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Israel’s predicament by Bret Stephens.

What is Israel’s predicament? It is this: It is surrounded on nearly all sides by enemies who are aggressively committed to its destruction. And too many people who call themselves its friends are only ambivalently committed to its security.

Consider the month that Israel has just had:

• On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed in a sophisticated cross-border ambush near the frontier with Egypt.

• From Aug. 18-24, some 200 large-caliber, factory-made rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza. …

… No democracy in the world today lies under a darker shadow of existential dread than Israel. And the events of the past month ought to demonstrate that Israel’s dread is not of shadows only. Israel’s efforts to allay the enmity of its enemies or mollify the scorn of its critics have failed. But is it too much to ask its friends for support—this time, for once, without cavil or reservation?

Spengler catches Arabs being Arabs.

Now Egypt has banned the export of palm fronds, whose ritual use is central to the observance of the Jewish Feast of Sukkoth (Tabernacles). Most American Jews ignore this holiday, one of the three pilgrimage festivals (along with Passover and Shavuot) for which all the men of ancient Israel came to Jerusalem. For observant Jews, though, Sukkoth recreates the liturgy of the Temple and embodies our hope for its restoration. According to press accounts, the Egyptian Agriculture Ministry gave no reason for the ban. Israel is sourcing palm fronds elsewhere.

The reason for Egypt’s ban is obvious: the Islamists who are taking Egypt over by stages hate Judaism–not just the Jewish State, and not just the Jewish people, but the religion itself.  By extension, they hate Christianity.

As I explain in my new book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too), Islam asserts the Election of the Arabs in opposition to the Election of Israel. The Jewish religion itself is an affront to Islam, except, of course, when the Arabs can chant, “The Jews are our dogs,” permitting them to practice Judaism under conditions of humiliation and oppression. This silly, petty, pointless act of religious hatred speaks volumes about the character of the new Egyptian regime and the devolution of Egyptian society.

Jonathan Tobin says the coming UN disaster is Obama’s fault. Pickerhead thinks its the fault of the fools who voted for him.

For many liberal pundits, the blame for the circus that will unfold this week at the UN with the start of a debate over Palestinian statehood is to be assigned to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu whom they wrongly claim has obstructed peace talks. Others are inclined, with more justice, to put the onus for the problem on Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas whose pursuit of UN recognition of statehood without first making peace with Israel is seen as both futile and counter-productive to the end that he claims to seek.

But the lion’s share of the blame ought to fall on President Obama. Though peace talks were stalled when he took office in January 2009, the deterioration of a relatively stable standoff into the volatile situation that exists today is due in no small measure to the blunders that the president’s team has committed over the past 32 months. Though friends of Israel will rightly give Obama credit for sticking to his word and vetoing the Palestinian resolution — a stand that will be undertaken as much if not more in defense of U.S. interests than those of the Jewish state — the diplomatic disaster that is about to be played out is the fruit of his own misjudgments. …

Speaking of fools who voted for Obama, here’s Ed Koch and why, now, he’s gonna keep Barack’s feet to the fire.

When Gov. Cuomo announced there would be a special election in the 9th Congressional District to replace Anthony Weiner, I gave public voice to an idea that had been percolating in my head for some time. As everyone now knows, I wound up strongly supporting the candidacy of Bob Turner, who last week won the seat in a hotly contested race.

I want to explain why I did what I did, so there’s no misunderstanding of my intentions, or of my future plans. I hope President Obama gets the message that’s been sent. If he does — and if he announces, for example, that an attack by Turkey (which is heading toward war with Israel) or an attack by Egypt (which allowed the mob to occupy the Israeli embassy and threaten Israeli diplomats) would be seen as an attack upon the United States — I’d be happy to support him and even campaign in Florida on his behalf in 2012.

But if he doesn’t read the tea leaves and change his position, you can be certain I will continue to bang my drum. I will campaign against him not only in New York, but in other parts of the country next year. I’ll be loud and clear about what I believe. There are many Floridians who are concerned about the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel, and Florida will be crucial to the President’s reelection. …

Peter Schiff testified before Congress on how the government could create jobs. His testimony is here.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking member, and all distinguished members of this panel. Thank you for inviting me here today to offer my opinions as to how the government can help the American economy recover from the worst crisis in living memory.

Despite the understandable human tendency to help others, government spending cannot be a net creator of jobs. Indeed many efforts currently under consideration by the Administration and Congress will actively destroy jobs. These initiatives must stop. While it is easy to see how a deficit-financed government program can lead to the creation of a specific job, it is much harder to see how other jobs are destroyed by the diversion of capital and resources. It is also difficult to see how the bigger budget deficits sap the economy of vitality, destroying jobs in the process.

In a free market jobs are created by profit seeking businesses with access to capital. Unfortunately Government taxes and regulation diminish profits, and deficit spending and artificially low interest rates inhibit capital formation. As a result unemployment remains high, and will likely continue to rise until policies are reversed.

It is my belief that a dollar of deficit spending does more damage to job creation than a dollar of taxes.   That is because taxes (particularly those targeting the middle or lower income groups) have their greatest impact on spending, while deficits more directly impact savings and investment. Contrary to the beliefs held by many professional economists spending does not make an economy grow. Savings and investment are far more determinative. Any program that diverts capital into consumption and away from savings and investment will diminish future economic growth and job creation.

Creating jobs is easy for government, but all jobs are not equal. Paying people to dig ditches and fill them up does society no good. On balance these “jobs” diminish the economy by wasting scarce land, labor and capital.  We do not want jobs for the sake of work, but for the goods and services they produce. As it has a printing press, the government could mandate employment for all, as did the Soviet Union. But if these jobs are not productive, and government jobs rarely are, society is no better for it. …

New Geography drills down into the Texas job numbers.

Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the Republican presidential nomination race bragging about the job creation record of Texas during his term as his primary pitch to a nation starved for jobs. This triggered a flurry of debate on whether or not Texas is really all Perry claims for it. But while there is certainly nuance in numbers, and Texas doesn’t win on every single measure, on the whole it seems indisputable that Texas did very, very well during the 2000s.

This may or may not be the doing of Perry. Nor are the national struggles clearly the fault of Obama. The  man at the top always reaps the credit for the blame for what happens on his watch, but the realities of the modern economy are quite complex and there’s only so much influence a governor or president has – and that usually comes with a lag. Nevertheless, the Texas story can’t simply be discounted.

Let’s take a look at the top level data. While reviewing, keep in mind that the data for the US as a whole actually includes Texas. If you stripped the Texas data out of the US total, the comparisons would generally get even better for the Lone Star State. …

Corner Post on how Michelle shakes down White House visitors.

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A Canadian comments on the American media. This from their National Post 

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”

Alana Goodman catches Axelrod complaining about Obama’s press coverage.

… Let’s see. Obama’s approval ratings are crashing and burning, new scandals are popping up daily, and his jobs plan is being widely panned by members of his own party. All that, and Axelrod still expects flattering coverage?

More than anything, the memo is a sign the media culture is beginning to change. Obama still gets far better coverage than a Republican politician would. But the rise of right-leaning media outlets and the competition for web traffic has made it much harder for mainstream outlets to ignore legitimate stories that reflect poorly on Democrats. That’s not to say the coverage of Obama’s campaign will be as fair and balanced as it should be, but he’s not going to get as much of a free pass as he did in 2008.

Mark Steyn thinks we’re pretty awesome when it comes to creating green jobs.

… On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” – and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent – $17.2 billion – and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! USA! USA!

So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications. …

James Pethokoukis says Solyndra is the logical end of Obamanomics.

The bankruptcy of solar-panel maker Solyndra neatly encapsulates the economic, political and intellectual bankruptcy of Barack Obama’s Big Idea. It was the president’s intention back in 2009 to begin centrally reorganizing the U.S. economy around the supposed climate-change crisis.

To what end? Well, Obama claimed his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But that was just the cover story. At its core, Obamanomics is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income. Government spending on various “green” subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits.

Oh, and Wall Street, too. Who was the exclusive financial adviser to Solyndra when it was trying to secure the $535 million loan from Washington? Goldman Sachs. And had the cap-and-trade scheme been enacted, big banks stood ready to reap billions from the trading of carbon emission credits. …

Corner Post notes the political interests of a career “civil servant.”

… Today’s Washington Post has a story about how an OMB career official warned in an e-mail on January 31, 2011, that they needed “to flag to DOE at the highest levels the stakes involved” in Solyndra’s looming financial collapse. The e-mail does not show much concern over the potential loss to taxpayers of half a billion dollars. No, what concerns the supposedly nonpartisan career civil servant is the “optics” of such a loss due to the “PR and policy attention Solyndra has received since 2009.” The bureaucrat writes, “If Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today.”

In fact, “the timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up, whereas a default today could be put in the context of (and perhaps even get some credit for) fiscal discipline/good government because the Administration would be limiting further taxpayer exposure letting bad projects go, and could make public steps it is taking to learn lessons and improve/limit future lending.” …

Jonah Goldberg reviews Obama’s weak week.

In Nevada, the Republican crushed a top-flight female Democratic candidate by 22 points. In New York, the seat that once belonged to Geraldine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer and Anthony Weiner went to Republican Bob Turner — the first time the seat since has gone Republican since 1923. A liberal strategist put a rosy spin on it: “The mine hasn’t collapsed, but the loss in New York is definitely a dead canary.”

In both races, the Democrats used their trump card: scaring seniors by telling them the GOP wants to take away their Medicare and Social Security. It didn’t work.

This came against a backdrop of abysmal poll numbers showing Obama’s approval falling with every constituency, including Democrats, Independents, Hispanics and African-Americans. That might be why congressional Democrats are openly balking at his must-pass stimulus do-over.

Corner Post quotes George Will.

“He went to Massachusetts to campaign against Scott Brown; Brown is now a senator. He went to New Jersey to campaign against Chris Christie, who’s now governor. He went to Virginia to campaign against Bob McDonnell, who’s now governor. He campaigned for the health-care plan extensively, it became less popular. He campaigned in 2010 for the Democrats, they were shellacked. He began, in a sense, his presidency flying to Copenhagen to get Chicago the Olympics; Chicago was the first city eliminated. There is no evidence that the man has the rhetorical powers that he is relying on.”

Another Corner Post quotes Karl Rove.

“President Obama has himself backwards,” Rove says. “His problem is not that he was a policy wonk: it’s that he wasn’t.  He refused to get his hands dirty writing a good stimulus bill, drafting bipartisan health-care reform, or negotiating with Republicans.  He found it easier to tell them ‘I won, so get lost.’”

“The president is comfortable with a technocratic approach because he is an imperious, arrogant, know-it-all left wing technocrat who leaves the details to his congressional Democratic allies, like Congressman Dave Obey with the stimulus bill,” Rove adds. “He is content to check the box on his list of achievements and tour the country with his teleprompter giving speeches.”

Peter Wehner comments on Obama’s claim to wonkishness.

There are two other things worth noting in what Obama said. The first is that he’s employing the old (and transparent) trick of criticizing himself by praising himself. The“disease” Obama suffers from, you see, is that he’s a “policy wonk.” The message the president is trying to send is he’s been too intellectual, too serious-minded, and too involved in mastering the depths of complicated policy issues; as a result, he just hasn’t paid enough attention to providing a “narrative” for his presidency. This is akin to the person who says his chief failure is that he hasn’t spent enough hosting Bible studies because he devotes a night a week to serving at the soup kitchen.

Maureen Dowd is doing her best beltway snobbery with comments on Rick Perry’s college and grades. Victor Davis Hanson says if grades are so important, why don’t the folks in the media go after the college grades of The One.

When Dowd trashes Perry and Bush (why not quote the hardly impressive Kerry record?), she is arguing that long ago college records and scores are a good barometer of presidential success (that is dubious if one were to compare a Lincoln or Truman to Wilson or Carter), and, by inference, that the current president is also apparent proof. But does she have inside information about the Obama undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia? If not, why not, given the supposed importance of undergraduate grades to liberal observers? I suppose we are to conclude that supposedly poor students like a Perry or Bush released their grades or had them leaked, but brilliant undergraduates earning top slots at Harvard Law have no need to release obviously straight-A transcripts and no worry that anyone would care?

David (Miltonovich)* Friedman asks what’s so bad about global warming. *That would be “son of Milton.”

… the global warming controversy involves changes over not a year or a decade  but a century. Over a century, most farmers will change the crop they find it most profitable to grow multiple times; if average temperatures are trending up, those changes will include a shift towards crops better suited to slightly warmer weather. Over a century, most houses will be torn down and replaced; if sea level is rising, houses currently built on low lying coastal ground will be rebuilt a little farther inland—not much farther if we are talking, as the IPCC estimates suggest we should be, about a rise of a foot or two. Hence the presumption that change is bad is a very weak one for changes as slow as those we have good reason to expect from global warming.

It is hard to see any other reason to expect global warming to make us, on net, worse off. The earth and its climate were not, after all, designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. It is true that our species evolved to survive under then existing climatic conditions but, over the period for which humans have existed, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. And, for the past many thousands of years, humans have lived and prospered over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by.

If we have no good reason to believe that humans will be substantially worse off after global warming than before, we have no good reason to believe that it is worth bearing sizable costs to prevent global warming.

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Andrew Ferguson profiles Rick Perry’s initiative’s in higher education.

If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.

In his 30-year public career, Perry?—?how to put this delicately??—?has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is unknown, since no one in higher education has thought to leak Obama’s transcript to a right-wing blog.)

Perry expends his considerable intelligence instead on using political power and, what amounts to the same thing, picking fights with his political adversaries. When Rollins came to Perry in 2007 with a radical and comprehensive proposal to overhaul higher education in the state, Rollins says the governor quickly understood the potential of the issue, not only politically but on its merits. …

… In late August, Perry scored another significant, if partial, victory. The University of Texas regents approved an “action plan” proposed by the system’s chancellor, who isn’t a Perry appointee. The plan is a compromise, but it incorporates many of Perry’s ideas, including some of the most radical, such as “pay for performance” and “learning contracts” between schools and their students. Amazingly, the plan has won support from both the right (Brooke Rollins’s Texas Public Policy Foundation) and left (Karen Hughes’s group). 

Reforms like these would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, before Perry picked up his stick and started poking the system until it had to respond. It’s been a remarkable display of political entrepreneurship: Create an issue, define it on your terms, cultivate public support, and your opponents, who never saw it coming, will have to go along, even if only partway?—?at first.

Victor Davis Hanson says the president’s quiver is empty.

Ex-president George W. Bush with accustomed candor once shrugged after the end of his eight-year presidency, “People were kind of tired of me.” That ennui happens eventually with most presidents. But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months.

We can sense the national weariness with Obama in a variety of strange and unexpected ways. There is the self-pitying anguish of liberal columnists who scapegoat him for turning the public against their own leftwing agenda. The current silence of “moderate” Republicans and conservative op-ed writers who once in near ecstasy jumped ship to join Obama is deafening. A growing number of Democratic representatives and senators up for reelection do not want their partisan president to visit their districts in the runup to November 2012. Approval ratings hover around 40 percent.

Perhaps strangest of all, there is now a collective “Been there, done that” any time Barack Obama walks up to the podium to give yet another teleprompted speech. …

Jennifer Rubin says now Dems are turning on Obama.

… When a president is failing, he acquires new troubles. Obama surely exemplifies this phenomenon. Obama’s jobs plan is now under assault from his own party. It sort of messes up his plan to run against the “do nothing” Republicans when Democrats mercilessly attack the plan.

The problems will soon multiply for Obama, as they do with any president who is on the ropes. How will he hold his troops in line for the remainder of his term? He won’t for now it is every man for himself. Can he expect Senate Democrats to block every effort from the House Republicans? Not if the red state Democrats want to win re-election.

It also poses some tricky problems for the 2012 campaign. What Democratic congressman in a swing state wants to be seen with him? …

Corner Post catches this on a Solyndra website;

“The leadership and actions of President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the U.S. Congress were instrumental in concluding this offer for a loan guarantee,” said Solyndra CEO and founder, Dr. Chris Gronet. “The DOE Loan Guarantee Program funding will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates. This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”

Michael Barone posts on Solyndra.

One factor favoring President Obama’s re-election, according to a recent article by political scientist Alan Lichtman, is the absence of scandal in his administration.

Lichtman may have spoken too soon.

The reason can be capsulized in a single word: Solyndra.

That’s the name of a company that manufactured solar panels in Fremont, Calif. (which voted 71 percent for Obama in 2008).

Solyndra was the first company to receive a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy as part of the 2009 stimulus package. This wasn’t small potatoes. The loan guarantee was for $535 million.

It was, Vice President Biden said, “exactly what the Recovery Act was all about.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, said it would help “spark a new revolution that will put Americans to work.” It was part of the Obama administration’s program to create so-called “green jobs,” which we were told were the key to future economic growth. …

Allahpundit at Hot Air says the White House ignored three warnings about Solyndra.

That’s not all they ignored, either. According to e-mails obtained by the AP, one White House official who helped plan Obama’s big photo op at the plant earlier this year dismissed a news story about Solyndra’s financial troubles with, “Seems B.S.” A few months earlier, the same chump ignored the alarm bells being rung by accounting firms and instead accepted at face value Solyndra’s assurances that they were doing well, writing, “Fantastic to hear that business is doing well — keep up the good work! We’re cheering for you.”

Everyone knew the company was toast. Except the people in charge of your money. ”’

Alana Goodman says the administration has created green jobs at a cost of $5.5 million per job.

… The administration has already spent half of the initial $38.6 billion loan guarantees, which would be around $19.3 billion. And it’s “created” 3,500 jobs – at a cost of roughly $5.5 million per job. Numbers like these explain why Obama has been relatively quiet on “clean energy” funding during his latest jobs push. Notice it hasn’t been popping up in his speeches lately. Obama’s getting attacked by environmental groups for it, but politically it’s his only option.

And for the White House, there couldn’t be a worse time for this information to come out. August wasn’t a kind month to Obama, but his jobs plan isn’t saving him from a September that’s shaping up to be even worse. As James Carville advised earlier today, “What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.”

James Pethokoukis explains how the “stimulus” and “jobs act” really work.

The point of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act is, well, to create jobs. And the sooner the better, right? Unemployment is above 9 percent, and everyone from Wall Street to the Congressional Budget Office to the White House now thinks that number isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Thus Obama’s new $450 billion stimulus plan. But since this new proposal is structured just like 2009?s $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it should be no surprise that it contains many of the same flaws as Stimulus 1.0….

Good News! Andrew Malcolm says Dennis “the menace” Kucinich may loose his house seat.

Well, it looks like the new congressional redistricting will help Ohio get rid of at least one long-term Democratic representative in next year’s House elections.

According to newly drawn district lines set to go to the Ohio Legislature any day, eight-term Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and 15-term Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo are both in the same new narrow district running along the southern Lake Erie shoreline. Both have announced their candidacies.

The Buckeye state is home to House Speaker John Boehner and is losing two of its current 18 House seats.

Corner Post says England is getting down on it’s bullies; especially those who call other kids, “broccoli heads.”

The Daily Mail reports that more than 20,000 British nursery and elementary schoolchildren ages 3–11 have been registered in a national database for uttering words perceived as “racist.”

Under anti-bullying laws, school authorities are required to report incidents of name calling to the Department for Education. One tyke was placed in the registry for calling another a “broccoli head.” Naturally, the bien pensants identified him as a budding Klansman. Thus branded, the information tracks the students to subsequent schools and may be accessed by future employers.

Think that’s a bit too 1984 for the U.S.? Think again. The U.S. Department of Education is seeking to expand its authority over school bullying and some proponents of the expansion seem to view the First Amendment as a minor impediment to bringing a British-style anti-bullying regime to America.

The U.S.Commission on Civil Rights will be issuing a report on the matter shortly. Kindly check out the dissents of Commissioners Gaziano, Heriot, and Kirsanow.

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David Warren alerts us to the threat coming from Turkey.

The greatest threat to the world’s peace, at this moment, comes from a man named Recip Tayyip Erdogan. He is the prime minister of Turkey, at the head of the Justice and Development Party (“AK,” from the Turkish). A former mayor of Istanbul, he was arrested and jailed when he publicly recited Islamist verses (“the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets,” etc.), in defiance of the old secularist, Ataturk constitution, which made it an offence to incite religious and racial fanaticism. …

… It was he who sent the “peace flotilla” to challenge Israel’s right to blockade Gaza (recognized under international law and explicitly by the U.N.). He made the inevitable violent result of that adventure into an anti-Israeli cause célèbre. He has now announced that the next peace flotilla will be accompanied by the Turkish navy.

This will put Israel in the position of either surrendering its right to defend itself, or firing on Turkish naval vessels. There is no way to overstate the gravity of this: Erdogan is manoeuvring to create a casus belli. …

… In other words, we are staring at the trigger for a genuine world war. With Recip Erdogan’s twitching finger on it.

David Goldman (Spengler) outlines the situation in Egypt.

Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), one of the great novels of the past century, is a portrait of the Austrian early in 1914. The readers know that their silly world will come to a terrible end a few months later with the outbreak of war, but the protagonists do not. Musil published a first volume and spent the rest of his life trying to write a second, without success, for it is the sort of story that has no end except for the abyss.

Arab politics today has a Musil-like quality of unreality, for the conclusion will be the collapse of the Egyptian state. The misnamed “Arab Spring,” really a convulsion of a dying society, began with food shortages. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing. …

Roger Simon reports on the latest GOP debate.

They say it ain’t over ’til it’s over or the fat lady sings at least a dozen times, finally making all the high notes in Aida and La Traviata in succession. Nevertheless — after only his second debate — things do look pretty good for Rick Perry.

And consider before this Tampa debate he was already twelve points ahead of nearest rival Mitt Romney, according to its sponsor’s (CNN) own poll.

So it’s no surprise that most of Monday’s affair — which mostly reprised the same questions from last week’s Reagan Library debate (this all could get pretty tedious fast) — was a game of “Everybody on Rick” with the Texas governor, perhaps in deference to his state’s proximity to Mexico, as the designated piñata.

Well, not quite everybody. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain declined to attack Perry. (I will try to explain that later.) But Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and, of course, Romney did their best to slam Perry at every opportunity, sometimes remembering, seemingly as an afterthought, to throw in an unkind word for Barack Obama, as if the Texas governor and the not the president was the incumbent.

This week’s report on poverty in American must make the president wonder if he can ever get a break. Andrew Malcolm notes a study from the Heritage Foundation on the conditions of the poor.

… Forty percent live in apartments, less than 10% in mobile homes or trailers and about 50% live in standard one-family homes. In fact, 42% own their own home.

The vast majority are in good repair, with more living space per person than the average non-poor person in Britain, France or Sweden.

Ninety-six percent of poor parents say their children were never hungry during the year due to an inability to afford food.

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning and 92% have a microwave.

One-third of poor households have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV, 70% have a VCR and two-thirds have satellite/cable TV, the same proportion as own at least one DVD player.

Half of the poverty households have a personal computer and one-in-seven have two or more. …

John Tierney visited the Monitor Center at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.

Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, by today’s standards, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter.

The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”

“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.

Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.

But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.

Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News. The team expects to have nearly all the barnacles and sediment removed by the end of this month, giving the public a new look at the dents from the Confederate cannonballs and shells that would have sunk any ordinary ship of its day. Then the turret will be submerged again in fresh water for 15 more years, until enough ocean salt has been removed from the metal to allow it to face the air permanently. …

A WSJ book review tells an amazing story of identical twins separated for almost 30 years

A Spanish mother gave birth to twin girls in 1973 at a hospital in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, but one of the babies was accidentally switched in the maternity unit. The mistake went undiscovered for nearly three decades. The mother assumed that she had given birth to fraternal twins (dizygotic, from two eggs) and not “identical” ones (monozygotic, two embryos developed from a single fertilized egg). The girl she named Begoña was her biological daughter; the baby named Beatriz was not.

As Nancy L. Segal relates in “Someone Else’s Twin,” her fascinating account of the switched-at-birth misstep and the painful family and legal entanglements that followed much later, an unexpected encounter in a clothing store was the tale’s turning point. A shop assistant mistook the 28-year-old Begoña for a person she knew named Delia. After Begoña explained who she was, the clerk—still struck by the resemblance—suggested that the two “doubles” meet each other. …

Popular Mechanics has the story on crowd counting mechanics.

On June 4, a huge crowd gathered in Hong Kong for a vigil to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. But just how huge? In some stories 77,000 people showed up. Another story, though, listed the attendance as nearly double that: 150,000.

There’s a reason for the disparity. The first figure—77,000—is a police estimate. The second is from the event’s coordinators, who probably had some motivation to pad their numbers. To find out which crowd size was correct, two professors—Paul Yip at the University of Hong Kong and Ray Watson at Melbourne University—ran the numbers. To fit 150,000 people into that space, they’d have to cram together at about one person per 2.7 square feet (four per square meter), so that estimate is unrealistic. That would be “mosh-pit density,” the researchers write in a new paper on crowd estimation techniques published in the journal Significance.

This story of competing head counts is not uncommon. Estimating large numbers is difficult even with the best of intention. If you count the number of jellybeans in a jar three times, you’ll probably have three different numbers, because people simply cannot count very large numbers without some error. Now, imagine trying to count a shifting mass of heads, some stooping to tie shoes, some sharing the same umbrella, some arriving late or leaving early. Plus, this is one field in which good intentions are rare. Crowd-size estimation is a murky science, positioned at the intersection of statistical precision and political sleight-of-hand, and plenty of people are motivated to either exaggerate or low-ball an event’s attendance.

“Almost everyone who has tried to make a crowd estimate has a vested interest in what the outcome of the estimate is,” Charles Seife says. Seife is a journalism professor at New York University who writes about math and physics. [Disclosure: I had a class with Seife at NYU.] His newest book Proofiness tackles the ways that people try to fool others (and sometimes fool themselves) with numbers. “Whenever you see a crowd estimate,” he says, “you have to wonder where it’s coming from.” Nevertheless, Seife says, if you do your math carefully, it is possible to count a large crowd to within a couple of tens of thousands. And researchers like Yip and Watson are now applying new strategies to find out whether it is indeed possible to get a more accurate count of a teeming mass of humanity. …

Christopher Hitchens in rare form.  

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.

No, he didn’t, actually. What he did instead was to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul that was our chat, lean across me, pick up the bottle of wine that was in the middle of the table, and pour it into everyone’s glass. And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?

There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. (“Why are they called waiters?” inquired my son when he was about 5. “It’s we who are doing all the waiting.”) The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the “specials” and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. “It’s the maitre d’ from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right.” …

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John Podhoretz announces the GOP win of Anthony Weiner’s seat.

… These may prove to be among the most suggestive special-election results in modern American history. The Democratic candidate Harris Wofford?’s win in the 1991 special for Senate in Pennsylvania proved a harbinger of Bill Clinton?’s victory in 1992, and Republican Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts in January 2010 presaged the shellacking in the midterms last year. If Obama loses next November, the writing on the wall will have appeared tonight.

Stanley Kurtz writes about Ed Koch’s influence in NY-9.

Other than Barack Obama, no single person had a greater impact on the NY-9 race than Ed Koch. The economy and marriage issues were also key, of course, but Koch explicitly framed the election as an attempt to send a message to Obama on Israel.

This March 2010 post from Ron Radosh helps make sense of Koch’s decision. Koch is a centrist Democrat, hawkish on defense and supportive of Israel. Like Joe Lieberman, Koch represents the Democratic party of an earlier day. Because of the War on Terror, Koch broke ranks in 2004 to support President Bush’s re-election campaign. Yet unlike Lieberman, who endorsed McCain in 2008, Koch campaigned enthusiastically for Obama in 2008. In Florida that year, Koch assured Jewish voters that Obama would be a strong friend of Israel. Koch also dismissed Republican attempts to cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to Israel as unfounded and hysterical. …

Tony Blankley warns against the left’s new violent speech. The Wisconsin teacher’s union intimidation tactics turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. 

In the past few weeks, leading Democrats in Congress have called Tea Party members terrorists, said they should go to hell and accused them of wanting to lynch black people. Last weekend at an event attended by President Obama, the head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., attacked the Tea Party, screaming, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches [Tea Party members] out and give America back to an America where we belong.” (Note: The president was not on the platform when Mr. Hoffa spoke.)

So far, neither the president nor any prominent Democrat has condemned such remarks – even though the phrase “take out” is commonly used to describe an act of criminal homicide. Thus, Mr. Hoffa’s statement might rise to the level of incitement to violence. …

Thomas Sowell looks at last week’s jobs speech.

… When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers’ unions, and “thousands of transportation projects.”

The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can “grow the economy” by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending “investment.”

Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.

Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.

Obama says he wants “federal housing agencies” to “help more people refinance their mortgages.” What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?

No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. …

FuelFix blog with more on Solyndra. 

Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.

Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later.

“People including our government put blinders on and did not want to believe in the obvious,” Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst in Boston for Canaccord Genuity Inc. of Vancouver, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government. “The fact that the government chose Solyndra as their white horse is mind-boggling.” …

Andrew Ferguson explains how the media spins BS.

I’ve spent much of my summer trying to dodge Mark Zandi. I pick up my newspaper, I turn on the TV, I tap-tap my iPad, and there he is: explaining the past, divining the future, teasing insights from the tumultuous present. It’s his job. Zandi is not a pundit, exactly. He’s an economist by trade. What he really is, is a go-to guy, one of the most successful go-to guys in journalism history. The need for go-to guys is never less than acute, but this summer, with the failing economy and the debt-ceiling debate, demand has been particularly brisk.

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein?, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill?? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan? were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

Ornstein, for example, is a moderate liberal, but the think tank that employs him is conservative: the politics of the one combines with the politics of the other to make a purely objective go-to guy who can offer liberal opinions without the label. Douglas Brinkley’s liberalism is deep and abiding, made explicit, to cite one instance, when he published a panting campaign biography of John Kerry in 2003. Yet he has also been chosen, inexplicably, to edit various editions of the papers of Ronald Reagan by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. Reagan breeds with Kerry and Go-To Brinkley is born, a scholar who plays it straight down the middle, listing leftward.

In economics, Zandi is capable of meeting all of a reporter’s go-to-guy needs, so the trade has been careful in obscuring his liberalism. He is a registered Democrat, as he freely admits when asked. But he’s seldom asked. The key to his indispensability is that he once—once—did some work for a Republican. Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, one of John McCain’s economics advisors enlisted Zandi to file a weekly analysis of current economic data for the campaign’s use. He never advised McCain on matters of policy, he never met McCain, and he was never paid for his labor. The real payout, in fame and influence, came after the election.

Why a story about clamming on Long Island? Because digging clams was how Pickerhead earned money in his early teens before he was work legal. And it was on the North Shore of Long Island – Conscience Bay in Setauket, NY. A bushel was worth $11. $14 if I could catch someone going across the Sound to Bridgeport, Conn. where rivers were polluted. We get this story from Gilt Taste blog.

Every summer, my wife, son, and I pay a visit to our friend Elena and her daughters, who rent a house in Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island.

The idea in going there, apparently, is to relax. To do nothing. It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, and… I kind of dread it, because I am not good at this. At all. I’m a restless sort. My need to move and do tends to contaminate the tranquility, and I hate to kill a (lazy) buzz.

I need a goal. A project. Something beach-y to keep my occupied, and this year, I decided my project would be clamming. Growing up in Florida, I learned two things: (1) there’s nothing in the world better than seafood you’ve pulled from the water yourself, and (2) half a day on a fishing boat will get me sunburn and seasickness with far more certainty than it will get me fish. Clams, they don’t swim away. Clamming was the perfect answer, I thought. Relaxing, yet productive, undeniably beach-y, and with the promise of pristine seafood at the end.

Having never clammed before, a bit of research was in order. I searched Twitter and hit paydirt immediately: Alec Baldwin, Long Island native, apparent guru of all things, was just then guiding actress Ali Wentworth in the finer points of the art: …

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Watching the 911 stuff made Mark Steyn a little grumpy.

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?

Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.” And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

“You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen.” …

Pittsburgh’s Jack Kelly says Obama and the unions are tanking together.

… the big things labor wants — card check, a bailout of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., massive pork barrel projects — are out of reach. With GOP control of the House, the outlook even for “little nibbly things” is cloudy.

Labor’s problems stem from our massive debt and dismal economy. They are exacerbated by thuggish behavior, and by the unwillingness of unions to tighten their belts as other Americans must.

President Obama is polling in Jimmy Carter territory. Unions are less popular now than in many decades. Mutual weakness will draw Democrats and unions closer, despite labor’s discontents. But the closer to each other they get, the more swing voters will recoil from both.

Jennifer Rubin posts that the president says, “Do it my way, do it now, and we’ll pay for it later.”

President Obama took to the Rose Garden today, apparently unaware that his public appearances these days annoy and bore Americans rather than persuade them. (Actually, his skills of persuasion have never been robust, on any issue.)

Today he demanded: “On Thursday, I told Congress that I’ll be sending them a bill called the American Jobs Act. Well, here it is. This is a bill that will put people back to work all across the country. This is the bill that will help our economy in a moment of national crisis. This is a bill that is based on ideas from both Democrats and Republicans. And this is the bill that Congress needs to pass. No games. No politics. No delays. I’m sending this bill to Congress today, and they ought to pass it immediately.” His contempt for Congress runneth over. …

So, what do Huntsman and Obama have in common? Besides the fact that neither one will be nominated by the GOP. Debra Saunders says they both worship science.

… Consider Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist. In 2009, Chu’s staff approved $535 million loan guarantee to the Fremont solar company, Solyndra. Within two years, despite half a billion in taxpayer dollars, Solyndra announced last week it was filing for bankruptcy, shuttering its remaining plant, and laying off 1,100 workers. That was one miscalculation. Mistakes happen.

But the biggest blunder was not made by a scientist, but by a politician who so trusted the hollow promises of the climate-change lobby that he bet the U.S. economy on green jobs that never did proliferate. That was President Obama, and you see the fruit of his misguided faith.

Forbes contributor Charles Kadlec writes on the great African American depression.

… No group has suffered more than individuals within the black community.  Nearly 400,000 fewer blacks are employed today than in February 2009, and their unemployment rate has shot up a gut-wrenching 3.1 percentage points to 16.7%.  By contrast, white unemployment rates are up only one-half a percentage point to 8.0%.

The comparison would look even worse except that black participation rates have fallen to 60.4% from 63.1%.  If participation rates had stayed where they were, black unemployment rate today would stand at 18.8%.

Even worse, black teenage unemployment now stands at an unconscionable 46.5%. That’s right, nearly half of all black teenagers seeking employment do not have a job.

Too often liberals ignore their policy failures by insisting on their good intentions.  But, not even good intentions can excuse the disparate impact the policies championed by the Congressional Black Caucus in particular, and Democrats and liberals in general, have had on the black community.

The anti-discrimination laws that rule the workplace provide a relevant standard for assessing any Administration’s economic policies. Under the law, the consequences of employment practices without regard to motive are what matter.

Using this standard, Republicans should challenge Democrats based on the consequences their policies have had on Americans in general, and on minorities in particular.  No matter its motive, the Obama Administration’s strategy of increasing the size and scope of government in the name of fairness and safety has had a disparate impact on black workers.  The apparent tolerance of high black unemployment as collateral damage on the road to the liberal vision of a “more just society” is itself intolerable. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: President Obama named his new $447-billion legislation the American Jobs Act. Better than the original name, the Save My Ass Act.

Letterman: Don’t forget, folks, tomorrow is take your son or daughter with you to the Unemployment Office Day.

Leno: Government statistics show the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. President Obama now says he’s confident this month he can double that.

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Deroy Murdock compares two presidents.

President Zero.

The brand-new nickname for Barack ObamAA+ symbolizes America’s total net jobs created in August: Zippo.

So, how many jobs emerged in August 1983, the analogous point in Ronald Reagan’s presidency? 280,000. Proportional to today’s population, that equals 367,360 new hires last month.

Citizens pondering Obama’s latest jobs speech and how to get America working again should focus on today’s great Keynesian experiment. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side mixture of tax cuts, deregulation, and sound money competes directly against Obama’s big-government blend of Keynesian stimuli, rampant red tape, and promiscuous printing of money — as if dollars were wallpaper. The late Reagan trounces the leisurely Obama. …

Barton Hinkle lays out the case against Solyndra-like government loans.

… The Solyndra story encapsulates a much bigger issue than mere crony capitalism, bad as that is. Because Solyndra is not alone. The Obama administration has sunk billions into loan guarantees for dozens of other renewable-energy companies as well.

This is known as the political allocation of economic resources, and it entails all kinds of problems. The first and most basic: It’s wrong. Government should not be picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

Problem No. 2: corruption. When government puts its massive thumb on the market scale, corporations have a huge incentive to try to win government’s favor. Hence: campaign contributions and lobbyists galore. Progressives who want to keep money out of politics should help libertarians build a high wall between economy and state.

Problem No. 3: the distortion of market incentives. Although federal policy was far from the only reason for the recent housing bubble and crash, it played a significant role. And even when market intervention does not produce a crash, it can still produce a creature like the Chevy Volt—an electric vehicle for which there is zero demand despite a whopping $7,500 federal tax credit for purchase—or Cash for Clunkers. That idea, now universally derided, seemed bright at the time, at least to some. In retrospect, it seems as smart as paying people to burn down their houses to stimulate demand for new ones.

Such market distortion shifts resources from more productive to less productive purposes, which inevitably produces less prosperity—fewer jobs at lower pay. Want evidence? See last month’s New York Times story “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises,” which concluded: “Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show.” For the Times to concede that government intervention in pursuit of progressive political goals has not worked is like National Review criticizing a Republican. The proof has to be overwhelming. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor looks at Solyndra and part of their financing.

… I want to focus on a narrower issue.  Remember in 2009, when the secured creditors of Chrysler were expropriated (that’s a nice way to say “hosed”) when that company went into bankruptcy?  Their purportedly senior claims were in fact subordinated to junior, unsecured creditors.  The secured creditors were the subject of vitriolic criticism from Obama personally, and from the administration and its media water boys.  It was an early indicator of the crony capitalism to come.

In the Solyndra case, a major Obama bundler George Kaiser–from very red-state Oklahoma, of all places–is an investor in Solyndra.  More to the point, when the company was in trouble back in March, it borrowed $75 million dollars, in part from the George Kaiser Family Foundation.   Crucially, this loan was made senior to most of the outstanding debts owed to the Federal government ($385 million out of the $535 million in total provided by Uncle Sucker).

So it will be quite interesting to see whether Kaiser, the Obama donor, gets the Chrysler secured creditor treatment, or whether the administration will have found a strange new respect for the virtues of strict adherence to priority rules in bankruptcy.

Speaking of Solyndra, Craig also points out the foolishness of the loan.

… The incompetence alternative gets a boost from Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy Chu.  DOE’s Inspector General participated in the raid, but Chu apparently thinks that Solyndra is a success.  Yes.  You read that right.  A success:

Mr. Chu’s spokesman argued that “the project that we supported succeeded. The facility was producing the product it said it would produce, and consumers were buying the product.”

Then I guess every firm filing through bankruptcy court is really a success.  Chu is obviously a brilliant physicist and an economic numbskull.  Which wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.

Seeing what has transpired with the spawn of the first stimulus, by all means, let’s “pass the bill” so we can watch Son of Stimulus.  By Chu’s standards, it’s guaranteed to be a smashing success.

ABC News has been doing much of the heavy lifting in Solyndra-gate. 

Federal agents have expanded their examination of the now-bankrupt California solar power company Solyndra, visiting the homes of the company’s CEO and two of its executives, examining computer files and documents, iWatch News and ABC News have learned.

Agents visited the homes of CEO Brian Harrison and company founder Chris Gronet and a former executive, according to a source who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the legal sensitivity of the situation.

Gronet, reached at his home Friday morning, did not dispute that his home was visited by federal agents a day earlier.

“I’m sorry,” Gronet said, “you probably understand full well that I cannot comment.” The third executive could not be immediately reached.

Solyndra spokesman David Miller confirmed agents visited Harrison’s home on the same day the FBI and Energy Department Inspector General seized boxes of records from the company’s headquarters.

“Yeah, they did go to his house and speak to him briefly,” Miller said. “I don’t know what they may have taken. I believe they took a look at his computer.” …

Peter Wehner writes on the fall.

… As Jimmy Carter can tell you, for a president to become an object of disdain and apathy is a very dangerous place to find himself.

It has been a stunning fall from grace for Obama, a man who, upon taking office, was routinely compared to Kennedy, to FDR, and even to Lincoln. One is tempted to say those comparisons were unfair to Obama, except that he did so much to invite them.

By now, the cult-like effect Obama had on his supporters is a distant, fading memory. The Greek columns built for his convention speech now look simply silly, as does Obama’s promise to heal the earth and reverse the ocean tide. His core appeal was aesthetic, and hence fleeting. It turns out Obama really was best equipped to be a community organizer and a state senator and perhaps not very much more than that. But Obama, a man of extraordinary self-regard, decided he was the world-historical person we had been waiting for. (What can one say about a person who surrounded himself with aides who referred to him as “Black Jesus” during the campaign?)

In a coincidence that calls to mind William Blake’s “fearful symmetry” phrase, it was also Dana Milbank who in July 2008, months before Obama was elected, reported  that Obama attended an “adoration session” with Democratic lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, “as if for the State of the Union.”

Inside, according to a witness, Obama told the House members, “This is the moment…that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

Some of us warned at the time that any man who believes he is “the moment that the world is waiting for” and views himself as “the symbol of the possibility and best traditions of America” is an individual of staggering arrogance. …

Michael Barone reviews the jobs speech.

What is there to say about Barack Obama’s speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That’s psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. “This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, “You lie!”). “This isn’t class warfare.” …

Instapundit, Ed Morrissey, and Legal Insurrection post on Obama’s Lincoln mistake last week.

By this time, Barack Obama should know better than to go off the TelePrompter. In the text of the speech last night given to a joint session of Congress, Obama was supposed to make a single reference to Abraham Lincoln:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Unfortunately, Obama felt the need to take a partisan shot at his opposition, and in doing so, offered up a historic flub (via Greg Hengler):

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

Er, not quite. Lincoln wasn’t even the GOP’s first Presidential nominee; …

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Corner Post with electrifying news about the special congressional election in Queens next week. You know, the seat that once was the location of Anthony’s Weiner.

Republican Bob Turner holds a commanding lead of six points in the latest poll in the special election to fill Anthony Weiner’s seat, conducted independently by Siena College. Crucially, he also now has 50 percent of the electorate, leading Democrat David Weprin 50-44.

Previous polls had shown him in the lead, but were potentially biased by GOP ties. This is a remarkable reversal; the last Siena poll, from August 15, placed Weprin six points ahead (though even this was considered a strong Republican showing in such a blue district). …

John Podhoretz has more on the vote in Queens.

We’ve been writing here all week about the stunning possibility that a conservative Republican named Bob Turner will upset a liberal Democrat named David Weprin in the special election Tuesday to fill Anthony Weiner’s Brooklyn/Queens district, which has a 3-to-1 Democratic registration advantage. It’s the most Jewish district in the country, and a great many of its Jews are religious Jews. In choosing Weprin to run for the seat, Democrats thought the fact that he sports a kippah would carry the day with his fellow Orthodox Jews.

It’s not happening that way, and even the notion that it would testifies to the ignorance of pols, including Jewish pols, who think religious Jews are like other ethnic voters. Weprin may be an Orthodox Jewish Democrat, but as such he is now actually in the minority among Orthodox Jews. And the commonality of their religious practice apparently does not provide sufficient cover for his being a representative of the Democratic party in the age of Obama. …

James Pethokoukis posts on the “jobs” address.

There’s been much speculation that President Barack Obama will spend $1 billion to get reelected. Turns out those guesses were off by $446 billion.

What Americans heard last night was a $447 billion political plan, not an economic one. It’s purpose was to a) fire up the demoralized Democratic base and b) show independents that Obama is trying to do something – anything – to reduce unemployment, not just slash needed “investment” like those heartless, pro-austerity Republicans. …

Michael Barone on Thursday’s speech.

Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.

Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”–11 days from now. …

Barone does a good job explaining the ways we changed 10 years ago today.

Dec. 7, 1941. Nov. 22, 1963. Sept. 11, 2001. All of us old enough to remember know exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first heard the awful news. We remember the stunning feeling that suddenly everything had changed, that nothing would be the same. We remember feeling that unknown horrors lay ahead.

Ten years after Pearl Harbor, the United States was mired in a stalemated war in Korea. But the nation had won a great victory in World War II, embarked on a generation of postwar prosperity, and confronted the Soviet Union in a Cold War that would take four decades to win.

Ten years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the United States went through a wrenching debate on the war in Vietnam and had a president mired in the scandal known as Watergate. But the nation had also passed landmark civil rights legislation, embarked on a war against poverty and landed the first men on the moon.

Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the changes are less dramatic and less resolved, but they touch Americans every day. Airport pat-downs, barricades outside government offices, identification checks at private buildings, searches at sports stadiums, armed security officers at public events, long motorcades with Secret Service SUVs and police outriders — all these are the legacy of 9/11.

On Sept. 10, 2001, America was on a decade long holiday from history. We were, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “the indispensable nation,” seemingly without any serious enemies. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 signaled with more clarity than is usual in history the end of the Cold War. We had mostly harmonious relations with Russia and our economy was increasingly intertwined with China’s.

It was a decade with fewer military conflicts and deaths than any for more than a century. And where America did intervene militarily, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, it did so without committing appreciable numbers of ground troops or incurring significant numbers of casualties.

Even more important, as Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book “The End of History,” there seemed to be no system of governance competitive with liberal democracies and market capitalism. Nazism was long gone, Marxism was dead, and democracy was making vast gains in large parts of the world.

Sept. 11 ended this holiday from history. …

Christopher Hitchens has remarks for the 10th anniversary.

The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce “complexity” into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.) …

Charles Krauthammer thinks our reactions to 9/11 have been about right.

The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.

The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.

What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”

First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of “the two wars” that bankrupted us. Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now.  …

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Salon features someone asking what can be done about Obama destroying the Dem party.

From the debt ceiling fiasco to the recent rescheduling of a jobs speech at the behest of Speaker Boehner, it has not been a good summer for President Obama. Like Chinese water torture, Gallup’s daily tracking poll has shown a steady and unrelenting drip of bad news. He has been in and out of the high 30s for his approval, and in the low to mid-50s for his disapproval.

George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit. And on the economy, 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is doing his job. Even among reliably Democratic groups — union households, women and young people — he’s now unpopular.

No one, not even the president’s defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there’s any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.

That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. …

Splice Today, another liberal site asks the question, ” Is Barack Obama dumb?”  The heresy of the question has them open thus;

A mere four months ago, most readers looking at the above headline would undoubtedly shake their heads and think the author was a gun-for-hire Tea Party provocateur and quickly click away from the page. But the political climate has changed dramatically this summer, and even hard-core liberals are wondering about the smarts of President Obama as they consider the perceived nightmare of President Rick Perry (who was victim of the same headline last week on Politico). It’s a measure of Obama’s current electoral pickle that some of those questioning the President’s decisions (or lack thereof) write for The New York Times and openly wonder if the man can get re-elected, whether it’s Perry or Mitt Romney who wins the GOP nomination next year.

There are usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review. And man, he sure can deliver (teleprompter notwithstanding) an inspiring speech! Let’s get this out the way now: in my view, without meeting either man, it’s silly to call either Obama or Perry “dumb.” Obama’s first three years in the White House have been, depending upon your views, disappointing, lackluster or just plain disastrous. But, unlike The Wall Street Journal’s excellent op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who argued, “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump.

WaPo’s Fact Checker examines one of the president’s claims and gives him the worst rating – 4 Pinocchio’s.

… Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous. He might have been on more solid ground if he had claimed the “broadest” tax cut, but that doesn’t sound very historic.

 We went back and forth over whether this was a three or four Pinocchio violation, until we found evidence that Obama knew he was saying a whopper.  Here’s how he put it in his 2010 State of the Union speech: “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.”  That phrasing, at least, would not have been so misleading.

Toby Harnden want to know if Hoffa and Biden will be censured by the administration.

… the statements today by Jimmy Hoffa Jr and Vice President Joe Biden demean the presidency and, tactically speaking, are stupid own goals.

Hoffa, the Teamsters president, was warming up a Detroit crowd when he said: “President Obama, this is your army, and we are ready to march. Everybody here’s got a vote. If we go back, and we keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.”

Biden, whose mouth has long been a liability for Obama, was at an AFL-CIO rally when he told union members: “You are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates…the other side has declared war on labour’s house.”

These comments were not nearly as bad as the statement last week by Congressman Andre Carson that members of the Tea Party want black people “hanging from a tree”. Let’s not get too sanctimonious here – they’re fairly common sentiments behind the scenes on both sides of the political divide.

The difference, of course, is that they were uttered publicly by someone chosen by the White House to introduce Obama and by the sitting vice-president at a time when Obama is calling for a bipartisan coming together to tackle the economy. …

More questions on the Hoffa comment from Victor Davis Hanson.

… A growing problem for Barack Obama is Barack Obama. Because he chose to be a sermonizing president, he is bound to practice what he so commonly preaches — otherwise he risks the fate of an Elmer Gantry, or sanctimonious Jimmy Carter. But on a number of topics, he has simply lost all credibility. How can Obama ever again lecture Americans on “civil discourse” and the need for common standards of polite public speech after following Hoffa’s mean-spirited rant and offering him praise? How, after these first family elite vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, Vail, etc., can Obama ever again credibly lecture on the dangers of indulgent “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” “spread the wealth,” and “fat cats” whose lives are so very different from our own? And how — after confessing that his “shovel-ready” $800 billion “stimulus” targeted at “investments” and “infrastructure” in fact “was not as shovel ready as we expected” — can he request to borrow hundreds of additional billions for shovel-ready investments in infrastructure? What has now changed to ensure the next near trillion will be “shovel-ready”? …

Debra Saunders is in San Francisco so she’ll have interesting thoughts on Solyndra.

Last year, President Obama came to the Bay Area to tout “green jobs” at an event at solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra’s Fremont plant. Quoth the president: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.”

On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.

I remember that day, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Rube that I am, I didn’t understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra’s “ability to continue as a going concern.”

If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn’t his people have found a California company that didn’t rely on a federal loan and actually made money? …

We started with a couple of liberals trashing the One. Now, Karl Rove takes a turn.

We can’t yet judge President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday before a joint session of Congress. But it’s not too early to render a judgment on the run-up to the address: It’s been amateur hour in the West Wing.

Eight days ago, Mr. Obama announced he would address Congress on the same evening that a Republican presidential debate was scheduled at the Reagan Library. White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed it was merely a “coincidence.” But his denial was soon undermined by comments to reporters by unnamed White House aides, who made it clear they intended to have the president drown out the GOP debate.

In any event, House Speaker John Boehner rightly nixed the date, pointing out that Wednesday was Congress’s first day back from its August recess and both the House and Senate must first pass resolutions inviting the president to appear.

Mr. Boehner was making an important point about institutional prerogatives. By setting the date and time of his own appearance, Mr. Obama was doing his best impression of an imperial president. A president addresses a joint session of Congress only at the invitation of the co-equal legislative branch. Mr. Obama didn’t seem to care. Mr. Boehner reminded him why he should.

So the president was forced to cave. …

It’s time for Late-Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Letterman: Big Labor Day Weekend. The day each year we celebrate our work force. Do we even have a work force anymore?

Leno: So the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. Zero. President Obama says don’t read too much into that. How can we? There’s nothing there. It’s zero!

Leno: Well, at least Hurricane Irene did something the economy couldn’t do. It got President Obama back into the White House.

Letterman: President Obama’s uncle was arrested for DUI. Here’s the odd part: His blood-alcohol level was actually higher than the president’s job approval.

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David Warren reminds us of some Mid-East truths.

… If an identifiable Jew from Israel wanders, unguarded, into any part of the Palestinian territories, he is a dead man. This is a fact of life, and everyone knows it. Leftist and Islamist rhetoric about Israeli “apartheid” masks a very big truth: that more than a million Muslim Arabs live, work, and move freely around Israel, with full citizenship and protection under Israel’s laws (enforced by very liberal courts). Whereas, the number of Jews enjoying this status under the Palestinian Authority is zero.

The western position has been, settle a boundary, let Israel live in peace within it, let Palestinians live in peace on the other side. Let all past claims be resolved by direct negotiations, under international supervision. This is called “the two state solution.”

It sounds plausible, but only so long as we avert our eyes from the reality.

The UN will be granting Palestinian statehood without a resolution of anything. It will be a reward for consistent Palestinian refusal to negotiate in good faith, or to deliver on any significant undertakings made under the various Madrid, Oslo, and other “peace agreements” reached in the past.

Israel was told to exchange Gaza for peace. All the Jewish settlements in Gaza were uprooted. All the Israeli troops were withdrawn. Observe what happened.

Using the examples of Boeing, ATT/T Mobile, and Gibson Guitars, Peter Schiff calls the president, “Job Killer in Chief.” 

Friday morning, many on Wall Street were stunned by the big fat zero put up by the August jobs report, the worst showing in 11 months. The data convinced many previously optimistic economists that the United States will slip back into recession.

I believe that we have been in one giant recession all along that was only temporarily interrupted by trillions of useless and destructive deficit and stimulus spending.  Unfortunately, the August numbers will increase the talk of government efforts to stimulate the economy.

As President Obama prepares to unveil a new plan for the Federal Government to create jobs, evidence is rapidly piling up on how his administration is actively destroying jobs with stunning efficiency. Recent examples of this trend are enough to make anyone with even a casual respect for America’s former economic prowess hang their head in disgust. …

Toby Harnden says the man who ran on hope and change, will run this time on fear.

So how much trouble is Barack Obama in? Well, it doesn’t get much worse.

His approval rating is hovering just above 40 per cent. Unemployment is stuck at 9.1 per cent; the White House forecast that it would be about 6.5 per cent by now if its economic stimulus plan was passed. Essentially, the American economy is grinding to a halt.

More importantly, what is Obama going to do about it? In terms of policy, the White House has run out of whatever ideas it ever had.

Obama, who declined even to comment on the latest jobless figures on Friday, is like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Having squandered the first two years of his presidency ramming through a healthcare reform that could not win the support of a single Republican on Capitol Hill and is now mired in the courts, he finds himself confronting a divided Congress.

So the only thing that matters to the people around Obama, who are eager for another four years of employment, is his re-election. I’ve long thought that Obama himself is lukewarm about continuing in a job where the adulation he is used to is in short supply. For Democratic powerbrokers, however, maintaining their grasp of the White House is everything. …

OC Register editors say we should remember the background of Alan Krueger, new head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Thus equipped we can expect more failure.

… Mr. Krueger worked on Mr. Obama’s “cash for clunkers” program. That didn’t work. Its main effect was to remove old, cheap vehicles from sales lots, making it difficult for poor people to buy cars. According to the NADA Used Car Guide, the average price of a used car two to five years old soared to $16,765 in April 2011 from $10,000 in January 2009.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Krueger maintains “that increases in the minimum wage don’t depress employment.” This defies basic economics, in which higher prices reduce demand (in this case, demand for workers).

“Krueger is a champion of the minimum wage – that is, outlawing some jobs – as good for the economy,” Lew Rockwell told us; he’s chairman of the free-market Mises Institute. “But if orders from D.C. to pay everyone more are a good idea, why not $10,000 an hour? Maybe because there would be 100 percent unemployment. Krueger is the worst sort of authoritarian Keynesian.”

Believers in Keynesian economics, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), believe that government can stimulate economic growth through minimum-wage increases, more government spending, inflation and artificially low interest rates. As during the 1970s “malaise” economy, it is just these policies that have been tried under Mr. Obama, and have failed. …

Legal Insurrection blog says workers who have no hope are keeping Obama’s re-election hope alive. If discouraged job seekers were in the work force, the unemployment rate would be 11.4%.  

James Delingpole has fun with green jobs.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a report into the future of “Green Jobs” in Britain. It is damning indeed. Though it doesn’t actually say as much – the GWPF is too austere and restrained for such flippancies – this Government’s green policies are the equivalent of trying to pay off the national debt by breeding unicorns to sell to Chinese millionaires.

Among the conclusions of The Myth of Green Jobs by Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at Edinburgh University, are:

1. “Green jobs” are a chimera. Though diverting taxpayers money into the renewable energy sector may indeed “create” jobs in the renewable energy sector, it will cost many more jobs in the broader economy.

2. Policies to promote renewable energy will add 0.6 to 0.7 per cent per annum to core inflation from now till 2020. This is equivalent to a rise in the same period of the Consumer Price Index by 6.5 per cent. if the Government sticks to its inflation targets and applies restrictions on speed of growth through higher interest rates, then the “sacrifice cost” – ie what the economy could have made, but was prevented from doing so by monetary policy – is £250 billion. …

The “Waffle House Index” is written up in the WSJ.

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. “That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.” …

Turns out the president no longer approves of us. That was the story from Barton Hinkle of Richmond’s Times-Dispatch. Reason Magazine had the reprint.

… The administration strongly approves of only 9 percent of Americans, while 47 percent are strongly disapproved of. Another 28 percent are somewhat disapproved of, and the White House somewhat approves of the remaining 16 percent.

“What these numbers show, I think, is that the president has become increasingly disillusioned with the American public,” said Trevor Gopnik, a professor of political science at Georgetown University.

“He’s completely disgusted,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney. “Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the state of the economy, the high unemployment rate, and the fact that most Americans are, let’s face it, fat lazy slobs. Go to a mall and look around if you don’t believe me,” said Carney.

The summer’s debt-ceiling stalemate has contributed to the president’s sour mood, observers say, as did the decision to cut short his vacation a day early even though many Americans are still enjoying theirs. …