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In the WaPo, Peter Carlson describes his experiences working for the Census.

…One old white guy identified his race as “homo sapien.” He said he learned on Wikipedia that it’s the only true race and we’re all in it together.

I tend to agree, but the census doesn’t. The questionnaire lists 12 races, plus a box labeled “Some other race.” Several choices seem more like nationalities than races — Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean — and this caused some confusion. Some people told me their race was Salvadoran or Iranian.

A Korean immigrant, who kept apologizing for her accent, identified herself and her husband as Korean. When I asked about the race of her children, she said, “Oh, they American.” …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, responds to critics of the Declaration of Independence.

…the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration — precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration — imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists’ cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn’t come up to the standard of “all men are created equal’’ should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that “self-evident truth’’?

Inveighing against slavery on Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?’’ It was a “sham,’’ he answered, “empty and heartless . . . revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.’’ For after all, he demanded, “Are the great principles . . . embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?’’ That Declaration could have been written without those great principles. But at what cost to Douglass and all who fought against slavery?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’’ The Founders chose those words not to describe the nation in which they lived, but a better, more just nation; the nation America could become. Their words became the American creed, the taproot of the American dream — as worthy of celebrating today as they were in 1776.

In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sherman Frederick says that Senator Harry Reid has to answer for his comments before the Iraqi surge.

…In 2007, Sen. Reid opposed the Iraq “surge” and questioned publicly the integrity of Bush’s general — David Petraeus.

In 2010, Reid supports the Afghanistan “surge” and gushes public praise for Obama’s general — David Petraeus.

Sen. Reid owes the country an explanation. He can start with Nevadans, who must decide in November whether he’s fit to send back to Washington. But in the end, he must stand accountable to the soldiers who won his “lost” war.

Political survival is causing some Dems to rethink sacrificing U. S. citizens for their environmental ideology. Investor’s Business Daily editors tell the story.

The Export-Import Bank wanted to stop the export of U.S. coal-mining equipment to India. But it seems coal isn’t so bad, and green isn’t all that special, when the re-election of a senator is affected.

President Obama journeyed to Wisconsin last Wednesday ostensibly to tout the success of his failed stimulus package(s). On the same day, the Ex-Im Bank announced it was reconsidering a denied loan guarantee affecting a Milwaukee-based company that sought to export coal-mining equipment to India. A coincidence? We think not.

Wisconsin is in play in November and so is the Senate seat held by incumbent Russ Feingold. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling showed Feingold leads challenger Ron Johnson by only two points, 45-43. Feingold, conscious of the president’s negative coattails in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey, made himself scarce during the visit, but Democrats still would like to hold the seat.

Last week, the Ex-Im Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, for a coal-fired plant and mine, effectively killing the sale of $600 million in equipment by Bucyrus International, based in South Milwaukee. The dead deal meant the potential loss of a thousand U.S. jobs, 300 of them at the Wisconsin plant.

“President Obama has made clear his administration’s commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future,” was the explanation given by Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg. “After careful deliberation, the Ex-Im Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse economic impact.” …

Toby Harnden reviews the events that led to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s trial.

…Jarrett was a long-time personal friend of Obama and his wife Michelle and that seemed to be qualification enough for the man about to enter the White House.

Tom Balanoff, president of the Service Employees International Union’s powerful Local 1 branch, took on the role as “emissary” for Jarrett, who initially wanted the Senate seat, and testified that Obama telephoned him personally to speak about it.

Next, Obama’s incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel spoke to John Wyma, a lobbyist, who then telephoned Blago’s right-hand man John Harris to communicate that “the president-elect would be very pleased if you appointed Valerie and he would be, uh, thankful and appreciative”.

…The gratitude of a President, however, is no small thing and who knows what favour Blago might have found coming his way in due course had he duly appointed Jarrett.  …

Michael Barone discusses Obama’s immigration speech.

…As Immigration Works, a pro-comprehensive immigration bill lobby, put it, “the president is still scolding and blaming Republicans rather than appealing to them in terms that might draw them into a serious effort to compromise on a bill.”

…One result of the failure of the 2006 and 2007 bills has been a push for tougher enforcement at the border and workplace, beginning under George W. Bush and continuing now. Conservatives are wrong to scoff at Obama’s statement that “we have more boots on the ground on the southwest border than at any time in our history.” We do.

He might have added, but didn’t, that an Arizona law requiring employers to use the federal e-Verify system has resulted in a statistically significant decline in the illegal immigrant population in that state, according to the Census Bureau. A similar federal measure might make a comprehensive bill more palatable to many Republicans and some Democrats too. …

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In the WSJ, Hillary Krieger contrasts her family’s fortunate immigration to the United States with the story of a man she met in Siberia.

…The discrimination and hardship visited on Jews in the Czarist army caused my great-grandfather’s parents to have him smuggled out of Russia at the age of 14 before he could be conscripted. Against a backdrop of anti-Jewish pogroms, the prospect of building a better life convinced my great-great-grandmother to sell her home so that she, her husband and their 10 children could join the huddled masses reaching the New York shore in 1895.

Had they wavered, they and their offspring would also have grown up to face the ravages of World War II and—had any survived—a life of stifled hopes under Soviet Communism.

…On Independence Day, I am acutely aware of the remarkable gifts I have been given because of decisions my forebears made, risks they took because of their conviction that America would receive and favor them. Because they were able to seize opportunity rather than let it slip away. …

Freedom is at the heart of the celebration of Independence Day. Claudia Rosett writes about how government needs to renew its focus on freedom.

This weekend, on July 4, Americans celebrate the 234th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Over the burgers and sweet corn, that’s always a good day to think about what, exactly, it means to be American. One of the best summaries I’ve heard lately came during a press teleconference Wednesday with someone who is not yet an American citizen. His native tongue is Arabic, thus the slip of syntax: “I think I became an American when I start to fight for liberty and freedom.”

The speaker was a Palestinian émigré, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who grew up as the heir-designate of a founder of the terrorist group Hamas. Having witnessed firsthand the horrors that Hamas, in the name of Islamic purity, inflicted on its own people, Yousef secretly went to work for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet, trying to thwart terrorist attacks. He also quietly converted to Christianity and in 2007 came to the U.S., where he made no secret of his past. Instead, he wrote an informative and damning book about Palestinian terrorism, Son of Hamas. And, out of what Yousef has described as his desire to live in freedom, he asked for asylum in America. …

Mark Steyn comments on what is happening in Afghanistan now that freedom has been given an expiration date.

… “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said Osama bin Laden many years ago, “by nature they will like the strong horse.” The world does not see President Obama as the strong horse. He has announced that U.S. troop withdrawals will begin in 12 months’ time. Karzai takes him at his word, and is obliged to prepare for a post-American order in Afghanistan, which means reaching his accommodations with those who’ll still be around when the Yanks are over over there. The new government in London takes him at his word, too. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, wants as rapid a British pullout as possible. When Obama announced an Afghan “surge” dependent on such elements as mythical NATO trainers and then added that, however it went, U.S. forces would begin checking out in July 2011, he in effect ruled out the possibility of victory. Over 1,000 American troops have died in Afghanistan, 300 British soldiers, 148 Canadians. What will our soldiers be dying for in the sunset of the West’s Afghan expedition? What is Obama’s characteristically postmodern “surge” intended to achieve? … Greater opportunities for women? Take Your Child Bride to Work Day in Kandahar? British troops, said Liam Fox, are not in Afghanistan “for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country.” And, even if they were, in certain provinces “education policy” seems to be returning to something all but indistinguishable from Mullah Omar’s days. The New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. …

In EuroPacific Capital, John Browne reviews the outcome of the G20 summit.

Last week, global attention was focused on Toronto as the G-20 gathered to confront the growing financial and economic worries darkening the global economic horizon. In an irony worthy of Orwell, the representatives of the world’s top 20 economies (19 countries plus the European Union) managed to ignore the out-of-control spending contained in Western governments’ budgets and instead unite behind a banner that they called “financial responsibility.” This is akin to a group of Mafiosi holding a summit on business ethics. …

Peter Schiff discusses the two disparate answers on how to restore nations’ economies.

…We now are witnessing a struggle between two camps that I playfully call the “Stimulators” and the “Austereians.” Both warn that a worldwide depression will ensue if governments now make the wrong choices: the Stimulators say the danger lies in spending too little and the Austereians from spending too much. Each side also has their own economic champion: the Stimulators follow the banner of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, while the Austereians are forming up behind the recently reformed former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. (It is cold comfort to witness “The Maestro” belatedly returning to the hard-money positions that characterized his earlier years.)

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Greenspan argued that the best economic stimulus would be for the world’s leading debtors (the United States, UK, Japan, Italy, et al) to rein in their budget deficits, a strategy dubbed “austerity” by the press. Greenspan explains that because lower deficits will restore confidence, diminish the threat of inflation, and allow savings to flow to private-sector investment rather than public-sector consumption, the short-term pain will lead to gains both in the mid- and long-term. Rather than redistributing a shrinking pie, this approach allows the pie to grow. Greenspan’s Austereian view has been echoed loudly in the highest policy circles of Berlin, Ottawa, Moscow, Beijing, and Canberra. …

You will be aghast at what his unfolded in Obama’s home state. Illinois’ fiscal crisis, like that of other states, was largely created by overpromising to government workers, and unrestrained spending. In the NY Times, Michael Powell does his best to present what he thinks is a politically center perspective on the situation. Even some liberals are waking up to reality.

CHICAGO — Even by the standards of this deficit-ridden state, Illinois’s comptroller, Daniel W. Hynes, faces an ugly balance sheet. Precisely how ugly becomes clear when he beckons you into his office to examine his daily briefing memo.

He picks the papers off his desk and points to a figure in red: $5.01 billion.

“This is what the state owes right now to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, the state university — and it’s getting worse every single day,” he says in his downtown office.

Mr. Hynes shakes his head. “This is not some esoteric budget issue; we are not paying bills for absolutely essential services,” he says. “That is obscene.”

For the last few years, California stood more or less unchallenged as a symbol of the fiscal collapse of states during the recession. Now Illinois has shouldered to the fore, as its dysfunctional political class refuses to pay the state’s bills and refuses to take the painful steps — cuts and tax increases — to close a deficit of at least $12 billion, equal to nearly half the state’s budget. …

Then there is the spectacularly mismanaged pension system, which is at least 50 percent underfunded and, analysts warn, could push Illinois into insolvency if the economy fails to pick up….

… “The pension move was Enron-esque,” said Mike Lawrence, a press secretary to the former Republican governor Jim Edgar, who was the last governor to sign an income tax increase. “Blagojevich was not a tax-and-spend governor; he was a spend-and-borrow governor.”

…Even if the state cut out all family and human services spending, more than half of the budget deficit would remain.

…The legislature has a different instinct: to borrow. In good times, that leads to unsightly imbalances. In bad times, it becomes catastrophic. This year, leaders gave the governor authority to move money around and left town to campaign. …

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We like the “in your face” July 4th message from David Harsanyi.

… Why, without cars, the rock-ribbed patriot would no longer be able to drive up to a window and order fried potatoes enveloped in unwholesome amounts of salt (the silent killer!) and a mega-caloric sugary drink to wash it down. How would he transport that 60-inch flat-screen from the gargantuan, air-conditioned box store to his home? Public transit?

I will join all others in offering my profound adoration of virtuous ideals like liberty, justice and equality on this July 4th. But those can often be theoretical discussions. Everyone loves freedom, right? Well, until they see fit to start dictating how their inconsiderate, eco-villain neighbors should start acting.

Cars — not public transit or shared bicycle programs — offer citizens the amazing freedom of movement, the ability to live like kings far from high-density, “transit-rich,” bicycle-friendly urban centers that we’re supposed to admire.

Admit it: America loves cars.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the dishonesty of the government’s response to the Islamic terrorist attacks.

…Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers varied in nationality, education, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

To deny this undeniable truth leads to further absurdities. Remember the wave of speculation about Hasan’s supposed secondary post-traumatic stress disorder — that he was so deeply affected by the heart-rending stories of his war-traumatized patients that he became radicalized? On the contrary. He was moved not by their suffering but by the suffering they (and the rest of the U.S. military) inflicted on Hasan’s fellow Muslims, in whose name he gunned down 12 American soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

With Shahzad, we find the equivalent ridiculous — and exculpating — speculation that perhaps he was driven over the edge by the foreclosure of his home. Good grief. Of course his home went into foreclosure — so would yours if you voluntarily quit your job and stopped house payments to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. As The Post’s Charles Lane pointed out, foreclosure was a result of Shahzad’s radicalism, not the cause. …

Starting with some European leaders’ criticisms of Obama’s spending, Karl Rove discusses the continued government spending and voters’ reaction to it.

…A report on these focus groups issued this week by Resurgent Republic (a group I helped found) showed that both political independents and tea party participants passionately denounced federal spending and deficits, using words like “reckless,” “out of control,” “unnecessary” and “unhelpful.” The evidence suggests that both groups remain deeply skeptical of Mr. Obama’s stimulus package and are unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments in its favor.

The authors of the Resurgent Republic study concluded that both independents and tea party voters believe “nearly unanimously” that reckless government spending, not lack of tax revenues, is responsible for the deficits. This goes to the very heart of the modern Democratic agenda with its guiding philosophy of bigger government and higher taxes.

…It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year. …

We have more comments from Charles Krauthammer, care of the NRO staff.

On President Obama’s criticism of Republicans for opposing his financial reform legislation:

“The president is showing in his response his style of demonizing and de-legitimizing opponents’ arguments. He pretends that he‘s a professor who deals in a Socratic way, recognizes arguments and deals honestly with them.

This is extremely dishonest. The Republicans, he charged in that speech, are opposing his reform on finance entirely on political grounds. There are obvious arguments that all the claims that the president has made — that it will ensure that we’re not going to have a bailout in the future and all the others — are not true. There are a lot of independent economists who say it’s going to increase the chance of a bailout. …”

Peter Wehner looks at Obama’s comments about the failed stimulus package.

…There is a lot to say in response, starting with the fact that some of these statements are flatly untrue. It is simply not correct that “every economist” who has looked at the stimulus bill says it did its job. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, for example — on the very day Obama claimed universal support among economists for his stimulus package — Allan Meltzer, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, began his op-ed this way: “The administration’ s stimulus program has failed.” There are even Keynesian economists, like Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, who are critical of the Recovery Act [h/t: Ed Morrissey].

But the problem for Obama goes deeper than simply this false claim. The Obama administration itself said that if the Recovery Act passed, unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. In fact, unemployment has exceeded what the Obama administration said would happen were the stimulus bill not passed. President Obama is the one who set the standard — and he’s now rightfully being held to it.

Beyond even that, though, it is interesting to see how much reality has humbled this president. He came into office not only promising to create jobs, restore prosperity, open doors of opportunity, cut health-care costs, and reduce our “mounting debt” but also to end divisions in our politics, transcend partisanship, put an end to the blame game, provide unprecedented transparency, stop the rise of the oceans, and heal the planet. Those were his words, his claims, his commitments. And now he has been reduced to saying: “Things are still tough; they just aren’t as bad as they could have been.” His strongest case in his defense is that unemployment is almost 10 percent — but it’s not 12 or 13 or 15 percent.

Talk about defining success down. …

In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery discusses the liberal intelligentsia’s perception of brilliance.

…”Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures,” says Tina Brown, describing the failure to handle the oil disaster, without explaining what, beyond talking, Obama has been brilliant at. He can talk up a storm (though of late this has faltered), but so far his shimmering intellect has led him to think that aggressors can be tamed by making concessions; that he should expand the welfare state just as it is proving unworkable (and very unpopular with the American people)…

…No one advances the more likely conclusion: That Obama seems so much like their idea of brilliance that they assume it of him without too much evidence; or that their perception of brilliance — often no more than a verbal facility — isn’t much use in the world. …

…Nor are degrees from the very best places. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln had next to no formal schooling, a failed haberdasher from flyover country saved West Europe from Josef Stalin, and one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century was an “amiable dunce” from Eureka College and Hollywood. …

Tunku Varadarajan didn’t think much of the president’s speech on immigration.

…Predictably, he came out against an “amnesty” for illegal immigrants in this country, estimated at 11 million people. The president is a smart man and knows political suicide when he sees it. Equally predictably, he said that deportation of these people was not an option, such a course being “logistically impossible and wildly expensive.” Besides, “it would tear at the fabric of our society” and “disrupt our economy.” So, what do we do? We must “navigate” between the two poles of mass amnesty and mass deportation. Don’t you see? …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin takes a different view of the president’s position and his speech.

…It is an unfortunate fact that many on the right have boxed themselves in on immigration to the point where any position on it other than a call for a draconian crackdown on illegals and mass deportation (which Obama rightly claims is unrealistic) is considered akin to amnesty. While the president attempted to pose somewhat disingenuously as the man between two extremes, by offering those here illegally a path to citizenship (preceded by paying a fine, waiting in line behind those who have applied via the legal apparatus, and learning English), he is unlikely to get much support from many conservatives or moderates from either party. That’s a shame, since Obama’s proposals, like those of Bush before him, constitute nothing more than recognition of reality in terms of both law enforcement and the undeniable demand that exists here for low-wage foreign workers. While neither this Congress nor its successor is likely to pass such a bill, that does not mean that it shouldn’t. …

John Stossel looks at several factors that make America great.

…We know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but Edison failed much more often than he succeeded. He had hundreds of failures. He was fired by the telegraph office, and lost money on a cement company and an iron business. Henry Ford’s first company failed completely. Dr. Seuss’ first book was rejected by 27 publishers. Oprah was fired from her first job as a reporter. A TV station called her unfit for television.

“There’s something in the American temperament that says, ‘Gosh, I lost seven times but that’s OK,’” D’Souza says. “And I think that that’s a resiliency of the American spirit.” …

The Economist reports on an interesting new hypothesis about differences in IQ across countries.

HUMAN intelligence is puzzling. It is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And it seems to have been rising in recent decades. Why these two things should be true is controversial. This week, though, a group of researchers at the University of New Mexico propose the same explanation for both: the effect of infectious disease. If they are right, it suggests that the control of such diseases is crucial to a country’s development in a way that had not been appreciated before. Places that harbour a lot of parasites and pathogens not only suffer the debilitating effects of disease on their workforces, but also have their human capital eroded, child by child, from birth.

Christopher Eppig and his colleagues make their suggestion in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. They note that the brains of newly born children require 87% of those children’s metabolic energy. In five-year-olds the figure is still 44% and even in adults the brain—a mere 2% of the body’s weight—consumes about a quarter of the body’s energy. Any competition for this energy is likely to damage the brain’s development, and parasites and pathogens compete for it in several ways. Some feed on the host’s tissue directly, or hijack its molecular machinery to reproduce. Some, particularly those that live in the gut, stop their host absorbing food. And all provoke the host’s immune system into activity, which diverts resources from other things. …

Pickerhead has long been amused by the bien pensants love of soccer, the sport of the sport of the world’s joe six-packs. In American.com, Marc Thiessen agrees.

…The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.) …

…At the youth level, soccer teams don’t even keep score and everyone gets a participation trophy. Can you say, “From each according to his ability…”? (The fact that they do keep score later on is the only thing that prevents soccer from being a Communist sport.)

Capitalist sports are exciting—people often hit each other, sometimes even score. Soccer fans are excited by an egalitarian 0-0 tie. When soccer powerhouses Brazil and Portugal met recently at the World Cup, they played for 90 minutes—and combined got just eight shots on net (and zero goals). Contrast this with the most exciting sports moment last week, which came not at the World Cup, but at Wimbledon, when American John Isner won in a fifth-set victory that went 70-68. Yes, even tennis is more exciting than soccer. Like an overcast day in East Berlin, soccer is … boring. …

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David Harsanyi discusses government’s addiction to spending your money.

…Hasn’t the president heard? His own administration doesn’t have the nerve to refer to the trillion-dollar government/union boondoggle as a “stimulus” anymore. Today, the preferred White House parlance is “emergency” bill.

Yet, the audacity of hope dictates that the president turn the tables on his critics and start kicking some serious Tea Party ass. That’s why, “next year, when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope people who are hollering about deficits and debt start stepping up, because I’m calling their bluff . . . .”

Now, by “difficult choices,” rest assured we’re talking about a bundle of tax increases — because no one in Washington right now will significantly cut spending. …

There may be trouble brewing for Elena Kagan. In the Corner, Yuval Levin fills us in.

If you haven’t read Shannen Coffin’s piece on Elena Kagan and the partial-birth-abortion debate today, you really should. What he describes, based on newly released Clinton White House memos, is absolutely astonishing.

It seems that the most important statement in the famous position paper of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—a 1996 document that was central to the case of partial-birth-abortion defenders for the subsequent decade and played a major role in a number of court cases and political battles—was drafted not by an impartial committee of physicians, as both ACOG and the pro-abortion lobby claimed for years, but by Elena Kagan, who was then the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. …

…What’s described in these memos is easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered. …

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler doesn’t think that this is unusual for politics.

…Assuming the allegations are true and do not omit key details, is this really a scandal?   I think it is, but not necessarily for Kagan.  Kagan was a White House staffer, so we would expect her to encourage outside groups to adopt positions that were amenable to Administration policy.  That’s not a scandal.  Encouraging a reputed professional organization to alter its factual claim in an official statement (e.g. whether the relevant procedure was ever the “most appropriate procedure available”) is a closer call, but probably not scandalous when done by a policy staffer for political purposes.  So this could be embarrassing for Kagan, and make abortion a larger issue in her confirmation, but it’s not the sort of thing that will stop her from being confirmed.

ACOG, on the other hand, comes out looking much worse.  If it actually let a White House rewrite an official statement of the organization on the necessity of a given medical procedure, its credibility will take a hit.  If ACOG categorically opposed any and all legislative impositions, that’s fine.  If it issued a specific statement based upon a White House staffer’s judgment of what was politically expedient, as opposed to what was true about the necessity or advisability of a given procedure, then it perpetrated a fraud and let itself be used for political purposes. …

Lawrence Solomon, in the Financial Post, reviews the irony and tragedy of the US government’s response to the oil spill. Pass this article on to the environmentalists you know.

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks. …

Economist Friedrich Hayek is making a comeback. Russ Roberts, in the WSJ, explains his relevance.

…When Glenn Beck recently explored Hayek’s classic, “The Road to Serfdom,” on his TV show, the book went to No. 1 on Amazon and remains in the top 10. Hayek’s persona co-starred with his old sparring partner John Maynard Keynes in a rap video “Fear the Boom and Bust” that has been viewed over 1.4 million times on YouTube and subtitled in 10 languages. …

…Even when the state tries to steer only part of the economy in the name of the “public good,” the power of the state corrupts those who wield that power. Hayek pointed out that powerful bureaucracies don’t attract angels—they attract people who enjoy running the lives of others. They tend to take care of their friends before taking care of others. And they find increasing that power attractive. Crony capitalism shouldn’t be confused with the real thing. …

In Bloomberg News, Richard Posner reviews the finance reform bill, and tells it like it is.

The most sensible legislative response to the financial collapse of September 2008 would have been to do nothing until the causes of the collapse were fully understood.

There is no urgency about legislating financial regulatory reform. The existing regulatory agencies have virtually total authority over the financial industry. And because they were asleep at the switch when disaster struck, they are now hyper- alert to prevent a repetition of it. Indeed, bank examiners have become so fearful of condoning risky practices that they are making it difficult for banks to lend to small businesses and consumers and thus are retarding the economic recovery. …

…Barack Obama’s main economic officials — Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers — were implicated in the regulatory oversights that precipitated the crisis, as were key legislative officials, such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank. None of them wants to shoulder blame for the crisis. Instead, they blame the banking industry. …

Christopher Hitchens has some arresting thoughts on the foundations on ethnic violence.

Reviewing the sudden spasm of violence between the Uzbek minority and the Kyrgyz majority in Kyrgyzstan recently, many commentators were at a loss to explain why the two peoples should so abruptly have turned upon one another. Explanations range from official pandering to Kyrgyz nationalism, to sheer police and army brutality, to provocations from Taliban-style militias hoping to create another Afghanistan, but none go very far in analyzing why intercommunal relations became so vicious so fast. As if to make the question still more opaque, several reports stressed the essential similarity—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek populations.

But that in itself could well be the explanation. In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: “the narcissism of the small difference.” As he wrote, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” …

The humor section tonight is filled with unintended consequences. John Fund starts us off with a short on the poor prospects for the dems in a number of house districts because of gerrymandering. Pickings has often commented on the grotesque people who get elected to districts that are maneuvered into large black majorities. Rather than electing people who have to appeal to blacks and whites, the most obnoxious demagogues get the nod. Well now it is going to bite the dems.

… Mr. Obama’s approval numbers may mask the real peril Democrats face because his job rating among blacks is an overwhelmingly positive 91%. As Michael Barone of “The Almanac of American Politics” points out, those readings imply that his job approval rating among whites is likely only about 39%.

That’s especially significant because most of the 70 competitive House races polled by NPR (as well as most of the states with the closest Senate races) have below-average populations of black voters. Racial gerrymandering justified by dubious interpretations of the Voting Rights Act has concentrated blacks into mostly safe Democratic districts, meaning now that most competitive seats are more white than average. These districts are more likely to be hostile to President Obama’s agenda, and thus more likely to be treacherous political terrain for Democrats. No wonder party strategists are so worried about this fall. …

And we get a Corner post from Stephen Spruiell about the disaster caused by the home buyer’s tax credit.

…  But that’s not all. Yesterday, the Treasury Department’s inspector general issued its second report on homebuyer credit fraud. And the scams are worthy of a Carl Hiasson novel. Among the lowlights: 1,295 prisoners received $9.1 million in credits for houses they claimed to buy while incarcerated. Two hundred forty-one were serving life sentences at the time. Hiasson—the bard of two-bit Florida hustlers— will be pleased to learn that almost two-thirds of these frauds occurred in his home state, where ripping off federal taxpayers appears to be about as common as shuffleboard.

And it wasn’t just cons running the hustle. Sixty-seven different people claimed the tax break for one house. More than 2,500 got almost $18 million for homes they bought before the credit was effective. In all, the IG unearthed 14,132 people who received erroneous credits of $17.6 million. …

WSJ editors point out the hypocrisy of Obama administration picks.

… In other words, the White House is happy to subsidize “green jobs” at a company that hasn’t proven it can compete commercially. But it refuses to subsidize the export-related jobs at a globally competitive U.S. company like Bucyrus because they involve coal, which despite Washington’s distaste will remain the workhorse of U.S. and world energy supply for decades to come.

The Bucyrus travesty is a preview of the consequences of the cap-and-tax program that Democrats are still trying to ram through Congress, and the peculiar income redistribution that it entails: taking from the middle class that depends on coal for jobs and power and giving to politically connected investors and the affluent who can afford to pay $40,000 for a car. Maybe Mr. Obama will explain to Bucyrus workers today why they are less deserving than Fisker Auto’s.

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In a 900 word column Bret Stephens nails the Obama Afghan weakness.

… Wars are contests of wills. If our efforts in Afghanistan have an increasingly ghostly quality—visible to the naked eye but incapable of achieving effects in the physical world—it has more to do with a widespread perception that we just aren’t prepared to do what it takes to win than it does with the particulars of counterinsurgency strategy or its execution. Gen. Petraeus won in Iraq because George W. Bush had his back and the people of Iraq, friend as well as foe, knew it.

By contrast, the fact that we have been unable to secure the small city of Marja, much less take on the larger job of Kandahar, is because nobody—right down to the village folk whom we are so sedulously courting with good deeds and restrictive rules of engagement—believes that Barack Obama believes in his own war. The vacuum in credibility begets the vacuum in power.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Pakistan is seeking to expand its influence in Afghanistan. “Coupled with their strategic interests,” noted the Times, “the Pakistanis say they have chosen this juncture to open talks with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai because, even before the controversy with Gen. McChrystal, they sensed uncertainty—’a lack of fire in the belly,’ said one Pakistani—within the Obama administration over the Afghan fight.” …

The Streetwise Professor discusses some of the numerous problems with the administration’s end run around the Constitution in order to get their hands on the BP oil spill slush fund.

…Feinberg will, like some imperial vizier, decide which state laws apply and which do not:

Overcoming differences in state laws will be another challenge, and Mr Feinberg’s team is now going through state laws to check for inconsistencies.

Although their initial inspection showed that the laws were “sufficiently similar”, the lawyer is also looking at creative ways to deal with any problems.

In this federal system, there is a demarcation between state law and federal law.  Each state has its own laws, duly passed by its legislature, its own courts for interpreting these laws and making judgments under it, and its own executive, for enforcing them.  …

…Where does Ken Feinberg, and the Obama administration, get the power to turn this system completely on its head?  Under what Constitutional theory does an unaccountable “official” (I use the quotes because the “position” he holds does not appear to have any legal sanction whatsoever) get the power to disregard some state laws to award claims that presumably have a legal basis in these same state laws?  Since when does a majority of state laws trump the laws of the remainder?  I mean, this is an absolutely bizarre legal doctrine. …

In Forbes, John Tamny calls politicians on their hypocrisy.

…Responding to Hayward’s testimony on the oil spill, Congressman Henry Waxman complained to the much maligned CEO that “You’re not taking responsibility, you’re just kicking the can down the road and acting like you have nothing to do with [BP]. I find that irresponsible.” Politicians have never been known for being self aware.

Indeed, for a congressman from either party to suggest someone is kicking the can down the road is quite something. From deficits, to corporate bailouts, to unfunded future liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare, Congress is the unchallenged expert when it comes to irresponsibly kicking problems of its own making down the road. Waxman et al love to hold others responsible for their errors, but when the prudent call them on their own lack of accountability, they simply blame the rich for not handing over even more of their honest earnings to Washington.

Given the limiting nature of the Constitution when it comes to the activities of the federal government, the simple answer to Washington’s situational worship of accountability is that the political class should keep quiet altogether about matters big and small in the private sector. …

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook has an unusual view of the G20 summit results.

…Germany is being called a bad global citizen for tightening fiscal policy despite its external surplus and unstressed borrowing capacity. The criticism is fair. But forget the debilitating implications for Europe and the world: unforced austerity is bad for Germany (though it might be good politics for Angela Merkel). Britain’s new government has a much more serious public debt problem but its fiscal plans – which gave rise to much boasting in Toronto – also look needlessly severe.

Europe as a whole seems intent on one-size-fits-all austerity, despite limping output and very low inflation. Some countries have no choice but to curb their borrowing immediately. All should make a credible commitment to fiscal consolidation in the medium term: deficit hawks are right that if you wait until the bond market hammer comes down, you have waited too long. But with economies still so weak – remember Japan – this should not dictate a universal headlong rush to fiscal retrenchment.

Under these circumstances one could forgive the US for lecturing others on fiscal policy, were it not for the fact that (a) poor US financial regulation and inattentive monetary policy caused the crisis in the first place, and (b) its own fiscal policy is a shambles. President Barack Obama is telling other countries to maintain fiscal stimulus even as his own fades and the US Congress is denying his modest requests for extra spending. For this, Mr Obama himself is mostly to blame.

He and his allies in Congress bungled last year’s stimulus. A big package was needed, and was duly delivered. But its design was poor: too much spending on shovel-ready projects that weren’t; too little in tax cuts. It was seriously oversold, leaving voters sceptical that more stimulus would do any good. Worst of all, with public debt through the roof, the administration has failed to give the smallest sign of its exit strategy. Last week its budget director, Peter Orszag, disclosed his own. He said he was quitting; colleagues said (though he denied) that he was frustrated by White House indecision over medium-term fiscal control.

The complaint after Toronto is that nations are concentrating on their own economies and ignoring global welfare. So far as taxes and spending go, my reaction is: if only. …

In the NY Post, Nicole Gelinas comments on the alarming incentives found in the finance reform bill.

…The compromises hammered out by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and others don’t address their bill’s fatal flaws — starting with the bill’s disastrous effort to end taxpayer bailouts.

The obvious — and correct — way to end Wall Street rescues is to let a failed financial firm go bankrupt. That is, the people who invested in a failed company — including bondholders, people owed money on derivatives and other lenders — should take the losses.

Instead, Congress would “end” bailouts by directing the feds to rescue the creditors to any failed “too big to fail” financial company. Later, the feds would make the failed firm’s competitors pay the cost. …

There are many reasons to be grateful that we don’t live in Europe. In the Daily Mail, UK, Christopher Leake adds another reason to the list. The EU doesn’t like eggs sold in dozen packages. They think weight is better because people are too stupid to figure out small, medium, etc..

…Last night, an FSA spokeswoman said: ‘This proposal would disallow selling by numbers. Retailers would not be allowed to put “Six eggs” on the front of the box. If it was a bag of rolls, it would say “500g” instead of six rolls.

‘It is important that information is provided in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to consumers. This issue is still being considered by EU member states and it will be some time before the regulation is finalised.’

The move could cost retailers millions of pounds because of changes they will have to make to packaging and labelling, as well as the extra burden of weighing each box of food before it is put on sale.

The cost is likely to be passed on to shoppers through higher grocery bills. …

Just when you thought the environmentalists were going to save us from ourselves, Futurity.org reports on dangerous levels of bacteria in reusable grocery bags.

Researchers randomly tested bags carried by shoppers in Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and found bacteria levels significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death.

They are a particular danger for young children, who are especially vulnerable to food-borne illnesses, says Charles Gerba, a University of Arizona professor and coauthor of the study.

The study also found consumers were almost completely unaware of the need to regularly wash their bags. …

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Mark Steyn writes an interesting column on Israel and the Muslim world.

…North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community. …

…The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople. …

In the wake of the G20 summit, David Warren ponders leadership.

…This, to me, has been the most puzzling thing, as I have looked at genuine “leaders” in several walks of life. The most impressive were not famous, and did not seek fame. They had the habit of taking on responsibilities, but not the habit of seeking praise. They were recognized, instinctively, in their own circle — a team, with its natural “captain.” Yet often as not, this captain was awkward with a crowd.

I am trying to get at a quality of “charisma” that is almost the opposite of the demagogue quality. For the crowd worships straw men, until they fail and the crowd sets fire to them. It is very rare that we get a Churchill: a man who was extremely impressive both close up, and far away. There are anyway, fortunately, few occasions when they are needed. Too, he was “an exception to prove the rule” — a man larger than his office, because endowed with some self-knowledge, who from his first public statement as prime minister promised the very opposite of magic. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino thinks the finance reform bill won’t address the behaviors that led to the financial meltdown. There’s a quote by Chris Dodd towards the end of the article that sums up the economic stupidity of the legislative branch. But then again, Dodd’s salary and pension are a sure thing, so it doesn’t really affect him if the economy suffers.

…All of which is one reason why banking stocks, which have gotten hammered in recent months, staged a rally on Friday. To be sure, there’s a lot in the proposed legislation that the banks hate. One banking executive said he expected the legislation to carve at least $3 billion in profits from his firm each year. The Volcker Rule, proposed by President Obama’s senior economic adviser Paul Volcker, appeared to make it through the final cut, meaning, we are told, that firms can’t make risky market bets, which means lower profits. Banks will have to raise capital, which also depresses earnings. There will be limits on the firm’s business of selling derivatives to large clients; they will have to create a special unit with its own capital to sell the most complex of these products. Banks like JP Morgan will get hit because the bill will force them to cap, and thus lower, so-called interchange fees, or the fees they charge for credit card transactions. …

…On top of all that, a “Financial Stability Oversight Council” will make sure the banks don’t take the kinds of excessive risks that led to the 2008 meltdown.

Sounds great, right? Well, keep in mind that before there was such a council, there was the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and a bunch of other bureaucratic entities making sure Wall Street risk-taking wasn’t unusual. And guess what? They all failed miserably. And by the way, why should anyone expect some paper-pushers in Washington to prevent something as complicated as the next great financial meltdown when they couldn’t stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the details of which were handed to the Securities and Exchange Commission numerous times on a silver platter before his fraud was exposed? …

In the NY Times, Joe Nocera reviews the good news on the oil drilling moratorium being overturned, and the real-world analysis that was involved.

…And Judge Feldman agreed … Concluding that the decision to impose the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, “An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.” …

…Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between the 1970s and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents — an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill — and a big critic of the moratorium — told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.

What’s more, he added: “The oil in those tankers was produced somewhere — somewhere that most likely has less regulation and less oversight than we have. We are not lessening the chance of a spill; we’re just transferring that risk to Nigeria and Brazil. We are not helping the world. We are just saying, ‘Brazil, we prefer to despoil your beaches, but not ours.’ ” …

John Steele Gordon comments on how the current administration remains insulated from reality, making decisions based on politics. We quote the first part of the post, the political decision follows.

To the Obama administration, it seems that it’s the latter. According to Canada’s Financial Post (h/t Instapundit), the administration turned down an offer from the Dutch to send skimmer boats that are far better and more capable than the ones we have because the water they discharge back into the ocean doesn’t meet the regulatory requirement that it be 99.9985 percent pure. Skimmer boats in a disastrous oil spill, in other words, are subject to a rule intended for bilge pumps.

“Why does neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil, and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985 percent pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.”

So thanks to a regulation that could have been waived in a second, rather than skim up most of the oil, the Obami chose to leave it all in the ocean. …

The Economist discusses the latest in tuna ranching and tuna farming.

DURING May and June, when the mighty bluefin tuna returns to the Mediterranean to spawn, fishermen arrive from all over the world to catch it (click here to watch a video). In days gone by, the fish were netted and killed on the spot. Now, in high-tech operations involving divers and video cameras, they are transferred from the nets into “farms”—arrays of cages anchored to the sea floor from Spain to Malta, to be fattened up. Then, come October, they are sold to Japanese boats, killed, frozen and shipped to Japan. …

…Things might be better for the bluefin if it were possible to breed them in captivity, as well as raising them there. Though they call it farming, what Mr Azzopardi and his competitors are engaged in is actually more like ranching. Real husbandry nurtures animals from birth to death rather than just fattening up wild-caught individuals. That could bring economic benefits. It would also, some people think, take the pressure off wild stocks. …

In the WSJ, Tom Perrotta reports on the Wimbledon marathon match.

…The longest match in history has mostly left people begging for seconds. As officials decided whether to send Messrs. Isner and Mahut off the court Wednesday, for the second time in two days, the crowd shouted, “We want more!”

Messrs. Isner and Mahut did more than play for days and delete pages and pages of records. They put Wimbledon at the top of the sporting world (even with a certain soccer tournament going on). On Thursday, these two men were no less a story than Queen Elizabeth II, who hadn’t paid a visit here in 33 years. …

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Now the president is in Canada trying to sell his nutty nostrums about borrowing your way to prosperity. Jeremy Warner in Telegraph, UK tells the story.

… President Barack Obama, backed to some extent by Nicolas Sarkozy of France, wants economic stimulus to continue until the global recovery is unambiguously secure. In the opposite corner is Germany’s Angela Merkel, now oddly aligned with Britain’s new political leadership in thinking the time is right for fiscal austerity.

Like much of what Mr Obama says and does these days, the US position is cynically political. With mid-term elections looming and the Democrats down in the polls, the administration hasn’t yet even begun to think about deficit reduction. Obama is much more worried by the possibility of a double-dip recession and the damage this would do to his chances of a second term, than the state of the public finances.

As it happens, the public debt trajectory is rather worse in the US than it is in Europe, yet Obama has adopted an overtly “spend until we are broke” approach in a calculated bid for growth and votes.

Part of the reason he can afford to do this is that the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency of choice. For some reason, international investors still want to hold dollar assets, which for the time being gives the US government an almost limitless capacity to borrow. As we know, not everyone enjoys this luxury.

Mr Obama’s cheerleader-in-chief in arguing the case for continued international deficit spending is the American economist Paul Krugman. This hyperactive Nobel prize winner has achieved almost celebrity status for his extreme neo-Keynesian views. Unfortunately, his frequent polemics on the supposed merits of letting rip public spending long since ceased to be based on objective analysis, and are instead argued as a matter of almost ideological conviction. He’s as much a fundamentalist as the “deficit hawks” he mocks.

As it happens, nobody is asking America to axe and burn with immediate effect, though you might not think this to read Professor Krugman’s ever more hysterical commentaries on the fiscal austerity sweeping Europe. But some sort of a plan for long-term debt reduction, other than blind reliance on growth, might be helpful. …

On Reason’s blog, Tim Cavanaugh reports Paul Krugman is now a fool on two continents.

… Of late, Krugman has had his Irish up at Europeans who are resisting the Obama Administration’s plan to continue spending hundreds of billions on financial stimulus. (Not that he agrees with the administration, which Krugman has been arguing for the last 18 months should be spending trillions, not mere billions, on stimulus.) And in the case of Bundesbank president Axel Weber — whom Krugman called out recently in the daily Handelsblatt for trying to shore up the falling euro at the expense of government job creation — it’s created a backlash. …

Shawn Tully in Fortune says if you want growth – governments should spend and borrow less.

Of all the highlights of Allan Meltzer’s half-century as a distinguished monetarist — advising Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, producing celebrated books on John Maynard Keynes and the history of the Federal Reserve — none proved more memorable than a crisis session at 10 Downing Street in mid-1980.

A group of 346 noted economists had just written a scathing open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, predicting that her tough fiscal policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base, and threaten social stability.” Thatcher wanted to make absolutely certain her unpopular attack on huge deficits and rampant spending, in the face of high unemployment and a weak economy, was the right one.

So Thatcher summoned Meltzer, along with a group of trusted advisors, to explain why the experts were wrong. Even leaders of her own party advised Thatcher to make what they called a ‘U-Turn,’ and enact a big spending program to pull Britain out of recession. “Our job was to explain why lower deficits and spending discipline were the key to recovery,” recalls Meltzer.

Thatcher was regally unamused by arcane jargon. “Being right on the economics wasn’t enough,” intones Meltzer. “She made it clear that our job was to explain it so she could understand it. If we didn’t, she made it clear we were wasting her time. She’d say, ‘You’re not telling me what I need to know.’”

Thatcher stuck with draconian policies, invoking the battle chant “The Lady’s Not for Turning.” She launched Britain on years of balanced budgets, modest spending increases, falling joblessness, and extraordinary economic growth. …

Veronique de Rugy charts the dismal failure of Obama’s stimulus.

… Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one.  And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000. ..

John Browne on preparing for a post-dollar world.

… In another ominous sign for the dollar, the Financial Times reported Wednesday that after two decades as net sellers of gold, foreign central banks have now become net buyers. What’s more, more than half of central bank officials surveyed by UBS didn’t think the dollar would be the world’s reserve in 2035. Among the predicted replacements were Asian currencies and the euro, but – by far – the favorite was gold. This is supported by Monday’s revelation by the Saudi central bank that it had covertly doubled its gold reserves, just about a year after China made a similar admission. There is no reason to assume these are isolated incidents, or that the covert trade of dollars for gold doesn’t continue. To the contrary, this is compelling evidence that foreign governments are outwardly supporting the status quo while quietly preparing for the dollar’s almost-inevitable devaluation. What people like Paul Krugman believe to be a return to medieval economics may, in fact, be the wave of the future. …

Toby Harnden agrees the firing of McChrystal showed the president’s weakness.

… No one would pretend that the profane, juvenile banter of McChrystal and his aides was clever or appropriate, never mind in the presence of an iconoclastic Rolling Stone reporter. The general, a legendary combat leader who engaged in fire fights in Iraq alongside SAS troopers while in his 50s, deserved to be reprimanded.

Inartful and ill-advised as the words were, however, they also spoke to a justifiable deep frustration within the US military in Afghanistan and contained a degree of truth about Obama’s civilian officials that made the famously thin-skinned President decidedly uncomfortable.

McChrystal and his “Team America” vented about Ambassador Karl Eikenberry betraying them with a leak; portrayed special envoy Richard Holbrooke as an egotist in fear of losing his job; joked about Vice President Joe Biden being a bit of a blowhard; and suggested James Jones, National Security Adviser, was an ineffectual relic of the Cold War.

These are hardly controversial opinions – even within the White House. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and a man whose salty language would make a sailor blush, probably says worse things about his colleagues to a reporter before breakfast on most days of the week.

Team America, of course, was a bit dismissive of Obama himself and that cannot have gone down well with the self-regarding occupant of the Oval Office. Even more difficult to take must have been the warm words they had for Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, who large numbers of Democrats and even many Republicans now wish had prevailed in 2008. …

Tonight on PBS comes a documentary on the Berlin Wall. WSJ has a review.

… Written and directed by Eric Stange, it begins with vivid images of young Germans celebrating the fall of the Wall juxtaposed with black-and-white footage of armed border guards and deadly failed escapes. “On Nov. 9, 1989, the world changed forever,” narrator Joe Morton says. “The Berlin Wall—the most potent symbol of Communist oppression—fell after 28 years marked by violence and tragedy.” Cut to former East Berliners telling their stories of surveillance and imprisonment by the East German secret police, the Stasi. One is struck by their youth, and by the realization that the Wall, a fixture of the Cold War since August 1961, fell fewer than 21 years ago.

We see JFK delivering his famed June 1963 Berlin speech: “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.” Fast forward 27 years and Ronald Reagan demands of his Soviet counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” …

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Today we concentrate on making war. The change in generals responsible for the Afghan conflict has brought this into focus, and many of our favorites have thoughts and comments. We think the change is interesting in two ways. First, it demonstrates, not Obama’s strength, but his weakness. Second, David Petraeus now owns Barack Obama’s presidency.

Today’s last item comes from the Economist and it describes war-making among chimpanzees. You can be appalled by the human condition and our evident propensity for conflict, or you can be encouraged by the thoughts of Robert Ardrey who wrote forty years ago;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Mark Steyn wonders what it would take to get the president engaged.

… He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.

The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.

After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it. …

Victor Davis Hanson noticed Obama’s criticisms of Bush have returned home to roost.

Do you remember candidate Barack Obama offering his hope-and-change platitudes in front of the fake Greek columns during the Democratic convention? Or, earlier, pontificating at the Victory Monument in Berlin?

Why didn’t an old cigar-chomping Democratic pro take him aside and warn him about offending Nemesis? She is the dreaded goddess who brings divine retribution in ironic fashion to overweening arrogance.

Or maybe a friend could have whispered to Senator Obama to tone it down when he was merciless in damning the Bush administration for its supposedly slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Obama railed that Bush showed “unconscionable ineptitude.” Obama further charged that Bush’s response was “achingly slow,” a result of “passive indifference,” and that his team was rife with “corruption and cronyism.”

Those phrases now apply to Obama himself, as he seems lost amid his own disaster — eerily, in about the same Gulf environs. Adding insult to injury, a recent poll revealed that Louisiana residents thought Bush had done a better job with Katrina than Obama has with BP. …

Can Petraeus do it again? Charles Krauthammer thinks a weak-willed vacilliating president like Obama will create problems. Guess we need a courageous commander in chief like George W. Bush.

… However, two major factors distinguish the Afghan from the Iraqi surge. First is the alarming weakness and ineptness — to say nothing of the corruption — of the Afghan central government. One of the reasons the U.S. offensive in Marja has faltered is that there is no Afghan “government in a box” to provide authority for territory that the U.S. military clears.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, after many mixed signals, eventually showed that he could act as a competent national leader rather than a sectarian one when he attacked Moqtada al-Sadr’s stronghold in Basra, faced down the Mahdi Army in the other major cities in the south and took the fight into Sadr City in Baghdad itself. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, President Hamid Karzai makes public overtures to the Taliban, signaling that he is already hedging his bets.

But beyond indecision in Kabul, there is indecision in Washington. When the president of the United States announces the Afghan surge and, in the very next sentence, announces the date on which a U.S. withdrawal will begin, the Afghans — from president to peasant — take note.

This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reiterated that July 2011 is a hard date. And Vice President Biden is adamant that “in July of 2011 you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”

Now, Washington sophisticates may interpret this two-step as a mere political feint to Obama’s left — just another case of a president facing a difficult midterm and his own reelection, trying to placate the base. They don’t take this withdrawal date too seriously.

Problem is, Afghans are not quite as sophisticated in interpreting American intraparty maneuvering. …

John Podhoretz agrees Petraeus owns Obama now.

… Now that he has sent Petraeus to take direct charge of the fight in Afghanistan, Obama has tied his own hands. Having successively relieved two commanders in Afghanistan (first Gen. David McKiernan, and now McChrystal), and having given the reins to the signal US general of the last two generations, the president has little choice but to accept the recommendations Petraeus makes to him — and not just about Afghanistan but about Iraq as well.

If Petraeus departs, his own conduct throughout his career and his own carefully chosen words over the past few years ensure it won’t happen because he foolishly cooperated with a reporter. It will happen because Petraeus will have lost the surety that his commander in chief is committed to the victory he wishes to secure for the United States. And that will be the greatest political disaster of all for Obama.

Petraeus is also on the hook, of course. He has to win this thing, and it hasn’t been going well. At least we know the effort is in the best possible hands.

Claudia Rosett has a clear view of what happened.

Rolling Stone’s piece on The Runaway General hit the web, and presto! before the print edition was even on the newsstands, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was ordered back to Washington for a sitdown with President Obama. If only Obama had been as eager to clear time on his calendar for McChrystal back in 2009. That’s when really getting to know the general — the man entrusted with winning the war in Afghanistan — should have been one of the top priorities of the new president.

I’m not suggesting that with earlier close acquaintance Obama might have spotted the seeds of McChrystal’s “enormous mistake” — as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described it at press briefing Tuesday. I’m suggesting that better leadership from Obama himself would have averted this mess altogether. Whatever comes next for McChrystal, the biggest lesson here is one the commander-in-chief himself has yet to master.

It’s this simple: To win this war, America, and its generals, need to be led by someone who really wants to win the war. Someone who believes his country is great, and extraordinary, and deserves to win its wars. Someone who takes a direct and genuine interest in those he sends to the frontlines. Someone who makes a point of really getting to know the general he puts in charge. Someone, in sum, who does what’s needed to inspire loyalty and respect.

Has Obama done that? He put McChrystal in command last summer, and over the following 70 days talked with him exactly once — by videoconference (something it was left to Fox News to discover in late September). He left McChrystal dangling during an agonizingly drawn-out strategy review last fall. He showed strangely little regard for the internal conflicts he set in motion. …

J. E. Dyer argues in Contentions that this is Obama’s war now.

… we shouldn’t exaggerate the signal sent about Obama’s leadership by a personnel shift that was essentially thrust on him by a discipline problem. Unlike other celebrated personnel replacements made by war-time presidents — Lincoln, Truman, the younger Bush — the replacement of McChrystal was not prompted by this president’s strategic concern about the conduct of the war. That is Obama’s great failing; what he owes the armed forces that do his bidding is precisely that strategic concern.

George W. Bush gave Bob Gates, Ryan Crocker, and David Petraeus a level of strategic concern — attention, political investment, diplomatic cover — that enabled them to adopt an executable plan for Iraq and then execute it. What Obama has done, by contrast, is take McChrystal’s original executable plan and, after months of seemingly aimless deliberation, compromise its executability. …

Toby Harnden suggests the president changed commanders when McChrystal impugned the honor of the French.

So now that General Stanley McChrystal’s storied military career has been brutally ended, we get the customary “tick tock” accounts that White House have spoonfed to its press corps. These accounts – surprise, surprise – paint a picture of President Barack Obama as being a leader of Solomonic wisdom and Churchillian decisiveness, a prince among men, a giant among pygmies, a commander-in-chief for all ages.

The New York Times describes the self-serving details eagerly provided by the White House as offering “an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress”.

Intense stress? Sure, being President of the United States is a tough job. But how about the intense stress McChrystal was as he oversaw around-the-clock Special Forces missions to dismantle al-Qaeda in Iraq, including going out on the missions under fire himself? How about the intense stress of running a war in Afghanistan when your commander-in-chief has announced an arbitrary exit date of July 2011 and created a muddled civilian command structure in which everyone is dissing everyone else?

But I digress. The New York Times sagely concludes that the details provided by White House advisers show an Obama who “appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive”. Got that? Obama is deliberative, he listens to everyone but ultimately he is a steely-eyed decider. What a guy. Give him a Medal of Honour. …

Abe Greenwald wonders where all of Obama’s power has gone.

… The big historic health-care victory was nothing more than a procedural high-wire act. Kind of like getting your package to FedEx at 7:55 p.m. on a rainy Friday. Never mind that the package is empty or, worse, that its contents are dangerous. ObamaCare’s popularity sinks with each day’s new frightening analysis.

What people do want are jobs. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Americans chose “job creation and economic growth” as their top-priority issue for the federal government to address. “The Gulf Coast oil spill and energy” was second. Health care came in at a distant number six, beating last place “social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.”

Like Tom Friedman says, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to see that Obama isn’t competently addressing the most important issues; you just have to be American. In fact, you don’t have to be Machiavelli at all. You just have to be effective. People instruct the president to get mad or get compassionate. But he only needs to get things done. All the “impressive leadership” stuff comes after a leader actually accomplishes something. For now, the new poll does at least partially vindicate Peter Beinart: people are certainly afraid of Barack Obama.

Toby Harnden says Michael Yon gets results.

Well, I wouldn’t cross Michael Yon, the intrepid independent war reporter and photographer who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction and dogged intensity. For weeks, he was fulminating about two men – Brigadier-General Daniel Menard of the Canadian Army and General Stanley McChrystal.

Then, two things happened. First, Menard was fired. Then, McChrystal was fired.

True, neither was dismissed for reasons directly related to Yon’s reporting …

We have spent our time today on the country’s methods of making war. Would that we could spend our time on other pursuits. However, it is in our genes. The Economist reports this week about the wars of our nearest relative. I allude to the chimpanzee.

PEOPLE are not alone in waging war. Their closest living cousins, chimpanzees, also slaughter their own kind—in brutal attacks that primatologists increasingly view as strategic, co-ordinated assaults rather than random acts of violence. But however tempting it is to see these battles through the lens of human warfare, the motives for chimp-on-chimp violence are poorly understood. In particular, researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for females.

A report just published in Current Biology may help to settle the question. The study it describes, led by John Mitani, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the first to offer a detailed picture of organised conflict between chimpanzees. Drawing on a decade of observations in the field, it concludes that, as with human conflict, wars between chimpanzees are fuelled by territorial conquest.

Between 1999 and 2008 Dr Mitani and his colleagues shadowed a group of chimpanzees called the Ngogo, who live in the Kibale national park in Uganda. Most of the time, the Ngogo chimps were anything but model soldiers—squabbling, foraging and lolling about their domain. But on 114 occasions Dr Mitani’s colleague Sylvia Amsler watched large groups of males strike out on silent, single-file patrols to the fringes of their territory.

These forays often turned violent. All but one of the 18 fatal attacks Dr Amsler witnessed occurred during boundary patrols. In each case, males colluded to kill chimps from a neighbouring group. …

More on this from Pickings two and a half years ago.

Pickings from the Webvine

December 20, 2007    http://www.pickerhead.com/?p=627

Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.

… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …

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John Fund has two articles that inspire hope. In the first, Fund reports on a true post-racial candidate.

Tim Scott, a state legislator from Charleston, S.C., captured 68% of the vote to win a House GOP primary runoff last night. Because the district is overwhelmingly Republican, Mr. Scott is almost guaranteed to win the fall race, becoming the first black Republican elected from the Old Confederacy since the 1890s. …

…Mr. Scott is an American success story. He grew up poor, his parents divorcing when he was age 7. His mother worked 16 hours a day to provide for two children. Mr. Scott was in danger of dropping out of high school when a conservative businessman who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant inspired him to keep going. After graduating from college, he went into the insurance business and won election to the state legislature in 2008.

When the local congressional seat opened up this year, he jumped into the race with a conservative platform calling for repeal of ObamaCare and a simplified tax code. His stance won him the support of the Club for Growth, which helped raise $313,000 for his campaign. No doubt you’ll find Mr. Scott featured on many news shows next year as the Republican House Caucus’s new history-making member.

Abigail Thernstrom celebrates Tim Scott’s victory.

… It is often said that southern whites will not vote for black candidates. Wrong. They will not vote for blacks with the far-left message of most of the Congressional Black Caucus. Scott doesn’t fit the mold. Get on his website; his message is that of a solid Republican: “If I can seek opportunity, not security, I want to take the calculated risk to dream and build, to fail and to succeed. I refused to barter incentive for dole.” He describes himself as a “believer in small government” and entrepreneurship, as well as an opponent of Obamacare. “President Obama’s health care bill taxes too much, spends too much, is bad for our health care, and is unconstitutional. Tim Scott will fight against government takeover of health care,” his site reads. …

John Steele Gordon too.

…That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.

But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.

Thomas Sowell says that BP’s oil spill slush fund is unconstitutional and sets a bad precedent.

…Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. …

…With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a “crisis”– which, as the president’s chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to expand the government’s power. …

Obama’s drilling moratorium was overturned. The WSJ editors wrote an excellent article that delineates the sloppiness of this government power grab.

As legal rebukes go, it’s hard to get more comprehensive than the one federal judge Martin Feldman delivered yesterday in overturning the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a remarkably pointed 22-page ruling, the judge made clear that even Presidents aren’t allowed to impose an “edict” that isn’t justified by science or safety. …

The collusion of big government and big business frequently benefits both, to the detriment of taxpayers. David Harsanyi ponders the angles on the oil spill slush fund.

…No, it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama was the top recipient of BP’s political action committee and individual bucks over the past 20 years. It is irrelevant that BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and lobbies for cap-and-trade schemes.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, in fact, the administration’s compensation fund has a little something for BP, as well. “In the end,” the piece states, “one aim of the fund — and a prime reason BP agreed to it — will be to minimize lawsuits against the company.” …

…Surely, the Trial Lawyers Association could enlighten the White House to the benefit and fairness of class-action suits. If the arrangement is broken, or too slow, shouldn’t we have some tort reformed? Is it really “mediation” when the administration and an oil company collude to decide what’s best for the victims? …

Roger Simon thinks that the president would like to call the whole thing off.

…I am not being metaphorical here — I am quite serious. The more I have thought about this, the more I am convinced Barack Obama no longer wishes to be president. The degree that he admits this to himself, I am not sure. But I rather suspect that in the small hours of the morning he fantasizes he were anywhere but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And who could blame him? By almost any measure, he is doing a terrible job. …

…This is a beaten man, struggling to show he is not, even though everybody knows he is. …

IBD Editors call BS on promises to get rid of federal red tape.

After President Obama’s dramatic BP address to the nation, there was reason to think federal red tape would be cut to save the Gulf Coast. Silly us. Bureaucrats are back at it, halting Louisiana’s sand berms.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday shut down a critical dredging operation off the Chandelier Islands in the Louisiana Delta. …

Hugh Hewitt may have found the catchphrase of the coming elections. Enough!

…There is a vast, coast-to-coast recognition of “oiiohh” — Obama is in over his head. I have offered the T-shirt to my radio audience, and they are moving quite briskly. The “messiah” has become a punch line.

What could he do to turn it around, I asked John Podhoretz, editor of the newly energized and sparkling Commentary magazine. “Things his ideology will never allow him to do,” John replied, and we went on to talk about extending the Bush tax cuts and standing resolutely beside Israel in the face of serial provocations. …

…If the GOP runs on extending the existing tax rates five years while bringing a massive ax to the federal budget, they will sweep all before them. “Enough!” is the one-word bumper sticker showing up across the country and uniting every candidate from the center to the libertarian right.

“Enough!” is enough of a slogan. Not even the Republicans can screw that up.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders thinks that McChrystal should stay for the sake of the troops.

…In failing to check his subordinates’ derisive talk, McChrystal allowed for a situation that now demands very public apologies. Worse, it could alter the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the general put it, “knee-deep in the decisive year.” …

…McChrystal and his inner circle behaved in a manner that was stupid, arrogant and immature. In their thoughtlessness, they let down troops who have made tremendous sacrifices.

A year into the Obama surge and a year before the reputed July 2011 withdrawal deadline, there are some 94,000 U.S. personnel serving in Afghanistan. Their interests must come first. They deserve the best military commander available. …

The Streetwise Professor adds his comments on McChrystal and Afghanistan.

…But regardless of the reasons for the disclosures to a freaking rock magazine (the most damaging of which came from the mouths of the General’s staffers, rather than his own), they give a glimpse of a very disturbing, dysfunctional relationship between the military commanders in the field in Afghanistan, and the entire civilian chain of command, from the Ambassador in Kabul, to the National Security Advisor, to the VP, and to the President himself.  The men in the field apparently have nothing but contempt for Obama and those who work for him.  (Only Hillary comes off well–another reason, as if she needs one, to watch her back.)   Moreover, such backbiting is hardly a harbinger of victory: instead, it is a symptom of a failing military effort.

It is hard to say whether it would be worse if the disdain is warranted, or not.  My sense is, though, that the distrust of the field commanders for the civilian leadership is largely merited.  Obama only talked about Afghanistan during the campaign to demonstrate his tough guy bona fides.  When in office, his reluctance to take charge of the war was palpable.  Instead of leadership, he gave a series of dog ate my homework excuses, played Hamlet, and finally “decided” on a strategy that was fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure.  He has subsequently all but washed his hands of the matter, relegating it to the very bottom of his priority pile; McChrystal’s discouraged and discouraging assessment reported in the article is probably an accurate one. …

McChrystal should have been fired. Turns out the dumb ass voted for Obama. Proof positive he’s a fool. Jennifer Rubin on the flap.

The news of the day is certainly Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s interview with Rolling Stone magazine and the potential fallout. Fox News reports:

‘The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.” It quoted an adviser to McChrystal dismissing the early meeting with Obama as a “10-minute photo op.” “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. The boss was pretty disappointed,” the adviser told the magazine.

The article claims McChrystal has seized control of the war “by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” ‘ …

Written before the McChrystal flap Marc Thiessen details why the Afghan surge is failing.

…What the Obama administration does not seem to appreciate is that the reason its surge is not working, while the surge in Iraq did, is because President Bush refused to set a artificial deadline for withdrawal. So when American commanders on the ground promised Iraqi tribes we would stick with them if they joined us in the fight, their word was credible. Iraqis had confidence that we would see the job through to the end, and not abandon their country to the enemy. Today, Afghans have no such confidence in America. …

…But let us not forget that it was President Obama decided to set an artificial deadline for withdrawal at the same time he announced the surge—effectively announcing our departure before additional American forces had even left for Afghanistan. This decision could prove to be an unmitigated disaster, one which may have doomed the mission in Afghanistan from the start. …

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Minyanville reviews the EU debt crisis and bailout.

The period from March 2009 was the year of wishful thinking. Central banks cut interest rates and governments opened their checkbooks, providing a flood of cheap money that gave the illusion of recovery and a normal functioning economy. By pouring a lot of water into a bucket with a large hole, the world sustained the impression that the receptacle was almost full. As Norman Cousins, an American political journalist, noted: “Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.”

Governments merely transferred the debt from private sector balance sheets onto public balance sheets. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has morphed into a Global Sovereign Crisis (GSC) as sovereign governments now face difficulty in raising money.

Stock markets and asset prices have tumbled. Money markets are exhibiting an anxiety not seen since late 2008/early 2009. The year of wishful thinking has run its course. …
…In April 2010, as the market for Greek debt worsened …after considerable prevarication, the EU proposed a highly conditional euro 30 billion rescue package. …
Markets considered the proposal inadequate and unlikely to avoid a Greek default. Increasingly desperate as circumstances began to rapidly spiral out of control, the EU increased the package in early May 2010 to Euro 110 billion, including a Euro 30 billion contribution from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who would supervise the package and the implementation of the economic “cure.”

About a week later, continued market skepticism and increasing pressure on Portugal, Spain, and Ireland forced the EU to “go nuclear.” After months of slow and tortured discussions, the EU acted with surprising speed announcing a “stabilization fund” to the value of Euro 750 billion to support eurozone countries, including an IMF contribution of (up to) Euro 250 billion. The actions were designed in no particular order to salvage the EU, the euro and over-indebted eurozone participants by stopping contagion and further spread of the crisis.

… Initially, stock markets rose sharply, especially shares of banks exposed to Greece who would benefit from the rescue. The interest rates on Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish bonds fell sharply. As the announcement over the weekend caught traders unaware, the rally was driven largely by the covering of short positions.

…Wiser commentators mused that if Euro 750 billion wasn’t going to do the trick, then what was? …

In EuroPacific Capital, Neeraj Chaudhary writes about labor strife in China and the changes he sees coming.

…Officials in Beijing know that, in reality, the Chinese workers are not striking against management, as we might expect in the West, but against the ruinous inflation caused by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). In order to maintain the ‘peg’ of the strengthening yuan to the weakening US dollar, the PBoC has been forced to print new money in lockstep with the Federal Reserve. Since the start of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has more than doubled the number of dollars in circulation. This inflation, exported to China via the peg, has resulted in frothy real estate prices in some Chinese markets, as well as consumer prices increasing at a rate of more than 3% per year (and probably much higher, given the propensity for all governments to systematically understate this data). According to the Washington Post, there is widespread “frustration among younger, urbanized workers that their wages have stayed relatively meager even as prices all around them — particularly for housing — have soared.”

With over one billion citizens, the Chinese government cannot afford widespread unrest. They must find a way to nip their labor issues in the bud. The best policy approach would involve yuan revaluation. By reducing the rate of inflation of the Chinese yuan, the purchasing power of the yuan will increase, thereby allowing Chinese workers to better enjoy the fruits of their labor. As living standards rise, worker unrest will subside, and the impetus to strike will vanish. …

Even with Governor Christie’s efforts to balance the budget, New Jersey’s fiscal crisis is far from finished. In the NY Post, Steven Malanga looks at the Garden State’s pensions.

…How bad is the Garden State’s situation? A new study by Joshua D. Rauh, a Northwestern University finance professor, warns that Jersey’s public employee-pension plans could run out of money within a decade.

…Jersey taxpayers find themselves in this pickle because the state’s politicians have been shamefully irresponsible by granting rich public-sector benefits — and then trying to hide the cost with fiscal evasions.

…Rauh thinks the numbers are so ugly that a federal bailout of the worst state pension funds like Jersey’s is inevitable. He says such a bailout, to pass Congress, would need to come with strict reforms — like forcing Jersey to immediately close its current plans to new hires and put all future workers in defined-contribution plans, like private-sector 401(k)s.

Others want the feds to be tougher — to shut down current pension funds completely, and cap the benefits of all current employees the way that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. does when it takes over a failed private pension plan. …

And we hear criticism of Obama from another disillusioned liberal. In the WaPo, Richard Cohen takes shots at conservatives while telling Obama to show more bleeding heart in his liberalism.

It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama’s approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.

For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

…What these people were seeking was not an eruption of anger, not a tantrum and not a full-scale denunciation of an oil company. What they wanted instead was a sign that this catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk — and this time just wouldn’t budge. He showed not the slightest sign in the idiom that really counts in a media age — body language — that he gave a damn. He could see your pain, he could talk about your pain, but he gave no indication that he felt it. …

In the WSJ, Paul Rubin offers an excellent comparison and contrast of Katrina and the oil spill.

…The Coast Guard has played an important role in both disasters. During Katrina, it rescued over 33,000 stranded people and received commendations from the president and Congress. In the current disaster, the Coast Guard has received widespread criticism for forbidding 16 barges from skimming oil because they were not inspected for life preservers. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal tried to get the barges working, but was for a long time unable to convince the Coast Guard to permit them to deploy.

Two days after Katrina’s landfall, Mr. Bush suspended the Jones Act (which restricts the ability of non-American ships to work in U.S. waters) to allow assistance for Katrina victims. During Katrina, over 70 foreign countries pledged emergency assistance. In the current situation, President Barack Obama has not suspended the Jones Act. Many countries such as the Netherlands, which would like to help and have expertise in cleaning oil spills, can offer only limited relief. This is significantly delaying the cleanup.

The Jones Act, which requires American crews, is a favorite of organized labor, a major supporter of Mr. Obama. …

David Brooks has fun revising Faustus and gives us these amazing polling numbers.

By 57 percent to 37 percent, voters in these districts embrace the proposition that “President Obama’s economic policies have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.”

Instead of building faith in government, the events of 2009 and 2010 further undermined it. An absurdly low 6 percent of Americans acknowledge that the stimulus package created jobs, according to a New York Times/CBS survey. …

…Election guru Charlie Cook suspects the G.O.P. will retake the House. N.P.R. polled voters in the 60 most competitive House districts currently held by Democrats. Democrats trail Republicans in those districts, on average, by 5 percentage points. Independent voters in the districts favor Republicans by an average of 18 percentage points.

The McChrystal kerfuffle was lucky for the prez because it overshadowed the moratorium slap administered by a federal judge. Michelle Malkin has the story.

… In a scathing ruling issued Tuesday afternoon, New Orleans–based Feldman overturned the administration’s radical six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — and he singled out Salazar’s central role in jury-rigging a federal panel’s scientific report to bolster flagrantly politicized conclusions. In a sane world, Salazar’s head would roll. In Obama’s world, he gets immunity.

The suit challenging Obama’s desperately political ban was filed by Louisiana rig company Hornbeck Offshore Services, which sued on behalf of all the “small people” in the industry whose economic survival is at stake. As the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued in court, the overbroad ban promised to be more devastating to Gulf workers than the spill itself. “This is an unprecedented industry-wide shutdown. Never before has the government done this,” attorney Carl Rosenblum said.
Scientists who served on the committee expressed outrage upon discovering earlier this month that Salazar had — unilaterally and without warning — inserted a blanket drilling-ban recommendation into their report. …