Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We were going to ignore the ignorant itinerant pastor from Florida cracker country, but Spengler had other ideas as he dubs Pastor Terry Jones an asymmetrical warrior.

…United States President Barack Obama, top US commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, the Vatican, and every talking head across the political spectrum screamed in unison until this Florida fringe preacher with a congregation that could meet in a double-wide listened, rather like Dr Seuss’ Horton hearing the Who.

Enlightened opinion prevailed, but at high cost: L’Affaire Jones demonstrated that a madman carrying a match and a copy of the Koran can do more damage to the Muslim world than a busload of suicide bombers. Leftists liked to brag during the Vietnam war that a US$10 hand grenade could destroy a $10 million plane. What’s the dollar value of the damage from a used paperback edition of the Koran, available online for a couple of dollars?

As George Packer wrote on the New Yorker website on September 10, “Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up … One man in Gainesville who represents next to nobody triggers thousands of men around the globe who know next to nothing about it to turn violent, which triggers more violence … it’s so easy to get people to go crazy. If I wanted to, I could probably start another India-Pakistan war all by myself.” Several of the world’s intelligence services doubtless are thinking along the same lines.

Instead of trying to stabilize the Islamic world, suppose – just for the sake of argument – that one or two world powers set out to throw it into chaos. I am not advocating such a strategy, only evaluating its effectiveness.

It is a misperception that America is the main object of Muslim rage. Most Muslim rage is directed against other Muslims. Religious violence perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims is a routine feature of life in Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Of the 1,868 acts of religious violence listed by the Global Terrorism Database, all but a handful were conducted by Muslims on Muslims. America has done its best to suppress such violence. What if America (or Russia, or India, or China) were to incite it?

The Islamic world’s claim on Western attention rests on its propensity to fail. America has spent a trillion dollars and 5,700 lives to prop up notionally pro-American regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention $2 billion a year to Egypt, and several hundred million each to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, as well as smaller sums to other Muslim countries.

America will continue its efforts to stabilize fractious Islamic lands for the foreseeable future. Obama holds a personal as well as an ideological commitment to foster friendship with the Muslim world, and the Republicans will not admit that they were mistaken to commit so much blood and treasure to nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. … 

Conn Carroll at The Heritage Foundation makes excellent points about the totalitarian dictates of a government bureaucrat.

…Never before in the history of our republican form of government has an administration threatened to extinguish individual firms for merely communicating with their customers. But such are the dictatorial powers Obamacare grants to Secretary Sebelius. There are over 1,000 instances in the more than 2,700 page bill where Congress granted Secretary Sebelius new powers to regulate the health care industry. For example, her power to “determine” what does or does not count as a medical expense alone will decide the fate of many health insurance firms.

Is this the type of government our Founders intended our federal government to become? No. Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Political Science Ronald Pestritto explains:

The Founders understood that there are two fundamental ways in which government can exercise its authority. The first is a system of arbitrary rule, where the government decides how to act on an ad hoc basis, leaving decisions up to the whim of whatever official or officials happen to be in charge; the second way is to implement a system grounded in the rule of law, where legal rules are made in advance and published, binding both government and citizens and allowing the latter to know exactly what they have to do or not to do in order to avoid the coercive authority of the former.

Secretary Sebelius’ Hugo Chavezesque threats against the health insurance industry demonstrate why the fight to repeal Obamacare is also the fight for the soul of our country. Obamacare and the progressive movement represent a fundamental threat to our founding principles. For the left, “progress” means fundamentally transforming America through bureaucratic dictates that will engineer a “better” society by assuring equal outcomes. Through Obamacare, progressives would redistribute wealth through a distant, patronizing welfare state that regulates more and more of the economy, politics and society. The question Americans face is: Are we a country ruled by law or by bureaucrat?

In the Atlantic Blogs, Megan McArdle blogs about the risk of no-money-down, in light of a new Fannie Mae program.

CNBC’s John Carney adds “…The arguments for the program are not really persuasive. Adjustable rate loans are not the primary drivers of defaults–the primary driver is the combination of borrowers who have negative equity and expect that the value of their home will not appreciate soon. This means that no money down home loans are particularly dangerous–regardless of how vigorously lenders counsel homeowners or screen for credit scores.”

I’m not sure I quite agree with Carney’s assessment.  It’s absolutely true that having negative equity is a better predictor of default than things like unemployment.  But while many people have interpreted this to mean that negative equity makes you likely to strategically default, it’s not clear to me that that is actually very widespread.  It’s just as plausible–perhaps more so–that having negative equity makes you much more vulnerable to negative income shocks, because you can’t sell the house or refinance when something bad happens.

But either way, having negative equity is very, very dangerous.  And that’s what a no-money-down borrower has in this market, because prices aren’t rising much, and they need to find thousands of dollars to pay broker commissions and closing costs if they want to sell.

What truly boggles the mind is that the government still thinks that it’s somehow a good idea to help push people with basically no savings into homeownership.  Do they want to make sure that a whole new class of financially marginal people can enjoy the benefits of foreclosure?

Steve Malanga is in the WSJ discussing a hopeful trend building against public-sector unions.

…The backlash against public unions has gone beyond heavily unionized states like California and New Jersey. One illustration is the finding of a July 7 national Rasmussen poll: Only 19% of Americans said that they would be willing to pay higher taxes to keep government workers from being laid off. Even in public safety, where Americans are sometimes reluctant to see cutbacks, the poll found only 34% endorsed higher taxes to preserve police and fire jobs.

The electorate may also be turning away from public unions because of their relentless campaigning for higher taxes. … In California, the teachers union has kicked in $500,000 as part of a campaign to rescind business tax breaks to keep jobs in the state. Last year in Michigan, a coalition of unions engineered a campaign called “A Better Michigan Future” that advocated hundreds of millions in new taxes, which the state legislature rejected.

The prospect of ever-higher taxes has Democrats distancing themselves from labor. New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo is preaching fiscal prudence and says public pensions are “out of line with economic reality.” In California, old allies of labor like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who was once a teachers union official) are also inveighing against the cost imposed by public unions. Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, an attorney who once represented unions, is advocating clamping down on public-sector pay and benefits to fix that state’s budget problems.

Unions are also on the defensive in the culture wars. Later this month the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” about the failings of our public schools, will debut in theaters nationwide. The film is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who earned impeccable liberal credentials as the director of the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.” His new documentary, say reviewers who’ve seen it, places a chunk of the blame for the woes of our schools on teachers unions and in particular paints Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as an opponent of meaningful reform. …

Roger Simon tells us about a new book written by three Republican congressmen who want to make changes.

Campaign books are almost never “high literature,” nor are they usually intended to be.  And no one would mistake Young Guns:  A New Generation of Conservative Leaders for de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, but the new book (published tomorrow) by Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy is the next best thing to a classic.  It is a war cry.

This war cry is not just the predictable excoriation of the failed liberal Democratic policies of Barack Obama, but a striking attack by the three Republican congressmen on their own party for having violated the small government principles upon which they were elected. If the Tea Party movement is looking for leadership, it may be sitting there in plain sight with Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy.

…Of course, these three gentlemen could be accused at this point of being career politicians themselves, but they clearly understand this contradiction, are airing it publicly, and struggling to stay principled.

The bulk of the short book continues with three longish essays, each by one of the authors.  They are essentially narratives of their recent experiences in Congress interspersed with their political views. …

In the NRO, Kevin Williamson comments on the young guns.

…Ryan, who has been one of the few sane voices on the debt for some time now, says he expects the new crop of Republicans expected to be sworn in come January to be a rowdy bunch, with little respect for the seniority system or traditional congressional politics. Cantor, too, made it clear that he knows they are in for a long-term fight — no magic-bullet solutions were under consideration. McCarthy was the surprise for me, though — I did not know much about him and was impressed by his command of the data, relating both to politics and policy.

I have been, and remain, skeptical of congressional Republicans’ ability to head off Fiscal Armageddon; the political incentives are all wrong, and it probably will take a major economic crisis to realign those incentives. But I am a little less skeptical today than I was yesterday — maybe 5 percent less. I think there is a non-trivial chance that non-entitlement spending could be scaled back to 2008 levels — not exactly raging austerity, but a start; combined with sane entitlement reform and tax reform, that could get us several steps back from the ledge we’re on. Something good seems to be afoot among Republicans.

Here’s what to worry about: Chances are, the economy is still going to stink in January 2011. It may be worse then than it is today — and it is possible that it will be significantly worse. Ryan is worried about the dollar, and he is right to be. If things get really hideous economically, then there is going to be tremendous political pressure on the GOP to do the dumb thing that Republicans always do: cut the taxes and let the spending grow. That could happen. We can’t let it. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In case all of the news is getting you down, David Goldman has the top ten reasons the world is not coming to an end.

Japanese-style stagnation, not economic collapse, is the most likely scenario for the US. Harrisburg, PA and Greece may go down the drain (and maybe even California and New York City and Illinois), but that’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of them.

10) China’s controlled growth deceleration is doing reasonably well, according to Cantor Fitzgerald’s Asia strategist Uwe Parpart, my old Bank of America colleague.

9) China’s banks may be choking on bad loans, but China’s massive foreign exchange reserves can cover the problem out of petty cash and rounding error.

8) Southeast Asia continues to grow, with local stock exchanges up about 20% year to date.

7) India is doing well. Add up these first four items and half the world’s population is doing just fine. …

Bret Stephens comments on anti-Semitism in Europe.

…Earlier this month, Karel De Gucht, the European Union’s trade commissioner and a former foreign minister of Belgium, gave an interview to a Flemish radio station in which he offered the view that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were sure to founder on two accounts: first, because Jews are excessively influential in the U.S; second, because they are not the sorts to be reasoned with. …

…consider that last year the Anti-Defamation League conducted a survey of European attitudes toward Jews in seven different countries. Do Jews have “too much power in the business world”? In France, 33% said this was “probably true”; in Spain it was 56%. Were Jews to some degree responsible for the global economic crisis? In Germany, 30% thought so; in Austria, 43% did. A separate 2008 Pew Survey also found that 25% of Germans, 36% of Poles and 46% of Spaniards had a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of Jews. …

In the Telegraph, UK, James Delingpole wraps an interesting article around a stunning confession from Fidel Castro.

…Over lunch with Atlantic magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, the Cuban dictator confessed: “The Cuban model doesn’t really work for us any more.” Unable to believe his ears, Goldberg asked one of his neighbours, a Latin American expert, to interpret this extraordinary statement. She explained: “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgement that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

Hmm. Sounds very much like a “rejection of the Revolution” to me. And if indeed it was, then it must come pretty close to being a historical first. Did Mao ever express any regrets about the 20 million who died during his Great Leap Forward? Was Stalin ever moved to tears over the millions more who were shot in the back of the head by his secret police or froze and starved in his Gulags? Of course not. That’s the thing about Leftist ideologues. Whether they’re major league mass murderers such as Pol Pot or simply pathological destroyers of economies like Gordon Brown, they usually remain in a state of blissful self-delusion right to the bitter end. …

…It’s nice, obviously, that the cigar-smoking beardie has finally had the grace to acknowledge the error of his ways. But shouldn’t he have worked this out 50 years earlier, and spared the poor Cuban people a heap of communist misery?

John Fund tells how the president is letting D.C. kids down. Government by a faculty lounge ideologue.

Education reformers will be watching Washington D.C.’s Democratic primary for mayor today. Incumbent Adrian Fenty is trailing Vincent Gray, the chair of D.C.’s City Council, in a race that is turning into a referendum on the shake-up of the local public schools by Michelle Rhee, the Fenty-appointed schools chief.

A Washington City Paper poll found that 53% of voters believe her tenure is a major issue in the campaign. Since she took charge of the D.C. schools in 2007, Ms. Rhee has fired poorly performing teachers, linked teacher pay to performance, and tried to shut down schools that continually fail to improve. She is almost certain to lose her job should Mr. Gray, who is supported by teacher unions, win today.

…President Obama spoke highly of Ms. Rhee and Mr. Fenty, one of his earliest supporters, during the 2008 campaign. But he has been largely AWOL from the Democratic race for mayor, even though it’s taking place in his backyard.

“The president should have said something in support of Fenty,” Juan Williams, a journalist with NPR and the author of books on the civil rights movement, told the Daily Caller. Mr. Fenty himself said last week that he had asked Mr. Obama for help, although he didn’t expect much to materialize. D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, a Fenty backer, added that Mr. Obama “could have won the election for Adrian” and made sure Ms. Rhee had time to finish her important work. Mr. Obama talks a good game on education reform, telling an audience recently that “the status quo in education is unacceptable.” But when he had a chance to make a difference and ensure the continuance of education reform in the nation’s capital, he did the functional equivalent of what he did over 140 times while serving in the Illinois legislature: identify himself as only being “present.”

Ed Morrissey remarks on one part of Obamacare being repealed. It makes you wonder who convinced Obama and all the other liberals to eat crow.

The momentum to repeal ObamaCare picked up a little momentum in an unlikely place: the White House.  After facing a deluge of criticism for new tax records mandates that threaten to drown both the IRS and small businesses, Congress finally scheduled an attempt to remove that portion of the new law.  Yesterday, the Obama administration quietly asked Democrats to expedite the process and eliminate the 1099 requirements…

…The media may have missed it, but we’ve been talking about this for at least eleven months.  Cato reminded everyone about it in April, and yet it has taken five months for the White House to conclude that it will create huge costs and administrative burdens for business and the IRS alike.

Had this bill been processed normally through committees and debated honestly, this flaw would have gotten immediate attention. Instead, the ObamaCare bill got written in back rooms, rushed to the floor of both chambers, instead of developed in the normal process.  The excuse was that it was too important to get vetted, and too time-critical to delay it or pass it in components.  Well, this is what happens when Congressional leadership says that they have to pass a bill to find out what’s in it, and when they drop 2800 pages of legislative text on members just 48 hours before floor votes. …

…Let’s just reflect on the fact that Democrats now claim that they backed a bill in the face of overwhelming opposition from voters, and now say they didn’t understand it when they did.   And instead of cutting the spending in the bill, Democrats insist on raising taxes to cover their own mistake.  If that’s not an election-year ad, I don’t know what is.

We have another post from Ed Morrissey on a Senate seat that everyone thought was safely in the Dem column.

Try to remember than six months ago, almost everyone wrote off the Senate race in Connecticut after Richard Blumenthal replaced the retiring Chris Dodd in the race.  Democrats practically own Connecticut, and Republicans would be foolish to spend money on a race that Blumenthal should have won by twenty or more points.  Fortunately for the GOP, it had self-funding candidate Linda McMahon — and a gaffe-prone Democrat — in a cycle that should erase any notion of safe seats.  Quinnipiac’s latest poll shows McMahon within six points of the lead…

…With seven weeks to go, McMahon appears to be gaining momentum, and perhaps in part because of the experience argument.  It’s an open seat, but Blumenthal represents the Democratic Party establishment in a cycle uniquely hostile to that very entity.  His multiple gaffes and exposure of dishonest statements has eroded his standing in Connecticut, although not yet to the point where he has sunk below 51% among likely voters.  McMahon has run a smart campaign, but the difference in this race is that Connecticut voters got a lot more acquainted with Blumenthal than they had in previous elections.

That 51% is still enough to win the seat, and McMahon is still an underdog, but this is a winnable race for Republicans.

David Warren takes on an interesting challenge.

…A cynical operator treats humans like dogs. Instead of reasoning with them, he manipulates with treats, and soothing words; or by invoking bogeymen, arousing fears, and pulling on their bureaucratic leashes. He teaches them to heel, stand, sit, sit and stay, fetch, beg. And all the while pretending to be humble; “the dog’s best friend.”

…The political equivalent is, “Vote for me, and you will feel good about yourself.” You’ll be caring and sharing, much more intelligent, in with the winners, and cool, way cool. Vote for the other guy and all you’ll ever get is some miserable tax cut. And you’ll feel like such a dork. …

…Mass manipulation wouldn’t be possible without people organized into a mass, and the means of delivering messages to them through mass media. Our democracy today is mass democracy, something almost infinitely removed from the original Greek idea, of democracy on the direct, personal scale. …

…In articles to come, God willing, I want to wrestle with what I believe to be our greatest political challenge: how to dismantle our morally and fiscally bankrupt “mass democracy” — or “bobblehead democracy,” if you will. And, how to return to the kind in which the citizen himself participates in decisions directly and personally.

And we have four posts from one of our favorites, Jennifer Rubin.

A new requirement for elected office is needed. How about ten years experience in the private sector, before you can make life miserable for the people that create or hold real jobs? Perhaps that would inject some sanity into government policies. Jennifer Rubin reports on the economic effects of the tragic stupidity from our current elected officials.

To all but the Democrats and the class-warfare mongers (I repeat myself), this comes as no surprise:

“The uncertainty over looming tax increases is starting to affect both investing and corporate decision-making.

The economy remains the biggest factor in many investors’ and businesses’ decisions. But worries over whether Congress will extend some of the expiring Bush-era tax breaks are emerging as another important one. … Small-business owners say unease about tax policy, along with the economy, has led them to hold off on hiring and investment. And many advisers are encouraging well-to-do clients to sell appreciated assets to avoid higher capital-gains taxes.”

Until Obama offered a round of business tax cuts, the Democrats had operated as if tax policy had a negligible impact on employment and investment. So they were “stumped” when jobs didn’t materialize. Lo and behold — who knew? — businesses are getting ready for the tax hit by hiring fewer workers:

If the administration had an entrepreneur or two in its ranks, if there were not merely pols and academicians populating the White House, someone might have seen this coming. But we have a president and a vice president who have never run anything, let alone a profitmaking enterprise, not to mention political hacks like David Axelrod who froth with contempt for “Wall Street” (i.e., those who supply and manage capital). So they are amazed that all their handiwork has indeed paralyzed employers.

It’s exactly what you figured would happen if a leftist law professor wound up in the Oval Office.

Rubin slams Christiane Amanpour for her bias and lack of professionalism.

In addition to her softball interview with Imam Abdul Rauf on This Week,  Christiane Amanpour hosted a panel on the state of Islam. … All three of the panelists were pro–Ground Zero. Even worse, Amanpour — with not a shred of evidence — claimed that mosque opponents are taking the position that al-Qaeda is building the Ground Zero mosque. Huh? Is anyone making that argument? She also takes as fact that the Ground Zero incident was ”whipped up by certain political interests.”

This sort of performance merely reinforces the perception that Amanpour plays fast and loose with the facts. And let’s get real — there is more than sloppiness at play here. …

…As a colleague with mainstream-news experience observed recently, it is hard to “believe ABC expects to hold or build an audience this way.” Maybe an MSNBC shouting-heads show would be up her alley — but a serious Sunday network talk show? At some point I suspect that the ABC brain trust will have to admit error and get her out of there.

Rubin shares Beltway talk on Pelosi’s demise.

Democrats aren’t waiting for the election returns to start planning Nancy Pelosi’s ouster. Politico reports:

…“This is a subject that everybody in town is thinking about,” said a former House Democrat who keeps close contact with his former colleagues. …

“If we lose it badly, Pelosi would have to leave, as might the whole leadership team,” said a veteran House Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I can see Hoyer becoming Minority Leader. And I can imagine that Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) would stay as Whip, but then retire. They could become transitional leaders as we look for new leadership. It would have to sort itself out.”

Pelosi may have peaked on the day she assumed office, as an identity-politics champion. In four years she’s helped drive her party into the ground and our country deeper and deeper into debt. Rather than draining the swamp, she’s coddled corrupt pols. Her “historic” achievement — ramming through ObamaCare — may turn to dust as states opt out of the individual mandate and a new Congress defunds and then sets out to repeal the measure. Come to think of it, that may be Obama’s legacy as well.

And Rubin blogs how the Left has lost that lovin’ feeling.

Obama’s public persona is so predictable and his image so overexposed that even the left is over him. He’s gone from fascinating and cool to a crashing bore in less than two years. … Maureen Dowd: “How did the first president of color become so colorless?”

…Why are liberals so bored all of a sudden? … There are, I think, several things at work.

First, style — that “superior temperament” and the coolness — was what attracted many urban liberals to him in the first place. Obama was in essence the latest trend, equivalent to this season’s fashion or the newest cell phone, which they had to have. But trends by definition come and go, and surface impressions and infatuation don’t last long.

Second, it is easier to admit that the candidate they swooned for is boring than it is to say he’s incompetent (or an empty suit). The former implies that Obama has lost his charm, the latter suggests that their own judgment was faulty. This also neatly sidesteps the troubling matter that Obama’s policies have tanked. (If he could only be more eloquent about the trillions spent, the public wouldn’t dessert him, the thinking goes.) …

Investor’s Business Daily editors jeer the 2007 Congress for destroying jobs, unnecessarily increasing costs for taxpayers, and perpetuating a green hoax.

Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It’s now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell.

…The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along with its 200 employees, of a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014.

…Washington’s force and coercion are necessary because it seems the great unwashed can’t seem to see the benefits or ignore the risks of compact fluorescents, or CFLs.

…It’s said that CFL bulbs are more economical in the long run because they supposedly use up to 80% less energy than old-style bulbs and don’t burn out as quickly. Though we’re not fully convinced of these claims, we do know that CFL bulbs are more expensive, costing up to six times as much as equivalent incandescent bulbs. Because they are made of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they also require more hand labor and therefore cost more. …

…Despite governments’ effort to market them, CFLs are not necessarily better. Tests conducted by the London Telegraph found that using a single lamp to illuminate a room, an 11-watt CFL produced only 58% of the illumination of an equivalent 60-watt incandescent — even after a 10-minute warm-up that consumers have found necessary for CFLs to reach their full brightness.

And in his blog, Don Surber matches Simpsons’ characters to the president and his minions.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin compares some of President Bush’s 9/11 speeches to Obama’s recent speech. Rubin picked several Bush excerpts that are particularly moving.

It may have been his finest speech, revealing both his character and ours. … George W. Bush on September 14, 2001:

“In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion; in long lines of blood donors; in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible. And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.

In these acts, and in many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another, and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity. This is a unity of every faith, and every background. It is evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils and American flags, which are displayed in pride and waved in defiance. Our unity is a kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity against terror is now extending across the world. …”

George Will brings up a startling fact about the Depression.

…Hoover — against whom Democrats, those fountains of fresh ideas, have been campaigning for 78 years — is again being invoked as a terrible warning about the wages of sin. Sin is understood by liberals as government austerity, which is understood as existing levels of government spending…

Real per capita federal expenditures almost doubled between 1929, Hoover’s first year as president, and 1932, his last. David Kennedy, in “Freedom from Fear,” the volume in the Oxford history of the American people that deals with the Depression, writes of Hoover:

“He nearly doubled federal public works expenditures in three years. Thanks to his prodding, the net stimulating effect of federal, state and local fiscal policy was larger in 1931 than in any subsequent year of the decade.” …

Obamacare continues to bring out the worst totalitarian instincts in our ‘public servants’. Michael Barone comments on one government official who needs to be removed from her post.

…Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

…And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”

…Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.

“Congress shall make no law,” reads the First Amendment, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

…The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government. …

Ed Morrissey also comments on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ trouble respecting the Constitution.

…Rarely have we heard a Cabinet official tell Americans to stay out of political debates at the risk of losing their businesses.  It points out the danger in having government run industries and holding a position where politicians can actually destroy a business out of spite.  It also demonstrates the thin skin of our current administration, where Hope and Change means keeping your mouth shut and pretending that everyone is happy while businesses slowly circle the drain. …

The WSJ Editors weigh in on the government bullying.

…Witness Kathleen Sebelius’s Thursday letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group—a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that “there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”

Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They’re more subtle than this in Caracas. …

Ed Morrissey has a less threatening, yet still amazingly stupid, quote from Sebelius.

…Yesterday, when addressing the strong opposition to ObamaCare throughout the nation, Sebelius chalked it up to ignorance and misinformation — and suggested a remedy that sounds as if it came out of Orwell, emphasis mine:

“Unfortunately, there still is a great deal of confusion about what is in [the reform law] and what isn’t,” Sebelius told ABC News Radio in an interview Monday.

With several vulnerable House Democrats touting their votes against the bill, and Republicans running on repeal, Sebelius said “misinformation given on a 24/7 basis” has led to the enduring opposition nearly six months after the lengthy debate ended in Congress.

“So, we have a lot of reeducation to do,” Sebelius said.

The administration is particularly concerned about the views of senior citizens – who “have been a target of a lot of the misinformation,” according to the health secretary.

“Re-education” has been a favorite effort by tyrannies over the past century or so, mainly (but not exclusively) communist.  The most notorious programs came in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the latter of which produced the mass exodus of “boat people” to the US and other countries.  “Re-education” has come to mean either brainwashing or intimidation of political dissidents. …

Mort Zuckerman discusses how the government has taken care of its own, at the expense, literally and figuratively, of taxpayers’ standard of living. He suggests a couple ways to start taking control back from the government class.

…Political tension is bound to grow when jobs disappear faster in the private than the public sector, just as compensation in the former is squeezed more. There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector, a difference for which the public sector compensated by providing more security and better benefits. No longer. These days, government employees are better off in almost every area: pay, benefits, time off and security, on top of working fewer hours. Public workers have become a privileged class – an elite who live better than their private-sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public’s masters.

Take federal employees. For nine years in a row, they have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private-sector workers. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9m federal civilian workers was more than $79,000, against an average of about $50,000 for the nation’s 108m private-sector workers, measured in full-time equivalents. Ninety per cent of government employees receive lifetime pension benefits versus 18 per cent of private employees. Public service employees continue to gain annual salary increases; they retire earlier with instant, guaranteed benefits paid for with the taxes of those very same private-sector workers. ,,,

…The only fair solution is to take the politicians out of the equation and have fully independent commissions in charge, fixing the scale of salaries and benefits for public-service workers and establishing an affordable second retirement tier for new employees. More reasonable retirement ages should be in order, such as 65 for general employees and 55 for public safety employees. This would take nothing away from the existing benefits of current employees.

A fundamental rethinking of the public workforce is necessary. Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the complexity, efficiency, and miraculous results of free markets.

…In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

…To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.

…the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner. …

Greg Mankiw’s Blog discusses an interesting scheme by some academicians. It is just one of the many ways rent control in NY city provides typical unintended consequences of intervention in free markets.

… In the end, the goal of the rent control laws is thwarted (the low rents are enjoyed by well-paid tenured faculty rather than the needy), the income tax laws are thwarted (a sizable part of compensation is untaxed), and all this is done by a nonprofit institution (the university) whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public interest. 

The attitude in Greece is worse than you’ve heard. Stephen Spruiell blogs in the Corner about a terrible incident.

Michael Lewis has written one of his impossible-to-stop-reading pieces on the intersection of human eccentricity and high finance, and his target this time is the nation of Greece. There’s way too much good stuff in the piece to pull out one key quote or graf, but in the midst of all the black humor I found this excerpt just plain sobering:

“Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves. The Greek public-sector employees assemble themselves into units that resemble army platoons. In the middle of each unit are two or three rows of young men wielding truncheons disguised as flagpoles. Ski masks and gas masks dangle from their belts so that they can still fight after the inevitable tear gas. “The deputy prime minister has told us that they are looking to have at least one death,” a prominent former Greek minister had told me. “They want some blood.” Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.”

It is a sharp contrast to the kind of things that happen when members of our Tea Party get together in large numbers, as well as a vivid reminder that we do not want to find out the hard way what happens when we reach our credit limit.

John J. Miller posts on a little-known fact in the Corner.

A long article in the NYT Mag asks why young people take so long to grow up these days. In the middle of it, we discover the hiding-in-plain-sight wisdom of car-rental companies:

Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

Hat tip: Joseph Asch of Dartblog.

And we have NRO Shorts. Here’s one:

The economy may not have double-dipped, but the housing market has — with a vengeance. After rallying earlier this year in response to a tax credit that subsidized home purchases to the tune of $8,000, it has plunged again with the expiration of the credit, and plunged much faster and farther than expected: July’s numbers for new and existing home sales were some of the worst ever recorded. The easy explanation for this is that the tax credit pulled forward summer demand into spring, and the homebuyers who would have bought this summer have already bought homes. This explanation is true as far as it goes, but it comes with an unpleasant addendum: The bubble sent housing prices into the stratosphere, and they still look artificially high. The administration’s misguided policies benefited the Democrats, at least in the short run, and also helped banks that needed a break from foreclosures. But they have delayed the market’s recovery.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the National Review, Jim Geraghty asks Scott Rasmussen some interesting questions about polling.

…GERAGHTY: Have you ever re-polled a race after getting results that didn’t sit well with your gut?

RASMUSSEN: We release the data and then we go poll it again if something is going on. There are two races right now where I am very curious about what our next polls will show, one in West Virginia and one in Alaska. In both cases, I can come up with a logical argument as to why the numbers are the way they are; I can also come up with a logical argument as to why they show the race as closer than it really is. But we want to get the information out there and let other people engage in that discussion, and we’ll poll again and see where it ends up. …

…GERAGHTY: Can Republicans blow it in the last two months?

RASMUSSEN: It depends on how you define “blow it.” Is it possible that they will blow it to such extent that this ends up being just a “normal” midterm, with the Democrats losing 15 to 20 seats? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think that they’re going to have only minimal gains in the Senate. But how close they get to gaining control of the Senate and whether or not they gain control of the House, that’s still up in the air. But that ultimately has less to do with Republicans than with Democrats, because this election is all about the party in power.

This election is a referendum on the Democrats — it’s not a referendum on incumbents as much as on the Democratic party. We put out a poll last week that I think captures some of the basic mood. Most Americans believe, as they have for decades, that cutting government spending and cutting taxes is good for the economy. That’s just sort of a bedrock belief of the American people. At the same time, they believe that the Democrats in Congress want to increase spending and increase taxes. That creates a tough road when you’re the party in power, when you’ve got that kind of perception out there. …

In Powerline, Paul Mirengoff has a disturbing story that needs investigation.

Bill Otis, at the Crime and Consequences blog, notes an under-reported aspect of the story of Rev. Terry Jones plan (which he subsequently called off) to burn the Koran. It is this: FBI agents visited Rev. Jones shortly before he changed his mind about the book burning.

The AP story about the FBI’s visit linked it to concern about public safety. But, as Bill observes, any reasonable public safety concern stemming from the action of Rev. Jones and his church would have only a local dimension — i.e., retaliation against him and his church. Thus, Bill, a former federal prosecutor, concludes that there is “no visible nexus whatever for FBI involvement.”

This raises the suspicion that the FBI visit was an attempt to intimidate Rev. Jones. A vist for this purpose would be an entirely improper infringement on his (and by extension our) civil liberties.

I had no sympathy for Jones’ plan to plan the Koran — better that Americans should read the book and evaluate the relationship between its words and the behavior of jihadists. But Jones has a constitutionally protected right to do what he was planning to do, and the FBI should not throw its weight around attempting to “persuade” Jones not to exercise that right. …

Peter Wehner shares interesting commentary on a number of issues regarding Obama’s recent speeches. We highlight the most surprising:

…And what is striking is how Obama, under growing political pressure, increasingly feels sorry for himself. “They talk about me like a dog,” the president told a crowd in Wisconsin earlier this week. “That’s not in my prepared remarks, it’s just — but it’s true.” And echoing the remarks made this morning by his top aide David Axelrod — who insisted “we didn’t create the mess we’re in” — Obama in his Cleveland speech said, “When I walked in [to the White House], wrapped in a nice bow, was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting on my door step — a welcoming present.”

What’s so revealing about Obama is that comments about how terribly unfair life has been for him since he assumed office are extemporaneous, off the cuff, from the heart. For example, neither Obama’s claim that “they talk about me like a dog” nor his statement in Cleveland about his “welcoming present” were in the prepared text. …

What we are seeing, then, is Barack Obama unplugged. …

“This is more than an inconvenience,” David Axelrod wrote in a memo to Obama on November 28, 2006, in raising concerns about Obama’s thin skin. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. … ” …

Ed Driscoll, in Pajamas Media, comments on recent Obama gaffes, including the misattributed quote on the Oval Office rug.

…The error perfectly encapsulates the shallowness of Barack Obama’s intellect and his lack of rigor. Obama is a man who accumulated academic credentials while giving no evidence whatsoever of achieving any depth. He was the only president of the Harvard Law Review to graduate without penning a signed article in that esteemed journal. His academic transcripts remain under lock and key, as do his academic papers. …

…For some reason or other, Obama has been able to skate through academia and politics without ever being seriously challenged to prove his depth. A simple veneer of glibness has been enough to win the accolades of the liberal intelligentsia. But now that he has actual responsibilities — including relatively trivial ones like custodianship of the inner sanctum of the presidency — his lack of substance keeps showing up in visible, embarrassing, and troubling ways. …

Also in Pajamas Media, Alex Knepper discusses character and the president’s performance.

…It’s been said that some people ascend to the presidency because they want to do something, while others fight for the job because they want to be someone. That is: some men come into the office captured by a vision of what the world should look like — Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan can be counted among them — while others, usually less consequential, want to be president simply because it’s another notch in their belt. Think George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (and Mitt Romney). The tea party movement thinks that Obama is in the former camp: that he is trying to remake America in a socialist image. They are wrong. Men with a vision don’t let the cries of protesters shake their poise. Rather, they tend to believe, much like George W. Bush did, that the course of history will vindicate their choices. Obama, interestingly, seems not to believe this. Instead — and this is not just bad for the Democrats, but for the country — he is panicking.

Obama came into office drunk on his own hype. He thought that he was bigger than the job; that his charisma and cool alone could shape history. (“This campaign is about you,” his campaign’s website said. That’s a good tip-off: whenever someone says that it’s not about them, it’s always, always about them.) …

…Alas, the charade, beautiful as it was, couldn’t hold. Obama has found that the inertia of his oratory won’t budge that stubbornly persistent unemployment rate. The Taliban doesn’t care one whit about his being the first black president. … Abroad, the narrative of history won’t vanish the problems of the here and now. Domestically, the institutions are too much for the man’s arsenal of verbiage. Our civic traditions are too entrenched to be knocked down by one man, however important he thinks he is. The system, after all, is designed to stop change that’s too rapid. Trying to steamroll your agenda through is, historically speaking, a pretty inept way of getting something done. That’s what our separation of powers is all about. “Party of No” is no misnomer — a strong opposition party is vital to a potent republic. Criticism of the powerful must be unrelenting. If the agenda is strong enough, it will withstand the force of the assault. Obama’s simply upset that his agenda can’t withstand such a withering attack.

Poor Obama… He simply has no idea what to do. Such a neophyte is he — both in practice and in worldview — that he is actually flabbergasted that his critics speak harshly of him. This is, I’m sorry to say, total amateur hour. But he is, after all, an amateur. …

William Jacobson dissects Obama’s Labor Day speech, in Legal Insurrection, and what it reveals about Obama’s thinking.

…But you really need to read the entire speech.  It is classic Obama, living in a time warp, declaring that unions are the past and the future of prosperity, and focusing on large infrastructure programs as if this were the 1930s. 

The entrepreneurs and workers who built the great technology companies that drive our economy are nowhere to be found.  It is the proletariat of the old economy who live in Obama’s imagination.

But what was most Obama-like about the speech was the launching of vicious attacks on his opponents, only to then cry foul over the fact that his opponents push back. Obama, as he did throughout the campaign and has done throughout his presidency, painted a picture of his political opponents as heartless victimizers of others, and of the capitalist system as cruel and inhumane. …

Glenn Reynolds passes on reader Hugh Akston’s recommendation to Obama on how to proceed.

I think its time for President Obama to pull a “Costanza”. Remember the Seinfeld episode when George realized that every decision he ever made had been wrong? Then he decided to do the opposite of what he thought he should do. He ended up with an awesome job with the Yankees, dating a great girl, and moving out of his parents’ house. That’s kinda where I think President Obama is today. He seriously needs to re-think his position on almost every major issue. Perhaps its time to do the opposite of what Rahm thinks…. No new stimulus package, re-new the Bush tax cuts, leave a few more combat soldiers in Iraq, throw a bone to Israel, leave Arizona alone, etc., etc. …

Pickings on July 25th this year contained a small Pickerhead rant about the president’s attitudes towards Great Britain that some readers properly criticized. Today we have a long piece from Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza that provides an excellent explanation of the sources for the president’s ignorance.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama’s approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama’s June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans “consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Obama railed on about “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world’s resources?

The oddities go on and on. …

…It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

… Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America’s carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
…

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

George Will highlights two Republican candidates from South Carolina who have campaigned on ideas.

The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

“I am a policy girl,” Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state’s Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she has been traveling around the state asking this question: Does anyone think it odd that in 2007 only 8 percent of the decisions by the state House, and only 1 percent of the state Senate’s decisions, were made by recorded votes?

The political class and its parasitic lobbyists preferred government conducted in private. Haley, whose early campaign strategy was exuberantly indiscriminate (“go anywhere and talk to anybody”) won the gubernatorial nomination by defeating the state’s lieutenant governor, its attorney general and a congressman. …

And then we head to the other end of the Republican spectrum, where the Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski’s desperate attempts to hold on to the Senate seat given to her by her father.

…Republican voters last month rejected the incumbent daughter just as they rejected the incumbent father. Princess Lisa lost the primary to Tea Party-backed Fairbanks lawyer Joe Miller — who also boasted the endorsement of Palin.

Republicans are poised to make historic gains against a power-drunk Democratic Party spending America into bankruptcy, but Sen. Murkowski apparently doesn’t care a whit about party or country. To stoke her own ego, she is set to launch a divisive write-in campaign against her own party’s nominee.

…As the Tea Party grass-roots revolt rages, the people have made it clear the Murkowskis represent the past. Defeating her even in her own party’s primary was an extraordinary signal of no confidence for an incumbent senator.

Palin supported the father some years ago in the name of party unity. Now Lisa Murkowski, this princess of a party dynasty, refuses to do the same — just because her name isn’t the one in lights. If there’s any Achilles’ heel that can be exploited against such RINOs, it’s obviously their oversized egos.

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin looks at how sections of the country with a lot of government and stimulus-financed funds are improving, at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers and the national debt. What will happen after the elections is hard to predict: whether there will be enough politicians with faith in market forces to allow productive markets to flourish, to everyone’s benefit.

…It is not surprising then that the capital district enjoys the highest job growth since December 2009 of any region. Indeed, the Great Recession barely even hit the imperial center. Given its current trajectory, it’s likely to remain the primary boom town along the east coast.

There are other less obvious regional winners from Obamanomics. Wall Street, despite its recent wailing, has fattened itself on the Fed’s cheap money. It may benefit further from highly complex new financial regulations that will drive smaller, regional competitors either out of business or into mergers with the megabanks.

Manhattan – a liberal bastion dependent on arguably the greediest, most venal purveyors of capitalism – enjoyed a revived high end consumer economy of high fashion, fancy restaurants and art galleries. Silicon Valley’s financial community also is seeing a surfeit of grants and subsidies for the latest venture schemes, keeping Palo Alto and its environs relatively prosperous. Perhaps this is the positive “change” that Time recently credited in its paen to the stimulus.

Other regional winners from the Obama economy generally can be found in state capitals and University towns, particularly those with the Ivy or elite college pedigrees that resonate with this most academic Administration. One illustration can be seen in the relatively strong recovery of Massachusetts – home to many prestigious Universities and hospitals – which has seen jobs grow by 2.2 percent since the Obama ascension. …

David Goldman sees the bubbles bursting in the public sector and the financial sector after the November elections.

…A great deal of Obama’s $800 billion stimulus went to cover state and local budget gaps. It was political life-support for the hard core of the Democratic party political base, the public employee unions whose generous pension deals have turned into an estimated $3 trillion underfunding gap. As bond yields remain depressed and equity returns remain non-existent that gap will grow.

And we are about to get a Republican Congress populated by candidates who ran on a promise of no more bailouts. In a deep and prolonged recession, the voters simply won’t approve new taxes (or new deficits) to bail out public employees who have it better than most employees in the private sector. The drumbeat against government employees sounds nightly on Fox News.

…The cure for the crisis is to break the public employee unions. It’s as simple as that. Layoffs, salary and pension givebacks, hiring of non-union employees, and so forth will enable cities and states to adjust to the misery of their circumstances.  …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner blogs that media liberals are starting to see the writing on the wall, and in their newspapers.

…The Post also ran another headline yesterday on its front page – “Republicans making gains ahead of midterm elections” – which would undoubtedly have sent a shudder through the White House. It carried a new poll commissioned jointly with ABC News, which showed public faith in Barack Obama’s leadership has fallen to an all-time low, with just 46 percent approval. The Washington Post-ABC News survey revealed high levels of public unease with President Obama’s handling of the economy, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving, and 58 percent critical of his handling of the deficit.

For most of the year, America’s political and media elites, including the Obama team itself, have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never materialised), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping America. It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is to experiencing a political revolution in November that will fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well – historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version promised by Barack Obama.

Daniel Foster posts on the Florida polls, in the Corner.

From Sunshine State News:

Republican Marco Rubio, garnering surprising strength among independent voters, holds a double-digit lead over his two chief rivals in Florida’s U.S. Senate race, a new Sunshine State News Poll reports. The survey of likely voters shows Rubio with 43 percent, independent Charlie Crist with 29 percent, Democrat Kendrick Meek with 23 percent and the remaining 5 percent undecided. …

The Schumpeter Blog in the Economist discusses the diminishing value of American higher education, thanks to government policies, and whether needed reforms will occur.

…College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

As costs soar, diligence is tumbling. In 1961 full-time students in four-year colleges spent 24 hours a week studying; that has fallen to 14, estimates the AEI. …

…The most plausible explanation is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research. Mr Hacker and Ms Dreifus point out that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year rather than every seventh. This year 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors will be on leave. …

…The Goldwater Institute points to a third poison to add to rising prices and declining productivity: administrative bloat. Between 1993 and 2007 spending on university bureaucrats at America’s 198 leading universities rose much faster than spending on teaching faculty. Administration costs at elite private universities rose even faster than at public ones. For example, Harvard increased its administrative spending per student by 300%. In some universities, such as Arizona State University, almost half the full-time employees are administrators. Nearly all university presidents conduct themselves like corporate titans, with salaries, perks and entourages to match. …

We get interesting anecdotal evidence from a recent graduate at The Frisky.com. Jessica Wakeman writes about her high-priced, impractical education.

I have a lot of regrets about my college education.

I regret that tuition was $40,000 a year, so that my classmates were mostly rich, white kids. I regret that I am paying back thousands in student loans. I regret that my journalism program forced me to take an introductory class on reporting, even though I’d already written articles for my hometown newspaper for two years. … I regret that I wasted time, money, and precious sanity on a required math class that gave me the anxiety attacks of your worst nightmares.

And most of all, I regret that I took as many gender and sexuality studies courses as I did.

Gender and sexuality studies classes ostensibly teach you to analyze the world with a critical lens, focusing on how one’s gender or sexuality impacts their life. Some classes deal with theoretical issues; others focus on literature, history or religion. Lots of gender and sexuality studies students go on to work in law, labor organizing, or social work. …my transcript from that time includes gems like the History of Prostitution, an introduction to grassroots organizing, and a class about pop culture …

…But I could have benefited from more politics, history and literature classes—to learn more about the world in general, rather than one tiny little sliver of the world. There’s a difference between what I thought was “cool” to learn about at the time and what has actually proved useful in life. … I probably could have learned a lot about sex work and labor abuse by reading magazine and newspaper articles on the subjects. But learning more about colonialism? Globalization? The World Wars? Important books? Religion? Supreme Court decisions? That knowledge would have provided such a better foundation for me as a writer than what I think I received from gender studies classes.

…Today I just find myself playing catch-up, reading the great books and researching great moments in history that I should have learned in school.

In Business Insider.com, Vincent Fernando spots an unbelievable story. Read his blog to find out the reason he gives for China’s housing bubble.

Property stocks in China were weak today due to media reports that the Beijing and Shanghai authorities were investigating the high vacancy rate for Chinese property. Markets are worried they’ll be shocked by what they discover and clamp down on speculation even harder than they have.

How large might the vacancy problem be? Here’s a taste:

Finance Asia:

Recent statistics show that there are about 64 million apartments and houses that have remained empty during the past six months, according to Chinese media reports. On the assumption that each flat serves as a home to a typical Chinese family of three (parents and one child), the vacant properties could accommodate 200 million people, which account for more than 15% of the country’s 1.3 billion population. But instead, they remain empty. This is in part because many Chinese believe that a home is not a real home unless you own the flat. …

J.E. Dyer, in Hot Air, describes what how little the new “green” lightbulbs offset carbon emissions. You’ll enjoy his summation of the facts, which is the only funny thing about this green debacle.

Hot Air’s headlines linked a Washington Post piece today on the closing of the last US manufacturing plant for the humble incandescent light bulb.  The article’s focus is on the “irony” of US engineers having come up with the compact-fluorescent lightbulb (CFL), as well as the way to manufacture it efficiently, but the actual manufacturing jobs – which are labor-intensive – having migrated overseas.

Of course, only if you’re a Washington Post writer does it seem ironic to you that manufacturers move their plants to where taxes are lower and all employer costs cheaper.  But the article has other unintended ironies – or, at least, fatuous and utterly unexamined statements.  The most important one occurs in paragraph 6, near the beginning, and it comes in for critical scrutiny not at all.  In fact, it’s expressed in vague, impressionistic terms that ought to get a journalist horsewhipped by a serious editor.  Here’s what WaPo tells us about the US decision to force the phase-out of the incandescent bulb…

Click on WORD or PDF for  full content

WORD

PDF

In Contentions, J.E. Dyer describes how America is quietly abdicating naval power.

…This is how maritime dominance is lost: incrementally and off the public’s radar. The U.S. Navy, as an oceangoing sea-control force, has shrunk from 568 ships and submarines in 1987 to 285 today. Our NATO allies’ navies have shrunk significantly as well, some of them by greater percentages. Among our key allies, only Japan and Australia are investing in larger and more diverse naval forces. The U.S. military, under Defense Secretary Gates, is looking at reducing further the inventory of warships — aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines — that perform sea-control missions and maintain maritime dominance. Equally troubling, DoD proposes to eliminate entirely the two major U.S. commands most closely linked with NATO and maritime power in the Atlantic: Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Second Fleet. Events, on the other hand, continue to warn us against this irresponsible course. We can expect more of them.

J.E. Dyer also discusses what is happening in Israeli foreign relations in the wake of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.

…Israel signed a framework agreement for defense cooperation with Russia on September 6 — the first ever between these two nations — and has been at work this year resurrecting its defense-cooperation agreement with China. …

…“Defense cooperation” portends more than military sales; it can mean conferences, intelligence and personnel exchanges, joint training, and shared weapons development. It’s a field of agreement with inherent implications for regional relations and security. And Israel’s defense-cooperation outreach this year is hardly random. Binyamin Netanyahu typically handles national security like a statesman in the Western classical mold, and it appears he is doing so here. Warming up ties with Russia and China is a way to gain leverage with the major outside powers that are putting down stakes in the Middle East as Obama’s America loses energy and presence. …

…The impetus for Israel to do this now comes from the persistent inertia of the Obama administration. …There is no rational basis for assuming Obama will take effective action against Iran or revise his approach to Syria. Exclusive alignment with the policy trend of Obama’s America promises nothing but disaster for Israel. In the absence of American strength — across the whole Middle Eastern region — Israel’s security situation will change. Although it means inviting Russia further into the Middle East, Netanyahu must work with reality in 2010: he must look for support — for a balancing agent with the region’s radical regimes — where he can find it.

David Warren writes that big government has been effective at stealing from its citizens, and bankrupting the nation. Perhaps it is time to remove both of these powers from politicians’ control.

…The background problem is simplicity itself. The Nanny State has blown the bank. She, or it, has done so everywhere. Even after appropriating half of every person’s national income with taxes both direct and indirect, and after offloading the costs of cumbersome do-good schemes onto businesses through convoluted regulations, Nanny is reduced to printing money.

…The cultivation and manipulation of envy is at the heart of all political schemes for income redistribution, and parties of the Left have been building their client base upon it. …

…The closest thing I can see to hope is currently invested in the Tea Party movement of the U.S. Notwithstanding the slanders heaped upon it, this movement is good-willed, riot-free, indeed situationally non-urban, and under the leadership of basically sane people. Of course, there is no guarantee that any movement devoted to genuine political change can remain so, under the inevitable provocations.

…That measure is, quite frankly, the complete dismantlement of the Nanny State, and the restoration of the status quo ante — governments focused on the provision of national defence, and domestically on the machinery of law and order. Full stop. …

David Harsanyi is lobbying for a sarcasm tax credit.

…Tax cuts for small businesses are always morally acceptable. Small businesses are innocuous coffee shops. Big business is chemical spills. They don’t deserve anything. Small business tax cuts help florists while “capital gains” cuts help hedge fund managers who should drawn and quartered, not rewarded.

During Labor Day weekend, I caught a number of local Democratic candidates calling themselves tax cutters in ads. Yet, nearly all of the tax cuts Americans have seen the past year and a half advance some liberal moral or social good. The overriding goal of the stimuli and tax breaks — from the things we build to the jobs we save to the tax credits we get — is to pick economic winners, steer us in the right direction and wheedle citizens to be good boys and girls.

To offer comprehensive, amoral cuts would be to admit ideological defeat. To allow them to work would mean a long-term disaster for Obama and the type of Democrats who now inhabit Congress.

This president would never surrender to such indignity.

Thomas Sowell gives a few historic examples how government intervention hurts the economy. Here he explains the Great Depression.

…There are two conflicting assumptions about what happened during the Great Depression. The most popular assumption, especially among politicians, is that the market failed and the government had to intervene to save the economy.

Another assumption is that the market went down and was on its way back up when federal intervention sent it down again and led to massive unemployment. …

…if you look at the facts, they go like this: Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the big stock market crash of 1929 that is often blamed for the massive unemployment of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the October 1929 crash, and then began drifting downward.

Unemployment was down to 6.3 percent by June 1930, when the first big federal intervention occurred. Within six months, the downward trend in unemployment reversed and hit double digits for the first time in December 1930.

What were politicians to do? Say “We messed up”? Or keep trying one huge intervention after another? The record shows what they did: President Hoover’s interventions were followed by President Roosevelt’s bigger interventions— and unemployment remained in double digits in every month for the entire remainder of the decade. …

Tunku Varadarajan wades through presidential pop culture.

…None of this would be worth a moment’s conversation had Obama not carried so much political support by dint of his sex appeal, which was an amalgam of his youth, his seeming dynamism, his idealism (always carefully curated, but always palpable), and his cinematic visual imagery… The great downside of all that came when he had to fill the seductive, pulse-quickening profile with presidential substance. The real world has quarried away at him in the form of Iran, BP, North Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, the economy, the Tea Party, and the like. The result has not been “hot.” It’s been room temperature.

…The promise of “otherness” and change that had made Obama so sexy to so many stands shorn of its magic. He has tried to do too much, and as a result has done too little well: And failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to “talk” about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag—in a word, charmless. This hasn’t merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead. Obama now looks more like tank-commander Dukakis than the George Clooney of our national narrative…

…Which leaves America without a single politician of stature with any sex appeal at all. It’s enough to make one weep.

Jennifer Rubin looks at the different party messages.

…Less than eight weeks before the election, the Republicans, as Bill Kristol points out, have a nice, sharp message: stop spending so much and stop raising taxes. You might not agree with it, but you know what they stand for. This was, after all, the media and the Obami’s complaint — “no ideas” from Republicans.

What’s Obama got? Cut some taxes, but raise others. We’re on the road to recovery, but really not. The deficit is strangling us but here’s another $50B for some government-bank idea to build the roads which I had told you the $800B stimulus plan would pay for. It’s not only not working, it’s a jumble — and it’s magnifying the problem: businesses are racked with uncertainty. …

Jennifer Rubin writes, if you think Rahm Emmanuel is bad, consider his likely replacement.

Those who keep advising Obama to fire people miss a key point: the replacements could be worse than the current crew. No, it really is possible. Mayor Daley of Chicago won’t run for another term, and Washington is abuzz with speculation that Rahm Emanuel will leave (flee?) the administration to run for the job. Ben Smith reports: “Emanuel has told Chicago associates, a source tells me, who he believes will likely succeed him: senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.”

Obama will be trading one Chicago pol (who at least understood how to elect Democrats from places that weren’t deep Blue) for a liberal Chicago pol whose instincts seem to mirror David Axelrod’s: when in doubt, go left. This was the gal who thought Obama’s defense of the Ground Zero mosque was a swell idea. She also remains a potential witness in the Blago retrial. She also led the vendetta against Fox News.  And of course, 9/11 truther Van Jones was her hire.

In short, if the Obami are looking for a far-left chief of staff with bad political instincts and a Chicago-machine outlook, they couldn’t do “better” than Valerie Jarrett.

Michael Barone comments on the November elections.

…Republicans need to gain 39 seats for a House majority. The professional analysts see it happening: Larry Sabato puts the number at 47, Stuart Rothenberg at 37 to 42, Charlie Cook at 40. Cook notes that Democratic incumbents are trailing Republican challengers in polls in 32 districts.

These are cautious prognosticators who evaluate candidates for every seat. No wonder Politico’s Mike Allen wrote yesterday that “the sky is falling” for the Democrats. …

…I think what we’re seeing is a rejection of the Obama Democrats’ big-government policies. The president and his party thought that in times of economic distress most voters would be supportive of or at least amenable to a vast expansion of the size and scope of government. …

John Stossel looks at how the Institute for Justice helps small businesses cut through unnecessary regulations.

Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It’s a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don’t want competition. Every locality has its share of business moguls who are cozy with politicians. Together, they use the power of government to keep competition down and prices high.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, works to free entrepreneurs from such opportunity-killing regulations. Here are four cases from IJ’s files.

Case No. 1. The monks at St. Joseph Abbey had to take the state of Louisiana to federal court to defend their right to make money selling handmade caskets. That’s right: empty wooden boxes. But as soon as the monks started selling them, they were shocked to receive a cease-and-desist order from something called the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors. The funeral directors had managed to get their state to pass a law decreeing that only “licensed funeral directors” may sell “funeral merchandise” like caskets. To sell caskets legally, the monks would have to obtain a funeral director’s license. That required a year-long apprenticeship, passing a funeral industry test and converting their monastery into a “funeral establishment” by installing embalming equipment, among other things.

The state board and the Louisiana Funeral Directors Association — the profession’s lobbyist — say the law is designed to protect consumers. But that’s what established businesses always say about absurd regulations they demand. An unusually candid funeral director told The Wall Street Journal, “They’re cutting into our profit.” Well, yes, free competition does do that. That’s the point. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Claudia Rosett comments on the Obami’s attempt to curry favor with the U.N.. Particularly at a time when our economy is struggling, such an article raises the question of why we fund an organization that is so corrupt, biased, and worthless in any honorable endeavors.

…Packaged as a 29-page report aiming to create “a more perfect union” in “a more perfect world,” this U.S. self-critique was sent by the State Department on Aug. 20 to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, in preparation for a formal review on Nov. 5 by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. A glaring feature of this report is its disparaging mention of Arizona’s new immigration law. This is the same law that Attorney General Eric Holder condemned in May without reading, and which the Obama administration is challenging in court. State is presenting this situation for review by the U.N., implying that Arizona is violating human rights with a law that has “generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer registered her protest in an Aug. 27 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking that the section on Arizona’s immigration law be removed from the report. Calling it “downright offensive” that Arizona law be offered up by the federal government for a “human rights” review by such U.N. members as Libya and Cuba, Brewer wrote: “The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”

…After an opening bit of lip service to “individual freedoms,” the report, along with lambasting Arizona’s immigration law, goes on to laud ObamaCare as making “great strides” for human rights–never mind that a majority of Americans did not want this regulatory Godzilla of a partisan health care bill. There is a laundry list of new affirmative action quotas, targeted federal grants, and pursuit of “freedom from want” via “social benefits” in which redistribution of wealth is required by law. And there are such items as a reprise of the case cited by Obama in his 2009 Cairo speech, in which the U.S. Justice Department defended the right of a Muslim girl to wear a head covering, or hijab. (This last is presumably to curry favor with Islamic countries, despite the reality that human rights violations in these places tend to involve the punishment of women who prefer not to wear the veil, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the full-body abaya). …

Michael Barone discusses another government-financed bubble that may be about to burst.

…Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they’re not getting their money’s worth, and the bubble bursts.

… The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy. University of California scholars Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report that students these days study an average of 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours in 1961.

…Transparency could also undermine the numerous dropout factories, public and private, described and listed by the liberal Washington Monthly. More than 90 percent of students there never graduate, but most end up with student loan debt.

…People are beginning to note that administrative bloat, so common in government, seems especially egregious in colleges and universities. Somehow previous generations got by and even prospered without these legions of counselors, liaison officers and facilitators. …

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook has interesting center-left commentary on the coming elections.

…Two other points deserve more attention than they have received. First, most commentators see the midterms as a referendum on Mr Obama. This is wrong. The elections are a referendum on the party in power — that is, on the president’s partnership with Democrats in Congress led by Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate. …

…Mr Obama should have kept his distance from his allies on Capitol Hill. It would have been better for him, and better for them. Centrist voters embraced Mr Obama in 2008 because they thought he would temper a polarised and dysfunctional Congress. He let them down. The reflexive opposition of Republicans is much to blame, but Mr Obama did not try very hard. Pragmatic he may be, but unlike the instinctively centrist Bill Clinton, he leans left. If Ms Pelosi and Mr Reid could deliver irreproachably liberal policies — on healthcare, energy, the stimulus, whatever — that was fine with him. As it turned out, they often had to compromise, but that was because of a sliver of conservative Democrats, not Mr Obama. …

…Strangely, it is not just the centre that is disappointed. Another potentially decisive factor in November is sagging enthusiasm in the Democratic base. You need not look far for the reason. For nearly two years, media progressives have whined about the administration and its works. The White House showed its frustration at this recently when spokesman Robert Gibbs attacked the “professional left”. He was rebuked by progressives, but he was correct. Turn-out in the midterms will be crucial, yet the left has talked itself into apathy. …

Nile Gardiner blogs about the polling numbers, and looks not only at wins, but the issues important to the electorate.

…Another poll by Gallup this week shows Republicans leading the Democrats in Congress on the handling of nine key election issues, including terrorism (a 24 point lead), immigration (15 points), federal spending (15 points), and the economy (11 points). In only one area do the Democrats hold a significant advantage – the environment, which is low down the list of voter priorities. On key economic issues, likely to dominate in November, the Republicans have a seemingly unassailable advantage – the four most important voter issues according to Gallup are the economy, jobs, corruption in government and federal spending.

Gallup’s findings largely mirror another major poll, released by Rasmussen in late August, which found that voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all ten key issues it regularly surveys. This includes an eight point lead on the economy and national security/ War on Terror, a nine point lead on immigration, and a striking 16-point lead on the issue of taxes. As they do in the Gallup poll, the Republicans have an overwhelming advantage on economic issues, which are likely to prove a major Achilles heel for the Democrats in November.

… According to Rasmussen, just 29 percent of likely voters now believe the country is heading in the right direction, a damning indictment of President Obama’s leadership of the country. …

…The Obama presidency is facing meltdown, and according to the polls is likely to be greatly weakened from November onwards, throwing a major spanner in the works of the ambitious Obama agenda to remake America. A conservative revolution is heading its way to Washington on a wave of anti-government sentiment, and looks unstoppable. Like Jimmy Carter before him, President Obama has succeeded in revitalising conservatism in the United States, and reawakening a sleeping giant. When Barack Obama spoke in his election campaign of bringing “change” to America, I doubt this is quite what he had in mind.

In Politico, Jennifer Haberkorn reports on how Dems are handling Obamacare in their campaigning.

A handful of House Democrats are making health care reform an election year issue — by running against it.

At least five of the 34 House Democrats who voted against their party’s health care reform bill are highlighting their “no” votes in ads back home. By contrast, party officials in Washington can’t identify a single House member who’s running an ad boasting of a “yes” vote — despite the fact that 219 House Democrats voted in favor of final passage in March. …

…Most of the Democrats running ads highlighting their opposition to the law are in conservative-leaning districts and considered the most endangered. They’re using their vote against the overhaul as proof of their willingness to buck party leadership and their commitment to watching the nation’s debt. …

George Will discusses how global warmists have fallen out of favor.

…Environmentalism began as Bambi doing battle with Godzillas, such as the Army Corps of Engineers. Then, says Mead, environmentalism became Godzilla, an advocate of “a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix.” Mead continues:

“Never mind that the leading green political strategy … is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree and we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.”

The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough “experts” in that branch. Hence the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to do what the elected representatives of the rubes refuse to do in limiting greenhouse gases. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren looks at the sham Middle East peace process.

…Now consider Mahmoud Abbas. He is the head of the Palestinian Authority, successor to the leadership of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Does my gentle reader believe he wants Israeli soldiers to leave the West Bank? Those who say “yes” have been seriously misinformed. Think, for a moment, and you will understand why Abbas would want the Israeli soldiers out, even less than Netanyahu would want to withdraw them, or to withdraw the Jewish settlements they defend.

This is because, if they do withdraw, Hamas will come to power, and slaughter the colleagues of Mahmoud Abbas — plus the man himself, should he not get out in time.

We can know this for fact. We actually saw what happened when the Israeli soldiers withdrew from Gaza, after uprooting all 21 Jewish settlements there. It took Hamas less than two years to physically eliminate their Fatah rivals, and they would have done it faster had the Israelis not launched the occasional airstrike against a significant Hamas target (in response to gratuitous rocket attacks into Israeli territory). But in the end, Fatah’s Gaza generals and administrators bloodily “disappeared,” usually with their families.

…While Abbas was smiling in his grandfatherly way in Washington this week, his ambassador in Tehran, Salah Zawawi, was declaring that, “the relentless struggle (jihad) against the Zionist occupier will continue until the liberation of Holy Quds.” That would be Jerusalem in your English-language atlas.

So much for the “moderates.” …

Peter Wehner shares his thoughts on the political considerations affecting Obama’s Afghanistan policy, that Charles Krauthammer discussed in an article in yesterday’s Pickings.

…And it’s not the first time such a thing has been said about Obama. Here is a paragraph from a June 23 Washington Post article on the controversy then surrounding General Stanley McChrystal:

…In exchange for approving McChrystal’s request for more troops and treasure, Obama imposed, and the military accepted, two deadlines sought by his political aides. In December, one year after the strategy was announced, the situation would be reviewed and necessary adjustments made. In July 2011, the troops would begin to come home. [emphasis added]

These are damning admissions — war policies not only being influenced by partisan considerations but in important respects being driven by them.

…Yet in Tuesday’s prime-time address to the nation, Obama, rather than walk back from his arbitrary withdrawal date, went out of his way to re-emphasize it. “Make no mistake,” the president said, “this transition will begin because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”

It turns out that the locution “our interests” refers not to America’s national interests but to Obama’s political self-interest instead. …

Peter Wehner also blogs about a liberal who has lost perspective, to put it politely.

I’ve admitted that it’s become something of a hobby of mine to point out how the left is becoming increasingly unhinged and alienated from America and turning on the American people with a vengeance (see here and here). We can add the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson to the list. According to Robinson,

In the punditry business, it’s considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.

…We have gone from an estimable people to a bunch of spoiled brats — all because the citizenry is rising up against a president who they believe (with considerable evidence on their side) is doing harm to their country. …

In the WSJ, Allysia Finley tells us more about the most expensive school ever built. The next question we’d like answered is: How much do all the yahoo administrators in the L.A. school district get paid?

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores. …

…The district’s building spree has sparked outrage from charter schools, not least because they are getting only a tiny piece of the bond pie. California Charter School Association President Jed Wallace says a charter school can be built at a seventh of the cost of the Kennedy complex and a quarter of most L.A. schools. For example, the nonprofit Green Dot built seven charters in the area—to serve about 4,300 mainly low-income students—for less than $85 million in total. These schools also have a collective graduation rate that’s nearly twice as high as that of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which Education Week magazine pegs at 40%.

Mr. Rubin says it’s unfair to compare charters with traditional public schools because charters aren’t saddled with onerous government regulations regarding labor and environmental standards. What he doesn’t say is that charter schools don’t have taxpayers as a backstop. Traditional public schools “have no accountability or restraints,” Mr. Wallace bristles. “They don’t have to make the tough choices when costs run over.” …

David Harsanyi engages in a little bit of Christina Romer-bashing.

Admitting you’re a fan of economics is another way of saying you live a deeply tragic life.

…But the most crucial lesson I’ve gleaned from smart men and women who practice the dismal science is this: Those who claim to grasp the vagaries of the economy enough to predict the future with any amount of certitude are charlatans.

Which neatly segues into a discussion about the reckless tenure of technocrat Christina Romer, former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and one of the chief architects of the stimulus plan. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, Michael Pento gives a brief explanation of the importance of goods producing jobs in an economy.

The BLS reported today that private sector employment increased by 67,000, while overall employment fell by 54,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6% from 9.5%. Far be it from me to highlight the negative side of this report but it is vitally important to know that manufacturing payrolls decreased by 27,000 and the Goods Producing sector of the economy produced ZERO jobs in August. …

…In fact, we lost over 200k goods producing jobs just in the last 12 months. Manufacturing, mining, construction and agricultural jobs create goods that can be traded and stored and provide the basis for developing real wealth. That is why they are so important and without them a country is doomed to chronically increase its trade and current account deficits. That leads to a constant erosion in the value of the currency and causes an inexorable selling of domestic assets into foreign ownership. …

Also in Euro Pacific Capital, Mark Hanna gives a snapshot of some of the latest economic numbers and what they mean.

U.S. stocks rallied on employment data that degraded month over month, but was not as bad as had been anticipated in some quarters… It certainly was an interesting week where a few reports the market viewed as positive, overshadowed many more that were showing weakening. …
On the economic front were 2 very closely watched economic reports – the monthly unemployment data, and ISM Services (which represents 80%+ of the economy).  Both were weaker than the previous month, but with whisper numbers of negative private job creation any positive job growth was seen as a positive.  So while the trend is down, it was “better than expectation” which normally is enough to get the market rallying.  The headline number is not worth mentioning as it is affected by census workers, but the private jobs figure was +67,000 versus an expectation of +40,000.  In an economy with over 110M workers, one would not think a difference of 27,000 jobs would bring such cheer to the market, but this was the case.  Of course the U.S. economy requires in excess of 125,000 jobs each month simply to keep up with population growth, so that bar was not beat – and the 67,000 is significantly lower than the 107,000 jobs created in July.  …  The unemployment rate increased from 9.5% to 9.6% as over half a million people re-entered the workforce; hence even as there was an increase in jobs the number of people entering the workforce was a much larger figure, leading to a higher unemployment rate. …

In the Corner, Veronique de Rugy looks at Obama’s alternative to Bush tax cuts.

Now, I guess to try to appear more business-friendly, the administration is weighing “hundred of billions in small business tax cuts,” according to the Washington Post:

The White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks — potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses.

…And if you remember, in an interview, William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, said, “Our member surveys for plans to add inventory and plans to hire are all coming in at 35 year lows. They have no reason to hire anybody because they don’t have anything to do. That’s why the tax credit is a silly idea.”

If the administration were so eager to help businesses, large or small,  it would end the constant public-policy uncertainties that businesses are facing: The health-care overhaul, which will bring new but still unknown obligations to insure employees, and legislation aimed at tackling climate change, which could raise businesses’ energy costs, add to the uncertainty about the economy. The new financial regulation, which will take years to put in place, adds its share of uncertainty, as does the potential expiration of the tax cuts. Meanwhile, as government spending increases, so do the chances of more taxes in the future. …

Ed Morrissey laughs at the Obami for yet another gaffe.

Today, the Washington Post notices that the White House doesn’t bother to do much research.  Of course, had Jamie Stiehm been an avid reader of our Obamateurisms of the Day feature at Hot Air, the Post may have noticed this over a year ago:

…“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. …

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

For the record, King never claimed the phrase as his own.  He quoted Parker, one of his inspirations, in using this phrase, a point never noticed by Barack Obama during his campaign.  He repeated the phrase often enough that it caught the attention of Reverend Matt Tittle, who attempted to inform the campaign in April 2008 that Obama was misattributing the quote.  The campaign never replied to Tittle, but for a while Obama dropped the reference, and Tittle thought the message had been received. …

In Popular Science, Rebecca Boyle writes about an interesting prospect for cheap, efficient, green energy.

One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and 3.5 million tons of coal, according to the former director of CERN. via Telegraph

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama’s court. …

…The Telegraph says this $1.8 billion (£1.2 billion) project could lead to a network of tiny underground nuclear reactors, producing about 600 MW each. Their wee size would negate the enormous security apparatus required of full-size nuclear power plants. …

…But nuclear plants need fuel, which means building controversial uranium mines. Thorium, on the other hand, is so abundant that it’s almost an annoyance. It’s considered a waste product when mining for rare-earth metals.

Thorium also solves the non-proliferation problem. Nuclear non-proliferation treaties (NPT) prohibit processes that can yield atomic bomb ingredients, making it difficult to refine highly radioactive isotopes. But thorium-based accelerator-driven plants only produce a small amount of plutonium, which could allow the U.S. and other nations to skirt NPT. …

In the Michigan View, Henry Payne reports a story of Green hypocrisy and a little bit of poetic justice.

Add Jesse Jackson’s ride to prominent vehicles being stripped in Detroit.

Following the embarrassing news that Mayor Dave Bing’s GMC Yukon was hijacked by criminals this week, Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.

Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the Jerusalem Post, Daniel Gordis has a stellar article on what lies behind the Ground Zero mosque controversy.

…For Israelis do have something to teach Americans… It goes something like this: It’s fine to say that “America is not at war with Islam,” to point out that most Muslims are not terrorists and that many American Muslims are moderates. That’s true, as far as it goes.

But it only goes so far. Because America is at war and its enemies are Muslims. Politically correct hairsplitting runs the risk of Americans blinding themselves to that simple but critical fact. It makes no difference what percentage of the world’s Muslims wants to destroy America. There are enough of them that US air travel is now abominably unpleasant and, more importantly, enough of them that more strikes on America appear inevitable. …

…When my parents were teenagers, they watched as evil took hold of Europe. But then they saw America turn itself into an unprecedented, enormous military machine. For America’s leaders understood that if the Nazis won, the world as we knew it would be over…

But when my children were teenagers, a different evil took root across their eastern horizon. This time, though, the world has feigned impotence. Iran is at the nuclear threshold. Iraq was at best a “non-failure.” The battle against the Taliban and al-Qaida may take years, or decades, and may require many lives sacrificed if we are to win. But America has grown war-weary. Obama is already planning to bring the troops home; the word “terrorist” is increasingly off-limits in the US because it is considered “politically loaded.”…

…Its tendency to gentility is part of what has made America great. But an unwillingness to call an “enemy” an enemy could lead to America’s demise. For Islam’s radical leaders tell us clearly what they seek: a world united under Islam, with America’s sacred freedoms eradicated as a new “morality” replaces them. What is much less clear is whether Americans are willing to fight – to die and to kill – to protect those freedoms. …

In Der Spiegel, Thomas Straubhaar writes about traditional American values, and whether we will return to the principles that made America great.

…A firm belief in the individual’s ability, ideas, courage, will and a reliance on one’s own resources brought the US to the top. The American dream promised everyone the chance of upward mobility — literally from rags to riches, from minimum wage to millionaire. The individual’s pursuit of happiness was seen as the crucial foundation for the well-being of society, rather than the benevolent state which cares for its subjects — and certainly not the welfare state, which provides a social safety net for its citizens. …

…Both the behavior of the American government and the Federal Reserve makes one thing clear: They do not see the solution to the US’s economic woes in a return to traditional American virtues. Obama is not calling for the unleashing of market forces, as Ronald Reagan once did during an equally critical period in the early 1980s. On the contrary: Obama, driven by his own convictions and advised by economists who believe in government intervention, has taken a path that leads far away from those things that catapulted America to the top of the world in the past century.

The Obama administration’s current policies rely on more government rather than personal responsibility and self-determination. They are administering to the patient more, not less, of exactly those things that led to the crisis. …

…This raises a crucial question: Is the US economy perhaps suffering less from an economic downturn and more from a serious structural problem? It seems plausible that the American economy has lost its belief in American principles. People no longer have confidence in the self-healing forces of the private sector, and the reliance on self-help and self-regulation to solve problems no longer exists.

…The settlers of the New World rejected everything, which included throwing out anything with a semblance of state authority. They fled Europe to find freedom. The sole shared goal of the settlers was to obtain individual freedom and live independently, which included the freedom to say what they wanted, believe what they wanted and write what they wanted. The state was seen as a way to facilitate this goal. The state should not interfere in people’s lives, aside from securing freedom, peace and security. Economic prosperity was seen as the responsibility of the individual. …

Charles Krauthammer thinks the president needs to focus on the war effort as well as his domestic initiatives.

…Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.

How did Obama come to this decision? “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser told the New York Times’ Peter Baker. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate members of Congress, pass health care and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out. …

In Forbes, John Tamny sets forth an excellent explanation of the additional costs taxpayers are forced to incur when federal workers receive higher salaries.

…If it’s true that government workers are more educated and in possession of greater skills, then it’s also true that a still-difficult economic situation has been made more difficult by virtue of some of our best and brightest offering their skills to the inefficient government sector over the private economy. Their gain is the recessed economy’s loss.

It should also be remembered the perverse incentives that exist among federal workers. Not able to advance based on profits, and doing more with less, workers in the government succeed the more the bureaucracy they work for grows, the more lawsuits they win against private actors, the more regulations they impose, and the more fines/fees they lift from the increasingly empty hands of the average American taxpayer.

Not only are we fleeced to cover the rising pay and gold-plated benefits of federal workers, we’re essentially paying them to make our lives more difficult. The more they’re able to do so, the more they advance. …

Michael Graham, in the Boston Herald, gives us a glimpse of how government is taking care of itself during the economic turmoil.

Hey President Obama, I found your “recovery!” It was hidden among the theater seats and swimming pools at Newton North High.

…Struggling taxpayers looking for prosperity just have to drive through Newton and check out the new 400,000 square-foot high school with its two theaters, two gymnasiums, its fully-functional television studio and an SOA or “simulated outdoor area.” Happy days are obviously here again when students are provided Kindle book readers and teachers use “interactive white boards” in wireless-tech classrooms. …

…Who cares if it cost more than $100,000 per pupil? We’re with the government and we’re livin’ large!

…And that’s the key. When you’re looking for recovery in an Obama economy, all the good news is in the government sector. In fact, if you just work near the government, Obamanomics is for you.

…The fact is, there is a recovery under way and no, we taxpaying private-sector workers were not left out. We get to pay for it.

Noel Sheppard points out Chris Matthews’ frustration with the teleprompted president, in Newsbusters.

…Near the end of a “Hardball” segment about the President’s prime time address to the nation Tuesday, the host said, “If he doesn’t get rid of that damn teleprompter…He’s just reading words now.”

Matthews continued, “It’s separating him from us.”

And continued, “You go to a meeting with him I’m told, businessmen are invited to meet him at the White House, he hauls out the damn teleprompter, and he reads it to them.”

“The teleprompter is a problem for this guy. I think it’s his menace”…

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jeff Jacoby explains why Cash for Clunkers was a monumentally stupid piece of legislation.

…Why are used-car prices rocketing? Part of the answer is that demand is up: With unemployment high and the economy uncertain, some car buyers who might otherwise be looking for a new truck or SUV are instead shopping for a used vehicle as a way to save money.

But an even bigger part of the answer is that the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers. …

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’ Alec Gutierrez, a senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, predicted that used-car prices would surge by up to 10 percent. “It’s going to drive prices up on some of the most affordable vehicles we have on the road,’’ he told USA Today. In short, Washington spent nearly $3 billion to raise the price of mobility for drivers on a budget. …

Michael Barone looks at how Obama’s policies have worked to help big business and big labor, at taxpayers’ expense.

…The Obama Democrats, faced with a grave economic crisis, responded with policies appropriate to the Big Unit America that was disappearing during the president’s childhood.

Their financial policy has been to freeze the big banks into place. Their industrial policy was to preserve as much as they could of General Motors and Chrysler for the benefit of the United Auto Workers. Their health care policy was designed to benefit Big Pharma and other big players. Their housing policy has been to try to maintain existing prices. Their macroeconomic economic policy was to increase the size and scope of existing government agencies to what looks to be the bursting point.

What we see is Big Government colluding with Big Business and trying to breathe life into Big Labor. …

Liberals have long railed against big business, and conservatives have focused on the sins of big government and big labor. Each has only a piece of the puzzle, explains Warren Meyer. He looks at European states as a template to how the powerful in government and business are protecting each others’ positions, and gives a striking list of examples that show their collusion.

…In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.

Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians’ pet projects–from recycling to windmills–with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.

In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same. …

…Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.

Robert Costa interviews Patrick Caddell, a former Carter pollster, on the upcoming elections. Caddell says the anti-government sentiment is startling.

…On Monday, Gallup released a new weekly poll showing Republicans leading Democrats by an unprecedented ten-point margin, 51 to 41 percent, in congressional voting preferences — the largest gap in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot. “I have never seen numbers like this,” Caddell says, shaking his head. “Unless Republicans can find some way to screw it up, they will win big, even though nobody really likes them, either.”

Indeed, rather than a ringing endorsement of either major party, Caddell sees November as a broader referendum on the political class — the class, he says, to which Obama, and his political fate, are irrevocably tied.

…Caddell believes that 2010 will be a louder, more raucous moment than 1978 in American politics. “The discontent is much larger than the turnout at Glenn Beck rallies,” he says. “A sea of anger is churning — the tea parties are but the tip of the iceberg. People say they want to take their country back, and, to the Democrats’ chagrin, they’re very serious about it.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Robert Costa’s article.

In a fascinating interview with Robert Costa, Democratic pollster and analyst Pat Caddell zeroes in on the Democrats’ impending doom (”the general outcome is baked”) and on Obama’s failure to live up to expectations (”The killer in American politics is disappointment. When you are elected on expectations, and you fail to meet them, your decline steepens”). But his most cogent analysis focuses on Obama’s base. He writes:

“The people who own the party — George Soros, the Center for American Progress, the public-employee union bosses, rich folks flying private jets to “ideas festivals” in Aspen — they’re Obama’s base.”

Yowser. He omitted only the liberal media, but I suppose they too — along with young people, old people, Hispanics, working- and middle-class whites, and even 42 percent of Jews — have grown disillusioned as well. …

Jennifer Rubin and David Brooks liked Glenn Beck’s rally. (There’s a sentence you probably never thought you’d see.)

David Brooks couldn’t find a bad word to say about the Glenn Beck rally. Really. In his conversation with Gail Collins, she certainly tried to drag something negative out of him. But he liked what he saw:

I have to confess I really enjoyed it. I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights. … There, at Saturday’s rally, were the most conservative people in the country, lauding Martin Luther King Jr. There they were, in the midst of their dismay, lavishly celebrating the basic institutions of American government. I have no problem with that.

…What seems to have flummoxed the left is that the Beck rally demonstrated that the populist anti-Obama faction in the country (some might use the mundane phrase “majority”) isn’t composed of wackos. They actually understand better than elites that the economic problems are in large part a function of a collapse in values. Obama likes to rail against Wall Street. Well, that’s a location. The ralliers want to talk about what went wrong with the people who populate business and government. They would say we have lost touch with essential values — thrift, persistence, responsibility, modesty, and, yes, faith in something beyond self and self-indulgence. As Brooks put it, “Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control.”

The chattering class should stop chattering long enough to listen to what citizens are saying. Not only is it quite reasonable; it is profound.