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Thomas Sowell reminds us about the failures of the brilliant.

Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time– and with the same disastrous results.

One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.

In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, “general well-being ought to have been the consequence,” but “instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood.”

The same could be said of the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions of the 20th century.

The idea that the wise and knowledgeable few need to take control of the less wise and less knowledgeable many has taken milder forms– and repeatedly with bad results as well. …

David Warren heard from readers after he minimized the Journolist scandal.

…I wrote about that JournoList scandal on Saturday, and would like to share the gist of mail that came back to me after that article was linked through the States. I expected to hear from a lot of good, right-wing, Tea Party types, congratulating me for even mentioning the issue in the “mainstream media,” but instead about half the notes from these people were unfavourable.

They thought my dismissal of the affair — I wrote that while it certainly looked like a conspiracy to twist the news, in fact liberal journalists would have twisted it the same way even without methodically consulting each other — was inadequate and cowardly. Nor did they accept my view that the “crime” was not journalistic bias, but instead the journalists’ condescending pose of “objectivity” when delivering news and analysis that is steeply slanted. …

…Not for the first time, I got a taste of just how angry a large and growing part of America has become, at the “liberal establishment” in the media, courts, Congress, White House, and the nearest public school. At the root of this, it seems to me, is the sense that decent, reasonable, tolerant people, who work for their livings, are losing control over their own lives to something like a “governing class”; are abused, insulted, being taxed to destruction. And, in the final aggravating clinch, the leaders who speak most articulately for them are smeared as “racists” and “rednecks.” …

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin has an interesting article about some of the divisions we are seeing between states and between the states and the federal government.

Nearly a century and half since the United States last divided, a new “irrepressible conflict” is brewing between the states. It revolves around the expansion of federal power at the expense of state and local prerogatives. It also reflects a growing economic divide, arguably more important than the much discussed ideological one, between very different regional economies.

This conflict could grow in the coming years, particularly as the Obama administration seeks to impose a singular federal will against a generally more conservative set of state governments. The likely election of a more center-right Congress will exacerbate the problem. We may enter a golden age of critical court decisions over the true extent of federal or executive power. …

…These may be just the opening salvos. If the Republicans and conservative Democrats gain effective control of Congress, the White House may choose to push its agenda through the ever expanding federal apparat. This would transform a policy dispute into something resembling a constitutional crisis. …

Peter Wehner takes a liberal to task for not taking other liberals to task.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. argues in his most recent column that it’s time to stand up to the right wing. Here’s a thought: how about, E.J., standing up, even just once, to the left wing? …

Tony Blankley adds a few more brushstrokes to the MSM portrayal of the Shirley Sherrod incident.

…Then some more of her speech-after the reconciliation of the races section-is made available and includes the following sentences: ” I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. (Murmurs of agreement.) Some of the racism we thought was buried — (someone in the audience says, “It surfaced!”) Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. (Applause) ” (Text courtesy of National Review).

In other words, she is accusing up to 70 million Americans (registered Republican voters) of opposing Obamacare because the President is black-rather than because we disagree with the policy-as we did with Hillarycare in 1994. That is a broad-brush bigoted attitude by Mrs. Sherrod against all of us who opposed the president’s healthcare policy. She implicitly accuses all 70 million of us of being racist. …

The Economist gives us a new way to look at railroads in the U. S.. Usually the bien pensants are bemoaning the lack of train travel because we’re not sitting like proles being moved around by “the authorities.” Instead, the magazine points out our system of rail freight is far superior, and suggests it might suffer if widespread changes were made to accommodate high speed passenger trains. 

…Their good run started with deregulation at the end of Jimmy Carter’s administration. Two years after the liberalisation of aviation gave rise to budget carriers and cheap fares, the freeing of rail freight, under the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, started a wave of consolidation and improvement. Staggers gave railways freedom to charge market rates, enter confidential contracts with shippers and run trains as they liked. They could close passenger and branch lines, as long as they preserved access for Amtrak services. They were allowed to sell lossmaking lines to new short-haul railroads. Regulation of freight rates by the Interstate Commerce Commission was removed for most cargoes, provided they could go by road.

Before deregulation America’s railways were going bust. …

…Several factors had combined to bring about this sorry state of affairs. Services and rates were tightly regulated. Companies were obliged to run passenger services that could not make a profit. And road haulage received a huge boost from the building of the interstate highway system, which began in the late 1950s. Although this was supposed to be financed by taxes on petrol and diesel, railmen saw it as a form of subsidy to a new competitor, the nationwide trucking industry. In a neat twist, the poor condition of today’s highways and the lack of public money for repairs have tilted the competitive advantage back to a rejuvenated rail-freight industry.

Giving the railroads the freedom to run their business as they saw fit led to dramatic improvements. The first result was a sharp rise in traffic and productivity and fall in freight costs. Since 1981 productivity has risen by 172%, after years of stagnation. Adjusted for inflation, rates are down by 55% since 1981 (see chart 1). Rail’s share of the freight market, measured in ton-miles, has risen steadily to 43%—about the highest in any rich country. …

… The trouble for the freight railways is that almost all the planned new fast intercity services will run on their tracks. Combining slow freight and fast passenger trains is complicated. With some exceptions on Amtrak’s Acela and North East corridor tracks, level crossings are attuned to limits of 50mph for freight and 80mph for passenger trains. But Mr Obama’s plan boils down to running intercity passenger trains at 110mph on freight tracks. Add the fact that freight trains do not stick to a regular timetable, but run variable services at short notice to meet demand, and the scope for congestion grows.

The freight railroads have learned to live with the limited Amtrak passenger services on their tracks. Occasionally they moan that Amtrak pays only about a fifth of the real cost of this access. Some railmen calculate that this is equivalent to a subsidy of about $240m a year, on top of what Amtrak gets from the government. Freight-rail people regard this glumly as just part of the cost of doing business, but their spirits will hardly lift if the burden grows.

Their main complaint, however, is that one Amtrak passenger train at 110mph will remove the capacity to run six freight trains in any corridor. Nor do they believe claims that PTC, due to be in use by 2015, will increase capacity by allowing trains to run closer together in safety. So it will cost billions to adapt and upgrade the lines to accommodate both a big rise in freight traffic and an unprecedented burgeoning of intercity passenger services. Indeed, some of the money that the White House has earmarked will go on sidings where freight trains can be parked while intercity expresses speed by. …

Get out in the sun! In the NY Times, Jane Brody writes about the widespread deficiency of vitamin D.

…Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University, a leading expert on vitamin D and author of “The Vitamin D Solution” (Penguin Press, 2010), said in an interview, “We want everyone to be above 30 nanograms per milliliter, but currently in the United States, Caucasians average 18 to 22 nanograms and African-Americans average 13 to 15 nanograms.” African-American women are 10 times as likely to have levels at or below 15 nanograms as white women, the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found.

Such low levels could account for the high incidence of several chronic diseases in this country, Dr. Holick maintains. For example, he said, in the Northeast, where sun exposure is reduced and vitamin D levels consequently are lower, cancer rates are higher than in the South. Likewise, rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and prostate cancer are higher among dark-skinned Americans than among whites.

The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said. …

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We start off with a number of Contentions’ posts. Abe Greenwald first and then four from Peter Wehner

Abe Greenwald comments on evidence that Obama knew the Lockerbie terrorist was going to be freed.

…For genuine scandal, check out the newly released letter from the U.S. embassy in London to Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond. It reveals a) the Obama administration’s passivity in the run-up to Scotland’s release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, b) the administration’s deception in claiming to have had no foreknowledge of Megrahi’s release, and c) the administration’s inability to persuade other governments of anything.

Although President Obama previously said that he was “surprised, disappointed and angry” about Scotland’s release of Megrahi, the letter makes plain that there was no surprise whatsoever. The anger and disappointment now belong firmly to the American people. …

Peter Wehner catalogs some of the reasons for the current malaise.

The Denver Post endorsed Barack Obama for President in 2008. So it’s yet one more indication of the problems now buffeting the Obama presidency when its editorial features sentences such these: “Welcome to the summer of malaise. Welcome back, Carter.” They are now becoming almost too numerous to list. But let’s try…

More from Peter Wehner. He asks Republican politicians to rise to the occasion.

…Representative Cole is correct that the American people want Republicans to say no. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion when you analyze the polling data. But Representative Ryan is correct as well; Republicans need to combine their no votes — which are necessary and admirable — with a sufficiently detailed governing agenda. There are plenty of fine ideas out there — beginning with Ryan’s own plan, a Roadmap for America’s Future. That need not be the only one, by any means. …

…Republicans should be smart, aim high, and provide a clear alternative to Obamaism. It’s in their self-interest and in the nation’s best interests. Those are two pretty good reasons to do it.

Some of our favorites took a nonchalant view of the JournoList kerfuffle. Not Peter Wehner. He thinks it’s a big deal.

… I understand people speaking candidly in e-mail exchanges and wanting to create a group of like-minded people to exchange ideas. And I accept that Journolist was started with good intentions. But somewhere along the line, it slipped off track.

What we had were journalists creating a “community” in which we see expressions of hatred that are both comically adolescent and almost psychopathic. We have them endorsing slander of innocent people simply because they hold a different point of view, comparing the Tea Party movement to Nazism, and participating in a post thread with the subject, “The line on Palin.” And we have journalists endorsing a “tough legal framework” to control what a news organization says.

What we have, in short, is intellectual corruption of a fairly high order. From what we have seen and from what those like Tucker Carlson and his colleagues (who have read the exchanges in detail) say, Journolist was — at least in good measure — a hotbed of hatred, political hackery, banality, and juvenile thuggery. It is the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from troubled, towel-snapping junior high boys. (It’s worth pointing out that if a principal got a hold of e-mails like the ones produced by Journolist, he would punish and probably suspend the offending eighth graders.)

Journolist provides a window into the mindset of the journalistic and academic left in this country. It is not a pretty sight. The demonization and dehumanization of critics is arresting. Those who hold contrary views to the Journolist crowd aren’t individuals who have honest disagreements; they are evil, malignant, and their voices need to be eliminated from the public square. It is illiberal in the extreme.

Some Journolist defenders argue that what has been published doesn’t capture the true nature of what went on at Journolist and that the published exchanges were taken out of context. The Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson has a reasonable response: …

Peter Wehner also posts on the many grownups that appeared in JournoList.  

… Even among the crackpots and the haters, there were some voices of restraint and civility. Good for them. I only wish there were more names to add to their ranks.

Wehner linked to this item in the Daily Caller which listed many of the instances when JournoList members attempted to put some balanced thinking into play.

The Daily Caller has highlighted some of Journolist’s worst moments — such as when liberal members of the media plotted to kill important stories about the presidential campaign.

But the 400-member listserv, like any community, was a complex arrangement comprised of many individual voices.

While some urged members to level indiscriminate charges of racism, other postings reflected admirable integrity or civility. Here are some examples: …

In the City Journal, Steven Malanga looks at the debt junkies that run state and local governments. We’ll leave you to read Malanga’s excellent explanation of the many ways in which politicians have acted irresponsibly. We highlight his discussion of what can be done to reign in politicians who are bringing this country to the brink of financial disaster while collecting big paychecks and big pensions for the damage they have wrought.

…The current crisis in state and local budgets may be the best opportunity in ages to bring reform to the muni market. Critics have argued in the past that the government should abolish the federal-tax-exempt status of municipal bonds. Those arguments have gone nowhere because the market has powerful defenders: the Wall Street firms that earn underwriting fees selling bonds; the investors benefiting from subsidies; and state and local politicians making liberal use of the debt.

Still, Congress has narrowed muni debt’s tax-free status in the past to eliminate egregious abuses, and it’s time to do so again. One place to start is municipal debt used to finance for-profit businesses, a job that governments are ill equipped to perform capably. Take the city of El Monte, California, which subsidized the opening of a handful of local car dealerships and watched three of them go bust. When cities take the process a step further and get into bidding wars with one another for things like the NASCAR Hall of Fame, they drive up the price of the attractions, ultimately at a heavy taxpayer cost. Congress should revoke the tax exemption for bonds in all these cases.

Another key reform is to restrain or eliminate the independent authorities. New Jersey has already moved in this direction with a 2008 referendum, approved by voters, constraining the authorities’ ability to issue debt without voter approval.  …

…Finally, states and cities need to limit debt-related fiscal maneuvers. …

July 27, 2010

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The judicial branch, in the person of a Clinton appointee, actually comes through again, this time in the Obama’s lawsuit against Arizona. Ed Morrissey blogs about the judge’s initial response.

It didn’t take long for federal judge Susan Bolton to zero in on the holes in the Obama administration’s argument in their lawsuit against Arizona and its new must-enforce policy on immigration violations.  Bolton, a Democratic appointee, shot holes in the Department of Justice’s pre-emption argument immediately, and in a broader sense wondered why the federal government concerned itself at all over Arizona’s get-tough policy on illegal immigration…

Robert Samuelson offers interesting insights on employment and market dynamics.

WASHINGTON — Judging from corporate profits, we should be enjoying a powerful economic recovery. The drop in profits in the recession was about a third, apparently the worst since World War II. But every day brings reports of gains. In the second quarter, IBM’s earnings rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier. Government statistics through the first quarter (the latest available) show that profits have recovered 87 percent of what they lost in the recession. When second-quarter results are tabulated, profits may exceed their previous peak.

The rebound in profits ought to be a good omen. It frees companies to be more aggressive. They’re sitting on huge cash reserves: a record of $838 billion for industrial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (companies like Apple, Boeing and Caterpillar) at the end of March, up 26 percent from a year earlier. “They have the wherewithal to do whatever they want — hire; make new investments; raise dividends; do mergers and acquisitions,” says S&P’s Howard Silverblatt. Historically, higher profits lead to higher employment, says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. Except for startups, loss-making companies don’t generate many new jobs.

So far, history be damned. The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that defines today’s economy.

…In hindsight, the massive job cuts of 2008 and 2009 should not have been surprising. “With the collapse of the financial system,” says economist Lynn Reaser of Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, “companies had to conserve cash desperately, (because) they couldn’t rely on outside financing.” So they savagely axed jobs, inventories and new investment projects (computers, machinery, factories). In the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first and second quarters of 2009, business investment dropped at annual rates of 24 percent, 50 percent and 24 percent. …

John Steele Gordon comments on the story surrounding Shirley Sherrod.

…This morning on Fox News Sunday, Howard Dean, obviously following the Obama line, tried to make it sound like Fox News had been part of the problem. Chris Wallace, in an unusually heated exchange, would have none of it. He pointed out that Fox did not carry the story or mention Ms. Sherrod’s name until she had been fired. It then ran the Breitbart tape, naturally, as part of the story. So did all other cable news channels.

So Fox, it seems to me, is blameless — it was reporting the news, which, after all, is its job. Breitbart was after attention and, perhaps, wanted to frighten the Obama administration into acting foolishly. If so, he sure succeeded. And the Obama administration has egg all over its face, contributing to the growing impression that it is incompetent.

The only hero here is Shirley Sherrod. She told her own moving story about how she managed to move beyond the racism of the past and enter the post-racial world that Barack Obama promised and has, rather spectacularly in this case, failed to deliver.

Maybe President Obama should fire one of the Chicago gang at the White House and replace that person with Shirley Sherrod. It seems the administration could use a little common wisdom and dignity around there.

David Warren doesn’t think there’s much conspiracy in the Journolists’ reporting.

…As Joe Klein, of Time magazine — prominent both as journalist and on JournoList — hath protested, he didn’t need any strategy sessions in e-mail to decide how to attack Palin; he could “easily” have selected all the angles, by himself. And I do not doubt for a moment that he is telling the truth.

It was his word “easily” that I found most significant. I could myself, in advance, “easily” have guessed from which angles Joe Klein would attack Sarah Palin, and will, as he promises, continue to attack her. The dogs in Pavlov’s experiment did not “conspire” to salivate.

No journalist can be perfectly “detached” from what he is covering; so that the pose of perfect detachment is a fraud. It is too much to ask of any human being, whether liberal or conservative. The best we can ask is for honesty and candour — for some elementary sense of fair play — and it is a shame we must search through private e-mails to find those qualities.

Ed Morrissey posts on the latest Journolist installment from the Daily Caller.

…But that wasn’t the end of it, according to the Daily Caller’s Jonathan Strong. Ed Kilgore of the Progressive Policy Institute and Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism continued to push for better messaging against John McCain and Palin.  Gitlin made it specific…

…There is little doubt that Journolisters used the listserv for cheerleading and campaigning.  In most cases, that would be as surprising as hearing that journalists talk politics at bars, and worthy of the same level of outrage.  It’s certainly telling, however, that a man tasked with instructing future journalists has no trouble urging writers to secretly coordinate messages on behalf of the party and candidate he likes.  I doubt that’s the first time Gitlin has offered that advice, and Columbia needs to respond to this revelation.  Will they stand behind this as proper ethics for their students, or will they repudiate Gitlin? …

Jules Crittenden comments on Senator John Kerry’s latest gaffe.

Oh, the hurtfulness. Boston Herald piles on, with New England boat builders wondering why, in times of hardship, Sen. Thurston Howell … I mean John Kerry, D-Mass., had to outsource his luxury, going halfway around the world to buy the $7 million luxury yacht he was berthing across state lines in tax-free Rhode Island: 

…When asked to respond to criticism of Kerry’s decision not to buy American, his state director, Drew O’Brien, said: “When it comes to creating and preserving jobs and economic opportunity in Massachusetts, no one has worked harder in Washington than John Kerry. Sen. Kerry is using smarts, clout and good old-fashioned hard work to make the Massachusetts economy grow and prosper.”…

The Economist reviews a new exhibition on baseball and cricket. Now it is in England. Later it spends a year in Cooperstown.

…The true origins of both games are to be found in “Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect”, a new exhibition for which the curator, Beth Hise, has written an exemplary catalogue. This cornucopia of bats and balls, uniforms (belonging to England’s Andrew Flintoff and the Yankees’ Derek Jeter), photographs and memorabilia has opened at the Marylebone Cricket Club’s museum at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London and will move on to the Hall of Fame.

It is based on the revisionist notion that the two games have much in common. Both are rooted in English folk traditions, and each is based on a contest between the pitcher and the batter in baseball and the bowler and the batsman in cricket. Referees are called umpires in both. “I see them as blood brothers, separated at birth but genetically linked,” writes Mr Engel in the catalogue’s introduction. …

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A eulogy for an Israeli rabbi serves as a reminder of the debt the civilized world owes to Judaism.    In Forbes, Daniel Freedman does the honors.

…The life of Rabbi Amital, an Orthodox rabbi and scholar (with his kind eyes and full beard), is a reminder that the very values that the free world holds so dear–charity, justice, and liberalism (in the classical sense)–have their roots in the Hebrew Bible and traditional Judaism. The Bible teaches lessons like the importance of hospitality (Abraham’s welcoming strangers) and the duty to fight slavery and oppression (Moses standing up to Pharaoh). The Book of Ruth is a lesson in common humanity, and the Book of Job one in principled dissent.

Moreover, many of the political freedoms that we enjoy today have their roots in the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinical commentaries that explained it. Eric Nelson outlines this in his brilliant new book The Hebrew Republic, showing, for example, how the triumph of republican government over monarchy is in large part thanks to the Bible and the rabbis. …

We have a look at more of the JournoList controversy. Howard Kurtz starts us off with a review.

To conservatives, it is a pulling back of the curtain to expose the media’s mendacity.

To liberals, it is a selective sliming based on e-mails that were supposed to remain private.

But there is no getting around the fact that some of these messages, culled from the members-only discussion group Journolist, are embarrassing. They show liberal commentators appearing to cooperate in an effort to hammer out the shrewdest talking points against the Republicans — including, in one case, a suggestion for accusing random conservatives of being racist. …

Paul Marks, in Samizdata, blogs about JournoList scandal, and wonders whether the British publishing world is employing similar underhanded tactics.

…Outwardly such magazines as Time and the Economist pretend to compete and to offer different world views (the Economist pretending to be a free market supporting journal – in spite of its support for endless bailouts and other corporate welfare, and support government “stimulus” spending). Yet Mr Carlson shows (by publishing their discussions) that high ranking people at these (and most other) “mainstream media” outlets actively cooperate, and coordinate their disinformation and propaganda campaigns for the collectivist cause.

…What is next going to be exposed? Will we find out, for example, that important people within the British publishing industry (and book trade generally) conspire to undermine books that do not fit in with their view of the world – and to promote books that do? …

… For example, the Economist has not published (over a period of years) a single review of any book that blames the economic crises on government intervention – in spite of several of these books (such as Thomas Woods “Meltdown” and Thomas Sowell’s “The Housing Boom and Bust” being best sellers in the United States). …

Actually I do not believe that their is a British book trade version of “JournoList” – but then I did not believe there was such a thing in the media either.

Jonah Goldberg closes the subject

…Journolist e-mails obtained by The Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don’t like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They tend to ascribe evil motives to their political opponents — sometimes even when they know it’s unfair. One obscure blogger insisted that liberals should arbitrarily demonize a conservative journalist as a racist to scare conservatives away from covering stories that might hurt Obama.

Oh, and — surprise! — it turns out that the “O” in Journolist stands for “Obama.”

…As James DeLong, a fellow at the Digital Society, correctly noted on the Enterprise Blog, “The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism.”

For a liberal activist that’s forgivable, I guess. But academics? Reporters? Editors? …

Tunku Varadarajan says Charlie Rangel’s toast.

…There will be resistance to Rangel’s departure, primarily from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for whom Rangel is, for all his flaws, a revered elder statesman. But Rangel is now indefensible, and not merely because Pelosi wants to show him the door: His is a style, a method, a politics from an age when it was simply not done to ask uncomfortable questions of a black politician, lest that politician (and his supporters) retort that the questioning was racist. That protective smokescreen of “racism” was good to men like Rangel, allowing them to go about their merry ways blithely, and untroubled. It is harder to strike pouting, Manichaean postures now, when a black man holds the highest office in the land. There can be no cheap and easy shaming of critics, no slick refuge in a narrative of racial oppression. …

Typical of all liberal feel good legislation, the WSJ editors review how congressional intervention to raise wages has resulted in less teens employed.

Today marks the first anniversary of Congress’s decision to raise the federal minimum wage by 41% to $7.25 an hour. But hold the confetti. According to a new study, more than 100,000 fewer teens are employed today due to the wage hikes.

Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they’re especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington’s ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes. …

…After isolating for other economic factors and broadening their analysis to include all 32 states affected by any stage of the federal wage increase, the authors conclude that “the federal minimum-wage hikes reduced teen employment by 2.5% translating to approximately 114,400 fewer employed teens.” …

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The current norm for government bureaucracy guarantees too many people producing too little results, and lots of politics and irrational rules thrown in that waste money and resources. David Warren comments on a WaPo series on the nation’s intelligence bureaucracy.

…Indeed, with a much smaller security establishment (even proportionally), and much less invasive techniques, the Israelis have a far better record for stopping terrorists dead in their tracks. And this, only because they shamelessly profile their lethal enemies.

When “politically correct” attitudes prevail, we get not only vast bureaucracy, but also, the real bad guys slipping through highly visible cracks. …

…Moreover, at the very top, intelligence findings, such as they are, take the back seat to political calculation. Every major U.S. intelligence finding over the last decade, including “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” has been dead wrong. In turn, the celebrated, very public 2007 finding that the Iranians had given up their nuclear weapons program, was delivered for no other plausible purpose than to cut the legs out from under President Bush before he started another war. …

…In other words, truth is seldom among leading criteria in the final assessment of this “intelligence” ocean; for bureaucracies have other priorities, the chiefmost being their own survival and growth. …

Michael Barone notes some changes in opinion regarding a military strike on Iran.

…I read three recent articles saying there’s an increasing chance that the United States — or Israel — might well bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. One was by Time’s Joe Klein, who has been a harsh critic of George W. Bush’s military policies and a skeptic about action against Iran. The other was by self-described centrist Walter Russell Mead in his ever-fascinating American Interest blog. …

…Klein thinks President Obama is still dead set against bombing Iran. Mead is not so sure. He thinks Obama is motivated by a Wilsonian desire for “the construction of a liberal and orderly world.” Or “the European Union built up to a global scale.” A successful Iranian nuclear program, in Mead’s view, would be “the complete, utter and historic destruction” of Obama’s long-term goals of a non-nuclear world and a cooperative international order.

This may sound far-fetched. But recall that Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Then in 1917 he went to war and quickly built the most stringent wartime state — with private businesses nationalized and political dissenters jailed — in modern American history. A Wilsonian desire for international order is not inconsistent with aggressive military action. Sometimes the two are compatible. …

We need to restore our special relationship with the UK, writes Paul Johnson in Forbes. Whether it was Forbes’ editors or Paul Johnson, the title of this item, “Is President Obama Anti-British?” is woefully misplaced; might as well ask if the Pope is Catholic, or if the bear dumps in the forest. It is obvious he is anti-British which is of a piece of some of his other stupidities. His defenders say he picked up this opinion from his father’s experiences with colonial era Kenya. If the president was not so ignorant, he could pause to ponder the history of the British anti-slavery crusade that brought an end to an institution that had been part of human history since the beginnings of time; or at least since Moby Dick was a minnow. Perhaps slavery would have ended without Wilberforce and the English abolitionists. But they deserve much credit and the whole country does too. It is without doubt one of the noblest efforts in history. To have a jerk in the White House who ignores the special relationship with our great friends and allies is almost too much to bear.

…The friendly relationship between our two countries has huge benefits for both sides, which is why it has lasted so long. Whenever the U.S. has felt that taking strong action–especially military action–is in its national interest, Britain has always taken America’s side. Britain is the first, the last and usually the only truly dependable ally the U.S. has. This was true during the immediate post-WWII period, the Berlin blockade and the Korean War. It was also true throughout the Cold War and its aftermath. It has been particularly true during the struggle with Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. judged that it was its right to intervene militarily in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain has given the U.S. 100% backing–politically, diplomatically and on the ground. Its involvement is highly unpopular among British voters. If Mr. Obama and the government he heads are publicly seen as anti-British and acting deliberately against British interests, the demand for the withdrawal of British military support could easily–and quickly–become irresistible. I trust the President will ponder this risk before he next indulges in his anti-British insinuations.

First John Fund warned us, now Charles Krauthammer looks at the liberals’ plans for the upcoming lame-duck session.

…As John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, Kent Conrad and Tom Harkin are already looking forward to what they might get passed in a lame-duck session. Among the major items being considered are card check, budget-balancing through major tax hikes, and climate-change legislation involving heavy carbon taxes and regulation.

Card check, which effectively abolishes the secret ballot in the workplace, is the fondest wish of a union movement to which Obama is highly beholden. Major tax hikes, possibly including a value-added tax, will undoubtedly be included in the recommendations of the president’s debt commission, which conveniently reports by Dec. 1. And carbon taxes would be the newest version of the cap-and-trade legislation that has repeatedly failed to pass the current Congress — but enough dead men walking in a lame-duck session might switch and vote to put it over the top. …

Daniel Foster also blogs on the subject.

…Here’s John Fund riffing on Mike Allen to that end:

“Mike Allen of Politico.com reports one reason President Obama failed to mention climate change legislation during his recent, Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill was that he wants to pass a modest energy bill this summer, then add carbon taxes or regulations in a conference committee with the House, most likely during a lame-duck session. The result would be a climate bill vastly more ambitious, and costly for American consumers and taxpayers, than moderate “Blue Dogs” in the House would support on the campaign trail. “We have a lot of wiggle room in conference,” a House Democratic aide told the trade publication Environment & Energy Daily last month. …”

David Harsanyi thinks we can pass on a second beer summit.

…Let me suggest one lesson the nation might take from the Breitbart/Sherrod story: Let’s take a breather from any more national dialoguing on the issue of race. Please.

After all, can anyone recall the last productive conversation on the topic? Whenever we hear about race in politics these days, it’s typically being wielded as a weapon to smear entire political movements, de-legitimatize a genuine national debate, and ratchet up anger over imaginary slights. …

Since he’s on vacation, we went to the files to find a rollicking good piece from the Bush/Kerry campaign. Mark Steyn has a flair for taking liberals’ absurd policies to their logical, and frightening, conclusions.

… There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don’t include Kerry’s silly debater’s points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush “outsourced” the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it (“It is the best way to protect our troops,” he said in December 2001. “I think we have been doing this pretty effectively.”). But, on the other, he claims he’s going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it. …

…So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment’s cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec’s Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It’s a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene — by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don’t clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don’t bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That’s the official number. Unofficially, if you’re over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to “old age” or some such and then “lose” the relevant medical records. Quebec’s health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq’s.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it’s a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can’t wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.

In the Boston Globe, Joshua Green thinks its time we got President Bush back. Not those. This time we get the pick of the litter.

…another potent political force — one who raised no money and has no PAC — could still win the nomination were he inclined to pursue it: Jeb Bush is the candidate hiding in plain sight. The brother and son of presidents stepped back from elected politics after his second term as Florida governor ended three years ago. At 57, he’s in his prime. …

…Bush, on the other hand, has a solid conservative record that wasn’t amassed in Washington and broad appeal in a critical state; for a party conspicuously lacking a positive agenda, he’s also known as an ideas guy. Bush hasn’t followed the Tea Partiers to the political fringes — he opposed Arizona’s racial profiling law, for instance — but neither has he ignored them. …

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Spengler writes on the growing dichotomy of interests between Germany and the rest of Europe.

To paraphrase a Wall Street adage: bulls make money, bears make money, and PIIGS get slaughtered. Of course I’m referring to Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Germany won’t bail them out again.

Germans work. The country’s unemployment rate stands at 7.5%, against an average of 13% for Europe’s so-called PIIGS. Those are heavily massaged estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). More revealing is a comparison of youth unemployment, now at 10% in Germany. By contrast, as Doug Saunders observed in the July 16 Globe and Mail, “The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.”

There is another important distinction between the German ants and the southern European grasshoppers: Germans save. They had better, because three-fifths of them are likely to be over the age of 60 by the middle of the present century. Gross national saving in Germany last year stood at 26% according to the OECD, against about 16% among the PIIGS, whose demographic profile is just as bad.

Thrifty, hard-working Germans in May bailed out dissolute, corrupt, feckless, spendthrift and lazy Greeks, Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. That, at least, is how it appears to the German public. …

Thomas Sowell writes about playing the race card.

… Playing the race card takes many forms. Judge Charles Pickering, a federal judge in Mississippi who defended the civil rights of blacks for years and defied the Ku Klux Klan back when that was dangerous, was depicted as a racist when he was nominated for a federal appellate judgeship.

No one even mistakenly thought he was a racist. The point was simply to discredit him for political reasons — and it worked.

This year’s target is the Tea Party. When leading Democrats, led by a smirking Nancy Pelosi, made their triumphant walk on Capitol Hill, celebrating their passage of a bill in defiance of public opinion, Tea Party members on the scene protested.

All this was captured on camera and the scene was played on television. What was not captured on any of the cameras and other recording devices on the scene was anybody using racist language, as has been charged by those playing the race card.

When you realize how many media people were there, and how many ordinary citizens carry around recording devices of one sort or another, it is remarkable — indeed, unbelievable — that racist remarks were made and yet were not captured by anybody.

The latest attack on the Tea Party movement, by Ben Jealous of the NAACP, has once again played the race card. Like the proverbial lawyer who knows his case is weak, he shouts louder. …

Time to explore the JournoList controversy. Fred Barnes is first.

When I’m talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there’s liberal bias in the media, but there’s no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn’t be the case.

Now, after learning I’d been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I’m inclined to amend my response. Not to say there’s a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism. …

John Podhoretz is next.

… Until disbanding last month, JournoList was an Internet ingathering of several hundred left-of-center intellectuals. The Web site Daily Caller yesterday published a series of JournoList e-mails dating back to the 2008 campaign and Obama’s relationship with Wright, his spiritual leader for two decades.

The exposure during the primary season of Wright’s disgusting words — blaming the United States for 9/11; accusing the US government of creating the AIDS virus; declaring “God damn America” — raised questions about the silent acceptance of Wright’s opinions by his most famous congregant.

It was always easy to imagine how the Wright matter could have brought down the Obama candidacy. Candidates have been stymied by far less when the media pressure became relentless — lead stories day after day on the evening newscasts; dozens of investigative reporters assigned to expose every word and action of the questionable associate; the pounding and hammering of press secretaries and endorsers and others not by political rivals but by prestigious news outlets.

That didn’t happen, not really, in this case — because the media covering Obama were uncomfortable playing that adversary role with him. And in part that was surely due to the efforts made by the JournoListers. …

Roger Simon gets in his licks.

… Journalism, no matter what the J-schools say, is not cardiology. It’s not even plumbing. It’s just another biased human activity practiced by those who can get — and keep — the job. The Daily Caller has performed a service in publishing the dull maunderings of the Journolist crowd. It takes them all down yet another peg. How many are left to go?

Of course, this doesn’t apply just to self-described liberals or leftists. Simply because their ideology is in desperate retreat doesn’t make them unique in this regard. No matter what our views, we are all merely citizens of a virtual Grub Street. Almost anyone can do what we do. In his jaunty cynicism, James Boswell had more to say about the life of a journalist than all the professors at Columbia added up and squared. The “elite” members of Journolist, who take themselves sooo seriously, would be well advised to read — our reread — his London Journal

Walter Williams shows how Washington really works. This example uses sugar to show how rent seekers game the system and how the politicians sell their souls.

… studies have linked diets rich in high-fructose corn syrup to elevated risks of high triglycerides (a type of blood fat), fat buildup in the liver and insulin resistance, notes Dr. Gerald Shulman and his colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine.

“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the UC Davis study, adding, “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose.”

You say, “Williams, sucrose, fructose — what’s the fuss?” Glucose is the sugar sold in 5- or 10-pound bags at your supermarket that Americans have used as a sweetener throughout most of our history. Fructose is a sweetener that has more recently come into heavy use by beverage manufacturers and food processors. You ask, “How come all the fructose use now?”

Enter the U.S. Congress. The Fanjul family of Palm Beach, Fla., a politically connected family, has given more than $1.8 million to both Democratic and Republican parties over the years. They and others in the sugar industry give millions to congressmen to keep high tariffs on foreign sugar so the U.S. sugar industry can charge us higher prices. According to one study, the Fanjul family alone earns about $65 million a year from congressional protectionism.

Chairman Emeritus of Archer Daniels Midland Company, Dwayne Andreas, has given politicians millions of dollars to help him enrich ADM at our expense. For that money, congressmen vote to restrict sugar imports that in turn drive up sugar prices. …

Shmuley Boteach (yes that’s his name) writes in the Jerusalem post about a recent Tom Friedman column.

… more puzzling is The New York Times column about Fadlallah penned by Tom Friedman, a man for the whom the line between right and wrong is increasingly blurred by the day.

Recall that three weeks ago Friedman wrote a column accusing Israel of employing “Hama rules”’ in Gaza, thereby comparing a thriving democracy battling Hamas, a terrorist organization that fired thousands of rockets at its citizens, to a bloodthirsty tyrant in Syria who mowed his people down with tanks when they dared rise up against his brutal regime.

Now, in his column on Fadlallah, Friedman begins by condemning CNN for firing its senior editor for Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted that she was “sad to hear of the passing of’ Fadlallah,” adding for good measure that the terrorist was “one of Hizbullah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Friedman concedes that Nasr’s posting was “troubling,” but not because she lamented the death of a terrorist but because “reporters covering a beat” undermine their credibility when they “issue condolences” for the people they cover.

If that amorality weren’t wacky enough, Friedman then begins to personally praise Fadlallah, quoting Richard Norton of Boston University who said that Fadlallah supported women and “was not afraid to speak about sexuality,” adding that “he even once gave [a mosque sermon] about sexual urges and female masturbation.” …

In the long line of recent bizarre columns by Friedman, this one wins a prize. …

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David Harsanyi says Obama’s love of government coercion demonstrates his lack of faith in the American people.

With midterm elections approaching, President Barack Obama has gone on the charm offensive, claiming Republicans are demonstrating a “lack of faith in the American people.”

Faith is often defined as having confidence or trust in a person or thing. In this case, though, faith means adding another $35 billion in unemployment benefits to the infinite intergenerational tab — sometimes referred to as the budget — and mailing out as many checks as possible before Election Day.

Yet, the jab is revealing in other ways. To begin with, what mysterious brand of public policy has Obama employed that exemplifies this sacred trust between public officials and the common citizen?

Was it the administration’s faith in the wisdom of the American parent that persuaded it to shut down the voucher program in Washington, D.C., and continue the left’s decades- long campaign denying school choice for kids and parents? Or was that just faith in public-sector unions?

Was faith in American industry behind the Democrats’ support of a stimulus bill that was almost entirely predicated on preserving swollen government spending at the expense of private-sector growth?

Is this hallowed faith in the citizenry also what compels the administration to dictate what kind of car we will be driving in the future, what kind of energy we will be filling these “cars” with and what amounts of that energy will be acceptable? …

When it suited the administration, the mandate to buy health insurance was not a tax. To defend against a lawsuit against the plan, they claim the mandate is a tax. Peter Wehner notes the contradiction.

… DOJ argues that the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And according to the Times, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.” Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.

Well, well, well, this does pose a problem for our president, doesn’t it?

In addition to being yet one more violation of his pledge not to tax families making less than $250,000, Obama, during the health-care debate, insisted that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was not a tax.

In an exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last September (h/t Ed Morrisey), Stephanopoulos pressed Obama on admitting that what he was advocating was a tax increase. “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” Obama assured us. …

Mort Zuckerman pays homage to the remarkable job creation engine that is the American economy. He goes on to show how the Obama administration is destroying it.

… in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created 73 million new private sector jobs—while simultaneously losing some 44 million jobs in the process of adjusting its economy to international competition. That was a net gain of some 29 million jobs. A stunning 55 percent of the total workforce at the end of these two decades was in a new job, some two-thirds of them in industries that paid more than the average wage. By contrast, continental Europe, with a larger economy and workforce, created an estimated 4 million jobs in the same period, most of which were in the public sector (and the cost of which they are beginning to regret). …

… But one unfortunate pattern that has emerged in the last 18 months is to lay all the blame for our difficulties only on the business community and the financial world. This quite ignores the role of Congress in many areas, but most glaringly in forcing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back loans to people who could not afford them. And not to mention the role of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2004 sanctioned higher levels of leverage for financial firms, from 12 times equity to over 30 times equity.

This predilection to blame business is manifest in the unnecessary and provocative anti-business sentiment revealed by President Obama in a recent speech that was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. “In the absence of sound oversight,” he said, “responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.” This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonization of business is exactly the wrong approach. It ignores the disappointment of a stimulus program that was ill-designed to produce the jobs the president promised—that famous 8 percent unemployment ceiling.

But it’s not just the rhetoric that undermines the confidence the business community needs to find if it is to invest. Consider the new generation of regulatory rules, increased bureaucracy, and higher taxes created by the Obama administration. For example, the new financial regulation bill includes nearly 500 “rule-makings,” studies, and reports, compared with just 14 in total for the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom. The disillusionment has spread to the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which represents small businesses that normally account for roughly 60 percent of job creation.

The chief economist of the NFIB, William Dunkelberg, put it clearly: Small business owners “do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed.” He also said, “The U.S. economy faces hurricane force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult.”

Our economic Katrina, in short.

Jennifer Rubin reports on more of the Obama administration’s job destroying.

… ‘A report to be released [today] by the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General for the Toxic Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) will contend that President Obama’s push for General Motors and Chrysler to close thousands of dealerships across the country as part of their government bailouts “may have substantially contributed to the shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls, all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impacts.”

The SIGTARP report will further contend, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it is questionable whether the closings were “either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the nation’s economic recovery.”’ …

Scary graph from The Atlantic Blogs showing the increased number of long-term unemployed.

The median duration of unemployment is higher today than any time in the last 50 years. That’s an understatement. It is more than twice as high today than any time in the last 50 years. …

Caroline Baum says she’s embarrassed for Christina Romer and the bilge she must present about “jobs created or saved.”

… Sure the government can spend money and generate GDP growth in the short run: Government spending is a component of GDP!

What it giveth it taketh away from the private sector via taxation or borrowing. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn’t spend, an investment it doesn’t make, a job it doesn’t create. This is what is unseen, as Frederic Bastiat explained in an 1850 essay.

“If the administration wants to take credit for ‘jobs created or saved,’ it should also accept responsibility for ’jobs destroyed or prevented,’” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.

Ignoring the flaws in the stimulus for the moment, Congress raised the hurdle for hiring entry-level workers when it refused to delay the third step in a three-stage minimum wage increase last year. And the Department of Labor cracked down on unpaid internships, outlining six criteria that businesses had to satisfy in order to hire someone willing and able to work for nothing to get the experience.

For example, the employer must derive “no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.”

You can’t make this stuff up. …

It would be nice to think a GOP win in November would turn around government spending. Kevin Williamson calls BS on that thought. What’s the answer Never again let our guard down. Hold their feet to the fire and never relax. Or else, we will end up like the old T party of Trent, and Tom, and Ted. That would be Lott, Delay, and Stevens. All poster boys for GOP spending excess.

… If you want to see just how befuddled Republicans are when it comes to this issue, look no further than Senator John Cornyn’s performance on Meet the Press opposite David Gregory this weekend. Gregory asks the same question I ask every time I interview a Republican bigwig: “What does distinguish the Republican party of today from the Republican party under President Bush’s rule, with regards to spending.” Cornyn’s answer was, basically, “Uhhhhh — hey, look, something shiny!” But let’s hear from the senator in his own words: “Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances. They’ve had single-party government and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping job creators on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs. That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs.” This is politician for, “The dog ate my homework.” Yes, there is some uncertainty about the political environment, and that surely is affecting investing and hiring decisions. You know what else is affecting those decisions? A couple of trillion dollars’ worth of devalued capital in the form of collapsed real-estate values and a crippled banking system that Congress has decided to prop up rather than allow it to be sorted out by the ruthless Darwinian forces of the market.

But what about those unemployment benefits? The Republicans say they want to extend them but pay for doing so by cutting other spending. Unfortunately, the “other spending” they plan to cut is stimulus funds that have been theoretically appropriated but not spent — i.e., they’re “saving” money by not spending money we might not have been spending, anyway. It’s like a broke guy saying: “Yeah, I was planning on buying a new Ferrari, but then I changed my mind. What should I do with the $250,000 I saved myself?” …

Victor Davis Hanson says being anti-Obama is not enough.

Republicans will shortly need to stand for something more than just being against much of the Obama agenda. Only a superior and detailed alternative can win more lasting support than just a midterm correction.

Obama, after all — with nationalized health care, amnesty, cap-and-trade, financial overhaul, government absorption of private enterprise, takeover of the student-loan industry, and gorge-the-beast deficits that will ensure a generation of higher taxes — at least seems to have some sort of plan to change America.

The absurdity of $1.5 trillion annual deficits is easy to run on; but where in the budget should we freeze or cut spending? To restore fiscal sanity, we need details rather than vague promises to reduce red ink to a particular percentage of GDP. Is there to be an across-the-board spending freeze or targeted cuts? How much, if at all, does defense get cut? If it does, where and how? …

Paul Ryan says he’s not interested in running for the presidency. Makes him normal. And qualified. He likes Mitch Daniels for the job. Weekly Standard has the story.

… “I want to be a normal person,” Ryan continued. “Other people can run for that thing. Other people can’t do this,” he said, pointing to one of his three young children sipping a kiddie cocktail.

Many politicians say they won’t run for higher office because of their family, but Ryan really seems to mean it. “I lost my dad when I was a little kid,” he said. “So I’m very sensitive to that issue. I’d be on the campaign trail in a month, and I’d be crying myself to sleep because I hadn’t seen my kids for eight or ten days. Right now, I can handle it when I don’t see them for three or four days.”

“As nice as New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina are, it’s not home,” Ryan said. “I just couldn’t do it. It’s a two year deal. It takes two years minimum to run for that job, to do it right, and there’s no way I could do it.”

Ryan was willing to talk up the presidential prospects of another Republican: Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. “He would be a great president,” said Ryan. “He looks like your accountant, but that’s not so bad maybe.” In Ryan’s estimation, Daniels is the only potential GOP presidential candidate at the moment who really gets the ideas outlined in his Road Map and is willing to fight for them. …

Amazing! Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than print.

… Amazon is reporting that it is now selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 paper-and-ink books. Kindle books outsold regular books for a while after
Christmas last year, and everyone assumed, doubtlessly correctly, that many people had gotten Kindles for Christmas and were loading them up. But now, half a year later, it seems to be a permanent shift. The recent cut in the price of a Kindle has tripled sales. …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Samuelson sees Obamacare’s future in Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abe Greenwald answers the administration’s excuse mongers.

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

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

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

Roger Simon sums up our thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Harsanyi sees a lot in Toy Story 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claudia Rosett has more on the story.

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

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

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