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Nicole Gelinas tracks what went wrong causing the financial crisis in a long piece in City Journal in which she reviews 10 books on the credsis.

In January 2007, four small-time fund managers with few Wall Street connections invited themselves to a Las Vegas conference of players in the mortgage-bond business. The interlopers’ mission: to see if they were wrong in betting against subprime mortgage securities. They found a money manager who couldn’t care less if his clients lost everything on mortgage-related collateralized debt obligations (CDOs): he made money on quantity, not quality. They found a Bear Stearns CDO salesman more interested in playing cowboy at a shooting range than in discussing the housing market. They found ratings analysts utterly indifferent to their crucial jobs—assessing the risk of trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-related securities. And they learned about some of the average people who had taken out so many mortgages, including a stripper who was juggling five home-equity loans, all dependent on ever-rising home prices.

The four men went home surer than ever that “this is a fictitious Ponzi scheme,” as one of them told journalist Michael Lewis, who recounts the story in his gripping new book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. “Convinced that the entire financial system had lost its mind,” they ramped up their bets. One of the men told his mother that America risked “the end of democratic capitalism”; she suggested that he take an antidepressant. But the four were right, of course, and once enough investors agreed with them, the housing and financial bubbles burst and drove the economy into a deep contraction. …

Once and awhile we slap around Trent Lott, our poster boy for unprincipled Republicans. This weekend he showed us why. Club for Growth has the story.

… In Sunday’s Post, Lott said of 2011’s likely incoming Tea Party-friendly freshmen, “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples … As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”  According to OpenSecrets.org, Lott is currently a registered lobbyist for corporations that supported the 2008 Wall Street bailouts, the 2009 stimulus, the cap-and-trade energy tax, and the financial regulatory reform bill.

What’s it like in Trent Lott’s Washington? Well, we don’t know if he got one, but 30 Senators and staffers got sweetheart loans from Countrywide. WSJ has the story.

U.S. senators or Senate employees received 30 loans—far more than had previously been known—under a controversial lending program at Countrywide Financial Corp. that provided cut-rate terms to favored borrowers.

The information is contained in a letter sent to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics by Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), who has been spearheading the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation into Countrywide’s so-called VIP mortgage program.

No specific loan recipients were named in the letter. But Mr. Issa’s letter said borrowers on a dozen loans listed their place of employment as the office of “Senator Robert Bennett.” Available public records don’t indicate that Sen. Bennett, a Utah Republican and member of the Senate Banking Committee, received a Countrywide home loan. …

Daniel Hannan, a member of the British Parliament blogs at Telegraph, UK. Recently he posted a favorable review of Peter and Andrew Schiff’s new book – How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes. We have that here, plus You Tube links to Daniel Hannan’s great 3 minute speech at the EU Parliament, and a montage of Peter Schiff’s warnings, in no uncertain terms, about the crash we would experience in 2008.

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Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana explains his disappointment with the feds oil spill response.

By now, everyone no doubt realizes that I am not a fan of the pace at which the federal government has worked to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sadly, federal officials were slow to act and overly bureaucratic. They have never really understood the urgency of the situation down here. I’m not raising a question of motive; it’s simply a function of the federal government being a slow-moving albatross. The only way to attack a crisis like this is with the urgency of a military mind-set.

Even after the well is finally capped, the damage done to our environment, to the Gulf of Mexico, and to our marshes, wetlands and beaches will take years to repair. There is another type of damage from this spill: its human impact. Thousands of lives, businesses and families are reeling.

Against this backdrop, the federal government unwisely chose to add insult to injury by decreeing a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the gulf. This ill-advised and ill-considered moratorium, which a federal judge called “arbitrary” and “capricious,” creates a second disaster for our economy, throwing thousands of hardworking folks out of their jobs and causing real damage to many families. Now this federal policy risks killing 20,000 more jobs and will result in a loss of $65 million to $135 million in wages each month. …

Chicago Boys post by David McFadden calls BS on the administration’s claim to be friendly to enterprise and economic activism.

Since approximately day two of his administration, President Obama has boasted about what he has done since “day one.” Actually, day one was relatively harmless. It was only a half day, and Obama spent it delivering another vapid speech, having a long lunch, and reviewing a boring parade. But on day ten, January 29, 2009, he began his project of giving employers additional reasons not to hire American workers. On that day he proudly signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows employees more time to sue employers for alleged pay discrimination.

And from that beginning, the project of exacerbating unemployment and prolonging the recession has been carried out on a broad front of initiatives. The government has borrowed capital and diverted it to less productive uses under the guise of stimuli. Complex new mandates and penalties regarding employee health insurance have been imposed on employers. Further uncertainty has been created by thousands of pages of impending financial legislation and rules and by the possibilities that new energy taxes will be imposed and that President Bush’s tax cuts will soon expire. …

Robert Samuelson sees Obamacare’s future in Massachusetts.

…. Even if its modest measures to restrain costs succeed — which seems unlikely — the effect on overall spending would be slight. The system’s fundamental incentives won’t change. The lesson from Massachusetts is that genuine cost control is avoided because it’s so politically difficult. It means curbing the incomes of doctors, hospitals and other providers. They object. To encourage “accountable care organizations” would limit consumer choice of doctors and hospitals. That’s unpopular. Spending restrictions, whether imposed by regulation or “global payments,” raise the specter of essential care denied. Also unpopular.

Obama dodged the tough issues in favor of grandstanding. Imitating Patrick, he’s already denouncing insurers’ rates, as if that would solve the spending problem. What’s occurring in Massachusetts is the plausible future: Unchecked health spending shapes government priorities and inflates budget deficits and taxes, with small health gains. And they call this “reform”?

The name Michael Bellesiles is not one that will immediately attract your attention. Here’s the start of his Wiki;

Michael A. Bellesiles is a former professor of American colonial and legal history at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. In 2000, Bellesiles authored Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize when published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. After critics of its thesis carefully scrutinized the work, an independent committee of distinguished historians found Bellesiles “guilty of unprofessional and misleading work.” In 2002, Bellesiles responded that he had “never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar,” but he simultaneously resigned his Emory professorship. Shortly thereafter, Columbia University rescinded the Bancroft Prize for the first time in its history.

Perhaps Bellesiles is a serial fabulist. I allude to an interesting post in Volokh Conspiracy by Jim Lindgren, law professor at Northwestern. Incidentally, Lindgren was instrumental in uncovering Bellesiles’ previous fraud.

A few days ago, questions were raised first by Big Journalism and then by me about a story that Michael Bellesiles published in the June 27th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education: Teaching Military History in a Time of War. I have now read through every DoD casualty report from last fall for both Iraq and Afghanistan and news obituaries for most of them, and I have found none that was even remotely possible as the case that Bellesiles wrote about in the Chronicle. This post discusses the serious questions this raises for the veracity of Bellesiles account.

In the Chronicle Review, after mentioning the military history course that he taught “this last semester,” Bellesiles told a compelling story of a troubled student, his dying brother, and an exceedingly sensitive teacher (himself): …

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Charles Krauthammer has a warning for those who love liberty. That would be the GOP. Unless, of course, we are talking about people like Trent Lott, Tom Delay, or Ted Stevens; who love money and their careers more.

In the political marketplace, there’s now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.

I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama. …

… The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and “comprehensive” immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.

That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will probably have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as the foil for his 1996 reelection campaign. …

Abe Greenwald answers the administration’s excuse mongers.

It somehow has never dawned on the Obama devotees who like to cite the administration’s “inherited mess” that this president’s failures don’t exactly reflect the overcautiousness of a leader constrained by a crisis. Taking over one-sixth of the private sector in an unintelligible health-care scheme is not an indication of tied hands; it’s a demonstration of unbridled recklessness. So too is dumping unprecedented billions into a liberal wish-list and calling it a stimulus. And so is cooking up financial reform that makes growth impossible and charges responsible banks with the task of bailing out irresponsible ones.

But it is Barack Obama’s most devoted supporters who should be most offended by the White House’s newest spin on the president’s shortcomings. Obama, we are now told, could never have lived up to people’s expectations of him.

Of the two excuses, the second is the more ignoble. The first merely passes the buck to another politician; the second places the blame at the feet of everyone else.  We’re not just talking about Americans, either. On Thursday, the European Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso told an interviewer that he was disappointed in the EU-America relationship under Obama. The administration’s response: “Senior U.S. figures said Obama could never live up to Europe’s sky-high expectations.” …

Roger Simon sums up our thoughts.

Mel Gibson isn’t the only vengeful narcissist in town.

Like spurned lovers eager to get back on the American people before the public votes them out of office, the U. S. Congress has enacted financial regulatory legislation that – remarkably like their healthcare legislation before it – exists only in broadest outlines for manipulation by generations of unregulated bureaucrats to come. …

Kimberley Strassel wonders if the financial regulatory bill is such a victory for the Dems.

… Democrats turned the financial regulation bill into a monstrosity. What started as a promise to streamline and modernize the financial system turned into 2,300 pages of new agencies and new powers for the very authorities that fomented the financial crisis. The bill is laden with uncertainty and brimming with costly regulations on small businesses. Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank made it easy for Republicans to pronounce their bill more Obama Big Government—a “Main Street takeover”—and to justify their votes against it.

Those votes were made easier by the knowledge that, like stimulus and health care, this is legislation that has overpromised. The bill does nothing to address the root causes of the crisis. Yet Mr. Obama recently assured the nation that it not only fixes the system’s problems, but was “good for businesses, it’s good for the entire economy.”

This is the same White House that just launched a new campaign to convince Americans that its stimulus bill—which it promised would keep unemployment below 8%—is working. It’s the same White House struggling to explain why health-care costs continue to rise, and benefits continue to disappear, after grandly promising that it would stop all that.

A recent CBS poll found that 86% of Americans believe the president’s policies have hurt them or had no effect. The financial regulatory bill has to be viewed in this context—a public that isn’t begging to be fooled a third time. A Bloomberg National Poll this month says four out of five Americans have just a little or no confidence that the Democratic financial services bill will prevent or significantly soften a future crisis. …

Joel Kotkin says Obama’s business problem is with the little guys.

… Obama’s big problems with business did not start, and are not deepest, among the corporate elite. Instead, the driver here has been what you might call a bottom-up opposition. The business move against Obama started not in the corporate suites, but among smaller businesses. In the media, this opposition has been linked to Tea Parties, led by people who in any case would have opposed any Democratic administration. But the phenomenon is much broader than that.

The one group that has fared badly in the last two years has been the private-sector middle class, particularly the roughly 25 million small firms spread across the country. Their discontent—not that of the loud-mouthed professional right or the spoiled sports on Wall Street—is what should be keeping Obama and the Democrats awake at night.

Small business should be leading us out of the recession. In the last two deep recessions during the early 1980s and the early 1990s, small firms, particularly the mom and pop shops, helped drive the recovery, adding jobs and starting companies. In contrast, this time the formation rate for new firms has been dropping for months—one reason why unemployment remains so high and new hiring remains insipid at best. …

David Harsanyi sees a lot in Toy Story 3.

… It’s not surprising that animation and commercials are the most sensitive to public trends. It was “South Park’s” mild poke at religious fundamentalism that illustrated how dangerous religious extremism can be to free expression. Shows like “Family Guy” and “The Simpsons” regularly opine on sensitive areas of race, religion and culture that others would never dare touch.

Perhaps inadvertently, it was Audi’s “Green Police” Super Bowl spot — featuring law enforcement officials confiscating batteries and arresting enviro- scofflaws — that most effectively poked fun at environmentalists.

It is a matter of time before concerns about liberty begin to filter into mainstream popular culture. The clues are everywhere: A remake of the greatest film of the 20th century, “Red Dawn,” is underway. As is a production of “Atlas Shrugged.”

Is “Toy Story 3″ part of that movement? Let me engage in a bit of wishful thinking and say: Of course it is.

You can’t make up how tone death some people are. Columbia University’s president proposes the government subsidize the media. He thinks DC will never run out of money. Jennifer Rubin posts on the latest liberal lunacy.

I thought this headline might be sardonic: “Journalism Needs Government Help; Media budgets have been decimated as the Internet facilitates a communications revolution. More public funding for news-gathering is the answer.” It’s an op-ed from Columbia University professor Lee Bollinger in the Wall Street Journal, so I was hopeful that we’d get a touch of iconoclastic common sense. My hopes were misplaced. And I wonder whether the Journal editors didn’t decide to publish this on their pages just to show how ludicrous liberal statism has become. First, Bollinger’s complains that “journalism” is failing. (Umm, not the Journal, not Fox News — so it’s really only liberal print publications he’s pining over). So the solution is government funding. We learn:

“Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.”

In other words, taxpayers will be forced to pay for what they won’t watch or read of their own volition. And the journalistic monstrosity will be a merger of PBS and NPR. The result sounds like something George Orwell would have dreamed  up:…

Claudia Rosett has more on the story.

You think there are problems now with the mainstream media? Just wait. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger joins the drumbeat of those proposing fixes that are guaranteed to make the MSM much, much worse — and he wants to do it with your tax dollars.

In a July 14th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bollinger argues that the time has come to rescue the declining fortunes of newspapers and broadcast news with “enhanced public funding for journalism.” He envisions the future of American journalism as a “mixed system,” part public, part private. Otherwise, worries Bollinger, Americans might not get the news they need. Absent a pipeline of government money, he fears the Fourth Estate cannot continue to perform its fabled function as a watchdog, prowling the globe and speaking truth to power.

But wouldn’t public money compromise the independence and impair the integrity of American journalism? Not to worry, says Bollinger, who believes the mission in mixing public money with news reporting is simply “to get the balance right.” As examples of what he considers terrific balance, he points to American public universities, and the British taxpayer-supported BBC. That’s a hoot, because both are notorious hotbeds of leftist bias. Maybe he should check out the 2007 report that  the BBC commissioned to look into itself — which concluded, as summarized in the UK by the Sunday Times — that the BBC “is an organization with a liberal, anti-American bias and an almost teen-age fascination with fashionable causes.” Or has Bollinger not worked around to reading any of the multiple private news sources that might have enlightened him on the rot at the BBC? …

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Pickings has often used Roger Simon to kick off a theme for the day. Today he starts us off with the thought the whole Obama enterprise was based on lies. He is perhaps a little harsh, but Simon’s perceptions prepare the way for much of what follows from opinion makers from both center and right.

…I am speaking, alas again, of the Reverend Wright affair. I thought it was serious at the time. In retrospect, I think it was disastrous, probably fatal.

Barack Obama told us on several occasions then that he had not been aware of Wright’s extreme black nationalist views during the candidate’s twenty years in the reverend’s church. That made no sense, since Obama had dedicated his book to Wright, had his children baptized by him, etc. …

…And now the revelations of J. Christian Adams have shown that his Department of Justice has a racial bias not entirely dissimilar to those of Reverend Wright. Again the MSM is doing its best to ignore this, but the damage is still there and growing and Obama will not be able, this time, to make a speech in his defense. …

Rick Richman comments on the sudden change in Obama’s attitude about Israel.

…It is in fact all a bit whiplash-producing and somewhat reminiscent of the old saying about history in the Soviet Union — there the future was always known; it was the past that kept changing. In Obama’s new narrative, relations with Netanyahu are not only currently excellent but retroactively terrific as well.

Obama’s “unwavering commitments” are becoming the new “let me be clear.” They include his “unwavering” commitments to comprehensive immigration reform (which left Lindsey Graham unconvinced); to NASA (after he slashed its budget); to the gay community (in response to their growing impatience); and to Afghanistan (at least until next July). After canceling the U.S. commitment to build an anti-missile shield in Poland, Obama sent Joe Biden to tell the Poles: “Make no mistake about it: our commitment to Poland is unwavering.” This is the same message Biden delivered to Georgia, even as Russian troops continue their occupation while Obama’s reset proceeds apace. It is the rhetorical response of choice after Obama’s actions or inaction call into question one of his commitments.

After a year of sending signals to the international community that the U.S. commitment to Israel was wavering, it is good that it is unwavering again. But after November 2, whiplash may strike again. It would not be the first time.

To demonstrate the president’s troubles are sinking into the public’s consciousness, we have an item from AOL News analogizing those problems to the dud that is the new iPhone.

Isn’t it disappointing when a much-hyped arrival lands with a bit of a thud? We were told that this one would be different! Different and better! This one would change the world — make things easier, faster, cooler.

But that didn’t quite turn out to be the case, did it? It turns out that there are major reception problems. Folks are upset that when they needed most to be heard … there was silence on the other end.

Yes, yes, this ham-fisted analogy is supposed to make a brilliant connection between President Barack Obama and the iPhone 4. …

In the WaPo, Dan Balz and Jon Cohen review their in-house polls.

Public confidence in President Obama has hit a new low, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Four months before midterm elections that will define the second half of his term, nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country, and a clear majority once again disapproves of how he is dealing with the economy. …

… Public opinion is split down the middle on the question of whether the government should spend more money to stimulate the economy in a way that leads to job creation. Among those who support such new spending, 18 percent change their minds when asked what they think if such outlays could sharply increase the budget deficit. In that scenario, 57 percent opposed another round of spending. …

Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph,UK comments on the WaPo/ABC poll too.

The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll is a major blow to the White House just four months before crucial mid-terms in November. According to the poll, “nearly six in ten voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country”, and two thirds “say they are disillusioned with or angry about the way the federal government is working.” A staggering 58 per cent of Americans say they do not have confidence in the president’s decision-making, with just 42 per cent saying they do. …

Things are getting so bad for the Dems, they’re fighting among themselves. Jennifer Rubin has the wonderful details.

… There are two noteworthy aspects to all this. First, as Pete and I observed yesterday, its a sign of the abject panic that has gripped Democrats. A party does not behave this way when things are going well. This is the first round of the blame game, which will officially start after the November election returns are in.

And more important, all the participants in this free-for-all are dancing around the real issue. The problem is not the number of campaign fundraisers Obama has held for Democrats. Nor is it favoritism for one house of Congress over another. It’s not even the lack of common courtesy shown by the White House, which seems to be an equal-opportunity insulter (Bibi, Democrats, the public, Republicans, the press, etc.). No, the unspoken but very obvious source of the angst is that the Obama agenda has driven the party into a ditch. …

Peter Wehner comments on the bogus reason for Berwick’s recess appointment.

…Like so much of what the Obama administration says, this charge is flat out false. It is not the GOP that is playing games but rather the White House. As ABC’s Jake Tapper reported last week:

“Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick’s nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick’s past statements about health-care rationing and his praise for the British health care system. … speaking not for attribution, Democratic officials say that neither Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., nor Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, were eager for an ugly confirmation fight four months before the midterm elections.”

… It’s obvious what’s going on here. The Obama administration is afraid to engage in another debate about ObamaCare, having been trounced in the past. The president’s team fears that Dr. Berwick’s comments are both too controversial and too revealing. So Obama decided to skip the nomination hearing. The administration, unable to defend its actions, offers up — in the person of Robert Gibbs — a testy and transparently silly explanation of its position. What Gibbs cannot answer is this: If Dr. Berwick is so qualified, why not have the hearing and, if Republicans in fact attempt to block his nomination, recess appoint him in August? Why not allow Dr. Berwick to explain, in a public setting, what his true views are? …

Mort Zuckerman gives his opinion on the national mood.

…Republicans are benefiting not because they have a credible or popular program—they don’t—but because they are not Democrats. In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, nearly two thirds of those who favor Republican control of Congress say they are motivated primarily by opposition to Obama and Democratic policy. Disapproval of Congress is so widespread, a recent Gallup poll suggests, that by a margin of almost two to one, Americans would rather vote for a candidate with no experience than for an incumbent. Throw the bums out is the mood. How could this have happened so quickly?

…Many people who joined the middle class, especially those who joined in the last few years, have now fallen back. It’s not over yet. Millions cannot make minimum payments on their credit cards, or are in default or foreclosure on their mortgages, or are on food stamps. Well over 100,000 people file for bankruptcy every month. Some 3 million homeowners are estimated to face foreclosure this year, on top of 2.8 million last year. Millions of homes are located next to or near a foreclosed home, and it is the latter that may determine the price of all the homes on the street. There have been dramatically sharp declines in home equity, representing cumulative losses in the trillions of dollars in what has long been the largest asset on the average American family’s balance sheet. Most of those who lost their homes are hard-working, middle-class Americans who had lost their jobs. Now many have to use credit cards to pay for essentials and make ends meet, and they are running out of credit. Another $5 trillion has been lost from pensions and savings. …

…Little wonder people have come alive to the issue of excess spending with entitlements out of control as far as the eye can see. The hope was that Obama would focus on the economy and jobs. That was the number one issue for the public—not healthcare. Yet the president spent almost a year on a healthcare bill. …

Ed Morrissey spotted the new liberal rag on our country – we’re ungovernable.

That’s the entire mindset of liberalism — that the masses can’t make their own decisions and need a cadre of elites to do it for them. That explains ObamaCare and every other social engineering project that we’ve seen since FDR, one of the people that Press claims couldn’t possibly govern the nation today if given the chance.

Expect to see more of the “ungovernable” argument as Obama continues to flop. We’ll hear it as an excuse for ever-increasing executive authority; we’ve already seen public paeans to authoritarian regimes by liberals like Thomas Friedman and Woody Allen, and we’ll likely see a lot more if the Republicans take control of the House in the fall.

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks on the current government’s negative effect on the economy.

…It’s also no answer to say that big business is cynical and unprincipled. That’s not news. But what is news is an administration that is adding not just costs but uncertainty.

There are three major areas a corporation, small or large, has to worry about: health-care costs, energy costs, and the cost of money. In each of these, the administration either has or is planning regulations worth thousands of pages which are going to raise costs, as we know, but also are going to interact in ways that nobody understands and that are going to create uncertainty.

If you‘re trying to figure out who you‘re going to hire and how many, and you have no idea if you’re going to be able to afford the extra health-care costs, you‘re not going to hire. …

…So in every area, there‘s going to be an increase in uncertainty. You know there’s going to be an increase in regulation. And when you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t invest. [That's why] we are having a capital strike.

John Stossel says we’re becoming a nation of a million laws. First, they came for the kindergartners…

…How about this one? Four kindergartners — yes, 5-year-old boys — played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: “Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you.” He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for “making threats,” a violation of their school district’s zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, “We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner.” District Superintendent William Bauer said: “This is a no-tolerance policy. We’re very firm on weapons and threats.”

…Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to lower her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one’s vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station. …

…Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more — so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors look at the continued damage the Obama administration inflicts on the Gulf states.

What does it say about America’s investment climate when the Republic of Congo now attract oil rigs that once drilled the Gulf of Mexico? That’s the effect of the Obama administration’s nonstop bid to halt production here. …

…On May 27, in the wake of the BP oil spill that began three weeks earlier, the Department of the Interior issued a blanket ban on all drilling deeper than 500 feet. When a federal judge threw that out as unjustified, the administration came right back with a new diktat that amounts to the exact same ban.

For rig companies, such pigheadedness gave the game away: The Obama administration is determined to halt offshore drilling by any means necessary. And for energy companies, the only rational response is to pull out.

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In the NY Times, Ross Douthat thinks it’s time to stop giving tax breaks to the politically connected.

…All of this ought to be grist for a kind of “small-government egalitarianism,” in the economist Edward Glaeser’s useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected. And sometimes conservative politicians make moves in this direction. President George W. Bush’s Tax Reform Commission proposed sharply reducing the mortgage-interest deduction. House Minority Leader John Boehner, to his great credit, recently floated the possibility of means-testing Social Security. Many Republican senators have been staunch critics of corporate welfare.

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort — the kind that takes money from the prosperous and “spreads the wealth” (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

Thomas Sowell discusses the anti-business climate in Washington, and how this is stopping the recovery. As for the stimulus dollars? They will cause inflation once money circulation (velocity) picks up.

…The current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a feature article about businesses that are just holding on to huge sums of money. They say, for example, that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is holding on to $26 billion. If so, there should not be any great mystery as to why they don’t invest it.

With the Obama administration being on an anti-business kick, boasting of putting their foot on some business’ neck, and the president talking about putting his foot on another part of the anatomy, with Congress coming up with more and more red tape, more mandates and more heavy-handed interventions in businesses, would you risk $26 billion that you might not even be able to get back, much less make any money on the deal?

Pfizer is not unique. Banks have cut back on lending, despite all the billions of dollars that were dumped into them in the name of “stimulus.” Consumers have also cut back on spending. For the first time, more gold is being bought as an investment to be held as a hedge against a currently non-existent inflation than is being bought by the makers of jewelry. There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the price level. …

In the WSJ, Brian Bolduc looks at the economy of West Virginia after years of too much government interference and too much pork. With Senator Byrd gone, we will see how West Virginia fares.

…In fact, 51.3% of the state’s economy relies on spending by the local, state and federal government—the highest level of any state. “We’ve created this culture of dependency,” warns Mr. Sobel, “Our human capital is not good at competing in the marketplace; it’s good at securing federal grants.” …

…Even worse, they found that pork actually pushes private investment out of a state. When the federal government intrudes, it raises demand for the state’s workers and real estate, jacking up prices. Often, companies can’t compete, so they flee.

But the West Virginia government scares away those investments with laws and taxes that smother private initiatives. …

…Unsurprisingly, West Virginia ranked dead last among the 50 states in the Fraser Institute’s Index of Economic Freedom of North America.

Stephen Spruiell, presents an excellent discussion of what could help the economy, and what the government has done instead, in the National Review.

…Keynesian economists also argue that scaling back stimulus spending might actually hasten a debt crisis. Cutting spending during a period of economic weakness, they say, would depress growth, which would depress tax revenues, which would make debt service even more difficult. The reason they are enchanted with this argument is that it never occurs to them to cut spending and tax rates simultaneously. To be clear, I am not claiming that tax-rate cuts would foster enough economic growth to pay for themselves, but there is strong evidence that they would foster more growth than deficit-financed government spending would — evidence that economist N. Greg­ory Mankiw recently summarized in the journal National Affairs. The incentive effects of tax-rate cuts would more than offset whatever harm (my guess is: very little) might accompany spending cuts of an equivalent size. Meanwhile, the spending cuts would offset the revenue lost to the tax cuts. …

…and at times over the past two and a half years various GOP members of Congress have put forward alternative solutions that make sense, such as House minority whip Eric Cantor’s 2008 proposal to enact a broad-based corporate-income-tax cut instead of the hodgepodge of temporary rebates and carry-backs that eventually passed. Republicans have been forced to work within the confines of what is politically feasible given their limited numbers. But it is not enough to say that “the stimulus failed.” It is necessary also to connect the dots from Stimulus I to Stimulus V — to argue that “temporary stimulus” is an oxymoron, one contributor among many to the destabilizing uncertainty that has made it impossible for businesses to make long-term plans. The stimulus machine will not run forever, because our creditors will eventually get tired of shoveling dollars into its furnace. But a vastly better outcome would be for the party ostensibly committed to limited government to find the political will to turn it off.

Michael Barone says that as long as the government threatens to steal more, taxpayers and corporations will keep their money locked up.

…Consider the plaint of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, head of the Business Roundtable, which has been playing footsie with the Obama administration for most of the last 18 months. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life,” Seidenberg recently wrote, “government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise new capital and create new businesses.”

Or take a look at Obama backer Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website. “Why aren’t businesses hiring?” asks tax lawyer Hale “Bonddad” Stewart. “Uncertainty: There has been a tremendous amount of change over the last 12 months. Businesses are still trying to figure out what this means for their bottom line. Until there are firm answers, they will freeze hiring.”

In other words, the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government — and the threat that they may pass even more such legislation in a lame-duck session of Congress after the November election — has chilled the animal spirits that John Maynard Keynes said were the driving force for economic growth. …

Fred Barnes says that Congressman Paul Ryan’s Road Map for America’s Future is also the future of the Republican party.

For Republicans, the road map authored by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the most important proposal in domestic policy since Ronald Reagan embraced supply-side economics in the 1980 presidential campaign. It’s not only the freshest, boldest, and most comprehensive Republican thinking, it’s also the most relevant. …

…The plan would give everyone a refundable tax credit to buy health insurance, allow individual investment accounts to be carved out of Social Security, reduce the six income tax rates to two (10 and 25 percent), and replace the corporate tax (35 percent) with a business consumption tax (8.5 percent). And that’s not the half of it.

As ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, Ryan was able to get the Congressional Budget Office to run the numbers in his plan. CBO concluded the plan would “make the Social Security and Medicare programs permanently solvent [and] lift the growing debt burden on future generations, and hold federal taxes to no higher than 19 percent of GDP.” …

In the Cato Institute, Nat Hentoff argues for repeal of Obamacare.

…Wesley Smith, an invaluable investigative reporter on the dangers of government-controlled health care, describes the consequences if Obamacare is not repealed by the next Congress after the midterm elections:

“Once the centralized planning of medical delivery is complete — with cost-containment boards controlling the standards of care and the extent of coverage for both the private and public sectors — insurance companies, HMOs and the government will be able to legally discriminate against the sickest, most disabled and most elderly in our country. In other words, those whose care is most expensive.”

…In the British Health Service Berwick loves, “750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. …The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedic patients, the figure is only 20 percent. … Every year. 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed.” …

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In the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell takes an interesting look at Tea Partiers and Wal-Mart Moms.

…But the two groups have little in common, to the extent that we can even figure out what it means to “support” an informal movement such as the Tea Party. When The New York Times tried to poll its supporters in April, fewer than a fifth in its sample had even attended a Tea Party event. Some of the Tea Partiers’ stranger-looking views are merely exaggerated versions of ones held by the rest of the country. True, 30 per cent of Tea Partiers believe Mr Obama was born outside of the US (and thus constitutionally disqualified for office). But 20 per cent of Americans in general think that, too. A plurality of Tea Partiers do not think Ms Palin would be a good president. To call them Republicans would be an oversimplification – only 54 per cent approve of the party. Yet they deplore the Democratic party, by a 92-6 margin. Their votes are mostly not winnable by Democrats, at least not now.

Walmart ladies are a different lot. Their political orientation tracks the country’s almost exactly: 34 per cent conservative, 40 per cent moderate, 20 per cent liberal. So does their ethnic profile. They voted for Obama in 2008 by a seven-point margin, as did the country. They are eclectic almost to the point of incoherence. Large majorities of them support both the environmental movement and the National Rifle Association. Smaller majorities support both the gay rights movement and the religious right. They are sitting ducks for Mr Obama’s rhetoric about the irrelevance of old political categories. The main reason they appear to have soured on Mr Obama is his healthcare plan – only 22 per cent think it will “make things better”; the remainder say it will either “make things worse” (42 per cent) or make “no difference” (32 per cent). …

Kimberly Strassel helps connect the dots between the Blagojevich trial and the Obama administration.

…The Balanoff testimony was a hint of what may come. Illinois Democratic Senate nominee Alexi Giannoulias has been subpoenaed over his role in setting up a meeting between Mrs. Jarrett and Mr. Balanoff. The trial thrusts back into the spotlight convicted Chicago felon and Obama booster Tony Rezko. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin was subpoenaed over his own call with Mr. Blagojevich about the seat. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett (a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley) has been subpoenaed. So has White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has become entangled (though not charged) in a separate accusation that Mr. Blagojevich sought to trade favors with him when he was a Chicago congressman. Don’t you just love this city?

One big White House worry is that most subpoenas have come from the defense. Mr. Blagojevich is fighting, and part of his strategy is convincing the jury that his actions did not fall outside the norm, that everybody was in on the Chicago games. His lawyers, unlike federal prosecutors, are only too happy to drag in the president. Mr. Blagojevich in fact attempted to subpoena Mr. Obama. …

…Viewed through the Chicago-Blago-Balanoff lens, after all, the White House’s backroom job offers to Rep. Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) and Andrew Romanoff (D., Colo.) suddenly make more sense. So too does the fact that Mr. Obama’s political director was a top Service Employees International Union official, and that SEIU chief Andy Stern practically lived in the White House. The threats against business, the health-care buyoffs, the extralegal actions against BP, and the attempted political assassinations of promising Republicans also come into clearer focus. This isn’t hope and change. It’s how you do business in Chicago. …

In the Telegraph, UK, Janet Daley writes about the realities of socialized medicine that the Brits know all too well.

…Dr Berwick professes a love (which he describes in ecstatic terms that will have a tragicomic ring to most British ears) of just those evils of a national health system with which we are exasperated: the calculated rationing of treatment, and the ruthless enforcement of uniform cost limits, which often puts the most advanced medication and procedures out of reach of patients whose lives might have been extended or transformed by them. Dr Berwick thinks that our own dear National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) – which is scarcely ever out of the headlines for denying some poor suffering victim a remedy that is available in other countries – is simply wonderful. ….

…Rationing is what happens when you do not have enough of something to go around. And health care that is paid for entirely by taxation creates shortages where they need not exist.

In Britain, we have maintained a perverse ideological insistence on the principle that it is better to have rationed, centrally controlled, uniformly dispensed health care even if it is poorer in every sense – in terms of resources, productivity, and medical outcomes…

The immigration issue has changed. Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes, enlightens us.

…According to a January study by Department of Homeland Security, overall population of unauthorized aliens in the country dropped from 11.8 million in 2007 to 10.8 million in 2009.  …

…But America’s sputtering economy is not just turning off low-skilled immigrants. High-skilled immigrants–who face relatively less hostility–are spurning it too. The clearest evidence of this is the number of applications for H1-B visas or work permits that allow them to legally work in this country. Prior to the recession, the entire 85,000 H1-B quota for the year would be filled within days of its becoming available on April 1. … Now these visas are going a begging.

Even this does not fully capture the waning interest of foreign techies in America. It’s not just that they are not coming to the U.S. as much anymore. The ones who are here are increasingly returning home, producing a reverse brain drain, notes Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School …

… Wadhwa polled 1023 returnees and found that 27% of Indians and 34% Chinese actually had green cards. And why are they retuning? Many of them cited personal reasons such as the difficulty of being separated from family and friends. But some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians–a vast majority with advanced degrees in engineering and management–cited better professional opportunities in their own countries, which have been liberalizing their economies. Many of them felt that America’s best days were over whereas in India and China the best was yet to come. …

David Warren comments on the “investigation” into the Climate Research Unit.

…We learned this week a third whitewashing investigation into the behaviour of the settled scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit has dutifully whitewashed everyone. It was conducted by the Scottish civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, a classic “Sir Humphrey Appleby” old boy, who has long specialized in seeing no evil, and who totally ignored the CRU’s critics in this case. Calls for a serious investigation are now being heard in the British House of Commons. …

…From outsized research grants, to carbon trading schemes, there is no end of corrupt, but technically legal, ways to make money from this dubious “settled science” — and continue making money, long after the whole premise has been exposed as buncombe, given the inertia of massive public-funding programs. (And there is still more “cap-and-trade” gunk oozing down the legislative pipeline.) …

It was difficult to understand why Mark Steyn camped out in Chicago for the Conrad Black trial, so we ignored it here in Pickings. Now there is a dénouement in the form of a Supreme Court decision. Seems fair now to let Mark explain what transpired.

… Conrad Black didn’t want a deal. He wanted justice.

He will never get his life back, and he will never get his company back, Richard Breeden’s “cleanup” having destroyed it. And, that being so, he will never get real justice. But through sheer doggedness he has demolished 99 per cent of the case against him. The US$400 million he was accused by Breeden of looting from Hollinger was down to US$60 million by the time the trial began in Chicago. He was found guilty of stealing US$2.9 million, which is less than one per cent of what Breeden accused him of, and indeed about 1.5 per cent of the US$200 million Breeden’s “investigation” had cost the post-Black regime at Hollinger by the start of the trial. Of the 19 original counts against him, Conrad was convicted of just four. The government lost on all the eye-catching tabloid fodder: Barbara’s birthday party, taking the corporate jet to Tahiti. The government won on three counts of “mail fraud.” But winning 80 per cent of the case isn’t enough. No matter how remorselessly it shrivelled from US$400 million to US$79 million to US$60 million to US$2.9 million, what was left was still enough to send Black to jail.

Nevertheless, he pressed on. And last week he won a huge victory. The Supreme Court voted unanimously—nine-zip—that the 28-word vaguely drafted “honest services” statute used by Conrad’s prosecutors had been applied too broadly. …

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Charles Krauthammer thinks it would be nice if the president regarded his country as highly as he regards himself.

…Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as “my” — “my secretary of homeland security,” “my national security team,” “my ambassador.” The more normal — and respectful — usage is to say “the,” as in “the secretary of state.” These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution — not just the man who appointed them.

It’s a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama’s exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies — both about himself.

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence — yet not of his own country’s.

Peter Wehner comments on the reasons Israel might worry about American policy.

…These statements combine some of Obama’s worst traits: arrogance, condescension, and detachment from reality. …

…In this instance, the anxiety Israel feels toward for Obama is not rooted in his unwise policies or his disgraceful past treatment of the Israeli prime minister. No, the cause is Obama’s middle name. …

…Israel’s wariness toward Obama is rooted in his pursuit of an agenda that is as harmful to Israel. But all of this is beyond the realm of comprehension for Obama. For him, it all comes down to his middle name. We have rarely, if ever, seen self-delusion on a scale quite like this.

Robert Samuelson writes today on the Great Recession’s hold on America’s psyche.

It has been the most egalitarian of all the 11 recessions since World War II. In various ways, it has touched every social class through job loss, pay cuts, depressed home values, shrunken stock portfolios, eroded retirement savings, grown children returning home — and anxiety about all of the above. The Great Recession (as it is widely called) has changed America psychologically, politically, economically and socially. Just how will be examined and debated for years. Here comes a booming cottage industry of scholars, pollsters and pundits.

A new study from the Pew Research Center, based on an opinion survey in May of nearly 3,000 Americans and an exhaustive evaluation of economic data, provides a preview. Not surprisingly, it confirms that Americans have become more frugal; 71 percent say they’re buying less expensive brands, 57 percent say they’ve trimmed or eliminated vacations. Life plans have changed; 11 percent say they’ve postponed marriage or children, while 9 percent have moved back with parents.

One interesting finding is that the elderly have been relatively sheltered. …

David Goldman looks at the changes in the economy that will hinder putting the unemployed back to work. His piece is titled “Americans Who’ll Never Work Again.”

…The employment situation will not improve until small businesses begin to hire. In America’s creative-destruction economy, jobs lost by big companies usually are lost forever; they are replaced by jobs created by startups. Startups created two-thirds of all new jobs in the U.S. during the past three decades. This is the only real hope for the unskilled — but small business remains dead in the water.

We simply don’t know whether the next wave of entrepreneurship—if we are able to launch it—will absorb the millions of young, less-educated men who seem lost to economic activity. I fear that something like Roosevelt’s CCC may be required, despite my conservative’s aversion to government spending. There is, after all, a good deal of infrastructure to be repaired.

In Seeking Alpha, Daryl Montgomery joins those who think another recession is coming.

We have entered another period similar to late 2007 and 2008, when the economic establishment had a rosy view of the economy, but a number of indicators were flashing warning signs that a major downturn was coming. Neither the Federal Reserve, the IMF, nor Wall Street correctly predicted a recession would begin in December 2007. None of these august bodies even realized the greatest economic downturn since the Depression was taking place even months after it had begun. Bullishness once again reigns supreme among the economic elites as one indicator after another is signaling trouble ahead.

Here are 10 reasons to think that there will be a recession soon …

Many have written about how government-created uncertainty in the marketplace hurts growth. In Forbes, Thomas Cooley quantifies corporate restraint, in the face of government recklessness and irrationality.

…The simple truth is that there are times when countries have no choice but to acknowledge the unsustainability of their current policies and take steps to correct them. It is unfortunate that the worst recession since the great crash of the 1930s has forced so many countries to face this choice at the same time. But the fiscal problems facing most countries did not primarily result from the financial crisis and the recession. There have been two decades of public sector growth and fiscal expansion, the consequences of which were masked by growing economies. …

…The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that U.S. corporations are sitting on $1.6 trillion in cash reserves, a record amount, because they are reluctant to expand in the uncertain policy environment. Even looking at the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of blue chips–and stripping out financials, which are required by regulators to keep large cash reserves in order to cushion against risk–the cash-on-hand number is a whopping $1.1 trillion. Would a more transparent, business-friendly environment turn that cash into investment and jobs?

Jon Basil Utley, in Reason, says the Gulf oil spill is nowhere near the disaster the government’s response has been.

…Now CNN reports that almost all new drilling activity has been suspended for over two months. This includes shallow wells in less than 500 feet of water—despite Obama’s statement that such wells would not be affected by his orders to cease all deep-water (over 1,000 feet) drilling. After thousands of deep-water wells have been drilled successfully without spills, the Interior Department, under Secretary Ken Salazar, has so delayed permitting and continuing operations as to possibly bring financial ruin to countless smaller companies. It would be similar to shutting down all airlines after a single crash. It may be that Salazar and his gang are just so ignorant of business that they think the government can simply shut down the super-sophisticated flow of supplies and men and then later restart it like flipping an electric light switch. It’s already estimated that it will take two years or longer to get Gulf production back to its pre-suspension levels. Meanwhile, deep-water drilling rigs—which cost over half a million dollars per day to operate—are being sent away from the Gulf to work in Africa and Asia where they are wanted. It will take months, if not years, to bring them back. Some 100,000 high-paying jobs are now at risk. Already the number of deep-water rigs has dropped from 42 to 19. …

…Most startling is the news that large boat skimmers could have sucked up much of the spill and cleansed it long before the oil reached shore. At the outset of the spill the Dutch offered skimmer boats with experienced crews that could have handled most of the spill. As The Christian Science Monitor reported in “The Top Five Bottlenecks”:

Three days after the accident, the Dutch government offered advanced skimming equipment capable of sucking up oiled water, separating out most of the oil, and returning the cleaner water to the Gulf. But citing discharge regulations that demand that 99.9985 percent of the returned water is oil-free, the EPA initially turned down the offer. A month into the crisis, the EPA backed off those regulations, and the Dutch equipment was airlifted to the Gulf. …

Tonight begins a new documentary about former Secretary of State George Schultz. Dorothy Rabinowitz gives a review.

No, “Turmoil & Triumph” isn’t another series about Winston Churchill, that title notwithstanding. The three-part documentary (airs consecutive Mondays beginning July 12, 10-11 p.m. EDT, on PBS; check local listings) concerns a less historic figure—namely, George Shultz. The turmoil and triumph in question are those of the years in which he served as secretary of state—and by the time this astonishingly dramatic miniseries has come to its end, with the final episode’s play-by-play account of the Reagan-Gorbachev face-off over nuclear disarmament and Star Wars, and the drive toward an end to the Cold War, a powerful case has been made for Mr. Shultz as one of the most significant statesmen in American history. …

Jay Nordlinger posts some anecdotes about George Schultz.

…Finally, a reader sent me an article about Shultz a few months ago (here). … Here is an excerpt from that article:

At a fundraising dinner for a charitable cause a few years ago, Shultz quietly got up and left in the middle of an anti-George W. Bush political monologue by Lily Tomlin. Is it hard for him to be floating in the Bay Area sea of Democrats? “Not a problem at all,” he said. “But if I go someplace and it’s supposed to be a good time, I don’t like that it’s political. I don’t like it when I go to church and the pastor has a political speech. I don’t like that. I go to church to hear the Gospels.” …

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It is almost beyond belief. First, the Dems won’t have a traditional budget because they are afraid of campaigning on one. Then they conspire with Obama for a recess appointment for Donald Berwick because they’re afraid of what will come out in hearings. Now John Fund outlines how they will continue to govern against the will of the country in lame duck sessions.

Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they’re leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won’t return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal’s Charlie Cook, the Beltway’s leading political handicapper, predicted last month “the House is gone,” meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.

The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That’s why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don’t want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.

“I’ve got lots of things I want to do” in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama’s deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. “It could be a huge deal,” he told Roll Call last month. “We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path.” By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.

In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like “card check”—the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections—”the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future.”

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that “to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again.” He told Mr. Press “we’re still trying to maneuver” a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in. …

David Broder has the details on the missing budget.

On June 30, the Congressional Budget Office issued its long-term outlook, predicting that deficits would come down for the next few years as the need for counter-recession spending eased and revenue improved. But then, it warned, “unsustainable” red ink would flow again, creating debts not seen since World War II.

The next day the House of Representatives passed a one-year budget resolution rather than the normal blueprint committing the government to a fiscal plan of at least five years.

For all the publicity that goes to earmarks and other spending gimmicks, this was a far worse dereliction of duty. And the cynicism of the maneuver just made it worse. …

John Podhoretz explains the Berwick trick.

… Past presidents have resorted to recess appointments when they believe a nominee’s appointment has been subjected to unjust political and ideological gamesmanship. And the White House said it was resorting to the recess appointment because of Republican recalcitrance.

“Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said on the White House blog Tuesday.

That was astoundingly untrue. The only way Republicans, who have 41 votes in the Senate compared to 58 for the Democrats, could have “stalled” the nomination would have been to organize a filibuster, and that would happen only when the nomination came to the Senate floor.

They couldn’t have blocked a favorable vote on Berwick’s nomination from the Senate Finance Committee, which has 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans.

As ABC’s Jake Tapper reported yesterday, “Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick’s nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick’s past statements about health-care rationing and his praise for the British health-care system.” …

Here’s another certified liberal from WaPo commenting on the kid president’s outrageous policies. Ruth Marcus on the Berwick appointment. And she quotes a Dem!

… As Montana Democrat Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said after Obama’s precipitous action, the confirmation process “serves as a check on executive power and protects… all Americans by ensuring that crucial questions are asked of the nominee — and answered.” Bypassing the process also harms the nominee, undercutting his legitimacy and truncating the time he has to act. Berwick can only serve until Dec., 2011, a short opportunity to make a big difference.

There are legitimate explanations for Berwick’s more incendiary comments on health care. It’s too bad he didn’t get to offer them. A cynic — who, me? — might think that the administration simply preferred not to suffer the political downside of a public airing.

A cynic might wonder, with Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln facing a tough re-election fight, whether Berwick could even get through committee on a party-line vote. A cynic might think that the last thing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted before the election was a floor fight about rationing health care.

A cynic might look at the White House explanation — that it was urgent for CMS, without a confirmed administrator since 2006, to have a leader — and ask: Then why did you dither for 15 months before nominating someone? …

The editors of Investor’s Business Daily have more on Berwick.

If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46%.

Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.

“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”

Berwick has opined: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.” Sounds like denial of care to us.

Berwick’s medical views also fit in well with Obama’s stated goal of transforming America through the redistribution of wealth.

There’s opportunity here for the GOP. Karl Rove outlines.

During the last week, President Barack Obama doubled down on a losing political bet, further cementing the Democratic Party’s reputation as the champion of bigger deficits, higher spending and more government. He did so just as the public is crying out for lower deficits, less spending and less government. …

… To maximize their gains, Republicans must go beyond promising to slash Democratic spending and reverse the Obama agenda (as important as these are). They also need to offer a competing agenda for increasing jobs and prosperity, and outline the concrete steps they will take to get back on the track for economic growth.

Republicans have a receptive audience: Americans overwhelmingly believe prosperity comes from entrepreneurs and free enterprise, not government. Republicans must emphasize that they stand for small and medium-size business—and stand foursquare against crony capitalists who seek advantage by partnering with big government. …

Normally, pieces on world affairs come first in Pickings. But, we got caught up in the Dems hat trick of governing against the will of the people. So let’s look at the Middle East where Rick Richman posts on a slam on Obama’s Israeli policy from a former head of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, thinks that whoever has been responsible for the Obama administration’s Middle East policy should be fired. He runs through the possibilities — Emanuel, Axelrod, Mitchell, Clinton, Jones — but realizes the problem may go higher:

“The more we find out about who makes decisions in the White House on every subject from nuclear weapons to coloring of Easter eggs, it turns out to be the man in the Oval Office himself. He’s the expert. He’s the decider. He invites everyone to state his or her piece or peace, then he tells them what to do — and seemingly without question, they do his bidding.”

Gelb writes that Obama entered office with a “near-zero base of foreign-policy knowledge and no experience in the Middle East,” demanded a pre-negotiation halt to West Bank construction, to which “no Israeli leader, even a dovish one” would ever agree, adopted the “brilliant tactic” of publicly humiliating Israel’s prime minister (not even shaking his hand at the end of the prior meeting), and “only made matters worse” this week by appearing as if he were cowed by domestic politics into treating Netanyahu well. …

Here’s Leslie Gelb’s piece from the Daily Beast. Maybe Obama’s Mid-East advisor is Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Whoever advised President Obama to flay Israel publicly until this week should be fired. Only advisers with no experience in dealing with Israel could have believed that Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Netanyahu would bow to public attacks.

And whoever advised Mr. Obama to kneel rhetorically to Mr. Netanyahu in public on Tuesday should also be fired. The only thing accomplished by this embarrassing tactic was to put Israel in a position to call the shots on Mideast policy for the rest of Obama’s first term.

Were the culprits the non-foreign policy White House intimates – chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and political honcho David Axelrod? Axelrod knows nothing about this, and worse, Emanuel thinks he does because he lived in Israel. Was George Mitchell, the president’s Mideast negotiator, the brains behind the foolishness? Surely, he’s had enough experience working with Israelis to know better. Did General James Jones, the National Security Adviser, remain silent, again? And of course, where was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? Strangely for someone so adept at pleasing Israel’s constituents in America, she spent a lot of time this past year publicly beating up on Israeli leaders. Has she been led astray by the pro-Arab contingent of the State Department?

Or is the guilty party none other than President Obama himself? …

After the third white-wash of climategate, Phil Jones gets reinstated as head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. Gerald Warner says, “No mind, the world knows man-made global warming is a fraud.”

“Move along now, please… Nothing to see here…” was the predictable burden of Sir Muir Russell’s investigation into Climategate. Are we surprised? Any other conclusion would have made world headlines as a first for the climate change establishment. This is the third Climategate whitewash job and it would be tempting to see it as just as futile as its predecessors. That, however, would be to underrate its value to the sceptic cause, which is considerable.

This is because Russell’s “Not Guilty” verdict has been seized upon as an excuse to reinstate Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia CRU, this time as Director of Research. That is very good news. It spells out to the world that the climate clique looks after its own; that there is no more a culture of accountability and job forfeiture for controversial conduct in AGW circles than there is in parliamentary ones; that it is business as usual for Phil and his merry men. Or, to put it more bluntly, the brand remains toxic.

Apart from Michael “Hockeystick” Mann, there is no name more calculated to provoke cynical smiles in every inhabited quarter of the globe than that of Phil Jones. The dogs in the street in Ulan Bator know that he and his cronies defied FOI requests and asked for e-mails to be deleted and that people only do that if they have something to hide. …

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Tony Blankley comments on how the situation in Afghanistan has worsened since Obama’s announcement of the scheduled US exit.

…Unfortunately, what the president and his political operatives meant as a little useful spin for their domestic base was taken as formal policy by foreign players – and they have acted accordingly. Our two allies in the Afghan war – Pakistan and Afghanistan – having heard the “spin” as policy have irrevocably taken the strategic action of discounting America as a reliable force in theater. And, as the president’s strategy relied on gaining and keeping their trust and loyalty, his strategy has necessarily collapsed. In the coming months, we should expect many more words of explanation in Washington and many more failures in Afghanistan. Alea iacta est (the die is cast). …

In Contentions, Abe Greenwald posts on the American University of Iraq.

About a month ago, while traveling in northern Iraq, I happened to visit in the same afternoon what my co-traveler Reuel Gerecht called “the best thing I’ve seen in the Middle East in 25 years,” as well as traces of the worst thing that happened there in the same period of time. Those two things are, respectively, the American University of Iraq at Sulaimani and the memorial erected in Halabja, where some 5,000 Kurds were killed with chemical weapons.  At the best, university students sport American-flag t-shirts and talk enthusiastically about political ideology. At the worst, the names of the dead are etched into black marble walls. At the best, Kurdish and Arab Iraqi girls play basketball together during breaks from comparative-religion class. At the worst, pictures of melted faces line a dark hallway. The best is the product of American courage, American generosity of spirit, and American imagination. The worst was accomplished by Saddam Hussein, from whom American soldiers delivered a long-suffering country. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs about one Arab nation that is willing to publicly oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

… The latest indication comes in this report from Eli Lake:

The United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that the benefits of bombing Iran’s nuclear program outweigh the short-term costs such an attack would impose.

In unusually blunt remarks, Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba publicly endorsed the use of the military option for countering Iran’s nuclear program, if sanctions fail to stop the country’s quest for nuclear weapons.

…“If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?,’ my answer is still the same: ‘We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.’ I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the UAE.” …

Thomas Sowell tells us how Republicans are poised to screw up.

…It goes like this: Democrats start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people who they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Sometimes the deal is sweetened by the Democrats promising to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases, and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republicans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown.

This old trick is now being unveiled by the Obama administration, like so many other old political tricks used in this “change” administration.

…There is already a bipartisan commission set to provide political cover for the Democrats’ wild spending that has increased the national debt from 63 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004 to 83 percent in 2009— and official estimates of more than 90 percent this year, with more increases in sight. …

Walter Williams shares some interesting thoughts and statistics on poverty.

…Material poverty can be measured relatively or absolutely. An absolute measure would consist of some minimum quantity of goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival. Achieving that level means that poverty has been eliminated. However, if poverty is defined as, say, the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution, it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Everyone’s income could double, triple and quadruple, but there will always be the lowest one-fifth.

Yesterday’s material poverty is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of poverty — behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to address material poverty.

Ed Morrissey has a post that warms our hearts. He blogs about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s plan to stay on SCOTUS until after Obama’s term is done. Many thanks to you, Justice Kennedy!

…Obama certainly reveled in his prime-time, televised, cheap-shot attack at jurists who couldn’t fire back.  Samuel Alito took fire from the media for having just mouthed a rebuttal.  The only revenge any of them can take is to make sure that they stay in place until Obama leaves office.  The “at least” part of the report almost certainly means that retirement at 80 may be just as possible as retirement at 76.  After all, John Paul Stevens didn’t decide to retire until he was almost 90 years old.

Perhaps the timing is just a coincidence and Kennedy didn’t have plans to retire any earlier even prior to the 2008 election.  However, this looks more like a quiet revenge, and a reminder to Obama that Kennedy will likely remain relevant longer than the President.

Ed Morrissey has more good news.

So far, the midterms look to be a good year for Republicans in Congressional elections, which have caught most of the media attention.  However, as Eric Ostermeier argues at Smart Politics, it looks as though the Republican Governors Association may have a banner year for new membership as well.  The University of Minnesota scholar believes that the GOP may win more elections on this level than any time in the past 90 years…

…Why is this important on a national scale?  Next year, state legislatures will begin drafting redistricting plans in accordance with new Census data from this year.  Republican governors can ensure that Democratic legislatures don’t gerrymander the GOP out of competitiveness in key states.  Winning the midterms in Congress is critical to stopping the Obama agenda; winning the redistricting battles will mean that Democrats can’t stack the deck in 2012 to get it restarted.

In the WSJ, Stephen Moore gives an instance where teachers’ unions are refusing to cut costs, and trying to force taxpayers to pay for their perks.

…The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association was immovable on benefits in part because it placed a bet on its Democratic friends in Washington rushing to the rescue. “The problem must be addressed with a national solution, a federal stimulus package that will restore educator positions,” Pat Omar, the union’s executive director said in June. The union’s strategy in recent weeks has been to stage rallies demanding a federal bailout, and it used hundreds of school kids at those rallies as political props.

Milwaukee’s experience suggests that the $23 billion bailout fund is meant to provide a federal life raft to keep afloat the unsustainable, gold-plated compensation packages that unions negotiated when states and cities were flush with cash. The citizens of Wisconsin have rejected tax increases to avoid layoffs, and they’re right to have done so. …

Hats off to the UK. In the WaPo, Marc Thiessen reports on the exciting news.

…Last week, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne unveiled an emergency budget that would be the envy of Tea Partyers here in the former colonies. Osborne announced dramatic spending cuts of 25 percent for all departments of government — the steepest reductions in eight decades. The austerity measures include a two-year wage freeze for nearly 6 million government employees, and nearly $17 billion in welfare cuts. …

…The Osborne budget shares the same objective as the Tea Party movement here in America: to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government. London’s Spectator gushes, “The assault proposed on public sector is, quite rightly, massive — much bigger than anything ever done by Margaret Thatcher.” The government’s Office of Budget Responsibility estimates the budget changes will eliminate 610,000 public-sector jobs over the next five years (mostly, Osborne insists, from not filling vacant posts), while creating 1.3 million new private-sector jobs — a massive transfer of workers from government to private employment.

Critics predicted a fierce popular backlash, but a recent poll showed that British voters support the budget by a margin of 57 to 23 percent (the only provision of the budget opposed by a majority of Britons was an increase in the value-added tax). Since the budget was released, Conservatives have risen from 36 percent support on Election Day to 42 percent support today. According to Liam Fox, the first official of the new government to visit Washington, if the election were held today the Tories would be able to form a government on their own. …

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The New Yorker has a great piece on how Washington works. They think it is just the story of how auto dealers pulled the teeth from the financial regulatory bill. Unfortunately the magazine doesn’t have the sense to understand this is how everything works in DC.

… The dealers’ victory wasn’t an anomaly: associations of small businesses and producers are often surprisingly influential. A classic example is the wool-and-mohair subsidy, which was first put in place after the Second World War, to subsidize the production of material for soldiers’ uniforms. But the subsidy stayed in place long after its military purpose disappeared, because there were wool producers in nearly every state, and they all cared a lot about keeping the subsidy intact. Similarly, among the most vociferous opponents of tougher regulations in the financial-reform bill were small banks and credit unions (which will also be exempt from the new agency’s jurisdiction). This time around, at least, the fact that small and community banks opposed a provision may well have mattered more than what a behemoth like Citigroup thought.

One could say, of course, that this is just the way interest-group democracy is supposed to work—enabling little guys to band together into effective lobbies. The problem is that the system does nothing for the littlest guy of all—the consumer. In giving the dealers their exemption, Congress may have said that it was helping Main Street over Wall Street. But what it was actually doing was putting the dealers’ interest in no oversight ahead of the public’s interest in a fair marketplace. The result is a consumer financial-protection agency that’s prevented from overseeing one of the most common, and most important, financial products that consumers buy. It’s like creating the F.D.A. and then denying it authority over pain relievers.

In the Telegraph, UK, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reviews current statistics on the economy.

…Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high. …

…The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s. …

Abby Thernstrom writes that the civil rights issue to watch is the Justice Department’s racial redistricting guidelines.

…Every state must draw new lines every ten years when the new census figures reveal demographic changes; the old districting maps seldom meet the “one person, one vote” standard.

Redistricting is always a delicate, politically charged process in which much is at stake. The DOJ under Holder will undoubtedly insist that states draw the maximum possible number of majority-minority districts — a reversion to old legal standards that were suspended after a 2000 Supreme Court decision. Those standards rest on a core conviction of the civil-rights community: In a nonracist society, minorities would be elected to political office in numbers proportional to the black and Hispanic populations.

…The revised guidelines increase the authority of largely invisible and unaccountable career attorneys in the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. The Voting Rights Act robs states of one of their most important constitutional prerogatives: setting the rules that govern elections. Southern black disfranchisement once justified a drastic change in the balance of power between the federal government and the states, but blacks throughout the nation are now important political players. Decisions to overrule districting and other policies made by democratically elected officials should not rest with low-level attorneys whose work is barely scrutinized and rarely challenged.

…Three suits are currently challenging the continuing constitutionality of preclearance. Arguably, the proposed new regulations, if instituted, will increase the odds that the Supreme Court will soon rule section 5 unconstitutional. And then perhaps Congress will fashion a Voting Rights Act that recognizes the political revolution in the South since 1965, one which responds to contemporary voting problems (the definition of which will need to be hammered out in the legislative process). …

In the LA Times, David Savage looks at the inevitable battle between defending the Constitution and the government intrusion on states’ rights and individuals’ freedoms.

…Many legal experts foresee a clash between Obama’s progressive agenda and the conservative court. …

…Already, the healthcare overhaul law, Obama’s signal achievement, is under attack in the courts. Republican attorneys general from 20 states have sued, insisting the law and its mandate to buy health insurance exceed Congress’ power and trample on states’ rights.

Two weeks ago, a federal judge in New Orleans ruled Obama had overstepped his authority by ordering a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

On another front, the administration says it will soon go to court in Phoenix seeking to block Arizona’s controversial immigration law, which is due to take effect July 29. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer said Arizona would go to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to preserve the law. …

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York discusses the sheer lunacy of the new NASA direction (pun intended).

…”When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things,” NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” …

…Last month, Bolden himself traveled to Cairo to mark the first anniversary of Obama’s speech. … Beginning with a hearty “Assalaamu alaykum,” Bolden explained that in the past, NASA worked with countries that were capable of space exploration, but now Obama has “asked NASA to change … by reaching out to ‘nontraditional’ partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and in particular in Muslim-majority nations.”

“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an Earth improvement agency.” …

Marty Peretz comments on the Earth Improvement Agency mission.

…So what are the prospects of the sciences in the Muslim world, especially in its Arab sector? Five volumes, written by a team of mostly apologetic intellectuals, “presents a rather bleak diagnosis of the state of the Arab world.” “This lamentable situation,” depicted in the Arab Human Development Report, “thrown into relief by (its) insistence on mere facts and figures, has evoked again, with unrestrained urgency, the question of modernity and secularization.” …

Speaking of that Muslim world, Mary Katherine Ham, in the Weekly Standard Blog, posts on one woman’s impending execution in Iran.

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, a 42-year-old mother of two, confessed to the crime of adultery in 2006 after being subjected to 99 lashes. She later recanted her statement, but was found guilty despite the fact that there were no witnesses to her adultery, as is supposed to be required in the Iranian justice system. Her conviction was upheld through all levels of the courts, which value a woman’s testimony at only a fraction of a man’s. Ashtiani will be put to death by stoning. She will be buried to her chest in the ground, at which point stones “large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill her immediately” will be hurled at her head. The public will not be allowed to see the execution for fear of a backlash against leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was named to a four-year seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women in April. In its capacity there, Iran will be part of the “principal global policy-making body” on women’s rights. According to the UN, “the Commission also makes recommendations to the Council on urgent problems requiring immediate attention in the field of women’s rights.”

Ashtiani’s stoning is imminent. Might be a good time to recommend an urgent problem requiring immediate attention.