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Mark Steyn is tired of the imperial presidency.

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, 11 years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers) who charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species and issued her a $535 fine. If the federal child-abuser has that much time on his hands, he should have charged the cat, who was illegally transporting the protected species from his gullet to his intestine.

So 11-year-old Schylar and other middle-schoolers targeted by the microregulatory superstate might well appreciate Gov. Perry’s pledge. But you never know, it might just catch on with the broader population, too.

Bill Clinton thought otherwise. “I got tickled by watching Gov. Perry,” said the former president. “And he’s saying ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible – while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.”

This is the best argument the supposedly smartest operator in the Democratic Party can muster? If Bill Clinton wants to make the increasingly and revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the American president a campaign issue, Gov. Perry should call his bluff. If I understand correctly the justification advanced by spokesgropers for the Transportation Security Administration, the reason they poke around the genitalia of 3-year-old girls and make wheelchair-bound nonagenarians in the final stages of multiple sclerosis remove their diapers in public is that, by doing so, they have made commercial air travel the most secure environment in the United States. In that case, why can’t the president fly commercial.

Streetwise Professor leads off a couple of articles on the future of Europe.

The recent volatility in the market has been linked with the S&P downgrade, but the real epicenter is Europe.  The shock waves that commenced in Greece and then Portugal and Ireland have spread to Italy and Spain, and tremors are being felt in France as well.

Europe has two choices: amputation or gangrene.

The amputation option is to jettison the Euro project by lopping off the weak Med countries, and letting them respond to fiscal crisis in the old fashioned way, through a currency devaluation that would permit these countries to become more competitive, and which would reduce the real burden of their debts. …

… Gangrene kills slowly, but it kills.  It is difficult to see how Europe can survive in the long run as currently constituted, with the rot progressively eating its way from country to country.  Amputation is a shattering experience, but it can be survived, and can increase the odds of long term survival.  But politicians typically choose to avoid pain today even if it is beneficial in the long run.  Which means that Europe’s future is bleak indeed.

Noted European historian Walter Laqueur tries to understand what has happened.  

“The twenty-first century may yet belong to Europe.” Thus said the late Tony Judt, author of a widely praised history of Europe after the Second World War. Historians are not necessarily prophets, and our century has a while to go, but the prospects of such a future coming to pass are not brilliant at present. Tony Judt was in good and numerous company at the time, in America even more so than on the Continent, and the reasons for such misplaced optimism (which has now quite often given way to panic) will no doubt be studied in the years to come.

Some five years ago in a book entitled The Last Days of Europe I dealt with Europe’s decline—and was criticized for my pessimism. And yet I now feel uneasy facing the apocalyptic utterances of yesterday’s Euro-enthusiasts. For even if Europe’s decline is irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

At a time of deep, multiple crises in Europe it is too easy to ridicule the delusions of yesteryear. The postwar generations of European elites aimed to create more democratic societies. They wanted to reduce the extremes of wealth and poverty and provide essential social services in a way that prewar generations had not. They had had quite enough of unrest and conflict. For decades many Continental societies had more or less achieved these aims and had every reason to be proud of their progress. Europe was quiet and civilized.

Europe’s success was based on recent painful experience: the horrors of two world wars; the lessons of dictatorship; the experiences of fascism and communism. Above all, it was based on a feeling of European identity and common values—or so it appeared at the time. Euroskeptics suspected it was simply a community of material interests; it began, after all, as an iron, steel and coal union. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, saw the dangers ahead. He later said that he would have put the emphasis on culture rather than economics if he had to start all over again.

When did things start to go wrong? It would seem the immediate crisis is certainly one of sovereign debt, of common currency and of other financial issues. It was no doubt a mistake to believe that an economic union could be established in the absence of a political one. And yet, did the current crisis perhaps happen because the European idea (meaning the welfare state), the basis of the scheme, was eroded? …

Speaking of failed enterprises, Ed Morrissey speculates on the idea Obama may quit.

… Some will scoff at the notion that Obama and his large ego would walk away from the office, but LBJ was also rumored to think pretty highly of himself.  It’s a low-probability outcome, but it isn’t a zero probability outcome.  Obama’s ratings have tanked this year along with the economy, and he hasn’t come up with an original thought on economic policy since Porkulus.  The leaks of his rumored plan sound a lot like Porkulus II, a sequel to a flop.  This gives the impression that Obama has run out of ideas, and as Noonan argues in her piece, his attacks on Republicans for their supposed refusal to pass a plan he has yet to even submit to them sounds like a man who realizes that he’s out of ideas, too.

But the decision may end up being out of his hands if the political environment doesn’t improve.  Obama’s numbers are plummeting in places Democrats can hardly afford to lose.  In Pennsylvania, where Obama will top a ticket that also includes Bob Casey’s bid for a second Senate term, he’s either at 43% approval (Quinnipiac) or at 35% (Muhlenberg).  Wisconsin turned Republican last year and a series of elections this year confirmed it, and Herb Kohl’s seat in the Senate is up for grabs.  Obama can be expected to drag down the ticket in Virginia (James Webb’s seat is open), Florida (Bill Nelson), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Maryland (Ben Cardin), and Michigan (Debbie Stabenow). …

Last week we closed with the student loan piece from the Atlantic. There’s some follow-up with a scary graph. Alert readers will note a contradiction. The article in the Atlantic noted student debt was approaching $1 trillion while this piece says it has ballooned to $550 million. We will follow up on that.

You think the housing bubble was enormous? Meet the education bubble. On Wednesday, an article here by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus explained the debt crisis at American colleges. But some startling statistics will help to make their analysis a little more tangible. The growth in student loans over the past decade has been truly staggering.

Here’s a chart based on New York Federal Reserve data for household debt. The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period.

This chart looks like a mistake, but it’s correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.

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What we saw during the bus tour of the Mid West was the president accusing the GOP of wishing failure for the country so they would have political success. Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts about that charge. Perhaps in his old career he would have called it projection.

… The charge is not just ugly. It’s laughable. All but five Republican members of the House — moderate, establishment, Tea Party, freshmen alike — voted for a budget containing radical Medicare reform knowing it could very well end many of their careers. Democrats launched gleefully into Mediscare attacks, hardly believing their luck that Republicans should have proposed something so politically risky in pursuit of fiscal solvency. Yet Obama accuses Republicans of acting for nothing but partisan advantage.

This from a man who has cagily refused to propose a single structural reform to entitlements in his three years in office. A man who ordered that the Afghan surge be unwound by September 2012, a date that makes no military sense (it occurs during the fighting season), a date not recommended by his commanders, a date whose sole purpose is to give Obama political relief on the eve of the 2012 election. And Obama dares accuse others of placing politics above country?

A plague of bad luck and bad faith — a recalcitrant providence and an unpatriotic opposition. Our president wrestles with angels. Monsters of mythic proportions.

A comforting fantasy. But a sorry excuse for a failing economy and a flailing presidency.

Warren Buffett, wise investor, is campaigning for higher taxes for the “rich.” Pickerhead thinks if Buffett cared so much about public service, he might have issued some warnings about Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s dangers to our economy. These were organizations he knew well. Berkshire Hathaway first bought heavily into them in 1988. At that time he owned 3.2% of Freddie Mac. The maximum allowed by law according to notes in the 1988 statements. Then in 1992 the holdings went up to 8.2% without any apparent note on how the law was changed. In 2000 that position was liquidated for a profit in the range of $3 billion. During 1988, Berkshire also started investing in Coca-Cola. A holding now worth $13 billion. So Buffett unloaded Freddie and Fannie while he let profits ride elsewhere. What did he know? And why didn’t he share that with the country from 2000 to 2006 when there might have been a chance to prevent the worst excesses of the real estate bubble? 

Peter Ferrara in Forbes points out the folly of Buffett’s present campaign for higher taxes. Like they say, no fool like an old fool. Then again, maybe he’s just continuing to be greedy, since his large holdings in insurance companies would benefit from higher taxes on income and estates.

And another thing; every time a hurricane hits and some enterprising soul gathers up and sells generators and the like in the stricken area, they are routinely maligned by the media for profiting from other’s misery. Yet Buffett was roundly admired in 2008 for his usurious investment in Goldman Sachs. ($5 billion of perpetual preferred stock with a juicy 10% coupon, as well as warrants that give it the right to buy $5 billion of common stock at any time in the next five years for $115 — 8% below Goldman’s closing stock price) Goldman stock spent the better part of the last two years north of $150 per share. You do the math. Sorry for the rant, here’s Ferrara;

Warren Buffett is performing a gross public disservice in creating urban myths about the nature of the tax system in America.  Those myths will mislead millions of Americans about the fundamentals of their own country.

Buffett began his media offensive with an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday, “Stop Coddling the Super Rich,” where he complained that taxes need to be raised on “the rich” so they can pay their fair share.  He reported that he paid 17.4% of his income in federal taxes, and claimed “If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine.  But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.”  That is inaccurate.

Official IRS data shows that for 2007, before President Obama was even elected, the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined.  That top 1% paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of income.  When Ronald Reagan entered office, the top 1% paid 17.6% of all federal income taxes.  That is why Jack Kemp always used to say if you want to soak the rich, cut tax rates. …

… A central factor that Buffett doesn’t understand is the multiple taxation of capital.  He complains about the 15% capital gains tax rate as unfair, since his secretaries pay higher income tax rates.  But the capital gains tax is only one layer of taxation on capital income.  Capital income is also subject to the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, and the death tax.  As the Wall Street Journal explained yesterday,

“Mr. Buffett makes most of his income from his investments, particularly from dividends and capital gains that are taxed at a rate of 15%.  What he doesn’t say is that much of his income was already taxed once as corporate income, which is assessed at a 35% rate (less deductions).  The 15% levy on capital gains and dividends to individuals is thus a double tax that takes the overall rate on that corporate income closer to 45%.” …

… The Journal started its editorial yesterday on Buffett’s tax confusions by saying, “Barry Kilgore, the man who made the Wall Street Journal into a national publication, was once asked why so many rich people favored higher taxes.  That’s easy, he replied.  They already have their money.”  But my own son, soon to graduate from college, who understands people and their motivations better than most, had a better insight.  “Buffett just likes the attention,” Peter Ferrara, Jr. explained.

Remember Chauncey Gardner from the movie Being There. The character played by Peter Sellers said many soothing yet meaningless things. The president did his best imitation last week. Politico has the story of a reporter who followed Obama’s advice.

At Wednesday’s town hall in Atkinson, Ill., a local farmer who said he grows corn and soybeans expressed his concerns to President Barack Obama about “more rules and regulations” — including those concerning dust, noise and water runoff — that he heard would negatively affect his business.

The president, on day three of his Midwest bus tour, replied: “If you hear something is happening, but it hasn’t happened, don’t always believe what you hear.”

When the room broke into soft laughter, the president added, “No — and I’m serious about that.”

Saying that “folks in Washington” like to get “all ginned up” about things that aren’t necessarily happening (“Look what’s comin’ down the pipe!”), Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.”

“Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor catches the ignorant One yet again.

Whoops!  He said it again.

Several weeks ago Obama blamed high unemployment on ATMs and the like.  He was widely ridiculed for those remarks, and rightly so.  But apparently he believes it, because he said virtually the same thing yesterday:

“One of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is – businesses have gotten so efficient, that, uh, when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller? Instead of using an ATM. Or, used a travel agent instead of going online. A lot of jobs out there that used to require people now have become automated.”

And the world is supposed to wait with bated breath for his jobs proposal?  What will it be?  To ban the internet?

This reminds me of the famous Milton Friedman story:

‘ There’s a story about Milton Friedman in China that may be apocryphal but illustrates this point. In observing hundreds of Chinese workers clearing land for a new building using shovels, Friedman asked his hosts “Why are they using shovels? Why not use heavy equipment like an earth-mover?” The Chinese official said “If we did that, we’d lose all of those jobs!” Supposedly Friedman said “Oh, you’re trying to create jobs! I thought you were trying to build a building. If you want to create jobs, why not take away their shovels and give them spoons?” ‘

So maybe the jobs program won’t be based on shoveling money to shovel ready projects, but to spoon ready ones.

I have little patience with those who label Obama as a Marxist.  However, his economic conceptions do seem to be little more than warmed over crypto-Marxist drivel; he looks at the nation’s poor employment picture and sees a modern day version of Marx’s description of the plight of the handweavers.  This is not evidence of hardcore Marxism, just the kind of thing one picks up in the intellectually miasmatic swamps of progressivism that Obama has inhabited the last 30 odd years.  Abject ignorance of real economics is the default condition in those swamps, as we find out whenever Obama chooses to bless us with an exegesis on the subject.

Jonah Goldberg posts a letter from a reader who farms tobacco and employs migrant workers.

… Recently, the USDA inspectors show up and pull our workers out of the fields for hours of questions (while we still are paying them). They inspect our houses. Several items just not up to code say these inspectors in an accusatory and snide tone.  Threw a stack of regulations literally 8 inches high, small type, saying we are responsible to know and to account for each and every one.
 
Now we treat our workers very well, but we treat them like men, not children.  The house was “messy.”  My goodness, we need to hire a maid!  The screen door was not exactly square with the frame by an 1/8th of an inch.  Well many folks around here live in older homes that have settled.  The list goes on, but no item was such that our workers thought there was a problem.  The worst part is we were treated like criminals.  We are awaiting our fine for our failing to memorize every federal regulation applicable to us.
 
My dad is 67 and told the feds that he was out of farming due to this ridiculous bureaucracy and storm trooper treatment.  Their arrogant reply, “well the law lets us inspect your land and homes one year after you have left farming, so you can’t keep us off your land next year either.” …

Toby Harnden posts on the Vineyard vacation.

In some respects, you’ve got to give Barack Obama some credit. People would rightly criticise Bill Clinton for poll testing everything he did, including, famously, his 1995 vacation. But Obama? He wants to go to Martha’s Vineyard with his family, he knows that it’s a politically insane thing to do but he’s damn well going there anyway.

If you were a Republican campaign operative drawing up Obama’s programme, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something better than sending him to this exclusive island that is the playground for the east coast social, intellectual and financial elites.

Here in the United States, there isn’t the resentment of money and success that is so prevalent in Britain. Nevertheless, a sojourn on Martha’s Vineyard is the kind of thing that is available to very, very few Americans, a break that ordinary voters cannot imagine having.

Oh, there is perhaps one thing that GOP operative could add to the programme. Just before leaving for “the Vineyard” (as its habituees call it), how about a three-day presidential bus trip through the Mid-West in which Obama’s message is that he will not rest for a minute in tackling America’s jobs crisis? …

Yet another bubble burst is sneaking up on us. The Atlantic has the story of student debt. It has passed credit card debt, and is approaching $1 trillion.

How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford’s professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there’s more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.

As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is “only” $27,650. What the Board doesn’t say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.

A fact of academic life is that the tuition-debt nexus keeps most colleges going. At Loyola University in Chicago, 77 percent enroll with loans, as do 85 percent in New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce. At historically black colleges, where endowments are low and students are often poor, it’s usually 90 percent. Nor is soaring private tuition the only reason. At public Kentucky State University, with only $6,210 in charges, 76 percent sign up for loans; so do 85 percent at the University of North Dakota, where state residents pay $6,934. What these figures suggest that borrowing is as much to finance living away from home as for bursars’ bills. …

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Wisconsin Interest magazine profiles Paul Ryan.

Ryan has become the ultimate political oxymoron – a Republican national media darling. To conservatives, this is akin to seeing Sasquatch roller skating down the street smoking a pipe. It simply doesn’t happen.

And yet there is Paul Ryan, on a CNBC panel out-nerding all the high-paid TV financial analysts. And there is Paul Ryan on the Sunday network talk shows explaining how America is in the midst of a slow-motion federal entitlement catastrophe. And there is Paul Ryan dismantling the health care bill at President Obama’s sham “summit,” while the president glares at him as if Ryan just told the Obama kids there’s no tooth fairy.

Ryan is a throwback; he could easily have been a conservative politician in the era before cable news. He has risen to national stardom by taking the path least traveled by modern politicians: He knows a lot of stuff.

Few members of Congress have attained Ryan’s mind-boggling velocity. Elected to Congress in 1998 at the tender age of 28, he is on everyone’s watch list. Fortune has anointed Ryan as President Obama’s foremost adversary. Conservative patriarch George Will has Ryan all but penciled in as the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012. America’s Cougar-in-Chief, Sarah Palin, listed Ryan as her favorite presidential candidate in 2012. The London Daily Telegraph ranked Ryan as America’s ninth most influential conservative, ahead of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

In fact, rarely does Wisconsin’s fiscal dreamboat give an interview these days when he’s not asked if he’s running for president in 2012; he steadfastly maintains that he will not. But why are people so suddenly so excited by a congressman from Janesville, Wisconsin? In other words…

What’s so damn special about Paul Ryan? …

David Harsanyi says we don’t want any more help.

… At a Minnesota town hall, for instance, the president offered this gem: “You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks. There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market.”

If only the common man had such insight into markets. Earlier this month, Ford reported that sport utility vehicle sales had increased 31 percent (car sales improved 3.4 percent) from a year earlier. General Motors also “bounced back” on the strength of its worldwide SUV sales. Who knows? If this administration didn’t harbor resentment toward useful and affordable energy, Ford could sell even more SUVs.

Just an example.

Now, considering the failure of Washington to help shake off this prolonged slump, it is no surprise that a recent Washington Post poll found that 73 percent of Americans — up from 52 percent last year and 41 percent a decade ago — doubt the ability of government to solve the nation’s economic problems.

I suppose it’s not surprising that this administration refuses to budge a single food stamp away from its faith-based beliefs. But if it really wanted to help, it would stop “helping.”

Andrew Malcolm says, “On Day 938 of his presidency, Obama says he’ll have a jobs plan in a month or so.”

… At his speaking engagements, Obama stressed the need to extend payroll tax cuts and to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and other union-made infrastructure kinds of stuff. Also some free-trade agreements. This was a repetition of what he had said on the first day of his Grand Ground Tour.

On his 938th day in office President Obama also said he would soon have a completed jobs plan. Maybe early fall, something like that. And he complained, “We could do even more if Congress is willing to get in the game.”

Tomorrow with all this heavy work in his rear-view mirror, the president is scheduled to join his family on Martha’s Vineyard for a nine-day vacation.

Kathleen Parker doesn’t like the bus. You know, the one made in Canada.

About that bus: What could the White House have been thinking?

Here the country is reeling from depression, recession and oppression, and the president decides to take a heartland tour in the visual equivalent of an armored hearse?

David Boaz tries to answer the question whether Obama is worse than Carter and Bush.

Conservatives have become so furious with President Obama that they forget just how bad some of his predecessors were. One Jeffrey Kuhner, whose over-the-top op-eds in the Washington Times belie the sober and judicious conservatism you might expect from the president of the “Edmund Burke Institute,” writes most recently:

“A possible Great Depression haunts the land. Primarily one man is to blame: President Obama.

Mr. Obama has racked up more than $4 trillion in debt.”

Yes, he has. And that’s almost as much as the $5 trillion in debt rung up by his predecessor, George W. Bush. True, on an annual basis Obama is leaving Bush in the dust. But acceleration has been the name of the game: In 190 years, 39 presidents racked up a trillion dollars in debt. The next three presidents ran the debt up to about $5.73 trillion. Then Bush 43 almost doubled the total public debt, to $10.7 trillion, in eight years. And now the 44th president has added almost $4 trillion in two years and seven months. …

For those who think the president will be Harry S, Obama, Michael Barone has a history lesson.

… Truman’s victory was due to two “F factors” — the farm vote and foreign policy — the first of which scarcely exists today and the second of which seems unlikely to benefit Obama in the same way.

When the nation went to war in the 1940s one out of four Americans still lived on farms. The 1948 electorate still reflected that America. Voter turnout was actually lower than it was in 1940, and the vast postwar demographic changes were not reflected in elections until turnout surged in the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

Truman promised to keep Depression-era farm subsidies in place and charged that Dewey and the Republicans would repeal them. That enabled him to run ahead of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 showing in 13 states with large farm populations from Indiana to Colorado and Minnesota to Oklahoma.

Without that swing in the farm vote Truman would not have won. Dewey, waking up to find that he would not be president as he and almost everyone expected, spotted that immediately the morning after the election.

Today only 2 to 3 percent of Americans live on farms. Farm prices are currently running far ahead of subsidy prices. Obama is not going to be re-elected by the farm vote.

The second F factor that helped Truman was foreign policy. As Ornstein correctly notes, Truman’s Cold War policies — the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan — were supported by Republican congressional leaders and by Dewey. Top Dewey advisers were taken into confidence by Truman’s foreign policy appointees. It was the golden era of bipartisan foreign policy.

But on one policy Truman went further than his top advisers or Dewey’s. When the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Truman’s advisers — men of the caliber of George Marshall and Omar Bradley — said that it was impossible to supply food and fuel to Berlin and we should just abandon it.

At a crucial meeting in July 1948 Truman listened to this advice. After others finished talking, Truman said simply, “We’re not leaving Berlin.”  …

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the many “seasons” stores use to focus on customers needs. The article is strange in that it moves from suggesting retailers spend their time trying to manipulate behavior to one more with more benign motives. Whatever your take, you’ll learn something about retailers’ efforts.

… In a suburb of Minneapolis, Supervalu runs a “lab store,” a model store not open to the public where the third-largest traditional grocery store company in the U.S. can test how new products look on its shelves and experiment with seasonal displays. Last month, Supervalu employees worked to create the perfect fall endcap, the shelves that anchor the end of the typical grocery store aisle. The goal—easy meals for parents pressed for time at the start of the school year.

Problems quickly became apparent. After setting up tuna in pouches, mayonnaise, peanut butter and bread on the lunch endcap, employees saw that the tuna pouches tilted slightly backwards. The tuna “didn’t present itself well to customers,” says Chris Doeing, a director of merchandising for Supervalu, which owns chains including Albertsons and Cub Foods. Tuna was booted from the endcap to a nearby shelf.

On endcaps, best-selling items often go on the larger shelves near the floor to grab people’s attention from farther away. Employees experiment with which size and shape products look best together. …

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There is little more important than stopping and the reversing the growth of the federal government. We have been blessed by the present administration. It is so bad, for the next 50 years we can bring out Obama to scare the kids. The question now is whether we will able to reverse course and get the government out of our lives. All the candidates so far can only be expected to slow the growth. Paul Ryan looks to be one who can do the heavy lifting of turning it back. So, any hints he may get in the 2012 race will be well received here. Stephen Hayes writes on why he thinks Paul Ryan is going to run.

… Perhaps more telling was Ryan’s request not to serve on the debt supercommittee created by the recent deal on the debt ceiling. Ryan has become driver of policy in the Republican Party, with a focus on debt and deficits. And virtually everyone assumed he would have a seat on the committee. But Ryan went to House speaker John Boehner and specifically requested to be left off of the panel. In his public statements, Ryan said he needed time to work on budget reform in the House. While there’s little doubt that Ryan is keen to work on reforming a badly broken budget process, a source close to the Wisconsin congressman says he asked to remain off the supercommittee in order to preserve the option of a presidential run. The same source says that Boehner encouraged Ryan to run.

In his interview Friday with Charlie Sykes, Ryan argued that the supercommittee is not the place to debate debt and deficits – the 2012 campaign is. “The reason I don’t think it’s going to get us another grand bargain – or should – is we should not have a system where 12 politicians cut some agreement in a back room that restructures the whole design of the federal government in three months time. This is a decision that should be brought to the American people.” He added: “I think we need to have a discussion and a debate about how we’re going to deal with this debt crisis because that will determine the kind of country we are going to be and the kind of country we are going to be for a long, long time.”

That’s the kind of debate that would take place during a presidential race, of course. Ryan does not see anyone in the current Republican field who is making such a debate the center of his or her presidential campaign. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ryan disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the entitlement reform proposals in his budget plan are poison to Republican candidates across the country. He points to the results of the recalls in Wisconsin last week, where the battles centered on Ryan’s plans for retooling Medicare as much as Scott Walker’s successful and increasingly less controversial budget reforms, as “vindication” for the solutions that House Republicans have put before the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin on why Ryan should run.

… There is another reason for Ryan to run, of course. The current GOP field is, even with the addition of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, uninspiring to many. Who is the guy to go toe-to-toe with Obama and make the conservative case against him in a way that is compelling to the general electorate? The pro-Ryan contingent just doesn’t see anyone. Although the push for a Ryan run preceded by months the entry of Perry into the race, Perry’s comments on Bernanke and Perry’s Texas persona have only heightened fears that he won’t be able to win back the White House for the GOP.

A Republican think-tanker who previously worked in the White House has been among those urging Ryan to run. I asked him why he’s so certain that Ryan is the right man. He replied that it is more than the conviction that Ryan would be a good president. He explained that “this is a match between the man and the moment. What I mean by that is that we’re in a particularly perilous situation economically. In most instances, what we hope for in a president is someone who is capable of making wise and informed decisions that lead to economic growth. Competence and good judgment are enough. But if we are in a period of unusual hardship and unusual challenges — which I believe to be the case — then we need to find someone of unusual gifts and talents.” He adds, “The one public figure who is comparable to Paul when it comes to this skill set is Governor Mitch Daniels. But his decision not to enter the race means we’re now down to one. And Ryan is the one. It’s true that he’s young, that he has no executive experience, and that the hour is growing late. But not too late. The stars, I think, are aligning his way. And now is his time.” …

You can’t make it up! The Buses for the Tour of The One are made in Canada. Ed Morrissey has the story.

The legendary Casey Stengel once lamented about his hapless expansion-season New York Mets, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”  Two stories this week prompt the same question about Barack Obama and his political team.  First, Obama spent $2.2 million in taxpayer money to buy specially-made buses for a three-state tour about jobs — without actually having a plan to flog.  At least the $2.2 million puts some Americans to work, right?  Well … North Americans, maybe:

“President Obama is barnstorming the heartland to boost US jobs in a taxpayer-financed luxury bus the government had custom built — in Canada, The Post has learned.

The $1.1 million vehicle, one of two that Quebec-based Prevost sold the government, has been tricked out by the Secret Service with state-of-the-art security features and creature comforts.

It’s a VIP H3-45 model, the company’s top of the line, and is used by major traveling rock bands.

“That’s the more luxurious model,” Christine Garant of Prevost told The Post.”

Barack Obama — rock star.  Yes, that’s exactly the kind of image that wins votes in the upper Midwest.  That’s bad enough, but buying two buses from a Canadian company while promising to create jobs in the US is the worst kind of optics imaginable.  Why not use a manufacturer based in the US?  I’m certain that Complete Coach Works in California could use the work, for instance, or North American Bus Industries in Alabama.  Setra USA manufactures its buses in Greensboro, North Carolina, a key state that Obama could easily lose in 2012.  Wouldn’t a $2.2 million buy there have turned a few heads?  For that matter, Obama could have bought them from Motor Coach Industries and picked them up in his home state of Illinois at the start of his tour. …

Michael Barone writes in the Journal about the Midwest economic model that would run the world.

… The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.

Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic “Southern Politics.”

History hasn’t worked out that way. In 1970, Michigan had nine million people. In 2010, it had 10 million. In 1970, Texas had 11 million people. In 2010, it had 25 million. In 1970, Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest metro area. Today, metro Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are both pressing the San Francisco Bay area for the No. 4 spot, and Detroit is far behind. …

Tony Blankley warns about the liberals’ authoritarian temptation.

… Make no mistake: If our form of government is “broken,” democracy’s critics would “fix” it by castration. In our case, they would castrate the “representative” bit. We have seen this argument before in our history. Put forward by authoritarians and their supporters, it disdains the messy and disorderly process whereby free people thrash out the nation’s decisions.

The current recrudescence of this authoritarian temptation did not start with the debt-ceiling fight. It’s been building for a couple of years. It comes – as it always does – at a moment when the nation faces serious economic or security dangers. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in September 2009 gave early voice to the current authoritarian temptation: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Abraham Lincoln could have been thinking of Thomas Friedman when he worried out loud in the Gettysburg Address whether any nation “conceived in liberty … could long endure.” Lincoln then called the nation to the “unfinished work” of maintaining a nation “of the people, by the people and for the people.” That work goes on today. …

More proof God has a sense of humor. This time from KOMO TV in Seattle. Seems the ‘green jobs” program there is a bust. Someone in the article sounds like a character from the movie Sixteen Candles. (Think Long Duk Dong)

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable. …

… “People are frustrated and rightly so,” Curtis said. “There’s been sort of a lag time when people graduated from those programs.”

They include Long Duong, 32, who got a certificate in sealing air leaks and insulating walls after he was laid off from a job handling bags at the airport. But he soon found that other men had more qualifications than him, and he took part-time gigs – installing light bulbs and canvassing doors – while waiting for work.

A year later, he’s still looking. …

Three Thousand miles away in Massachusetts, we see politicians who are just as stupid. Boston Herald has the story of the “green company” that filed for bankruptcy protection.

Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.

Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.

The Massachusetts Republican Party called the Patrick administration’s $58 million financial aid package, which supported Evergreen’s $450 million factory, a “waste” of money. …

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James Pethokoukis notes some Paul Ryan moves in Iowa and wonders if he will get in the race.

… the current field still seems unsettled enough that Ryan probably yet has a window to jump into the race. Betting markets, for instance, have Mitt Romney and Rick Perry more or less tied at 33 percent. I would imagine Ryan, currently at 1 percent, would be running roughly even with those guys the day after he announces … if he announces, which I still doubt he will. But if Rick Perry can get into the GOP race in mid-August and be seen as viable, Ryan could certainly wait until September.

And Bill Kristol is almost wistful in his interest in another candidate.

… So history suggests a Romney-Perry showdown for the nomination. The legacy candidate vs. the big state candidate. And the polls have the two of them as the frontrunners.

Should Republicans yield to history, and resign themselves to a Romney-Perry choice? They could do worse. And it’s true that all experience has shown that Republicans are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Or, here in the 21st century, is it Republicans’ right, and their duty, to throw off such precedent, and to welcome new champions for our future security and prosperity?

But they can only be welcomed if they step forward.

Jonathan Tobin in Contentions says as far an another candidate is concerned, fagedaboutit!

… Though it is theoretically possible for someone like Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio or Chris Christie (the trio of GOP heavy hitters who the Journal and likeminded conservatives still wish would run for president) to still get in, at this point it would be difficult if not impossible to do so successfully. And that is leaving aside the fact none of those three seem to want to run.

The time for dreaming about the perfect candidate is over. Even if such a person existed, they aren’t running. Bachmann, Perry and Romney all have drawbacks that might, under other circumstances, make it hard to imagine them being nominated, let alone elected president. Yet one of them will be nominated next year, and that person will, depending on the state of the economy, have a good chance of taking the oath in January 2013. Conservatives have a tough choice to make in the coming months. But choose they must.

Nile Gardiner notes the presidential approval ratings of 39% are the lowest since Jimmy Carter.

Strikingly, Barack Obama has achieved the lowest ratings for any US president at this stage of his first term in office for 32 years, since 1979, according to polling data provided by the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center. To place Obama’s ratings in historical context, at the same stage of their first term (or only term in the case of Bush Snr.), George W. Bush had a 60 percent approval rating (August 2003), Bill Clinton had 46 percent approval (August 1995), George H.W. Bush 71 percent (August 1991), and Ronald Reagan 43 percent (August 1983).

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor calls out attention to yet another series of unintended consequences.

Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem has an excellent post that illustrates perfectly three fundamental problems with the metastasizing regulatory state.   EPA rules on air toxins and mercury are going to force–or at least accelerate–the closure of large numbers of coal-fired power plants especially in the East and Midwest.

Problem One: making uncoordinated policy decisions that have myriad impacts in tightly connected systems.  The EPA decision focuses on one thing: air quality.  But its chosen remedy has the potential to cause major disruptions in areas outside of EPA jurisdiction, considerations that EPA did not take sufficiently into consideration.  Specifically, the loss of such large quantities of baseload generation threatens electricity supply, and electricity reliability.  The stability of the grid depends crucially on the spatial configuration of load and generation; those have to be balanced tightly in order to ensure reliability.  Shutting down just one plant can upset that delicate balance in a way that greatly increases the system’s vulnerability.  So in its zeal to do good, EPA has created a huge potential for bad. …

Here’s that blog post from Knowledge Problem.

Even an article in the New York Times is characterizing the spate of EPA regulations, recently issued or coming shortly, affecting the electric power industry as a “cascade.” Regional power grid operators have been reviewing their reliability projections and becoming alarmed. Here’s Matthew Wald in the Times:

“WASHINGTON — As 58 million people across 13 states sweated through the third day of a heat wave last month, power demand in North America’s largest regional grid jurisdiction hit a record high. And yet there was no shortage, no rolling blackout and no brownout in an area that stretches from Maryland to Chicago.

But that may not be the case in the future as stricter air quality rules are put in place. Eastern utilities satisfied demand that day — July 21 — with hefty output from dozens of 1950s and 1960s coal-burning power plants that dump prodigious amounts of acid gases, soot, mercury and arsenic into the air. Because of new Environmental Protection Agencyrules, and some yet to be written, many of those plants are expected to close in coming years.

No one is sure yet how many or which ones will be shuttered or what the total lost output would be. And there is little agreement over how peak demand will be met in future summers. …

Kevin Williamson in National Review’s Exchequer blog does a number on the many lies of Paul Krugman and the NY Times.

Paul Krugman continues his campaign to discredit the economic success of Texas, and, as usual, he is none too particular about the facts. …

Other liberals are jumping on the trash Texas bandwagon and they are just as foolish as Krugman. Beltway Confidential has some examples.

But the silliest criticism of the Texas job record has to go to Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who explored Perry’s line that “Since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.”

Kessler notes the following:

“This is a great-sounding statistic, and likely will form the core of Perry’s campaign against a presidency that thus far has negative job creation.

But, as always, there needs to be some context. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has especially promoted this figure, and even it acknowledges that the number comes out differently depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs. Since Texas is adding jobs, and many other states are losing jobs, Texas’s gains become out-sized in a general national survey.”                       

So Texas’s job gains look better because lots of states have lost jobs. And this is supposed to be a criticism?

Andrew Malcolm has the best of late-night humor.

Leno: President Obama is off on his three-state bus tour this week. I believe the three states are Confusion, Delusion and Desperation.

Fallon: Obama took some campaign volunteers out for burgers the otherday and apparently he left a 35% tip. Oh man, that guy is SO generous… with China’s money.

Leno: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will stay on with President Obama and not join the private sector. Thanks to his economic policies there are no private sector jobs.

Leno: More fallout from that Standard & Poor’s credit downgrading of the U.S.. Today England, France and Germany unfriended us on Facebook.

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Time to cover the riots in the United Kingdom. Mark Steyn is first with his observations.

… This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

There are lessons for all of us there.

Nile Gardiner from Telegraph Blogs.

I just watched this truly heart breaking interview on BBC online from Tuesday with a devastated young shop owner, Liz Pilgrim, whose business in Ealing, west London, was looted by what she described as “feral rats”, who took whatever they wanted with impunity. She made an impassioned appeal for the army to be brought on the streets to restore law and order, and I’m sure millions of Britons would have agreed with every word she said.

What took place this week in many of Britain’s biggest cities was nothing short of pure barbarism, carried out by evil thugs who have zero respect for private property, the rule of law, common decency, and in many instances human life. These feral looters deserve to spend years behind bars, and the prime minister has promised that these rioters would “pay for what they have done”. They do not deserve an ounce of sympathy or mercy from the courts, regardless of whatever background they are from. The only lesson these brutal thugs understand is the heavy hand of the law, and severe punishment for their crimes. …

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.

… The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked. …

Has the president changed? Norman Podhoretz says nope. He’s the same leftist product of the country’s intellectually bankrupt academic community that he’s always been.

… Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.

But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.

Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own. …

Peter Schiff is unhappy with the Fed’s low interest rate announcement.

… This reckless policy, designed to facilitate government spending and appease Wall Street financiers, will continue to starve Main Street of the capital it needs to make real productivity-enhancing investments. American investment capital will continue to flow abroad, denying local business the means to expand and hire. It also destroys interest rates paid to holders of bank savings deposits which traditionally had been a financial pillar of retirees. In addition, such an inflationary policy drives real wages lower, robbing Americans of their purchasing power. The consequence is a dollar in free-fall, dragging down with it the standard of living of average Americans.

Until interest rates are allowed to rise to appropriate levels, more resources will be misallocated, additional jobs will be lost, government spending and deficits will continue to grow, the dollar will keep falling, consumer prices will keep rising, and the government will keep blaming our problems on external factors beyond its control. As the old adage goes, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” …

Reader’s Digest has figured out the higher education bubble.

If you’re the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don’t do it.

Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America’s colleges and universities — especially the elite — aren’t worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.

More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. “Tuition is probably the second-largest item you’ll buy in your lifetime, after your home,” Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years. …

NewsBiscuit found the real downside to the UK riots.

Senior looters have returned early from their summer riots to apologise to local communities across England for unleashing a wave of visits by annoying, insincere politicians. …

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The LA Times has a story from Warsaw that took place at the start of World War II.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.

She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper.

Natalie Yazinska.

Her mother, Sima, sobbed.

“The little one must make it,” Leon Weinstein told his wife. “We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive.”

He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: “I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.”

A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us. …

Back to our time as the IBD editors celebrate the win over Wisconsin’s modern day Nazis. Think that is too strong? They don’t like secret ballots. They intimidate people by showing up at their homes. They occupy buildings in defiance of the law. etc. etc. …

Unions’ failure to recall four Republican state senators shows that their days of power through intimidation are over. If this was a rehearsal for 2012, the White House should start making other plans.

The natives are still restless, the pitchforks sharp and the Walker revolution safe. Portrayed by union leaders as an aberration fueled by a generic voter wrath against incumbents, the GOP grab of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature and the governor’s office in 2010 was predicted to fade once voters realized “workers’ rights” were at risk.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the polling booth, that shrine to the secret ballot so anathema to union leaders. Voters decided they liked a limited government that said there are things we just can’t afford. They also liked the idea that taxpayers had rights and could and should control how their money is spent.

It didn’t help the union cause when the city of Milwaukee announced it will save at least $25 million a year — and potentially as much as $36 million in 2012 — from health care benefit changes it didn’t have to negotiate with unions, as a result of provisions in a 2009-11 budget-repair measure that ended most collective bargaining for public-sector unions. …

Charles Krauthammer says forget the left’s claim that DC is broken. The system is working.

Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid, and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation’s political direction.

The process has been messy, loud, disputatious, and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.

The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation’s ideological trajectory. Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near–$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health-care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.

In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2–1, this causes a reaction. …

Want to know more about Rick Perry? Toby Harnden traveled to West Texas to check our the origins of the GOP’s latest candidate.

So I decided to follow Paul Burka’s advice (See Pickings – July 28) and head down to Paint Creek, Texas, where Governor Rick Perry – due to announce his White House run on Saturday – grew up. It was an absolutely fascinating trip to West Texas (the 108-degree heat notwithstanding) and my news feature for the Telegraph can be found here.

Before George W. Bush was elected president, I made a similar journey to Midland, also in West Texas, where the then Lone State governor had spent his youth (the resultant post-election piece is still on the interweb here). But Bush, of course, was a scion of a patrician New England clan and was educated at Andover and Yale while Perry is Texas and Paint Creek through and through.

Despite the superficial similarities between the two (cowboy boots and a certain Texas braggadocio) the two men (who are said to have frosty relations) are very different.

But if the contrasts between Perry and Bush are strong, just think of those between Perry and Obama – you could not get two more dissimilar American life stories.

Harnden shares more of what he learned in West Texas.

… “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church, and Boy Scouts,” Mr Perry said last year, looking back on the late 1950s. “That’s it. And it was plenty.” Paint Creek was “one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate” depending on the weather. As a child, he ventured, it was the home of “some of the most principled, disciplined people in the world, and faithful”. 

Back in the late 1950s, he was known as Ricky Perry, a mischievous boy, always smiling, who lived with his parents and older sister Milla in a rented wooden house that lacked indoor plumbing. He wore a cowboy shirt hand sewn by his mother, a locally renowned quilter, and his highest ambition seemed to be to become an Eagle Scout.

Now 61 and governor of Texas since 2000, Mr Perry is the longest-serving chief executive of the state in its history and a man who has held elected office for almost 27 years. This weekend, he is expected to announce a bid for the American presidency, an office that until recently he had steadfastly maintained held no attraction for him.

Thus far, Mr Perry’s life has been characterised by uncanny good fortune and an ability to seize an opportunity and capitalise on it.

He left the Democratic Party in 1989 to run as a Republican against a prominent liberal who was the strong favourite to keep his post as Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

In 2000, he was a little-known lieutenant governor who was automatically elevated to the state’s top post when George W. Bush won the presidency. …

Democracy in America Blog has a bit on Perry.

… Can he win? I think he has a very good chance. In my view, he is a shrewd politician and not as much of a far-right ideologue as people tend to think. I’ve elaborated on that here, and gathered some of my recent takes on Mr Perry here. Our Lexington columnist also took a look at the governor last month, and concluded that a Perry-Obama general election “would offer an invigorating choice between different visions of America’s future.” I think that’s right. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I’ll just say that rivals who misunderestimate him do so at their peril.

James Pethokoukis has more.

Congratulations to Michele Bachmann, but the big political winner Saturday wasn’t in Ames, Iowa. That politician was half a country away in South Carolina, completely scrambling the Republican presidential race.

1) Online betting markets have already decided that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is no flash in the Panhandle — another Fred Thompson or Wesley Clark who sparks a flurry of interest but quickly fades. To bettors, it’s a two-horse race and a dead heat between Perry and Mitt Romney. But anyone listening to Perry’s well delivered, muscular, high-energy speech in Charleston, S.C., would probably draw the same political conclusion. He hit tea party-friendly themes and hit them well:

“The change we seek will never emanate out of Washington…it must come from the windswept prairies of Middle America…the farms and factories across this great land…the hearts and minds of God-fearing Americans who will not accept a future that is less than our past…who will not be consigned a fate of less freedom in exchange for more government. … And I will work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your lives as I can.” …

… Assuming no other heavy hitters join the race. Perry-Romney is shaping up to be an epic brawl between two aggressive candidates with impressive resumes, both able to raise boats loads of campaign cash. Let the Austin-Boston battle begin.

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Ed Morrissey gives us the good news from Wisconsin.

… For the second time, unions had an opportunity to bring their organizational and funding advantages into a special election environment, and for the second time, Wisconsin voters largely rejected them.  The union tried to unseat Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser in April, blanketing the state for challenger Joann Kloppenburg in an election that should have had a small, easily manipulated turnout.  Instead, they came up empty as Wisconsin voters turned out heavily.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza calls this “an undeniable defeat for labor and progressive activists”: …

David Harsanyi celebrates the fall of the cult of Obama.

… The sight of a crumbling Cult of Obama — and with it the end of the progressive presidency — has many on the left so frustrated that they simply dismiss the very idea of ideological debate. To challenge the morality and rationality of Obamanomics only means you’re bought, too stupid to know any better or, most likely, both. A slack-jawed hostage-taking saboteur.

Armed with this unearned intellectual and ethical superiority, it is not surprising to hear someone like John Kerry reprimand the media for even covering conservative viewpoints. It is predictable that the Senate would “investigate” a private entity like Standard & Poor’s for giving an opinion on American debt that conflicted with its own. (Remember when not listening to the Dixie Chicks was a “chilling of free speech”?)

Obama himself blamed the volatile stock market on the “prolonged debate over the debt ceiling … where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip.” So it’s not the job-killing policy or another $4 trillion of debt in two years that’s problematic; it‘s the insistence of elected officials to represent their constituents that’s really killing America.

Following the lead of the Environmental Protection Agency, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently used this imagined “dysfunction” as an excuse to try to unilaterally implement comprehensive education “reform” by bypassing law and using a waiver system. Why? “Right now,” Duncan explained, “Congress is pretty dysfunctional. They’re not getting stuff done.”

Hate to break the news to you, Arne; for many Americans, stopping this administration from “getting stuff done” is getting stuff done. …

Bret Stephens gets it. 

The aircraft was large, modern and considered among the world’s safest. But that night it was flying straight into a huge thunderstorm. Turbulence was extreme, and airspeed indicators may not have been functioning properly. Worse, the pilots were incompetent. As the plane threatened to stall they panicked by pointing the nose up, losing speed when they ought to have done the opposite. It was all over in minutes.

Was this the fate of Flight 447, the Air France jet that plunged mysteriously into the Atlantic a couple of years ago? Could be. What I’m talking about here is the Obama presidency.

When it comes to piloting, Barack Obama seems to think he’s the political equivalent of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager and—in a “Fly Me to the Moon” sort of way—Nat King Cole rolled into one. “I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” he reportedly told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my political director.”

On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game.” …

…  But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

Jennifer Rubin says it is about time the left figured out what we have know for years.

Poor Evan Thomas will never live down his ludicrous comment that President Obama was “sort of God.” What seemed like slobbering now seems outright dumb, given the president’s performance. And don’t take my word for it.

Left-wing pundits have discovered he’s sort of like Jimmy Carter. Others now comprehend he’s remote and cold. Still others recognize he is weak and ineffectual (“strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency”).

It’s not strange at all. Conservatives have been saying the same thing for several years (ever since the 2008 campaign got underway). We noticed his contempt for his fellow citizens who “cling to guns and religion.” We noticed when his response to the Fort Hood massacre was oddly disengaged. Even the death of his political patron didn’t evoke any real emotion. …

The Daily Beast writes on the Dems who are disheartened by the president.

… During the last few days, the whispers have swelled to an angry chorus of frustration about Obama’s perceived weaknesses. Many Democrats are furious and heartbroken at how ineffectual he seemed in dealing with Republican opponents over the debt ceiling, and liberals are particularly incensed by what they see as his capitulation to conservatives on fundamental liberal principles.

In Connecticut, a businessman who raised money for Obama in 2008 said, “I’m beyond disgusted.” In New Jersey, a teacher reported that even her friends in the Obama administration are grievously disillusioned with his lack of leadership—and many have begun to whisper about a Democratic challenge for the 2012 presidential nomination. “I think people are furtively hoping that Hillary runs,” she said.

The son of a longtime Democratic congressman from Texas, a 73-year-old lawyer, is so enraged with Obama that he’s threatening not to vote for the 2012 Democratic ticket—the first time in his entire life that he’s contemplated such apostasy.

Among many of the 18 million Americans who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008, the reaction is simple and bitter: “We told you so.” …

Powerline has the story of what happened to the president’s passion as asked by a NY Times Op-Ed.

That is the question that is posed by psychology professor Drew Westen in a long essay in today’s New York Times. Westen is a stereotypical liberal who thinks Obama’s problem is that he isn’t tough enough or far-left enough. His ignorance of history is so glaring that the essay isn’t worth responding to in detail. Along the way, however, Westen does hint at the truth:

“A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.” …

Dana Milbank roughs up the administration.

A familiar air of indecision preceded President Obama’s pep talk to the nation.

The first draft of his schedule for Monday contained no plans to comment on the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating by Standard & Poor’s. Then the White House announced that he would speak at 1 p.m. A second update changed that to 1:30. At 1:52, Obama walked into the State Dining Room to read his statement. Judging from the market reaction, he should have stuck with his original instinct.

“No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country,” Obama said, as if comforting a child who had been teased by the class bully.

When he began his speech (and as cable news channels displayed for viewers), the Dow Jones industrials stood at 11,035. As he talked, the average fell below 11,000 for the first time in nine months, en route to a 635-point drop for the day, the worst since the 2008 crash.

It’s not exactly fair to blame Obama for the rout: Almost certainly, the markets ignored him. And that’s the problem: The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency. …

Andrew Malcolm noticed the market drop too.

Seeking to show leadership and calm anxiety on the first trading day after the unprecedented credit downgrade for the federal government, a beleaguered President Obama made an 11-minute financial statement this afternoon that proved prophetic.

“Markets will rise and fall,” the Democrat said, “but this is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country.”

The results: On the worst day since the 2008 financial crisis, all three major U.S. stock indexes dropped between 5% and 7% with the Dow plunging 633 points to close beneath 11,000 for the first time in nine months. …

Andrew Malcolm also has late night humor.

Leno: President Obama turned 50 Thursday. A year ago he was in his forties and his approval was in the fifties. This year it’s the other way around.

Leno: President Obama is making a three-day bus tour across the Midwest later this month focused on jobs, mainly him keeping his.

Conan: Did you read about that man who jumped the White House fence? There was a brief chase, but the Secret Service was able to convince President Obama to return and continue his term.

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Strange Pickings today. Pickerhead is in the Detroit area with four grandchildren and there’s no time for an ordinary post. And, it is really tiring following the miscreants in Washington. So, today one item that is twice the length of a normal post.

This is a story from the New Jersey Ledger-Star about a scallop boat that was lost at sea two years ago this past spring. After completion of the Coast Guard investigation reporter Amy Ellis Nutt and photographer Andre Malok began a seven month investigation that was published in November 2010. Last April, the story won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. ”The Wreck of the Lady Mary” suggests the possibility the boat disappeared within minutes after being run down by a container ship. Water temperature in the North Atlantic at that time (March 2009) was 40 degrees. Six men perished. One was rescued.

Pickerhead has some familiarity with these waters from ten years ago. It was December and I was running my boat from the Virginia to New York. Teaching a class at William and Mary was the cause of the late departure. Luckily it was still warm and the water temperature was almost 70. However, that caused some fog. Fog so thick I sat over some shallow draft shoals at the beginning of the trip in the James River. Sat over them for protection from larger vessels. Finally when it cleared some it was possible to find the way down the James through the Chesapeake Bay and then up the Atlantic coast. It was possible to see only 1,000 feet or so. Then when it was time to cross the entrance to the Delaware Bay visibility closed to 500 feet.

It is a 15 mile run to cross the approaches to the Delaware River. With the chance the fog would get worse, and even with excellent GPS and good radar, the decision was made not to make the crossing. There are just too many large ships making their way perpendicular to the course I would follow. The night was spent in Indian River. And then the next night because fog was cleared by northwest winds blowing 30 to 35 miles an hour that put up waves of 8 or more feet. The next day conditions cleared. The next stop was New York harbor.

All of this is proof when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish. In my defense the safety gear (immersion suits and EPIRB) mentioned in the story are carried on my small craft. Both of those items were key to one man surviving the sinking of the Lady Mary. Had there been more than a few minutes, all of the crew might have lived.

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Of all the electrons activated so far by the downgrade, Clive Crook strikes a reasonable tone; both reassuring and foreboding. Truth be told, this was “baked in the cake” when the Obama stimulus turned out to be nothing but a payoff to his supporters.

In a way it will be puzzling if the S&P downgrade–despite all the blather about its historic significance–changes anything at all. Certainly, the news should not have come as a surprise: the agency has been talking about it for weeks and the rating for US government debt had been under formal negative review before the announcement. If there is a surprise, it is mainly that the agency had the nerve to go through with it.

More fundamentally, what new information did the downgrade and the analysis supporting it provide? None. After their performance of the past few years, rating agency analysts have, or should have, little credibility in any case. Reports of the initial $2 trillion misunderstanding in S&P’s examination of the Treasury’s books (they used the wrong CBO baseline) lend a tragicomic note, and run their reputational capital down even further. And all this would be true even if US Treasuries were arcane instruments that few investors could afford to monitor carefully, forcing them to rely on the agencies for lack of anything better. In fact, of course, US Treasuries are the most widely and intensely analyzed obligations on the planet. What does S&P know about them that you and I don’t? The informational content of the downgrade is precisely zero.

When it comes to judging market impact, two complications arise. One is the rules that some investors have adopted–or have had forced on them by regulators–obliging them to hold AAA assets. If those assets have to be dumped, the market implications would obviously be severe. According to what I read, these rules should not be triggered by a downgrade to a notch under AAA at just one agency. Federal regulators in the US, for instance, have already said that the news will have no effect on risk-based capital requirements for US banks. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors have comments. 

As the economy flatlines and stocks crater, the Pied Piper of hope and change leads us over a cliff while blowing out birthday candles at the White House and snuffing out America’s future.

This administration has been so wretched, its performance so incompetent, that we half-expect to see billboards popping up with the image of Jimmy Carter and the words, “Miss me yet?”

At least Carter, who with any luck will be supplanted in 2013 as America’s worst former president, used appropriate symbolism in donning sweaters, sitting in front of fireplaces and complaining of America’s “malaise.” …

Mark Steyn’s column was written before the downgrade, so is prescient. Was going to write “remarkably prescient” but that’s what everybody writes. So in Pickings they’re just prescient. This little aside is remarkably precious. 

… Under the “historic” “resolution” of the debt crisis (and don’t those very words “debt crisis” already feel so last week?), America will be cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years. “Cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years” is Washington-speak for increasing federal spending by $7 trillion over 10 years. And, as they’d originally planned to increase it by $8 trillion, that counts as a cut. If they’d planned to increase it by $20 trillion and then settled for merely $15 trillion, they could have saved five trillion. See how easy this is? …

… Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: “After America: Get Ready For Armageddon”. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists”. I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.

When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately, I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined. …

WSJ Op-Ed by Peter Berkowitz examines the crack-up of the progressives.

… In the congressional elections of 2010, the electorate, led by the tea party movement and disaffected independents, rendered its judgment on the president’s priorities. The people dealt him and his party a historic midterm defeat, producing large Republican gains in the Senate and a comfortable majority in the House, including 87 freshmen.

The voters’ message was clear: Cut spending, compel the government to live within its means, and put Americans back to work. In short, the president and his party badly overreached in 2009 and 2010; and in 2011 the Republicans, to the extent their numbers in Congress allowed, have effectively pushed back.

But that’s not how progressives have tended to see things. They have ferociously attacked congressional Republicans, particularly those closely associated with the tea party movement, with something approaching hysteria.

Consider the unabashed incivility of progressive criticism, its tone dictated from the top. During and after the budget negotiations, we heard that tea party representatives were content with “blowing up our government” (Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne). Then came accusations that “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people” (New York Times columnist Joe Nocera), while acting like “a maniacal gang with knives held high” (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd). At the height of negotiations, Vice President Biden either said, or agreed with House Democrats with whom he was meeting who said, that Congressional Republicans “have acted like terrorists.”

In addition, progressive legal scholars concocted a wild theory to justify an executive power grab by means of which President Obama would unilaterally raise the debt ceiling to avoid having to hammer out a deal with Congress. …

Michael Barone says Americans want to earn their success.

Why aren’t voters moving to the left, toward parties favoring bigger government, during what increasingly looks like an economic depression? That’s a question I’ve asked, and one that was addressed with characteristic thoughtfulness by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in the New York Times last week.

Greenberg argues that voters agree with Democrats on issues but don’t back them on policy because they don’t trust government to carry it out fairly. I think he overstates their agreements on policies: They may favor “investment in education” until they figure out that it actually means political payoffs to teachers’ unions.

But his larger point rings true. He points out that “the growth of self-identified conservatives” began during the fall 2008 debate over the TARP legislation supported by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain. The voters’ take: “Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.” …