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Daniel Hannan, MP has a new book coming out. He blogs about it in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

Barack Obama born in Kenya? Pah! If anything, he was born in Brussels. The policies his administration is pursuing amount to comprehensive Europeanisation: European carbon taxes, European foreign policy, European healthcare, European daycare, European disarmament, European industrial intervention and, inevitably, European unemployment rates. …

…I’m not saying that everything in the US is good and everything in the EU is bad, far from it. It’s just that the aspects of Euro-politics which your rulers seem most intent on copying are those which have demonstrably failed: the centralisation of power, higher state spending, welfare dependency, excessive regulation.

Why does this model fail? Why does the current administration seem so drawn to it? Is there still time to turn aside? Can US conservatives get their act together? Will the Tea Party succeed? Is there such a thing as American exceptionalism? Why does the success of the US matter to Britain? I address these and other questions in The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America, out tomorrow.

In the WSJ, Nicole and Mark Crain explain how government regulation hurts the economy, discourages hiring, and increases your cost of living.

The annual cost of federal regulations in the United States increased to more than $1.75 trillion in 2008, a 3% real increase over five years, to about 14% of U.S. national income. This cost is in addition to the federal tax burden of 21%, for a combined cost of 35% of national income. One out of every three dollars earned in the U.S. goes to pay for or comply with federal laws and regulations, and new policies enacted in 2010 for health care and financial services will increase this burden. …

….In a report released last week for the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, we find that small businesses bear a disproportionately large share of regulatory costs. The portion of these costs that falls initially on businesses overall was $8,086 per employee in 2008. But these costs are not borne equally by businesses of all sizes. Larger firms benefit from economies of scale in compliance; small businesses do not have that advantage.

…Small manufacturers bear compliance costs that are 110% higher than those of medium-sized firms and 125% higher than large firms’ costs. As much as it is fashionable to blame China for the demise of small manufacturing in America, the evidence suggests that looking for some reasons closer to home is warranted. …

…In per-household terms, the combined federal burden of regulation and taxes is a remarkable $37,962. Increased transparency in both the cost and benefit side of the regulatory equation is necessary to determine whether what we spend is worth the 35% of national income that it costs, and whether the distribution of the burden is relatively efficient. This is particularly true now that the federal government is undertaking Herculean efforts to stimulate the economy while increasing regulations costly to businesses.

Tony Blankley writes about a remarkable movement, and the hope that true change is coming.

…Christopher Lasch‘s “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” posthumously published in 1995. The noted historian, whose intellectual journey carried him from the left in the ’60s to the populist right by the ’90s, would have been giddy over the Tea Party.

…The very idea of virtue and other absolutes has fallen into disfavor with the elites. Lasch described the emergence of elites who “control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. …

…The Tea Party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by postmodern elitists. The movement’s central tenets – small government, decentralization of power and an end to profligate spending – are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

The elites’ fear and loathing of the Tea Party movement is rooted in the recognition that the real change is only now coming. They are right to be fearful, for the ultimate outcome of the Tea Party‘s triumph will be to constrain the elites’ economic and cultural hegemony. This reversal of fortune, with power flowing from the privileged back to the middle class, will take time to fully manifest itself. But an inexorable movement has begun. …

With his trademark clarity of thought and word, Thomas Sowell gives us an explanation of gold and freedom.

One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who sell gold. This had nothing to do with medical care but everything to do with sneaking in an extension of the government’s power over gold, in a bill too big for most people to read.

Gold has long been a source of frustration for politicians who want to extend their power over the economy. First of all, the gold standard cramped their style because there is only so much money you can print when every dollar bill can be turned in to the government, to be exchanged for the equivalent amount of gold.

When the amount of money the government can print is limited by how much gold the government has, politicians cannot pay off a massive national debt by just printing more money and repaying the owners of government bonds with dollars that are cheaper than the dollars with which the bonds were bought. In other words, politicians cannot cheat people as easily. …

In the National Review, James Capretta reviews the Obami abuses of power related to the establishment of the Obamacare bureaucracy.

…It’s now been six months since Congress passed Obamacare — not a long time given the sweeping nature of the legislation and the long phase-in schedule for its most significant provisions. Even so, it is already abundantly clear that Obamacare’s critics were dead right: The new health law has set in motion a government takeover of American health care, and a very hostile one at that. The Obama administration’s clumsy and overbearing behavior since its passage proves the point.

First, there are the heavy-handed statements coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Two weeks ago, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to the nation’s insurers with a plainly stated threat: Either the insurers conform to the political agenda of the administration and describe the reasons for premium increases in terms acceptable to the Democratic party, or they will be shut out entirely from the government-managed insurance marketplace. What could possibly have provoked a cabinet secretary to launch such an indiscriminate broadside against an entire industry? Simple: A handful of insurers had dared to utter the truth, noting that the new law has imposed costly insurance mandates that will raise premiums for everyone. For that offense, the federal government has essentially threatened to put the truth-telling insurers out of business. And what’s truly astonishing, and telling, is that the new law almost certainly gives the HHS secretary the power to do so if she really wants to.

Then there is the matter of Dr. Donald Berwick. Recall that President Obama took more than a year to settle on Dr. Berwick as his nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and then moved in a matter of weeks to put him in place without Senate confirmation. The president tried to blame Republicans for this blatant end-run around constitutional checks and balances, even though Democrats control the Senate and could have held a hearing and a vote if they had wanted to. The truth is that Democrats didn’t want Dr. Berwick to be confirmed in the Senate. They wanted him on the job, for sure, because he is an ardent government-takeover enthusiast, and is prepared to use all of the levers at his disposal to advance that objective. The president and his Democratic allies just wanted to get Dr. Berwick in place without the public’s really noticing. So they chose to circumvent the normal process and put him in the CMS position with a time-limited recess appointment. For the next year and a half, Dr. Berwick is free to use CMS’s enormous new powers to force doctors and hospitals to conform to his vision of effective health care, and he is essentially accountable to no one but the president. …

The ABC Sunday Morning show began to develop a following for Jake Tapper. Then the idiots in charge of ABC put Christiane Amanpour in the anchor’s chair. Jennifer Rubin describes the result.

ABC News decided to put the overtly biased and under-informed Christiane Amanpour in the host chair for “This Week.” Perhaps they thought she had star quality or that MSNBC’s netroot viewers could be lured. But the result is a weekly display of journalistic malpractice. …

AMANPOUR: All right. But really a lot of people — I mean, people from all over the world, frankly, say to me here comes a president with a huge mandate, a huge reservoir of goodwill, huge promises to change, and with all of that, his popularity is down. People don’t appreciate some of the amazing legislative agenda that he’s accomplished. Is this a failure of leadership? Has he allowed the opposition to define him? [Emphasis added.]

Good grief. Is she on the White House payroll?

Peter Wehner agrees with Rubin, and adds these thoughts:

Apropos your posting, Jennifer, Christiane Amanpour has been ABC’s “This Week” host for nine Sundays — and a week ago last Sunday, on September 19, the show dropped to its lowest ratings in the 25-54 age demographic in more than seven years. According to Mediaite, the last time ABC had a lower rating in the demo was the August 24, 2003 show. Year-to-year, the show was down 29 percent in total viewers and 38 percent in the demo, while its popularity declined in both categories week-to-week as well (while that of NBC and CBS grew).

Just like the Philadelphia Eagles head coach Andy Reid acknowledged his mistake in making Kevin Kolb the starting quarterback and has now replaced him with Michael Vick, ABC’s brass should recognize the error of its ways and replace Amanpour with Jake Tapper, who not only received higher ratings than Amanpour but is also a far better (and more objective) host. Tapper is, in fact, among the nation’s best political reporters. For reasons Jen details, Amanpour is not.

And we have Steve Krakauer’s piece from Media-ite to which Wehner referred.

…Last Sunday, September 19, the show didn’t just finish in third place, behind NBC’s Meet The Press and CBS’ Face The Nation – it was the lowest ratings in the A25-54 demographic in more than seven years.

… Year-to-year, the show was down 29% in total viewers and 38% in the demo, while it declined in both categories week-to-week as well (while NBC and CBS grew).

It’s not like it had anything to do with the guests either – This Week put together arguably the best guest list last Sunday. Amanpour had a Sunday exclusive with President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as an interview with Sec. Hillary Clinton. On paper, it was a strong show. But the ratings, which haven’t been spectacular from the very beginning, have continued to see a decline, despite these high profile bookings. ..

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Mary Anastasia O’Grady is skeptical of Fidel Castro’s recent declaration.

…If the regime is to stay in power, it needs a new source of income to pay the secret police and keep the masses in rice. The best bet is the American tourist, last seen circa 1950 exploiting the locals, according to revolutionary lore, but now needed by the regime. It wants the U.S. travel ban lifted. To prevail, Castro needs to counteract rumors that he is a dictator. Solution: a makeover in the Atlantic. …

…We are supposed to conclude that Cuba is no longer a threat to global stability and that Fidel is a reformed tyrant. But how believable is a guy whose revolution all but wiped out Cuba’s tiny Jewish community of 15,000, and who spent the past 50 years supporting the terrorism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Syria, Libya and Iran? And how does Castro explain Venezuela, where Cuban intelligence agents run things, Iran is an ally and anti-Semitism has been state policy in recent years? Mr. Goldberg doesn’t go there with Fidel.

…When Castro declares that the Cuban model no longer works, Mr. Goldberg turns to Ms. Sweig, as if there is something profound to be grasped. He is not saying “the ideas of the Revolution” have failed, she explains, but only that the state “has much too big a role” in the economy. Right, except that the state-owned economy is the idea of the revolution. …

China is in the headlines for flexing its naval muscles and provoking regional disputes. In the WaPo, Anne Applebaum looks at the increasing economic strength of this superpower.

…Over the past decade, China has kept silent, lain low and behaved more like a multinational company than a global superpower — and garnered enormous political influence as a result.

The fruits of this success are everywhere. Look at Afghanistan, for example, where American troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent — and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world’s largest copper deposits. Though American troops don’t protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do. And though the mine is still in its early phases, the Chinese businessmen and engineers — wearing civilian clothes, offering jobs — are already more popular with the locals than the U.S. troops, who carry guns and talk security. …

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where American troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in American military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

…Quietly, the Chinese have also cornered the market in rare-earth metals, unusual minerals that have lovely names (promethium, ytterbium) and are vital for the production of cellphones, lasers and computers — not to mention hybrid cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Though China doesn’t control the world’s reserves of these elements, some of which aren’t all that rare, mining them is dirty, labor-intensive and ideally suited for cheap production in a country with low wages and lower environmental standards. Nobody else can compete, which is why China now controls 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of these elements. …

J.E.Dyer explains why China’s provocation of Japan should produce concern.

…Difficult as such positions can be for Asian nations to draw back from, it’s China’s prosecution of a material stake in the disputed economic zone off the Senkaku Islands that may keep both sides in confrontation. Japan has reportedly identified Chinese drilling equipment in the disputed area and suspects that Beijing is preparing to drill for natural gas there. Oil and gas exploration by both nations goes back to 2004; Japan has already stated concerns that drilling performed within China’s acknowledged economic zone could tap gas reserves in the area claimed by Tokyo. Taiwan is another claimant to economic rights in the area, a factor that serves to complicate relations among the parties.

China has assumed a position it cannot back off from gracefully — and one involving its most important economic interests. The outcome of this confrontation will be a point of no return in one way or another. Neither China nor Japan will rest if it loses this face-off. More than economic assets are at stake; this is about power relations and the future of Asia. Of greatest concern in all of this is the basic fact that China was emboldened to pick this fight. Beijing apparently calculates that the U.S. will acquiesce in whatever de facto diplomatic triumph China’s leaders can achieve over Japan.

Japan is unlikely to back down, however. The outcome of this incident matters too greatly to its national future. It’s trite to talk about being at a crossroads, but that’s because the metaphor usually fits. Americans are faced with a choice of our own in this situation: either we are relevant to its resolution — a resolution involving one of our closest allies — or we are not. If we’re not, the status quo of the “Pax Americana” will not last much longer.

The Daily Beast has a must-read article from Philip K. Howard on reforming government.

Government is broken. It spends money we don’t have, takes no responsibility for the future, and suffocates daily freedoms under a thickening blanket of unnecessary bureaucracy and litigation.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are to blame. Instead of appealing to our better nature, they promise short-term self-interest of continued entitlements or lower taxes. Instead of leadership for a responsible society, they attack each other with partisan half-truths, oblivious to the critical need to change course.

Changing leaders is not enough. Decades of accumulated law and bureaucracy have made it impossible for anyone to use common sense. New leaders come to Washington and immediately get stuck in the bureaucratic goo.

Government needs to be cleaned out. Government has a vital role in a crowded society, as a steward of common resources and public services. But it cannot deal effectively with the important challenges of today—whether to contain runaway entitlements or to create clean energy—when resources are committed to goals of past decades. Accumulated law has become a fortress for the status quo. Unnecessary law and bureaucracy also act as a heavy weight on society, making it hard for teachers, doctors, and other citizens to pursue their dreams. Many Americans no longer feel they can make a difference.

Government will never fix itself. Washington and state capitals have become disconnected from the public they serve, focused on partisan tug-of-wars instead of on the vital needs of society.

Change can only come from outside pressure. Americans must come together to demand a new approach to governing. …

In Investor’s Business Daily, Brian Deagon writes about the Tea Party’s use of the internet.

Type TeaPartyPatriots.org into your Web browser, and the roots of the upstart political movement are quickly exposed.

On the right are listings of Tea Party events across America — the latest of 6,000 events posted in the 18 months since the movement and Web site sprang up.

At the site’s lower part are state-by-state lists of links to individual Tea Party groups — 2,400 in all, says Robert Gaudet, the software consultant who designed the site. …

…The site has 127,000 registered members, with hundreds signing up each day. Along with other related sites he created, Gaudet estimates that he has an e-mail list of 1 million Tea Party enthusiasts.

The Internet has allowed the Tea Party movement to be radically decentralized. Really, the movement doesn’t use social networking, it is social networking. No single leader sets priorities and marshals forces, yet activists have managed to channel huge sources and attention on political races and issues. …

We hear about another interesting new advance from the Economist, on dirigible transport.

TRANSPORTING large, clunky bits of equipment has always posed a challenge. Roads and railways do not reach everywhere, and even if they did, many cumbersome and heavy constructions need to be hauled in pieces, only to be put together at the final destination. Aeroplane cargo faces even tighter restrictions on shape and size, not to mention the need for runways. Heavy-transport helicopters, such as the Mil Mi-26 or Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane, address some of these difficulties, but their payloads are limited to 20 and nine tonnes, respectively, and the huge rotors create a powerful downdraft that makes handling that payload rather tricky. So people have long been looking for other ways round the problem. Now, Skylifter, an Australian aeronautical firm, thinks it has found the perfect solution.

The company is developing a piloted dirigible capable of carrying loads of up to 150 tonnes over distances as great as 2,000km (1,240 miles) at a speed of 45 knots (83kph). This would permit the craft to transport not just hefty components, but entire buildings, to remote areas. The company envisages modules ranging from rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to luxury airborne cruise ships.

Rather than use either a spherical or a cigar-shaped aerostat, as the gas-filled envelope of a lighter-than-air craft is known, Skylifter has developed a discus-shaped one. This means that like a traditional, round balloon—and unlike the elongated dirigible blimps that have hitherto been used as serious modes of commercial transport—the craft is “directionless”. In other words, it is oblivious of where the wind happens to be blowing from, which simplifies load-handling in places where the wind is fickle. At the same time, being flatter than a sphere, the aerostat acts less like a sail than a traditional balloon does, making it easier to steer. The flying-saucer shape also acts as a parachute, affording greater control during descent. …

For years, cardiologists have recommended aspirin in low dosages for heart health. Turns out it also prevents bowel cancer. New Scientist has the story.

A LITTLE aspirin might just go as far as a lot when it comes to preventing bowel cancer – with fewer side effects.

So says a five-year retrospective study led by Malcolm Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh, UK, that compared the aspirin habits of 2800 people with cancer and 3000 without. The team found that the risk of getting cancer was 25 per cent lower in those who had been taking 75 milligrams of the drug daily compared with those who had not …

This small reduction in risk is comparable to that from earlier studies in which the doses were much higher. Andrew Chan of Harvard Medical School in Boston is not convinced: “I still believe that lower doses are not as effective as higher ones.” His 20-year follow-ups on 80,000 women and 50,000 men showed that daily doses of 325 milligrams worked best for preventing bowel cancer.

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Robert Samuelson looks at the possibility of a trade war with China.

No one familiar with the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 should relish the prospect of a trade war with China — but that seems to be where we’re headed and probably should be where we are headed. Although the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it contributed to its severity by provoking widespread retaliation. Confronting China’s export subsidies risks a similar tit-for-tat cycle at a time when the global economic recovery is weak. This is a risk, unfortunately, we need to take.

In a decade, China has gone from a huge, poor nation to an economic colossus. Although its per capita income ($6,600 in 2009) is only one-seventh that of the United States ($46,400), the sheer size of its economy gives it a growing global influence. China passed Japan this year as the second-largest national economy. In 2009, it displaced Germany as the biggest exporter and also became the world’s largest energy user. …

…How much China’s currency is undervalued and how many U.S. jobs have been lost are unclear. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group, says a revaluation of 20 percent would create 300,000 to 700,000 U.S. jobs over two to three years. Economist Robert Scott of the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that trade with China has cost 3.5 million jobs. This may be high, because it assumes that imports from China displace U.S. production when many may displace imports from other countries. But all estimates are large, though well short of the recession’s total employment decline of 8.4 million. …

David Warren continues his efforts to generate answers to the problems our society is currently facing. In this article, he delves into public education.

… But, in a single phrase, the notion that “education is too important to be left to chance” is so universally accepted, that the public at large is capable of overlooking universal failure. Our state schools… have degenerated into dysfunctional propaganda mills.

We easily accept the associated notion that “in a democracy, public schooling is necessary to assure minimum standards for citizenship.” That schools should provide the machinery for the indoctrination of the masses follows naturally from this. Think it through. The proposition actually reverses the first principle of democracy: that government should answer to citizens, and not citizens to government. And remember, that all “progressive” educational proposals require political compulsion.

…But schools exist for education, not vice versa. We have come to look at the basic issue in an inverted way. There are people alive today who actually think problems with education can be solved by spending more money on schools, in defiance of an easily observed, nearly inverse relation between spending and results. …

The one immediate, radical reform for which I think we should aim, after winning the battle of ideas, is the destruction of all centralized school boards and liquidation of all departments of education. Put every single public and high school in the control of a local parent association, and necessity — the most efficient instructor — will soon teach the parents what they must do. Return the universities to the elitist status quo ante, before governments took them over: for “average” people don’t belong in there. …

Michael Barone writes about two important issues addressed by the Pledge to America.

…On Sept. 23 last week, 12 Republican House members stood in a hardware store in Sterling, Va., and issued a Pledge to America.

…One is to roll back non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels. The other is to repeal — not revise or amend or embroider, but repeal — the health care bill signed by Barack Obama…

…But wouldn’t it hurt Republicans, if they have a House majority, to get into a budget fight as it hurt Newt Gingrich’s new majority back in 1995? Not necessarily. The benefits from those spending increases are pretty invisible to the ordinary voters (though visible to public employee union leaders who give millions to Democrats). How many ads are Democratic candidates running bragging about these spending increases?

…Moreover, the macroeconomy is in a very different place than it was during the Gingrich era. Then we were well started into an economic recovery, one aided by Republicans’ partial victories on budget and tax issues. Money didn’t seem scarce and shutting down the government seemed extreme.

Today we are in, if not an official recession, at least an agonizingly slow recovery. And if Democrats complain that it’s unfair for government and public employees to be limited to what they got in 2008, Republicans can reply that an awful lot of their constituents would be very happy to go back to the income levels and the housing equity and the 401(k) balances they had in 2008.

Everyone has been suffering. Why should government be exempt? …

Jennifer Rubin has an amazing story on voter fraud that was discovered by a grass-roots organization. We’ll leave you to read the post and to wonder what, if anything, the government does right.

…The Obama Justice Department isn’t keen on enforcing Section No. 8 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud. So ordinary citizens are doing what the Justice Department won’t — uncovering voter fraud. This report explains that 50 friends took up the effort after seeing what went on in Houston on Election Day 2008:

“What we saw shocked us,” [ Catherine Engelbrecht] said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers. …

We have an article from the WSJ that brings us some concern. Jim Towey was the Director of the White House Office on Faith-Based Initiatives, and writes how Obama has used this office to push a political agenda. This article begs the question of why the government is trying to do the work of churches, charities, and non-profits. We need to have more discussion about what duties we need government to perform, and make government focus on doing those tasks, and only those tasks, effectively and efficiently. The President would not be able to politicize an Office on Faith-Based Initiatives if the office didn’t exist.

…Yet on Tuesday President Obama and his director of faith-based initiatives convened exactly such a meeting to try to control political damage from the unpopular health-care law. “Get out there and spread the word,” Politico.com reported the president as saying on a conference call with leaders of faith-based and community groups. “I think all of you can be really important validators and trusted resources for friends and neighbors, to help explain what’s now available to them.”

…According to the White House website, the faith-based office exists “to more effectively serve Americans in need.” I guess that now means Americans in need of Democratic talking points on health care. Do we really want taxpayer-funded bureaucrats mobilizing ministers to go out to all the neighborhoods and spread the good news of universal coverage?

…Nearly 20 months later, however, the faith-based office has failed to be a voice within the administration for compassion. Poverty rates are at record highs, and the economy is producing new waves of homeless families. Meanwhile the faith-based office in the White House and those in 11 federal agencies have no record, no results, and no relevance.

This operation stands in stark contrast to the priority Mr. Bush placed on this office. Every year, he used the grand stage of the State of the Union address to launch new compassion programs. In his first six months in office, he pushed for a vote in Congress to end discrimination against religious charities. New programs to mentor the children of prisoners, expand choices for addicts seeking treatment, and combat the spread of AIDS were launched. They have since transformed countless lives. …

In Politico, Sarah Kliff has more on the administration attempt to use religious leaders.

With nothing else working, President Barack Obama is asking religious leaders to help him sell the public on health care reform.

POLITICO listened in to an Oval Office conference call Tuesday, where Obama and top administration officials, beseeched thousands of faith-based and community organizations to preach the gospel on new insurance reforms, chiefly the Patients’ Bill of Rights.

“Get out there and spread the word,” Obama told leaders from across the religious spectrum on the conference call, organized by the Health and Human Services Center for Faith-Based and Community Partnerships.

…Obama instructed faith leaders to treat the new law as settled fact and use their perches of power to convey that message to congregants and friends. …

…The call included the administration’s highest-ranking health reform officials: Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, White House Office of Health Reform director Nancy Ann-DeParle, and Assistant to the President for Special Products Stephanie Cutter.

Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Partnerships, gave activists a rallying cry: “Get the word out there, get information out there. Make use of the resources we’ve described on this call: the website, door hangers, one pagers and so forth. We’ve got work to do.” … 

Toby Harnden blogs about another Obami media campaign.

This smacks of real desperation. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior adviser, told liberal bloggers that he wants to “enlist” them to help Democrats in the mid-term elections. To which Susan Madrak of Crooks and Liars responded that the White House was treating the Left like “the girl you’ll take under the bleachers but you won’t be seen with in the light of day” and was guilty of “hippie punching”.

…Axelrod is also asking the mainstream media to help out Democrats. In a Washington Post oped (interesting that the White House can apparently get this for free rather than paying the going rate for what amounts to party political advertising) he calls on “the media to shine a light” on conservative groups supporting Republican candidates in the mid-terms.

The truth is that many in the mainstream media feel a tad embarrassed about how OTT they went with Obama in 2008. Since then, they have been starved of access and, according to a number of White House reporters, treated with near-contempt by administration officials. …

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Daniel Hannan, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, shares a snapshot of India’s importance to the Anglosphere.

The Anglosphere, for anyone who still doesn’t know, is the community of free, English-speaking nations linked, not by governmental decree, but by shared values. …

…When passing through Delhi recently, I pointed out that the city feels more familiar, less foreign, than it did a decade ago – partly because the Indian middle class is ballooning, partly because the English language is more widespread and partly because of migration.

Communities of Indian descent remain in almost every corner of the Commonwealth, including those which British settlers evacuated long ago: Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia, East Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada – and increasingly, of course, the US. …

…Almost all post-colonial governments begin by emphasising their distance from the former occupiers, and India was no exception. But technological change and rapid embourgeoisement are realigning India with the other Anglophone democracies. David Cameron, to his credit, grasps that power is shifting eastward, and sees the opportunity for Britain. Barack Obama, by contrast, seems to scorn the vast ally which Bush had secured. Fortunately, Indians seem content to wait for a different attitude from Washington. They are a patient and courteous people.

Notwithstanding his consternation at O’Donnell’s Delaware win, Charles Krauthammer likes the idea of a Dem campaign against the tea parties.

… what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats’ only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues. That’s how John Murtha’s former district director hung on to his boss’s seat in a special election in Pennsylvania.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard — getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America — to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans — nationalize the election, gratis — in 2010. As a very recent former president — now preferred (Public Policy Polling, Sept. 1) in bellwether Ohio over the current one by 50 percent to 42 percent — once said: Bring ‘em on.

The Dems are abandoning ship, writes Bill Kristol.

It would be unbecoming for us at The Weekly -Standard?—we do have to uphold standards, after all!—to chortle with glee as the Democratic party melts down. It would be unkind to whoop at the top of our lungs as Obama White House big shots quit or get fired, and to cheer with gusto as the GOP leadership behaves sensibly, the Tea Party goes from strength to strength, and momentum builds towards a huge Election Day repudiation of big government liberalism.

So, instead, we’ll simply point out, calmly and quietly, that the Democratic party is in meltdown, the Obama White House is in disarray, and the voters are in rebellion against both of them.

…This White House will have lost, by the end of this year, a remarkably high percentage of its original senior staff members. The White House counsel, communications director, budget director, and chair of the council of economic advisers are already gone—to say nothing of the estimable Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation. The chief of staff, national security adviser, and top economic policy director will follow shortly. Almost all of them were oh-so-convinced they were the best and brightest, oh-so-contemptuous of others who had labored in those jobs, and oh-so-disdainful of the American people. If we were less good-hearted and generous in spirit, we would be tempted to say: Goodbye and good riddance. …

Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor answers Thomas Friedman’s delusions of grandiose central planning.

…What has made the American economy more productive than any in history is the largely uncoordinated actions of millions of individuals, often in competition with one another. Competition among freely assembled cooperative organizations–firms.  Guys in their basements and garages.  Not governments and mandarins and bureaucrats who act like those paid to whip Chinese boat haulers in the old days.

America’s current economic problems are largely a manifestation of the unceasing efforts of the government to impose central direction and control.  And the current political firestorm sweeping the country is directly attributable to millions of people pushing back.
Carlson’s 2d Marine Raider Battalion used the Chinese expression “Gung ho” as a motto: it was soon adopted by the rest of the Marine Corps.  Gung ho means “Pull together,” or “work together in harmony.”  That’s Tom Friedman’s idea of how an economy and a polity should work.  It also happens to be the idea held by Obama, and a good part of Congress and the bureaucracy.

It is appealing to a certain kind of mind that makes analogies between tribes or firms or military units or other formal organizations on the one hand, and entire economies on the other.  A kind of mind that has no comprehension of emergent order, spontaneous organization, ordered liberty, or decentralized coordination through competition and the price system.  ”Gung ho” makes sense as an ethos for a military unit: it makes no sense as an organizing principle for an economy. …

Jonah Goldberg heard from a reader who is more informed on China than Thomas Friedman.

From a reader:

Dear Mr. Goldberg:
 
I have appreciated your past articles exposing Thomas Friedman’s ridiculous envy of so-called “progress” in China. But his latest article demonstrates beyond doubt that he has no clue about the real China or its people. Contrary to his protestation, his opinions are based on illusion and have no credibility whatsoever. …
 
…If Thomas Friedman bothered to visit with real Chinese families and saw how they actually lived, he would realize that his admiration for China is misplaced. He would no longer stand in awe of its buildings but rather would admire those Chinese citizens who have managed to remain inspired by the dream of freedom and liberty despite the oppression of their government.
 
(I still have to travel to China so please keep my name confidential in all respects. By the way, doesn’t that request say all that needs to be said about China?)…

It has come to pass that the DOJ disinclination in the Black Panther’s case has broken into mainstream discourse with publication Saturday in WaPo.

A veteran Justice Department lawyer accused his agency Friday of being unwilling to pursue racial discrimination cases on behalf of white voters, turning what had been a lower-level controversy into an escalating political headache for the Obama administration.

Christopher Coates’s testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was the latest fallout from the department’s handling of a 2008 voter-intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party. Conservatives and some congressional Republicans accuse Justice officials of improperly narrowing the charges, allegations that they strongly dispute.

Filed weeks before the Obama administration took office, the case focused on two party members who stood in front of a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008, one carrying a nightstick. The men were captured on video and were accused of trying to discourage some people from voting.

Coates, former head of the voting section that brought the case, testified in defiance of his supervisor’s instructions and has been granted whistleblower protection. Coates criticized what he called the “gutting” of the New Black Panthers case for “irrational reasons,” saying the decision was part of “deep-seated” opposition among the department’s leaders to filing voting-rights cases against minorities and cases that protect whites.

“I had people who told me point-blank that [they] didn’t come to the voting rights section to sue African American people,” said Coates, who transferred to the U.S. attorney’s office in South Carolina in January. “When you are paid by the taxpayer, that is totally indefensible.”  …

John Stossel has an interesting discussion about the fairness of earning pay and the “fairness” of taking other people’s money.

…Arthur Brooks, who heads the American Enterprise Institute.

“…the fairest system is the one that rewards the makers in society as opposed to rewarding the takers in society.”

Brooks wrote “The Battle,” which argues that the fight between free enterprise and big government will shape our future.

“The way that our culture is moving now is toward more redistribution, toward more progressive taxation, exempting more people from paying anything, and loading more of the taxes onto the very top earners in our society.”

But it seems “kind” to take it away from wealthier people and give it to those who need it more.

“Actually, it’s not,” Brooks says. “The government does not create wealth. It uses wealth that’s been created by the private sector.” …

We have the second part of Jeff Jacoby’s discussion of recycling. He expels the myths of recycling.

…Most of the stuff we throw out — aluminum cans are an exception — is cheaper to replace from scratch than to recycle. “Cheaper’’ is another way of saying “requires fewer resources.’’ Green evangelists believe that recycling our trash is “good for the planet’’ — that it conserves resources and is more environmentally friendly. But recycling household waste consumes resources, too.

Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables, and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them. Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned, and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and manpower; then they have to be transported somewhere for post-consumer processing and manufacturing. Add up all the energy, time, emissions, supplies, water, space, and mental and physical labor involved, and mandatory recycling turns out to be largely unsustainable — an environmental burden, not a boon.

“Far from saving resources,’’ Benjamin writes, “curbside recycling typically wastes resources — resources that could be used productively elsewhere in society.’’

Popular impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not running out of places to dispose of garbage. Not only is US landfill capacity at an all-time high, but all of the country’s rubbish for the next 100 years could comfortably fit into a landfill measuring 10 miles square. Benjamin puts that in perspective: “Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Mont., could handle all of America’s trash for the next century — with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.’’…

After seeing the movie Top Gun, it is hard to believe where military aviation is heading. The Economist fills us in.

JET fighters may be sexy in a Tom Cruise-ish sort of way, but for guerilla warefare—in which the enemy rarely has an air force of his own with which to dogfight—they are often not the tool for the job. Pilotless drones can help fill the gap. Sometimes there is no substitute for having a pilot on the scene, however, so modern air forces are starting to turn to a technology from the yesteryear of flying: the turboprop. …

…Turboprops are also hard to shoot down. Air Tractor, another firm that makes cropdusters, branched out into warplanes last year. One reason was that a fleet of 16 unarmed versions of its aircraft had been used by America’s State Department to dust South American drug plantations with herbicide—an activity that tends to provoke a hostile response from the ground. Despite the planes’ having been hit by more than 200 rounds, though, neither an aircraft nor a pilot has been lost.

…Not surprisingly, then, many countries with small defence budgets are investing in turboprops. Places that now fly them, or are expected to do so, include Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco and Venezuela. And the United States. For the biggest military establishment in the world, too, recognises the value of this new old technology. The American air force plans to buy more than 100 turboprops and the navy is now evaluating the Super Tucano, made by Embraer, a Brazilian firm.

In aerial combat, then, low tech may be the new high tech….

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Anne Bayefsky, in the Corner, writes about Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s grotesque performance at the UN, and how appeasement is not working for the administration.

…Ahmadinejad, therefore, took the opportunity provided by the U.N. to slam the door once more in President Obama’s face. While he lectured about the “lust for capital and domination” and “the egotist and the greedy,” the American U.N. delegation sat stoically in their seats. They had instructions to tough it out until Ahmadinejad really got offensive — though what would count as sufficiently offensive was never publicly announced.

The tripwire turned out to be Ahamdinejad’s suggestion that 9/11 was an inside job. “The U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grip on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” With that, the Obama representatives finally hauled themselves out of their seats and put engagement temporarily on hold.

But Ahmadinejad was only warming up. After all, this was the United Nations, a place where Iranians are comfortable throwing their weight around. Once more Ahmadinejad declared his opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, repeating his call for a “vote of the people of Palestine” that would democratically outnumber and therefore rid the region of Zionists. He repeated his grotesque anti-Semitism: “All values, even the freedom of expression, in Europe and in the United States are being sacrificed on the altar of Zionism.” …

Bob Woodward’s new book gives a look inside the White House that is generating much commentary. Roger Simon is up first, discussing how security concerns were trumped with political considerations.

… Politburo? I’ve heard tea party folks and others accuse Obama of being a socialist, but I’ve never heard any of them go nearly so far as his own national security adviser, who uses full-bore Bolshevik terminology for the staff. Maybe he’s right.  From what I’ve heard elsewhere, Biden is right about Holbroke, whose reputation as “the most egotistical bastard” is well known.

As for Obama, Woodward says he lectures his staff like a professor and gives them homework.  Good grief!  I can’t imagine anything more tedious.  I’d rather have ten years of non-stop root canal.

So Rahm, run for the hills.  The time is ripe — Jesse Jackson Jr. has apparently self-immolated and you are as good as mayor. I don’t know what Axelrod will do.  He can probably go back to his cheesy political public relations firm.  That’s what he does anyway — and he could be paid better for it.

Meanwhile, regarding Herr Professor Obama, there’s only one president in our lifetime I could see having behaved the same way.  You all know it, but I’ll say it — Jimmy Carter.

Next, Peter Wehner criticizes the president’s priorities.

The Washington Post’s story on Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Obama’s Wars, includes these passages:

‘ Obama rejected the military’s request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. “I’m not doing 10 years,” he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. “I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.” …’

So we finally found the one institution where Barack Obama is frugal and interested in cost-savings: the military during time of war.

…There are two problems for Obama. The first centers on Article II, Section II, of the Constitution, which states, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.” The president’s primary responsibility, as envisioned by the Founders, is to serve as commander in chief, not as the tax collector for the welfare state. “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention,” John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 3, “is that of providing for their safety seems to be first.”

…Quite apart from being reckless, Obama is reinforcing almost every bad impression of his party: keen on raising taxes, spending record amounts on domestic programs, centralizing power, and expanding the size and reach of the federal government. When it comes to war, though, Obama is conflicted and uncertain, in search of an exit ramp more than victory, and even willing to subordinate security needs to partisan concerns (most especially by insisting on an arbitrary drawdown date of July 2011 in order to please his political advisers). …

Nile Gardiner thinks that the Obami are going to be very unhappy with the perception of Obama’s military judgment.

How damaging will Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars be to the White House? Very. Released next Monday, the veteran Washington Post journalist’s scathing take on the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan could not come at a worse time ahead of the November mid-terms, and will attract a huge amount of media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. It will add to a growing perception of a deeply flawed and divided presidency that is failing to show real leadership both at home and on the world stage.

…Judging by these previews, the big picture which emerges from Woodward’s book is of a president fundamentally at odds with his military advisers, barely concerned with defeating the Taliban, obsessed with finding an early exit strategy, and driven heavily by party political considerations and his drive for re-election in 2012. To describe it as damning would be an understatement.

…The United States, Great Britain and the NATO alliance simply cannot afford to retreat from Afghanistan, with huge implications for American and international security. US and British soldiers are laying down their lives for the cause of victory over the enemy, not for an exit strategy. Unfortunately it is not a message Barack Obama appears to be heeding, while his presidency slides further towards the political abyss.

It’s hard to believe that the Obami think this reflects well on the president. Jennifer Rubin has critical comments for Obama’s unwillingness to review the Afghanistan situation and reconsider his military advisors’ assessments in the future.

…The disregard for his responsibilities — the equivalent of putting his fingers in his ears and humming — is stunning. It also stands in sharp contrast with his predecessor, who insisted on a review of flawed policy and ultimately the implementation of a winning one:

‘ The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: “In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, ‘We’re doing fine, Mr. President, but we’d be better if we just do more.’ We’re not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] … unless we’re talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.” ‘

Imagine FDR telling General Eisenhower, “I don’t want to hear things aren’t going well in Italy.” It’s inconceivable that Obama’s supposed role model, Abraham Lincoln, would have said, “No more news about McClellan’s shortcomings.” …
…Obama’s peevishness and determination to avoid facts that conflict with his ideological disposition are chilling. His apparent disinclination to pursue victory should frighten both allies and foes. Has he matured since the events detailed in the book? We have no evidence of that. I think it’s time to stop pretending that Obama is “growing” in the job and that he understands the responsibilities of a wartime president. …

In the Enterprise Blog, Marc Thiessen focuses on the trillion dollar comment.

“I’m not spending a trillion dollars,” President Obama declares forthrightly on the front page of today’s Washington Post—words few imagined would ever pass the lips of perhaps the biggest spender ever to occupy the Oval Office.

What sparked Obama’s sudden embrace of fiscal restraint? The only matter Obama and the Democrats seem to think is a waste of taxpayer dollars—defending the country from terrorism.

…So we see Obama spending without restraint in virtually every sphere of domestic life, but suddenly discovering fiscal discipline when it comes to defense and national security. The Woodward book promises to be a fascinating insight into the behind-the-scenes thinking of a president who sees his responsibilities as commander in chief as an expensive distraction from his real agenda.

We have more from Jennifer Rubin. She highlights an inquiry into the Rolling Stone article that got General McChrystal fired.

Stanley McChrystal didn’t do what he was accused of doing. The New York Times reports:

“An Army inquiry into a Rolling Stone magazine article about Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has found that it was not the general or senior officers on his staff who made the most egregious comments that led to his abrupt dismissal as the top Afghan commander in June, according to Army and Pentagon officials.

But the review, commissioned after an embarrassing and disruptive episode, does not wholly resolve who was responsible for the inflammatory quotations, most of which were anonymous.”

…It is yet one more indication that the White House decision-making process bounces between the slipshod (e.g., Shirley Sherrod, Stanley McChrystal) and the snail-like agonizing that characterized the Afghanistan strategy sessions. As to the latter, if Bob Woodward’s book is remotely accurate, the reason it took so long was that a recalcitrant president resisted the advice of his military advisers and was interested not in a war strategy but in a political one. Credit is due primarily to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who hung in there to get the best result obtainable from a president whose concerns were primarily political.

Rubin comments on one of the most distressing aspects of Obama’s Afghanistan policy, which David Ignatius brings up.

David Ignatius uses a peculiar adjective to describe Obama’s portrayal in Bob Woodward’s new book: “poignant.” An odd word choice, considering Ignatius’s otherwise apt description:

By Woodward’s account, Obama was looking for an exit from Afghanistan even as he sent 30,000 more U.S. combat troops there.
That’s an untenable position. If the president doubted his strategy, he shouldn’t have sent the troops. If he believes his war plan stands a chance of stabilizing Afghanistan so that he can transfer responsibility to the Afghans starting next July, then he must rally the public so that it understands and supports what he’s doing.

Woodward shows us an Obama who is halfway to war, doubting his strategy even as he asks young men and women to die for it. That’s the one thing a president must not do: Sacrifice lives for a policy he doesn’t think can succeed.

Poignant or shameful? Poignant or irresponsible? Poignant is George Bush, an increasingly reviled figure in the White House making a decision for the sake of the country and the Free World that he knew would politically harm him and his party.

In the National Journals’ Against the Grain Blog, Josh Kraushaar reports on the elections in Ohio and the anti-incumbent mood there.

There’s no shortage of political tumult in the Buckeye State this year, where the Democratic-held governorship and at least six Democratic-held House seats are in jeopardy. But what makes it particularly notable is that the state represents several key demographic groups whose changing perspectives will give serious insight into President Obama’s broader political standing for 2012.

The voters Obama is losing — white-collar managers in Columbus, blue-collar union workers in Youngstown, pro-life independents around Cincinnati — are exactly the types he needs to win re-election in 2012, and they’re backing away from his party in droves. Obama tallied a whopping 60 percent disapproval rating in Quinnipiac’s latest Ohio poll, with nearly two-thirds of voters disapproving of his economic performance.

…Working-class Democrats are abandoning the party to support Republicans with both Wall Street and Washington ties. The business-friendly base around Columbus, which swung towards Obama in 2008, now gives both Portman and Kasich substantial leads. A sizable share (42 percent) of Kasich backers in the Quinnipiac poll said they were casting their vote specifically against Strickland, who was once one of the most popular chief executives in the country. …

Stuart Taylor looks at the chances for litigation, backed by twenty states, to strike down provisions of Obamacare.

…However the case turns out, any ruling by the justices on the constitutionality of the health-care law would be the most important pronouncement on the relative powers of the federal and state governments in many decades.

The most fundamental question is whether Congress’s undoubtedly broad power to regulate activities affecting interstate commerce is so sweeping as to empower the government to require people who are engaged in no relevant activity at all other than living in the United States to buy health insurance. …

The lawsuits also challenge as an invasion of state sovereignty the new law’s provisions requiring states, already strapped for cash, to spend billions of dollars expanding their Medicaid programs unless they withdraw entirely, a step widely seen as unthinkable. …

At the same time, leading centrist-to-conservative legal experts, including UCLA Law School’s Eugene Volokh, doubt that the justices would or should strike down such a hugely important enactment with so vast an impact on interstate commerce. ..

.
The justices have not struck down a major piece of legislation, let alone a president’s signature initiative, as beyond Congress’s power to regulate commerce in some 75 years. …

Tony Blankley reviews the sore-loser RINOs who think they are more important than taking our country back.

…In a different season, such petulance might have strategic significance. But not in 2010. These various “moderates” and party operatives will be swept away by the coming storm – next and last to be seen as post-storm debris hanging undecorously next to old tires and broken awnings. As a party, broadly, the GOP will embrace its new voters and its old principles and thereby profit from the energized grass-roots activists whose efforts surely would flow to a third party next time if thwarted by the Republican establishment this time.

Despite their years of expertise, some Beltway insiders of all varieties – press, pundits, politicians and strategists – some friends of mine – only dimly understand the Tea Party phenomenon. Spontaneous in its formation and wide-ranging in its composition, the Tea Party upwelling is the first genuine grass-roots movement in American politics in decades.

John Fund comments on the moderates who won’t let go.

… Moderates may posture that their refusal to acknowledge the will of primary voters is based on high principle. But it appears to be more and more rooted in a desire to retain office at all costs, while ignoring a clear decision by the Republican primary electorate that the power grabs of Obama Democrats demand the election of GOP officials with stiffer spines to oppose them.

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Mark Steyn has a wonderful way of exposing the idiocy of current establishment thinking. Here he discusses how multi-culturalism is complicit with Islamo-fascism.

…Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in. …

…As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. …

In AOL News, John Merline has an interesting discussion on the official end of the recession and what this means about Obama’s economic measures.

You’d think the news that the Great Recession is officially over would be something to cheer about. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research — the official recession scorekeeper — said the downturn that began in December 2007 ended way back in June 2009.

Anyone feel like celebrating?

The news is particularly unhelpful to the Obama administration right now.

…The trouble is that we now know the recession ended just as the stimulus money started to get spent. According to the White House’s own 100-day stimulus report, issued at the end of May 2009, only $45.6 billion in spending and tax relief had gone out the door by then. In other words, less than 6 percent of the stimulus money was in the economy as the recession ended…

John Fund writes about Obama-Carter comparisons.

Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats.

…Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter’s vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s “just turned against us—same as with Obama.” As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” Democrats on Capitol Hill are now saying this is happening to Mr. Obama. …

…Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter’s pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a “bunker mentality” that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that’s happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president’s ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking. …

Michael Barone looks at how the gubernatorial races are shaping up.

…Republicans currently lead in polls in 12 of the 18 states where they have governors now, and all of their incumbents are ahead. They’re behind in five relatively small Democratic-leaning states where Republican incumbents are retiring, but by wide margins only in two, Hawaii and Connecticut.

…Democrats are faring worse. Their nominees are currently trailing in 13 of the 19 states where they hold the governorships. Only three of their nominees have double digit leads — in Bill Clinton’s home states of Arkansas and New York and in Colorado, where the Republican nominee has been disavowed by many party leaders.

Most unnerving for Democrats is that their nominees are currently trailing by double digits in the nation’s industrial heartland — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. These are states Barack Obama carried with 54, 51, 57 and 62 percent of the vote.

Democrats are not supposed to be trailing there in times like these. The old political rule is that economic distress moves voters in the industrial heartland toward Democrats. Oldtimers remember that that is what happened in recession years like 1958, 1970 and 1982. …

Colin Powell showed up last weekend to remind us how silly he can be. The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on his recent Sunday news program gaffe.

Americans are grateful to Gen. Colin Powell for his exemplary service in uniform. But in his media-ordained role as political wise man, his knowledge and judgment leave a lot to be desired.

Powell is touted as a rare sage within the Republican Party (though it’s a funny kind of Republican who endorses Barack Obama at the worst time imaginable for his GOP opponent, in October 2008). The media present him as a better angel of our nature who has chosen to belong to a hellish political organization dominated by intemperate ideologues.

…But on Sunday, Powell again and again proved his sage status to be little more than a myth. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the biggest embarrassment came when the veteran of the last three Republican administrations took a shot at “his” party on immigration. …

Common sense has long since left the green movement. Jeff Jacoby discusses the tyranny of the trash police, and the added expense of their mandates.

…Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving voluntary market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser. Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to The New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’

“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.’’

But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,’’ writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin. “On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.’’ Now whose idea of exciting is that?

Froma Harrop explores the economic unsustainability of universities, but then brings up an exciting alternative.

…Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

Yet American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers. American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times. This kind of income-price mismatch haunted the housing market right before it melted down. …

…The market will eventually recognize the out-of-whack economics of today’s “place-based colleges” and intervene. Some day soon, Web alternatives will let students of modest means try their hand at a college education. And what a great day that will be.

In Reason, Steve Chapman comments on Cuba’s dismal economic and political situation. It’s so bad that the UN has praised Castro.

…the average Cuban makes only about $20 a month—which is a bit spartan even if you add in free housing, food, and medical care. For that matter, the free stuff is not so easy to come by: Food shortages are frequent, the stock of adequate housing has shrunk, and hospital patients often have to bring their own sheets, food, and even medical supplies.

…Instead of accelerating development, Castro has hindered it. In 1980, living standards in Chile were double those in Cuba. Thanks to bold free-market reforms implemented in Chile but not Cuba, the average Chilean’s income now appears to be four times higher than the average Cuban’s. …

…The latest instrument for strangling dissent is a law allowing the arrest of people exhibiting “dangerous” un-socialist tendencies even before they commit crimes. “The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset, which views anyone who acts out of step with the government as a potential threat and thus worthy of punishment,” says Human Rights Watch.
But even economic failures and political tyranny have been not enough to deprive Castro of Western admirers. On a 2000 visit to Havana, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asserted, “Castro’s regime has set an example we can all learn from.” …

And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:

Senate Democrats (plus Republican George Voinovich) looked ready at press time to pass a bill that would push another TARP-like infusion of capital into the banking system, on the theory that the banks do not have enough money to lend, or, if they do have enough, that they are not making enough loans to small businesses and need to be given better incentives to do so. To that end, the Small Business Lending Fund would allow the Treasury Department to make up to $30 billion in credit available to small community banks at varying rates of interest: The more politically conforming loans the banks make, the less interest they pay. Banks that “plan to provide linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach” would receive special consideration, of course. The fund is a bad idea. Those community banks that are most eager to borrow from the fund are more interested in political protection than in making sound loans, while those community banks that have responded to the weak economy with an appropriate and measured reluctance to lend are unlikely to take the money anyway. There is the administration’s economic policy in a nutshell: reckless borrowing to finance reckless lending.

In a renewed effort to promote homeownership, the Home Affordable Modification Program now instructs mortgage servicers to identify all applicants by race, even if they balk. The program’s new guidebook stipulates that if the borrower declines to provide a racial affiliation, “the servicer should . . . provide the information based on visual observation, information learned from the borrower or surname.” It gets creepier. Servicers are advised to provide employees with “training and job aids (e.g. desk references)” to help them racially inspect clients with clinical expertise and up-to-date stereotypes. The purpose, naturally, is to fight racial bias.

When in the past we have criticized college courses for catering to students’ tastes, we were speaking metaphorically. Not anymore. Earlier this month, 600 students crammed into a 350-seat lecture hall at Harvard University for a new class, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science.” The course, which fulfills a core-curriculum requirement, promises to “discuss concepts from the physical sciences that underpin . . . everyday cooking.” It will feature guest lectures by world-famous chefs, such as Enric Rovira on “his chocolate delicacies.” Here’s a sampling of the required reading: On Food and Cooking, Kitchen Mysteries, and The Science of Ice Cream. When asked by the Harvard Crimson why he was taking the class, one knowledge-hungry student responded: “I think the fact that you can eat your lab is pretty much the coolest thing ever.” Given tuition, it had better be five-star.

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Bill Kristol starts us off with a transcript of Congresswoman Eleanor Norton soliciting contributions from a lobbyist. He takes an excellent macro view of the incident.

…If you set up a casino of welfare statism, crony capitalism, and big government liberalism, this is what you’re going to get.

…The point is that this is what happens when you have crony capitalism and a big government welfare state. Tea Party activists already understand this. The Norton phone call is just more evidence for their broader point about how the current system works and why it has to be reformed.

So our advice to GOP candidates is this: Go ahead and play aloud the Eleanor Holmes Norton tape. But don’t then waste time excoriating the D.C. delegate. Instead, ask your constituents whether this is the kind of government they want. Point out to them that low tax rates do not invite this kind of extortion, while earmarks and stimulus spending packages do. Turn the ethical issues of this Congress (and this administration) into fodder for a broad reform agenda of re-limiting government…

Thomas Sowell comments on the sad outcome of D.C.’s mayoral election.

Few things have captured in microcosm what has gone so painfully wrong, where racial issues are concerned, like the recent election for mayor of Washington, D.C.

Mayor Adrian Fenty, under whom the murder rate has gone down and the school children’s test scores have gone up, was resoundingly defeated for re-election.

…Either one of these achievements would made mayors local heroes in most other cities. Why then was he clobbered in the election?
One key fact tells much of the story: Mayor Fenty received more than 70 percent of the white vote in Washington. His opponent received more than 80 percent of the black vote.

Both men are black. But the head of the school system that he appointed is Asian and the chief of police is a white woman. More than that, most of the teachers who were fired were black. There were also bitter complaints that black contractors did not get as many of the contracts for doing business with the city as they expected.

In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to. …

Toby Harnden describes the Tea Party movement in the wake of a number of Republican primary wins for Tea Party candidates.

…Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members.

…A desire for small government, lower taxes and fidelity to the United States Constitution binds members together. There is a prevailing mood of anger towards Washington and a sense of having been conned. …

But beyond that, the Tea Party is a vast, teeming muddle of opinion and impulses. Many of its strong supporters don’t attend public meetings. “The Tea Party is more an attitude than anything organised,” one Southern conservative told me.

…The Republican primary system is such that ordinary people can reject the choice of the party hierarchy. This has now happened with Senate races in Florida, Alaska, Utah, Kentucky, Colorado and Nevada as well as Delaware.

For all the talk of how the Tea Party will help the Democrats by splitting the Republican vote, the first five of those states are highly likely to result in Republican/Tea Party wins, Nevada is in the balance and only Delaware looks like an uphill struggle. Increased conservative turnout and the energy generated by the Tea Party is likely to punish Democrats disproportionately. …

David Warren writes his first column on what needs to be done to get government under control.

…A correspondent in Virginia, responding to last week’s column, put this point so well, that I will quote and not paraphrase: “Patients are no longer responsible for their own good health; doctors and the ‘health care system’ are. Students are no longer responsible for their own learning: teachers and the schools are. And citizens, by extension, are no longer responsible for their own civic well being; someone else is.”

The most urgent political task, now and into the indefinite future, is to articulate such home truths, in direct defiance of the “progressive” Zeitgeist.

That, more than anything else, is what Reagan and Thatcher accomplished in their day: setting their faces against the statist breeze. Lord knows, they accomplished little at the practical level. But for a glimmering moment, they helped us remember that a nation is her people and not her government.

They knew that bureaucracy is an evil; but accepted it as a necessary evil, susceptible to reform and occasional “downsizing.” We need to take one step farther, and grasp that it is an unnecessary evil — that any human activity which requires a cumbersome bureaucracy is itself morally dubious; that anything which reduces the human being to a “unit” for bureaucratic purposes is in its nature inhuman.  …

Jennifer Rubin turns an Obama phrase on its head.

…Obama declares that the choice is between “hope and fear.” Actually, he’s right, but not in the way he intends. For many voters the hope is that electing conservatives to Congress will slow and reverse the spend-a-thon and focus the peripatetic White House on the issue they care most about — jobs. As for the fear, one suspects the public has grown weary of the host of villains the White House conjures up to deflect attention from its own dismal record.

It’s been two years since Obama articulated his own hopeful vision. Now it’s all about recriminations and finger-pointing. You wonder what his reaction will be when the Bible- and gun-huggers, the stooges of the insurance industry, and the Islamophobes stream to the polls, throw out many Democratic incumbents, and declare Obamanomics kaput. At this point, he’s certainly not acting like a president prepared to take the voters’ message to heart and revise his agenda accordingly. …

And we have more witty commentary from Jennifer Rubin, this time at Jimmy Carter’s expense. She wonders if Obama is up to being a worse ex-president than president because Carter has set a new precedent.

Jimmy Carter has been an annoyance to every one of his successors. He’s played footsie with dictators, made common cause with Israel’s enemies, made Osama bin Laden’s book list, and demonstrated the peevishness that was not yet fully in evidence during his presidency. He then pronounces that he is ”superior” to all his successors. Sensing that is a bit much for Saint Jimmy, he backpedals, explaining, “What I meant was, for 27 years the Carter Center has provided me with superior opportunities to do good.” Not much better is it? Frankly, on this one even Bill Clinton has the right to be offended.

Carter, as one of the wittiest commentators points out, now insists in his diary (on Osama bin Laden’s nightstand no doubt!) that he would have won in 1980 had it not been for those darn hostages and the pesky Ted Kennedy. …

…Carter has managed, arguably, to be a worse ex-president than president. For Obama, that will be a challenge.

Thomas Sowell looks at the concept of nuclear disarmament.

…Had there been no nuclear weapons created during World War II, that would have given an overwhelming military advantage in the postwar world to countries with large and well equipped armies. Especially after the U.S. Army withdrew from Europe, following the end of World War II, there was nothing to stop Stalin’s army from marching right across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

…Western Europe has had one of its longest periods of peace under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella. Japan, one of the biggest and most cruel conquerors of the 20th century, has become a peaceful nation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the real world, the question of whether nuclear disarmament is desirable or undesirable is utterly irrelevant because it is simply not possible, except in words— and we would truly be fools to accept such words at the risk of our lives. …

The WSJ editors comment on an economic clunker.

…economists Atif Mian of the University of California Berkeley and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago have examined “cash for clunkers,” the $2.85 billion program that subsidized consumers to buy new cars and destroy older ones. Their conclusion: The program “had no long run effect on auto purchases.” It did juice sales during its two-month run last summer, by about 360,000 cars, but then it quickly hurt sales by about the same amount, in effect stealing purchases from the future. The program was a wash in a mere seven months.

…It’s impossible to test what would have happened without cash for clunkers because there’s no control group. But Messrs. Mian and Sufi do the next best thing by looking at how clunkers were distributed around the country. Comparing high-clunker areas to low-clunker areas—and thus the areas that were more “stimulated”—allowed them to measure relative economic outcomes.

Lo, Messrs. Mian and Sufi found in their paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research that there was “no noticeable difference” in economic outcomes among the 957 metropolitan areas they studied. …

George Will shares his thoughts on Castro’s late awakening to economic reality.

Fidel Castro, 84, may have failing eyesight but he has noticed something: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” So, the secret is out. …

…By saying what he recently did about the “Cuban model” (he said it to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic), Castro seems to have become the last person outside the North Korean regime to understand how statism suffocates society. Hence the Cuban government’s plan to shed 500,000 public employees.

This follows a few other measures, such as the denationalization of beauty parlors and barber shops — if they have no more than three chairs. With four or more, they remain government enterprises. Such is “reform” under socialism in a nation that in 1959 was, in a variety of social and economic indices, one of Latin America’s five most advanced nations, but now has an average monthly wage of about $20. Many hospital patients must bring their own sheets. …

…Today, the U.S. policy of isolating Cuba by means of economic embargoes and travel restrictions serves two Castro goals: It provides an alibi for Cuba’s social conditions, and it insulates Cuba from some of the political and cultural forces that brought down communism in Eastern Europe. The 11th president, Barack Obama, who was born more than two years after Castro seized power, might want to rethink this policy, now that even Castro is having second thoughts about fundamentals.

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Jonah Goldberg breaks down the Senate races to see if Republicans can take control. See his post for the charts.

Okay, I decided it was time for me to put on my rank punditry hat and start looking at the horserace stuff in the Senate. So here’s a pretty vanilla tally of things, that at least helps me commit this stuff to memory.

Lots of people say that without Delaware, taking back the senate is now impossible. Looking at this rundown in First Read, I’m not so sure…Geraghty or Ponnuru can check my math. But it looks to me that  the GOP would need to hold all of the existing seats (FL, AK, OH, KY, MO, NH) –  which looks likely –  and then pick up 10 of the remaining 13 contested Dem seats (ND, AR, IN, PA, CO, WI, IL, CA, NV, WV, WA, CT and DE). The first five of those looks likely according to this chart by Mark Blumenthal…

…The next three are doable if everything breaks the GOP way (I think Wisconsin is going to the GOP, by the way). That makes a pick-up of 8. Then the GOP would need to take 2 seats out of the five [Me: this originally said "four"]remaining races in West Virginia, Washington, Connecticut and Delaware.

Update: Getting better all the time. Several readers remind me that Charlie Cook put Connecticut in the toss-up column yesterday.
That would be a huge parlay. It’s doable in a wave election. But it would need to be a really big wave.

Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Jonah Goldberg’s tally.

I don’t think nominal control of the Senate is all that important (which is why my concerns about the O’Donnell nomination have not included that it endangers that “control”). In the House, 218 votes really is a magic number. Having a tiny majority brings headaches but going from 217 to 218 is a much bigger increment of power than going from 216 to 217. I don’t think that going from 50 to 51 in the Senate is quite as crucial. The key numbers in the Senate are 40 and 60–and even that gets fuzzy if party discipline does.

I’d fiddle with FirstRead’s rankings on the likelihood of Republican pickups. I’d say Colorado is more likely than Illinois, and Wisconsin more likely than Nevada.

Tunku Varadarajan covers the bases in a guide to the Tea Party movement.

What would we do without the Tea Party? For well over a year, this rollicking muster of citizens—mocked and feared in equal measure by the Democrats and, indeed, by many Republicans—have offered more than just whizz-bang political entertainment. Starting out as a loose-knit posse of loudly disaffected conservatives, the movement has become better organized and improbably daring; in fact, it is now a full-blown political uprising. As we gird our national loins for the mid-term elections in November, here is a brisk primer on the movement.

A is for anger, the jet-fuel of a movement that Nancy Pelosi, in a rare moment of wit, pooh-poohed as Astroturf (i.e., not grassroots). Tell that to Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate nominee seeking to unseat Pelosi’s confrere, Harry Reid. She is the archetypal Tea Party insurgent: she checks all the ideological boxes, but would you have her home to dinner with the kids?

B is for Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, the two gaudiest Tea Partiers in the American media, and for Scott Brown, the Massachusetts senator whose astonishing election to Ted Kennedy’s seat in February was the earliest indication that the Tea Party amounted to more than just a rabble of birthers (although it does, to be sure, have in its ranks more than a few who believe that the president’s birth-certificate is an immaculate deception). …

Hugh Hewitt suggests campaigns that could use our contributions.

With just about 40 days to go to the election –less, actually, as voting starts very soon by absentee in many places– it becomes crucial to target time and money to key races. This is my suggested list of candidates to support.  You can donate up to $2,400 per candidate in federal races and more in most state races, but many people like to contribute to multiple campaigns, so I am listing them with the assumption that some folks want to donate $25, $50, $100 or more to many different campaigns.

Please note that I am not listing some great campaigns.  John Thune, for example, is coasting in South Dakota, and though he may be the best conservative candidate in the country this cycle, he doesn’t need your money right now.  That goes for Governor John Hoeven in North Dakota as well, running for U.S. Senate there and leading by about 100 points.

By contrast, John Kasich and Pat Toomey are both on the list and at the top no less, even though both have pretty good poll leads right now in their races for governor in Ohio and senator in Pennsylvania respectively.  I strongly recommend them because they are building get-out-the-vote organizations that will help many down-ticket races for Congress.  Please note as well that I only list one race per state so I am suggesting those races over their fine colleagues on the ticket –Rob Portman for senate in Ohio and Tom Corbett for governor in Pennsylvania– because Kasich and Toomey have tougher races at this point than Portman and Corbett.  When there is both a competitive race for senate and governor in a state, I suggest sending money to the race which is closest in that state.

Finally, I do have some races like Carly Fiorina and Sharron Angle rated higher on the list because of the message a defeat of Boxer or Reid would bring and because of the expected surge of resources the left will throw against them in the next six weeks. …

Robert Samuelson disagrees with the right and the left, and then discusses the anti-business climate.

…Confidence is crucial to stimulating consumer spending and business investment, and Obama constantly subverts confidence. In the past year, he’s undone some of the good of his first months. He loves to pick fights with Wall Street bankers, oil companies, multinational firms, health insurers, and others. He thinks that he can separate policies that claim to promote recovery from those that appeal to his liberal base, even when the partisan policies raise business costs, stymie job creation, or augment uncertainty—and, thereby, undermine recovery. His health-care “reform” makes hiring more expensive to employers by mandating insurance coverage; the moratorium on deepwater drilling kills jobs. No matter.

Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on personal incomes exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles) is the latest example of his delusional approach. It satisfies the liberal itch to “get the rich.” Well, the rich and most other taxpayers will ultimately have to pay higher taxes to help close budget deficits. But not now. Raising taxes in a weak economy doesn’t make sense. Just consider: these affluent households represent almost a quarter of all consumer spending, says Zandi. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, says his data suggest that uncertainty about the extension of the Bush tax cuts has already caused affluent buyers to cut their spending.

Some small businesses would also be affected, because many (sole proprietorships, partnerships, and subchapter S corporations) file their taxes on personal returns. Higher taxes would discourage hiring and expansion. …

Ed Morrissey discusses Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat. He names the only Senator to ever win a seat from a write-in campaign, and comments on the likelihood that Murkowski will be the second such win in US history.

…Lisa Murkowski has never been terribly popular with Alaskans, not since her father appointed her to the Senate seat she holds.  She won in 2004, mainly due to the overwhelming support for George Bush in Alaska.  She just lost her primary, which means more than half of the people who would normally be inclined to vote for the Republican didn’t want her in the general election anyway.  Murkowski offered no compelling reason to vote for her in the primary, and the only compelling reason for the write-in bid seems to be that Lisa Murkowski likes living in Washington DC. …

The Financial Times paints a portrait of Raul Castro, as dramatic changes are initiated in Cuba.

There are two very different visions of the young Raúl Castro who fought alongside his older brother Fidel and Che Guevara against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista more than five decades ago. …

…the 79-year-old is now more likely to go down in history as the man who tried to save Cuban communism from itself – by turning to capitalism. This week the government announced it is to shed 500,000 workers, who will instead have to become self-employed or start co-operatives in just six months. As Raúl said: “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working.” The measures will eventually lead to 1m, or a fifth of the labour force, working in the private sector, and represents the biggest shake-up of the Cuban state since 1968, when all shops, from hamburger joints to street vendors, were nationalised. …

…It was only in July 2007, however, that he gave his first major public speech in which he echoed popular complaints of a decaying command economy where state wages, equivalent to $20 a month, cannot cover bare necessities. Since then he has repeatedly decried paternalism, called for more individual initiative and encouraged the public and official media to denounce bureaucratic bungling. When Fidel quipped the other day that the Cuban model no longer worked, he was merely uttering the common view fostered by his brother to prepare the way for change. Any hard-line dissenters in the elite – who might respect but do not revere Raúl as they do Fidel – fell in line. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole has the latest in globaloney warming

President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”

And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of  the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).

Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. …

The Economist reviews a book of letters from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, known to his mother as Dan and to everyone else as Pat, served four presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—as adviser, speechwriter and ambassador, in Delhi and at the United Nations. He represented New York for 24 years in the United States Senate. When he retired, one scholar said he brought to that job “luminous intellect, personal conviction, deep historical knowledge, the eye of an artist and the pen of an angel, and above all, an incorruptible devotion to the common good”. Someone else called him “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln, and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson”.

Now a New York Times journalist, Steven Weisman has edited a 671-page collection of Pat’s letters, diary entries, reports to his New York constituents (addressing them as “Dear New Yorker”) and what amount to state papers written for his four presidents. Almost every page is enlivened by a sharply minted phrase, an enchanting vignette, a joke or a shrewd inversion of the conventional wisdom. …
…He knew everyone. He wrote to cardinals, presidents, senators, to the Oxford historian Alan Bullock and to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to William F. Buckley and to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In a letter to Yoko Ono, he offers to teach Sean Lennon about Northern Ireland. A couple of weeks later he offers, at some length, to explain the history of ethnic conflict in the 20th century to Woody Allen. He sends limericks to Robert Conquest, a historian of the Soviet Union. He also has time to exchange charming letters with the preteen daughter of an old friend, who has asked him about the games he played as a child: “We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.” …

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No doubt GOP voters in Delaware have selected a senate candidate who is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Today we’ll try to understand how this happened. Pickerhead says better a flake than the bien pensants from the Northeast who have bankrupted the country and tried to destroy our most important alliances. And the cartoonists are having fun with the tea parties.

In WSJ’s Best of the Web, James Taranto posts a Delaware reader’s decision to vote for Christine O’Donnell in the primary.

Reader Dave Beruh writes in response to our column yesterday on the Delaware Senate primary:

…I agonized quite a bit before voting for Christine O’Donnell. My politics (I believe) are similar to yours, I’m an agnostic, and social issues aren’t very important to me, although I would probably be in favor of compromise (civil unions, keeping abortion legal but emphasizing adoption, etc.).

For me Rep. Mike Castle’s cap-and-trade vote was my last-straw moment. …

Toby Harnden writes in the Telegraph, UK, about Christine O’Donnell’s primary win and its wider implications.

…O’Donnell is a party apparatchik’s nightmare. Although attractive and personable – there is a physical as well as a political resemblance to Palin – she is a flawed candidate who will struggle against her Democratic opponent in November’s midterm elections. …

…Yet the point to take from Delaware is that none of this really matters. To say that voters are angry is an understatement. They are furious, disgusted and resentful. They are fed up of being told by besuited party honchos and professional politicians whom they should vote for, and what they should think. …

…So the reaction of establishment figures to O’Donnell’s win was as predictable as it was misguided. Karl Rove, former Svengali to George W Bush, branded her “nutty”. Senate Republicans, who trashed her in the primary campaign, announced they would not fund their new nominee. Rove’s point may be substantively correct, and in terms of allocating the party’s resources, not funding O’Donnell makes some sense. But the response showed an arrogance that will fuel the outrage Republicans should be trying to harness. …

…There are certainly some eccentric characters at Tea Party events, but the vast majority are small-government conservatives who think Washington is corrupt, complacent and working for itself rather than the people. Those feelings have only been exacerbated by President Obama’s policies: elected on a wave of anti-Bush feeling, he interpreted the desire for something different as a mandate for a vast expansion of government, piling trillions on to the already swollen national debt. In Florida the other day, I saw a home-made sign tied to the front gate of a modest home in a black neighbourhood. “No more big plans with my money,” it declared. That’s the essence of the Tea Party message – and it has huge resonance. …

This Corner Post suggests she might do just fine.

“There’s been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now,” O’Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.

Toby Harnden also sets the record straight on some of the misinformation being circulated about the Tea Party.

…There’s a glut of commentary and assumptions about the Tea Party and much of it is wrong. Here are some common mistakes:

1. The Tea Party will fade away. Christine O’Donnell’s victory confirms that it is a major electoral force. Many of those involved have not voted before. The movement is growing, not shrinking.

…5. The Tea Party is part of the Republican party. It’s not. Tea partiers are conservatives but they have little interest in simply achieving a Republican Congress. Its ambitions are much bigger than that.

…8. The Tea Party is full of loonies who believe masturbation is evil and dinosaur bones are fake. We’ll see a lot of citations of the “nutty” (K.Rove) opinions of Tea partiers – especially, for the next few days at least, by O’Donnell. But the broader Tea Party has little concern about social issues. It is primarily a low-tax, small-government movement.

…10. The Tea Party is an angry reaction to Obama’s 2008 victory, which was a true realignment of US politics. There was no political realignment in 2008. Obama won because he was anti-Bush and the country was in the mood for a complete change. It was not a mandate for increasing the national debt and growing government. While the Tea Party opposes Obama and all he stands for, it is not especially focussed on him personally. In fact, Congress – Democrats and Republicans – seems more unpopular than Obama among Tea partiers.

Charles Krauthammer tells everyone fed up with government to focus on candidates who can win seats, so Obama and the liberals can be stopped. And he rightly tells Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin to put their money where there mouths are, and start campaigning for O’Donnell in Delaware.

…Bill Buckley — no Mike Castle he — had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.

A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court. …

 In Contentions, Abe Greenwald adds his thoughts.

…The very reason O’Donnell is attracting attention is because she’s an aberration and not an exemplar. If the Tea Party were made up of nothing but Christine O’Donnells, it would not have produced a Tupperware party’s worth of turnout at a single event. Yet the movement caught fire among America’s working class and reshaped the political landscape in about a year. It befuddled the liberal establishment because it could not easily be pegged as crazy, misguided, or inauthentic.

…What is most significant is that small-government, anti-elite, anti-tax sentiment is so strong that an apparent oddball candidate was not enough to dissuade conservatives of their passion for reform. …

And we have some excellent points from J.E. Dyer, in Contentions.

…It’s becoming clear that ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, bank bailouts, private-sector takeovers, czars of the week, and epic deficit spending are more alarming to voters than Ms. O’Donnell’s views on sanctity in private life. As a (relevant) aside, I give most voters credit for understanding that O’Donnell doesn’t propose using the power of the state to enforce on others the particular views for which she has recently gained notoriety. That level of interference in private life is antithetical to the Tea Party demand for smaller government; indeed, under the daily assault of Obama’s energetic regulators, a growing number of voters are associating such intrusiveness explicitly and resentfully with the political left.

But the national electoral dynamic this year isn’t about O’Donnell; it’s about changing course. And in making their choice, the Republican voters in Delaware showed a perfect comprehension many senior conservatives haven’t. A vote for Mike Castle was, in fact, a vote for the status quo. The voters knew what they were voting for — and many of them would have said that the kind of strategic voting urged on them by pundits and political professionals is exactly what has produced the status quo.

…But the people are on the move. George W. Bush said often during the 2004 campaign that the poll that mattered was the one that occurred in the voting booth. In a majority of “voting booth” polls this year, the people have signaled that their dissatisfaction with our current course outweighs everything else. …

In Der Spiegel, Jess Smee highlights various German newspaper editorials on the Tea Party primary wins.

…On Thursday, German editorialists look at what the latest victory means for US politics.

…The business daily Handelsblatt writes:

“Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are part of an opposition movement outside of Congress which is moving mountains. This is a revolt against ‘Obamaism,’ which is seen as representing big government, more taxes, a higher deficit and not enough ‘Americanism.’ Day by day, it puts more and more pressure onto those at the top.”

“In the US, people … spend time and money supporting the Republicans. Unlike in Germany, in America, which never had a Hitler, being ‘right-wing’ is not taboo. ‘Right-wing’ represents Reagan, religion, the free market, individualism, patriotism and small government. In reality, it is an impossible mixture: National pride, God and tradition are conservative ‘us’ values. The profit motive, competition and a weak state are ‘me-first’ sentiments … . But this mixture of conservative values and neoliberalism works well in America, where it transcends social class — that’s the difference to Germany.” …

David Warren contrasts the Koran non-burning and the 9/11 mosque controversy.

…Here it is worth noting that, for all his flakiness, Jones was willing to stand down. Compare Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose project to build an “Islamic cultural centre” at the edge of Ground Zero in Manhattan is offensive to a large majority of Americans and who has been made vividly aware of that fact. …

But the question for both is: “Why are you doing this?” It applies with greater force to Rauf and associates for they have been assured by almost everyone who is offended that they are welcome to build their centre anywhere else; that the issue is not religious freedom, but location, location, location.

Here we look into the deep well of hypocrisy that feeds all contemporary “progressive” thought — and which Rauf has been happily exploiting by using smooth leftist “rights” jargon in all his public utterances. The “transgressive act” is to be encouraged, imperiously, when one class of people are offended — average Americans in this case. It is to be vilified if another class of people are offended — average Muslims in the Pastor Jones case.

Remember that we are comparing a huge, permanent, symbolic building to a little passing bonfire that did not finally occur. …

Walter Russell Mead, in American Interest.com, sings Wal-Mart’s praises.

…At the risk of forfeiting any remaining elite cred I may have, let me confess: I love Walmart.  For years, every time I traveled outside New York, I descended on Walmart stores across the country.  Everything in those stores is significantly cheaper than in the hoity-toity New York department stores that want me to pay $9 and up for a “designer” undershirt.  For the price of a pair of socks in New York I can get three pairs at the average Walmart.

…As I drove my load of goodies home, I started to feel a surge of Green Guilt: the Great Wastrel staggers home in his gas-guzzling automobile stuffed with Big Box Retail productions — the enemy of everything sustainable. Shouldn’t I be riding a bio-degradable bicycle to the farmer’s market to pick up locally produced heirloom beets and carry them home in my reusable organic burlap shopping sack?

Actually, no.  Walmart and its Big Box friends are making the world a greener, more sustainable place.  This isn’t because of any PR stunts or corporate green initiatives they may have going; it’s because they are relentlessly focused on profit and efficiency.  It is their cutthroat capitalism not their sense of corporate citizenship that will save us — if anything can. …

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David Harsanyi tells conservative commentators to stay on topic and don’t get personal.

…Take the tortured contention of noted conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. In a recent Forbes cover story “How Obama Thinks” he blames the president’s “odd” blame-America-first, re-distributionist behavior on his Kenyan father’s long lost anti-colonial philosophy.

Conservatives have an opening to make an uncluttered argument — using the empirical data of a collapsing economy — that less spending, less regulation and less government is the way to create more prosperity. Dragging Third World colonialism into it — and I can say this with near certitude — is a bad idea on a number of levels.

To begin with, no decent TV-watching American has the faintest clue what you’re talking about. And worse, the spurious claims about rampant right-wing racism will now gain fresh traction. That is, I’m afraid to say, the byproduct of bringing African descent into a perfectly constructive debate about how terrible this administration has been. …

We are reminded of David Harsanyi’s excellent article featured on September 9th that Obama, and liberals, won’t offer tax cuts for everyone because that would undermine their political power. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear some mainstream folks suggesting tax cuts to stimulate economic recovery. Noriel Roubini, in the WaPo, recommends a short-term payroll tax cut.

…A much better option is for the administration to reduce the payroll tax for two years. The reduced labor costs would lead employers to hire more; for employees, the increased take-home pay would boost much-needed economic consumption and advance the still-crucial process of deleveraging households (paying down credit card debt and other legacies of the easy-credit years).

Most policy approaches, including the Obama proposals, have tended to subsidize the demand for capital rather than the demand for labor. That has the problem backward. In the second quarter, capital spending reached an annual growth rate of 25 percent. The argument that increased demand for capital leads to greater demand for labor (i.e., if you buy more machines you need workers to run them) has not held up. Firms are investing in capital goods, equipment and offshore offices that allow them to produce the same amount of goods with less — and lower labor costs. To avoid a chronic increase in the unemployment rate, we need to subsidize the demand for labor — achieving job creation — rather than making it cheaper to buy capital, as investment and other tax credits would do.

President Obama could fully fund the reduction in payroll tax by allowing the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year to expire. Meanwhile, the Bush-era cuts affecting middle- and low-income earners — the vast majority of Americans — would remain in place for the time being. …

Thomas Sowell presents a series on words and their meanings. In the first article, Thomas Sowell brings up an important discussion. Many well-meaning people in our society have bought into the idea that some people having more wealth than others is unfair, and that government must treat people unequally in order to make up for this unfairness. Sowell argues that making everyone’s life equal is beyond the power of progressives or the scope of any kind of “social justice”.

…No wonder “social justice” has been such a political success for more than a century– and counting.

While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right– that it is unjust– that some people are so much better off than others.

…Some advocates of “social justice” would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person’s chances in life radically different from the chances that others have– through no fault of one and through no merit of the others.

…There are individuals who were raised by parents who were both poor and poorly educated, but who pushed their children to get the education that the parents themselves never had. Many individuals and groups would not be where they are today without that.

All kinds of chance encounters– with particular people, information or circumstances– have marked turning points in many individual’s lives, whether toward fulfillment or ruin.

None of these things is equal or can be made equal. If this is an injustice, it is not a “social” injustice because it is beyond the power of society. …

In this second article, Thomas Sowell makes an important distinction between health care and medical care. He also looks at some terms that are used to justify government’s inequal treatment of citizens.

…Among the many other catchwords that shut down thinking are “the rich” and “the poor.” When is somebody rich? When they have a lot of wealth. But, when politicians talk about taxing “the rich,” they are not even talking about people’s wealth, and what they are planning to tax are people’s incomes, not their wealth.

If we stop and think, instead of going with the flow of catchwords, it is clear than income and wealth are different things. A billionaire can have zero income. Bill Gates lost $18 billion dollars in 2008 and Warren Buffett lost $25 billion. …But, no matter how low their income was, they were not poor.

By the same token, people who have worked their way up, to the point where they have a substantial income in their later years, are not rich. …A middle-aged or elderly couple making $125,000 each are not rich, even though politicians will tax away what they have earned at the end of decades of working their way up.

Similarly, most of the people who are called “the poor” are not poor. Their low incomes are as transient as the higher incomes of “the rich.” Most of the people in the bottom 20 percent in income end up in the top half of the income distribution in later years. Far more of them reach the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent over the years. …

Thomas Sowell, in his third article, looks at the terms liberal and conservative and how ironic these terms are now.

…The late liberal Professor Tony Judt of New York University gave this definition of liberals: “A liberal is someone who opposes interference in the affairs of others: who is tolerant of dissenting attitudes and unconventional behavior.”

According to Professor Judt, liberals favor “keeping other people out of our lives, leaving individuals the maximum space in which to live and flourish as they choose.”

…Communities that have had overwhelmingly liberal elected officials for decades abound in nanny state regulations, micro-managing everything from home-building to garbage collection. …

…Liberals are usually willing to let people violate the traditional standards of the larger society but crack down on those who dare to violate liberals’ own notions and fetishes.

…Liberals often flatter themselves with having the generosity that the word implies. Many of them might be shocked to discover that Ronald Reagan donated a higher percentage of his income to charity than either Ted Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nor was this unusual. Conservatives in general donate more of their income and their time to charitable endeavors and donate far more blood. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner covers a lot of ground in his post: census numbers on poverty, UK v US handling of the fiscal crisis, and how the US needs another Reagan.

The Obama administration is bracing itself for more bad news this week with the release of stunning census figures which are projected to show the biggest increase in poverty in the United States since the 1960s. As Associated Press reports:

…Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

The new figures are an indictment of President Obama’s handling of the economy, and will add to the growing perception that his Big Government agenda has been a spectacular flop. Despite a huge $787 billion stimulus package (with another $50 billion in spending on the way), and a wave of public bailouts, unemployment continues to rise towards 10 percent, and the housing market remains on a downward trajectory. …

The president started attacking John Boehner two weeks ago. So, the NY Times being a loyal organ of the Dem party ran a hit piece last Sunday; front page, above the fold. A couple of the blogs we follow noticed. In the Economist’s Democracy in America Blog,  W. W. in Iowa City blogs that Congressman Boehner has received less lobby money this year than Speaker Pelosi. It is amazing how much time and effort has to be spent simply refuting liberals’ lies and distortions.

“WELL, somebody has it out for John Boehner,” I muttered to my empty kitchen as I scanned the front page of my freshly unsheathed Sunday edition of the New York Times. “A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists”, the headline read. But isn’t “tightly bound to lobbyists” packed into the very meaning “Congressman”? Presumably anticipating questions in this vein, the Times reports that “While many lawmakers in each party have networks of donors, lobbyists and former aides who now represent corporate interests, Mr. Boehner’s ties seem especially deep.” And seeming is believing, it seems, because I believed it. “Maybe the bastard has it coming,” I said to the dog, who had ambled in.

Well, I just want to say: I’m sorry, John Boehner. You’re not especially bad.

Timothey Carney, the Washington Examiner’s indispensable lobbying sleuth, today sets the record straight:

[F]rom 1999 until today, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Boehner has raised $299,490 from lobbyists. For comparison, Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, and Chuck Schumer have each raised more money from lobbyists in this cycle alone. This election cycle, Boehner is not even in the top 20 recipients of lobbyist cash. He’s raised less than $40,000 from lobbyists this cycle—compared to Nancy Pelosi’s $71,000 from lobbyists. Sure, Boehner is too close to lobbyists, but the money trail says he isn’t closer than Nancy Pelosi. …

John Steele Gordon also comments on the NY Times story on Boehner, in Contentions.

…The story is astonishingly thin. Are his ties to lobbyists “especially tight”? Who knows? The Times gives no examples whatever of the dealings of other Congressional leaders with lobbyists. The Times writes, “From 2000 to 2007, Mr. Boehner flew at least 45 times, often with his wife, Debbie, on corporate jets provided by companies including R. J. Reynolds. (As required, Mr. Boehner reimbursed part of the costs.)” So he didn’t do anything against House rules, apparently. But how does his aeronautical hitchhiking compare with, say, that of Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader, or Sander Levin, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee? The Times doesn’t bother to say, which raises the suspicion that Democratic leaders like flying around in private jets about as much as Republican ones do. …

…This article, which alleges no wrongdoing and gives no comparisons, is simply an attempt to further the Democrats’ plan to demonize Boehner. It is water carrying, plain and simple, proving only that the Times’s ties with the Democratic Party are especially tight.

To round all this out, in the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden gives us accurate information about Congressman Boehner. Turns out the man the president is trying to picture as an elitist was the second of 12 children in a middle class suburban Ohio family. Of course, it took a reporter from Great Britain to find the story.

…Mr Boehner, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board

Bob Boehner, 62, the oldest of the 12, …said: “We were conservative because we had to be. There wasn’t the money to spend frivolously on things. We grew our own vegetables up on the hill. We learned early on that if you wanted something you had to go out and work for it.”

His brother’s childhood, he thinks, was good training for Congress, where, if he becomes Speaker, he will have 435 members to control. “He tried to make the younger ones do their homework and get the room cleaned up. He was somewhat of an authority figure to the younger ones.

“John is still an everyday person and we need more people like that in Congress because too many people there have never had a job and never had to balance a budget before.” …

Discovery.com reports on an amazing lightweight armor that may have helped Alexander the Great, in Discovery.com. Think 2,300 year old Kevlar.

A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research.

“While we know quite a lot about ancient armor made from metal, linothorax remains something of a mystery since no examples have survived, due to the perishable nature of the material,” Gregory Aldrete, professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, told Discovery News.

“Nevertheless, we have managed to show that this linen armor thrived as a form of body protection for nearly 1,000 years, and was used by a wide variety of ancient Mediterranean civilizations,” Aldrete said. …