its 52-week low of $18.72, the loss would be $1.75 billion (or 3.3 solyndras) more than the Treasury estimate.

Optimistic assumptions are also embedded in GM’s balance sheet, for example in its pension plan accounting. At the end of 2011 GM estimated that its domestic pension plans were underfunded by $25.4 billion, but this figure relied on an assumed long term return on plan assets of 8.00%. When ten-year US Treasuries are yielding 1.65%, “optimistic” doesn’t quite capture the full measure by which GM’s estimate is detached from reality. The term “lunatic” springs to mind as a more accurate substitute. …

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm is only Conan O’Brien because the rest are on August hiatus.

The U.S. leads China in both gold medals and total number of medals. In response, China said, “That’s nice but we still have all your money.”

The US women win the soccer gold medal. All of us in America are happy for the athletes and thrilled we don’t have to watch soccer for four more years.

A brief history of the lawnmower from Popular Mechanics.

“Gentlemen will find using my machine an amusing … healthful exercise.” — BRITISH MECHANIC EDWIN BUDDING’S PATENT APPLICATION FOR THE FIRST LAWNMOWER, 1830

1868: The reel-type spiral-bladed cutter makes its stateside debut via manufacturer Amariah Hills, who receives the first U.S. patent for the machine.

1921: Knud and Oscar Jacobsen introduce a mower with a purpose-built gas engine. The reel-mowing machine cuts a blistering 4 acres a day—perfect for the golf courses, parks, and cemeteries it’s intended to maintain. …