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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mort Zuckerman gives his opinion on the national mood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Nordlinger posts some anecdotes about George Schultz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Broder has the details on the missing budget.

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

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

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

John Podhoretz explains the Berwick trick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Williams shares some interesting thoughts and statistics on poverty.

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

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

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

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

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

Ed Morrissey has more good news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marty Peretz comments on the Earth Improvement Agency mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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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. …