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George Will on the Ryan pick.

When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater.” When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, “Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney.” …

 

… Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.

 

He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice. …

… Romney’s selection of a running mate was, in method and outcome, presidential. It underscores how little in the last four years merits that adjective.

In May James Pethokoukis wrote a Paul Ryan background piece for Commentary.

It’s probably safe to assume that no elected official in America understands the ins and outs of the labyrinthine U.S. budget the way Paul Ryan does. The 42-year-old Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee has dreams of completing the small-government Reagan Revolution so that America might avoid repeating the “managed decline” of Old Europe. Ryan knows the numbers and projections and models backward and forward. He knows the strengths and weaknesses of his own arguments about reforming the EntitlementState and of those espoused by his opponents across the aisle and inside the Obama White House. He knows how the legislative process can breathe life into ambitious budget plans or, far more often, suffocate them in the cradle.

Ryan knows it all to a fine granularity. And that is not all he knows. As a veteran of the conservative movement who started out writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett at their joint think tank, Empower America, Ryan knows how three decades of off-and-on conservative governance in Washington have given credence to the notion that, in domestic affairs, Republicans understand how to cut taxes—and not much else. This has certainly been the case when it comes to fixing America’s social-insurance entitlements. Creating a financially sustainable safety net that does not sap America’s economic dynamism has been a political and policy puzzle, and repeated attempts to solve it have ended in economic or political disaster, or both.

Consider this: In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck a deal to save Social Security through a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. The agreement continues to be highlighted by Democrats as a model for bipartisan reform. Yet not only was Social Security not saved—the program almost immediately veered back into long-term insolvency—but several decades of surpluses in the Social Security “lockbox” were used cynically to make federal budget deficits look smaller than they were. For instance, if you don’t count “borrowings” from the Social Security trust fund, the four-year, $559 billion surplus in the late 1990s was really a two-year, $88 billion surplus. …

And just a few days before Romney’s pick, David Harsanyi wrote, “Why Not Paul Ryan?”

… So, no matter whom Republican Mitt Romney finally taps as his vice presidential nominee, Democrats will accuse this person of crimes against common decency and fairness. This person will, you can bet, be indicted as someone hellbent on “dismantling” Social Security, sacrificing Medicare to the gods of social Darwinism and “slashing” the safety net into worthless tatters.

If that’s the case, why not pick a politician who actually speaks about reforming entitlement programs in a serious way? Someone who has actually come up with some ideas that reach beyond platitude? Rep. Paul Ryan, who was spotted pushing a frail wheelchair-bound elderly woman off a cliff in a political ad last year, is really the only person on the shortlist we keep hearing about who fits the bill.

Obama strategist David Axelrod has already written that Ryan, like Romney, has “a conviction that our future will be brighter if we simply pass even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy; dramatically shift health care costs from Medicare to seniors, and walk away from our national commitments to education, research and development, and new energy technology.”

Rest assured David Axelrod is going to regurgitate the exact same nonsense no matter whom Romney picks. …

Robert Costa profiled Ryan for National Review.

… According to Romney insiders, Romney deeply appreciated Ryan’s willingness to privately share his critique of the campaign during the heated Republican primary, where Romney often struggled to make his case. As he watched from afar, long before he endorsed, Ryan drafted a series of detailed strategy and policy advisories, and discussed them with Romney over the phone. For Romney, those corporate-style memos made a lasting impression — and catapulted Ryan into Romney’s circle, where he has remained since.

“Both men are intelligent and very empirically minded, driven by facts,” says Peter Wehner, a friend of Ryan’s and a former Bush and Reagan administration official. “When he looks at Ryan, Romney probably sees somebody like himself, a person he’d want at his side in the business world or the political world. They approach complicated problems the same way.” …

Sara Murray writes an interesting piece for the WSJ on the behind the scenes of the pick logistics.

The day before Rep. Paul Ryan was introduced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he surreptitiously walked through his backyard in Janesville, Wisc., and was smuggled, with the help of a congressional aide and a 19-year-old, to a Fairfield Inn in North Carolina.

“We wanted to try to do this very quietly and looked at maps and put it together,” said Beth Myers, the woman who coordinated Mr. Romney’s pick, recounting the tale in an airport hangar here after Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin had been named as the Republican running mate and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” had been blasted at Romney-Ryan rallies Saturday across Virginia.

She mostly got her wish. Even though plenty of aides had been briefed on the vice presidential pick — foreign policy adviser Dan Senor, senior adviser Ed Gillespie, chief strategist Stuart Stevens, campaign manager Matt Rhoades and longtime friend Bob White, among others– the news stayed under wraps until just hours before the official announcement.

Ms. Myers gleefully unraveled the events of the weekend, explaining how Mr. Ryan stole past his childhood treehouse in an a quiet escape from Janesville Friday and ultimately landed in front the U.S.S. Wisconsin in Norfolk Saturday morning, where he was announced as joining the the 2012 Republican ticket.

Getting to the moment of the surprise announcement was a long and tortured process. …

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Ryan is the big news. Jennifer Rubin comments.

Heading into the weekend, I’ll leave for publication some thoughts about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the vice presidential pick whom Right Turn has been touting for some time. In the event Ryan isn’t the pick, what follows will be a historical keepsake.

There are many Democrats and pundits (some overlap there, I agree) who will be puzzled by Mitt Romney’s selection of Ryan as his pick. But it’s no mystery to those who’ve spent time with Ryan and come to understand what makes both men tick.

As for how this came about, I can say that early in the primary season Ryan and his staff worked cooperatively with Romney and his team. Ryan’s effort was not to self-promote, but to urge Romney to be clear and unequivocal in his policy pronouncements. He encouraged Romney to set up the election as one of two competing visions. It was advice Romney was primed to hear, and the candidate’s tax and entitlement reform plans came to resemble Ryan’s to a large degree. The policy views and much of the rhetoric of the two men converged as the primary race continued.

Romney is above all else a problem-solver, a doer and a fixer. Ryan, likewise, is a policy maven who has since 2007 been trying to advance budget, tax and health-care reforms, moving the Republican Party to become the champion of market-based reform. Ryan is a smart man, certainly the smartest in Congress, with an eye for detail and a facility with numbers. Romney prizes brains, precision and the ability to wield numbers. Ryan uses a scalpel, not a sledge hammer in skewering his opposition; Romney likewise uses piles of data to slay his competitors (as he did in the Florida and Arizona GOP primary debates). Ryan is personally and professionally disciplined, a straight arrow with a gee-whiz brand of optimism. Romney is as well.

The joke has been that Ryan could be Romney’s sixth son. He is, to my eye, more the younger brother, the brains and the idea factory for the top of the ticket who will sell himself as the leader best able to execute the Romney-Ryan vision.

The left will be effusive about the opportunity to renew Mediscare. But the Ryan team has been fighting that fight for some time and is perfectly willing to engage President Obama, who has heckled but not lead on entitlement reform. Who better than Ryan to take on the president while Romney sails above the fray?

Ryan has not been a governor or a CEO, but he has led his party and developed an agenda that House and Senate Republicans eventually embraced. He has shown himself to be the most capable conservative in educating the public and fitting specific policies into a bigger theme. That would have made him fully qualified to be at the top of the ticket.

The selection will thrill conservatives, intrigue commentators and surprise, I imagine, the left. So much time has been spent trying to smear Romney personally that Obama and his team may find it difficult to get back to a debate on policy. With Ryan, they will find that doubly hard. Oh, and that debate with Vice President Biden will be a knee-slapper.

 Steve Hayward does the honors for Power Line.

… I suspect Ryan is one of the few Republicans Obama genuinely fears; after all, Ryan schooled Obama in Obama’s faux-”health care summit” early last year. (Obama does not look pleased in the video.) David Brooks reports, by the way, that Obama never picks up the phone to try to talk with Ryan.
Ryan is not simply fearless about the issues, he also gets the larger picture, and can talk about the larger picture in a way that Kemp often fell short. Ask Kemp about any other question than taxes, and you’d often hear a rambling answer that tied inner city education problems to the gold standard. That’s why his presidential prospects withered.  Ryan, on the other hand, has immense facility to talk about the broader principles of the republic; he’s not just a number-crunching bean counter.

Check out the opening to his speech to CPAC this year:

“There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less “political interference” with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society.

If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded. . .

If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good.
But there’s a major flaw in this “progressive’” argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.

Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s “fatal conceit.” The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom — and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!”

Hmm, who does this remind me of? Oh yeah, that guy we call the Gipper, who said this in his first inaugural address:

“From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? …”

Charles Krauthammer makes the case for running against Obama’s ideas rather than his record. Of course, his dismal record is the result of the foolish ideas.  

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.

The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt.

The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you — you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly — but to government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.

Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing philosophy you want for this nation?

Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however, is stewardship. Are you better off today than you were $5 trillion ago? Look at the wreckage around you. This presidency is a failure. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to fix things. Elect me, etc. etc.

Easy peasy, but highly risky. If you run against Obama’s performance in contrast to your own competence, you stake your case on persona. Is that how you want to compete against an opponent who is not just more likable and immeasurably cooler but spending millions to paint you as an unfeeling, out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity plutocrat? …

As we said in these pages upon Obama’s election four years ago;

Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open minded  tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

 

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people had already moved on.

 

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

 

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?

Karl Rove says the fact that Romney is even now, means he is ahead. 

Wednesday’s Gallup poll had President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney essentially tied, with Mr. Obama at 47% and Mr. Romney at 46%. That’s good news for the challenger: Mr. Romney has absorbed a punishing three-month Obama television barrage that drained the incumbent’s war chest. Historically, undecided voters tend to break late for the challenger.

Mr. Romney and his campaign have also raised their game. After Mr. Obama declared on July 13 that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mr. Romney went on offense, saying the following Tuesday in Pennsylvania that the notion entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses was “insulting.” Wednesday in Ohio, Mr. Romney attacked Mr. Obama for not having met with his Jobs Council for six months. Thursday in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney belittled the White House’s explanation that the president had failed to do so because he “has a lot on his plate.” The following Tuesday in Nevada before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Obama over cuts in defense and veterans care.

Each time, Mr. Romney’s message was delivered in the morning and dominated the day’s coverage. That change appears now to be standard procedure for Team Romney. …

Bryan Preston in Pajamas Media posts on why the Obama folks ran with the ad that suggest Romney was the cause of a women’s death.

… we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?

The danger for the Obama camp is that they risk going over a tipping point. There is a point at which the negativity becomes absurd, and instead of depressing the opponent’s vote, angers the opponent’s supporters and draws the undecided over to the opponent’s side. No one can really put a finger on where that point is, but it’s real and we saw the effect of reaching that point in the Texas Senate run-off last week. The Dewhurst campaign went too far into negative territory, no one really believed their last-minute attacks, and the backlash ended up ensuring that Cruz would win running away. Obama risks the same dynamic hitting him.

The Obama campaign has gone from accusing Romney of boyhood bullying to adulthood felony, to being a murderer in all but name. What accusation is left to throw at him? There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.

Another government pay outrage from California; meter maids making almost $100,000 a year.

When contemplating the many reasons cities in California and elsewhere are venturing closer to bankruptcy, look no further than the relatively lucrative and often-unjustifiable salaries bestowed on municipal employees – and the lofty pension benefits attached to the high pay.

One of the latest examples comes from the California coastal city of Hermosa Beach, where some community service staffers who collect money from parking meters and manage their operations – positions once widely known as “meter maids” – are making nearly $100,000 a year in total compensation, according to city documents.

There are 10 parking enforcement employees for the 1.3-square-mile beach city southwest of downtown Los Angeles, and they pull down some disproportionate compensation, considering their job functions. In fact, the two highest-earning employees for fiscal year 2011-12 are estimated to have made more than $92,000 and $93,000, respectively, according to city documents provided by Patrick “Kit” Bobko, one of five council members and who also serves as mayor pro tem. Those two have supervisory roles. The other eight parking-enforcement employees make from $67,367 to $84,267 in total compensation. …

More silliness from the Cherokee senate candidate.

With all of the talk about tax returns dominating the national news, Massachusetts Senate candidate  Elizabeth Warren undoubtedly figured she could make some hay against Scott Brown on the topic, and get a little national media attention in the process.  Why she thought that Brown, an attorney who has spent 30 years in the National Guard and had just been promoted to the rank of colonel, was wealthy enough to make income-tax returns a big issue is itself a mystery than may never be unraveled.

But unraveled is a great way to describe her attack — after the media pointed out that Brown has already disclosed more years of income-tax returns than Warren has:

Elizabeth Warren demanded Monday that Senator Scott Brown release more of his tax returns. The only problem was that Brown, her Republican rival, had already released six years of tax returns while Warren has refused to release more than four years of her filings.

Now that Brown has been established as the more transparent candidate in the race, will Warren match Brown?  Nope:

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Veronique de Rugy from George Mason has a revealing chart of job creation under presidents all the way back thru Truman.

… Here is what the data show:

Since President Obama took office, fewer jobs were created than were lost. Actually, some 300,000 fewer Americans are employed then when the president took office. That’s mainly because a large number of jobs were lost during 2009 and the so-called recovery is the slowest one of all time, with very meek monthly job creation and weak economic growth.

It would take Obama roughly 280,000 new jobs per month for every month from now until January 2013 to get him out of last place. [He would need 2.1 million new jobs per month for every month until January 2013 to catch up to Carter.]

While it would be unfair to compare Obama with Clinton, this chart shows that at this point President Obama’s job numbers are far worse than Presidents Carter, Kennedy, and Ford, who were in office almost as long or served much shorter periods than he has.

This chart also shows two-term presidents:

Presidents Clinton and Reagan saw the highest gains in jobs and maintained some of the lowest unemployment rates during their administrations.

President George W. Bush’s overall record is underwhelming [to say the least], especially considering that so many of the jobs created during his term were government jobs.

Here also are a few facts about our labor market.

In theory, we are exactly three years into recovery.

This is the slowest recovery in history.

Wage growth over the last twelve months is the slowest ever.

We have the slowest economic growth of any recovery.

We have had an important drop in labor-force participation that makes unemployment rates look better than they probably should.

Now, there is an important question: Under these conditions, are we really recovering? …

De Rugy alludes to another chart, this one prepared by Keith Hall of the Mercatus Center at George Mason. Here is the description of that chart.

The release of the June labor market data marks the third anniversary of the official end of the recession in June 2009. Thus, this is a good moment to look at the single best indicator of U.S. labor market health. As is so often the case, it is also one of the simplest: the employment-to-population ratio. In essence, this tells us what share of the working-age population (16-years old and above) has a job. When the ratio goes up, things are getting better. When it doesn’t, the labor market is not recovering.

 

So, what kind of labor market recovery have we seen over the past three years? As the graph shows, the answer is simple: NONE. Job growth hasn’t been strong enough to support our growing population. The employment-to-population ratio was 59.4% three years ago. It hit a 25-year low of 58.5% in October of 2009, and yet it remains at just 58.6% today.

To know what kind of job growth we need for economic recovery, we must first realize that the United States is still a growing nation. Each month, the working-age population grows by an estimated 180,000 people. Simply to support this growing population, we need to add at least 130,000 new jobs. With anything less, we fall further behind. No matter what the other economic data indicates, a true labor market recovery requires job growth strong enough to consistently raise the employment-to-population ratio. This would mean adding at least 250,000 new jobs per month, every month, for years.

Power Line introduces us to yet another lie from the administration.

Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. When the government bailed out GM, 20,000 Delphi workers lost nearly their entire pensions. But Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.

But now, the Daily Caller has obtained emails showing that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of the 20,000 salaried Delphi retirees. According to the Daily Caller, the emails contradict testimony given to Congress by Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout. …

Ed Morrissey has more on the Delphi pensions.

… Very obviously, Treasury was at least involved in the decision-making, if not the ultimate decider of the Delphi pension termination.  A Treasury spokesman insisted to the DC that the PBGC made the decision on its own, but it looks pretty clear that the PBGC was at least coordinating efforts with the Obama administration.  To the extent that any officials testified differently, we may be seeing more subpoenas and Congressional hearings in the near future.  One question in particular will be why the PBGC terminated the non-union pension while taxpayers absorbed the union pension obligations, and whether that outcome was coordinated all along by the White House.

Richard Epstein exposes the foolish fracking opinions of Tom Friedman.

It is amazing how quickly the technological and political landscape can change over a period of only four years. At this point during the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama was touting a promising future that featured scads of new jobs in the green energy business. The United States would be able to solve two problems with one bold stroke. It didn’t quite pan out that way. The Solyndra website leads off with its promise of “Clean and Economical Solar Power from Your Large Rooftop,” only to note that the bankrupt firm has suspended operations in order to evaluate its reorganization options.

This brutal reality reflects one insuperable difficulty with these renewable energy sources. Today, as in 2008, no one has found a way to store them except at a prohibitive cost. Unlike the much maligned fossil fuels, wind and solar power must be used when they are created, whether needed or not. Both wind and solar power sources are highly variable, so that, all too often, they are in greatest supply when they are least needed. In the absence of a seismic technological breakthrough, they are doomed to remain boutique sources of energy that cannot be counted on to power the economy going forward. 

These major difficulties have not stopped the United States government from lavishing extensive subsidies on an industry that is ill-equipped to use them. These subsidies programs have failed for mundane but compelling reasons. No government has ever succeeded in trying to shape industrial policy with state subsidies, for the simple reason that it has neither the knowledge nor the incentives to pick which fields make sense to invest in or which firms in these fields have latched onto a viable technology.

No government should, of course, ban investments in solar and wind energy, but the prudent strategy is to let these investments be made by venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who might actually know what they are doing. And currently, the smart money seems to be steering clear of renewable energy technologies.

At the same time that renewable energy sources have proved to be a stupendous bust, the fossil fuel business has undergone a mini revolution. I am not speaking of the sorry state of affairs with ethanol, whose huge subsidies, given the current drought, are now wreaking havoc in the food market because of its sheltered status as a “renewable” energy source under current regulation. No, the huge source of the new revolution is fracking, which has transformed the energy market. …

… it is disconcerting to see the environmental backlash against the expansion of fracking, as was recently defended by Thomas Friedman in a recent op-ed entitled “Getting it Right on Gas.” Relying on a set of recommendations from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Friedman takes the position that what is good news in the short run could in reality spell bad news in the long run. The great fear, we are told, is that the United States could remain “addicted to fossil fuels for decades,” which Friedman denounces as “reckless.”

Friedman’s nightmare scenario has two components. The first is that government regulators could go soft on the pollution that fracking creates in both water and air. The second is that the short-term success of fracking will dull the incentives to invest in renewables, which emit no pollution at all.          

Neither objection leads to a sound energy policy. …

Ever wonder why Washington always gets it wrong? Phillip K. Howard says it is because DC is a deviant sub-culture.

Behavior that would seem grotesque to most Americans doesn’t raise an eyebrow inside the Beltway. Only radical change can fix the problem. 

A deviant subculture is defined by sociologist Anthony Giddens as one “whose members have values which differ substantially from those of the majority in a society.”

American government is a deviant subculture. Its leaders stand on soapboxes and polarize the public by pointing fingers while secretly doing the bidding of special interests. Many public employees plod through life with their noses in rule books, indifferent to the actual needs of the public and unaccountable to anyone. The professionals who interact with government — lawyers and lobbyists — make sure every issue is viewed through the blinders of a particular interest, not through the broader lens of the common good. Government is almost completely isolated from the public it supposedly serves. The one link that is essential for a functioning democracy — identifiable officials who have responsibility to accomplish public goals — is nowhere to be found. Who’s in charge? It’s hard to say. The bureaucracy is a kind of Moebius strip of passing the buck. The most powerful force in this subculture is inertia: Things happen a certain way because they happened that way yesterday. Programs are piled upon programs, without any effort at coherence; there are 82 separate federal programs, for example, for teacher training. Ancient subsidies from the New Deal are treated as sacred cows. The idea of setting priorities is anathema. Nothing can get taken away, because that would offend a special interest. …

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Streetwise Professor posts on half measures in Syria.

… Perhaps this is just a dodge, and the Saudis, Qataris, and others are going to provide weapons that will permit the rebels to combat more effectively the heavy weapons, artillery, and fixed and rotary wing aircraft that the Syrian military has in its arsenal while the US retains sort of plausible deniability.  But maybe this is just another example of Obama’s lead-from-behind, half-in, half-out approach to military matters, Afghanistan being another prime example.  Commit enough to generate significant casualties, but not enough to achieve any decisive or lasting result.

Unless the objective is to encourage a protracted and brutal civil war in Syria, such half measures are catastrophic, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of humanity.  Strengthening the rebels some, but not enough to overcome the government, will prolong the suffering, and also prolong the uncertainty in the region, which is the last thing it needs.

As Fisher (or was it Macauley?-sources disagree) said: moderation in war is imbecility.  As Napoleon said (no disagreement about attribution here): If you want to take Vienna-or Damascus-take Vienna-or Damascus.

But that’s probably the nub of the problem.  Obama doesn’t know what he wants, or if he knows, is unwilling to take any political risk to get it.  So he continues the cynical game of leaking information about his “secret” military aggressiveness, while failing to make hard decisions about what to do with Assad.  This moderate course is a recipe for stalemate-which will condemn thousands to death and injury.  We know by hard experience that we cannot dictate outcomes in that region, but we can influence them.  No outcome is likely to be all that desirable, but letting things go on their own without a more robust attempt to influence them seldom works out well in that part of the world.

James Pethokoukis says Obama’s recovery is not only worse than Reagan’s but also worse than Teddy Roosevelt’s and Grover Cleveland’s. Each of those followed financial crises.

Some great charts from economist John Taylor putting the weak economic recovery in some deep historical perspective. First, here is the three-year old Obama recovery. As Taylor points out, “The gap between real GDP and potential GDP (CBO estimates) is not closing at all. That is the main reason why unemployment remains so high.” It’s just not getting better:

Next, here is the Reagan recovery after the 1981-82 recession. Again, you have severe drop, but then the output gap between is closed.

But let’s go much further back and look at two recoveries that occurred after financial crises. Here’s the recovery after the Panic of 1907, a downturn which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve:

Finally, here is the Depression of 1893:

No Federal Reserve stimulus. No $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And yet, 100 years ago, the U.S. economy somehow managed to recover after two nasty downturns, each marked by a banking crisis.

Maybe we’re not doing it right.

Richard Cohen, one of stable of WaPo liberals, is disgusted by Harry Reid.

In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.

Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a source they will not name.

Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.

 For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.

Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.

The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.

As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.

When Obama goes down to defeat in November, one of the causes will be the delicious irony he cannot manage money. Just like he has mis-spent trillions of dollars in our economy, on a smaller scale he has mis-spent millions in the campaign. As George Will might say; a condign punishment. NY Times has the story.

President Obama has spent more campaign cash more quickly than any incumbent in recent history, betting that heavy early investments in personnel, field offices and a high-tech campaign infrastructure will propel him to victory in November.

Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have burned through millions of dollars to find and register voters. They have spent almost $50 million subsidizing Democratic state parties to hire workers, pay for cellphones and update voter lists. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on polling, online advertising and software development to turn Mr. Obama’s fallow volunteers corps into a grass-roots army.

The price tag: about $400 million from the beginning of last year to June 30 this year, according to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records, including $86 million on advertising.

But now Mr. Obama’s big-dollar bet is being tested. With less than a month to go before the national party conventions begin, the president’s once commanding cash advantage has evaporated, leaving Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee with about $25 million more cash on hand than the Democrats as of the beginning of July.

Despite Mr. Obama’s multimillion-dollar advertising barrage against Mr. Romney, he is now being outspent on the airwaves with Mr. Romney benefiting from a deluge of spending by conservative “super PACs” and outside groups. While Mr. Romney has depleted much of his funds from the nominating contest, he is four weeks away from being able to tap into tens of millions of dollars in general election money. And many polls show the race to be very close.

Mr. Obama’s cash needs — he spent $70.8 million in June alone, more than half on advertising and far more than he raised — have brought new urgency to his campaign’s fund-raising efforts. His advisers have had to schedule more fund-raising trips than originally planned to big-money states like New York, according to donors involved in the effort. The super PAC supporting his campaign, Priorities USA Action, is enlisting former President Bill Clinton as a rainmaker, hoping to counter its conservative counterparts.

While Mr. Obama will also have access to general election money in September, he is unlikely to have the same spending advantage over Mr. Romney as he had during the primary season, when Mr. Romney spent much of his money battling Republican rivals. …

Maybe the Obama campaign will conserve cash by not paying their bills. Andrew Malcolm reports they are stiffing the city of Newport Beach, CA. 

Here’s how much financial trouble Barack Obama’s presidential campaign appears to be in:

He’s stiffing the California city of Newport Beach $35,000 for extra security costs incurred when the campaigner-in-chief held a fundraiser in the oceanfront community early this year.

The bill is already nearly two months overdue. The Democratic National Committee and Secret Service are giving the city the old “Talk to them, No, talk to them” routine that would immediately get any real business operation on the Better Business Bureau’s “Do Not Hire Again” list. …

Speaking of California, Walter Russell Mead posts on its future.

… Once again, California’s dysfunctional governance has utterly failed the state’s residents. California can’t afford to enforce its own laws: an absurd and even insane position for a state to be in. California needs laxer laws that lock fewer people up, or it needs a bigger prison budget but there are no sane grounds on which the status quo can be defended. Forced by the US Supreme Court to do something, the state has acted with its characteristic fecklessness and passed the buck: handing the problem off to local governments, which, we should add, are facing serious fiscal problems of their own and are ill-equipped to deal with new prisoners.

California is in a hole but can’t seem to stop its compulsive digging. Schools, universities, prisons, pensions, cities and towns: the state has lost the ability to manage even the most basic elements of communal living. But foie gras is now illegal there, grandiose plans for white elephant fast trains built with borrowed money waft through the air, and the state continues to boost the self esteem of affluent and cause-oriented gentry liberals by scattering scarce resources to the four winds, hunting unicorns when the cupboard is bare.

Someday, perhaps, California will be governed by people who care about governing: that is to say, educating the kids, balancing the books, enforcing the law. Until then, it offers the rest of us a spectacle and a warning. It is some spectacle and some warning. California remains awesome, even in decline.

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David Harsanyi says the White House and media can’t spin the jobs numbers.

Remember: We’re now on our 42nd straight month of unemployment at or above 8 percent, and the President of the United States is out on the campaign trail arguing that raising taxes and spending money will fix it.

And how is that working out for us?

In July, the Labor Department reports, the economy added 163,000 jobs and unemployment ticked up to 8.3 percent. The economy, which typically needs around 100,000 jobs just to keep pace with the new workers entering the labor market, is on a three-month average of 105,000.  So another disaster. (Also, job creation in June was revised down to 64,000.)

The White House claims that “today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover.” But stagnation is not recovery — a noun, meaning a return to a normal state of health or strength. Unless, that is, this is the new normal and voters accept it.

You expect the White House to spin, but the media’s take on these numbers — though subtle — is also misleading.

“Despite the seemingly good news,” reports CNBC (seemingly good news!), “the report’s household showed that the actual amount of Americans working dropped by 195,000,” as labor force participation is at a 30-year low. As Jim Pethokoukis at AEI likes to point out, if the workforce were the same as when George W. Bush left office, the unemployment rate would be 11 percent. Seemingly, indeed. …

Investors.com editors say “163,000 jobs” is pure bs.

… The 163,000 figure becomes even more suspect when you consider that 150,000 people left the workforce in July — something that almost never happens when the economy is expanding and creating new jobs. In short, the 163,000 “new” jobs is a mirage due mostly to seasonal adjustments — not real jobs.

Nor is this a one-month phenomenon. Since Obama stepped into office, 7.5 million people have left the workforce — calling all the administration’s claims of job “gains” into question.

Yes, some of those people have retired. But the vast majority has become so disgruntled with their job prospects that they’ve quit looking.

What Obama didn’t mention was that the monthly employment survey of households — which is used to create the unemployment rate — shows a stunningly different picture than the business payroll data.

By this household measure, the number of jobs plunged by 195,000, pushing the unemployment rate up to 8.3% from 8.2%. So talk of job gains is deceptive.

And, indeed, alternative measures of the unemployment rate show far worse problems. The so-called U3 measure of unemployment is the one most people know. It shows 8.3% joblessness, and 12.9 million people with no job.

But the government also releases what it calls the U6 measure — one that takes into account discouraged workers and those who, as the Labor Department puts it, are “marginally attached” to the labor force.

What does U6 show? It shows an alarming 15% unemployment rate — with 23 million people having no job. Worse, the U6 measure of unemployment is rising as the economy slows down. …

 

Matthew Continetti covers the Romney coverage.

… As Dan Quayle, John Ashcroft, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Charles and David Koch know all too well, once the Democrats and their allies in the media have determined the story they are going to tell about a conservative political figure, nothing can change the emphasis or tone of their coverage. The media portrayed Quayle and Palin as airheads, and that was that. They called Ashcroft a religious fundamentalist, and he was berated and dismissed from polite society. They said Limbaugh was a racist and a sexist, and entire public relations campaigns were launched to deprive him of sponsors. They “reported” that the Koch brothers’ political giving was entirely self-interested, and hardly anyone who edits our major newspapers or produces our network news gave these philanthropists the benefit of context—let alone the benefit of the doubt.

With Romney the storyline had proven more elusive. Before settling on “gaffe-prone” the media had difficulty choosing between extremes. They shoot at Romney coming and going. One day he is a bully, the next day he is a wimp. One day he has “no core,” the next day he is a radical. One day he is out of touch, the next day he is pandering to his base. In the morning they say Romney is too vague, in the evening they say his specific policies will be ruinous. Romney is too secretive, but what we know about him is scary. The whiplash from attack to attack provokes nausea. Some, like Harry Reid, have taken simply to making things up.

And who can blame him? The media have displayed an insatiable and indiscriminate appetite for negative stories about Romney, his wealth, his company, and his religion. The narrative of Mitt Romney, gaffe-machine, colored media coverage of the foreign trip before it even began. As Romney was making his way to England, journalists were asking his campaign to follow-up on a Daily Telegraph report in which an unnamed “adviser” said the United States and the United Kingdom “are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and [the governor] feels that the special relationship is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Whether the quote was true or false, it was nevertheless unremarkable. The United States and the United Kingdom do share the same heritage. And the White House has seemed particularly dismissive of our longtime ally—its communications director, for example, did not even know that it had returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. The Obama campaign and the media were just waiting for a moment to accuse Romney of criticizing the president on foreign soil. David Axelrod called the banal, possibly fictitious quote “stunningly offensive.” Joe Biden said it was “beneath a presidential campaign.” Points scored.

The pattern was established. Throughout his trip Romney would say something perfectly well meaning and true, and the press would declare it a gaffe and the voyage a horrible failure. He stated the obvious to Brian Williams: There were concerns over London’s preparedness for the Olympics. From the ensuing coverage you would have thought he had just spat on the Queen. …

Michael Barone says the media are finding ways to ignore news they don’t understand.

Americans keep behaving in ways that baffle the liberal mainstream media. Two examples figured prominently–or should have–in last week’s news.

One is the runoff primary for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz thumped incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, 57 to 43 percent.

Cruz won even though the Texas Republican establishment, from Gov. Rick Perry on down, endorsed Dewhurst. So did the Austin lobbying community, since Dewhurst as lieutenant governor has run the state Senate for the last 10 years (and, having lost this race, will do so for at least the next two).

Dewhurst has had a generally conservative record and had no problem getting elected and reelected statewide four times. And he spent liberally from the fortune he made in the private sector.

To be fair, some MSM outlets did run stories on Cruz’s rise in the polls since he ran behind Dewhurst by a 45- to 34-percent margin in the May 29 primary. And it’s not uncommon for a second-place finisher to overcome the primary winner in a runoff.

But there’s a pattern here that the big liberal press has been reluctant to recognize: Candidates from the GOP establishment are getting knocked off by challengers with less name recognition, far less money, and the support of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and gone, you know. …

Great Corner Post from Mark Steyn.

Previously on Dallas:

Only six months ago the Canadians were planning to ship nearly all of this newly developed oil to Texas via the Keystone Pipeline. Environmentalists, however, swore the pipeline would be built over their dead bodies and President Obama, not wanting to be left with no natural constituencies except single mothers and minorities, decided to appease environmentalists and block the pipeline.

The Canadians were shocked. They had long planned to sell this oil south of the border. Canada is already our largest supplier of foreign oil and it was inconceivable that we wouldn’t want to take more it instead of relying on Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other unpredictable sources.

America had been offered first refusal, and had refused it. So, after they got over being shocked, Canada looked elsewhere for business partners. Last week, the Chinese announced they were buying a Canadian company with major interests in those oil sands that Obama & Co have no interest in. Whatever one’s feelings about this Sino-Canuck deal, it does not appear to fall under the jurisdiction of a New York senator and a Massachusetts congressman. Nevertheless:

I am speaking, of course, of Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, both of whom have decided we are in a position to tell a Chinese company that it cannot acquire a Canadian company because… well, because we’re Americans and the world has to pay attention to what we say.

My weekend column concludes with a tweet from Huffington Post/MSNC honcho Howard Fineman on what Washington can learn from the London Olympics:

“Brits long ago lost their empire,” he tweeted, “but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.”

Fineman and other lefties who commend this line might want to ponder on the likelihood of America declining “gracefully” as opposed to imploding through a pitiful Schumeresque combination of hollow bullying and self-destructive buffoonery: The Brokest Nation in History thinks it can dictate to its principal energy supplier and its principal loan shark what business deals it will permit them to do. Good luck with that.

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Writing in Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel gives the back story to “you didn’t build that” in the form of a book review of Bourgeois Dignity.

The controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s admonishment that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” has defied the usual election-year pattern.

Normally a political faux pas lasts little more than a news cycle. People hear the story, decide what they think, and quickly move on to the next brouhaha, following what the journalist Mickey Kaus calls the Feiler Faster Thesis. A gaffe that might have ruined a candidate 20 years ago is now forgotten within days.

Three weeks later, Obama’s comment is still a big deal.

Although his supporters pooh-pooh the controversy, claiming the statement has been taken out of context and that he was referring only to public infrastructure, the full video isn’t reassuring. Whatever the meaning of “that” was, the president on the whole was clearly trying to take business owners down a peg. He was dissing their accomplishments. As my Bloomberg View colleague Josh Barro has written, “You don’t have to make over $250,000 a year to be annoyed when the president mocks people for taking credit for their achievements.”

Hectoring Entrepreneurs

The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

Peggy Noonan does a column of various election year snippets.

From a friend watching the Olympics: “How about that Michael Phelps? But let’s remember he didn’t win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim.”

The note was merry and ironic. And as the games progress, we’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing, because President Obama’s comment—”You didn’t build that”—is the political gift that keeps on giving.

They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.

***

There was lots of chatter this week about the decision to have Bill Clinton speak in prime time on the penultimate night of the Democratic Convention. Is it a sign of panic? Would the president give Big Dawg such a prominent spot if he wasn’t nervous? Does it gall him to ask for help from the guy who said of his 2008 candidacy, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”?

But all this kind of misses the point.

The central fact of Bill Clinton is that he is really good at politics. And he has every reason to want to give a really good speech—to show he’s still got it like nobody else, to demonstrate he’s still the most beloved figure in the party, to do his wife proud. And of course to rub Mr. Obama’s nose in it.

David Harsanyi says Barack is no Bill.

Former President Bill Clinton is slated to deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention. No doubt, he’s going to give one hell of a talk. The man is on his game, enjoying the highest favorable ratings he’s seen since 1993; a robust 66 percent of Americans think highly of the former president.

It’s a politically astute choice by Barack Obama, as “there isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton,” David Axelrod explained to The New York Times. “He can really articulate the choice that is before people.”

He sure can. Or, rather, he sure could, if he felt like it. Problem is that if Clinton actually used his perspective, he’d be giving a rousing convention speech on the benefits of free trade and free markets at the Republican convention. After all, if the man from Hope has taught America one thing, it’s that even a power-abusing letch can be great for prosperity if he just leaves the economy alone.

Jeff Greenfield says things don’t look good for the president.

I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.

Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.

They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)

I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.

So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.

Charles Lane reviews “Failing Law Schools” for WaPo.

… “Many law professors at many law schools across the country are selling a degree to their students that they would not recommend to people close to them,” Tamanaha writes. He also accuses them of lying about it: Some schools have been caught luring students with inflated post-graduation employment statistics.

If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha’s argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.

Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of “academic freedom” and other abstractions.

Tamanaha argues that most law schools should emphasize lower-cost practical training, perhaps in fewer than the three years of study that are standard now. The resulting lawyers would serve the mundane but vital needs of ordinary people, a surprisingly large number of whom cannot afford representation even though they are not indigent. It would be an honorable calling and a decent living.

Tamanaha’s message — that law schools fail to fulfill this social purpose and that their failure is due to their selfishness and myopia — may not go over well in faculty lounges. But it is an important one nonetheless.

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Krauthammer sums up Romney’s trip.

… Romney’s point about “culture” was to highlight the improbable emergence of Israel from resourceless semi-desert to First World “start-up nation,” a tribute to its freedom and openness, just as free-market Chile stands out from state-dominated Ecuador.

Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actual endorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero.

Two staunch U.S. allies salute a man they would like to see lead the free world. Yet the headlines were “shove it” and “culture.”

Scorecard? Romney’s trip was a major substantive success: one gaffe (Britain), two triumphs (Israel and Poland) and a fine demonstration of foreign-policy fluency and command — wrapped, however, in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.

Marty Peretz was the subject of the WSJ Interview this weekend.

‘I bought the NewRepublic to take back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites,” the legendary editor and publisher Martin Peretz says. Now, he fears, George McGovern’s ideas may be back in vogue within the party.

The 1972 election and the domestic drama surrounding the Vietnam War caused a major schism between Democrats. On one side were supporters of Mr. McGovern, the U.S. senator and presidential candidate who preached engagement and accommodation with communism. On the other were those who thought the rise of the McGovernites spelled disaster for Democrats and the nation, and who were determined to return the party to a responsible center on foreign policy.

Mr. Peretz, then a HarvardUniversity lecturer and a veteran of the antiwar movement, was in the latter camp. Two years after Richard Nixon thumped Mr. McGovern in the election, he purchased the NewRepublic, the flagship liberal magazine founded in 1914. Under Mr. Peretz’s ownership the magazine promoted a set of foreign-policy ideas that gradually reconquered the Democratic mainstream. Chief among these were a willingness to deploy military power to advance national interests and values, plus an abiding commitment to Israel as a mirror of American ideals in an unfree Middle East.

Since selling the NewRepublic to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in 2011, however, Mr. Peretz, now 73, has emerged as a vociferous critic of Barack Obama and much of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. His break with the president he campaigned for in 2008 has been sharp and painful. The Obama administration’s worldview, he now thinks, represents a radical departure from the “healthily hard-ass” foreign policy he has long championed on the left. Mr. Peretz is especially disturbed by Mr. Obama’s failure to support Israel at a time when the Jewish state faces an unprecedented combination of threats. …

… To Mr. Peretz, the notion that Arab cultures are beset with endemic pathologies is noncontroversial, almost a banal point. “[Mitt] Romney was said to have made a tremendous faux pas when he said that the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a matter of culture,” alluding to historian David Landes’s book, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.”

“Mostly David discusses their social cooping up of women as a factor in Arab poverty, backwardness, et cetera,” Mr. Peretz explains. “Now, this would be, if you were talking generally, a very acceptable and progressive critique.” Indeed, “one of the reasons that you have economic backwardness is that women do not work and women do not get education.”

That Mr. Romney should have to go on the defensive over his remarks, Mr. Peretz thinks, has to do with the fact that “the magazines and the websites that are popular among the liberal, semi-intelligent, semi-intellectual readership of America have their own ideological blinders.”

Mr. Peretz has little patience for such pieties. And he holds few hopes that the recent Arab uprisings will make the region more liberal or peaceful. …

Stanley Kurtz outlines the plans Obama has for the suburbs.

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. …

Remember last week the story about Nancy Black the whale watch captain who ran afoul of the Feds for violating some law about marine mammals? Three Thousand miles away the same stupid feds are creating food for great white sharks. Jammie Wearing Fool has the story.

…’The booming, federally protected seal population basking in Bay State waters will only bring more hungry, dead-eyed great white sharks closer to shore — where they can strike in as little as 6 feet of water, experts warn.

State wildlife officials said yesterday they’re tracking nine great whites — the most they’ve ever had tagged — but it’s not clear whether that lethal group includes the stealthy predator that attacked a bodysurfer off Ballston Beach in Truro on Monday afternoon, splattering blood on the beach.

The victim, Christopher Myers, is recovering from leg injuries at Massachusetts General Hospital in what officials called the first attack by a great white in Massachusetts since a fatal strike in 1936.

Swarming the Cape coast in pockets from Eastham to Chatham, seals — a protected species for the past four decades — are being blamed for the sudden spike in shark sightings.

“Nature is out of balance,” said Michael Snell, a former Truro beach commissioner. “Until we start harvesting seals, we are going to keep having these kind of problems.” ‘ …

Veronique de Rugy and Nick Gillespie team up on a look at congress.

Despite looming deadlines related to budget sequestration and decade-old “temporary” tax rates that expire at year’s end, massive entitlement crises and much more, Congress has effectively stopped work on serious legislation until at least some time after November’s election. 

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.

And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Another instance of budding bipartisanship is the pork-laden farm bill that extends sugar subsidies, maintains crop subsidies and creates a “shallow-loss program” that effectively guarantees incomes for farmers at a time when that sector is doing historically well. The bill passed the Senate with 16 GOP votes. Though the House version of the bill is still being worked out, no one doubts it will not only pass, but largely resemble the Senate version.

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility …

The White House has actually apologized to Sir Charles over the bust flap. Nile Gardiner has the story.

The Obama White House: in apology mode.

The Obama presidency is fond of issuing apologies for America on the world stage, but very rarely makes them at home to Americans. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer has just issued one to Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who last week wrote an op-ed berating the Obama administration for removing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when it came to power. Pfeiffer had issued a stinging attack on Krauthammer, alleging that his Churchill bust reference was “100 percent false.” Krauthammer was of course 100 percent correct, and the British Embassy in Washington even issued a statement contradicting Pfeifer’s remarks.

Here is the full text of Pfeiffer’s mea culpa, published on the White House blog in the form of an open letter to Mr. Krauthammer: …

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Today is Milton Friedman Day honoring the 100th anniversary of his birth on July 31.

Kevin Williamson on Milton Friedman’s economics of love.

… The libertarianism of Rand … was based on an economics of resentment of the “moochers” and “loafers,” the sort of thing that leads one to call a book The Virtue of Selfishness.  Friedman’s libertarianism was based on an economics of love: for real human beings leading real human lives with real human needs and real human challenges. He loved freedom not only because it allowed IBM to pursue maximum profit but because it allowed for human flourishing at all levels. Economic growth is important to everybody, but it is most important to the poor. While Friedman’s contributions to academic economics are well appreciated and his opposition to government shenanigans is celebrated, what is seldom remarked upon is that the constant and eternal theme of his popular work was helping the poor and the marginalized. Friedman cared about the minimum wage not only because it distorted labor markets but because of the effect it has on low-skill workers: permanent unemployment. He called the black unemployment rate a “disgrace and a scandal,” and the minimum wage the “most anti-black law” on the books with good reason. He talked about two “machines”: “There has never been a more effective machine for the elimination of poverty than the free-enterprise system and a free market.” “We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. . . . I’m not blaming the people. It’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster.” …

Donald Boudreaux, econ prof at George Mason is next.

At the height of the Vietnam War, U.S. commander Gen. William Westmoreland testified before the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. The 15 members of that commission were charged with exploring the feasibility of ending the military draft.

Staunchly opposed to an all-volunteer military, which must pay its soldiers market wages, Gen. Westmoreland proclaimed that he did not want to command “an army of mercenaries.” One of the commission members immediately shot back with a question: “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?” That penetrating query was posed by Milton Friedman, a diminutive (he stood only 5 feet 3 inches tall) giant among 20th-century scholars. Were he still alive – he died in 2006 – Friedman would celebrate his 100th birthday on July 31. …

Stephen Moore has the honors for the WSJ. 

It’s a tragedy that Milton Friedman—born 100 years ago on July 31—did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It’s perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world’s greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country.

Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be skewering today’s $5 trillion expansion of spending and debt to create growth—and exposing the confederacy of economic dunces urging more of it.

In the 1960s, Friedman famously explained that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” If the government spends a dollar, that dollar has to come from producers and workers in the private economy. There is no magical “multiplier effect” by taking from productive Peter and giving to unproductive Paul. As obvious as that insight seems, it keeps being put to the test. Obamanomics may be the most expensive failed experiment in free-lunch economics in American history.

Equally illogical is the superstition that government can create prosperity by having Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke print more dollars. In the very short term, Friedman proved, excess money fools people with an illusion of prosperity. But the market quickly catches on, and there is no boost in output, just higher prices.

Next to Ronald Reagan, in the second half of the 20th century there was no more influential voice for economic freedom world-wide than Milton Friedman. Small in stature but a giant intellect, he was the economist who saved capitalism by dismembering the ideas of central planning when most of academia was mesmerized by the creed of government as savior. …

Erika Johnsen at Hot Air.

In these strange times of Obamanomics, populism, Keynesian revival, envy politics, big government, bureaucracy, regulation, and widely held belief in basic economic fallacies, the life and work of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman is all that much more poignant. Though he passed away in 2006, today would’ve marked Mr. Friedman’s 100th birthday, and it’s always worthwhile to appreciate a voice like his that could cut through all of the baloney out there with such clarity and simplicity. If you haven’t read Capitalism and Freedom, get on it — it’s a quick and rewarding read that delivers more intellectual honesty than you can shake a stick at. …

Thomas Sowell

If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he was more needed — he would be one hundred years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman’s death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.

Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like “Free to Choose” or the TV series of the same name.

In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his profession and also at a level that the average person could readily understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes. …

Bob Enlow, CEO of the Friedman Foundation, in National Review.

Exactly a century ago, the United States was a highly charged magnet for immigrants around the world. Thousands entered Ellis Island each day in the hope of making a better life for themselves and their families. Two of those immigrants were Jeno and Sara Friedman; they would become the parents of Milton Friedman, one of the most influential and important economists of the 20th century.Dubbed by the New York Times as the “grandmaster of free market economic theory,” Friedman in his writing — especially his 1980 book Free to Choose, authored with his wife, Rose — refuted popular claims that “more government” would improve the quality of our lives. Milton Friedman was the most ardent spokesperson advocating the complete opposite: Voluntary choices of individuals rather than arbitrary dictates of the state, he argued, should be the default mode of human life. Government is justified only insofar as it preserves, protects, and defends individual liberty. …

Pickerhead once got some tax advice from Dr. Friedman.

YouTube has many videos of Milton Friedman available. We have highlighted a few including the first episode of Free to Choose.

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We have heard about Nancy Black before. She is the whale watch captain who ran afoul of federal thugs. George Will has an update and more about the laws that wait to ensnare us.

The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year — so far — federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon. Nevertheless, our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled.

Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in MontereyBay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.

A year after this bizarre charge — that she lied about the interaction with the humpback that produced no charges — more than a dozen federal agents, led by one from NOAA, raided her home. They removed her scientific photos, business files and computers. Call this a fishing expedition. …

Kevin Williamson has more on law enforcement criminals.

This Houston Chronicle story is terrifying:

The phone rang before sunrise. It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing news about Truck 793 — a big red semi supposedly getting repairs in Houston.

“Your driver was shot in your truck,” said the caller, a business colleague. “Your truck was loaded with marijuana. He was shot eight times while sitting in the cab. Do you know anything about your driver hauling marijuana?”

“What did you say?” Patty recalled asking. “Could you please repeat that?”

The truck, it turned out, had been everywhere but in the repair shop.

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

This jackass DEA adventure has driven Mr. Patty to the edge of bankruptcy, and possibly toward an even worse fate: …

What if Washington thinks one of their meddlesome laws will hurt them? Jennifer Rubin has the story.

This is rich: One of the most meddlesome federal labor laws foisted on employers by Big Labor has now come back to bite the administration. The Post reports:

The deep federal spending cuts scheduled to take effect at the start of next year may trigger dismissal notices for tens of thousands of employees of government contractors, companies and analysts say, and the warnings may start going out at a particularly sensitive time:

Days before the presidential election.

By law, all but the smallest companies must notify their workforce at least 60 days in advance when they know of specific job cuts that are likely to happen.

Obama administration officials say that the threat of layoffs is overblown and that Republicans are playing up the possibility rather than trying to head it off. The Labor Department said Monday that it would be “inappropriate” for contractors to send out large-scale dismissal notices, because it is unclear whether the federal cuts will occur and how they would be carried out.

You see laws are optional in the Obama administration. If the immigration laws haven’t been amended, do it unilaterally. If the welfare rules require able-bodied recipients to work, just waive the law.

And if a federal law designed to protect workers from abrupt changes in their employment situation are inconvenient, why just “advise” employers not to follow it. And get sued by the employees? Most employers would say, “No way.” There are also state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN Act) requirements that the feds have no jurisdiction over.

The administration wants to have it all ways: Slash defense, take no heat for the layoffs and resulting downturn in the economy and make the companies look “political.” In fact, the administration should come to grips with the implications of its insistence on slashing defense. (“Economists say the threat of deep cuts in domestic and defense spending, coupled with automatic increases in taxes, is already a drag on economic growth and a source of enormous uncertainty for businesses, which are holding back on hiring and helping to keep the nation’s unemployment rate above 8 percent.”)

With any other administration, liberals would be hollering about an imperial executive and/or demanding the administration follow labor laws. But not this one. Civil libertarians and Big Labor long ago tossed aside principle; their sole mission is to reelect President Obama. Actually the same could be said of the entire administration.

David Harsanyi reminds us Obama once held the position Romney advocated in Jerusalem.

During his recent visit to Israel, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney commented that “it is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.” Somehow this declaration of fact has become controversial and a “gaffe.”

Needless to say, the Obama Administration took a shot at Romney’s foreign policy “fumbles.” And in response to the candidate’s innocuous declaration, White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated: “Well, our view is that that’s a different position than this administration holds. It’s the view of this administration that the capital is something that should be determined in final status negotiations between the parties.”

Funny, because when addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on June 4, 2008, as a Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama said that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Like Romney, Obama upset the perpetually upset Palestinian government.

Naturally, Obama later backtracked – or perhaps evolved — saying, “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations” – which is nearly identical to the position Mitt Romney took this past week on the status of (East) Jerusalem. …

Max Boot defends Romney’s comments about Palestinian culture.

… In point of fact, there was nothing offensive–or particularly novel–in Romney’s observation. His words could have been drawn from the UN’s Arab Human Development Reports, written by Arab intellectuals, which have reached damning conclusions about the lack of freedom, education, women’s rights, and other factors holding back the Arab world. As the latest such report notes: “The Arab region is dominated by long-standing state structures which have inhibited the empowerment of Arab individuals and communities.”

The Arab Human Development Reports were considered big news when they first started coming out a decade ago because they represented a break with an age-old tradition in the Arab world: that of blaming outsiders for all of one’s woes. For decades Arab rulers, echoed by compliant intellectuals, have chosen to blame “Zionists,” “imperialists” and other bogeymen for their countries’ shortcomings. Thankfully, the Arab Spring represents a moment of self-awareness in which Arab publics are realizing that their own leaders are the cause of their woes. …

Boot expands on his thoughts about Palestinians.

Here is a follow-up to my item yesterday about Mitt Romney and his comments about Palestinian culture in order to clarify some of the debate swirling on Twitter and the Internet. I want to make a couple of things clear: I was in no way disparaging the entrepreneurial and educational achievements of the Palestinian people, whose record in building human capital is among the most impressive in the Arab world. Nor was I claiming that Israeli security restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip play no role whatsoever in retarding Palestinian economic development. Obviously, they do. But even here Palestinian culture (and institutions) are, I believe, ultimately to blame.

Israel is not restricting movement in and out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip because it wants to play the role of colonial occupier or believes it has a duty to rule the benighted Palestinian people. The vast majority of Israelis are happy to give up any claims to rule in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and to acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to statehood. Indeed, in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to cede upwards of 95 percent of the West Bank, part of Jerusalem, and the entire Gaza Strip to Palestinian rule. As we know, Yasir Arafat refused to take the deal.

Why? Much of the explanation may be found in Arafat’s character: shaped by a “resistance” struggle, he was unwilling to beat swords into ploughshares and become the president of a small, impoverished state with little claim on the world’s attention. But part of the explanation can also be found in the Palestinians’ dysfunctional political culture which they share in common with much of the Arab world–a culture that elevates grand gestures (such as “resistance”) over mundane realities such as improving economic life, and a culture that is so deeply impregnated with anti-Semitism it is simply unimaginable for most Palestinians to give up the “right of return” and truly accept they will never win back by force the land now occupied by the “Zionists.” Arafat was said to fear that if he actually gave up the struggle, he would not be long for this world, and he may have been right–look at the fate of Sadat. …

Ed Morrissey says you can’t make it up. The Dems are going to put Elizabeth Warren front and center at their convention. Talk about doubling down.

It’s not quite as good as getting the keynote slot, which will instead go to San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, but for Republicans, it’s pretty darned close to perfect.  Democrats gave Elizabeth Warren the prime-time slot just before Bill Clinton will officially nominate Barack Obama to be the party’s candidate in the November election, which means she may get even more viewers and attention than Castro in the keynote position. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar wonders what Democrats are thinking: …

Next up at the Dem convention will be Bill Clinton. Erika Johnsen of Hot Air quotes Britt Hume on that:

The convention role being given Bill Clinton is proof that President Obama is in deep trouble and he and his political handlers know it….

… Add to that the Rasmussen survey in which voters by 62 percent to 30 said economic growth was more important to them than economic fairness. Fairness, of course, is a major theme of Mr. Obama and his party. With his attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record and his repeated and unsubtle appeals to elements of his party’s base, Mr. Obama is clearly shooting for a big Democratic turnout in November.

But Gallup reports that the number of Democrats who say they are more enthusiastic about voting this year is at 39 percent, down from 61 percent four years ago. 51 percent of Republicans, meanwhile, said they are more enthusiastic this year, that is up from 35 per cent in 2008.When you put all this together with the continuing bad news on the economy, you know why Mr. Obama is suddenly reaching out to Bill Clinton.

This is a distress call. …

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WSJ’s Weekend Interview carried a warning.

Yale Prof. Charles Hill is often called a “conservative.” But he is one of the foremost students and advocates of what he calls the “liberal” (“in the finest sense of the word”) world order. And he is worried that Americans increasingly don’t understand how special the modern era has been or their own crucial role in developing and securing it.

To some, the Obama’s administration’s desire to “lead from behind” and seek United Nations approval for actions abroad represents an appropriate retreat to a more humble American posture. Mr. Hill, by contrast, sees the possible end of a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen.

Our world has “been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom. And it can come to an end,” he says.

What might replace it? “Spheres of influence.” Or to use a more archaic term, “empire.”

Mr. Hill is the all-too-rare professor with an extensive background outside of academia. He made his career in the U.S. foreign service working on China and the Middle East, among other issues. He has advised secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and served as a policy consultant to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His ability to combine real-world experience with appreciation of the intellectual currents animating history—Dickens comes up during our discussion of the anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain—has made his courses some of the most popular at Yale. …

… What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman. That culminated in President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which he likens to an “emancipation proclamation for the world.” But, he says, “The democracy wave that began 20 years ago [at the end of the Cold War] is now turning backward.” Why? “The conduct of the Obama administration.”

So the future is still very much a choice, not an inevitability, I ask.

“Absolutely. It’s been a choice,” he says. “I’m not so sure now that people even see the choice because the mentalities are shifting. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on 1.5% ‘growth.’

He can blame George Bush. He can whine that he was handed a terrible economy. (Ronald Reagan inherited worse.) But there’s no spin that will make 1.5 percent growth in GDP anything but dismal. It is not a recovery we are in; this is what we need to recover from — anemic growth, endemically high unemployment and record poverty.

What is the president’s big idea? Raise taxes on small business. What is he campaigning on? Mitt Romney’s tax returns. What’s his major rhetorical thrust? Businessmen shouldn’t claim credit for their success.

You know why the media sycophants want to talk about David Cameron (the man who apologized to North Korea for a mix-up with flags and gave Obama smooches in 2008). You understand David Axelrod wants to flog a blind quote in a British newspaper. You can see why Obama isn’t asked hard questions.

The latest news only points up how irrelevant, if not absurd, is most of the media coverage of the presidential campaign. …

Kim Strassel writes on “four little words.” 

What’s the difference between a calm and cool Barack Obama, and a rattled and worried Barack Obama? Four words, it turns out.

“You didn’t build that” is swelling to such heights that it has the president somewhere unprecedented: on defense. Mr. Obama has felt compelled—for the first time in this campaign—to cut an ad in which he directly responds to the criticisms of his now-infamous speech, complaining his opponents took his words “out of context.”

That ad follows two separate ones from his campaign attempting damage control. His campaign appearances are now about backpedaling and proclaiming his love for small business. And the Democratic National Committee produced its own panicked memo, which vowed to “turn the page” on Mr. Romney’s “out of context . . . BS”—thereby acknowledging that Chicago has lost control of the message.

The Obama campaign has elevated poll-testing and focus-grouping to near-clinical heights, and the results drive the president’s every action: his policies, his campaign venues, his targeted demographics, his messaging. That Mr. Obama felt required—teeth-gritted—to address the “you didn’t build that” meme means his vaunted focus groups are sounding alarms.

The obsession with tested messages is precisely why the president’s rare moments of candor—on free enterprise, on those who “cling to their guns and religion,” on the need to “spread the wealth around”—are so revealing. They are a look at the real man. It turns out Mr. Obama’s dismissive words toward free enterprise closely mirror a speech that liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren gave last August.

Ms. Warren’s argument—that government is the real source of all business success—went viral and made a profound impression among the liberal elite, who have been pushing for its wider adoption. Mr. Obama chose to road-test it on the national stage, presumably thinking it would underline his argument for why the wealthy should pay more. It was a big political misstep, and now has the Obama team seriously worried. …

Charles Krauthammer replies to administration flacks.

Shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush received from Prime Minister Tony Blair a bust of Winston Churchill as an expression of British-American solidarity. Bush gave it pride of place in the Oval Office.

In my Friday column about Mitt Romney’s trip abroad and U.S. foreign policy [“Why he’s going where he’s going,” op-ed], I wrote that Barack Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.”

Within hours, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer had created something of a bonfire. Citing my statement, he posted a furious blog on the White House Web site, saying, “normally, we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column . . . This is 100% false. The bust [is] still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room.”

Except that it isn’t. As the British Embassy said in a statement issued just a few hours later, “the bust now resides in the British ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C.”

As the British Embassy explained in 2009, the bust “was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned.”

QED.

At which point, one would expect Pfeiffer to say: Sorry, I made a mistake. End of story.

But Pfeiffer had an additional problem. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says he’ll visit Israel in his second term. Israel’s response, “We’ll put you down as a ‘Maybe.’”

Leno: President Obama’s college apartment in New York City is up for rent at $2,400 a month. Coincidentally, he was only there for one four-year lease.

Leno: Joe Biden says he had to ask his wife Jill to marry him five times. Five times! That’s not a proposal. That’s harassment!

Fallon: President Obama says thanks to him, people in the rest of the world have a new attitude toward America. It’s true — people used to hate us, but thanks to him, now they just feel sorry for us.