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Peter Ferrara makes the case that growth helps all levels of our society, and redistribution attempts damage the most vulnerable. 

President Obama is proving a fundamental economic principle proven as well by President Reagan, though in the opposite way.  That principle is that economic growth provides vastly greater benefits for working people and the poor than redistribution.  It is economic growth that is the key to prosperity and the good life for the middle class, working people, and the poor.

President Obama’s policies have been all about redistribution, spreading the wealth as he puts it, a polite phrase for plunder.  That redistribution is in evidence from ObamaCare, to runaway government spending, to raising tax rates on “the rich.”

The results of those policies are in the latest Census report on September 14.  Median real family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels.  As the Wall Street Journal explained the next day, “Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower — adjusted for inflation — than in 1978.”

The Census also reported that the poverty rate has climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago.  The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children.  The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying poverty.

Moreover, historically, for the American economy, the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery.  Based on that historical record, we should be nearing the end of the second year of a booming recovery by now.  But almost four years after the last recession started, there still has been no real recovery.  Unemployment is stuck over 9%, with unemployment among African-Americans, Hispanics, and teenagers at depression double digit levels for at least two years now. …

More of the same from Mort Zuckerman.

Take a deep breath. The industrialised world, America included, seems stuck in one of those horror movies, where the monster, thought to be slain, morphs into something even more scary. The fear is that a double-dip, or worse, is now upon us. Those who might help us escape are now being held back by the anti-business policies of President Barack Obama.

Mr Obama’s administration predicted a V-shaped recovery, based on the historical experience of the 1970s and 1980s. Not this time. The $4,000bn of fiscal and monetary stimulus produced less than $1,000bn in growth. Gross domestic product is now running at about 1.8 per cent this year but two-thirds of this will come from growth in business inventories, not final sales.

Consumers are clearly not willing to generate these new sales. The University of Michigan’s confidence numbers have fallen to levels 20 per cent or more below earlier recessions. The numbers now match the drops seen after the Iran hostage crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. No wonder that in the 14 quarters since the beginning of 2008, growth in consumption adjusted for inflation averaged just 0.5 per cent, the longest period of weakness since the end of the second world war.

This weak record on growth is proving disastrous for ordinary Americans. Per capita income remains below its 2006 level, while wage-based incomes are declining. It is little surprise, then, that adjusting for inflation, retail sales last month contracted at nearly a 5 per cent annual pace, while the proportion of Americans living in poverty soared. This is a modern day depression, only this time soup lines have been replaced by unemployment cheques. …

Sherman Frederick doesn’t like the way people who disagree with Obama are called racists.

We’ll probably never purge society of racial stupidity. Holding it to a minimum, however, remains a fine American goal.

It’s hard to marginalize the race-card mentality, however, when the country’s first black president and his supporters wield it like a splitting ax.

That track record on this is crystal clear. In 2008, when campaigning in Missouri, Sen. Barack Obama set the stage for his national run by saying his opponent, Sen. John McCain, would seek to “scare” voters because Obama didn’t look like past presidents and had a “funny name.”

You don’t need the imagination of Dr. Seuss to see that race card.

Those with no imagination (or those who won’t see) may wish to contemplate comments by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Racebait, TX. In the recent debt ceiling debate, Rep. Jackson said: “I’m particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president, only this president, only this one, has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work. Only this one.”

And just in case you didn’t get it, she added: “Read between the lines.”

We get it, Sheila. If you won’t give President Obama more money to spend, you’re a racist. …

WSJ gives us a tour of Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

… Unlike most hotels, MGM Grand does all its own laundry. A separate 65,000-square-foot facility employs 165 people to wash, dry and fold linens. Each of the three dryers can handle 300 pounds. Employees feed dried towels and washcloths into folding machines that enable a single worker to fold 1,000 hand towels or 600 bath towels in one hour.

A six-month-old $1.2 million machine, nicknamed “the tunnel,” is making the washing process quicker. It continuously cleans, moving laundry through the 11 compartments of a 40-foot-long tube. A hydraulic press squeezes moisture out. The end result looks like an oversized hockey puck.

The driveway leading to MGM Grand has 14 lanes. “It is almost like working on a major freeway,” says Paolo Domingo, director, front services. One of the biggest headaches for valets—who parked about one million cars last year—is lost valet tickets. Once, that meant “running around” looking for cars in the 9,487-space guest parking lot, Mr. Domingo says. (On busy weekends, a minivan ferries valet workers around.) But in 2005, MGM linked a computer system to cameras that photograph all sides of each car. The system notes the space number and the time the car entered the lot. If a guest knows roughly when the car was parked, an employee can track it down. … 

Telegraph, UK with the background of our success killing Awlaki.

As he sat by a roadside eating what would be his last ever breakfast, Anwar al-Awlaki could have been forgiven for being in upbeat mood. Some 18 months after Washington had given him arguably the ultimate terrorist accolade by putting him on a list of people authorised for assassination, he was still hiding in the lawless Yemeni mountains where neither his own government nor US drone strikes could seem to reach him.

Then, as he and his comrades chewed dates and drank traditional Yemeni tea, a high-pitched buzz above them signalled yet another drone strike – this time one that found its mark.

Details of how the US finally managed to track down al-Qaeda’s chief mouthpiece to the West can be revealed today by The Sunday Telegraph, which has learned that the key breakthrough came when CIA officials caught a junior courier in Awlaki’s inner circle. The man, who is understood to have been arrested three weeks ago by Yemeni agents acting for the agency, volunteered key details about Awlaki’s whereabouts which led to Friday’s drone strike as his convoy drove through the remote province of Jawf, 100 miles east of the capital, Sana’a. Told he faced either a harsh prison term or the chance of a new life outside terrorism, the prisoner gave the vital clues that led to the most significant blow against al Qaeda since Osama bin Laden’s death. …

Stunning time lapse picture of 15 minutes of lightning in Missouri from Earth Science Picture of the Day.

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Mark Steyn wants to know why the bien pensants never did due diligence on the kid.

“The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”

He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at The New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”

If you’re a tenured columnist at The New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’ Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.

But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum:

“Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer, and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk? …

The administration’s jobs act still has no co-sponsors in either the House or the Senate. Ed Morrissey points out that in a parliamentary system, the government would fail because of this no confidence vote.

… Anyone in either chamber can add their name to the bill as a co-sponsor.  It’s not as if there are only a couple of Democrats in Congress.  The House has 193 Democrats, 192 of which apparently don’t want to be associated with Obama’s job-creation track record.  Democrats control the Senate with 51 members and two independents, although on this legislation it looks more like one Democrat and 52 independents.

We have a federal system, not a parliamentary system, so our legislature doesn’t take votes of no-confidence to force an executive out of power.  But given the high-profile rollout of the AJA by Obama, including his demand for a joint session to escalate pressure for action, the lack of any co-sponsors on these bills is about as close as we’ll get to a vote of no confidence in this executive short of an outright floor-vote failure in the Senate on the bill.

Matthew Continetti shows how the left media was hot on the Enron trail, but decides to overlook Solyndra.

In happier times, the firm had been celebrated as a harbinger of the future. The political connections it enjoyed were the fruit not only of well-placed contributions but of a self-imposed ideological mission: It was going to deliver cheap energy in amazing ways. Top executives had dismissed accounting irregularities. The normal rules, it was said, did not apply.

Then came the reckoning. Bankruptcy. Layoffs. An FBI investigation. Subpoenas. And the guard dogs of the press—always ready to sniff out a good scandal—leaped into action. What you read in the news was “not just the story of a company that failed,” wrote one major columnist. “It is the story of a system that failed. And the system didn’t fail through carelessness or laziness; it was corrupted.” A frenzy of speculation surrounded the company’s demise: “One wonders if it is the tip of an iceberg,” the columnist wrote. “And how many of us have, without knowing it, booked passage on the Titanic?”

The columnist’s then-colleague, who has a flair for the dramatic, wasted no time placing this image of corporate greed “against the stark backdrop of those less well-connected Americans who are fighting our war.” And the editorial board at their paper let its verdict be known throughout the land: “In order to restore confidence in American capitalism and in the integrity of its financial markets,” the editors wrote, “the public needs to understand what brought” the company “down.”

Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and the New York Times, in other words, were all bent on uncovering the extent of the executives’ crimes and the nature of the White House’s involvement. But that must have been only because the company in question was Enron and the administration under attack was George W. Bush’s. About the spectacular bankruptcy of the (admittedly smaller) solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, our most fashionable minds are much less curious. …

This administration by the numbers. Great graphics from flickr.com Could not manage to massage the format of this blog post. So, follow the link.

Jennifer Rubin on hypocrisy alert.

I had to rub my eyes when catching up on my news reading for the past few days. Are liberals such as columnists Eugene Robinson and Michael Kinsley really suggesting that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is too fat to be president?

If so, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with reasons why throngs of GOP voters and a great many independents and Democrats otherwise prepared to vote for Christie should reconsider.

Let me first observe the gross hypocrisy at work here. President Obama smokes. While in office Bill Clinton was overweight and had high cholesterol. I never heard any of these folks raise a peep. So long as there was no evidence that they could not fulfill their duties over the course of their term, liberals (being nonjudgmental in all things except the behavior of conservatives) didn’t seem to mind. (I suppose they’d have insisted that Winston Churchill stay in the wilderness with that smelly cigar?) …

The US is oil rich like Saudi Arabia? WSJ piece by Stephen Moore says so. 

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”

“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can’t come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You’d expect an oilman to make the “drill, baby, drill” pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation’s fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: “No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels.”

If he’s right, that’ll double America’s proven oil reserves. …

… Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties.” That’s more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he’s wrong by half, it’s a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn’t just about jobs and economic revival. It’s also about repairing America’s battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.

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Charles Krauthammer can tell the Mid-East truth again.

While diplomatically inconvenient for the Western powers, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to get the United Nations to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state has elicited widespread sympathy. After all, what choice did he have? According to the accepted narrative, Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses to accept a Palestinian state and continues to build settlements.

It is remarkable how this gross inversion of the truth has become conventional wisdom. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu brought his Likud-led coalition to open recognition of a Palestinian state, thereby creating Israel’s first national consensus for a two-state solution. He is also the only prime minister to agree to a settlement freeze — 10 months — something no Labor or Kadima government has ever done.

To which Abbas responded by boycotting the talks for nine months, showing up in the 10th, then walking out when the freeze expired. Last week he reiterated that he will continue to boycott peace talks unless Israel gives up — in advance — claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. Meaning, for example, that the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. This is not just absurd. It violates every prior peace agreement. They all stipulate that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition.

Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called “right of return,” which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state. And he has repeatedly declared, as recently as last week in New York: “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.”

Nor is this new. It is perfectly consistent with the long history of Palestinian rejectionism. Consider: …

The more things change . . .   Michael Ledeen has interesting post comparing Carter and Obama foreign policies.

… One of the best short summaries of the dangerous foolishness of our current foreign policy goes like this:

‘ Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies. Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest. What makes the inconsistencies of the Obama administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s “true interests.” ‘

I made one change in the original text.  I inserted “Obama” in place of “Carter.”  The paragraph comes from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in Commentary magazine in November, 1979. …

Nile Gardiner thinks it is foolish for our debtor nation to lecture Europe.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported, Germany’s finance minister Wolfang Schauble has launched a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration after Washington pushed for the European Union to boost its EFSF bail out fund. After Obama declared that the European financial crisis is “scaring the world”, Schauble shot back at the US president by warning: “It’s always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself. I am well prepared to give advice to the US government.” He also made it clear what he thought of the idea of increasing the 440 billion euro lending limit, a position supported by US Treasury Chief Tim Geithner:

“I don’t understand how anyone in the European Commission can have such a stupid idea. The result would be to endanger the AAA sovereign debt ratings of other member states. It makes no sense.”

It is rather ironic that Barack Obama, who has probably done more damage to the American economy that any president in modern US history, is now lecturing European leaders on their financial problems as well. …

Toby Harnden catches David Axelrod telling the truth.

Talking at a Politics and Eggs breakfast in New Hampshire (a quaint little event where attendees are given a wooden egg and clamour to have it signed by the speaker), David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign, used the word “titanic” when talking about the task facing his boss next year:

“This is going to be a titanic struggle.But I firmly believe we are on the right side of the struggle. In 2008, we had the wind at our backs. Now, we don’t have the wind at our back. We have the wind in our faces, because the American people have the wind in their faces.”

Of course, Axelrod, a kindly, lugubrious figure who is often compared to a walrus, meant “titanic” in terms of the dictionary definition of “huge or colossal”, deriving from Titan, rather than the R.M.S. Titanic, which sank in the Atlantic en route from Southampton to New York in April 1912. But for a political consultant to use the t-word about his own candidate was, to put it mildly, not an example of the best political spin. …

Alana Goodman notes the president’s fundraising has hit some headwinds.

This might explain those passive-aggressive donor solicitation emails. The White House Dossier’s Keith Koffler catches some news buried in the New York Times write-up on Obama’s town hall yesterday. According to Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, the president is on track to pull in $55 million when the filing deadline ends Friday – which is $30 million less than he raised in the previous quarter: …

Michael Barone says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, has had enough.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, is a very smart guy. He got JPMorganChase  moving out of mortgage-backed securities while the other big banks were moving further into them. He got Bears Stearns, and its $1 billion headquarters building at Madison and 46th, from Ben Bernanke for a song. His acquisition of WaMu turned out much better than Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. He made it clear his bank didn’t want or need Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $25 billion capital tranche and paid it back as soon as he could. I’ve observed him other the years and interviewed him and have been hugely impressed.

Dimon describes himself as a moderate Democrat. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, was mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary and has had meetings at the Obama White House. Now comes the news from the New York Post that Dimon has just attended a Mitt Romney fundraiser.

Streetwise Professor posts on “soft.”

We should all feel so ashamed.  We are letting down Obama.  We’re not pulling our weight.   He thinks we’re “great”, but we’ve gotten “soft” and lost our “competitive edge.”  He gives himself high grades, except for his failure to communicate just how wonderful he and his administration have been for the country, but he has an explanation for that: he’s been so darned focused on his Herculean labors that he’s forgotten to let us know just how heroic they are.  As for the rest of us, we need to pick our game, toughen up, stop whining, and get with it.  We need to live up to his lofty standards, and his lofty expectations for us. …

Hearing remark’s saying America has gone soft, Jonah Goldberg wonders if “soft” is a translation of the French work “malaise.”

… Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really?

Jersey boy moves to the South and says to folks back home. “Y’all come down.” National Review has the story.

I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone.

According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve even seen in history,” Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said a few months ago.

That migration wasn’t limited to white Yankees like me. The nation’s African American population grew 1.7 million over the last decade — and 75 percent of that growth occurred in the South, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. What those stories and studies failed to report were the reasons propelling that migration. The economic and cultural forces driving this migration south have been ignored by the press. And by the Obama administration

So I figured this Jersey boy who now calls Oxford, Mississippi, home could explain why. This Yankee turned good ol’ boy could explain the pull — no, the tug — of the South. …

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Tony Blankley says the incompetence shows up everywhere.

… Just last week, the Obama administration sustained three self-inflicted international reversals – in Russia, China/Taiwan and the United Nations – regarding the Palestinian/Israeli peace process.

Consider Russia. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that he would step aside to permit Vladimir Putin to run essentially unopposed for president next year. That means Mr. Putin is likely to be president of Russia for 12 more years because, constitutionally, he can now serve two more consecutive six-year terms.

Unfortunately, President Obama had placed a huge strategic bet that Mr. Putin was not coming back. CNN reported on July 6, 2009: “In an interview with the Associated Press late last week, Obama seemed to be trying to work through the sticking points by driving a bit of a wedge between Medvedev and Putin. ‘The old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russia relations is outdated and that it’s time to move forward in a different direction,’ said Obama. ‘I think Medvedev understands that. I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.’ ”

It doesn’t take much to imagine where Mr. Putin, the former KGB operative, will place one of those booted feet when he gets back in office. That foot placement will be felt hard in Washington.

As Foreign Affairs magazine described it a few days ago, “Mr. Putin’s return is likely to complicate Russia’s thawing relations with the West, particularly the U.S.-Russia ‘reset’ begun in 2009. … ‘If Putin returns then I guess we will need another reset,’ joked a former high-ranking Kremlin official earlier this month. The White House said on Saturday that it would keep making progress in the reset regardless of who the next Russian president was.”

It’s not just that the president has given away a lot to gain Mr. Medvedev’s approval – now of no value to us – by: 1) reneging on our anti-missile defensive commitment to our friends Poland and the Czech Republic and 2) publicly attacking the corruption of Mr. Putin’s associates in order to try making Mr. Medvedev look stronger to his fellow Russians. It’s hard enough for an American president to dabble in American politics, let alone Russian domestic politics. Most shrewd American presidents resist the temptation that Mr. Obama could not. …

Christopher Hitchens lays out the case against Pakistan.

In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a “syndicate” under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder. It’s only at this point that he is deemed to have gone a shade too far.

In his electrifying testimony before Congress last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has openly admitted to becoming the victim of a syndicate scheme that makes Minderbinder’s betrayal look like the action of a small-time operative. In return for subventions of millions of American dollars, it now turns out, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency (the ISI) can “outsource” the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and several other NATO and Afghan targets, to a related crime family known as the Haqqani network. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the disclosure about the official hospitality afforded to Osama Bin Laden, this reveals the Pakistani military-intelligence elite as the most adroit double-dealing profiteer from terrorism in the entire region. …

Bret Stephens says there are many reasons to like solar power. He says that wasn’t the problem with Solyndra.

… At the same time, the market has also been plenty supportive of solar uses that actually do pay for themselves. In 1978, the first solar-powered calculator appeared. Since the 1950s, solar has dominated the powering of satellites in earth orbit. In almost every state in the union (i.e., not just in Alaska) homeowners inconvenient to the grid have found it cost-effective to combine solar with diesel generation. In sunny states solar has been used to help utilities meet peak load, as well as to power everything from railroad signaling to garden lighting.

In the decade up to 2008, solar panel shipments grew at an average of 46% every year. In 2008 alone, total global private investment in solar technology topped $16 billion.

Not only is solar a big industry, with lots of expertise, lots of experience, and highly capable of figuring out where its opportunities lie. But notice something else: Solar still isn’t competitive with traditional fuels for most applications. Nor is there the slightest reason to believe that only the absence of government spending stands between us and a solar revolution. Worse, even if it did, that still wouldn’t justify subsidizing a Solyndra.

You can read a lot of poorly reasoned defenses from the typical offenders along the lines of, “It’s OK Solyndra failed since the whole point is for the government to take risks the private sector won’t.”

This illustrates what might be called the macro Solyndra policy failure. A poor commercial risk is a poor commercial risk, whether private or government investors take it.

But Solyndra is also a micro failure. Think about it this way: The Manhattan Project was an engineering venture aimed at putting into effect a solution already thoroughly understood in theoretical terms. No such solution is in sight for the fundamental problem holding back solar, which isn’t energy collection at all but storage—a problem that’s not even unique to solar (see plug-in cars, laptops and phones charged on the grid).

Because there are no generation costs and sunshine is abundant, collection (Solyndra’s business) does not have to be particularly efficient if you can solve the storage problem. Likewise, in the absence of a storage solution, incremental gains in collection efficiency like those pursued by Solyndra do little to alter deployment prospects.

Joel Kotkin thinks if you want to create jobs, look to traditional energy industries.

… But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.

Nor is this expansion showing signs of slowing down. Contrary to expectations pushed by “peak oil” enthusiasts, overall U.S. oil production has grown by 10% since 2008; the import share of U.S. oil consumption has dropped to 47% from 60% in 2005.  Over the next year, according to one recent industry-funded study, oil and gas could create an additional 1.5 million new jobs.

This, of course, violates the widespread notion that the future lies exclusively in the information and technology industries. While technology may well be ubiquitous, as a sector it is far from a reliable creator of high-wage jobs. Since 2006 the information sector has hemorrhaged over 330,000 jobs. And those who do have jobs make on average about $20,000 less than their oil-stained counterparts per year.

How about those “green jobs” so widely touted as the way to recover the lost blue-collar positions from the recession? Since 2006, the critical waste management and remediation sector — a critical portion of the “green” economy — actually lost over 480,000 jobs, 4% of its total employment. Pay here is lower still, averaging something like $32,000 annually, about one-third that of the conventional energy sector. …

Jonah Goldberg says healthcare was a step too far.

… In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America’s innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.

But Obama promised to change that. He was tired of the timid, almost apologetic talk. He was going to be an FDR, or at least a Reagan for liberalism. He was going to “fundamentally transform” the country. And to those who counseled that Democrats can’t govern that way, Obama and his followers responded with shouts of “Yes, we can!”

You might think it was those shouts that woke the bear, but that’s not what happened. After all, Obama enjoyed stunning popularity when he entered the Oval Office.

No, it wasn’t words but deeds that roused the beast. The poorly crafted, deeply partisan stimulus was like a sharp stick to the bear’s belly. But it was “Obamacare” that ended the hibernation.

Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands means “leave the bear alone.” The Democratic response was to mock the grizzly. Nancy Pelosi even called the town hall protesters “un-American.” …

Roger Simon reviews Herman Cain’s campaign book.

The secret of Herman Cain is that he seems — at least to me — genuinely to be a mentally healthy human being.

This is no small thing, particularly in the world of politics — even more so presidential politics, where large dollops of nearly clinical narcissism are necessary to propel the ambition needed to run for this most powerful of offices.

As most of us know by now, Cain leavens his narcissism with generous jolts of humor — much of it self-deprecating — that make him, at this moment anyway, the most engaging figure on the political scene.

But beneath the humor is the more serious tale of a self-made man who has pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps — a “po’” boy (not a poor boy), as he describes himself in his just released autobiography campaign manifesto, This Is Herman Cain: My Journey to the White House. …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.

Letterman: There’s a fabulous new CBS show out called ‘Unforgettable.” It’s about a woman who remembers every minute of her life. A woman who, I think, it’s called a wife.

Conan: Big news story out today that SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low. Or as the headline put it, “SATs Be Most Baddest.”
Leno: President Obama says his new jobs bill will create 1.9 million new jobs, up to 50 of them right here in America.

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Robert Samuelson should scare you with his latest column.

… There’s too much debt. In the spring of 2010, the interest rates demanded by financial markets indicated that about 5 percent of the euro zone’s debt was considered highly risky, says the IMF. That represented only Greece. By late summer 2011, the portion judged risky was 46 percent and included Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium. If financial markets added France to this group — a possibility — the share of threatened debt would rise to 66 percent.

It’s implausible that the strong half or third of the euro zone (the 17 nations using the euro) could rescue all the weaker members, in part because “strong” countries also have high debts. Everyone knows about the debts of Greece, Italy and Ireland, which are, respectively, 166 percent, 121 percent and 109 percent of their annual output (gross domestic product). It’s less well-known that Germany’s debt is 83 percent of GDP and France’s, 87 percent. (Americans should not smirk. The U.S. debt — using similar assumptions — is 100 percent of GDP.)

Europe is hostage to financial markets because maturing loans and ongoing deficits mean many countries must regularly borrow huge amounts. Already, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been excluded from private markets; lenders demanded crushing interest rates. That fate could await others. Some countries face staggering 2012 borrowing needs. The IMF estimates that Italy requires new loans equal to one-fourth of its GDP; for Spain and France, the amounts are about one-fifth of GDP.

Europe is caught in an economic pincer: slow-growth assaults from one side; fickle financial markets from the other. One obvious way out — the China option — seems barred by geopolitics. There is precedent. Historians blame the Great Depression’s severity in part on poor international cooperation. Economist Charles Kindleberger found a vacuum of power: Great Britain, the old economic leader, could no longer lead alone; and the United States — a replacement — wasn’t ready to help. Is there a parallel today between the United States and China? Are we repeating the mistakes of the 1930s? Unsettling questions.

Richard Epstein says read the new jobs bill and weep.

The dim news about the current economic situation has prompted the Obama administration to put forward its latest, desperate effort to reverse the tide by urging passage of The American Jobs Act  (AJA), a turgid 155-page bill. The AJA’s only certain effect is to make everything worse than it already is by asking Congress to tighten the stranglehold that government regulation has already placed on the economy.

That sad fact would certainly elude anyone who accepted the president’s justification for the AJA when he sent the bill to Congress. This bill, he said, will “put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans. And it will do so without adding a dime to the deficit.” How? Why, by closing “corporate tax loopholes” and insisting that the wealthiest American’s pay their “fair share” of taxes.

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes “Buy American” restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. “[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods” used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a “manufactured good” for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff. The fatal problem with this form of jingoism is that, in the name of economic efficiency, it forces American taxpayers to pay more for less. That upside down logic may seem sensible to a die-hard Keynesian, but not to ordinary people who realize that deliberate overpayment for inferior goods makes no more sense in the public sector than in the private one.

The universal statutory command to “Buy American” is not capable of rigorous enforcement, which brings us to another problem with the bill: It allows its legislative mandates to be waived when the head of the relevant federal agency finds that its enforcement is against the “public interest,” including in hard to calculate cases where such deliberations increase project costs by 25 percent. The basic structure of the AJA thus uses large doses of administrative discretion to defang some of its most unrealistic commands. In so doing, it introduces what I have termed elsewhere the vice of government by waiver , where unbridled discretion creates uncertainty and breeds favoritism.

This process only adds to the cost of legislative enforcement. The real jobs created are for government bureaucrats who determine, under rules to be promulgated later, whether the rule or exception applies. The provision has it exactly backwards. The correct piece of legislation should provide that no recipient of funds (assuming there are any) should be allowed to impose “Buy American” preferences—ever.

Section 5 makes the same error as Section 4. One of the lasting shames of American law is the Davis-Bacon Act , passed at the height of the depression in 1931. It guaranteed the payment of “prevailing,” i.e. union, wages to workers on government jobs. For those with short memories, the 1931 statute was introduced to keep “itinerant colored workers” from the South from underbidding union workers in the North. …

Nile Gardiner notes that Americans are not fooled.

This week Gallup is unveiling a series of in-depth analyses of “Americans’ views on the role and performance of government” based on its annual Governance Survey. The first overview, released on Monday, is a real-eye opener. According to Gallup, Americans are expressing historic levels of negativity towards the US government, with “a record high 81 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed,” including 65 per cent of Democrats, and 92 per cent of Republicans. Gallup concludes by stating that “Americans’ various ratings of political leadership in Washington add up to a profoundly negative review of government,” ratings which are likely to get worse during the lead up to next year’s presidential elections. …

Bart Hinkle has some answers for Liz Warren’s rant.

(5) Plenty of smart, well-meaning people also think even government’s core functions could be delivered better and for less—just as the Obama administration has used the Dartmouth Atlas to argue for greater efficiency in medical care. E.g., since 1970  inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in public K-12 education has doubled. Class size has been cut in half. Neither change has produced any substantial effect on academic performance. Why don’t we have the equivalent of a Dartmouth Atlas for public education?

(6) Warren’s remarks epitomize the caricature of a progressive as someone who loves jobs but hates employers. She implies the captain of industry is simply sponging off society and hoarding the proceeds. But hiring workers is a huge social good. So is providing a funding basis for pensions, which generally rely on stock returns. So is creating products people want. Five bucks says Warren has a smartphone and a DVR and a bunch of other modern conveniences, and that she didn’t buy any of them with a gun to her head. So why is she so mad at the people who offered to sell them?

(8) Perhaps, like film critic Pauline Kael, who famously didn’t know anyone who had voted for Nixon, Warren doesn’t know anyone who believes government and taxes should be small. And, therefore, perhaps she does not understand their reasoning. She certainly doesn’t give any indication that she does.

So for the record, the reason is that—as Sheldon Richman wrote recently in The Freeman—“government is significantly different from anything else in society. It is the only institution that can legally threaten and initiate violence; that is, under color of law its officers may use physical force, up to and including lethal force—not in defense of innocent life but against individuals who have neither threatened nor aggressed against anyone else.” Many of those who truly love peace prefer to live in a society where the use or threat of violence is minimized.  Maybe that idea simply hasn’t crossed Warren’s mind.

Maybe that’s why she looks like she’s ready to haul off and hit someone.

The only downside to an Alaska cruise is pulling into port and seeing the largest building in town is the one occupied by offices of the federal government. A Wall Street Journal story about people who accidentally violate laws explains what the feds are doing.

For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a “guilty mind.”

This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. When the police came to Wade Martin’s home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can’t. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.

Mr. Martin, 50 years old, readily admitted making the sale. “Then, they told me the buyer wasn’t a native,” he recalls.

The law requires that animals sold to non-Native Alaskans be converted into handicrafts. He knew the law, Mr. Martin said, and he had thought the buyer was Native Alaskan.

He pleaded guilty in 2008. The government didn’t have to prove he knew his conduct was illegal, his lawyer told him. They merely had to show he had made the sale.

“I was thinking, damn, my life’s over,” Mr. Martin says.

Federal magistrate Judge John Roberts gave him two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. He told the trapper: “You’re responsible for the actions that you take.”

Mr. Martin now asks customers to prove their heritage and residency. “You get real smart after they come to your house and arrest you and make you feel like Charles Manson,” he says.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Alaska didn’t respond to requests for comment. …

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Once and awhile something happens that helps us focus. Bill Clinton complaining about banks subprime loans is one of those instances. Investor’s Business Daily editors spotted this one.

… For good measure, Clinton late in his second term installed several of his cronies — including White House budget chief Franklin Delano Raines — in key Fannie and Freddie board positions, ensuring they continued his affordable-lending crusade well into the next administration.

By the time he left office, Clinton had changed the rules for risk in the lending business. He had fundamentally changed the home finance market for the worse.

This untold Clinton scandal stayed hidden until the bubble burst. Now the former president is conveniently a critic of the very loans he promoted.

He was all for them before he was against them.

Interestingly, “Bank Robbery” notes that the Clinton Foundation that sponsors his global initiative has scrubbed from its website Clinton’s boasts of shaking down banks for riskier minority loans.

History should deal harshly with this former president. He didn’t just damage the dignity of the presidency with his personal failings. He may have permanently damaged American living standards.

Debra Saunders deals with Dem Solyndra excuses.

Excuse No. 1: New technology start-ups by definition are risky ventures.

Problem: Solyndra engaged in profligate behavior. A Washington Post story describes the spending spree that followed the Department of Energy loan guarantee – new factory, state-of-the-art conference room, lobbying bills that grew from $160,000 in 2008 to $550,000 last year. Within a week of winning the first loan guarantee, Solyndra went back to the Department of Energy for another $400 million (which was never approved).

Excuse No. 2: Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., claimed that both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations “supported Solyndra’s loan guarantee application.”

Problem: In its final month, the Bush Department of Energy credit committee voted against a loan guarantee for Solyndra.

It was the Obama White House that pushed for early conditional approval of a Solyndra deal, …

Steve Hayward explains why Solyndra is worse than it looks.

The spectacular collapse of Solyndra has all of the trappings of an epic Washington scandal, with serial revelations of embarrassing and potentially improper White House machinations to secure a $535 million federal loan guarantee for a startup company with dubious prospects of success. The sudden bankruptcy of the Fremont, California, manufacturer of solar panels?—?after it was feted as a model creator of “green jobs” by President Obama and Vice President Biden?—?has already featured FBI raids, contentious congressional hearings, and demands for a special prosecutor to investigate. The plot thickened further last week when Solyndra’s two top executives, who made 20 trips to the White House while their loan application was under consideration, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Even if the administration eventually escapes any finding of legal wrongdoing, Solyndra threatens to haunt the green energy campaign in much the same way that the collapse of Lincoln Savings became the emblem of the savings and loan industry’s recklessness in the 1980s. The Solyndra story includes Obama campaign donors and everybody’s favorite Wall Street whipping boy, Goldman Sachs, in the middle of the whole sorry mess. Yet it would be a mistake to mark the story down as merely another excrescence of crony capitalism. It is much worse.

The green energy lobby is probably hoping that Solyndra’s failure can be portrayed as an isolated case of illegal influence, lest it cast a shadow over the entire edifice of massive subsidies that green energy requires to survive. But Solyndra is merely the most spectacular of several recent green energy failures. And beyond the domain of green energy, the Solyndra fiasco is emblematic of the Obama administration’s economic philosophy, which harks back to the mid-20th-century hubris of state-planned enterprise. It is also fair to note that the origins of this fiasco predate the Obama administration, and illustrate the continuing incoherence and wishful thinking of U.S. energy policy.

Here’s what we know so far: Solyndra was founded in 2005 on the concept that lightweight, high-efficiency thin-film solar panels in a unique tubular design could compete effectively with traditional silicon-based flat panels. Thin-film solar is the energy equivalent of thin-thigh diets?—?dazzling results are always promised but seldom delivered. …

In a WSJ OpEd, Matt Ridley says human advances were not the result of a dramatic evolutionary step, but are the result of trade.

… There was no sudden change in brain size 200,000 years ago. We Africans—all human beings are descended chiefly from people who lived exclusively in Africa until about 65,000 years ago—had slightly smaller brains than Neanderthals, yet once outside Africa we rapidly displaced them (bar acquiring 2.5% of our genes from them along the way).

And the reason we won the war against the Neanderthals, if war it was, is staring us in the face, though it remains almost completely unrecognized among anthropologists: We exchanged. At one site in the Caucasus there are Neanderthal and modern remains within a few miles of each other, both from around 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal tools are all made from local materials. The moderns’ tools are made from chert and jasper, some of which originated many miles away. That means trade.

Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That’s the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.

At first it was a peculiarity of us Africans. It gave us the edge over Neanderthals in their own continent and their own climate, because good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network.

In the same way, today, American consumers do not have to rely only on their own citizens to discover new consumer goods or new medicines or new music: The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians are also able to supply them. …

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Mark Steyn has a downer of a column. 

“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” sang the popular musical artistes REM many years ago. And it is. REM has announced that they’re splitting up after almost a third of a century. But these days who isn’t? The Eurozone, the world’s first geriatric boy band, is on the verge of busting apart. Chimerica, Professor Niall Ferguson’s amusing name for the Chinese-American economic partnership that started around the same time REM did, is going the way of Wham!, with Beijing figuring it’s the George Michael of the relationship and that it’s tired of wossname, the other fellow, who gets equal billing but doesn’t really do anything. The deeper problem may be that this is a double-act with two wossnames.

Still, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Headline from CNBC: “Global Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.” I assumed “Nearly Everything” was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it’s “Nearly Everything” in the sense of the entire global economy. Headline from The Daily Telegraph of London: “David Cameron: Euro Debt ‘Threatens World Stability.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of the world, you should be OK. Headline from The Wall Street Journal: “World Bank’s Zoellick: World In ‘Danger Zone.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of …no, wait, I did that gag with the last headline.

A woman walks in front of screens showing stocks at the Athens Stock Exchange, in Athens, on Friday, Sept. 23. Moody’s downgraded eight Greek banks Friday, citing their exposure to their government’s bonds and the deteriorating economic situation in the country as it struggles to convince creditors it’s doing enough to get more bailout cash. …

Corner Post on Cain’s speech.

From the very beginning of his speech delivered to the straw poll delegates this afternoon, Herman Cain had the audience wrapped around his finger.

“Wait a minute, whose teleprompters are these? I’m not using these,” he said of the teleprompters near-by, chuckling as the audience exploded into laughter.

He got at least seven standing ovations. His speech was constantly interrupted for applause and cheers. …

Byron York explains how Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll.

… hundreds of GOP delegates who came to Orlando intending to support Perry were having second thoughts.  They’d all been in the room for the Fox News-Google debate on Thursday night and were dismayed by Perry’s performance.  Actually, more than dismayed — some were insulted by Perry’s accusation that people who don’t support his immigration positions are heartless.  Still, they didn’t immediately drop the Texas governor, did not immediately say, “That’s it — I’m outta here.”  Rather, in the 40 hours after the end of the debate, their minds were a little more open than they had been before.  And most were specifically a little more open to Cain, who impressed them during the debate and had made a number of impromptu appearances around the hotels adjacent to the Orange County Convention Center.

But even on Saturday, Perry might still have recovered some support with an inspiring speech before the voting.  Instead, he headed off to Michigan, and it was Cain who delivered a barn-burner that brought at least seven standing ovations from the delegates.  Wavering Perry delegates became Cain voters.

“I couldn’t make up my mind,” said Thelma, from Panama City, after the vote.  “It was the speech that made the hair stand up on my arms.  It wasn’t a tingle down my leg — it was an emotional excitement that this man knows how to get our country out of trouble.” …

Corner Post links to a WaPo story on the spending blitz at Solyndra.

… As it turns out, Solyndra wasn’t just wasting money on fancy gadgets they didn’t need. Once they realized, in the words of billionaire Obama fundraiser and Solyndra investor George Kaiser: “There’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history, and probably never will be again, than in the last few months and in the next 18 months” (referring to the first stimulus package), the company spent generously on Washington lobbyists in an effort to direct even more federal dollars their way:

“Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. Within a week of getting a loan guarantee commitment from the Energy Department, Solyndra applied for another guarantee worth $400 million.” …

NY Times article shows the soft underbelly of the governing process.

Solyndra executives, seeking an edge in the competition for federal loan guarantees, began employing Washington lobbyists in 2008. The company stepped up its efforts in early 2009, retaining McBee Strategic Consulting. Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra’s behalf, including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009.

Steve McBee, the firm’s founder and a former Senate aide, did not return calls seeking comment, but in an April 2009 press release he said that his firm could help technology companies gain a chunk of the projected bonanza of $100 billion in federal money for clean-energy projects.

Mr. McBee said that lobbying was not allowed as part of the process. But in early 2009, the firm filed a disclosure form saying it was retained by Solyndra to lobby on stimulus act spending related to the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program. A critical piece of the stimulus bill removed a requirement that firms like Solyndra pay a substantial up-front fee to cover the risk of a loan, a provision that had slowed approvals of loan guarantees. Once that was removed, loans began to flow and Solyndra was the first to benefit.

Over the next three years, Solyndra retained two other lobbying firms, hired two in-house lobbyists and aggressively pushed for White House meetings to plead its case. Another lobbying and public relations firm with close ties to the White House — Glover Park Group — also worked on Solyndra’s behalf.

In January 2010, four months after the loan was finalized, Solyndra executives and lobbyists pressed Gregory S. Nelson, an aide to Ms. Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, for a meeting to boast about progress at the plant financed with federal money and to discuss a possible second loan, according to White House e-mails. That meeting occurred on Jan. 15, 2010, records show. White House scheduling officials later began talks that led to Mr. Obama’s visit in May.

But signs were increasing in 2010 that the company’s business plan was imploding. The dive in silicon prices, which had started in late 2008, accelerated by the end of 2010. Solyndra sales were growing, but so were its losses. It was forced to slash prices much lower than its costs in order to compete with conventional silicon panel producers. Trade publications began to question whether Solyndra would survive — even its own accountant in March 2010 said it had “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

But Solyndra and its lobbyists continued to provide assurances to the White House and the Energy Department, which still could have stopped the flow of federal money that was being given out for construction of a new factory.

“We have no intention of going out of business,” David Miller, a Solyndra executive, wrote to Mr. Nelson, the White House aide, in July 2010. Mr. Miller, added in May 2011, as the cash crunch had severely worsened, that “we have good market momentum.”

Mr. Nelson wrote back encouraged. “Fantastic to hear that business is doing well,” he said, according to a May 2011 e-mail released by the White House. “Keep up the good work.”

Corner Post describes the disaster that has become NASA.

As scandals pile up at the White House door, another example of amateurish government mismanagement slid under the radar last week: President Obama’s NASA unveiled its new rocket system designed to lift man into space sometime after 2021 with no clear mission or objective.

This is just the latest in a long string of embarrassments for NASA since Administrator Charles Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver took over.

In January 2010, Bolden labeled NASA an “Earth improvement agency” and said it would essentially scrap manned space exploration and concentrate on “researching and monitoring climate change.” This redefined mission came with additional funding. NASA was going to spend more, and do less.

Then in July 2010, Administrator Bolden announced NASA’s mission as threefold: (1) “re-inspire children”; (2) “expand our international relationships”; and “foremost” (3) “reach out to the Muslim world.” He condescendingly explained that Muslim outreach would help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

In this same interview, Bolden “inspired children” by declaring the United States could never reach beyond low-earth orbit again, as it did alone from 1968–1971, without international help, saying: “We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low earth orbit as a single entity. The United States can’t do it, China can’t do it — no single nation is going to go to a place like Mars alone.”

In March 2011, Russia raised the price of Americans flying on their Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station by more than 20 percent, to roughly $63 million a trip. With no near-term alternative, the United States is in no position to negotiate a better deal for taxpayers. …

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The real Obama is back, according to Charles Krauthammer.

In a 2008 debate, Charlie Gibson asked Barack Obama about his support for raising capital gains taxes, given the historical record of government losing net revenue as a result. Obama persevered: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

A most revealing window into our president’s political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes our communal bank account (the U.S. Treasury) is ridiculous. It is nothing but punitive. It benefits no one — not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless.

Now that he’s president, Obama has actually gone and done it. He’s just proposed a $1.5 trillion tsunami of tax hikes featuring a “Buffett rule” that, although as yet deliberately still fuzzy, clearly includes raising capital gains taxes.

He also insists again upon raising marginal rates on “millionaire” couples making $250,000 or more. But roughly half the income of small businesses (i.e., those filing individual returns) would be hit by this tax increase. Therefore, if we are to believe Obama’s own logic that his proposed business tax credits would increase hiring, then surely this tax hike will reduce small-business hiring.

But what are jobs when fairness is at stake? Fairness trumps growth. Fairness trumps revenue. Fairness trumps economic logic. …

Some have asked if the president will decide to quit. Ed Morrissey says perhaps he already has.

In my latest column for The Week, I ask if we have been pondering the wrong question about Barack Obama and his falling poll numbers.  We’ve analyzed the potential for Obama to pull an LBJ and pull out of the 2012 election, or for Democrats to pressure him into quitting the race if he doesn’t reach that conclusion on his own.  With the obvious implications of Obama’s two proposals this month, the better question is whether he’s already quit being President in favor of just being a candidate:

“The plan itself broke no new ground. Indeed, it closely resembles the 2009 stimulus bill, with its mix of infrastructure spending, temporary tax breaks, and another round of bailouts for states. But if the rehashed jobs plan was a passive disappointment, Obama’s new deficit reduction plan is an aggressive partisan attack — the very kind that Obama blasted in his joint-session speech earlier in the month.” …

Andrew Malcolm spots The One touting the “intercontinental railroad.” It might be near the transcontinental one.

“We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad,” Barack Obama.

That’s what the president of the United States flat-out said Thursday during what was supposed to be a photo op to sell his jobs plan next to an allegedly deteriorating highway bridge.

A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!

It’s yet another humorous gaffe by the Harvard graduate, overlooked by most media for whatever reason. Like Obama saying Abraham-Come-Lately Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party. Or Navy corpseman. Or the Austrian language. Fifty-seven states. The president of Canada. Etc.

If you talk as much as this guy likes to talk instead of governing, if you believe you are a Real Good Talker as much as this guy does, you’re gonna blow a few lines. But this many?

No doubt, we’ll see a collection of Obama’s Best Bombs on ‘Saturday Night Live’ this weekend, one right after the other. No doubt.

One week after calling the joint session speech a “bold bid to reset his presidency” Clive Crook is finding flaws.

Barack Obama’s bid to seize the initiative with a second fiscal stimulus is barely a week old and, as the president prepares to make a second announcement on the subject on Monday, already in trouble. As I argued last week, part one of the plan was good and the president’s pitch to a joint session of Congress well received in Washington. The rest of the country was less impressed.

A new CBS poll gives Mr Obama his lowest approval rating (43 per cent) and highest disapproval rating (50 per cent) of this series to date. In other polls he is doing even worse. Last week, soon after Mr Obama’s big speech, a Republican won what Democrats thought was a safe congressional seat in New York. … 

… One day, Mr Obama is the pragmatic outsider trying to talk sense into Congress. The next, he is the ardent liberal complaining about social injustice and corporate jets. The president keeps canceling himself out. Nobody is impressed, people stop listening, and he becomes irrelevant.

In the past week, Mr Obama has been attacked not just by disappointed progressives and disappointed centrists, but by party professionals close to the White House. The smell of scandal rises from a loan guarantee for a failed “green energy” venture. Excerpts from a forthcoming book show a White House at war with itself. James Carville, formerly a top Democratic strategist, tells the president to panic. Nothing is working. It seems all of a piece. …

Toby Harnden lists ten reasons why last Thursday’s debate was horrible for Rick Perry.

Let’s start with a few caveats. Rick Perry has many powerful attributes as a presidential candidates. He’s been a conservative 10-year governor of the huge state of Texas. He has a lot of Tea Party support. His chief rival Mitt Romney has a number of well-documented weaknesses. While the media often fixates on theatrics like debates, there’s a case to be made that they seldom decide who becomes a party’s nominee. And it is still early days for Perry, who has been in the race for barely six weeks. He could well become the Republican nominee – and the next President of the United States.

Having said all that, this was, unarguably, an awful night for Perry. While it might not change the dynamic of the Republican race overnight, it could well prompt supporters and donors to pause. There is likely to be  rash of media commentary and newspaper stories questioning whether, after the initially very successful launch of his candidacy, he is truly ready for primetime. So in what ways was his performance so bad? here are 10 things to think about:

1. This was Perry’s third debate. He’s no longer the rookie. Romney is much more experienced in these forums (he did 13 debates in the 2008 race and has done five this time) but Perry can’t get a pass forever. Having been below par at the Reagan Library debate in Simi Valley, California, he needed to raise his game this time. he didn’t.

2. Once again, Perry faded as the debate went on. Some Republicans speculate that he is in pain from recent back surgery and that standing up for two hours is difficult for him. He seems to find it hard at times to concentrate.Whatever the reasons for this, it needs to be tackled and corrected. …

The Economist wants to know when the word “awesome” became so awesome.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome. 

If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”. Nehemiah, Deuteronomy and the Psalms refer to “the great and awesome God”, “mighty and awesome”, and ask worshippers to praise his “great and awesome name”. How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good? …

… “Awesome” became the default descriptor for anything good. In 1982, I was seven and I swallowed it whole. It stayed with me for decades. In 2005, I remember meeting a girl when I had just seen “Batman Begins”, the moody psychological picture that reinvigorated a tired franchise. “It’s awesome,” I told her. “Awesome. Just awesome.” She wondered, she later said, what kind of journalist had just one adjective in his vocabulary. Somehow, she married me all the same. …

Translations from Russian have similar problems. Ivan the Terrible is “Ivan Grozny” in Russian. Grozny is a Russian word that means awesome. It is a derivative of the word for thunder. Helps explain the White Russian disdain for Chechnya and the capital there – Grozny.

Remember when the “wave” was getting raves at baseball games. Seems some moron is intent on starting it again. The Week has the story.

Whoops. A “hilarious” photo of President Obama — taken during his visit this week to the United Nations — is eliciting chuckles worldwide. In a group shot of world leaders at an Open Government Partnership event, the president “moronically” waves his hand — blocking the face of Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj. (See the image at right and below). While many people initially suspected that this image was a Photoshop creation, it appears to be the real deal. Naturally, commentators are cracking wise. Here, a sampling: …

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Marty Peretz on the Middle East that is in shambles thanks to The One.

It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself, lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true friend unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett, which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.

Obama’s first personal excursions into the Middle East as president were to Turkey and Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed his visit. Indeed, the president’s journey set the framework for the Ottomanization of modern Turkey’s foreign policy. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally abrogated the empire’s previous rights in North Africa, these being the rights it had lost in the First World War. From then on, the country was content to make trouble only for the Kurds across its borders and for Greece. A member of NATO, with more than 600,000 troops under arms (omitting more than half a million reservists and paramilitary), it certainly played a role in deflecting Soviet ambitions in the Mediterranean. Now, with the Russian threat (temporarily?) deferred, the military still faces minor annoyance from Georgia, Armenia, Iraq. But since Obama communed with Erdogan—by all accounts, it was love at first sight—the prime minister has been taking on new projects. Only in the last days has he made what can reasonably be called a conqueror’s march through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, evoking the old empire’s rule in North Africa not so long ago.

After all, let’s face it: Egypt is simply spent. Erdogan can seduce it with a speech or two. Yet it does have up-to-date military equipment. But, if it were tempted by war with Israel, Jerusalem would not give it the respectful pity that it gave Cairo’s Third Army 38 years ago. …

Claudia Rosett wants to know why we keep the UN in New York.

… Seriously, why does the setting for this have to be midtown Manhattan? At far less cost to Americans and their allies, this entire performance could more easily be staged in Doha. Or Beirut. Or Riyadh. Or Tehran. Or, for that matter, Ramallah. If the UN is going to function largely as a vehicle to serve the demands and agenda of the Middle Eastern gang now dominating the doings of the General Assembly in New York, then why should America grant the UN right-of-way in Manhattan, and pay to put fuel in the tank? Ship the whole caboodle to the Middle East. Save American taxpayers roughly $8 billion per year by letting the UN enthusiasts in that part of the world pay for it. And let the new UN patrons know that if they’re willing to play nice and pay for the tickets, American diplomats might perhaps be persuaded it’s occasionally worth the bother to drop by.

Real Clear Politics has a lengthy article by Carl Cannon on Jeb Bush’s education record in Florida.  

Rick Perry’s emergence as a prominent Republican presidential contender has confounded some conservative intellectuals, especially those who care about education reform, and not because of Perry’s mediocre grades while attending Texas A&M — or because of his education policies as governor in Austin.

When the 2012 presidential campaign season began, some GOP insiders thought their best candidate, all things being equal, might be the former governor of another Southern state. Jeb Bush was an unalloyed conservative and proven vote-getter who’d presided over a strong economy in a big state while posting a record of legislative achievement so impressive that his nickname was “King Jeb.”

His name was the two-term Florida governor’s problem when it came to any possible aspirations of national office: Not the Jeb part, or even the showy modifier, but rather the surname. It was universally believed, apparently by Jeb Bush himself, that four years wasn’t enough time to counteract the “Bush fatigue” attendant to his oldest brother’s last year in the White House.

Unexpectedly, however, a governor who walks and talks a lot more like George W. Bush than his own brother and who served under Bush in Austin has emerged as the 2012 presidential front-runner.

It’s probably too late for Jeb Bush to reconsider his 2012 options, but it’s certainly not too late to give his record in Tallahassee a second look. And in no area did Bush have more of an impact than in education policy. …

… Since 1994, the reading scores of fourth-graders in this country, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, have risen steadily. “Simply stated, poor and minority students are achieving at dramatically higher levels today than they were two decades ago — in some cases two or three grade levels higher,” writes education reformer Michael J. Petrilli. And Florida, as noted, helped lead the way.

The highlights include:

– In 1998, Florida’s fourth-graders scored at the bottom nationally in NAEP scores in reading and math. By 2009, they had scored above the national average in both categories.

– Florida’s fourth-grade Hispanic students equaled or surpassed the performance of all students in 31 states.

– Fourth-grade African American students in Florida outperform African American students in all but three states in NAEP math tests.

– Low-income Florida elementary school students of all races rank near the top nationally in math.

– High school graduation rates increased 21 percent, even as the requirements got tougher.

– Some 38,000 Florida high school students were taking Advanced Placement exams for college credit a decade ago. Offering merit pay of up to $2,000 for teachers who get students to take — and pass — AP exams helped boost this number to 157,000.

– The number of African American and Latino students passing AP tests increased 365 percent.

For skeptics who believe that standardized testing sucks the creativity out of the learning process, Jeb Bush always had a stock answer: “What gets measured, gets done.”

In the early years, things did not always go swimmingly. The teacher unions made opposing Bush a crusade, even mortgaging their own building to raise money to support his 2002 opponent in his re-election bid. Bush weathered that challenge, but gains at the middle school level didn’t really kick in until his last two years in office, leading to some testy press conferences, as his top education adviser, Patricia Levesque, recalled.

In the end, it would be nice to say that Florida’s impressive results speak for themselves, but it’s never quite that simple in the politics of education.

David Harsanyi says why not eat the rich.

… When President Barack Obama unveiled his new un-passable “deficit reduction plan,” many accused him of playing class envy. The plan ostensibly calls for $1 in budget cuts (cuts that would never happen) for every $1 in tax increases ($1.5 trillion). And if we’re not willing to ask more from the rich, says the president, “then the logic — the math — says everybody else has to do a whole lot more; we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”

This argument is offered by Obama in endless iterations, but it won’t add up until we invent an Arabic numeral that signifies a lie. In no way, by no percentage, no matter how you quantify or qualify or twist it, does the middle class (or certainly the poor) pay more in taxes than the rich. As an Associated Press fact check put it, “on average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data.”

That doesn‘t mean a person can’t argue the rich should pay more than the 80 or 90 percent of federal taxes they already do. Go for it. In that debate, Republicans can make many strong arguments about how tax-the-rich schemes (seemingly Obama’s sole idea) are counterproductive. But there are three points that they can’t make but should. …

Joel Kotkin analyzes the vote in NY’s 9th congressional district.

… Some Democrats like California Rep. Henry Waxman have another explanation for the vote: greed. “They want to protect their wealth,” he explained, “which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah of such views from a man who represents Beverly Hills.

Waxman, of course, is wrong. This election was driven not by desertions of the rich but by the shift to the GOP among largely middle or working class voters. In many ways this election followed the pattern established by Sen. Scott Brown’s stunning 2009 Massachusetts victory, which came largely from middle-income voters. The ninth district’s new representative, Bob Turner, won big in modest Middle Village and South Brooklyn, while losing decisively in the wealthiest precincts such as Forest Hills and some minority, immigrant-oriented enclaves.

The big story here, as Bronstein suggests, lies in the growing unease about the national and New York economies among large sections of the city’s beleaguered middle class. Despite the enormous wealth generated on Wall Street, New York’s middle class has been fleeing the city at breakneck speed for decades.

According to the Brookings Institution, New York has suffered the fastest declines of middle class neighborhoods in the U.S.: Its share of middle income neighborhoods is roughly half that of Seattle or the much maligned Long Island suburbs. Twenty-five percent of New York City was middle-class in 1970, but by 2008 that figure had dropped to 16%.

Even the young, who so dominate parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, do not appear to be hanging around once they get into their 30s, particularly after their children reach school age. One reason: Bloomberg’s much touted school reforms have been, for the most part, ineffective in turning the bulk of the city’s public schools around. …

James Delingpole spots another rogue trader.

A rogue trader at one of the world’s largest banks (USA Inc., second in economic power only to China Inc.) has been exposed as the biggest fraudster in the history of mankind. The fraud – conservatively estimated at $38.6 billion, though others believe it could be at least 20 times bigger once his secret trading accounts in a file mysteriously marked “Stimulus Package” are fully investigated – comfortably exceeds the paltry $2.3 billion losses run up by UBS trader Kweku Adoboli.

Though full details of the Uber Rogue Trader – known only by his initials B.O. – have yet to be released, he is believed to be either of Hawaiian or Kenyan birth, with a plausible speaking manner and a deceptive aura of competence and gravitas. He is said to be “coolly unrepentant” about his crime, which, he claims, he was only doing to provide “hope and change” to his 200 million victims. …

Dilbert thinks liberal attacks have gone over the top.

… Consider Rick Perry. He called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” As analogies go, that’s a good one. I believe I have used it myself. It’s a colorful way of saying the math doesn’t work well when the population of retired people greatly increases and the number of workers funding Social Security does not. Literally no one on Earth disagrees with the central point of Perry’s analogy. But I keep seeing Perry’s Ponzi scheme quote reported as if it were some sort of idiot misunderstanding or conspiracy theory or foreshadowing of evil. WTF?

I’ve never seen more vicious, cheap attacks on a candidate than I’ve seen leveled at Michelle Bachmann. Recently she made a glancing reference to a well-known joke/parable about God using natural disasters to get the attention of humans. When I read Bachmann’s quote, I understood her generic point that politicians need to open their eyes to both the problems and the solutions in front of them. The liberal media reported the quote as if a crazy street person was yelling that God sent floods as a message. …

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IBD editors on LightSquared.

The Air Force’s Space Command chief was pressured to alter testimony about the danger of a wireless project developed by a Democratic donor’s company. Are lives as well as money being put at risk?

Crony capitalism, which has been rampant in President Obama’s push for green energy, is one thing. Rewarding donors with stimulus dollars is merely the “Chicago Way” brought to Washington, D.C.

But when ideology combines with cronyism to place American lives and the nation’s security at risk, it’s quite another thing.

At issue is a plan by Reston, Va.-based satellite broadcast communications company LightSquared to build a next-generation 4G wireless phone network. Many at the Pentagon, including Space Command chief Gen. William Shelton, think the system would seriously hinder the effectiveness of high-precision GPS receiver systems on which the military and many others depend.

The general’s public testimony last Thursday before the members of the House subcommittee on strategic forces came a week after a classified briefing where the same subcommittee had been told, according to chairman Michael Turner, R-Ohio, that the impact of LightSquared’s 4G network of some 40,000 broadcast towers would be “unacceptable.”

Gen. Shelton dropped a precision-guided bombshell of his own when he walked into the highly secured room on Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on Pentagon concerns that the project was harmful, if not outright dangerous, to national security. He said he was pressured to alter his prepared testimony to say the project’s effects could be mitigated. …

Jennifer Rubin says John Boehner gave a speech on Israel she wishes the president would make.

In the nearly three years of the Obama administration — certainly the dreariest time in the history of U.S.-Israel relations — we’ve learned that presidents come and go (some quicker than others, we fervently hope), but the relationship between Congress and the American people, on one hand, and the government and people of Israel, on the other, is enduring. A high point in President Obama’s term was Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress. It was, ironically and tragically, a repudiation of the U.S. president’s approach to Israel and exuberantly applauded by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

On Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in direct, straightforward language confirmed the U.S.’s commitment to Israel in a speech at the Jewish National Fund’s 2011 National Convention in Cincinnati. In using simple, but not simplistic, language, Boehner’s speech (the handiwork of his excellent speechwriter Mike Ricci) eloquently conveyed that, in essence, this stuff is not hard to figure out: …

Bill McGurn says when it comes to trade deals, the president is owned by unions.

… Maybe that helps explain why—three years into his first term—Mr. Obama’s trade policy consists almost entirely of three trade deals his predecessor had already negotiated, and three weeks before Mr. Lee’s arrival the White House has still not sent the appropriate legislation on Korea up to Capitol Hill. Ironically, this presidential dithering comes at a time when these trade deals should be more attractive, given that the growing economies they represent would be healthy markets for our exports.

Korea’s economy, for example, is growing at an annual rate of more than 4%. Colombia’s is growing at more than 5%, and Panama’s is growing at more than 6%. Like the rest of the world, moreover, these nations are not standing still for Mr. Obama: Last week, for example, the Koreans and Colombians announced a bilateral free-trade agreement they expect to be done by year’s end.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When candidate Barack Obama went to Berlin in July 2008, his promise to the “people of the world” was that he would restore wisdom and sophistication to American leadership. When Mr. Lee shows up in Washington, it might be worth asking how he thinks it has turned out.

David Brooks says he was a “sap” for believing Obama.

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures.

We have a hat trick of Contentions posts by Peter Wehner.

In re-reading Monday’s speech by President Obama, several things stand out.

The first is its crass distortions. In his remarks in the Rose Garden, the president said, “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit … then the logic, the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more: We’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.” As others have pointed out, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes and the richest one percent pay more than 30 percent of their income to the federal government, while the average worker pays less than 14 percent. In addition, almost half of the public do not pay any income taxes at all. This is known as a progressive tax system. Now, one may argue the wealthy should pay even more than they do in taxes – but to pretend not embracing Obama’s plan would place the “entire” burden on the middle class and the poor isn’t “math”; it’s a massive distortion.

The second notable thing about Obama’s speech is its insight into the president’s state of mind. Obama has a deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is. This appears to involve more than simple political considerations. Obama has an unusual capacity to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. And so the most profligate spender in history warns the rest of us about profligacy and not placing a debt burden “on our children’s shoulders.” The man on whose watch America amassed more than $4 trillion in debt says, “Washington has to live within its means.”  The president whose stimulus package was among the most wasteful and ineffective in history insists we have to “go through the budget line-by-line looking for waste.” The same individual who ridiculed Speaker Boehner for his “my way or the highway” approach then threatened, in the very same speech, to issue a veto unless he got his way. And the man who professes solidarity with the poor has seen poverty increase each year of his presidency, with a record number of people (46 million) now living in poverty. If that weren’t enough, Obama also wants to reduce the tax benefit for charitable giving.

Then there’s the fellow who lectured us yesterday about fighting for the middle class “as hard as the lobbyists and some lawmakers have fought to protect special treatment for billionaires and big corporations.” This admonition comes from the same fellow who presides over a White House that inappropriately pressured the Office of Management and Budget to approve half-billion dollars to a company, Solyndra, which wasn’t deserving of the money and has now gone belly up. The reason the money was fast-tracked and funneled to Solyndra was because its chief investor, George Kaiser, is a significant fundraiser for Obama. Kaiser, by the way, is a billionaire. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: Good news for Obama. His approval overseas is very high, higher than at home. But then he’s created more jobs overseas than at home.

A little more late night humor from The Corner which leads to this.

As I have mentioned on countless occasions, I didn’t vote for Obama in 2008, but I did not dislike him personally. For all I knew, there could have been something to the imposing façade of leadership he put forward, and even an empty suit has a possibility of getting filled with something worthwhile; that was my hope; and, in any case, we would find out soon enough.

Well, we’ve found out. It’s a vindication both for those of us who voted for John McCain in the general and those of us who voted for Hillary in the primary. (I qualify on both counts). …

… I can guess what you must be thinking: another anti-Obama rant at NRO, basically a case of a minnow joining the dolphins at Sea World; leave it to the professionals, Mike. But I just want to be on record as a non-Obama-hater who deeply resents how this president has wasted America’s time and good will.