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Some of our favorites react to the downgrade. John Podhoretz first.

This is a terrible day. …

 … This is a colossal disaster for Barack Obama?, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding himself or trying to spin you. We know that the election of 2012 is going to be fought on jobs, the economy, and the wisdom of health care. But now the GOP has an overarching theme that I predict will be at the core of a $500 million advertising campaign: “America needs its good name back.”

Mark Steyn.

As the author of a suitably apocalyptic book to be released on Monday, I’m grateful to Standard & Poor’s for providing the ultimate publicity tie-in. (Junk rating by the time of the paperback edition?) The frivolousness of the political theater in Washington this last month and its mostly fraudulent media coverage did huge damage to the United States. It confirmed to the world, as S&P’s analysis suggests, that Washington is institutionally incapable of genuine reform. This was one of those it’s-the-music-not-the-lyrics moments: As damaging as the specifics of the ”deal” were, the broader sub-text of a political class pretending that it was meaningful was even more so.  

We don’t have till 2021. As I say in my column tomorrow, we have till mid-decade to turn this thing around, or it’s over. …

From Pajamas Media.

… Just a couple of years in that big house in Washington and you and your spendthrift colleagues have managed to blight the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Thank you Mr. President!

What planet are you and Joe Biden and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid from?

In the space of two years, you have done more damage to this economy — which means the future not only of this country but the rest of what you would disdain to call the civilized world — than any President in history. You are a poor man’s Jimmy Carter, a midget Herbert Hoover, a disaster for this country and the world. …

Nile Gardiner

… Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets. Free enterprise has taken a backseat to continental European-style interventionism, as an intensely ideological left wing administration has sought to dramatically increase the role of the state in shaping the US economy. The end result has been a dramatic fall in economic freedom, sluggish growth, poor consumer confidence, high unemployment, a collapsing housing market, and an overall decline in US prosperity, with more than 45 million Americans now reliant on food stamps – that’s over one seventh of the entire country….

At the end of last week we trashed the idea of the super committee. Charles Krauthammer says it may have value.

Conventional wisdom holds that the congressional super-committee established by the debt-ceiling deal to propose further deficit reduction will go nowhere. I’m not so sure. There is a grand compromise to be had. It does, however, require precise sequencing. To succeed it must proceed in three stages:

(1) Tax Reform.

True tax reform that removes loopholes while lowering tax rates is the Holy Grail of social policy. It appeals equally to left and right because, almost uniquely, it promotes both economic efficiency and fairness. Economic efficiency — because it removes tax dodges that distort capital flows (and thereby diminish productivity) while cutting marginal tax rates (thereby spurring growth). Fairness — because a corrupted tax code with myriad breaks grants deeply unfair advantage to the rich who buy the lobbyists who create the loopholes and buy the lawyers who exploit them.

Which is why the 1986 Reagan-Bradley tax reform was such a historic success. It satisfied left and right, promoted efficiency and fairness, and helped launch two decades of almost uninterrupted economic expansion. …

Of course Pickings readers know that government efforts to heap mortgages on poor credit risks would have devastating unintended consequences. Thomas Sowell on how it worked out.

Many years ago, the Saturday Evening Post was one of the best-known magazines in America. But somehow I learned that the Saturday Evening Post was actually published on Wednesday morning. That was a little disconcerting at first. But it was one of the most valuable lessons, that words do not necessarily reflect reality.

Recent statistics on the average wealth or net worth of blacks are a painful reminder that rhetoric favoring blacks does not mean that politicians using such rhetoric are actually helping blacks. The media seized upon the statistics published by the Pew Research Center to show that whites averaged far more net worth than blacks, and that this disparity was now greater than it was in years past. But what is even more revealing is that the net worth of blacks in 2009 was less than half of what it was in 2005.

What happened to cause such a sharp loss in such a few years? After all, the Republicans controlled both the Congress and the White House in 2005, and the Democrats had control by 2009. There was now a black President of the United States, with much of the media celebrating the beginning of a new era in race relations.

What happened was that the political words had no relationship to the economic reality. But few people judge any administration’s effect on blacks by what actually happens to blacks under that administration.

A finer breakdown of the data on the net worth of blacks shows that the most drastic loss of net worth was in the value of the homes owned by blacks. This occurred after years of both Democratic and Republican administrations pushing policies designed to enable more blacks to buy homes. …

More on misleading words from T. Sowell.

… Virtually everyone living in “poverty,” as defined by the government, has color television, and most have cable TV or satellite TV. More than three-quarters have either a VCR or a DVD player, and nearly nine-tenths have a microwave oven.

As for being “ill-housed,” the average poor American has more living space than the general population — not just the poor population — of London, Paris and other cities in Europe.

Various attempts have been made over the years to depict Americans in poverty as “ill-fed” but the “hunger in America” campaigns that have enjoyed such political and media popularity have usually used some pretty creative methods and definitions.

Actual studies of “the poor” have found their intake of the necessary nutrients to be no less than that of others. In fact, obesity is slightly more prevalent among low-income people.

The real triumph of words over reality, however, is in expensive government programs for “the elderly,” including Medicare. The image often invoked is the person who is both ill and elderly, and who has to choose between food and medications.

It is great political theater. But, the most fundamental reality is that the average wealth of the elderly is some multiple of the average wealth owned by people in the other age brackets.

Why should the average taxpayer be subsidizing people who have much more wealth than they do? …

Canada’s National Post says the proposed solutions to no growth will continue – no growth.

… To those of us on the outside of the economics profession, the sound of the internal crash of the pillars of interventionism is becoming deafening. While contradictions pile up, the advice still keeps flowing. Deficits are bad, spending must be cut to save the economy. But if spending is cut, the economy will suffer. While politicians struggle to interpret the contradictory incantations of economists, the world is struggling under a burden of growth-killing policies.

Banks are being regulated to an extent never seen before, forcing the world’s core providers of credit for business expansion to curb their appetite for risk. Confusion reigns as global and trans-national regulators blunder their way to impose ill-conceived rules and policies. The hard reality of new rules, especially new capital requirements, is that it forces banks to accumulate risk-free liabilities while curbing risk-taking loans.

The world’s energy markets are under constant assault from governments that want to force innovation by fiat. Carbon taxes and green-energy initiatives that are uneconomic have two growth-killing impacts. First, they force capital out of economically productive investments into projects that are intrinsically uneconomic. Investors will not put money into wind turbines because they are uneconomic. Throwing subsidies at wind power does not create net new jobs and growth; it kills jobs and growth by forcing others to cover the cost of the uneconomic activity.

In the auto industry, meanwhile, sales are flat and show no signs of returning to production levels of the past. In the face of this ongoing slump, the U.S. government will force auto companies to spending billions to meet tough fuel-efficiency standards that will raise the price of cars. Whatever they teach in economics these days, some logic must seep into the curriculum. This is not a growth plan.

Similar government interventions, bolstered by constant calls for more spending and taxes, are the norm through most of the G20 membership. To end the many debt crises, the first step should be to abandon growth-killing policies. With growth, even debts cease to be a problem.

The Economist reviews a book on our history with dogs.

THE relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began, but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000 years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche region of France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.

The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over the past century or so. …

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In a brilliant Corner post, Nicole Gelinas likens the new 12 person budget committee to the financial system’s attempt to offload sub-prime mortgage risk.

… Now, clever politicians think that they can transfer the responsibility of deciding what kind of spending we’re going to cut — entitlements to pay for the past, or infrastructure investments to pay for the future — to a committee that is of the political system but also somehow outside of it.

It’s a political derivative — and it won’t work. Come December 23rd, the results of this political derivative will boomerang right back to the politicians and the nation. 

And remember: Politicians purposely — and foolishly — manufactured this particular crisis so that they could show how forward-thinking they were in saving us from it. No wonder financial markets — also in turmoil because of Europe right now — are skeptical of the exercise and the outcome. …

Alana Goodman, in Contentions, illustrates the uncertainty created in the super committee.

As we await the creation and deliberation of the “super committee” to determine the future of national defense, it’s worth taking a look at how this instability impacts the economy.

The prospect of massive – and unpredictable – future defense cuts isn’t just a concern for national security officials. It’s also reportedly spooking defense contractors, who are hesitant to hire new employees in such a volatile atmosphere.

From reading local news reports, we learn communities across the country are already bracing for the prospect of additional economic turbulence:

San Diego:

“The impreciseness of the deal and the uncertainty about where budget cuts will come from does little to help the fragile economic recovery in San Diego and could potentially have a huge impact on the region’s job growth in the coming years, experts said.

The deal imposed $1 trillion in budget reductions over the next decade but did not outline where cuts would be made, virtually ensuring continued hesitance among consumers and businesses that will keep them from spending. That doubt is expected to guarantee the unemployment rate in the county will remain about 10 percent through the rest of the year with very little job growth, experts said.” …

The National Journal says the super committee will create super lobbyists.

… When the Divine Dozen are named, it will lead “to the emergence of a pack of superlobbyists who will have access to those members” and who can try to protect clients from the carnage, said Democratic consultant David Di Martino. That’s because with only six members from each party on the committee, influencing the super committee will largely be an inside game with Democratic and Republican lobbyists working their respective lawmakers.

Each appointment will be closely watched for the signals it sends about the direction of the super committee, more formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

“The bubbling, No. 1 question in the last 24 hours for downtown is, ‘Who are the 12 going to be?’ Because that will shape what the super committee will or will not tackle,” Republican lobbyist Kirk Blalock said.

A Democratic insider put the concern more bluntly: “If you’re a company with a major stake in what’s going to happen in the super committee and you have a team that has no connection to those members, you’re probably going to be looking for additional help”—an observation that may turn out to be a colossal understatement. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors say it is a sham to say these are budget cuts.

… According to IBD’s analysis of available budget numbers, the deal’s $2.4 trillion in 10-year cuts amounts to a mere 5% trim off total projected federal spending during that time. It’s like a 400-pound man boasting that he plans to drop 20 pounds over a decade, while his doctors warn about the risks of losing weight so fast.

Even calling these “cuts” is a bit of a stretch, since spending will continue to increase, just at a slightly slower pace. (See charts below.) By 2021, federal spending would still equal 22% of the nation’s economy, above the post-World War II average of 20%. Not really a cut, is it?

Plus, in the short term, these “deep,” “sharp,” “slashing” cuts would still leave the federal government spending roughly 4% more in 2012 than it did in 2010, and 20% more than it did in 2008.

Shorn of all the hyperbole, what this agreement really demonstrates is why it’s so hard to get federal spending under control. Both sides routinely use budget gimmicks to exaggerate spending cuts, while armies of special interests swarm Washington to make sure their pet programs don’t get touched. …

In a courageous blog post, Charles Lane points out the hypocrisy in the liberals calling the tea parties “terrorists.” 

If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009. 

But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues. Consider the “terrorism” analogy now being aimed at the Tea Party by Democratic members of Congress — in the acquiescent presence of the vice president, no less — and by some journalists who sympathize with the Democrats. To pick just one example of the genre, today’s New York Times carries Joe Nocera’s column, “Tea Party’s War Against America.”

According to Nocera, President Obama’s debt-ceiling deal with the Republicans violated a basic rule: “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He adds: “Much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” These “intransigent” spending cutters were indifferent to “blowing up the country” in pursuit of their goals. They are indifferent to “inflicting more pain on their countrymen” via “the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class” and the extra unemployment it will bring. 

I’m puzzled. The Times editorial board only recently condemned “many on the right” for “exploit[ing] the arguments of division,” and “demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Right-wingers, The Times notes, “seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.” 

So how can it be okay for Times columnists to demonize the Tea Party and try to persuade Americans that they are not just misguided, but the enemies of the people? …

Jennifer Rubin calls BS on the president’s claim he is pushing free trade deals.

One of the more disingenuous aspects of President Obama’s Rose Garden speech yesterday was his plea to pass three pending free-trade deals. He said, “I want Congress to pass a set of trade deals — deals we’ve already negotiated — that would help displaced workers looking for new jobs and would allow our businesses to sell more products in countries in Asia and South America, products that are stamped with the words ‘Made in America.’” Does he?

At every turn, the administration has dragged its heels and come up with one excuse after another. He has done nothing to accelerate ratification of the deals. …

… Given the way the debt-ceiling deal worked out, you can understand what is going on here. Obama in theory might favor passage of the trade deals. But he lacks the ability to galvanize his own party and the will to buck his union patrons. So nothing happens. It is quintessential, impotent Obama.

Peter Wehner with notes on the One’s fall.

If you want to gauge how upset President Obama’s liberal base is with him right now, consider the words of Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, who said this as the final debt ceiling deal was coming together: “I am just sorely upset that Obama doesn’t seize the moment. That’s what great presidents do in times of crisis. They exert executive leadership. He went wobbly in the knees.”

This isn’t simply stating a policy difference with the president; it’s a barely concealed assault on his character and fortitude.

It highlights not simply the unhappiness prominent Democrats have with Obama, but their borderline contempt for him.

I don’t think people fully realize just how weak and incapacitated the debt ceiling debate has left the president. But fairly soon, it’ll become clear enough.

His presidency is coming apart, and he doesn’t have a clue how to repair it. Obama’s fall from grace has been quite remarkable, and I suspect it’s nowhere near finished.

Iain Murray and Mark Steyn post in The Corner on lemonade stands. Here’s Mark;

… the state enforcers won’t let you make lemonade.

Iain Murray wrote yesterday about the spate of lemonade-stand crackdowns by this once great republic’s depraved regulatory class. This is not a small thing. A land in which a child requires hundreds of dollars of permits to sell homemade lemonade in his front yard is, in a profound sense, no longer free: It is exactly the kind of micro-regulatory tyranny of which Tocqueville warned two centuries ago.

Guest-hosting for Rush a week or two back, I suggested en passant that we needed a children’s version of the Tea Party — a Lemonade Party. I see now that a concerned citizen is organizing a Lemonade Freedom Day for August 20th.

By the way, our fellow NR cruiser Ed Driscoll has posted an excerpt from my new book about another curious priority of the control freaks of the Brokest Nation In History: The church bake-sale pie crackdown. I hesitate to channel Martin Niemöller (“First they came for the kid next door’s lemonade stand and I did nothing, then they came for the widder woman across the street’s maple pecan pie”), but this is a sustained assault by the state on civic participation, and thus on citizenship itself.

The proper response of any self-respecting seven-year-old girl on being told she needs the state’s permission to sell homemade lemonade is, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: A new poll says only 17% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction. I think it’s time for a female president. At least she’d stop and ask for directions.

Conan: The U.S. government is nearly out of money to pay its bills. Things are so bad, America may have to move in for a while with Canada.

Letterman: So the deficit talks keep breaking down. And right about now Obama, the president, he wishes he was born in Kenya.

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Paul Ryan calls out the president. Wants to know where his budget is. 

During the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama reportedly warned Republican leaders not to call his bluff by sending him a bill without tax increases. Republicans in Congress ignored this threat and passed a bill that cuts more than a dollar in spending for every dollar it increases the debt limit, without raising taxes.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama signed this bill into law. He was, as he said, bluffing.

Nevertheless, the president still hasn’t shown us his cards. He still hasn’t put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.

Ever since they abused the budget process to jam their health-care takeover through Congress last year, the Democrats have simply done away with serious budgeting altogether. The simplest explanation—and the president’s real bluff—is that they don’t want to commit publicly to the kind of tax increases and health-care rationing that would be required to sustain their archaic vision of government.

The president’s February budget deliberately dodged the tough choices necessary to confront the threat of runaway federal spending. It was rejected unanimously in a Senate controlled by his own party. …

Michael Barone thinks the president was missing in action.

In the negotiations that produced the bill the 44th president of the United States seemed to be more of an onlooker than a participant.

The president went into this controversy well armed. The Constitution grants him a veto which can be overridden only by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. Administratively he has at hand the expertise of the career professionals in the Office of Management and Budget and a competent and experienced budget director. He had the political weapon of the threat of chaos and economic disaster if the deadline of August 2, set by his Treasury secretary last April, was not met. …

… Obama promised to unite the country. Instead he has united the opposition, antagonised the centre and demoralised his base. Let us just say this is not what he set out to do.

David Harsanyi celebrates the success of the “terrorists” in Washington.

… No amount of hysterics changes the fact that there has been realignment to the national conversation. The country has been radicalized by reality. A new CNN poll finds that though they rightly disapprove with everyone involved, 65 percent of those polled think that cuts in the debt deal were appropriate. Most polls find that voters believe government is too large and favor spending cuts. Remember that polls showed that most voters were against raising the debt limit at all.

It’s not the terrorists who drive this change. It’s the evidence. It’s the economic suffering that “spreading it around” policy has created. It’s institutionalization of a recession. For a while, at least, those who claim that bankruptcy spending and bullet trains create jobs — no matter how regularly the media offer these myths as fact — can’t be taken seriously.

Fleeting as this shift may be, we were brought a sliver of good news this week. During one glorious day, the United States passed legislation with the sole intention of cutting government rather than “creating” so-called jobs or “investing” in some cockamamie energy boondoggle or “helping” “working families” — which is, of course, the biggest help Washington can offer us. For that, we can thank the “terrorists.”

More from Harsanyi’s blog.

To put things in perspective: this year alone the federal government spent $1.7 trillion more than it took in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the John Boehner plan (really more of a recommendation), cuts $917 billion in spending growth over 10 years. That‘s barely more than the debt ceiling hike that’s been proposed and far less than we overspent this one year alone. …

Toby Young in Telegraph Blogs has more on the victory of the tea party.

For British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty. Under the terms of the deal, the federal government will cut spending by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years and there won’t be any corresponding increase in taxation. That is to say, the American Government has agreed to tackle its deficit by spending cuts alone. The British Government, by contrast, is planning to cut its deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises – and it’s cutting it by a smaller amount.

Even if the Tory Party had won an overall majority at the last election, it’s hard to imagine it adopting such a bold fiscal policy. Yet the American Government is on the verge of adopting this plan in spite of the fact that the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. A year ago, American conservatives were showering David Cameron with praise for adopting such a radical approach to reducing Britain’s deficit and contrasting him unfavourably with their own spendthrift President. Now, our Prime Minister looks like a weak-kneed liberal in contrast to the hard-headed Obama. Whatever happened to the stimulus?

Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer. …

Ross Douthat at the NY Times tries to understand why the administration is doing so poorly.

By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.

Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.

The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding. …

Peter Wehner reminds us just how sycophantic the mainstream press was on the election of the One.

As President Obama?’s approval drops to 40 percent and independents are fleeing him in droves, as the economy continues to stagger and comparisons to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter? are increasingly being made by Democrats, it’s worth recalling the almost cult-like reverence Obama inspired after his election. You need not go further than this November 7, 2008 broadcast of “The Charlie Rose Show,” which featured a conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker and historians Alan Brinkley? and Michael Beschloss?.

“The extraordinary outpouring of celebration, joy, and hope all over the world at this election is something I could never have imagined in my lifetime,” according to Professor Brinkley.”There’s a discipline to Obama that is so extraordinary,” he raved. And then he added: “I don’t think we’ve had a president since Lincoln who has the oratorical skills that Obama has. Obama has that quality that Lincoln had.”

Remnick, too, compared Obama’s rhetorical skills to Lincoln. The campaign also “shows him in a decision-making mold that is very encouraging.” Obama demonstrates a “receptivity to ideas outside the frame” and possesses a “worldview that allows for complexity.” He “assumes a maturity in the American public” and possesses “great audacity.” And not to believe Obama’s election will have “enormous effect” on the streets of Cairo, or Nairobi, or Jerusalem is “naive.” We were dealing, after all, with a tranformational president unlike any in our lifetime. …

Gateway Pundit posts on the “Jobs Bash” that will crash today’s birthday party in Chicago.

The Economist reports on social scientists who take a stab at understanding human’s gene for altruism.

THE extraordinary success of Homo sapiens is a result of four things: intelligence, language, an ability to manipulate objects dexterously in order to make tools, and co-operation. Over the decades the anthropological spotlight has shifted from one to another of these as the prime mover of the package, and thus the fundament of the human condition. At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?

Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. …

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Cantor’s ode to Boehner draws a Corner post from Robert Costa.

… “We have been through a lot,” Cantor reportedly said. “The leadership team has had its differences. You made us focus on the fact that we are all on one team dedicated to the cause we came here to accomplish — to reset the size of government, to limit government.”

To House colleagues looking on, Cantor’s gift was about more than magazine spreads — it was about reminding everyone, even us reporters, that Boehner and Cantor are a team. They may not click on the little things, but on the big picture (and small frames), they are allies.

Peter Wehner says Maureen Dowd has become a neo-conservative. Here’s Dowd;

‘ The Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.” ‘

Andrew Ferguson turns his gaze to some appointments in the arts.

Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the current president’s selections were sub-Bushian. 

It was an article of faith with Obama’s snootier acolytes that George W. Bush was a philistine and a moron. (“Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot” was stripped across the bumper of many a Prius puttering around the reality-based community back in the day.) In fact Bush’s appointments showed he took the cultural agencies seriously. If not a man of high culture himself, he knew one when he saw one. To the NEH he brought a world-class historian of Renaissance painting, Bruce Cole. He selected Dana Gioia, one of the country’s most admired poets and literary critics, to lead the NEA.

Although unusually accomplished, these men were in line with the appointments of previous presidents, who generally picked their chairmen from the country’s large reserve of artists, scholars, and arts administrators. Even Bill Clinton had the inspired idea to pick the celebrated actress Jane Alexander to run his NEA. And he’s from Arkansas.

But Barack Obama? Memoirist, prose stylist of distinction, resident of Hyde Park, prowler of used bookstores, professor of constitutional law? The man whom Michael Beschloss (Distinguished Professor of History, Charlie Rose Tech) called “probably the smartest guy ever to become president”? Surely he would use the opportunity to look beyond the things that divide us as Americans and, drawing on our core common values that we all share as Americans, appoint chairmen who could lift us up and speak to the heart of the American narrative about who we are as Americans. Some artist or scholar—a well-known pottery maker, even. A macramé artist. Pete Seeger. I don’t know. 

No, though. Instead Obama has used the agency chairmanships as spoils of political hackery. …

Ed Morrissey says guess what happened to the Obama recovery?

For the past two years, the Obama administration has tried to sell the American public on the notion that its economic policies created a substantial recovery.  Friday’s GDP numbers, especially the revisions that impacted results for the past several years, has put an end to that illusion.  Derek Thompson at The Atlantic lowers the boom on the supposed Obama recovery (via Instapundit):

“Yesterday, analysts thought the economy was expanding by 2.5% a year. This morning, they learned GDP grew by only 1.6% in the last four quarters. This is a remarkable discovery. It’s the difference between thinking we’re expanding at a decent, if disappointing, pace, and knowing we’re growing around half our historical norm.

Analysts also thought, as recently as twelve hours ago, that the economy declined 6.8% and 4.9% in the quarters bisected by Obama’s inauguration. It turns out the actual declines were much steeper: 8.9% and 6.7%.

To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33% deeper than we thought. And we’re driving 33% slower than we hoped.”

Thompson includes a couple of eye-opening charts, although nothing that we haven’t seen before.  Check out his charts comparing the recession and post-recession periods of various downturns, but this one from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve on employment really tells the story better: …

According to the New Yorker, the president has not been liberal enough. Peter Wehner has the story.

What happens to an ideologue when the president in whom he invested enormous hope is increasingly seen as a failure? For one answer, see the lead “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg writes this:

“Invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s seeming refusal to hold it in reserve … is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy–indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing  aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supercede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must ‘live within its  means.’ (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now–a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital–higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich.”

Translation: Barack Obama, the most liberal president in generations, hasn’t been liberal enough. His problem hasn’t been profligacy but frugality. During the last two-and-a-half years, as $3.7 trillion has been added to our national debt, it turns out Obama has spent too little. …

Nile Gardiner reacts to Biden’s claim the tea party folks were “terrorists.”

… There is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US presidency. About a third of the country are favourable towards the Tea Party, according to Gallup – i.e. tens of millions of Biden’s fellow Americans. Does he label them terrorists too?

Working in Washington I’ve met numerous Tea Party supporters and have always found them to be unfailingly patriotic people who love their country and feel passionately about the need to rein in Big Government through the democratic process. To compare their elected representatives to terrorists who seek to destroy the United States and everything it stands for is gravely insulting to hard working Americans who have in many cases devoted their lives to serving their country. …

The WSJ has more on the Canadian miracle of limited government.

While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.

Now with the first majority government since 2004, and the first Conservative majority since 1993, the country has an opportunity to vault forward. The Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper have a chance to build on the reforms begun under previous Liberal governments that Americans can only look at with envy.

Canada’s government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. …

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Regarding the “agreement” reached in Washington, the Streetwise Professor strikes the right tone.

Today would have been Milton Friedman’s 99th birthday.  His son, David, said something today about the debt ceiling circus that I’m sure his father would agree with:

“Reading Google News, I am struck by the degree to which dramatic stories crowd out arguably more important material. The top of the page is dominated by the current U.S. debt limit crisis. It is an entertaining example of the game of Chicken as played by politicians but of limited importance otherwise, since both sides are focused not on how to deal with the long term debt problem but on the terms on which they will agree to postpone dealing with it.”

Exactly.  The “both sides” remark is perfectly justified, although there are exceptions on one side.  The problem is that too many of those who are serious about tackling the problem are tactically inept and hasty, and those who are tactically canny and patient are not all that serious about tackling the problem. …

… while doing my daily mad-dog midday walk in the St. Louis sun, I was thinking today that considerable blame for what is going on now can be attributed to one mechanical invention: air conditioning.  There is no way such a tortuous process would have dragged on so long if the legislators and executive branch people had to broil in the midsummer heat of DC.  That would be far more a sobering a prospect to those types than a looming default.

So, to fix our politics, break the air conditioning.

Mark Steyn columns on the Pelosi remark about “saving life on this planet.”

… The Democrat model of governance is to spend four trillion dollars while only collecting two trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and preapproving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze – that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same – the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.

Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.

So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to re-acquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. …

Contentions post on the crash of Tom Freidman’s China train.

Tom Friedman’s favorite model train set suffered a tragic disaster a week ago, when a carriage from China’s high-speed rail system leapt over the side of a bridge, killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. China fetishists like Friedman view the fast and flashy Chinese infrastructure boom as a literal model for the U.S. Our trains are slow and need new paint, you see, and that means China is better positioned to excel in some presumably train-obsessed future. Or something like that. …

Nile Gardiner posts on the obnoxious tweets from the White House that caused 30,000 followers to cancel in one day.

… As the president’s approval rating slips to a dismal 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the spin-obsessed White House only looks further out of touch with reality in a nation where 75 percent of likely voters believe the country is moving down the wrong direction. This latest Twitter campaign merely comes across as yet another act of desperation from a presidency whose mantra is increasingly “leading from behind,” both at home and abroad.

Michael Barone writes an interesting analysis of Obama’s chances next year based on the house vote in 2010.

The popular vote for the House and the president have converged. Here’s what it means for Obama’s chances in 2012.

Since the middle 1990s, the popular vote for the House of Representatives has become a good proxy for the standing of the nation’s two major parties. This was not the case for many years, in large part because Democratic House candidates in the South stood for different issues than their party’s national nominees and tended to run far ahead of Democratic presidential candidates. But during Bill Clinton’s presidency and afterward, Democratic presidential candidates became more successful nationally than they had been in most of the 1970s and 1980s, even as Republicans started running much better than they had in House districts in the South.

In 1992, for the first time since Reconstruction, the Republican percentage of the House vote in the South, defined as the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, was (slightly) higher than in the North; in 1994, Republicans carried the House popular vote in the South, as they have ever since, in years when they carried the House popular vote in the North only twice (in 1994 and 2002).

So it is fair to say that the popular vote for the House and the president have converged. This is apparent in the following table, showing the Democratic percentage for president and for House members in presidential election years going back to the first election after World War II. …

IBD Editors report on the unraveling of junk science.

The scientist who claimed that global warming threatens polar bears is under investigation. There’s a hole in Earth’s greenhouse. A cooler era lies ahead.

That hiss is the hot air coming out of alarmists’ balloon.

The global warming fraud is coming apart faster than the alarmists can repackage and rebrand their fairy tale. Their elaborately constructed yarn can’t hold together much longer. There are just too many loose ends:

• Charles Monnett, the scientist who predicted that polar bears would drown from a lack of sea ice, “is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity” of the article in which he makes that claim, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Monnett, a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been placed on leave pending the probe’s outcome. …

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Krauthammer says there’s nothing more important than 2012.

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

The sausage-making may be unsightly, but the problem is not that Washington is broken, that ridiculous ubiquitous cliché. The problem is that these two visions are in competition, and the definitive popular verdict has not yet been rendered.

We’re only at the midpoint. Obama won a great victory in 2008 that he took as a mandate to transform America toward European-style social democracy. The subsequent counterrevolution delivered to that project a staggering rebuke in November 2010. Under our incremental system, however, a rebuke delivered is not a mandate conferred. That awaits definitive resolution, the rubber match of November 2012. …

More thoughts like that from Andrew Malcolm.

In a local government cabinet meeting some years ago, the elected official asked his veteran budget expert what the public revenue and expense forecasts were for the next quarter.

The budget expert began rummaging in his notes and inquired, “What do you want them to be?”

There was dead silence around the shiny table until the savvy budget guy smiled. He’d captured the essence of many government numbers.

We’re reminded of that revealing episode in recent days by the Howdy Doody Show playing out in our nation’s capitol over the phony debt ceiling and the sham cuts and numerical maneuverings, as if they were the issues at hand instead of the genuine struggle for dominant political position come Nov. 6, 2012. …

And Mike Rosen from the Denver Post.

… The 2012 election will be a pivotal and potentially irreversible turning point in our nation’s history. The voters will have to decide in which direction we go. Obama, Democrats and the left are poised to launch us into the stratosphere of government spending. At 25 percent of GDP, we’re already at a level not seen since World War II?. The Congressional Budget Office projects entitlement spending and interest on the national debt to propel us to 40 percent by 2075.

This is the flight plan of statists. Their economic guru, Paul Krugman, is a delirious Keynesian, cheerleading for even larger deficits than those that have failed to stimulate the economy under Obamanomics. Greece offers an object lesson in this folly. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” Observing the destruction in Stalin’s wake, the obvious but unspoken question was, “Where’s the omelet?” The same could be asked of Krugman about Obama’s promised omelet.

Obama still continues to blame his economic failures on George W. Bush and, lately, on businesses reluctant to hire new workers. When he’s not complaining about their corporate jets, he berates them for sitting on trillions in cash. Apparently he doesn’t understand that businesses aren’t in business to sit on cash, especially when interest rates are near zero. They generate profits by investing, expanding and hiring workers. They’re not doing that because of his economic policies, suffocating regulations, threatened tax increases, favoritism to unions and the prospect of costly government mandates for employees. …

Overlooked in all the debt-limit mess were the awful numbers on the Obama depression. James Pethokoukis has the story.

More evidence, as if we needed it, that the U.S. economy is in sad shape. America’s gross domestic product grew just 1.3 percent in the second quarter, according to the Commerce Department. And first-quarter growth was revised down to just 0.4 percent. This is now the weakest two-year recovery since World War II.

More importantly, it means we’re in the danger zone for another recession. Research from the Federal Reserve finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 48 percent of the time. (And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 70 percent of the time. …

Shikha Dalmia shows the lies behind CAFE standards.

… In an effort to bring its global warming initiative back from the dead, the administration has announced that it wants automakers to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, of their fleets from the 34.2 miles per gallon that it mandated in 2009 (which the companies are still scrambling to meet) to 56.2 mpg by 2025. Not a single car—big or small, hybrid or non-hybrid—currently delivers this kind of mileage (with the exception of electrics). But CAFE backers are pooh-poohing industry claims that these standards are unattainable. “Virtually every major improvement in U.S. fuel economy and emissions over the last quarter of a century started as a stringent government standard that automakers … initially insisted was impossible to meet,” harrumphed a recent Detroit Free Press editorial. “Then the same companies turned their engineers loose and met or exceeded the threshold.”

Did they?

Not really. Rather, they unleashed armies of lobbyists on Washington to poke holes in the CAFE regime. For example, companies that don’t meet CAFE standards face fines. But the fines are so low that many luxury brands prefer to pay up rather than comply. Likewise, companies get CAFE credits, the auto equivalent of indulgences, for flex-fuel vehicles built with gasoline as well as ethanol tanks. Fitting them with both doesn’t add much to manufacturing cost, which is why carmakers happily churn them out even though everyone knows that few drivers ever use ethanol.

But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE’s downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries. …

Joel Kotkin was in the Journal writing about the end of Los Angeles.

.. The machine that now controls Los Angeles by default consists of an alliance between labor and the political leadership of the Latino community, the area’s largest ethnic population. But since politicians serve at the whim of labor interests, they seldom speak up for homeowners and small businesses.

Mayor Villaraigosa, a former labor organizer, has little understanding of private-sector economic development beyond well-connected real-estate interests whom he has courted and which have supported him. He has been a strong backer of L.A. Live, a downtown ports and entertainment complex, and other projects that have benefited from favorable tax treatment and major public infrastructure investments. He’s currently supporting a push to build a new downtown football stadium, though L.A. has no professional football team. His biggest priority is to build the so-called subway to the sea, a $40 billion train line to connect downtown with the Pacific.

But L.A.’s downtown employs a mere 2.5% of the region’s work force; New York’s central business districts, by contrast, employ roughly 20%. …

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David Harsanyi is enjoying democracy these days.

There is still a slim chance that this summer’s debt ceiling debate won’t end with demagoguery’s winning the day. That’s an unusual development, yes, and something to be thankful for, however fleeting the interruption.

After all, whenever politicians moan and groan about how Washington isn’t “working,” or, as the president likes to say, whenever his agenda crashes against democracy, that the system is “broken,” well, it’s probably not. …

… Recently, Obama joked with a La Raza crowd, “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform.” He was joking, but when many of the crowd cheered heartily and chanted “Yes, you can,” we learned a little about expectations on the left. No doubt, Obama would like things to go a lot more smoothly. But without two houses of Congress jumping off the ideological deep end with him, Washington is working a lot better than it used to. That’s bad news for Obama.

Jennifer Rubin spots a White House attempt to look relevant.

Josh Kraushaar, National Journal,  looks at the 2012 race.

…For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that 2012 will be a close presidential contest, with a best-case scenario for Republicans of winning the race with a map similar to George W. Bush’s 2004 victory over Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.  

But if the president can’t turn things around, that logic could prove badly outdated. If Obama is struggling in the Democratic-friendly confines of Michigan and Pennsylvania (as recent polls have indicated), it’s hard to see him over-performing again in more-traditional battlegrounds such as Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

Unless the environment changes significantly, all the money in the president’s reelection coffers won’t be able to expand the map; it can only defend territory that’s being lost. And just as House Democrats played defense to protect the growing number of vulnerable members in last year’s midterms, Obama is looking like he’ll be scrambling to hold onto a lot of the states that he thought would be part of an emerging Democratic majority.

 Jonah Goldberg describes the leadership we have.

… Imagine you’re in a burning office building. Obama’s plan for getting out alive: “Okay, you guys break up into different groups and come up with a series of proposals about how we get out of the building. I will then negotiate with each of you separately and then together, and then separately. Then I’ll get on Skype and tell the world what I think of your respective plans and criticize you for their lack of seriousness. I will insist that we have balanced approach of applying both water to the fire and opening the windows, which some say will only provide more oxygen for the flames. But my base says window-opening is essential. Oh and I will blame all of the gasoline I threw around on the lower floors of this building on the guy who moved out two years ago. And I will veto any plan that requires we have a new plan should we get stuck on another floor. And, did I mention this mess was created by the former tenant and….ahhh what’s that smell?

Political reporters from around the country get a primer on Rick Perry from a columnist at Texas Monthly. 

Here we go again. As you know, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, is contemplating a presidential run, which means that any day now, your boss will be sending you down here to take the measure of the man. Though he managed to avoid the 2012 spotlight longer than any other candidate, Perry, the nation’s longest-serving governor, has lately become, in the words of a recent NPR report, “the eight-hundred-pound gorilla on the sidelines of this race.” The trickle of stories about him has become a stream, and the minute Perry declares his candidacy, that stream will become a flood, a flood that will carry you straight to Austin. I am writing you this note in the hope that it will help you avoid the political and sociological clichés that Texas is subjected to every time one of our politicians seeks the national stage.

It’s an experience we’re all too familiar with. A Texan has occupied the White House in 17 of the past 48 years—just over a third of the time. Texas has become an incubator for presidents, as Virginia and Ohio were in America’s distant past. I’ll grant you that the presidents we have sent to Washington, from LBJ to ?George W. Bush, have not always served as the best advertisements for Texas. Nevertheless, we have endured a disproportionate amount of bad writing about our state from journalists who don’t know very much about the place, and I for one can’t bear to suffer through another campaign of it.

So please, heed this advice. Rick Perry, as you have no doubt already discovered, is not the easiest man to write about. He is secretive and leery of the media (sometimes to the point of hostility), and he has a strategically valuable knack for being underestimated by his critics. I have been writing about him since the eighties, when he began his career in the Texas Legislature. Along the way I have learned a few things, which I have arranged in this handy list of Eight Points to Keep in Mind When Writing About Rick Perry. …

The administration can save us from the latest job killer from the EPA. WSJ with the details.

President Obama won praise from businesses in January when he promised to bring “reason and balance” to a “21st-century regulatory system.” Yet now, fewer than six months later, his administration is preparing to issue the single most expensive environmental regulation in U.S. history, a job-killing rule it is under no obligation to impose on the struggling economy.

There’s nothing reasonable or balanced about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten national air-quality standards for ozone emissions at this time. For one thing, it’s premature, coming a full two years before the EPA is scheduled to complete its own scientific study of ozone emissions in 2013. …

The New Editor with hypocrisy alert.

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog draws a simile between Indulgences sold by the medieval Church and the tax “indulgences” sold by the criminal class in Washington.

MICHAEL MUNGER, a professor of political science at Duke University, insightfully compares “tax expenditures” to the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences, which fomented the Reformation by sending Martin Luther into fit of righteous pique. Mr Munger reminds us that

‘ Indulgences were “get out of purgatory free!” cards. Of course, it was the church that had created the idea of purgatory in the first place. Then the church granted itself the power to release souls from purgatory (for a significant fee, of course). 

As Luther put it, in his Thesis No. 27, “as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out.” ‘

If high tax rates are a sort of purgatory (and who doubts it?), then tax credits are indeed akin to indulgences. Mr Munger writes: …

 Politico says the Navy has rescinded the Silver Star awarded to the man who vouched for John Kerry’s bravery. So when are they going to go get his Purple Hearts? 

Here’s a welcome change of pace. The NY Times reports the bizarre story of a jilted lover who framed his ex. Definitely a plot for Law and Order – Criminal Intent.

Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.

He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with “C.S.I.,” “Law & Order” and other television police dramas.

About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen. ..

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Thomas Sowell says it’s time to get rid of the debt ceiling.

… Regardless of what it is supposed to do, what the national debt-ceiling actually does is enable any administration to get all the political benefits of runaway spending for the benefit of their favorite constituencies — and then invite the opposition party to share the blame, by either raising the national debt ceiling, or by voting for unpopular cutbacks in spending or increases in taxes.

The Obama administration is a classic example. When all its skyrocketing spending bills were being rushed through Congress without even being read, the Democrats had such overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives that Republicans had all they could do to get a word in edgewise — even though their words had no chance of stopping, or even slowing down, the spending of trillions of dollars.

Now that the bill is coming due for all that spending and borrowing, Republicans are suddenly being invited in to share the blame for either raising the national debt ceiling or for whatever other unpopular measures will be legislated.

Many years ago, someone said, “If you didn’t invite me to the big take-off, don’t invite me to the crash landing.” This was Obama’s big spending spree, but “bipartisanship” requires Republicans to either split the bill or be blamed if the government shuts down or defaults. …

Robert Samuelson on the “crisis of the old order.”

We are witnessing “the crisis of the old order.” The phrase, coined by the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to describe the failure of unfettered capitalism in the late 1920s, also applies to the present, despite different circumstances. Everywhere, advanced nations face similar problems: overcommitted welfare states, aging populations, flagging economic expansion. These conditions define the global crisis and explain why it struck the United States, Europe and Japan simultaneously. We need to move beyond daily partisan fireworks to see this larger predicament.

The old order, constructed by most democracies after World War II, rested on three pillars. One was the welfare state. Government would protect the unemployed, aged, disabled and poor. Capitalism would be tamed. A second was faith in economic growth; this would raise everyone’s living standards while permitting income redistribution. Growth was ordained, because economists had learned enough from the 1930s to cure periodic recessions. Finally, global trade and finance served countries’ mutual interests.

All three pillars are now wobbling. To be sure, the financial crisis worsened matters, and each country’s situation is different. America’s welfare state is less generous than Germany’s. Greece’s crisis began because it had vastly underreported its budget deficit; Ireland’s stemmed from a burst housing bubble that led to a costly bank bailout. But these differences obscure large similarities. …

Jennifer Rubin reviews Monday’s speeches.

President Obama’s decision to give a speech Monday was proof that things have not gone well for him. He threw (another) tantrum in the Friday news conference, he turned down a bipartisan deal presented to him Sunday and thereby took himself out of the limelight. Tonight’s speech was not intended to “solve” the impasse but to make sure Obama would get credit if a deal is struck and avoid blame if it is not.

The speech itself was part panic attack, part platitudes and a whole lot of class warfare (corporate jets! hedge fund managers!). …

… Then it was House Speaker John Boehner’s turn. He touted his small-business background and made clear that ordinary people don’t get to simply borrow more and more. He reminded us that Obama wanted a clean debt bill, but the House insisted on a new way of doing business. Then he recapped the president’s intransigence:

“What we told the president in January was this: the American people will not accept an increase in the debt limit without significant spending cuts and reforms.

And over the last six months, we’ve done our best to convince the president to partner with us to do something dramatic to change the fiscal trajectory of our country. . .something that will boost confidence in our economy, renew a measure of faith in our government, and help small businesses get back on track.” …

More from Jonathan Tobin.

President Obama’s speech tonight on the debt ceiling debate was not an attempt to bridge the gap between his position and that of his congressional opponents. By repeating the rhetoric he has been using all through this debate by attempting to demonize Republicans, it was clear his goal was not to make a deal but to exacerbate a situation he has already described as a crisis. …

 … In response, House Speaker John Boehner’s short speech simply indicated the Republicans understand Obama is either bluffing or actually wants a default because he believes it is in his political interest. …

And Ed Morrissey weighs in.

For the fifth time in three weeks, Barack Obama seized the bully pulpit in the debt-ceiling debate, this time using a prime-time speech instead of a press conference to do so.  And for the fifth time in three weeks, Obama literally did nothing with it except to utter the same platitudes and clichés as he did on the previous four occasions.  Obama offered no solutions, no specifics for a solution, and spent 15 minutes avoiding both.

And at least one media outlet noticed:

“President Barack Obama elbowed his way back into the debt ceiling debate Monday night, three days after Republicans shoved him out, but he offered no hint of a solution to the escalating political and financial crisis.”

Politico also got the impression that Obama was delivering a campaign speech rather than a solution to a crisis that Obama himself has hyped considerably: …

Furthermore, a NY Times blog calls BS on the administration’s Chicken Little strategy.

… The administration may have made a strategic mistake in warning too soon that the market would react negatively. It ultimately undercuts the government’s negotiating position because the doomsday scenario has not played out, even though the deadline is fast approaching.

“They have lost all credibility,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “It’s so typical of the way Treasury and the Fed treat everything — it is always to warn that Armageddon is coming.”

The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, is among those who may have miscalculated.

He has consistently held out Aug. 2 as the cutoff date for lawmakers to reach a compromise. After that, Mr. Geithner has said the government might not be able to continue sending out Social Security checks or Medicare payments. “On Aug. 2, we’re left running on fumes,” he told the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

He told me back in May that he was expecting to reach a deal by mid-July, way ahead of the final deadline. “Why would you want to experiment? In July, you’d want this done.”

But increasingly, the market seems to believe it was a false deadline. …

Mona Charen columns on some Dem BS about the Clinton economy.

As the fight continues over whether to raise taxes to ratify the additional $3.6 trillion President Obama and the Democrats have spent in just 27 months, you hear the same refrain from Democrats — we must raise taxes to the levels of the Clinton administration. This is always followed by flights of exaggeration portraying the Clinton-era economic record as “The Greatest Peacetime Expansion in American History,” or in world history, or in galactic history.

They seem to think it was the tax hikes that produced the prosperity.

The economy did expand during the Clinton presidency — though not quite as much as it had during the Reagan years. Reagan’s presidency required a steep recession to undo the mistakes of his predecessors. Despite that, his overall record was astounding. Real GDP increased 32 percent under Reagan (it was 31 percent under Clinton). Disposable income grew 22.7 percent under Reagan versus 20.4 percent under Clinton. Obviously, both look luxurious from this remove.

Reagan overcame serious economic woes, including raging inflation and interest rates. Clinton was more fortunate in his timing. …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night jokes.

Conan: The American space shuttle program is over after 30 years. NASA will now have to pay Russia $63 million to fly every U.S. astronaut into space. Another $15 million if he checks a bag.

Leno: Your federal government at work: The FAA has ordered the owner-pilot of his own one-helicopter company to give himself a surprise random drug test.

Leno: Daniel Craig is here tonight to talk about Cowboys & Aliens. No, not California farming. It’s his new movie called ‘Cowboys & Aliens.’

Fallon: Philadelphia has a new plan to ticket pedestrians texting without looking as they walk. As opposed to the previous punishment -– lampposts.

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First up, BBC News published a translation of the text messages between a mother and her 16 year-old daughter who was on Utoeya island in Norway where last week’s shooting took place.

Julie

We are hiding in the rocks along the coast.

Mum

Good! Should I ask your grandfather to come down and pick you up when everything is safe again? You have the option.

Julie

Yes.

Mum

We will contact Grandpa immediately.

Julie

I love you even if I still misbehave from time to time.  

And I’m not panicking even if I’m shit scared.  

Mum

I know that my darling. We love you too very much. Do you still hear shooting? …

Quoting from The Federalist by Edward Banfield, Peter Wehner essays on political mess in Washington and counsels acceptance of it.

…”it is the nature of men to have divergent opinions and interests, and to subordinate the common good to their private and particular interests… the harsh fact is that American society — any society– is not a band of brothers but a set of competitors. Man is a creature more of passion than of reason; he is vain, avaricious, shortsighted.”

The founders believed the common good existed and was worth aspiring to. They conceded some people  of “superlative virtue” can be expected to set aside their interests for the interest of others. But above all they knew this: the nature of man — “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good” — ensured factional struggles were inevitable.

That is what we see played out in politics, and in life, every day. Sometimes it’s more apparent (and more frustrating) than others. But the genius of the founders is that they built a system of government based on what human beings are rather than what we wish them to be. They also understood, in their more enlightened moments at least, the human failures they saw in others also resided in themselves, that few of us are unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.

Every day we’re reminded the American system of government is far from perfect. But so, of course, are we.

Clive Crook, writing London’s Financial Times, has a fair minded liberal’s view of recent Washington events.

When I moved from Britain in 2005 to live and work in the US, I was a born-again admirer of the American people, the American project and the American system of government. I had no patience with the view that the country was entering its twilight years. I was a militant anti-declinist.

Six years on, I am having second thoughts. I am not quite ready to defect, but like any fair-minded observer I am impressed by Washington’s determination to prove the pessimists right.

You could say that the debt-ceiling impasse, which prompts such thoughts, is out of the ordinary and no basis for prediction. It is an extreme case, admittedly: regardless of how it is resolved, Congress and the White House have lately taken fiscal irresponsibility to a new level. In another way, though, the breakdown is representative. Dysfunction in Washington is now so acute that many areas of policymaking have all but shut down.

We anti-declinists have always had two main answers to this kind of gloom. The first is that the underlying strengths of the US economy have nothing to do with Washington, and remain undimmed. The second is that the country’s founders deliberately built dysfunction into the constitution, because they wanted to keep the federal government in check. …

Toby Harnden has a Brit’s view of the GOP race.

The debate convulsing Washington right now is how to prevent the United States defaulting on its national debt while also forcing President Barack Obama to slash spending and Republicans to abandon their fetish of resisting any increase in tax revenues.

It’s a big, important battle involving a clash of political philosophies and the grinding practicality of running a country in economic crisis when there are no easy answers that will satisfy everyone or be guaranteed to work.

Despite what’s at stake in the debt ceiling negotiations, however, the Republican presidential candidates have been missing in action, preferring to stick to vapid talking points or, in the case of the frontrunner Mitt Romney, choosing not to comment at all on the different proposals being offered. …

… To the dismay of many activists, most of the current crop of Republican candidates are acting as if they’re from Venus rather than Mars. …

… Those yearning for an alpha male to join the Republican race look like their wish will be granted. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whose tirades against voters have become YouTube classics, seems determined to hold on until 2016.

But Governor Rick Perry of Texas is poised to throw his Stetson into the ring this summer. It was Perry who, last year, was out jogging when he spotted a coyote bearing down on his daughter’s Labrador. Taking out his.380 Ruger pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets, Perry shot the coyote dead. …

… It remains to be seen whether, four years after George W. Bush left office, Americans are ready for another swaggering Texan in the White House.

But for Republicans who see a vulnerable Obama and doubt whether a safety-first opponent can beat him, an injection of testosterone into the 2012 race can’t come soon enough.

For those who think the GOP is losing in the debt limit debate, Mark Tapscott has soothing words.

Republicans have gained a 10 point lead over Democrats in Rasmussen Reports latest national survey on who the public most trusts to deal effectively with economic issues.

The 10 point lead is the widest margin held by either party in months and has opened up in recent weeks as President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have become the central players in the debate over how to deal with the approaching debt-ceiling crisis. …

While admitting to having enough of the Palin drama, Pickerhead notes that woman sure can turn a phrase. Ed Morrissey on Sarah’s latest stroke of brilliance.

John Boehner’s (momentary) dismissal of Barack Obama as a partner in deficit-reduction talks has the effect of making him a “lame duck president,” Sarah Palin wrote last night on her SarahPAC website — and she’s pretty happy about it, too.  Palin praises the leadership of the Republican caucus for sticking to their promises, and then reminds readers about the history of this President and the deficit: …

We started with Peter Wehner and now we’re about to close with him as he comments on the “petulant and inept president.”

The negotiations about raising the debt ceiling remain extremely fluid, and it’s still too early to draw any definitive conclusions at this stage. But just a week away from the August 2 deadline, a few things do seem clear.

The first is the president’s angry and narcissistic press conference on Friday badly damaged the president, even with those, like David Brooks, who have  been sympathetic to Obama’s substantive position.

It’s been clear to some of us for a while that Barack Obama is a man of uncommon self-admiration, quite thin-skinned, and increasingly consumed by his grievances. Obama has masked these traits pretty well so far, but on Friday his mask slipped more than it ever has. And that is bound to hurt him.

Second, Democrats on Capitol Hill are rapidly losing confidence in the president’s competence as a negotiator. Obama’s conduct during the debt ceiling  negotiations – from his flip-flops to his irrelevant deadlines to his backtracking on his agreements with various parties – has been so erratic and uneven that  his own party has decided the best hope of reaching an agreement is to sideline him. …

Jeff Jacoby takes on the population idiots.

… Has there ever been a more persistent and popular superstition than the idea that having more kids is a bad thing, or that “overpopulation’’ causes hunger, misery, and hopelessness? In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus warned that human population growth must inevitably outstrip the food supply; to prevent mass starvation, he suggested, “we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction,’’ such as encouraging the spread of disease among the poor. In the 20th century, Paul Ehrlich wrote bestsellers with titles like “The Population Bomb,’’ in which he described the surging number of humans in the world as a “cancer’’ that would have to be excised through “brutal and heartless decisions.’’ (His list included sterilization, abortion, and steep tax rates on families with children.)

Just last month, Thomas Friedman avowed in his New York Times column that “The Earth Is Full,’’ and that “we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished.’’

For more than 200 years the population alarmists have been predicting the worst, and for more than 200 years their predictions have failed to come true. As the number of men, women, and children in the world has skyrocketed – from fewer than 1 billion when Malthus lived to nearly 7 billion today – so has the average standard of living. Poverty, disease, and hunger have not been eradicated, of course, and there are many people in dire need of help. But on the whole human beings are living longer, healthier, cleaner, richer, better-educated, more productive, and more comfortable lives than ever before. …

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Fred Barnes notes Obama’s reneges in the trade deals.

The path to ratification by Congress was greased after President Obama renegotiated trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Obama would supply Democratic votes.  Republicans were already on board, President Bush having put together the treaties in the first place. It had the look of a done deal.

It wasn’t. In May, the White House suddenly insisted the treaties be accompanied by roughly $1 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA as it’s known in Washington. Organized labor was demanding TAA funds be set aside for workers whose jobs might be lost as a result of the treaties. Obama took up the cause. 

That wasn’t the last of labor’s demands. A month ago, labor officials said TAA had to be part of the trade agreements themselves. Again, Obama went along. This was unprecedented. Spending legislation had never been included in trade bills. Republican support instantly collapsed. It took the intervention of Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and a few other Republicans to get things back on track by stripping TAA from the treaties. Separate votes on the three pacts and TAA are likely in September. But don’t hold your breath.

There’s a pattern here that’s become emblematic of the Obama presidency. …

David Harsanyi brings us back to the debt limit thingy.

When a reporter recently asked President Barack Obama about the House Republican efforts to pass the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011, Obama explained that politicians “don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs. The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs — and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices.”

Dear God, we’re doomed.

Remember that the president’s last tangible stab at a “responsible choice” was a budget that would have added $9 trillion of debt over the next 10 years. This was months before he realized the debt ceiling debate and “economic Armageddon” could bring about political opportunity. The White House went on to call the bill, which trades a debt ceiling increase for a constitutional balanced-budget amendment and caps on spending, “extreme, radical and unprecedented.”

Considering nearly every state works with similar restrictions, it’s not exactly unprecedented. And if it’s “extreme, radical and unprecedented” to the administration, it undoubtedly makes plenty of fiscal sense. …

And Mark Steyn writes on the president’s plan.

… The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democratic Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Sen. Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody’s downgrading them.

Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional. …

Charles Krauthammer retails his favorite debt limit plan.

… What to do now? The House should immediately pass the Half-Trillion Plan, thereby putting something eminently reasonable on the table that the president will have to address with a serious counterproposal using actual numbers. If the counterproposal is the G6, Republicans should accept Part One with its half-trillion dollars in cuts, consumer price index change and repeal of the CLASS Act, i.e., the part of the G6 that is enacted immediately and that is real. Accompany this with a dollar-for-dollar hike in the debt ceiling, yielding almost exactly the time envisioned in the G6 to work out grander spending and revenue changes — and defer any action on Part Two until precisely that time.

The Half-Trillion with or without the G6 Part One: ceiling raised, crisis deferred, cuts enacted and time granted to work out any Grand Compromise. You can’t get more reasonable than that.

Do it. And dare the president to veto it.

George Will gets in on the debate too.

Obama vaguely promises to “look at” savings from entitlements because “we need to find trillions in savings over the next decade.” But when McConnell learned that negotiations chaired by Vice President Biden had identified a risible $2 billion in 2012 discretionary spending cuts — a sum equal to a rounding error on the GM bailout — McConnell concluded that Obama’s frugality pantomime required a response that will define the 2012 election choice.

Obama’s rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

Events are validating the Tea Partyers’ arguments. Time is on their side — but not on America’s, unless the impediment to reform is removed in 16 months.

Jennifer Rubin thinks the adults in Congress (Who knew we’d ever write those words?) are going to find a way to make a deal. Then we’ll see what the petulant president will do.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was forced to take matters into his own hands. The White House meeting with President Obama on Saturday morning was brief and unproductive. The name of the game then became for congressional Democratic and Republican leaders to make a deal that would be ready to announce today.

The image of the president’s angry press conference on Friday made for a stark contrast with the bipartisan congressional efforts throughout Saturday afternoon. Even Obama’s most fawning admirers had to admit that he hadn’t improved his stature in the episode. (David Brooks observed, “I’ve never seen a presidential press conference with the president so angry in public. . . . But the president’s tone of being the only adult in Washington, everyone else is a child, that he’s going to summon people to the White House as if they are kindergartners, even if you agree on the substance, it’s kind of hard to go along with someone who is insulting you all the time.”)

So much for the White House. Now it’s time to make a deal. The Post reports: …