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Nile Gardiner on Obama’s last SOTU.

Two words hardly mentioned in Barack Obama’s 65-minute State of the Union address to Congress: freedom and liberty. President Obama’s fourth and possibly last State of the Union speech was long on big government proposals, but short on the principles that have made America the world’s greatest power. His lecturing tone exuded arrogance, and he failed to present a coherent vision for getting the United States back on its feet after three years of economic decline. It was heavy on class-war rhetoric, punitive taxation, and frequent references to the Left-wing mantra of “fairness”, hardly likely to instil confidence in a battered business community that is the lifeblood of the American economy.

Above all, he remains in denial over the levels of federal debt that threaten the country’s long-term prosperity. This was not a speech that was serious about the biggest budget deficits since World War Two. There was no sense at all that America is a superpower on a precipice, sinking in a sea of debt that threatens to undermine America’s power to project global leadership  for generations to come. In fact, his interventionist proposals will only make matters worse.

From new federally funded infrastructure projects to increasing regulations on financial institutions, President Obama remains wedded to big government – an approach rejected by a clear majority of Americans, who view it as a millstone around their necks. As Gallup’s polling has found, nearly two thirds of Americans see big government as “the biggest threat” to their country. …

Yuval Levin comments on the speech for the Corner.

Toward the end of his State of the Union address, President Obama delivered a paragraph that was so blatantly absurd and self contradictory as to actually become clarifying—so incoherent that it shed a bright light on his thinking and his grave dilemma. It’s hard to believe he actually said this, but he did:

“I’m a Democrat.  But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed:  That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.  That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.  That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work.  That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.”

The examples he chose of course jump out as ludicrous: K-12 education in America is thoroughly dominated by the government, and the president has not proposed to make it less so. (And state governments, by the way, are also governments.) “Getting rid of regulations that don’t work” is certainly an unusual way to describe the regulatory agenda of this administration, which has involved a series of unprecedented delegations of authority to regulators (especially in health care and financial regulation) and which continues every day to spew forth an interminable array of costly, complex, and highly assertive rules that will give the federal government (and the executive agencies in particular) previously unimagined discretion over vast swaths of our economy. And “relies on a reformed private market, not a government program” is surely the most unabashedly dishonest and Orwellian way yet devised to describe Obamacare—a law that begins from the premise that the solution to our health care financing problems is to make the government an even greater provider and purchaser of health insurance, …

Because he was a presidential speech writer, Peter Wehner has some creds when it comes to the SOTU.

I have some sympathy for President Obama’s speechwriters. A State of the Union address is inherently challenging to write because there’s a laundry list quality to them. (That was not the case for President Bush’s early State of the Union speeches, as we were able to focus on the war on terror, which created a clear hierarchy of priorities, allowing us to reject the usual input from various federal agencies). But what made Obama’s address last night doubly challenging is he clearly understands he cannot defend his record and won’t even try. That was obvious, given the glaring omissions in his speech. For example, Obamacare barely made a cameo appearance last night while his stimulus package was kept off-stage completely.

Then there is the fact that the president has no compelling second-term agenda to offer (something I wrote about yesterday). And since a State of the Union address imposes some constraints on Obama’s favorite rhetorical device these days, which is to accuse Republicans of being unpatriotic and very nearly sadistic, what’s a presidential speechwriter to do?

One option is to have Obama say in 2012 almost exactly what he said in 2010 and 2011. The problem with that is it’s not only rhetorically uncreative, it’s downright embarrassing. …

Megan McArdle thinks the speech was filled with nostalgia.

… I think the speech made it even clearer than other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships.  Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice people like Obama at the reins–all the inventions coming out of massive government or corporate labs, and all the resulting products built by a heavily unionized workforce that knows no worry about the future.

There are obviously a lot of problems with this vision.  The first is that this is not what the fifties and sixties were actually like–the government and corporate labs sat on a lot of inventions until upstart companies developed them, and the union goodies that we now think of as typical were actually won pretty late in the game (the contracts that eventually killed GM were written in the early 1970s).

And to the extent that the fifties and sixties were actually like this, we should remember, as Max Boot points out, that this was not actually the day of the little guy.  Big institutions actually had a great deal more power than they do now; it was just distributed somewhat differently–you had to worry less about big developers slapping a high-rise next to your single-family neighborhood, and a whole lot more about Robert Moses deciding he wanted to run a freeway through the spot where your house happened to be.  

The military model of society–employed by both Obama, and a whole lot of 1950s good government types–was actually a kind of creepy way to live.  As Boot says, “America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.”  If you want the 1950s except without the rigid conformity and the McCarthyism, then you fundamentally misunderstand what made the 1950s tick. …

Both Mitt and Newt made money from a Denmark drug company. Mitt made it out in the open as an honest man. Newt made his under cover of his lobbying activities. Nicole Gelinas has the story.

Whose financial activities tell us what’s wrong with America — Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s? 

Romney released some tax returns this morning. In 2010, Goldman Sachs, one of the Romneys’ investment firms, reported that a trust set up for Ann Romney booked a $17,728.21 profit on the sale of stock in Novo Nordisk, a global pharmaceutical company based in Denmark. The Romneys paid a 15 percent federal tax levy on this capital gain, or $2,659.23.

Romney’s Novo investment was unremarkable. It was a tiny part of his portfolio. It catches the eye only because Gingrich, too, made cash off Novo Nordisk in recent years — just in a different way.

As the New York Times reported last month, Novo Nordisk paid $200,000 annually to be a big part of Gingrich’s “Center for Health Transformation.” Novo paid Gingrich separately, too, for lobbying in all but name. 

What did Novo want? It wanted Gingrich to wring money from the U.S. government. The Times says: …

Volokh Conspiracy provides a good example of the benefits of the government leaving the economy alone.

Interesting column by James Grant on the short but severe post-WWI Depression of 1920–21:

“Our Great Recession ended 2½ years ago, according to the official cyclical timekeepers, but you wouldn’t know it by a glance at the news. Zero percent interest rates and $1 trillion in “stimulus” notwithstanding, the U.S. economy can hardly seem to heave itself out of bed in the morning. Now compare this with the first full year of recovery from the ugly depression of 1920–21. In 1922, under the unsung stewardship of the president best remembered for his underlings’ scandals and his own early death in office, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared.

And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, produce these astonishing results? Why, by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget. Let 21st-century economists rub their eyes in disbelief. Eighteen months after the depression started, it ended.”

I’ve been fascinated by the contrast of Harding’s response to the 1920 depression versus Roosevelt’s seemingly-counterproductive response to the Great Depression since I read several discussions a few years back (see here, here, and here).  The problem with macroeconomics, of course, is the paucity of data points and the inability to control for relevant variables.  But it is nevertheless striking to me that discussion always seems to focus on what at first glance appears to be the failed Hoover-Roosevelt response to the Great Depression rather than the apparently effective Harding response to the 1920 Depression.

The only discussions I’ve seen of the 1920 Depression are those that support Harding.  Has anyone written a good response to that story, because what I’ve read seems fairly compelling (at least to the extent that macroeconomics can ever tell a compelling story).

Cato has a graph that shows the growing state dependency on the federal government. The graph is defective in that it does not clearly show the devastating effect of the present administration. In 2002 the percentage was 27.2% and in 2008 it dropped to 26.3%. In 2011 it increased to 34.1% That is an increase of 23% in just three years. So it was stable for a good bit of time until Barack Obama was elected.

The president’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal is scheduled to be released on February 13th. State officials are predictably sounding the alarm on the coming “deep cuts” to federal subsidies now that stimulus funds are running out and Washington is being forced to confront its mounting red ink.

State officials have become addicted to federal subsidies because they allow them to spend money taken from taxpayers across the country instead of having to ask their voters to pony up the funds. As the following charts shows, total state spending continued to increase during the economic downturn because the federal government picked up the slack. Note that the federal share of total state spending went from 25.7 percent in 2001 to 34.1 percent in 2011.

Ever wonder why the Glock handgun is so popular? WaPo reviews a book on the gun and the man who invented it.

As you pass through airport security, graphics depict items prohibited in your carry-on luggage. While the representations of a knife and an aerosol spray can are fairly generic, the pictograph of a handgun is unequivocally the silhouette of a Glock pistol.

In 1982, an obscure Austrian engineer named Gaston Glock, who worked in a radiator plant and had a side business with his wife making curtain rods, knives and belt buckles, invented a type of pistol that changed the worlds of law enforcement and firearms and powerfully influenced politics and popular culture. Glock is now 82, and his surname has become synonymous in some circles with “handgun.”

Less than three decades ago, few had heard of Glock, the man or the gun. Just how a pistol developed by an unknown engineer with little firearms experience became the dominant, if not iconic, law enforcement handgun in the United States is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s “Glock.” …

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City Journal says Walker’s Wisconsin reforms are working.

Public unions around the country have poured money into an effort to vote Walker out of office.

One morning last February, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called his staff into his office. “Guys,” he warned, “it’s going to be a tough week.” Walker had recently sent a letter to state employees proposing steps—ranging from restricting collective bargaining to requiring workers to start contributing to their own pension accounts—to eliminate the state’s $3.6 billion deficit. That day in February was when Walker would announce his plan publicly.

It turned out to be a tough year. The state immediately erupted into a national spectacle, with tens of thousands of citizens, led by Wisconsin’s public-employee unions, seizing control of the capitol for weeks to protest the reforms. By early March, the crowds grew as big as 100,000, police estimated. Protesters set up encampments in the statehouse, openly drinking and engaging in drug use beneath the marble dome. Democratic state senators fled Wisconsin to prevent a vote on Walker’s plan. Eventually, the Senate did manage to pass the reforms, which survived a legal challenge and became law in July.

The unions aren’t done yet: they’re now trying to recall Walker from office. To do so, they will try to convince Wisconsin voters that Walker’s reforms have rendered the state ungovernable. But the evidence, so far, contradicts that claim—and Wisconsinites seem to realize it. …

… the reforms not only are saving money already; they’re doing so with little disruption to services. In early August, noticing the trend, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Milwaukee would save more in health-care and pension costs than it would lose in state aid, leaving the city $11 million ahead in 2012—despite Mayor Tom Barrett’s prediction in March that Walker’s budget “makes our structural deficit explode.”

The collective-bargaining component of Walker’s plan has yielded especially large financial dividends for school districts. Before the reform, many districts’ annual union contracts required them to buy health insurance from WEA Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s largest teachers’ union. Once the reform limited collective bargaining to wage negotiations, districts could eliminate that requirement from their contracts and start bidding for health care on the open market. When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid, for instance, WEA Trust suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.

Appleton isn’t alone. According to a report by the MacIver Institute, as of September 1, “at least 25 school districts in the Badger State had reported switching health care providers/plans or opening insurance bidding to outside companies.” The institute calculates that these steps will save the districts $211.45 per student. If the state’s other 250 districts currently served by WEA Trust follow suit, the savings statewide could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the outset of the public-union standoff, educators had made dire predictions that Walker’s reforms would force schools to fire teachers. In February, to take one example, Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad predicted that 289 teachers in his district would be laid off. Walker insisted that his reforms were actually a job-retention program: by accepting small concessions in health and pension benefits, he argued, school districts would be able to spare hundreds of teachers’ jobs. The argument proved sound. So far, Nerad’s district has laid off no teachers at all, a pattern that has held in many of the state’s other large school districts. No teachers were laid off in Beloit and LaCrosse; Eau Claire saw a reduction of two teachers, while Racine and Wausau each laid off one. The Wauwatosa School District, which faced a $6.5 million shortfall, anticipated slashing 100 jobs—yet the new pension and health contributions saved them all.

The benefits to school districts aren’t just fiscal, moreover. Thanks to Walker’s collective-bargaining reforms, the Brown Deer school district in suburban Milwaukee can implement a performance-pay system for its best teachers—a step that could improve educational outcomes. …

Spengler says Obama is toast.

President Obama thinks that the improving economy will win him a second term, the New York Times reports today. Whatever he’s drinking, order me a double. His poll numbers look a little better because the Republicans have spent the past several months in a fratricidal bloodbath. Fortunately, the memory of the American electorate for such antics is short. Once we choose a candidate (and I am happy with Romney, Santorum, or Gingrich) and unite behind him, we will win, unless, of course, we find a way to sabotage ourselves.

People are hurting, and badly. The official unemployment rate may have fallen, slightly, but the real unemployment rate — the number of working-age Americans who aren’t working — rose from about 12% before the 2008 crisis, to about 23%, and hasn’t come down. That includes people who have retired early because they can’t find work, spouses who used to earn a second income but have gone back to homemaking because work isn’t available, self-employed people whose businesses have collapsed, young people who live in their parents’ basement because they can’t afford tuition and can’t find work. …

Turns out the Scrooge of Omaha will benefit from the pipeline spike. Bloomberg News has the story.

Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.

With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department.

“Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.”

The State Department denied TransCanada a permit on Jan. 18, saying there was not enough time to study the proposal by Feb. 21, a deadline Congress imposed on President Barack Obama. Calgary-based TransCanada has said it intends to re-apply with a route that avoids an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska, something the Obama administration encouraged. …

Putting more BS to the administration, New Editor has a map of the oil and gas pipelines in the US.

Michael Barone says even some of the left can’t stomach high speed rail BS.

Three cheers for Kevin Drum, blogging at the left-wing Mother Jones website. Drum, who is based in California, has been opposing the ridiculously expensive California high-speed rail project still supported, against all common sense, by Governor Jerry Brown. In this blogpost he takes aim at the high-speed rail authority’s estimate that it would cost $171 billion to produce highway and airport infrastructure to replace that which would be provided by high-speed rail service. Drum notes that the authority’s well compensated consulting firm bases that projection on an assumption that “the high-speed rail system could carry 116 million passengers a year, based on running trains with 1,000 seats both north and south every five minutes, 19 hours a day and 365 days a year. The study assumes the trains would be 70% full on average.”  …

There was a SOTU address last night. Jennifer Rubin fills us in.

President Obama’s third State of the Union address was, as expected, a transparently partisan kick-off speech for his 2012 election campaign.

The president began shamelessly by hyping the complete withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. (“For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. ”) This is an applause line for him, but his failure or unwillingness to negotiate an agreement with Iraq to keep troops present has unleashed a wave of violence, considerable angst among allies, and cheers in Tehran.

After an easy applause line for killing Osama bin Laden, Obama then plunged into his economic defense. He then reviewed the financial collapse, making sure we all knew it wasn’t on his watch that the banks and economy melted down. From there it was bromides mixed with attacks on Republicans. (“As long as I’m president, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”)

Fairness, of course, was much on his mind: “Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.” By that, he is talking about equality of income and outcome. He’s not talking about a flat tax (which would truly be treating all taxpayers alike), but a redistribution of wealth.

His actual agenda was meager, however. Yes, he asked for tax reform and breaks for manufacturing companies, but presented no plan of his own.

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Joel Kotkin says many trends could make the 21st century “America’s moment.” He thinks this can come about if we get better political leadership. More likely, we can perform if the government will leave us alone.

The vast majority of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and, according to a 2011 Pew Survey, close to a majority feel that China has already surpassed the U.S. as an economic power.

These views echo those of the punditry, right and left, who see the U.S. on the road to inevitable decline.  Yet the reality is quite different. A confluence of largely unnoticed economic, demographic and political trends has put the U.S. in a far more favorable position than its rivals. Rather than the end of preeminence, America may well be entering  a renaissance.

Just survey the globe. The European Union’s prolonged crisis will likely end in further decline. Aging Japan has long passed its prime, its market share receding in everything from autos to high tech.  China’s impressive economic juggernaut has slowed down, and the Middle Kingdom faces increased social instability, environmental degradation and a creaky one-party dictatorship.

While the U.S. has its challenges, it is positioned to achieve a more solid long-term   trajectory than its European and Asian rivals. What it lacks, however, is a strong political leadership capable of seizing this opportunity.

Resources

Energy constitutes the biggest ace in the hole for the U.S. For almost half a century, an enormous fossil fuel bill that still accounts for 40% of the nation’s trade deficit has hampered economic growth. Now that situation is changing rapidly.

Due to vast new finds and improved technology to exploit them, the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and could emerge as the leading oil producer by 2017. Reserves of natural gas — a clean-burning fuel — are estimated at 100 years supply and could generate more than 1.5 million new jobs over the next two decades.

The U.S. agricultural sector is also booming, with exports reaching a record $135.5 billion in 2011. With global demand increasing, sustained growth  will continue across America’s fertile agricultural regions. …

As a juxtaposition to the upbeat piece from Kotkin, we have a story from the NY Times about manufacturing as it is done in China.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares. …

After that from the Times, we need late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Letterman: I don’t know how many times Newt Gingrich’s been married–5, 6. But I know at the last wedding they had an on-deck circle.

Leno: John Edwards having heart surgery in February. While he’s under, they also hope to neuter him.

Fallon: President Obama needs no cash to get into Disney World. He just charges it to the China section in Epcot.

Letterman: So Burger King now delivering in New York City. You know, sometimes you just don’t have the energy to get dressed up and go out to dinner at BK. Now, if we can get the same deals on cigarettes and fireworks, we’re having a real conversation.

Conan: A California man was arrested for poisoning his wife’s Rice Krispies. He was charged with attempted murder & completely misunderstanding the term “Serial Killer.

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Mark Steyn rises to the challenge from Abe Greenwald. 

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

“Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?”

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. ….

… Abe Greenwald isn’t thinking big enough. The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but – here it comes down the slipway – the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures – the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security – and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.

Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life – to the proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise, sailing (as the Concordia’s name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor – of a Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course – has become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician attempting to project urgency. But let’s assume they’re correct, and we’re heading full steam for the big ‘berg. When we hit, what’s the likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?

The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

David Warren picks on the design of these ships.

… As we approach the centenary of the Titanic disaster, we might observe that the laws of physics remain in force. I was struck, almost risibly, by a BBC sidebar headline, which asked, “How did this happen to a modern ship?” The answer would be: “Easily.”

The builders of these immense floating pleasure palaces declare they are safe because they are loaded with technical gizmos, helping us forget that their extraordinary size is the weakness. The weight of the thing is sufficient to rip any hull apart, when it hits anything immovable; and the oceans are full of things like that. The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled, thanks to the destructive power of this weight; yet the less manoeuvrable she becomes.

Cruise ships are anyway not built as solidly as, say, the Titanic. When airliners took over the North Atlantic run, the fast tough passenger ships designed for its heavy seas went to the scrapyards, ultimately to be reincarnated as these holiday vessels. Cruise ships are built structurally lighter, for moderate speed and moderate seas; then loaded to ever larger economies of scale. They are resort hotels, posing as ships.

As a correspondent with some knowledge of shipbuilding explains, “They are eggshells without proper keels, and they have lots of little propulsion pods below that would each leave quite a hole if rubbed off.” Luck alone may explain why none has yet gone down, a little farther from shore, with losses on the scale of 9/11. …

Chinese peasant farmers launched a revolution with a secret document that hoped to end constant shortage of food. NPR has the story.

… There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says.

“Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.”

In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.

This is an old idea, of course. But in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it. …

Hungarian entrepreneur blogs on why he will not start a business.

I could hire 12 people with €760 net salary, but I don’t. I’ll tell you why.

You could work for my service provider company in a nice office. It’s not telemarketing, it’s not a scam. You would do serious work that requires high skills, 8 hours a day, weekdays only. I would employ you legally, I would pay your taxes and social security. I could give such a job to a dozen people, but I will not, and here I’ll explain why.

I wouldn’t hire a woman.

The reason is very simple: women give birth to children. I don’t have the right to ask if she wanted to. If I had the right, and she answered, she could deliberately deceive me or she could change her mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem with women giving birth to children. That’s how I was born and that’s how my child was born. I wouldn’t hire a woman because when she gets pregnant, she goes for 3 years maternity leave, during which I can’t fire her. If she wants two children, the vacation is 6 years long.

Of course, work has to be done, so I would have to hire somebody who works instead of her while she is whiling away her long holiday years. But not only couldn’t I fire her while she’s away, I couldn’t fire her when she comes back either. So I would have to fire the one who’s been working instead of her the whole time. When a woman comes back from maternity leave, I would be legally forced to increase her salary to the present level in her position. Also, I would be required to give out her normal vacation days, that she accumulated during her maternity leave. When she finally comes back to work, she would start with 2-4 months of fully paid vacation.

I wouldn’t hire people over 50 either. …

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Robert Samuelson launches on the Keystone decision.

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. …

Joel Kotkin explains the decision in terms of the great American divide.

America has two basic economies, and the division increasingly defines its politics. One, concentrated on the coasts and in college towns, focuses on the business of images, digits and transactions. The other, located largely in the southeast, Texas and the Heartland, makes its living in more traditional industries, from agriculture and manufacturing to fossil fuel development.

Traditionally these two economies coexisted without interfering with the progress of the other. Wealthier gentry-dominated regions generally eschewed getting their hands dirty so that they could maintain the amenities that draw the so-called creative class and affluent trustifarians. The more traditionally based regions focused, largely uninhibited, on their core businesses, and often used the income to diversify their economies into higher-value added fields.

The Obama administration has altered this tolerant regime, generating intensifying conflict between the NIMBY America and its more blue-collar counterpart. The administration’s move to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico represents a classic expression of this conflict. To appease largely urban environmentalists, the Obama team has squandered the potential for thousands of blue-collar jobs in the Heartland and the Gulf of Mexico.

In this way, Obama differs from Bill Clinton, who after all recognized the need for basic industries as governor of poor and rural Arkansas. But the academic and urbanista-dominated Obama administration has little appreciation for those who do the nation’s economic dirty work. …

More on the environmental divide from William Tucker in the American Spectator.  

… In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time — born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun’s rays.

My story in Harper’s was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.

Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’ spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Keystone.

… A number of House and Senate Republicans have released similar statements. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said:. “Keystone was an obvious choice: everybody in Washington says they want more American jobs now. Well, here’s the single largest shovel-ready project in America — ready to go. Some of the news outlets are calling this pipeline controversial — I have absolutely no idea why. The labor unions like it. Democrats want it. It strengthens our national security by decreasing the amount of oil we get from unfriendly countries. And it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a dime. .?.?. The only thing standing between thousands of American workers, and the good jobs this project will provide is President Obama.”

Indeed, although Obama may feel obligated to his environmental supporters, the move makes no sense from either an economic or a political point of view. Moreover, it reinforces a favorite theme of Republicans; namely, that Obama’s top priority is not job creation but reelection. In sum, this is a political gift to Republicans that is likely to long outlast whatever dim memory exists over the payroll-tax-cut extension.

This episode also emphasizes that Republicans benefit when the topic shifts to Obama’s job record and decision-making. There is no better way to help his reelection prospects than for the GOP to nominate someone who provides a nice, fat target for the Obama campaign. The goal for Republicans must be to keep the focus on what Obama has done (Solyndra, the failed stimulus, the debt accumulation) or not done (lead on entitlement reform). The pipeline decision is just one of many examples Republicans will have at their fingertips.

The Economist tells about cat poop coffee. Pickerhead got some from Indonesia from #2 son. Actually was quite good.

… For the civet cats and their famous brew, the prospects were once more encouraging. In 1857 French colonialists introduced the first coffee trees to Vietnam and 30 years later built the first coffee plantations in the country. Farmers were barred from taking harvested beans, so they scavenged for the civet droppings to make their own secret roasts—a practice that gained popularity as the drink caught on in the mid-20th century.

Today most chon merchants don’t look in the wild for manure, but rent out farms for their cats to roam, chew (often less than a fifth of the ripest beans) and then let nature take its course. After farmers collect and wash the droppings, they dry them in the sun for weeks until the outer skin falls off. Brewers then use one of several methods for roasting the beans. One popular approach involves dashing the beans with sugar, salt and butter, and then giving them a medium or light roast over some coffee-tree wood (a heavy roast would cause the sugary beans to lose their natural taste). …

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise reacts to the Keystone Pipeline decision. Our country presently has 2,300,000 miles of pipeline carrying natural gas and hazardous liquids. The president doesn’t think we can safely add 1,700 miles. He thinks we’re stupid. 

So Obama has rejected–at least for now, for heaven forfend he make a firm decision–the Keystone XL Pipeline.  He claims that the rejection was not on the merits, but due to the fact that the Republicans had given him too little time–a mere 60 days–to determine whether the pipeline was in the national interest.  This after 3 plus years of the pipeline application began wending its way through the labyrinthine pipeline of the Federal approval process. So it’s not like this just landed on his desk with no prior analysis.  It’s more like: get on with it, Mr. Vote Present.

This from the guy who on every other day berates the same Republicans for foot-dragging obstructionism.  The guy who says he is going to do something every day to create jobs even if Congress doesn’t go along because it is just too slow.

I guess Obama is just President Goldilocks.  This is toooo fast.  This is toooo slow.  But he hasn’t found just right yet.

And the guy who is supposedly sooooo smart that he is bored because his mind is racing ahead of everyone (just ask Valerie Jarrett!) apparently needs a little extra time on this exam.

Please.  This was just another political dodge, wrapped up in a whinging excuse about being hustled along by meanie Republicans. …

More environmentally based economic stupidity is evidenced by a George Will column on the proposed dredging of Charlestown’s harbor to accommodate the large container ships that will soon navigate the widened Panama Canal. So far, our country has been studying the environmental impact of the project for 13 years.

… Newsome says the study for deepening Savannah’s harbor was made in 1999. It is 2012, and studies for the environmental impact statement are not finished. When they are, the project will take five years to construct. “But before that,” he says laconically, “they’re going to be sued by groups concerned about the environmental impact.” A Newsome axiom — that institutions become risk-averse as they get challenged — is increasingly pertinent as America changes from a nation that celebrated getting things done to a nation that celebrates people and groups who prevent things from being done. …

… The huge project of widening the Panama Canal began in 2006; it will be completed in eight years. Newsome, who is unstinting in his praise of the Army Corps, knows it must comply with ever-thickening layers of laws. But even if we stipulate that all these laws are wonderful, we should also stipulate that surely things would move faster if the nation faced an emergency. Such as economic enfeeblement.

The Empire State Building was built in 14 months during the Depression, the Pentagon in 16 in wartime. The aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, which earned 11 battle stars in the Pacific and now is anchored here, was built in less than 17 months, back when America was serious about moving forward. Is it necessary to take eight years — just two years less than it took to build the Panama Canal with yellow fever and without computers — to deepen this harbor five feet?

More from John Steele Gordon.

… Savannah began studying the possibility of dredging in 1999. Today, 13 years later, the study is still not completed. When and if it is, the dredging itself will take five years. So even if dredging started today, Savannah will not be able to take the new Panamax ships until three years after they begin to transit the canal. But dredging won’t start upon completion of the environmental study because various self-appointed guardians of the environment will–as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow–sue, arguing over every comma of the environmental impact statement that will run to thousands of pages. These groups have become past masters at using the legal system to delay–and thus all too often kill–projects they do not approve of, which, it seems, is nearly all of them. …

… The successful completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 was a great psychological moment for the United States, providing powerful evidence that this country could do anything it set its mind to. That attitude built the Hoover Dam, produced the industrial miracle that won World War II?, constructed the Interstate Highway System, and sent men to the moon. Today, it seems, we can’t even dredge a harbor, a technology that goes back centuries.

Steve Hayward proposes a solution to the “Charlestown Harbor” problems.

… Clearly the review process we have now is largely deadweight loss, just as high marginal tax rates discouraged capital formation, investment, and productivity improvements in the high-inflation 1970s.  We can arguably afford the extravagance of regulatory suffocation when the economy is booming at 4 percent growth a year or better (as in the late 1990s) and unemployment is 5 percent. We cannot afford it under the current stagnant circumstances.  A Laffer Curve for regulation will explore just how much economic growth and how many jobs were are sacrificing for this artificial punctiliousness.

What needs to be done?  The regulatory review process ought to have a short deadline.  Agency review should be completed within six or nine months, with a presumption in favor of granting permission unless an agency can delineate a substantively new problem based on precedents from previous similar projects (that is, no speculative objections based on what global warming might do 75 years from now, as actually happened to a proposed project in California a few years back where regulators denied a building permit on the theory that rising sea levels would make the land habitat for an endangered species that would want to move upland).  Standing to sue to block projects should be tightened, and the threshold for hearing such suits made much more restrictive.  And how about requiring that all Environmental Impact Statements be no longer than 200 pages?  I’m sure all the environmental lawyers and consultants who charge by the hour and make a bundle doing these multi-volume EIRs that no one reads will howl, but if the Supreme Court can limit briefs to 50 pages on matters of high constitutional importance, why can’t our regulatory process not emulate a standard of brevity that emphasizes the essential over the frivolous and tedious?

More on NY rent control from Nicole Gelinas.

Does the US Constitution apply on the Upper West Side? The Supreme Court may soon decide.

New York City and state regulate the rents of 982,000 apartments — half the city’s rental homes.

The rules are complicated, but for the most part, apartments are regulated until they’re vacant and lease for more than $2,500 a month. Until then, the government determines annual rent increases. With few exceptions, tenants can renew their leases forever and can hand down their apartments to their kids.

New York controls this “market” because, they say, there’s a housing “emergency.” The emergency is that everyone on the planet wants to live here, and only so many people fit. With a few gaps in time, this “emergency” dates back to just after World War I, when rents soared for returning veterans.  …

Andrew Ferguson profiles Rick Santorum and puts the BS sign on his anti-establishment smoke.

After he almost won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Rick Santorum was instantly dubbed a “Washington outsider,” even an “anti-establishment candidate.” It was a convenient tag that made it easier for reporters to keep all these strange Republicans straight: Newt Gingrich, Washington insider; Michele Bachmann, mad housewife; Mitt Romney, establishment prom king; Jon Huntsman, moderate hair guy; Rick Santorum, anti-establishment Washington outsider. Like that.

But Santorum’s titles were rescinded as quickly as they were bestowed, for the press discovered certain details that undercut any claim he might have to be a Washington outsider, such as the fact that he lives in suburban Washington and has for more than 20 years. Rick Santorum has spent his entire career either working in government—his first job out of school was as an assistant to a Pennsylvania state senator—or, when he wasn’t working in government, working to get another job in government, as he is doing now. And when, in 2007, he found himself once again without a government job, having been booted out of the Senate by a large majority of Pennsylvania voters, he took a bunch of government-like jobs right here in his beloved hometown of Washington.

This is where the press smelled an insider.

“After Santorum Left Senate,” headlined the New York Times, “Familiar Hands Reached Out.”

“After Senate,” echoed the Washington Post two days later, “Santorum turns Washington experience into lucrative career as consultant, pundit.” …

Ancient humans used mattresses that chased away insects. Story from the Economist.

SETTING up home in the modern world means acquiring some furniture—particularly a bed. And things were not so different 77,000 years ago, according to the latest research on the behaviour of early man in South Africa. Caves in that country have yielded a lot of discoveries about how Homo sapiens made the transition to modernity. That he liked to sleep on a comfortable mattress is the latest. …

… The most interesting layer is the oldest. It is this stratum that dates from 77,000 years ago. Among the things Dr Wadley’s team found in it were sheets of plant matter several square metres in area, themselves divided into layers. The lower part of these layers, compressed to a thickness of about a centimetre, consists of sedges, rushes and grasses. The upper part, just under a millimetre thick, is made of leaves from Cryptocarya woodii, a tree whose foliage contains chemicals that kill insects.

These insecticidal leaves would have discouraged fleas and other biting arthropods—and possibly mosquitoes, too. Dr Wadley thus thinks that what she has found are mattresses on which the inhabitants of Sibudu slept. They may also have walked and worked on them, in a way similar to the use of tatami in modern Japanese houses.

Andrew Malcolm sweeps up the week’s humor.

Twitter: If Mayans were good at predicting the future, there’d be Mayans. via @jonlovett

Twitter: Newt Gingrich insists that he’ll be in Florida for the primary too. Callista has booked a Caribbean cruise that sails from Miami. @EdCarson1

Fallon: The national debt is now the size of the entire U.S. economy. I don’t want to say Obama is out of ideas, but today he called Tim Tebow.

Conan: During one of the GOP debates, Jon Huntsman spoke Chinese. Not to be outdone, during the same debate Newt Gingrich ate Chinese.

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A remarkable essay has surfaced in NY. Written by a self-employed craftsman and home schooling father, the essay recounts how the green movement has degenerated into groups who fight against advances that can improve the human condition. We get this from the NY Shale Gas Now blog.

Two generations ago the discovery of retrievable gas from the Marcellus Shale would have been greeted with — it’s there, we need it, let’s get it.  Today, after two generations of the environmental movement, the response is — it’s there, you don’t need it, it will hurt the earth.  Other than the agreement “it’s there,” the calculus has turned 180 degrees.??

In the mid-twentieth century the lords of industry reigned as the only team on the playing field.  Today environmentalism has become a full-fledged belief system and has largely won the public relations war.  The environmental movement now plays on the field from a dominant position as the white knights opposed to the now dark lords of industry.  But are the knights really so white and the lords really so dark?  I believe the lords are not so dark and the knights not so white.  However, it is the knights that generally get the free pass, and it is the knights of environmentalism and their seemingly pure quest for the perfect world that I would like to look at.

The current environmental movement fixates on improvements that are immeasurable, intangible and unaffordable.  Where earlier gains in environmental protection tangibly cleaned up dirty rivers, dirty lakes, and dirty air, it now fights against remote possibilities, against threats not actually visible but hiding under every stone and behind every tree in our future landscape.  For these “improvements” it will sacrifice jobs that measurably improve many lives.  It will sacrifice cheap energy that cooks our food, heats our homes, drives us to work and even pumps the water whose purity it holds supreme.  And it will sacrifice public funds on schemes that would never see the light of day if people were asked to invest their own personal resources. …

… The Marcellus Shale and many other resources in this country can be mined responsibly, but none of it can be done completely without risk.  There is neither progress nor freedom without risk.  It is foolhardy to think that a life without risk is even possible.  It is foolish to think that risk always favors the do-nothing position.  The risk of doing nothing is the risk of poverty and stagnation.  I think history will show that to be the greater risk.

The perfect world will be found in neither poverty nor prosperity.  But one is better than the other.  Prosperity will always be messy.  There will always be accidents waiting to happen and unforeseen consequences.  However, history shows — particularly the history of the United States — that more people live better lives when they are willing to take those risks and deal with the consequences as they occur.

It is our prosperity that has allowed us to live in a cleaner and healthier world than our ancestors.  It is our continued prosperity that will allow us to continue doing so.  This prosperity will require an attitude that says, “How can we make this happen?”  It will require an emphatic “YES!” rather than a tired, overused “NO.”

Matthew Continetti profiles Valerie Jarrett – the one we should run against this year.

If for nothing else, Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas will be remembered for an anecdote from 2010. After he spent hours disputing an allegation in the French media that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was “hell,” press secretary Robert Gibbs encountered senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. She told him the first lady was unhappy with his work. Gibbs exploded in a rage, informing Jarrett that she didn’t “know what the f— you’re talking about” and that if Mrs. Obama was displeased, well, “f— her too.” Subsequent relations between the senior adviser and press secretary were strained. Gibbs told Kantor he stopped taking Jarrett seriously “as an adviser to the president of the United States.”

It’s about time. Many have wondered—and the Washington Post asked last year—“What, exactly, does Valerie Jarrett do?” No one has a clear answer. Whatever she does, the U.S. taxpayer pays her $172,200 a year to do it. A confidante of the Obamas for more than two decades, variously described as the president’s “closest adviser” and a member of the “innermost ring” of influence, Jarrett clearly has the first couple’s ears. She seems to function as a sort of third party to the Obama marriage, guarding the president and his wife from bad news and outside influence while meeting with Lady Gaga. Her lack of any national political experience whatsoever—she had never been to Iowa before Obama competed there three years ago—has not prevented her from shaping the White House’s political strategy and influencing economic and foreign policies. One might liken her to Don Corleone’s consigliere Tom Hagen, bedecked in a designer shawl, except Hagen gave better advice.

What Valerie Jarrett does best is represent the Obama administration in microcosm. She embodies its insularity, its cronyism, its cluelessness. Born in Iran to a prominent African-American family from Chicago, she took degrees at Stanford and Michigan Law. She worked briefly as a corporate lawyer but hated every moment. So she decided to “give back,” which is Chicago code for cashing in. She campaigned for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and worked for him in the corporation counsel’s office. Washington died in 1987, but Jarrett remained in government, working for his successor, Mayor Richard M. “Richie” Daley, son of legendary boss Richard J. Daley. It was all upward from there. …

… The House is lost, Obama’s reelection looks dicey, but Jarrett is flying high. In one sense she is the most successful Obama courtier of them all: She has outlasted her rivals. Gibbs is gone. Internal clashes led to Emanuel’s sudden discovery that he had always wanted to be mayor of Chicago. Emanuel’s replacement, fellow Chicagoan Bill Daley (brother of Richie), was muscled out last week; word is he fought with Jarrett too. Her persistence is matched only by her tone-deafness. Wolffe describes the president’s first visit to Chicago after his inauguration. From the window of his helicopter Obama could see that his arrival had caused a major traffic jam. “We shouldn’t have come here in rush hour,” he reflected. This was too much for Jarrett. “You know what, Mr. President?” she said. “You may not be enjoying your new life, but I am.” 

Better enjoy it while it lasts—which won’t be for long if Obama continues to listen to his inept political fixer.

Andrew Sullivan gets the once over from Big Government.

“Why Are Obama’ Critics So Dumb?” That’s the question posed by Andrew Sullivan in the cover story of this week’s Newsweek.

But you’d have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue–as Trig Truther Sullivan does–that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious “long game” that is destined to succeed.

If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field.

Sullivan, who claims to care about national debt, begins by arguing, contrary to reality, that Obama’s massive $787 billion stimulus (actually, $862 billion) turned the economy around. He offers no proof other than the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy familiar from basic economics. Sullivan also ignores the composition of the stimulus, which shoveled cash to cronies and bloated big states with their massive public sector obligations.

In addition, Sullivan claims that Obama’s auto bailout succeeded–when in fact it pushed aside property rights and subsidized failed “green” cars, rather than allowing car makers to rebuild through normal bankruptcy. He also commends Obama for continuing George W. Bush’s bank bailouts–but does not mention the Dodd-Frank financial “reforms” that enshrine “too big to fail,” hurt small businesses and fail to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Next, Sullivan tries to defend Obama on taxes, pointing out that the president passed tax cuts as part of the stimulus. He ignores the numerous new taxes and tax increases that Obama signed into law–from higher cigarette taxes to the many ObamaCare taxes–as well as the glaring fact that Obama has been campaigning for the past several years on the promise to raise taxes on the rich, and would have done so if not for Congress.

Additional response to Sullivan from Nile Gardiner.

… As I’ve noted previously, this is probably the nastiest US presidency in decades. There is nothing “dumb” about the administration’s critics questioning attacks on political opponents, which have been a hallmark of this administration. Take Joe Biden’s appalling comparison of the Tea Party to terrorists last August. As I wrote at the time, “there is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US presidency.”

Obama’s critics have also been smart to criticise the arrogance of an imperial-style presidency with a penchant for acting without Congressional restraint. The president’s hubris, from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize just months after taking office, to declaring himself the fourth best president in US history, knows no bounds, and has been a defining characteristic of a presidency that is out of touch with ordinary Americans.

For all its talk of “smart power”, this is a gaffe-prone presidency that makes mistakes so elementary they are embarrassing. Instead of calling Obama’s critics “dumb”, the president’s supporters should be telling their own Executive Branch friends to smarten up their act and do a bit of homework, especially when it comes their less-than-stellar knowledge of current affairs. From Hillary Clinton’s description of murderous Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad as a “reformer” to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s calling the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular”, this administration’s foreign policy track record has been a mess. And as for the myth that the current president is smarter than his Yale-educated predecessor, I don’t recall George W Bush ever referring to “the English Embassy”, or incredibly describing France as America’s strongest ally.

Andrew Cline in the Corner with a snarky send-off for Jon Jon.

Jon Huntsman ended his presidential campaign exactly as he began it: as a pompous, sermonizing mannequin.

To say that Huntsman was Mitt Romney without the flair would be unfair — to Mitt Romney. Despite their surface similarities, Romney and Huntsman were enormously different candidates. Huntsman lacked all of Romney’s great strengths — a reason for running, a coherent message for the voters, a plan for winning, and the discipline, organization, and killer instinct necessary to defeat his opponents. Huntsman brought two visible attributes to the table: condescension and the need for adulation.

He tried to mask his disdain for rank-and-file Republican voters by pandering to them relentlessly. He treated them as beings of little intellect who could be manipulated with cartoonish sloganeering. …

A Corner post asks if a second language is a liability.

During his campaign speeches, Jon Huntsman would often say a few sentences in Mandarin Chinese. This display did not go over well with audiences, which led some commentators to suggest that knowledge of a second language is a political liability. This commentary misses a distinction.

It’s good for candidates to know other languages. Because so many issues involve statistics, it’s also good for them to know calculus. But it would be strange if a candidate routinely interrupted speeches to solve differential equations. People would think that the candidate was just showing off.

And that’s why the Mandarin phrases flopped: People saw them as a sign of boastfulness, not expertise.

Newt Gingrich is overlooking this distinction. Though Romney does not drop French into his speeches, Gingrich is running an attack ad with a 9-year-old clip of Romney greeting French volunteers to the Winter Olympics. Not only is the attack ineffective, it also serves as a reminder that Gingrich himself learned French. (His dissertation cites many French-language sources.) It seems that his new campaign slogan is: “I used to know French, but don’t worry: I forgot it!”

Peter Wehner says Newt has a new friend – Michael Moore. 

Here are two sentences that buttress the argument of those of us who said Newt Gingrich was temperamentally unfit to be president by virtue of his chronic indiscipline, erratic style and lack of philosophical grounding. It comes from Michael Moore, perhaps the most visible and harshest American critic of capitalism in the last couple of decades.

In commenting on Newt Gingrich’s assault on Bain Capital specifically and capitalism more broadly, here is what Mr. Moore said: “I wondered who they stole from my crew. It was fun to hear what I have been saying for 20 years, not just by any Republican candidate, but Newt Gingrich.”

Say goodnight, Newt.

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Egypt is in big trouble. We know that because Jimmy Carter is happy with events there. Jonathan Tobin has the story.

If you weren’t already worried about the direction events are heading in in Egypt, here’s one more reason to be worried: Jimmy Carter?’s feeling good about things. Carter, who was in the country monitoring the recent elections, had this to say about the impact of the new Egyptian government on the Middle East peace process:

“This new government will probably be much more concerned about the rights of the Palestinians than have the previous rulers or leaders in Egypt, but in my opinion that will be conducive to a better prospect of peace between Israel and its neighbors.”

But the only real difference between the Mubarak government and his successors is that the latter are good friends with the Hamas terrorists who run Gaza. In Carter’s distorted worldview, support for Palestinian Islamists is synonymous with “Palestinian rights.” That’s bad enough, but to think the opening up of Hamas’s supply lines and its increased influence will actually lead to peace is so contrary to logic and reason the only conclusion one can draw from such a statement is that any development that heightens Israel’s isolation and increases the danger of terrorism is something the 39th president regards with complacence.

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin write for City Journal on the “New Authoritarians.”

“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. …

A defense of equity capital from Holman Jenkins.

… the best antidote to foolish thinking about job creation is the work of economists Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger. Their painstaking research has revealed a side of America’s dynamism that isn’t always pretty. Between 1977 and 2005, years roughly overlapping Mr. Romney’s business career, some 15% of all jobs were destroyed every year, even as total jobs grew by an average of 2% a year. Job creation and destruction are both relentless, the authors showed in paper after paper. The small difference between the two is what we call prosperity.

But now Republicans are worried. To fault Mr. Romney for being involved with businesses that both grew and shrank, that created jobs and destroyed them, may be to fault him for having eaten from the tree of knowledge in a way that, say, President Obama has not. But how will his story fare in November against Mr. Obama’s simpler story, in which ravenous capitalists destroy jobs and government creates them with things like the Detroit/UAW bailout, solar subsidies and health-care mandates?

Mr. Romney would be a fool to believe a political campaign is the right place to explain the private-equity business. But he has a perfectly defensible story to tell. …

Janet Daley in Telegraph, UK with more on the attacks on Romney.

In the midst of what was shaping up to be a stupefyingly boring US presidential primary last week, an interesting thing happened. This bizarrely unexpected turn of events might have been explained by the desperation of one of the candidates, Newt Gingrich, to make a perceptible dent on the drearily predictable front runner, Mitt Romney, or possibly as an attempt by virtually everybody involved to inject something startling into a monumentally tedious political process. Whatever it was that provoked it, the phenomenon should be of serious interest both in the United States and in Britain, where it has been a feature of our public life for much longer.

What happened was this: a number of Republican candidates who are generally thought to be on the Right of Mr Romney began to attack him from the Left. Homing in on Romney’s career in the venture capital business – a feature of his past which is generally thought to count as an advantage in a contest with the unworldly academic Barack Obama – Gingrich launched into a full-blown assault on the evils of asset-stripping corporate take-over merchants who mercilessly disregard the fate of ordinary workers. Sounding for all the world like a good old-fashioned European socialist (which is to say, like Ed Miliband), he railed against Romney’s former company Bain Capital, which specialised in buy-outs of failing businesses, describing his rival as a “corporate looter”.

The even more desperate (and even more Right-wing) contender, Rick Perry, dragged Wall Street into the mix, and spoke of something called “vulture capitalism” – a rather more lurid image than Mr Miliband’s “predator capitalism”, although it is, in fact, less alarming since vultures only prey on the already dead.

What on earth were they thinking? …

Friday afternoon the White House made a document dump of some Solyndra items. Ed Morrissey was paying attention.

… Let’s straighten out that timeline and connect a couple of dots, shall we?

10/25/2010 — Solyndra CEO writes to the DoE that he will announce worker layoffs on 10/28.

10/27/2010 — In the White House, climate change adviser Zichal sent out an e-mail to Obama adviser Browner and several other officials warning of a layoff announcement in very specific terms — “200 of their 1200 workers” — and added, “No es bueno,” which is Spanish for “not good.”

10/28/2010 — No announcement comes forth from Solyndra on layoffs.

10/30/2010 — Solyndra investor explains that the DoE “push[ed] very hard” for a delay on the announcement until November 3rd, the day after the election, even remarking that the DoE “oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.”

One does not have to be Sherlock Holmes to see the game afoot in this sequence.  The DoE alerted the White House to the “no es bueno” situation at Solyndra, which would have undermined Democratic arguments that their spending spree in 2009 created real jobs rather than unbearable risk for borrowed taxpayer funds.  After the White House got alerted to the situation, suddenly the Solyndra announcement never takes place, and two days later the primary investor has to explain internally that the DoE pressured them to delay the announcement.

Something smells very badly.  It’s clear that the Obama administration at some level used taxpayer funds as leverage to manipulate a private enterprise for purely electoral benefit to the President, and it seems clear that the direction to do this came from the White House.  I’ll bet we have a few more Friday night document dumps to go in this scandal.

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Blake Hurst, a Missouri farmer, writes about federal regulations. He reacts to the claim by David Brooks, and others, that complaints about the burden of the state is just “right wing nuttery.”

… That’s what I’ll tell one of the suppliers for my farm, who runs a very small fertilizer business. He was recently fined around a third of his yearly profit for failing to correctly complete his “Risk Management Plan.” He had hired a consultant, but his consultant neglected to complete the form in the prescribed manner. Even though the form was incomplete, the information he did file filled a three-ring binder three inches thick. The owner of the business has to re-file the plan online. The instruction form for the filing is 110 pages. Timothy Noah subtitled his article “Republicans surpass their own environmental absurdity.” My friend has been operating his business, without incident, for nearly 40 years. Absurd is no doubt how he would describe the new regulatory regime, if he was asked to do so without resorting to four letter words.

Similarly, the Department of Labor has recently released a proposed rule on child labor. The rule would end the learner exemption that allows farm kids to work with animals or operate machinery during their participation in a 4-H or FFA (formerly known as Future Farmers of America) project. The new rule would also prohibit children from working on their grandfather’s farm, or a family farm organized as a corporation.

Tens of thousands of young people in their first two years of high school, the age range covered by the proposed rule, participate in what are called Supervised Agricultural Experiences as part of vocational training. The new rules would end their ability to work with livestock or operate machinery. My project when I was 14 and 15 years old was a couple of steers and 40 acres of corn. I fed the steers, helped to plant and harvest the corn, and kept a set of books for the whole operation. Only the bookkeeping would be allowed under the new rules.

After four years working as a young teenager, I’d saved enough money to pay for my college education. While corn prices today are at record highs, they have not increased as much as tuition has, so that path to a college education may not be available to my granddaughter.

Either way, the point is not ultimately about money. It’s about what constitutes an education. To those of us in flyover country, “learning how to work” is still a crucial part of growing up.

That faith in the value of work, even for kids under 16, is the sort of thing that causes our betters to lose patience with us. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has said that she refuses to “stand by while youngsters working on farms are robbed of their childhood.” A recent article in the Kansas Law Journal calling for stricter rules on farm labor attacked our old-fashioned beliefs head on: “Even today, many Americans believe in the value of labor intensive work, and that positive work experience can foster individual development, and a sense of responsibility.” Yes, we still believe those things. Even today. …

Mark Steyn has another example of government run amuck.

One of the most disturbing features of the US justice system is its ever more grotesque loss of proportion, at the federal level and in far too many states and municipalities. On his radio show this week, Derb discusses the case of Meredith Graves, the Tennessee nurse who, upon visiting the 9/11 memorial in New York and seeing the signs forbidding firearms, asked the staff if she could check her pistol (lawful and licensed in her home state). She was handcuffed, arrested, and now faces three and a half years in jail for firearms possession – for the crime of being unaware that the Second Amendment does not apply in New York City.

Asked about the case, New York’s thuggish mayor decided to add insult to injury:

“Let’s assume that she didn’t get arrested for carrying a gun. She probably would have gotten arrested for the cocaine that was in her pocket.”

There was no cocaine. The white stuff in her pocket was analyzed by Bloomberg’s cops and found to be, as the nurse had said it was, aspirin powder. So this loathsome slug of a man has slandered an ordinary American citizen on tape in front of the world. Why? Because he can. …

CBS News finds more Obama “green energy investments” that have gone awry.

… It’s been four months since the FBI raided bankrupt Solyndra. It received a half-billion in tax dollars and became a political lightning rod, with Republicans claiming it was a politically motivated investment.

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

Others are also struggling with potential problems. Nevada Geothermal — a home state project personally endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid –  warns of multiple potential defaults in new SEC filings reviewed by CBS News. It was already having trouble paying the bills when it received $98.5 million in Energy Department loan guarantees.

SunPower landed a deal linked to a $1.2 billion loan guarantee last fall, after a French oil company took it over. On its last financial statement, SunPower owed more than it was worth. …

… Nobody from the Energy Department would agree to an interview. Last November at a hearing on Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu strongly defended the government’s attempts to bolster America’s clean energy prospects. “In the coming decades, the clean energy sector is expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars,” Chu said. “We are in a fierce global race to capture this market.”

Economist Morici says even somebody as smart as Secretary Chu — an award-winning scientist — shouldn’t be playing “venture capitalist” with tax dollars. “Tasking a Nobel Prize mathematician to make investments for the U.S. government is like asking the manager of the New York Yankees to be general in charge of America’s troops in Afghanistan,” Morici said. “It’s that absurd.”

David Harsanyi in Newt’s creative destruction.

Yes, it’s true that unlike some Republicans, Democrats don’t “enjoy firing people.” They enjoy “investing” your money in exploding electric vehicles, bullet trains and other highly unprofitable but morally satisfying economic misadventures. Venture socialism is certainly empathetic.

Venture capitalism, on the other hand, happens to be useful.

And until the presidential aspirations of Newt Gingrich were dashed by this starch-shirted RINO, there existed a target-rich environment for conservatives — namely Mitt Romney’s elastic record on policy. Yet for reasons not well-known, Newt and other Republicans have chosen to make Barack Obama’s populist case by attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital.

To the un-cynical independent voter, it may sound as if some conservatives are buying the fable of “unfettered capitalism” rather than concentrating on unfettered government. Now, Gingrich points out that criticism of a single institution is not an attack on the entire free market. This is true enough. Yet when Newt claims that Romney has operated in a “flawed system” wherein “a handful of rich people … manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money,” he is only a couple of pup tents removed from a Zuccotti Park mob or an Obama stump speech. …

A new bio of Eric Hoffer is reviewed in the Weekly Standard.

Not long ago Thomas Edsall told readers of the New York Times that the 2012 Obama campaign had essentially given up trying to win the support of white working-class voters. The Democrats, explained Edsall, had become a top-and-bottom coalition of highly educated professionals, many of whom work directly or indirectly for government, at one end, and the low-income recipients of government benefits on the other.

What’s missing from that alignment are the producers, people who make things and those who maintain and repair them. The starkness of the division was anticipated 45 years ago in the writings of the San Francisco dockworker Eric Hoffer (1902-1983).

Hoffer, a major intellectual figure for three decades, became famous with his 1951 essay on communism and fascism, The True Believer, which bypassed Marx and Freud to explain totalitarianism. Tom Shactman has brought this extraordinary, but unfortunately forgotten, figure back into the public eye with this new biography. …

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Craig Pirrong says the proposed reorganization of commerce and trade duties is like rearranging the deck chairs on the “fiscal Titanic.”

Yesterday, Obama formally requested that Congress raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. This came only days after Federal debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP–and that doesn’t take into account the vast sums in future government spending commitments, on entitlements particularly.  With deficits running about 10 percent of GDP, debt will increase to about 110 percent of GDP in a year, 120 percent of GDP the year after that . . . I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the class.  In the meantime, growth remains sluggish, thereby making it progressively more difficult to pay for that mounting debt.

Meaning that the country’s fiscal situation is fraught, and only likely to become more so, due primarily to the growth in entitlement spending.

So what is Obama’s response?  Supporting passage of a serious budget?  Advancing a credible and enforceable plan for containing entitlement spending growth?

Surely you jest.  The actual response is to reorganize the deck chairs on this fiscal Titanic: …

… Overlooking Obama’s typical defiance of Constitutional niceties (he said he’d do this with or without Congress), maybe this makes sense, when evaluated on its own merits.  But any efficiency improvements that result are rounding errors on rounding errors. To say this is an irrelevance and a distraction is the understatement of the century. …

Peter Ferrara examines Obama’s economic record.

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that.  What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

The recession started in December, 2007.  Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) to see the complete history of America’s recessions.  What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

When President Obama entered office in January, 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month.  His responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again.  Based on the historical record, that recovery was imminent, within a couple of months or so.  Despite widespread fear, nothing fundamental had changed to deprive America of the long term, world-leading prosperity it had enjoyed going back 300 years.

Supposedly a forward looking progressive, Obama proved to be America’s first backward looking regressive.  His first act was to increase federal borrowing, the national debt and the deficit by nearly a trillion dollars to finance a supposed “stimulus” package, based on the discredited Keynesian theory left for dead 30 years ago holding that increased government spending, deficits and debt are what promote economic growth and recovery. That theory arose in the 1930s as the answer to the Great Depression, which, of course, never worked. …

… Today, over 4 years since the recession started, there are still almost 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed.  That includes 5.6 million who are long-term unemployed for 27 weeks, or more than 6 months.  Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression.

Notably, blacks have been suffering another depression under Obama, with unemployment today, 49 months after the recession started, still at 15.8%. Black unemployment has been over 15% for 2 ½ years under Obama.  Black teenage unemployment today is over 40%, where it has persisted for over 2 years as well.

Hispanics have also been suffering a depression under Obama, with unemployment today still in double digits at 11%.  Hispanic unemployment has been in double digits for three years under President Obama.  Over one fourth of Hispanic youths remain unemployed today, which also has persisted for years.

The Census Bureau reported in September that more Americans are in poverty today than at any time in the entire history of Census tracking poverty. Americans dependent on food stamps are at an all time high as well. …

Jennifer Rubin writes about the chances of a better economic future.

Mitt Romney’s victory speech in New Hampshire was the most effective of this campaign. Clearly he aimed to defuse critics who are intent on underplaying his remarkable win. Reminding the crowd that no one other than an incumbent president has ever won both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, he declared: “Tonight we made history!”

It was both a general election speech and a rebuke to his Republican challengers.

He began by making his case against President Obama:

The middle class has been crushed. Nearly 24 million of our fellow Americans are still out of work, struggling to find work, or have just stopped looking. The median income has dropped 10 percent in four years. Soldiers returning from the front lines are waiting in unemployment lines. Our debt is too high and our opportunities too few.  And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, ‘It could be worse.’ It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse?

Invoking a campaign catch phrase, he told the cheering crowd: “The President has run out of ideas. Now, he’s running out of excuses.” …

Here is Romney’s speech.

“Thank you, New Hampshire! Tonight, we made history!

This state has always been a special place for our family. Ann and I made a home here and we’ve filled it with great memories of our children and grandchildren. And this Granite State moment is one we will always remember.

Tonight, we celebrate. Tomorrow, we go back to work.

We remember when Barack Obama came to New Hampshire four years ago.

He promised to bring people together.

He promised to change the broken system in Washington.

He promised to improve our nation.

Those were the days of lofty promises made by a hopeful candidate. Today, we are faced with the disappointing record of a failed President. The last three years have held a lot of change, but they haven’t offered much hope. …

Andrew Malcolm notes Romney’s rise in the polls.

Mitt Romney appears to be gaining steam in a new national poll, especially among conservatives.

Former Governor Romney now leads former Representative Newt Gingrich, 34-18, according to a CNN/ORC International survey completed yesterday of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. 

Last month before Todd Palin’s endorsement of Gingrich the pair were tied at 28%. In November Romney had only 20% support. …

According to Charles Krauthammer, Ron Paul has been a big winner too.

There are two stories coming out of New Hampshire. The big story is Mitt Romney. The bigger one is Ron Paul.

Romney won a major victory with nearly 40 percent of the vote, 16 points ahead of No. 2. The split among his challengers made the outcome even more decisive. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were diminished by distant, ­lower-tier finishes. Rick Perry got less than 1 percent. And Jon Huntsman, who staked everything on New Hampshire, came in a weak third with less than half of Romney’s vote. He practically moved to the state — and then received exactly one-sixth of the vote in a six-man contest. Where does he go from here?

But the bigger winner was Ron Paul. He got 21 percent in Iowa, 23 in New Hampshire, the only candidate other than Romney to do well with two very different electorates, one more evangelical and socially conservative, the other more moderate and fiscally conservative.

Paul commands a strong, energetic, highly committed following. And he is unlike any of the other candidates. They’re out to win. He admits he doesn’t see himself in the Oval Office. They’re one-time self-contained enterprises aiming for the White House. Paul is out there to build a movement that will long outlive this campaign.