Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn juxtaposes the demise of the News of The World and the lack of accountability for the debacles in Atlanta Schools and the justice department. 

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.

Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.

The News Of The World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid-20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, …

Jennifer Rubin with background on the debt ceiling talks.

On Saturday afternoon a Capitol Hill source let it be known that “we’re hearing the White House is demanding major, unambiguous tax hikes. To get spending caps and entitlement tweaks, greater economic pain appears to be the White House’s asking price. It is increasingly likely that we aren’t going to see a ‘big’ deal if the White House doesn’t budge. [The]Speaker looks to be holding strong.”

And indeed, early Saturday night, Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement indicating: “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.” A senior House advisor told me that still left open the potential for a substantial deal with no tax hikes. “The White House says they’ll veto anything that doesn’t get us through 2012. And Boehner still says we’ve gotta cut more than we raise. So $2 trillion? $2.5?” …

Jonathan Tobin thinks the untrustworthy Dems was the biggest kink in the deal.

… since the deal is so complicated, doing it all at once was improbable if not impossible. And that meant that tax reform would have gone last. That meant trusting not only Obama but also House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to do help push it through after everything else was done. Given that the Democrats don’t believe in this vision and have partisan reasons for sabotaging a deal that would prevent them from ranting about evil Republicans throwing grandma over the cliff, the GOP had good reason to be distrustful.

Sooner or later, Congress will have to enact the sort of far reaching entitlement cuts and tax reform that Boehner wanted. It would have been better for the country if it had happened now rather than in the future. But the blame for this delay deserves to be pinned as much, if not more, on untrustworthy Democrats as on hard line Republicans.

Peter Wehner on the dismal jobs report.

The political class has already exhausted the adjectives describing today’s bleak/horrible/awful/God-awful/dismal/terrible/absolutely flat out terrible jobs report. The new data showed, among other things, the unemployment rate increasing to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent even as the labor force got smaller (by more than a quarter-of-a-million people). That is an amazing and alarming phenomenon, since it demonstrates that unemployment has gone up even as the pool of workers shrinks.

The real unemployment rate increased as well, from 15.8 percent to 16.2 percent. …

Robert Samuelson is on it too.

… It isn’t clear what happened. Standard explanations for the economy’s sluggish first half of 2011 cite three causes: bad weather (flooding in the Midwest); Japan’s earthquake, which depressed auto production by disrupting supply chains; and high oil prices, which sapped consumer buying power. But all this was factored into the June job forecasts.

The question now is whether the meager job creation heralds prolonged stagnation. Many economists have predicted a rebound in the second half of the year: Zandi expects the economy to grow at a 3.5 percent annual rate, up sharply from the estimated 1.9 percent for 2011′s first half; Gault is slightly below that. Both are sticking to their forecasts. They expect the negatives of the first half to reverse: lower gasoline prices will bolster consumer spending; restored supply chains will raise auto production; better weather will permit more construction spending.

But the bleak job market raises the specter of much worse. …

Investor’s Business Daily Editors want to know if now we can call the administration’s economic policy a failure.

With unemployment now at 9.2% and job growth at a standstill, is there anyone not blinded by ideology or rank partisanship who can’t see that Obama’s spend-and-regulate economic plan has been an utter failure?

When Obama was running for office, he likened himself to Ronald Reagan. Not because he liked Reagan’s policies — he despised them — but because he saw Reagan as a transformative figure worthy of emulation.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said during the campaign. He’s since talked endlessly about the need to “remake” the economy, and “do big things.”

Well, Obama’s been transformative all right. While Reagan rescued a country mired in hopelessness, stagflation and fear, Obama has managed, by reversing Rea-ganomics, to bring it all back again. …

Fred Barnes reacts to the president’s ideas on patent streamlining.

Streamlining our patent process? Yes, that was one of the remedies President Obama offered Friday in response to news the unemployment reached 9.2 percent in June and job growth was pitiful.

It raises once again this question: Does the president have any idea how a free market economy is supposed to work or how to fix it when it’s ailing? The answer, based on Obama’s remarks in recent months, is no and no.

The president said Americans “expect us to act on every single good idea that’s out there.” But he hasn’t acted on any of the ideas that might give the economy more breathing room and less intervention by Washington. But these ideas continue to pile up at his doorstep.

For instance, how about rolling back the wave of regulations his administration has imposed on the economy and job creators?  Nope, that idea’s not on his radar. How about delaying the implementation of his health care program that terrifies so many small businessmen? Sorry, that’s off the table. How about serious cuts in spending in areas other than defense? The very idea makes Obama nervous, even as he tries to negotiate an agreement on raising the debt limit. How about having government gobble up a smaller share of GDP, thus leaving the private sector more to work with. Forget it. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We open with some great news! James Pethokoukis posted on the debt ceiling negotiations early this morning. He claims Boehner walked from the administration’s deal. If true, it means there is a chance our country can someday get spending under control. It also means he acted contrary to constant exhortations from all the bien pensants (folks like David Brooks; more on that later today). Pickerhead had been pessimistic the GOP would have the strength to resist. Perhaps that was wrong. If so, we are going to want statues erected throughout the land celebrating the steadfast courage of John Boehner. 

So in the end, it was bit of a Ronald Reagan moment for John Boehner on Saturday. Just as the U.S. president walked away from a bad arms control agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, the House speaker passed on President Barack Obama’s mega-debt reduction deal in Washington.

In both case, the asking price was just too high. For Reagan, it was lethal limitations on his Strategic Defense Initiative. For Boehner, it was a trillion-dollar tax distraction from America’s true fiscal threat: spending run amok: “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes.”

A GOP congressional source was a bit less diplomatic, telling me Saturday afternoon via email:

“Their fierce insistence on higher taxes is beyond bizarre.” …

Krauthammer on the debt ceiling negotiations.

Here we go again. An approaching crisis. A looming deadline. Nervous markets. And then, from the miasma of gridlock, rises our president, calling upon those unruly congressional children to quit squabbling, stop kicking the can down the road and get serious about debt.

This from the man who:

1.? Ignored the debt problem for two years by kicking the can to a commission.

2.? Promptly ignored the commission’s December 2010 report.

3.? Delivered a State of the Union address in January that didn’t even mention the word “debt” until 35 minutes in.

4.? Delivered in February a budget so embarrassing — it actually increased the deficit — that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97 to 0.

5.? Took a budget mulligan with his April 13 debt-plan speech. Asked in Congress how this new “budget framework” would affect the actual federal budget, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf replied with a devastating “We don’t estimate speeches.” You can’t assign numbers to air.

President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.

My compliments. …

Jennifer Rubin watched the Rose Garden speech after the jobs disaster.

Following the release of the dreadful jobs numbers, President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning. However, it was entirely unclear why he was there or what his plan is for digging the economy out of the deep hole in which we find ourselves.

The speech, if you can call it that, seemed to be a disconnected collage of one-liners and excuses. …

Paul Greenberg says the Misery Index is back.

Remember the Misery Index? It tends to reappear whenever the economy exhibits a couple of unwelcome trends in unusual tandem: not just a high unemployment rate but more inflation, too. Talk about a double whammy.

Add those two figures together and you get the Misery Index. So if you combine the current 9.1 unemployment rate with the 3.6 inflation rate, the rate of misery in the American economy is 12.7. The country hasn’t seen that kind of number in almost 30 years.

The president indelibly associated with the Misery Index is Jimmy Carter, who made a talking point of it in the long-ago presidential election of 1976. He said the index was too darned high — it stood at a painful 13.6 percent back then. But by the time Mr. Carter ran for re-election as president in 1980, he had managed to raise it to almost 22 percent. And he would lose the White House to Ronald Reagan.

The Misery Index stayed under double digits from the early 1980s and the booming Reagan Years of the 1980s till the Great Recession struck in 2008. Now it’s moved into Jimmy Carter territory, and that’s not good news for Barack Obama. Or the country. …

Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media says the private jet industry is just the latest to hammered by this president.

So starting as a presidential candidate, Obama has:

Called for bankrupting the coal industry.

Raised gas prices by forcing domestic production to a crawl.

Demonized bankers and automatic teller machines.

Went to war against Fox News, talk radio, and Twitter user Kevin Eder.

Alienated Wall Street, which backed him in 2008 — and will probably do so again.

Nationalized the car industry.

Forced Chrysler to terminate 25 percent of its auto dealers.

Demonized Las Vegas.

Alinskyized the Chamber of Commerce.

Blocked Boeing from expanding into a Right to Work State.

Is busy transforming the insurance industry into the equivalent of quasi-government utilities.

Created an uncertain (to say the least) regulatory environment, making new hiring a challenging proposition.

And is now Alisnkyizing private planes, despite having temporary custody of the greatest “private” plane of all. …

Just in case there is anyone on earth who thinks David Brooks is a conservative, be aware he is the Dems favorite columnist this week. Glenn Thrush from Politico has the story.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is fast becoming the Democrats’ man of the hour, providing some of their favorite talking points of the week.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cited the writer’s column published Tuesday, headlined “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” that blasted congressional Republicans for being unwilling to accept a compromise on raising the debt ceiling. And House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, at his weekly briefing with reporters, distributed copies of the column, calling it his version of Oprah’s Book Club.

“Have you all read it?” Hoyer asked journalists, who mostly murmured yes. “God bless you all.” …

Guy Benson thinks Brooks needs a vacation. Pickerhead thinks Brooks has been out in the sun too long already.

As someone who (a) admires the intellect of faintly conservative-ish New York Times columnist David Brooks, and (b) is currently on vacation, I’d humbly submit that some R & R may also be in order for Mr. Brooks.  His new column on debt negotiations is lazy, is premised on a series of false assumptions, and — worst of all — relies on a string of strawmen that would make Brooks’ one-time political crush, Barack Obama, beam with pride.  Brooks has concluded that Republicans are the bad-faith, fanatical actors on the debt ceiling and casts Democrats as the sensible adults in the room.  Brooks’ column is so wrongheaded, it practically cries out for a thorough fisking — so away we go:
“Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.”
Democrats have “agreed not to raise” taxes, but they also insist on “revenue increases.”  How would that work, exactly?  Brooks may protest that Democrats say they won’t insist on rate hikes, but how does that square with President Obama’s vow to raise marginal income tax rates on millions of small businesses and families when the current tax deal expires?  And how does it jibe with the White House’s recent proposal to raise taxes by $600 Billion?  Perhaps Mr. Brooks will explain this impressive feat of fiscal and rhetorical magic in his next column. …

John Steele Gordon on the blindness of the NY Times.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was once giving a lecture in which he stated the earth circled the sun, held in the grip of gravity. He was interrupted by an elderly woman in the audience who told him that was nonsense, and the earth rode on the back of a giant tortoise.

“What does the tortoise stand on?” Russell asked.

“Very clever, young man,” she retorted, ”very clever indeed. But it’s turtles all the way down.”

 When it comes to explaining the current fiscal difficulties facing the country, for liberals and their principal mouthpiece, the New York Times editorial page, it’s the Bush tax cuts all the way down. …

The Economist reviews a book about the good and bad of internet personalization.

ELI PARISER is worried. Why? Call a friend in another city or a foreign country, and ask them to Google something at the same time as you. The results will be different, because Google takes your location, your past searches and many other factors into account when you type in a query. In other words, it personalises the results. As Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, once put it, “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean, and give back exactly what you want.” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, muses that someday it might be possible for people to ask Google which college they should apply for, or which book to read next.

This is only one example of internet personalisation. Mr Pariser, an internet activist best known as a leading light at MoveOn.org, a progressive online campaign group, sees this as a dangerous development. Netflix, Amazon and Pandora can predict with astonishing accuracy whether you will enjoy a particular film, book or album, and make appropriate recommendations. Facebook shows you updates from the friends you interact with the most, filtering out people with whom you have less in common. “My sense of unease crystallised when I noticed that my conservative friends had disappeared from my Facebook page,” Mr Pariser writes. The result is a “filter bubble”, which he defines as “a unique universe of information for each of us”, meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. “A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn,” Mr Pariser declares. He calls this “invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas”. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

A Corner Post on the dedication of Reagan’s statue in London.

Intertwined American and British flags normally would seem an odd choice to celebrate Independence Day, but they waved at Grosvenor Square in London in this July 4 under special circumstances: the dedication of a statue of Ronald Reagan commemorating the centennial of his birth on the grounds of the American embassy. Comparable ceremonies abroad over the last week honored Reagan, included a Mass of thanksgiving in Krakow; another statue unveiling in Budapest; and the renaming for Reagan of the street in front of the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Prague.

The embrace of President Reagan’s memory 100 years after his birth was hardly predictable in his time. In a 1976 episode of All in the Family, Archie Bunker’s revelation that he had cast a write-in vote for Reagan for president was a laugh line. During the first two weeks of his presidency, Reagan bluntly condemned the Soviet government as amoral, and the Washington Post in turn criticized his supposedly simplistic “good-vs.-evil approach” to the Kremlin. …

Speaking of less capable presidents, Reuters’ James Pethokoukis thinks Obama has made things worse.

The Republican charge is a body shot aimed right at the belly of President Barack Obama’s re-election effort: He made it worse.

No, not that White House efforts at boosting the American economy and creating jobs and “winning the future” were merely inefficient or wasteful, which they certainly were. Even Obama finally seems to understand that. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” he joked lamely at a meeting of his jobs council.

Rather, that the product of all the administration’s stimulating and regulating is an economy that’s in significantly worse competitive and productive shape than when Obama took the oath in January 2009. He was dealt a bad hand, to be sure – and then proceeded to play it badly. …

… Elections have results. So do bad policies. Obama’s choices on taxing and spending and regulating, sorry to say, seem to have made things worse.

Pethokoukis gives us a graphic illustration of the results of the administration’s foolishness. This is a graph of the employment rate recovering from recessions since the 1960′s.

Peter Wehner says those bad policies have human consequences.

According to the Department of Labor, a smaller share of 16-19-year-olds are working than at any time since records began to be kept in 1948. Less than one-quarter of teens (24 percent) have jobs, compared to 42 percent in the summer of 2001. And in a story in the Wall Street Journal, we read this:

“Two years ago, officials said, the worst recession since the Great Depression ended. The stumbling recovery has also proven to be the worst since the economic disaster of the 1930s. Across a wide range of measures—employment growth, unemployment levels, bank lending, economic output, income growth, home prices and household expectations for financial well-being—the economy’s improvement since the recession’s end in June 2009 has been the worst, or one of the worst, since the government started tracking these trends after World War II.”

This merely confirms what those of us at CONTENTIONS have been writing about for many months now. Still, those nine words about the recovery — “the worst since the economic disaster of the 1930s” — are arresting. And underneath the data are countless human lives that are being disrupted, traumatized, and in some cases, ruined. …

And George Will wonders who the GOP will run against “Alibi Ike?”

The Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee will run against Alibi Ike. Lardner, a Chicago sportswriter, created that character (“His right name was Frank X. Farrell, and I guess the X stood for ‘Excuse me.’?”), who resembles Chicagoan Barack Obama. After blaming his predecessor for this and that, and after firing all the arrows in liberalism’s quiver — the stimulus, cash for clunkers, etc. — Obama seems poised to blame the recovery’s anemia on Republican resistance to simultaneously raising the debt ceiling and taxes.

So the Republican nominee’s campaign theme can already be written. In 1960, candidate John Kennedy’s theme was: “We can do better.” In 2012, the Republican candidate should say “Is this the best we can do?”

In the contest to determine who will wield those words, there have been three important recent developments: …

A Corner discussion about the well credentialed takes place between Michael Walsh and Mark Steyn. Here’s Mark;

… The “education” system is one of the biggest structural deformities in America today. It leads to later workforce participation and later family formation, both of which factor into our existentially catastrophic entitlement liabilities. And yet Obama wants every American child to go to college. What sort of “education” do you think they’ll be getting once that happens? And what value do you think that sheepskin will hold in the wider world?

The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League – Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 per cent had “advanced degrees”. How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage – a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 per cent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane. …

Richard Epstein comments on presidential ignorance.

… Second, the president always seems to be making the wrong either/or choices. There is no connection whatsoever between the use of corporate jets and the awarding of scholarship money. The correct way to think about such a tradeoff is to ask this question: is allotting tax dollars to one type of venture preferable to allotting it to another?

The president’s failure to compare different expenditures matters, big time. During his press conference, Obama was asked about the ill-conceived decision of the National Labor Relations Board to chase after Boeing for opening a new plant in South Carolina. Naturally, the president played dumb on the question, saying that he did not know the facts and that the matter was properly before “a judge”—i.e. the National Labor Relations Board—to decide. But here is what he should have said if he had the courage to own up to his own decisions:

“Right now, Lafe Solomon, my acting General Counsel of the NLRB, has decided to chase after Boeing for the temerity of seeking to open up a new plant in South Carolina in order to escape the risk of union strikes back in Seattle. Economic downturns create hard political choices. I think that it is wise for me as your president to spend your hard-earned tax dollars harassing a company whose increased profits from doing business in South Carolina could actually increase tax revenues. We have to get our priorities right, and mine are simple. Stay true to my union supporters, even if going after Boeing means losing money that could be spent on funding scholarships that let poor kids to go to college or to make sure that the food supply is safe against E. Coli infections.”

Unfortunately, you will never hear this level of candor in any presidential press conference. …

Contentions’ Alana Goodman reports the Jewish vote is moving away from Obama.

There was a lot of attention given to a Gallup poll yesterday showing Jewish approval for President Obama has remained fairly steady at around 60 percent since the beginning of the year (though it has also dropped by 20 points since 2009). But another poll released yesterday, taken by conservative strategist Dick Morris, found a shockingly low 56 percent of Jewish Americans said they would vote to reelect Obama over a generic Republican candidate if the elections were held today.

Considering the fact 78 percent of Jewish voters cast a ballot for Obama in 2008, this seems like a staggering — and almost unbelievable — drop in support. But here’s one reason to take it seriously: presidential approval ratings often find more support for the president than generic match-ups. …

… A few final takeaways from both polls: Gallup’s was of 350 Jewish Americans, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percent. In comparison, Morris’ poll was of 1,000 Jewish voters, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent. Morris’ seems to have an edge here, which is certainly something to keep in mind as you compare both surveys.

John Tamny notes the results of tapping the oil reserves.

On Wednesday, June 22nd, the price of oil closed at $95.41. The following day President Obama announced to great fanfare the release of 30 million barrels of crude over the next 30 days from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with an eye on reducing oil’s price.

Mildly sentient minds with a basic sense of oil-price history knew it wouldn’t work, and sure enough, one week later – yesterday – oil closed at $95.25. As of today oil is trending down to $94/barrel, but this can be chalked up to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s looming resignation. As this piece will make abundantly clear, the price of oil is a dollar phenomenon, and with a weak dollar Treasury Secretary getting ready to depart, gold is down $19/ounce in concert with increased dollar strength, thus helping to explain oil’s slight weakness relative to yesterday. …

… Priced in gold, the most stable measure of value known to mankind, oil’s price has remained mostly the same over the last 40 years. An ounce of gold bought 15 barrels oil in 1971, 15 barrels in 1981, and it buys 15 barrels today. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The first three items today look at the prospects for our country. We start with Toby Harnden and the United States of Gloom.

Across America today, people will gather for barbecues in their backyards, parades through their towns and firework displays lighting up the night sky.

They’ll be celebrating Independence Day – the birthday of the United States and the 235th anniversary of shaking off the oppressive yoke of British rule.

On this day in 1776 a group of 13 colonies broke away to found a new nation free to govern itself as it saw fit, pledging that each citizen would have the unalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A nation, as Americans are apt to declare without equivocation, which became the greatest on the face of the earth.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, however, a country whose hallmark has always been a sense of irrepressible optimism is in the grip of unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt.

With the United States mired in three foreign wars, beaten down by an economy that shows few signs of emerging from deep recession and deeply disillusioned with President Barack Obama, his Republican challengers and Congress, the mood is dark.

The last comparable Fourth of July was probably in 1980, when there was a recession, skyrocketing petrol prices and an Iranian hostage crisis, with 53 Americans being held in Tehran.

Frank Luntz, perhaps America’s pre-eminent pollster, argues that his countrymen are much more downbeat now than in 1980. “The assumption with the Carter years was that it was a failure of the elites, not the system. We thought the people in charge screwed up. We didn’t blame ourselves.” Remarkably, many Americans think things will only get worse and the good times will never return. …

A columnist for the Financial Times says the problems here and in Europe are similar.

In Washington they are arguing about a debt ceiling; in Brussels they are staring into a debt abyss. But the basic problem is the same. Both the US and the European Union have public finances that are out of control and political systems that are too dysfunctional to fix the problem. America and Europe are in the same sinking boat.

The debt debates underway in the US and the EU are so inward-looking and overwrought that surprisingly few people are making the connection. Yet the links that make this a generalised crisis of the west should be obvious.

On both sides of the Atlantic, it is now clear that much of the economic growth of the pre-crisis years was driven by an unsustainable and dangerous boom in credit. In the US it was homeowners who were at the centre of the crisis; in Europe, it was entire countries like Greece and Italy that took advantage of low interest rates to borrow unsustainably.

The financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath dealt a blow to state finances, as public debts soared. In both Europe and the US this one-off shock is compounded by demographic pressures that are increasing budgetary pressures, as the baby-boomers begin to retire. …

An antidote to this pessimism comes from Walter Russell Mead as he appears in the Wall Street Journal. We have him here often from his blog. It is nice to have his work subjected to WSJ editors. 

It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The 21st century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers.

This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. Sure, America has big problems. Trillions of dollars in national debt and uncounted trillions more in off-the-books liabilities will give anyone pause. Rising powers are also challenging the international order even as our key Cold War allies sink deeper into decline.

But what is unique about the United States is not our problems. Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the 21st century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.

Geopolitically, the doomsayers tell us, China will soon challenge American leadership throughout the world. Perhaps. But to focus exclusively on China is to miss how U.S. interests intersect with Asian realities in ways that cement rather than challenge the U.S. position in world affairs.

Change of subject; we’ll spend some time on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn turnabout. Bret Stephens admits to his schadenfreude 

Almost from the beginning, there was something amiss in the case of People v. Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This was the very specific way in which the managing director of the International Monetary Fund was alleged to have forced himself upon a maid in his pricey Times Square Sofitel suite. More than a few people must have pondered the one-word question—really?—that might have cut short the prosecution’s case before it got rolling.

Then again, who would have dared ask this in print or on air? And who really wanted to, anyway?

Let me confess: I was pretty much delighted by the way L’Affaire DSK seemed to be playing out. When the news broke last Thursday that the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was falling apart—that his accuser was a serial liar, a prostitute according to the New York Post, with a $100,000 bank account and ambitions (caught on tape) to turn her supposed tragedy into a get-rich-quick scheme—my immediate reaction was: how disappointing.

Not that I ever took any joy in the thought that a presumably vulnerable woman had apparently been raped by a man with a reputation for promiscuous and predatory appetites.

But I did enjoy the thought of this mandarin of the tax-exemptocracy being pulled from the comfort of his first-class Air France seat and dispatched to Riker’s Island without regard to status or dignity. …

Victor Davis Hanson has his DSK thoughts.

… If the preponderance of evidence in the accuser’s past soon undermines her credibility to such an extent that her word cannot be used against Strauss-Kahn, then we will still be left with a controversy. It will simply be a matter, not of legality, but of Strauss-Kahn’s judgment, morality, and hypocrisy — as is usually the case in high-profile sexual scandals.

So, to recap: To prove his innocence, if the forensic evidence of a sex act turns up, Strauss-Kahn will either have to prove that a young maid he just met was quite willing, in ad hoc fashion in a few minutes between work, to have sex with an older, plump foreign stranger; or that he, in fact, paid money as he may have promised. Either way, I don’t see how that justifies the cries of vindication that we hear coming across from the Atlantic. And no need to mention, as feminists quite rightly remind us, that a past of prostitution, or sexual indiscretion, or some such skullduggery, does not ipsis factis, prove that in a moment of passion, sexual force was not used. 

So as these rumors continue to surface and are spun, we still await to learn whether DSK is guilty of a criminal act, or merely remains a fool and a hypocrite.

Andrew Malcolm has the best of late night humor

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

George Will takes up the book “Reckless Endangerment.”

… The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered.

Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more.

Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.

The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.” The book is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, “a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.”

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, “whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum.” …

History lesson from Democracy in America blog.

… Maybe next time Ms Bachmann discusses this issue, she can gives some credit to Jay, who, in addition to co-authoring The Federalist and serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, actually put an end to slavery in New York.

Or how about a shout-out to Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the final draft of the Constitution? That ought to be a pretty impressive credential to any self-described “constitutional conservative”. Here’s what Morris said, to his eternal credit, on the idea of counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining representation in the House:

“Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves that cover the rice swamps of South Carolina….The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice.” …

Fourth of July message from Thomas Sowell.

… Some clever people today ask whether the United States has really been “exceptional.” You couldn’t be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document — the Constitution of the United States — by opening with the momentous words, “We the people…”

Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way — and that includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.

More than a hundred years ago, so-called “Progressives” began a campaign to undermine the Constitution’s strict limitations on government, which stood in the way of self-anointed political crusaders imposing their grand schemes on all the rest of us. That effort to discredit the Constitution continues to this day, and the arguments haven’t really changed much in a hundred years.

The cover story in the July 4th issue of Time magazine is a classic example of this arrogance. It asks of the Constitution: “Does it still matter?”  …

James Pethokoukis blogs on the president’s presser.

… Maybe the biggest economic issue of the year, other than the anemic recovery, is the National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing and its decision to open an aircraft assembly line in right-to-work South Carolina. This de facto attempt to impose wage controls on one of America’s largest exporters by limiting where it can do business is a dagger aimed at the heart of the American free enterprise system. But here, sadly, is the president again leading from behind:

“Essentially, the NLRB made a finding that Boeing had not followed the law in making a decision to move a plant.  And it’s an independent agency.  It’s going before a judge.  So I don’t want to get into the details of the case.  I don’t know all the facts.  That’s going to be up to a judge to decide.”

Who knows, maybe the president just has something against jet airplanes,  akin to his apparent dislike of those job-killing ATMs. But this seems certain: Obamanomics took flight in 2009 as a purist Keynesian experiment in economic management from high above. The ultimate Dreamliner for Democrats. Now, two-and-a-half-year later, it’s begun its sputtering descent.

Even Evan Thomas of Obama is “sort of (a) God” has fallen out of Obama love. Ed Morrissey has the story.

… ‘On “Inside Washington,” host Gordon Peterson asked his panel to suggest a way to overcome the current impasse and get Congress and the White House moving on a budget deal. Thomas offered up a solution, but also expressed his frustration with Obama.

“Yeah, because it’s happened before – Obama has got to be President of the United States,” Thomas said. “He has to be two things. He has to make a public case of how bad is this, because he is not doing that. He’s not being honest about just how bad this is going to be — no, he was partisan. He was God [bleep] Democrat! He was just, you know – being a party guy. I applaud the energy but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. He has got to rise above that and then in private, in private – he’s got to make a deal.” …

Peter Wehner has more on the extraordinary press conference.

… In other words, the most memorable example Obama used in his press conference – the need to eliminate a tax loophole for corporate jets – is comparable to trying to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. And it’s not simply that Obama resorts to this bit of sophistry; it is that in the process he presents himself as the only adult in Washington, America’s intrepid truth teller, our modern-day Socrates.

His intellectual dishonesty and unparalleled self-image would be difficult enough to take separately. Together, it’s all a bit much. The good news is, in the end the truth will out. And I’m betting regardless of how many false statements the president makes, regardless of how many straw men he trots out, he cannot escape the bitter fruits of his policies. In 2008, Obama relied on promises of what he would do. In 2012, he will have to rely on deeds he has done. That will make all the difference.

Events have unmasked Obama. At this juncture it looks as if the president is likely to lose his re-election bid. It’s a shame he is besmirching his public character in the process.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Dennis Prager has an idea for a Fourth of July Seder. The importance of the Seder can be learned here.

Four years ago, I wrote a column titled “America Needs a July Fourth Seder.” In it I explained that “national memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies.” Many readers and listeners to my radio show responded by creating their own rituals to make the day far more meaningful than watching fireworks and eating hot dogs.

I now present a simple ten-minute ceremony that every American can easily use on July Fourth. It is a product of the Internet-based Prager University that I founded nearly two years ago. We call it the Fourth of July Declaration and here it is. (A paginated and printable version can be downloaded here.)

It begins with a note to the individual leading the ritual, the “host.”

NOTE TO HOST
We hope this day finds you, your family, and your friends in good health, enjoying another glorious Fourth together. We all love barbecues, parties, and fireworks, but if that’s all the Fourth of July is about, the day has lost its meaning and we lose a vital connection to our American past.

Welcome to our Fourth of July Declaration!  . . .

And, Andrew Malcolm provides the text of the Declaration of Independence.

. . . When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. . . .

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn says there is no independence day for an America that is broke.

… “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ – i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.” …

… Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that’s different! He’s in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Virginia. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That’s 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats – the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it’s ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America’s debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry. …

… The president has a point about “tax breaks”. We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies – equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued – what is it now? – over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.  That’s all, folks!

National Review finds a Greek conservative blogger who understands what went wrong in his country – they didn’t have a Tea Party.

Thirty years ago this fall, on October 18, 1981, a charismatic academic with rather limited government experience and with a one-word slogan, “Change,” was elected prime minister of Greece. His name was Andreas Papandreou. Greeks may now wish that 30 years ago they had had a Tea Party movement. Things could have turned out differently.

Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP. Most advanced countries can manage that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio. By the end of Papandreou’s first term in office, that ratio had nearly doubled, with debt at 54.7 percent of GDP. By the end of his second term, the figure was in the mid 80s.

The 1980s in Greece were a time of dramatic expansion of government. Papandreou and his Socialist party created a new government-run health-care system, dramatically expanded employment in the public sector, nationalized failing companies, and increased government handouts of every shape and form. …

Robert Tracinski, of the Randian Intellectual Activist tries to explain the administration’s economic ignorance.

So I heard the latest economic bulletin from President Obama: that the whole problem with the economy and the federal budget is because of a tax break for corporate jets.

Really? We’re in economic and fiscal trouble because we haven’t raised a tiny little tax on corporate jets? Does the president have any concept of how irrelevant this is? The tax accounts for less than one tenth of one percent of the deficit reduction his negotiations with the Republican are supposed to achieve. Moreover, as he sneers derisively about the owners of corporate jets, does he have any concept of their value to the economy? As someone who has recently traveled on a commercial airliner, let me say that I certainly hope that the nation’s CEOs are not waiting around to be stuffed into coach class on Delta. I certainly hope that they have more efficient travel arrangements and more productive things to do with their time.

Thinking about this latest claim reminded me of the president’s previous economic brainwave: his claim that the reason for high unemployment is automation, as embodied by the new-fangled ATM machine. In response, the Wall Street Journal published a very thorough response explaining how increased productivity from automation creates wealth and therefore not only creates jobs but creates higher-paying jobs.

It was a nicely done piece, but when I was reading it I felt a vague sense of embarrassment. It was all correct and very clearly stated, with good concrete examples–but there was nothing there that I hadn’t read more than twenty years ago, in college. The embarrassment was not for me, but for Obama and his protectors in the mainstream media. How could they not know this already? How is it that they need this to be explained to them?

But then I realized that I went through very much an alternative history compared to Obama. …

Jonah Goldberg responds to the president’s knocks on corporate jets.

… “The idea is to create jobs now, and to make sure America stays on the cutting edge of manufacturing for years to come,” Obama declared.

The factory Obama visited, however, isn’t a generic aluminum plant. It is, according to Alcoa, the “premier aerospace supply plant and is today the hub of Alcoa’s $3 billion aerospace business.”

That includes the general aviation industry, which is centered in Wichita, Kan., where they make private jets “right here in America” as Obama likes to say. The upshot: Obama says that Alcoa must lose business among American customers to repeal a tax break Obama and the Democrats supported because Republicans want to balance the budget.

To be fair, Alcoa’s biggest customers aren’t manufacturers of private jets but the big manufacturers of commercial jets — you know, like Boeing. Well, that company is being told by Obama’s union-hack-packed National Labor Relations Board that it cannot open a new manufacturing plant in South Carolina, because to do so would offend Obama’s beloved unions in Washington State.

The point isn’t that there’s no merit to any of Obama’s positions (personally, I’m all for clearing the junk out of the tax code). The point is that at this point merit simply has nothing to do with the positions Obama takes.

Byron York says curbs on union power are a boon to Wisconsin schools.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen. …

Karl Rove says don’t let 2012 get personal.

… The GOP nominee should fiercely challenge Mr. Obama’s policies, actions and leadership using the president’s own words, but should stay away from questioning his motives, patriotism or character. He will do this to his GOP opponent to try to draw Republicans into the mud pit. They should avoid it.

It won’t be easy. Mr. Obama can’t win re-election by trumpeting his achievements. And he has decided against offering a bold agenda for a second term: That was evident in his State of the Union emphasis on high-speed rail, high-speed Internet and “countless” green jobs.

Instead, backed by a brutally efficient opposition research unit, the president will use focus-group tested lines of attack to disqualify the Republican nominee by questioning his or her values, intentions and intelligence.

Republicans should avoid giving him mistakes to pounce on and should stand up to this withering assault, always looking for ways to turn it back on Mr. Obama and his record. The GOP candidate must express disappointment and regret, not disgust and anger, especially in the debates. Ronald Reagan’s cheery retorts to Jimmy Carter’s often-petty attacks are a good model. Any day that isn’t a referendum on the Obama presidency should be considered wasted. …

Real Clear Markets has more on the politics of “fracking” for natural gas.

You’re Ian Urbina, a senior New York Times reporter. In February and March you write that hydraulic fracturing, a method of natural gas extraction, is contaminating Pennsylvania drinking water. Your accusations are subsequently disproved by government tests.

What do you write next?

You write a three-part series in the Times saying that shale gas production is “inherently unprofitable” and a giant Ponzi scheme, as well as loosely-regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

No matter that many emails you cite quoting industry managers, geologists, government officials, and market analysts are two years old. No matter that two of your supposedly objective sources are environmental activists. No matter that profit-maximizing companies are investing billions of dollars in shale gas.

Over the weekend and on Monday The New York Times ran a three-part series by Mr. Urbina on the bullish outlook for natural gas production in the United States and questioned whether some industry officials and analysts are too optimistic.

The article’s timing is significant. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation will soon issue a new Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement that will decide whether New York State will allow hydrofracturing within its borders in order to tap the Marcellus and Utica Shales.

Pennsylvania produces over 80 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year from the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that stretches into New York, giving the state an extra $1.7 billion in economic activity a year and 18,000 jobs.

One wonders whether the Times’s three-part series was meant to nudge the Empire State towards a negative decision. …

Click here for a Reason Magazine video on Fracking Facts.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

James Pethokoukis of Reuters explains why the GOP should hold firm and refuse to raise taxes.

It’s up to House Speaker John Boehner now. Democrats, the media and Wall Street will be pounding him to agree to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal. But now is no time for Republicans to go wobbly. Here’s why the GOP should stick to its guns until Aug. 2 – and beyond if necessary:

1. The last thing the economy needs is a tax hike. If the economy was too weak to absorb a tax hike last December – when the White House and Congress agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two more years –  its health is even worse today. The economy grew at just a 1.9 percent pace in the first quarter, and many economists now think it might grow just 2.0 percent in the second quarter – or even less. This should be a red flag to Washington. New 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.)

In other words, the economic recovery is sputtering with stall speed fast approaching. Now would be a terrible time to penalize investors and business, both big and small, with new taxes. …

Matthew Continetti, sitting in for Jennifer Rubin says Obama’s fixation on taxes in yesterday’s presser is an indication an agreement is a long way away.

… One of the reasons Obama’s arguments are unlikely to convince Americans is that there is a huge divide between elite and popular opinion streams on the economy. Since the 2008 financial crisis, elites have made promises to the public that have not been kept. Most people were never comfortable with the idea that the only way to preserve the financial system was by bailing out its worst members. The claim that the stimulus bill would keep unemployment at 8 percent or below was proven false long ago. The Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing program has not resulted in sustained recovery.

The idea that the way to solve America’s debt problem is by raising the debt ceiling is the most counterintuitive of them all. The public doesn’t buy it. In the experience of most Americans, the way to get out of debt is to cut up the credit cards and stop spending. They have not read Lord Keynes and doubt whether his prescriptions work in the real world. For them, thrift is not a “paradox” but a virtue. 

This intellectual divide between the president and the public is the reason his ratings on the economy are so poor. One suspects the gap is unbridgeable.

Peter Wehner on the press conference.

During his press conference today, President Obama repeatedly invoked the theme of leadership. “Leaders lead,” he helpfully informed. “Leaders rise to the occasion,” he added. They are willing to make “tough decisions,” to “do the tough things” and to “do the responsible thing.” By the end I was reminded by the line from Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” …

More on the conference from Yuval Levin.

“Call me naïve,” President Obama told reporters during his press conference yesterday, “but my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”

I’m not sure “naïve” is right, but terms like “frivolous” and “vain” did come to mind again and again throughout the press conference. The President came before reporters without any news to make. He seemed to want to vent a kind of unfocused rage at Congress for something—criticizing congressional leaders at various points for taking too many breaks, for failing to take up patent reforms and free trade legislation, and generally ignoring the fiscal crisis (all of which, we can only assume, were criticisms of Democratic leaders). And when he turned to Republicans, he argued that they were not making serious proposals in the debt-limit talks. They were failing to lead, he said repeatedly.

It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; …

 Andrew Malcolm catches the president talking about the economy.

… He admitted that things are not good for millions of Americans and said it was going to take even more time to do what his vice president promised would be happening 14 months ago.

How could the awful economic hole from you-know-who keep getting deeper 889 days after the guy fled back to Texas?

Obama stated:

“For a lot of Americans, those numbers don’t matter much if they’re still out of work, or if they have a job that doesn’t pay enough to make the mortgage or pay the bills. So we’ve got more work to do. And that work is going to take some time. The problems that we developed didn’t happen overnight. We’re not going to solve them overnight either. But we will solve them.”

Perhaps the plea for more time has something to do with the 497 (and dwindling) days left before Americans pass their final judgment on the Obama-Biden administration’s stewardship of everything, including the new war in Libya.

Will it be Democrat Jimmy Carter redux? Or will it be the first time in nearly two centuries that Americans reelect three presidents in a row? …

David Harsanyi says people are saying crazy things about population. 

For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.

“We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put,” explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, “there are too many people.” (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)

In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman asked: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we’ve learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.

Though, admittedly, it’s difficult to ignore the charismatic pseudoscience of Al Gore. …

Here’s the promised profile of Randy Barnett.

Over three decades, law professor Randy E. Barnett’s libertarian scholarship on the Constitution’s original meaning and the proper balance between federal and state power brought him respect within academia but little notice beyond.

That began to change in 2009, as the Georgetown University scholar made the case that Congress exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce by including a requirement in the health care overhaul that everyone have insurance. Most constitutional scholars initially ridiculed Barnett’s argument against the individual mandate — that Congress cannot regulate or punish the “inactivity” of not buying something.

Few mock it anymore, now that two courts have adopted the same reasoning in ruling against the individual mandate’s constitutionality. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will hear an appeal to one of those rulings this week in Atlanta.

In less than two years, Barnett, 59, has accomplished what few law professors ever manage to do: make an arcane constitutional argument so compelling and clear that it becomes part of the national conversation.

But what makes Barnett unique is how his influence has extended beyond the elite circle of litigators fighting the health care law and into the grass roots. He has helped members of the tea party movement and supporters on Capitol Hill formulate a proposed constitutional amendment that would authorize the repeal of laws enacted by Congress to which two-thirds of the states object. While its chances of being adopted are slight, that effort, and his work against the health care law, has made Barnett an intellectual favorite of House Republicans.

Still, Barnett feels no compunction about taking the GOP caucus to task when he believes its members have overstepped the proper bounds of federal power. In a recent newspaper opinion piece, Barnett accused House Republicans of “fair-weather federalism” for supporting a bill that would limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor who doesn’t agree with Barnett’s legal arguments, says his efforts have to be seen as part of a broader push by conservatives and libertarians to change the way the public thinks about federal power.

“They want the public and the courts to rethink the assumptions of the activist state that came with the New Deal,” Balkin wrote last year on his blog, “Balkinization.” “Randy and his allies are trying to change people’s minds through op-eds, speeches, protests and litigation. They are trying to move things from ‘off the wall’ to ‘on the wall.’” …

NY Times reports on the problem of trash in the satellite belt.

One of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space-age litter orbiting Earth zipped uncomfortably close to the International Space Station on Tuesday.

The six crew members of the space station took refuge in their “lifeboats” — two Soyuz space capsules they would use to escape a crippled station — as the unidentified object hurtled past them at a speed of 29,000 miles per hour, missing the space station by only 1,100 feet. The episode took place at 8:08 a.m. Eastern time.

“We believe the probability that it would the hit the station was about 1 in 360,” said Lark Howorth, who leads the team at NASA that tracks the space station’s trajectory. NASA rules call for precautions when the risk of impact is greater than 1 in 10,000.

In the section of the station run by the United States, astronauts closed the hatches in case the debris — commonly known as space junk — crashed through, to limit the danger of explosive decompression. To prepare for a rapid departure, the clamps holding the Soyuz capsules to the station were released. …

James Delingpole says the science is settled, U. S. liberals are the “dumbest creatures on the planet.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Click pm WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

When he got to Washington the president sent his kids to a private school, but called a halt to the successful DC voucher program that assisted poor blacks looking for a quality education for their children. The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday about the return of the program, courtesy of John Boehner. That one bit of hypocrisy by Obama is how Pickerhead knew for sure he is a fraud. The balance of today’s Pickings is devoted to the manifest shortcomings of the kid president.

MOST OF THE PARENTS who showed up Saturday to find out more about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program could not care less about the politics or the polemics behind private school vouchers. What matters to them is arranging a decent education for their children. The excitement they brought to the task of choosing a good school for their sons and daughters should give pause to those who sought to deny them this opportunity.

D.C. parents, including many single mothers, streamed into the Renaissance Hotel for information about the federally funded program that this year will provide vouchers of up to $12,000 to children from low-income families to attend private schools. The scholarship program began in 2004 as part of a three-pronged approach to improve education in the District; additional resources also were funneled to traditional and charter public schools. When Democrats recaptured Congress, they barred the scholarship program from accepting new students, with the Obama administration a disappointing accomplice. The administration even rescinded scholarships that had been promised to 216 families in 2009. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), a strong supporter, used his clout to broker the program’s reauthorization as part of the deal to avert a federal shutdown.

Given the popularity of the program — evident in the hundreds of applicants as well as a recent Post poll showing more than two-thirds of D.C. residents (even higher numbers among African Americans) in support — there’s a strange disconnect in seeing such local leaders as Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) voice their opposition. They should hear Josette Hardy, her voice breaking, talk about wanting a better future — “including college” — for her 5-year-old daughter, Jamia. For Ms. Hardy, having lost out on lotteries for better-performing public schools, winning a scholarship is the only thing that will allow her daughter to escape the failing school in her Southeast neighborhood.

LaKia Smith, hoping to win a voucher for her 10-year-old son, said it best: “We should have as many choices as possible, not just the choices you choose to give us.”

Mark Steyn talks about the fiscal state of the union and how it won’t be cured by speeches.

The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise two trillion dollars in revenue every year, and then spend four trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the President did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next 12 years.

That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”

“No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. …

…The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” …

…In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending make-work projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “highly persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge.

In the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin discusses the budget battles and the latest CBO report.

…The Democratic Senate has not proposed a budget in either of the last two years. In February, President Obama offered a budget that would actually increase the deficit. Then in a speech in April he essentially retracted it, and offered in its place a vague and incoherent series of policy goals that left Democrats with no particular agenda. On June 23, at a hearing of the Budget Committee, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf was asked what his agency made of the proposals in that presidential address. “We don’t estimate speeches,” he said. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

Republicans have no way to force the Democrats to be more specific and to take the crisis seriously. But they are doing their best to use the fight over raising the government’s debt ceiling—a fight the Democrats cannot avoid—to compel some responsible action.

Until last week, that fight had been focused on negotiations led by Vice President Biden. Those talks certainly revealed something about the Democrats’ priorities: In the midst of a spending-driven debt explosion and a weak economy, Democrats in Washington want to raise taxes. But the negotiations also revealed the continuing unwillingness of the president to make specific proposals about how to reduce spending, reform entitlements, and bring the debt under control. On June 23, House majority leader Eric Cantor (who had represented House Republicans at the negotiations) decided he’d had enough, and left the talks in order to force the issue to a higher level and compel the president to get specific. …

In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Colin McNickle looks at several examples of the administration’s economic ignorance.

…Gasoline prices have been falling. Supplies have been and are expected to be relatively stable. And the Obama administration taps the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, designed to offset serious supply disruptions. That 30 million barrels — and 30 million more from the reserves of more than two dozen member countries of the International Energy Agency — will be dribbled into the supply chain over the next month.

The net positive economic effect? Pretty negligible. But the net negative effect of what really is a political stunt designed to slap what looks like a rich veneer onto a particle board economic record — could be lasting. The New York Times reports that the move was intended, in part, to send a message to market traders “that governments would react when they believed there was excessive speculation in oil markets.”

That would be those evil speculators whose work, in reality, promotes price stability.

As Fox Business News host John Stossel reminded in a column last month, “When (speculators) foresee a future oil shortage — that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future — speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there’s relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted.”

And this Mr. Obama wants to stop? …

Bloomberg columnist, William Cohan, writes on the administration’s treatment of Wall Street.

As we head into the 2012 presidential election cycle, the new, official Obama administration policy on Wall Street is crystalline: Hands off the bad guys. …

… The continuing free passes are immensely frustrating, especially when the evidence continues to pile up that lots of people at these firms knew very well as 2007 progressed that they were packaging lousy mortgages and selling them at par to investors. For instance, the SEC’s complaint against JPMorgan included an e-mail sent on Feb. 13, 2007, by a “salesperson” in JPMorgan’s investment bank who was working with Magnetar Capital, the hedge fund looking to short Squared, the synthetic CDO in question. “We all know,” the salesperson wrote, that Magnetar “wants to print as many deals as possible before everything completely falls apart.”

As the market began to crack, JPMorgan pushed potential investors very hard to buy Squared. On March 19, one employee wrote to the European sales force that “we really need your help on this one. This is a top priority from the top of the bank all the way down.” Three days later, another member of the deal team tried again to get the sales team hyped. “We are soooo pregnant with this deal, we need a wheel-barrel to move around,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Let’s schedule the cesarian, please!”

Needless to say, similar e-mails have been found in the files of bankers and traders along Wall Street and at the credit rating services, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Are we really expected to believe that such widespread questionable practices flourished without any of the corner-office folk knowing about it?

Make no mistake, Sheila Bair: those “higher up” on Wall Street knew very well what their firms were doing and simply chose to ignore it. After all, there was money to be made. (JPMorgan got paid $18.9 million to slap together Squared, and Goldman got paid $15 million for Abacus.) If that isn’t enough to make you lose your lunch — although not, of course, a $35,800 dinner — then the fact that Wall Street is going to get away with it all surely will.

Michael Barone thinks there’s a better comparison to Obama than Jimmy Carter. Barone points to Chauncey Gardiner, Peter Sellers’ character in the movie “Being There.”

…But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie “Being There.”

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.” “First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97-0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics. …

Michael Ledeen comments on some embarrassing presidential gaffes that would have greatly amused the Liberal Media if they’d been W’s.

Big Media doesn’t pay much attention to them, even though Obama makes an amazing number of errors in his public statements.  And I think it’s easy enough to understand why the BM largely ignores them:  to report them all would totally undermine the image of the president to which a surprising number of “reporters” and pundits are wedded:  that of an unusually intelligent and well educated man.

Yet someone who tells a crowd in Vienna that his “Austrian” isn’t very good, who tells Marines that he’s pleased to speak to the “Marine Corpse,” and who, just today, said he’d given the Medal of Honor to a survivor from the 10th Mountain Division, when in fact the award was given posthumously, doesn’t fit my definition of a brilliant and cultured man.

…And these people think they’re the smart guys, and we’re the dummies, even though we know that German is spoken in Vienna, and many of us would be mortified to make a glaring error about an American hero.

The gaffes are important.  They tell us a lot about the nature of our leaders, and it’s not good news.  But it is news…even though it’s not reported as often as it should be, or with the sort of concern the gaffes deserve.

Toby Harnden has more thoughts on Obama confusing two Medal of Honor recipients, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…The Medal of Honor is the highest United States award for valour. It’s the equivalent of the Victoria Cross. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, just eight have been awarded. Three of them have been awarded by Obama. The names of recipients are seared on the hearts of many, many Americans.

To mix up SSG Giunta and SFC Monti was just awful and it suggests a relaxed attitude towards American heroes that has been evident on previous occasions. Note that rather than referring to SFC Monti by his rank, Obama said just “Jared Monti”. Servicemen and women earn their ranks and deserve to be addressed by them. …

…All this suggests that Obama doesn’t really understand or fully appreciate the military, its culture and its traditions. I don’t think for a moment that he deliberately wants to disrespect Medal of Honor winners or American troops. It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. But sometimes being casual about something solemn and serious does amount to disrespect. A good first step towards putting this right would be to apologise to the family of SFC Monti and to SSG Guinta.

UPDATE: According to ABC: “On his Facebook page this evening, Monti’s father, Paul, posted: “FYI- President Barack Obama telephoned me personally this afternoon to apologise for his error in his speech to the 10th mountain division re: Jared’s medal ceremony. Apology accepted.”

Pundit and Pundette comment on the First Lady’s inappropriate attire at a posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony.

You might think a posthumous Medal of Honor award ceremony would be a somber occasion, but not everyone would agree with you. Either this is an especially skillful photo shop effort or Michelle Obama has no clue whatsoever about the nature of this event. U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti’s parents received the award for him. I hope they didn’t notice the first lady’s stunningly inappropriate dress, but that’s unlikely.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Randy Barnett, law prof at Georgetown, who will be profiled in Thursday’s Pickings has a Volokh post today on the organized campaign against Supreme Court justices.

It has been clear for some time now that activists have moved from impugning the character of conservative Supreme Court nominees to delegitimating them as sitting justices. Curt Levey has an interesting article describing these tactics and the possible motives of the attackers: Ganging Up on Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Alito. Here is how the article begins:

“President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address featured an unprecedented scolding of the conservative Supreme Court justices, seated before him, for their Citizens United campaign finance ruling. It signaled a dangerous escalation in the left’s politicization of the courts and “set the tone,” says Politico, for this year’s “aggressive — and, at times, personal — attack on the… impartiality and ethics of Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and, to a lesser extent, Samuel Alito.”

The attack is being led by left-wing activist groups, talking heads, and a group of liberal congressmen. It is born of unhappiness about the Court’s recent and prospective decisions impacting the Obama agenda, as well as paranoia about a corporate cash-fueled, vast right-wing conspiracy headed by the Koch brothers. And it is maintained by cobbling together tenuous suggestions of conflicts and misconduct involving Scalia, Thomas, and Alito in the hopes of creating an ethical cloud. …”

Didn’t think Liberals could fight any dirtier? Curt Levey writes about the attacks against conservative Supreme Court Justices, in the American Spectator.

…liberals hope their attacks on the conservative justices will ensure that the justices are intimidated and the public is suspicious when the most controversial aspects of Obama’s agenda — Obamacare, the attack on Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown, and the EPA’s attempted end-run around congressional resistance to cap and trade — reach the Supreme Court.

…The bottom line is that the Supreme Court’s vote on the constitutionality of Obamacare is likely to be very close, so liberals need Kagan’s vote and will fight hard against any pressure for her recusal. Are the attacks on the conservative justices the beginning of that fight? Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey thinks so:

“The purpose of this isn’t really to pressure Thomas into a recusal, at which Thomas is almost certain to issue his trademark booming laugh, but to pre-empt the recusal argument for Elena Kagan.”

…TO BE FULLY understood, the ethics attacks must be seen in a historical context. It is said that “Liars think everyone lies, and thieves think everyone steals.” Thus, it should come as no surprise that the ethics allegations — essentially, charges that the conservative justices are beholden to political interests — comes on the heels of the left’s decades-long endeavor to politicize the courts. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors criticize Secretary Geithner for wanting to pay for the federal spending spree by increasing taxes on small businesses.

The secretary of the Treasury says taxes must be raised on small business so the federal government can stay big. With that breathtaking statement, he helpfully mapped out the key difference between the parties.

…”If you don’t touch revenues,” Geithner said, “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”…

Even more appalling is the fact Geithner didn’t back off his position when Ellmers told him that 64% of new jobs in this country are created by small businesses. In fact, he acknowledged that she is correct. …

In the WSJ, Stephen Moore looks at the recovery that isn’t.

…In a report entitled “Unchartered Depths,” the Committee finds that “employment is now 5.0% below what it was at the start of the recession, 38 months ago. This compares to an average rise in employment of 3.7% over the same period in prior post-WWII recessions.”

On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions.

The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, “this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from.” In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground. …

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the massive wealth redistribution program called the Department of Agriculture.

The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead it is a vast, self-perpetuating, postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation’s net farm income this year.

In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished — comprising now only about 1% of the American population.

Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the U.S. to provide it everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Somebody should explain that good news to the Department of Agriculture: This year it will give a record $20 billion in various crop “supports” to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10% receiving over 70% of all the redistributive payouts. If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the Department of Agriculture borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them? …

Joel Kotkin notes the growth of the Gulf Region.

For most of the nation’s history, the Atlantic region — primarily New York City — has dominated the nation’s trade. In the last few decades of the 20th Century, the Pacific, led by Los Angeles and Long Beach, gained prominence. Now we may be about to see the ascendancy of a third coast: the Gulf, led primarily by Houston but including New Orleans and a host of smaller ports across the regions.

The 600,000 square mile Gulf region has long been derided for its humid climate, conservative political traditions and vulnerability to natural disasters. Yet despite these factors, the Gulf is destined to emerge as the most economically vibrant of our three coasts. In Forbes’ rankings of the fastest-growing job markets in the country, six Gulf cities made the top 50: Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville, in Texas; New Orleans; and Gulfport-Biloxi and Pascagoula, in Mississippi. In contrast, just one Pacific port, Anchorage, Alaska, and one small Atlantic port, Portsmouth, N.H., made the cut.

This reflects a long-term shift of money, power and jobs away from both the North Atlantic and the Pacific to the cities of the Gulf. The Port of Houston, for example, enjoyed a 28.1% jump in foreign trade this year, and trade at Louisiana’s main ports also reached records levels.

This growth stems from a host of factors ranging from politics, demographics and energy to emerging trade patterns and new technologies. One potential game-changer is the scheduled 2014 $5.25 billion widening of the Panama Canal, which will allow the passage to accommodate ships carrying twice as much cargo as they are able to carry currently. …