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Charles Krauthammer says after getting spanked by the voters, the left will move their agenda by administrative fiat.

…Over the next two years, Republicans will not be able to pass anything of importance to them – such as repealing Obamacare – because of the presidential veto. And the Democrats will be too politically weakened to advance, let alone complete, Obama’s broad transformational agenda.

That would have to await victory in 2012. Every president gets two bites at the apple: the first 18 months when he is riding the good-will honeymoon, and a second shot in the first 18 months of a second term before lame-duckness sets in.

Over the next two years, the real action will be not in Congress but in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Democrats will advance their agenda on Obamacare, financial reform and energy by means of administrative regulation, such as carbon-emission limits imposed unilaterally by the Environmental Protection Agency. …

Even the NYTimes must be stunned by their polling results. Jennifer Rubin fills us in.

…Other figures evidence the electorate’s rightward shift. Women, who have of late tilted Democratic, are now evenly split between support for Democrats and Republicans. By a margin of 55 to 36 percent, respondents favored smaller government with fewer services over bigger government with more services. Fifty-three percent think Obama does not have a clear plan for creating jobs. Respondents think Republicans are more likely than Democrats to create jobs and reduce the deficit (by a 43 to 32 percent margin).

And oh, by the way, the polling sample — 38 percent Democrat and 27 percent Republican — is more dramatically skewed toward the Democrats than just about any other poll (OK, there’s Newsweek, but not even James Carville takes that seriously).

Obama has managed to lose his own standing, take his party down with him, and convince core Democratic constituencies to vote Republican. And it took him only two years.

Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, posts on the latest Gallup poll.

…Gallup has another devastating poll which makes extremely grim reading for the White House today. Gallup’s polling shows that 48 percent of Americans now regard themselves as conservative, higher than each of the last three midterms, compared to just 20 percent who describe themselves as liberals. In addition, Gallup reveals that 55 percent of likely voters next week are Republican or lean Republican, in contrast to 40 percent who are Democrat or lean Democrat. …

…The poll underscores not only the huge advantage the Republicans have going into next week’s election, but also the sheer scale of the conservative revolution in America. As Gallup shows, conservatives now outnumber liberals by an almost 2.5 to 1 ratio. Liberals make up just 20 percent of the American population. Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in US history, and is clearly out of touch with at least 80 percent of the American people, who clearly do not share his ideology. Next Tuesday looks set to be an epic disaster for the Left in America, and the capsizing of the president’s Big Government dream.

More and more liberals have seen enough. In the WaPo, Dana Milbank discusses the president’s appearance on The Daily Show. More striking than Obama’s attitude was what the interview said about Jon Stewart and liberals like him.

…Stewart, who struggled to suppress a laugh as Obama defended Summers, turned out to be an able inquisitor on behalf of aggrieved liberals. …

…”Is the difficulty,” Stewart asked, “that you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you delivered? You ran with such, if I may, audacity…. yet legislatively it has felt timid at times.”

Stewart had found the sore point between Obama and his base — and Obama was irritable. “Jon, I love your show, but this is something where I have a profound disagreement with you,” he said. “What happens,” he added, “is it gets discounted because the presumption is, well, we didn’t get 100 percent of what we wanted, we got 90 percent of what we wanted — so let’s focus on the 10 percent we didn’t get.”…

Peter Wehner also comments on President Obama and Jon Stewart.

…Throughout the interview, Obama also found himself hoisted with his own petard. It is Obama who created, by his words and promises, almost Messianic expectations for himself and his presidency. He was going to do so much, so fast, so well. Those expectations have come crashing down around Obama. Stewart’s line of questing was consistent. “Is the difficulty you have here the distance between what you ran on and what you’ve delivered,” Stewart asked the president. Mr. Obama did not seem happy with Stewart’s impertinence. But, at least, out of the interview emerged a new motto from the Obama White House. It’s based on what the president himself said: “Yes We Can — but…” as in “I think what I would say is ‘yes we can, but it’s not going to happen overnight.’”

Most of us missed the qualifiers during the campaign. …

Peter Wehner unpacks Obama’s comments to the Latino community. Wehner draws attention to Obama’s stunning narcissism and lack of perspective, when Obama calls political opponents “enemies” because it’s personal and affects the president.

I had lunch yesterday with a long-time friend who is intelligent, well informed, and a life-long Democrat. In the course of our conversation I asked for his reaction to what the president said on Univision.

If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, “We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder.

Given how out of sync the president’s words have been, compared with his high-minded campaign rhetoric, I asked my friend, “Help me to decode Obama.” I wanted to hear his perspective as someone who had invested great hopes in the president.

His response was arresting: “He’s ruthless.” My friend proceeded to tell me that Obama should be understood in the context of the Chicago Way.

…Obama’s rhetoric — using the word “enemy” to describe members of the opposition party — has become nearly unhinged. For Obama there are, it seems, no honest or honorable critics; they are all dishonest, dishonorable, operating in bad faith, and now, apparently, out-and-out enemies. Mr. Obama’s rhetoric is more scorching toward Republicans than it is toward Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il. …

Having seen enough of the unscripted president, Victor Davis Hanson suggests the prez get back on teleprompted message.

…But the problem with the first is that Obama does not do well when he’s impromptu and petulant: see “typical white person,” “spread the wealth,” “clingers,” and, more recently, “they talk about me like a dog,” his telling the Republicans that they have to sit in the back of the car, and warning “Latinos” to punish their conservative “enemies” by voting for the Obama slate. The result is that he appears either weird (at best) or Nixonian (at worst), given his now apparently insincere bring-us-together rhetoric. …

Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, writes about Bill Clinton hitting the campaign trail. How does Bill Clinton diss Obama? Remember the Dem candidate for RI Governor? Bill’s campaigning for him.

…Some are speculating that Hillary might resign from State and mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012. I think that’s highly unlikely – it would be an extremely difficult path for her to challenge the first black President. Seven years is a long, long time (and so is five, when the decision to run would be taken) but all things being equal she is currently a near cert to run in 2016.

Of course, it’s not impossible that Obama, badly damaged by the mid-terms and sick of the distinct lack of the adoration he’s always been used to, will do an LBJ and decide not to run in 2012. I’ve long wondered whether his heart is in getting re-elected. In mid-September, a “big-time Democrat” told Politico’s Roger Simon that 2010 was already lost:

“It is gone. He must now concentrate on saving 2012. But the biggest fear of some of those close to him is that he might not really want to go on in 2012, that he might not really care.”

In the event that Obama decides not to run for re-election, Hillary becomes the immediate Democratic front runner.

In the Economist Blogs – Democracy in America, A.E. posts an excellent snapshot on the power of government unions.

ON FRIDAY the Wall Street Journal provided a wonderful bit of irony: despite the howls of indignation from the Democrats over private campaign spending, it turns out that the biggest sugar daddy is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a public-sector labour union that spends almost all of its cash for the Democrats. AFSCME accounts for roughly 30% of spending from pro-Democratic groups. A piece from US News and World Report points out that, in total, “Big Labour” is spending more private cash than the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads (Karl Rove’s outfit) combined.

Since the WSJ article most of the commentary has involved arguments over possible Democratic hypocrisy (pro, con), but that debate misses the point. The Democrats are electorally beholden to union support, and this often leads to bad policy.

In an essay in National Affairs previously flagged by Schumpeter, Daniel DiSalvo notes some of the negative consequences of this symbiotic relationship. He focuses on public-sector unions, which have grown while membership in their private-sector counterparts has flagged. … public-sector unions have a distinct advantage over private ones. “Through their extensive political activity,” says Mr DiSalvo, “these government-workers’ unions help elect the very politicians who will act as ‘management’ in their contract negotiations—in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation (like, say, American Airlines or the Washington Post Company) cannot.” And the public-sector managers sitting across the table don’t have the same worries as private-sector bosses…

…Amid savage private-sector job cuts, one-third of the funds from the 2009 stimulus bill went to state and local governments, mainly to rescue public-sector employees. An executive order last spring strongly encouraged government agencies to use construction companies with unionised workforces for any federal construction project over $25m. That followed three other union-friendly orders. In his bail-out of Chrysler and GM unions won some special favours. And Mr Obama imposed tariffs on imports of Chinese tyres at a union’s request. …

Michael Barone also sounds off against government unions.

…The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public employee unions’ interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable.

…Public employee union members have become, as U.S. News Editor in Chief Mortimer Zuckerman writes, “the new privileged class,” with better pay, more generous benefits and far more lush pensions than those who pay their salaries — and who are taxed to send money to their leaders’ favored candidates.

Franklin Roosevelt thought public-sector unions were a lousy idea. Do you?

Unfortunately, Sandra Day O’Connor isn’t finished making up the Constitution.

…”This is Sandra Day O’Connor calling about Ballot Question 1″ was the recorded message that greeted Nevada voters when they picked up the phone earlier this week. Justice O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2006 but sits on lower federal courts from time to time, was pitching a Nov. 2 state initiative that would replace judicial elections with “merit selection.”

…The public campaign for merit selection has been led by O’Connor’s Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. But behind the scenes is liberal moneyman George Soros, who has provided $45 million in grants to groups like Justice at Stake and the left-wing People for the American Way that press for an end to judicial elections.

Think of it as an investment in judicial activism. Selection boards get captured by trial lawyers, academics and antibusiness activists. They nominate plaintiff-friendly judges and state legislatures rubber-stamp them. Rather than play to the voters, would-be judges play to the special interests that dominate the commissions. This campaigning takes place behind closed doors. One Missouri judge called the process “exclusive, secretive and political.”

In “merit” states the law takes a left turn toward jackpot justice. This has played out in Alaska and Wyoming, both states in which “merit” picks have struck down common-sense tort reforms. …

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David Harsanyi kicks off the day by telling the political class that they now have America’s attention.

…Tea Party types are interested in ideology not just economy. They will be disappointed at the first whiff of “bipartisanship” consensus on spending. They will be irate when Republicans fail to shut down unnecessary federal departments as promised.

(As others have pointed out, if the GOP doesn’t have the stomach to de-fund those nerds at NPR, how can we expect them to repeal Obamacare?)

Most elections aren’t as historically momentous as partisans would have us believe, but many can shift the trajectory of the national conversation for a long time.

Now that the Tea Party cleared the brush and lived to tell about it, the next round of candidates will be far less apprehensive in advocating free-market reforms. In fact, the next round of economically libertarian candidates — folks who had never thought of running against the establishment previously — are likely to be more polished, impressive and intellectually prepared to make their case.

…A new Rasmussen poll finds that 75 percent of likely voters believe a free market economy is better than an economy managed by the government. …

Jeff Jacoby thinks that expressing disdain for dense voters will not be a winning strategy for the Democrat party.

…The smug condescension in this — we’re losing because voters are panicky and confused — is matched only by its apparent cluelessness. Does Obama really believe that demeaning ordinary Americans is the way to improve his party’s fortunes? Or that his dwindling job approval is due to the public’s weak grip on “facts and science’’ and not, say, to his own divisive and doctrinaire performance as president?

…Obama is far from alone in looking down his nose at the great unwashed. Last month, Senator John Kerry explained that Democrats are facing such headwinds these days because voters are easily swayed dolts: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth.’’

…Heading into next week’s elections, Americans remain a center-right nation, with solid majorities believing that the federal government is too intrusive and powerful, that it does not spend taxpayer’s money wisely or fairly, and that Americans would be better off having a smaller government with fewer services. Nearly halfway through the most left-wing, high-spending, grow-the-government presidential term most voters can remember, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many of them are rebelling. The coming Republican wave is an entirely rational response to two years of Democratic arrogance and overreach. As the president and his party are about to learn, treating voters as stupid, malevolent, or confused is not a strategy for victory.

Toby Harnden, in the Telegraph, UK, says the electorate will get the last laugh.

…The most chortling of all about the populist Tea Party and its anti-tax, anti-government uprising against the Republican establishment can be found on the shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the edgy liberal satirists on Comedy Central. …

…Three days before the elections, Stewart will hold a “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington on the same day as Colbert, who adopts the character of a Right-wing talk show host, leads a “March to Keep Fear Alive”. The thinly-disguised message: Republicans are crazies who trade on fear. …

…The problem for Obama and the Democrats is that belittling the Tea Party movement, which is taking hold of much of Middle America, merely fuels the popular sense that the party in power is out of touch. It also highlights the reluctance of Obama and the Democrats to discuss the Wall Street bail-out, economic stimulus and health care bills because they know they are not vote winners. …

In the WaPo, Marc A. Thiessen has an interesting article on what might have been, but for Democrat arrogance. And it reminds us that we will have to watch the GOP. Anybody remember Trent Lott, Tom Delay and Ted Stevens?

The decline of the Obama presidency can be traced to a meeting at the White House just three days after the inauguration, when the new president gathered congressional leaders of both parties to discuss his proposed economic stimulus. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor gave President Obama a list of modest proposals for the bill. Obama said he would consider the GOP ideas, but told the assembled Republicans that “elections have consequences” and “I won.” Backed by the largest congressional majorities in decades, the president was not terribly interested in giving ground to his vanquished adversaries.

He may rue that decision next Tuesday. Whether the midterm elections are a tidal wave that sweeps Democrats out of power on Capitol Hill or simply result in major losses for the president’s party, one thing is clear: The stimulus will play a major role in determining the outcome. The legislation has not kept the unemployment rate below 8 percent, as the White House promised — but it has been an electoral boon to Republicans, and an albatross around the necks of many Democrats who voted for it. It might have been a different story had Obama handled the stimulus differently. In January 2009, Republicans were running scared — still reeling from the thumping they received in the past two elections, and afraid to so much as criticize the new Democratic president with stratospheric approval ratings. In these circumstances, the president could have easily co-opted the GOP by making it a partner in crafting the stimulus. He could have told Republicans: Take half of the money and use it for tax relief, spending, or both. Indeed, Republicans introduced several alternative stimulus bills that cost half as much as Obama’s (“twice the jobs at half the cost” was the GOP mantra). Had Obama really wanted to be the first “post-partisan” president, he could have incorporated one of these alternatives into his final stimulus legislation. …

…Would Republicans have accepted hundreds of billions in new government spending in exchange for including pro-growth tax relief and other GOP proposals? The offer would likely have split the party, with a significant number supporting the bill. The grass-roots movement for fiscal discipline had not yet been born, and many of the same Republicans who voted in favor of the “Bridge to Nowhere” would have gladly compromised with the popular new Democratic president. …

Also in the WaPo, Michael Gerson says Obama wins the prize for most arrogant presidential quote. Actually, humans, and are ancestors, are hard-wired to think quite well when scared. It’s why we’ve survived for millions of years. 

…”Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now,” he recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, “and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.”

…Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president.

…It is ironic that the great defender of “science” should be in the thrall of pseudoscience. Human beings under stress are not hard-wired for stupidity, which would be a distinct evolutionary disadvantage. The calculation of risk and a preference for proven practices are the conservative contributions to the survival of the species. Whatever neuroscience may explain about political behavior, it does not mean that the fears of massive debt and intrusive government are irrational.  …

…One response to social stress doesn’t help at all: telling people their fears result from primitive irrationality. Obama may think that many of his fellow citizens can’t reason. But they can still vote.

John Steele Gordon adds his thoughts on Obama’s condescension.

…Equally interesting, I think, is a front-page article in today’s New York Times, with its simply astonishing opening sentence: “It took President Obama 18 months to invite the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to the White House for a one-on-one chat.” Who was it who ran for president as a “post-partisan,” and who was going to bring a new way of doing things to Washington?

…The constitutional scholar in the White House might want to take a look at the Constitution’s preamble and refresh his memory as to who it was who ordained and established the government he heads. They’re going to be heard a week from tomorrow, and I don’t think President Obama is going to like what they have to say.

David Brooks dissects the liberal mindset.

…Over the past year, many Democrats have resolutely paid attention to those things that make them feel good, and they have carefully filtered out those negative things that make them feel sad.

For example, Democrats and their media enablers have paid lavish attention to Christine O’Donnell and Carl Paladino, even though these two Republican candidates have almost no chance of winning. That’s because it feels so delicious to feel superior to opponents you consider to be feeble-minded wackos.

On the other hand, Democrats and their enablers have paid no attention to Republicans like Rob Portman, Dan Coats, John Boozman and Roy Blunt, who are likely to actually get elected. It doesn’t feel good when your opponents are experienced people who simply have different points of view. …

Toby Harnden fills us in on the latest Obama gaffe.

To give credit where credit is due, President Barack Obama made something of a bipartisan gesture on Sunday night: he declined to endorse Frank Caprio, the Democratic candidate for governor of Rhode Island. This shock decision not to endorse the Democrat was effectively a thumbs up for Lincoln Chafee, the former Republican Senator.

…Now: Obama’s got the Democratic Governors’ Association on his back; he’s whipped up Rush Limbaugh into paroxysms of delight; he could well have lost his party a governor’s seat; and if he hasn’t lost his party the seat then he’s got a sworn enemy for the next four years in the form of Governor Caprio of Rhode Island (though after his outburst against the President in such a liberal state, I’d say that is a receding possibility). 

People often think of Obama as being a masterful campaigner and political strategist. …

Ed Koch thinks that the American electorate is planning another round of housecleaning in D.C.

…Why would intelligent voters leave the Democratic Party that they endorsed so heavily two years ago in the 2008 presidential election? The reason is obvious – deep, deep disappointment in the record of President Obama. The President has wasted many opportunities in his term to date, and has lost by his own admission almost every battle for the hearts and minds of the electorate in pushing through Congress monumental legislation that he signed into law.

…I believe, the coming November tsunami will roll across America and give the Republicans, who are undeserving of the honor, control of both Houses. The American public is enraged and wants to punish those who have been in charge of the country. They know those who will replace incumbents may be as bad or worse, but they also believe they can’t do any greater damage. They are willing to put up with them until the next election to teach our elected representatives a monumental lesson — that public service is an honorable profession and must be performed competently and honestly. …

Jennifer Rubin has recommended reading.

Michael Gerson conducts a must-read interview with Charlie Cook. In addition to predictions of a massive GOP wave, there is this discussion about Obama and the Democratic agenda:

…Some, Cook says, “are told all their lives that they are the most brilliant people on the planet. They don’t get less bright, but hubris kicks in. [Obama] just assumed that he was going to be a success, as he had always been in life.”

According to Cook, this reflects a lack of experience. “Experience is not an end, it is a means to an end: judgment.” Cook said that a few years in the Senate “don’t give an understanding of institutions and their dynamics. If [Obama] had been in the Senate six or eight years, he might have accumulated the wisdom to match the intelligence.”

…But there was more going on than simply picking the wrong agenda items or refusing to temper his own ego. Obama’s ideological rigidity and policy preferences ran headlong into Americans’ skepticism about big government and their sense of moral outrage. The Tea Party is a movement grounded in the belief in limited government. But it was also born out of a sense that we have lost track of fundamental values — thrift, discipline, and humility, for starters — and as a result are seeing irresponsible spending, massive debt, and liberal statism.

In Pajamas Media, Ed Driscoll comments on more obnoxious Obama-isms.

…President Barack Obama attacked Republicans with gusto Monday as he plunged into a final week of midterm election campaigning, but his party’s prognosis remained darkened by the feeble economy and his itinerary was designed largely to minimize losses. …

…He said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. Now that progress has been made, he said, “we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

Rosa Parks could not be reached for comment.

The president does realize he’s elected to govern all of the voters, not just those who get their news from MSNBC, right? …

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Calling attention to his new book Don’t Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, P. J. O’ Rourke makes a splash. He writes a strongly worded article that Democrats hate everything and everyone except power.

…Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.

…Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. …And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.

…Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. …

…Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.

And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.

This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.

In the National Journal Blogs – Against the Grain, Josh Kraushaar notes that contrary to Democrat hopes, the Tea Party accurately reflects America’s concern with expanded government power and runaway spending.

…Despite the Democratic portrayal of the tea party as extreme, Americans have soured over the increased scope of government under President Obama and the Democratic Congress — and are looking for a course correction. A newly-released ABC News/Yahoo poll shows that 55 percent of Americans think the tea party can “effectively bring about major changes in the way the government operates.” …

Republican candidates who have openly advocated for conservative principles are, by and large, outperforming GOP colleagues who have run to the center.  Businessman Ron Johnson, who has directly taken on Sen. Russell Feingold’s economic liberalism, is over the 50 percent mark in most public polling. That’s all the more impressive, given that Feingold held strong personal approval ratings back home and represents a Democratic-leaning state in Wisconsin.  

…All this should put to rest the notion that somehow conservative Republican nominees are making it tougher for the party to hold onto contested Senate and House seats. In fact, the opposite is true.

Moderate Republican candidates are dramatically underachieving in several of the key races where they should hold a comfortable advantage.

In Illinois, where GOP Rep. Mark Kirk’s centrist voting record made him the Republican Senate recruit du jour of this cycle, has struggled to pull ahead of Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, despite the Democrat’s significant baggage. …

The Economist Blogs – Lexington looks at race issues.

…If such voters have now changed their minds, the reason is not that Mr Obama is black—he was black in 2008. And for all its momentous symbolism, his election is not the most recent evidence that America has turned the page on race. In June, in South Carolina of all states, Tim Scott, a black Republican, defeated the son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond in a primary, and is on his way to a seat in the House. Compare that to 1983, when a disgraceful number of Democrats in Chicago voted for the Republican rather than send the black Harold Washington to city hall.

All of that has gone. The electorate may be divided by race, but no longer mainly because of race. Some of Mr Obama’s enemies have tried to harness pockets of bigotry by painting him in various ways as un-American. But outright racism in politics is now beyond the pale and will probably have little to do with the coming rejection of the Democrats by the white working class. A wrecked economy and the feeling that their president is out of touch are reason enough. It has, after all, happened before. In two short years from 1992 to 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, white working-class support for the Republicans soared like a rocket from 47% to 61%. Nobody blamed that on skin colour.

The Economist – Editorial looks at more government baloney about the stimulus: the infrastructure improvements and jobs that weren’t.

DEMOCRATS, Republicans chant, are irresponsible big spenders. But in the run-up to the mid-terms, the Democrats ought to have had one example of spending at its best: investment in infrastructure. When they passed the $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009, they promised an historic investment in roads, bridges and rail. It would put Americans to work quickly and raise productivity in the long term, a Keynesian kick with benefits for years to come. But this ambitious plan has had middling results. Infrastructure is still in need of investment; unemployment in the construction sector was 17.2% in September. Barack Obama is touting a new $50 billion infrastructure proposal, but as the mid-terms loom, it is probably too late.

The stimulus bill’s spending on infrastructure may have been doomed to mediocrity from the start. First, and most important, a relatively small share of the bill was actually devoted to infrastructure. Mr Obama called the bill “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.” But even on the broadest definition of the term, infrastructure got $150 billion, under a fifth of the total. Just $64 billion, or 8% of the total, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges, aviation and wastewater systems. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on NPR’s smooth moves.

Vivian Schiller, NPR’s CEO, who will be remembered for her firing of Juan Williams and her slander of him thereafter, has apologized. Sort of. Not to him, mind you. She has sent a letter that reads somewhat like a Dilbert cartoon — evidencing all the ham-handedness and nastiness you would expect, coupled with a little dollop of obsequiousness. She has written a letter to her “program colleagues,” revealing that Juan Williams had been warned (i.e., issued a verbal discipline) in the past — another inappropriate disclosure…

…She concedes that others could disagree with the decision. (Like every newsperson in America and about 90 percent of the public.) She then vaguely apologizes for the way in which the firing was handled…

…I think she means she’s sorry she didn’t give them talking points, but she’s not ashamed she smeared Williams by suggesting that he talk to his psychiatrist (which he does not have). Not clear whether she also regrets the squirrelly manner of the firing — over the phone (classy, guys). She closes by asking for suggestions.

Here are three. First, fire Schiller, who has brought disgrace (well, more than before) on NPR. She fired a valuable commodity, slandered him, incurred the wrath of the journalistic community, and put her organization’s funding at risk. Forget the morality of it; she’s simply incompetent. …

Debra J. Saunders tells us more about Juan Williams firing and adds her thoughts.

“Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don’t address reality,” Juan Williams observed rather prophetically on Bill O’Reilly’s show Monday night, before he made the comments that got him fired from his assignment as senior news analyst for National Public Radio.

…Too late. Williams already had handed ammo to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad called on NPR to investigate Williams Wednesday. In a statement Awad charged, “NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats.”

CAIR is an identity-politics organization that trolls for opportunities to take offense. Whenever anyone acknowledges the nexus between terrorism and radical Islam – not Islam, but radical Islam – CAIR cries foul. Wednesday afternoon within hours of the CAIR complaint, NPR rewarded CAIR’s campaign of intimidation with a scalp.

…Should the public then assume that NPR’s editorial standards demand that journalists ignore Islamic extremists who declare jihad – even while noting that it’s crazy to lump all Muslims as extremists? Ironically, NPR’s editorial standards comport with what Williams said about political correctness feeding the air of unreality. …

Peter Wehner also weighs in on National Politically intolerant Radio.

On the matter of the firing of Juan Williams by NPR, I wanted to add a few thoughts to what has already been said and written. The first is that this incident will not soon fade from memory; rather, it will be seen, over time, as an important moment that further discredited liberal media institutions. It took well-known but fairly abstract truths — NPR is taxpayer supported and dominated by a liberal political culture — and gave it a name, a context, and a human face. The fact that NPR’s Vivian Schiller turned out to be monumentally inept and mean-spirited may have been known to a few others before NPR cashiered Williams; now that fact is known by millions of others. Consequently, NPR will suffer a serious blow to its reputation and pay a considerable price (hopefully) in terms of funding.

Second, what was unmasked during the last week was the extent to which modern liberalism (at least as embodied by NPR) is antithetical to classical liberalism, which celebrated open-mindedness, a diversity of thought and opinion, and the spirited exchange of ideas. The depth of intolerance at National Public Radio is so deep that even a liberal like Juan Williams was thrown to the curb. His sin is not only that he didn’t parrot the Party Line closely enough; it was also that he didn’t parrot the Party Line at the appropriate Party Outlets.

…Out of this most recent controversy, Juan Williams will come out just fine. NPR, on the other hand, has emerged disgraced. All in all, not a bad outcome.

Jennifer Rubin spots a telling exchange between Karl Rove and Bob Schieffer about the Left’s hypocrisy over 501(c)4 organizations.

Karl Rove gave a feisty interview on Face the Nation to Bob Schieffer — who couldn’t really explain why it was somehow dangerous for conservative 501(c)4 groups to give to Republicans but perfectly fine if Big Labor gives to the Democrats…

…Moreover, the real difference between all these groups and Big Labor is that the latter takes money from union members involuntarily. Schieffer seemed unmoved by the facts. Rove then zeroed in on the massive hypocrisy game being played by the White House and bolstered by much of the mainstream media:

“Bob, I don’t remember you having a program in 2000, when the NAACP spent ten million dollars from one single donor, running ads anonymously contributed, attacking George W. Bush. …everybody is gone spun up about it this year when Republicans have started to follow what the Democrats have been doing and create 501(c)4s, which can use less than half their money for express advocacy. But you have the environment America, feminist majority, humane society… Vote Vets, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife and a bunch of others which are all liberal groups that have been using 501(c)4s with undisclosed money for years. … And it’s never been an issue until the President of the United States on the day when we have a bad economic jobs report, when we lose ninety-five (thousand) jobs in September, and the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, the President of the United States goes out and calls conservatives at the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads GPS, and says these are threats to democracy because they don’t disclose their donors. I don’t remember him ever saying that all these liberal groups were threats to democracy when they spent money exactly the same way we are.”

Ouch.

And just as quickly as the hue and cry arose in opposition to conservative groups, it will go quiet again as Democrats form their own entities for the 2012 campaign. Then all that outside money will be a sign of the vibrancy of American politics. And so it is — for both sides.

Tony Blankley discusses brilliant ideas to start reigning in the government.

…But the greater part of federal intrusion is generated by the permanent regulatory bureaucracy that burrows away in almost all of our federal agencies. Sometimes they are authorized by Congress to create and enforce regulations (like the incandescent light law). But over the generations, the culture that exists among the regulatory bureaucrats drives them constantly to seek out new targets for regulation and new methods for entangling Americans in their webs.

…Although I don’t believe it has ever been tried, a new Congress could try to use its power of the purse to begin to attrit the regulators. That is to suggest, Congress should order permanent, immediate and massive staff reductions among the regulators. Defund and de-authorize, say, 50 percent of the regulatory staff positions.

It actually takes a long time and a lot of hard work to conceive, write and legally enact a new regulation. If there were only half as many bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, they simply wouldn’t have the time to pass as many oppressive regulations as they do.

That would both slow down new regulations and make it harder for the regulators to enforce regulations already on the book. …

The WSJ editors highlight a new study by the Institute for Justice on the overregulation of American businesses.

When most people think of occupations requiring fingerprints and police reports, corner bookshop owners don’t spring to mind. Try telling that to Los Angeles, where many used booksellers are required by law to get a police permit and take a thumbprint from every 40-something trying to offload his collection of French poetry.

That’s one scene from a study to be released this week by the Institute for Justice, which has collected dozens of examples of regulations choking economic growth by taxing and over-licensing small businesses. In a survey of eight major cities, the study found that entrepreneurs routinely face obstacles of bureaucracy and red tape that deter them from otherwise promising opportunities.

…In many cases, the regulations were promoted by existing business owners who want barriers to new competition. In Washington, D.C., an interior designers guild succeeded in lobbying the city to require that all new designers take a 13-hour test and get a special license merely to reorganize your living room. In Newark, New Jersey, would-be barber shop owners must prove they’ve spent three years working in someone else’s hair cuttery before they can start their own. Even then, the city’s laws bar them from serving customers on Sunday and restrict working hours on other days of the week.

…Politicians of all stripes like to celebrate “small business” while running for office, but the reality is that they often strangle entrepreneurs once they get in power. Read the Institute for Justice study and you’ll better understand why the business of America is no longer business. It’s bureaucracy.

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Daniel Hannan, the outspoken English member of the European Parliament whose book, The New Road to Serfdom was just published, wrote in The Telegraph, UK a piece titled I’m starting to understand what made Ronald Reagan such a great president.

Hannon recently visited President Reagan’s ranch and writes about the “unaffected simplicity” of the ranch and the man. Pickerhead needs no more than that to take a stroll down memory’s lane. It is a pleasure to take a break from politics today and look back at the inspirational figure who revitalized conservatism and helped end communism.

We have Hannan’s article, and then we reprint many things written about Reagan in the weeks after his death in June 2004. Included are pieces by John Fund, Natan Sharansky Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Steyn again, Ken Adelman, Jeff Jacoby and we finish with the text of the Reagan’s October 1964 speech in support of Goldwater. There is also a link to a YouTube version of the speech.  

Nothing demonstrates our attachment more than the 1965 membership card in the Republicans for Ronald Reagan you can see on the website by clicking on ABOUT which is located just above the sun’s reflection on the surface of the Potomac. Click on the card and it will enlarge.

Daniel Hannan, in the Telegraph, UK, tells of the modest furnishings at Reagan’s ranch.

…In other politicians’ homes, you find constant reminders of status: photographs with popes and monarchs, gifts from visiting statesmen, piles of books by famous contemporaries, cases of trophies and awards. But Reagan’s one-bedroom bolt-hole couldn’t be simpler. He painted and furnished it with his own hands, and enclosed it with a fence which he sawed from old telegraph poles.

The casual visitor wouldn’t guess that this had been the home of the leader of the free world, this the table where the greatest tax cut in America’s history was signed into law, this the telephone used to call the families of fallen American soldiers. Other than one or two historical works among the cowboy novels, the only political touch is the shower-head, which is in the shape of the Liberty Bell. Here, plainly, lived a man who was bien dans sa peau; a man who, unlike so many politicians, had nothing to prove. Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting the ranch, was distressed by how basic it was; Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, loved it, intuiting that it reflected the character of its inhabitant. …

…Reagan did, however, have an unaffected simplicity. He was a straightforward patriot, who refused to get distracted from his two big ideas: tax cuts at home, and the defeat of the USSR abroad. He succeeded on both counts, giving his country its longest period of sustained growth, and liberating hundreds of millions from Communist tyranny. …

…Reagan, more than any modern American leader, approximated the Founders’ ideal: a citizen president, who never allowed the magnitude of his office to turn his head and who, when his work was done, retired gratefully to the countryside…

In 2004, John Fund remarked on how Reagan, with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, hastened the demise of communism.

…As the nation mourns Ronald Reagan we should also pause to reflect that in the space of 27 months between 1978 and 1981 three such extraordinary leaders–each with the belief that evil must be confronted–should have come to power. Together they changed the world.

…Few like to recall the feelings of resignation or even despair that many in the West felt in the 1970s as countries from Angola to Nicaragua became Soviet proxies. Mrs. Thatcher says that the West was “slowly but surely losing” the Cold War, and she eagerly embraced Reagan’s strategy to win it by becoming “his principal cheerleader” in NATO.

That strategy rested on six pillars: support internal disruption in Soviet satellites, especially Poland; dry up sources of hard currency; overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race; slow the flow of Western technology to Moscow; raise the cost of the wars it was fighting; and demoralize the Soviets by generating pressure for change.

…Joseph Stalin once dismissed the Vatican’s influence by asking, “How many divisions does the pope have?” In the end, that didn’t matter. The pope and two stalwart Western leaders helped topple the entire Soviet empire without moving a single division across a border. As Reagan himself said in his 1989 Farewell Address. “Not bad, not bad at all.”

Natan Sharansky remembered how Reagan gave Sharansky and other dissidents hope when Reagan spoke the truth about the enemy that the free world was facing.

In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

At the time, I never imagined that three years later, I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. When he summoned some of his staff to hear what I had said, I understood that there had been much criticism of Reagan’s decision to cast the struggle between the superpowers as a battle between good and evil.
Well, Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.

Mark Steyn wrote about Reagan’s political courage.

…I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those ’70s detente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:

   Tear down this wall!

- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody – which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.

…“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our dessicated elites: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.” And at the end of a grim, grey decade – Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government.  …

Charles Krauthammer commented on the vindication of Reagan’s policies.

…Reagan was optimistic about America amid the cynicism and general retreat of the post-Vietnam era because he believed unfashionably that America was both great and good — and had been needlessly diminished by restrictive economic policies and timid foreign policies. Change the policies and America would be restored, both at home and abroad.

He was right.

In the early ’80s, the West experienced a nuclear hysteria — a sudden panic about imminent nuclear destruction and a mindless demand to “freeze” nuclear weapons. What had changed to bring this on? Reagan had become president. Like George W. Bush today, the U.S. president was seen as a greater threat to peace than was the enemy he was confronting.

The nuclear freeze and the accompanying hysteria are an embarrassment that liberals prefer to forget today. Reagan’s critics completely misunderstood the logic and the power of his nuclear posture. He took a very hard line on the Soviets, who had broken the nuclear status quo by placing missiles in Europe. Backed by Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, Reagan faced the Soviets down — despite enormous “peace” demonstrations throughout the West, including the largest one to date in U.S. history (New York City, 1982) — and ultimately forced the Soviets to dismantle the missiles and begin their overall retreat.

Rarely has a president been so quickly and completely vindicated by history. The Berlin Wall came down 10 months after Reagan left office. His policies of unrelenting toughness won the Cold War and brought a new peace. That is because Reagan understood that the key to peace was never arms control. …

Ann Coulter reminded us that the liberal tune hasn’t changed. Al-Qaeda will not be seduced, just as the communists were not seduced, by kumbaya speeches from the Left. This is something that the American people understand, just as Reagan understood.

…Reagan was a March hare right-winger. He had enough faith in the American people to know that as long as the facts were clear, they would rise to the occasion and be March hare right-wingers, too. As Reagan himself said, back in 1964: “Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and me believe that this is a contest between two men … that we are to choose just between two personalities.”

…While Reagan had undeniable magnetism, what set him apart was that he had the courage to speak the truth and trust the American people. In the 1964 speech that launched his political career, “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan never smiled. …

…In the throes of the Cold War – still hot in Vietnam – Reagan forthrightly said liberals refused to acknowledge that the choice was not between “peace and war, only between fight and surrender.” …he said liberals tell us “if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” All who disagree with the “peace” crowd, he said, “are indicted as warmongers.” To this, Reagan said: “Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.” …

Mark Steyn discussed Reagan’s stand on SDI.

…President Reagan did what politicians are always being urged to do: he took the long view. And, while Tony Blair and other CND unilateralists were insisting that the best way to make the world safe from annihilation was to surrender, Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete. Why the Left should be opposed to ending the nuclear age is unclear. …

… On 14 July, science said an interceptor could shoot down an incoming missile. Science has yet to find anything proving a connection between the one-degree rise in temperature over the last century and that proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions for which Western industrial societyis responsible, nor anything to suggest that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would reverse the modest warming trend. …

Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan foresaw a missile defence shield. By contrast, John Cusack’s chums foresaw a global population explosion, the exhaustion of the world’s oil resources, and the melting of the polar ice caps. Whose crystal ball would you bet on? In Bonn this week the Rest of the World was meeting to ‘rescue’ Kyoto – not rescue their beloved planet, mark you; only one of their sacred texts, and even then there’s not exactly a stampede to join Romania in actually ratifying it. Meanwhile, 144 miles over the Pacific, the Pentagon blew a warhead out of the sky. So who are the fantasists and who are the realists?

No doubt Colin Powell and Condi Rice will be happy to assure the French, German and even the Canadian governments that if they are determined to ensure that their citizens remain vulnerable to nuclear attack, the Americans will not stand in their way. …

Jeff Jacoby had a wonderful eulogy.

…”The American sound,” Reagan said in his second inaugural address, “is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair.” Much the same could be said of Reagan himself. All week long, the accolades have emphasized the character and values that made him the man he was — his optimism, his patriotism, his self-deprecating humor, his moral clarity, his rocklike belief that freedom is the birthright of every human being, his willingness to call evil by its name, his faith in God, his sheer guts.

But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.

In her moving and affectionate account of the 40th president’s life, “When Character Was King,” Peggy Noonan says that when she really wants to convey what Reagan was like, she tells the “bathroom story.”

It occurred in 1981, shortly after the assassination attempt. Reagan was still in the hospital and one night, feeling unwell, he got out of bed to go to the bathroom. “He slapped water on his face, and water slopped out of the sink,” Noonan relates. “He got some paper towels and got down on the floor to clean it up. An aide came in and said: `Mr. President, what are you doing? We have people for that.’ And Reagan said, oh, no, he was just cleaning up his mess, he didn’t want a nurse to have to do it.”

That was Reagan: On his say-so armies would march and fighter jets scramble, but he hated to trouble a hospital orderly to mop up his spill. That humbleness, it seems to me, is a mark of Reagan’s greatness, too — and a key to understanding the outpouring of affection his death has unleashed.

In the WSJ, Ken Adelman shared this anecdote about Reagan’s vision.

…What I witnessed personally…was a leader of impressive skill and stunning vision.

The first epiphany came early in his administration, when we gathered in a formal National Security Council meeting in the Cabinet Room. Secretary of State Alexander Haig opened by lamenting that the Law of the Sea Treaty was something we didn’t like but had to accept, since it had emerged over the previous decade through a 150-nation negotiation. Mr. Haig then proceeded to recite 13 or so options for modifying the treaty–some with several suboptions.

Such detail, to put it mildly, was not the president’s strong suit. He looked increasingly puzzled and finally interrupted. “Uh, Al,” he asked quietly, “isn’t this what the whole thing was all about?”

“Huh?” The secretary of state couldn’t fathom what the president meant. None of us could. So Mr. Haig asked him.

Well, Mr. Reagan shrugged, wasn’t “not going along with something that is ‘really stupid’ just because 150 nations had done so” what the whole thing was all about–our running, our winning, our governing? A stunned Mr. Haig folded up his briefing book and promised to find out how to stop the treaty altogether. …

And we have the text of Reagan’s 1964 speech.

…Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. …

You can watch Reagan’s 1964 speech about Goldwater here.

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Charles Krauthammer, who coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome, spots another disorder.

…Opening a whole new branch of cognitive science — liberal psychology — Obama has discovered a new principle: The fearful brain is hard-wired to act befuddled, i.e., vote Republican.

…I have a better explanation. Better because it adheres to the ultimate scientific principle, Occam’s Razor, by which the preferred explanation for any phenomenon is the one with the most economy and simplicity. And there is nothing simpler than the Gallup findings on the ideological inclinations of the American people. Conservative: 42 percent. Moderate: 35 percent. Liberal: 20 percent. No fanciful new syndromes or other elaborate fictions are required to understand that if you try to impose a liberal agenda on such a demonstrably center-right country — a country that is 80 percent non-liberal — you get a massive backlash.

Moreover, apart from ideology is empirical reality. Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. …

… Hence their opposition to Obama’s proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world’s foremost exemplar of that model — Europe — is in chaotic meltdown. …

David Harsanyi points to some of the questionable judgments and opinions on the Right. Particularly disappointing is the moralizing. Republicans supposedly want less government intrusion in our lives, but then bring up issues in which the government should not be involved. The Left wishes to convert everyone to socialism, and some on the Right wish to convert everyone to fundamentalist Christianity. Neither are appropriate uses of government power. Harsanyi makes the important point that the Left has been more successful in circumventing the Constitution and the will of the people to achieve their goals, to the detriment of the society and the economy.

…Do I wish that science-challenged believers would resist the urge to raise their hands when asked if they believe the world is 5,000 years old? God, yes. But an election offers limited choices. Take Delaware, where voters can pick a candidate who had a youthful flirtation with witchcraft or one who dabbled in collectivist economic theory.

Only one of these faiths has gained traction in Washington the past few years. And as far as I can tell, there is no pagan lobby.

Do I wish that Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck hadn’t declared that being gay was a choice (as if there’s something wrong with choosing to be gay)? Yes. Do I wish he hadn’t followed up by comparing a gay genetic predisposition with alcoholism? I do. If you were brainy enough to watch “Meet the Press” instead of wasting time in church last Sunday, no doubt you cringed at this primitive lunacy.

After all, what’s more consequential than a faux pas about nature and/or nurture? Who cares that Democrat Michael Bennet was busy moralizing about the cosmic benefits of dubious economic theory and science fiction environmentalism — ideas that have already cost us trillions with nothing to show for it? …

Tunku Varadarajan comments on how the political waffling at the White House continues, this time regarding a visit to a Sikh temple.

Barack Obama has become a Sikh joke. The 44th president of the United States, a man who offered himself up to the world as the cosmopolitan alternative to the Little Americanism of the Bush years, has dropped plans to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar—the Vatican, as it were, of the Sikh religion—on his state visit to India in early November. As The New York Times reports, the president would have had to cover his head with a knotted handkerchief on his visit to the shrine, in keeping with Sikh religious tradition, so the White House invertebrates scuttled plans to go there out of fear that images of Obama with a cloth on his head would reignite rumors that he is a Muslim.

…And now, instead of leading on the issue of religious tolerance by beaming for the cameras in Amritsar, Sikh handkerchief firmly on head, he has backed away. Note that the trip to India will be after the midterm elections, so he can’t be worried about the adverse impact of Amritsar images on his party’s performance. He is worried, instead, about his own image. (That said, the 250,000 Sikhs who live in California are surely, now, looking at Carly and Meg with a new enthusiasm.)

Americans are much, much better than their political leaders ever give them credit for. The overwhelming majority of Sikhs in the U.S. go to work every day without harassment from their neighbors and colleagues. You can focus on a few stray incidents of violence against Sikhs after 9/11, but why ignore the fact that 99.9 percent of them have suffered no problems; Americans, overwhelmingly, are decent people. Sikhs have done marvelously well in Wall Street, with their turbans on. They serve in the U.S. Army, with their turbans on. …

In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm reviews the latest Gallup poll on the prez.

…The new survey reveals that the more Americans get to know this guy, the less they like him. His …

… approval rating has gone down every single quarter since that sunny promising inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.

…Latest Gallup numbers also show that on the first day of his 22nd month in office, for the first time more Americans view Obama unfavorably than favorably, 50% to 47%, his lowest favorable rating yet.

…According to Gallup’s results,  39% of Americans now believe Obama deserves a second term.

Unfortunately for him, 54% believe he does not deserve a second chance at change. …

Thomas Sowell criticizes Congressman Barney Frank for helping create the housing bubble and bust. The road to recession may have been paved with some good intentions, but Congress didn’t know what they were doing when they intervened in the housing market, and now they won’t own up to the financial disaster they created.

…No one contributed more to the policies behind the housing boom and bust, which led to the economic disaster we are now in, than Congressman Barney Frank.

His powerful position on the House of Representatives’ Committee on Financial Services gave him leverage to force through legislation and policies which pressured banks and other lenders to grant mortgage loans to people who would not qualify under the standards which had long prevailed, and had long made mortgage loans among the safest investments around.

…To those who warned of the risks in the new policies, Congressman Frank replied in 2003 that critics “exaggerate a threat of safety” and “conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.” …

With the federal regulators leaning on banks to make more loans to people who did not meet traditional qualifications — the “underserved population” in political Newspeak — and quotas being given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more of these riskier mortgages from the original lenders, critics pointed out the dangers in these pressures to meet arbitrary home ownership goals. But Barney Frank counter-attacked against these critics.

…Fast forward now to 2008, after the risky mortgages had led to huge numbers of defaults, dragging down Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the financial markets in general — and with them the whole economy.

Barney Frank was all over the media, pointing the finger of blame at everybody else. When financial analyst Maria Bartiromo asked Congressman Frank who was responsible for the financial crisis, he said, “right-wing Republicans.” It so happens that conservatives were the loudest critics who had warned for years against the policies that Barney Frank pushed, but why let facts get in the way? …

Thomas Sowell has more on Barney Frank’s actions that led to the mortgage meltdown.

Having been a key figure in promoting the risky mortgage lending practices imposed by the federal government on lenders, and on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy these risky mortgages from the lenders, Barney Frank blamed the resulting collapse of financial markets and the economy on everybody except Barney Frank.

…When federal regulators uncovered irregularities in Fannie Mae’s accounting, and in 2004 issued what Barron’s magazine called “a blistering 211-page report,” Barney Frank lashed out — not at Fannie Mae, but at the regulators who uncovered Fannie Mae’s misdeeds. He said “a leadership change” in the regulatory agency was “overdue.”

Politicians who say we need more regulation almost never mean regulation in the sense of impartially enforcing explicit rules, such as the accounting rules that Fannie Mae was violating to cover up its own risks. They mean regulation with arbitrary powers, such as those under the Community Reinvestment Act, which enable regulators to carry out the agendas that politicians give them.

…A reining in of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a reining in of Barney Frank’s power. But he can’t stop the voters from reining in his power, unless he can once more get by this election year with pious rhetoric to conceal his cynical actions.

In the WaPo, Charles Murray takes an anthropologist’s view of the New Elite.

The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.

“On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, “and the other side, we have the regular people.” The elites are “no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking,” Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, “I didn’t go to Yale,” she could be confident that her supporters would approve.

…There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.

Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn’t get America, there is some truth in the accusation. …

Toby Harnden breaks down the Senate races, in the Telegraph, UK.

With two weeks until election night, a lot of Senate races appear to be tightening. The Republicans need to gain 10 seats to win a majority in the 100-member chamber. Back in January, I blogged that gaining GOP control was possible but a long shot.

A look back at my assessments then shows that the political terrain has shifted largely, though not uniformly, in the GOP’s favour. In January, I assessed Arkansas, North Dakota, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California and Connecticut as possible GOP pick-ups. To varying degrees, that remains the case.

…So could Republicans win a 51-49 majority? It’s still a tall order but it’s a lot more achievable now than it was at the start of the year. Here’s their path to victory, starting off with the seats that are most likely to fall into the GOP column…

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks in the Corner.

On a union protester in France claiming that “We want to stop work at 60 because it’s something our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents fought for”:

Is that what the Second World War was about? I thought it was about something else.

…And that I think are the two effects that people living here see abroad. In the end, the social democratic state is unsustainable because the public sector, being parasitic, is too large and the private sector is unable to sustain it. And secondly, it changes the spirit of the people in a way that in the end can be irreversible.

We think that NJ Governor Chris Christie is going to have a field day with the NJ Turnpike Audit. Luke Funk gives us the scoop in Fox New York.

Auditors say the New Jersey Turnpike Authority wasted $43 million on unneeded perks and bonuses.  In one case, an employee with a base salary of $73,469 earned $321,985 when all payouts and bonuses were included.

The audit says that toll dollars From the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway were spent on items ranging from an employee bowling league to employee bonuses for working on birthdays and holidays.

…The biggest expense uncovered in the audit was $30 million in unjustified bonuses to employees and management in 2008 and 2009 without consideration of performance.

…The Comptroller’s Office audit released Tuesday says taxpayers also paid $430,000 for free E-ZPass transponders for employees to get to work and nearly $90,000 in scholarships for workers’ kids.

…Comptroller Matt Boxer says tolls are set for another increase in 2012.

“While tolls are going up, the Turnpike Authority is overpaying its employees, overpaying its management, overpaying for its health plan and overpaying for legal services,” Boxer said in a statement.

Public money was also used to cover costs for a toll operators event that none of the authority’s employees actually attended. …

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Caroline Glick thinks the Left, in Israel and the U.S., does not represent the majority opinion.

…On Tuesday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was asked, “Do you [i.e. the administration] recognize Israel as a Jewish state and will you try to convince the Palestinians to recognize it?

As Rick Richman at Commentary’s blog noted, Crowley repeatedly tried to evade answering the question. Reporters were forced to repeat the question six times before Crowley managed to say, “We recognize that Israel is a – as it says itself, is a Jewish state, yes.”

As for whether or not the administration will try to convince the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state, Crowley could not bring himself to give a simple affirmative answer.

Crowley’s refusal to give straight answers to straight questions about US recognition of Israel as a Jewish state shows that Israel has never faced a more unfriendly US administration. After all, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state means recognizing that the Jewish people are a nation, and as a nation, the Jews have a right to self-determination in our national homeland. So recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

…As a poll released last week makes clear, Americans are far more likely to ditch leaders they believe are harming the US-Israel alliance than they are to ditch the alliance. The poll was carried out from October 3-5 by the non-partisan McLaughlin and Associates survey research group for the pro-Israel Emergency Committee for Israel. It is the most in-depth poll of US sentiment towards Israel in recent memory. The poll broke down respondents by political affiliation, geographical area, religion, race, age, education level, sex, income level and ideological outlook.

The results were extraordinary. …

In Contentions, Evelyn Gordon responds to Thomas Friedman’s assertion that Israel should extend the building moratorium.

…Israel’s experience with previous withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza — which, as Friedman admitted, gained it nothing but rocket fire in return …

Thus Israel has a valid security-based claim to these areas, and a onetime, temporary building moratorium as a goodwill gesture to promote peace, like the one Israel instituted last November, doesn’t undermine it. But extending the freeze would, because that implies the moratorium isn’t a onetime goodwill gesture on Israel’s part, but — as most of the world indeed claims — a necessary condition for progress, since this land a priori belongs to the Palestinians, and Israel has no right to it.

Israel can’t stop other countries from rejecting its claim to this land. But for Jerusalem to itself denigrate this claim by extending the freeze would undermine its negotiating position on a vital security issue: defensible borders. And that is something no country with any vestige of a survival instinct should agree to do.

Tammy Bruce, in the Guardian, UK, looks at women and the Tea Party.

…On Monday, after over a year and a half of the Tea Party emerging as a political force, a cable television roundtable of “experts” in media wondered why the heck so many women were involved in the Tea Party. CBS’s Lesley Stahl baffled her panel constructed of a New York Times reporter, someone from Newsweek and other Anointed Ones, when she asked, “I wanted to ask all the gurus here, why so many of the Tea Partiers are women. I find that just intriguing and don’t quite understand why that has happened,” Stahl said. …

Actually, the answer is: taxed enough already. Women control the household accounts and we know when spending is unsustainable, threatening the very fabric of our families, or our country as the case may be. As one Tea Party rally sign aimed at big government succinctly put it, “My kid isn’t your ATM.”

The Tea Party represents stakeholders in the American system; people who were never involved in politics or thought they had to be, yet realised that political corruption and incompetence threatened not only their families, but the future of the nation itself. Economic collapse, the shocking spending by an Obama administration that most analysts agree is in over its head, combined with remarkable contempt shown citizens during the debacle of the healthcare debate and legislation, have mobilised those stakeholders – including women and their families – to take action. …

…The liberal feminist movement never imagined that women would take seriously the encouragement to become our own heroes and claim life for ourselves, on our terms, no matter who we are. Pro-choice and pro-life, Christian and not, poor and rich, black, white, gay and straight. It is a dream we all hold dear, and it’s called the Tea Party.

Jennifer Rubin responds to Maureen Dowd’s attacks with items unfamiliar to Dowd: logic and facts.

…Of course, Christine O’Donnell is now the useful model for portraying all conservative women as dopes. But what will Dowd and the other harpies do when O’Donnell loses? Sarah Palin, the queen bee they fear and resent the most, has been on a roll. She understood that ObamaCare meant rationing; that renunciation of first-strike nuclear power against a biological or chemical attack was daft; that Keynesian economics was bunk; and that animus toward Israel and indifference to our allies more generally was dangerous. What’s ignorant about all that?

I’m not going to defend the gaffes by conservative candidates, male or female, or make the argument that they don’t matter when running for office. They do, especially when these candidates have already been tagged by the mainstream press (whose own brilliance was so stunning that they were certain the surge would fail and that Obama was a political genius) as intellectually deficient, as Palin has. But the ideas that they embrace are not the product of ignorance. They are rooted in time-tested principles of free market economics, limited government, and, yes, American exceptionalism.

At least conservative women have not made the meta-errors of the type that imperil Obama and his Democrats (not to mention our country). So better, then, for Dowd to keep the arguments trivial, personal, and mean. Otherwise, the Gray Lady’s venom-spitting columnist might have to engage in some real policy critiques. And who thinks Dowd is remotely up to that?

Michelle Malkin goes through a list of Liberal women that have participated in the recent government power grabs.

…Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the possibility that environmental czar Carol Browner could be appointed White House chief of staff next year. …

Browner is the neon green bureaucrat who sits on the board of the George Soros-funded, anti-business Center for American Progress and was listed by the Socialist International umbrella group as a member of the “Commission for a Sustainable World Society” until her czar appointment was announced in 2009. A ruthless, power-grabbing regulator since her days in the Clinton administration, Browner has spearheaded the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on carbon, with EPA Secretary Lisa Jackson serving as her front-woman. Their anti-carbon agenda’s job-killing effects are so alarming that several House Democrats have signed on to legislation curtailing the draconian greenhouse gas emissions rules.

You want to talk about “mean”? Browner has plenty of “experience” bullying American business executives. She infamously told auto industry execs last year “to put nothing in writing, ever” regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated on a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. She is salivating at the prospect of ramming through the massive, increasingly unpopular cap-and-tax plan in the lame-duck session. And more recently, she gained hands-on experience telling falsehoods to the American public about the BP oil spill. The independent presidential commission on the disaster criticized her earlier this month for repeatedly misrepresenting the findings of a federal analysis, which she claimed showed that “more than three-quarters of the oil is gone.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on comedic condescension.

Timothy Noah at left-leaning Slate is nervous about the upcoming Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rally:

There’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about the Tea Partiers and the political independents who have lost faith in Obama. But one thing we should all be pretty clear on by now is that they hate, hate, hate anything that smacks of elitism. The spectacle of affluent 18-to-34-year-olds blanketing the Mall to snicker at jokes about wingnut ignoramuses and Bible thumpers will, I fear, have the effect of a red cape waved before a bull. Stewart and Colbert aren’t supposed to want to affect the midterm elections, and for the most part I believe they don’t. But let Republicans regain the House (and maybe even the Senate) in part because Comedy Central used mockery not merely to burlesque political protest but also, to some inevitable extent, to practice it—and I think Stewart and Colbert will be sorry they came.

Well, if it will make him feel better, the House is already pretty much lost, and the Senate isn’t going to be decided by sneering comics. It does, however, remind us that the “cool” set was originally entranced with the “cool” candidate Obama. Why? Well, aside from liberalism (Hillary Clinton had that after all), they shared a contempt for the Bible-and-gun huggers, a suspicion that their fellow citizens were dolts and racists, and a confidence that they were smarter than just about anyone else. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra J. Saunders writes about how Dems are trying to buy senior votes with taxpayers’ dollars.

Last week, on the heels of an announcement that there will be no Social Security cost-of-living adjustment, Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced their support for legislation that promises $250 checks to the country’s 54 million seniors – because there was no cost-of-living increase.

…Yes, some seniors are struggling, but so are a lot of working families; in some cases, their paychecks have declined in the last two years. These families will be on the hook for the added debt – some $14 billion – if Obamaland pulls off this legislation.

…This is all about buying the votes of seniors by dangling the prospect of a little bonus – thanks to a vote that Pelosi conveniently postponed until the lame-duck session.

Megan McArdle responds to speculation the Supreme Court might strike down the individual mandate.

…I assume that the Supreme Court will be extremely reluctant to strike down the individual mandate, for a whole host of reasons.  But I do not think that political worries will be among them, because the mandate is extremely unpopular.  Nor do I believe that the Supreme Court justices will be checked by the fear of “a tremendous confrontation between the Democratic Party, the Democratic president, and the Supreme Court of the United States.”  …

Not only does Peggy Noonan write a blow your socks off column on the value of the Tea Party, she also introduces the following item on Maureen Tucker

… The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: “We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!” They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home, taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.)

The GOP establishment stayed, and one way or another lived off government, breathed in its ways and came to know—learned all too well!—the limits of what is possible and passable. Part of the social and cultural reality behind the tea party-GOP establishment split has been the sheer fact that tea partiers live in non-D.C. America. The establishment came from America, but hasn’t lived there in a long time.

I know and respect some of the establishmentarians, but after dinner, on the third glass of wine, when they get misty-eyed about Reagan and the old days, they are not, I think, weeping for him and what he did, but for themselves and who they were. Back when they were new and believed in something. …

… We may be witnessing a new political dynamism. The Tea Party’s rise reflects anything but fatalism, and maybe even a new high-spiritedness. After all, they’re only two years old and they just saved a political party and woke up an elephant.

The second fact of 2010 is understood by Republicans but not admitted by Democrats. It is that this is a fully nationalized election, and at its center it is about one thing: Barack Obama.

It is not, broadly, about the strengths or weaknesses of various local candidates, about constituent services or seniority, although these elements will be at play in some outcomes, Barney Frank’s race likely being one. But it is significant that this year Mr. Frank is in the race of his life, and this week on TV he did not portray the finger-drumming smugness and impatience with your foolishness he usually displays on talk shows. He looked pale and mildly concussed, like someone who just found out that liberals die, too.

This election is about one man, Barack Obama, who fairly or not represents the following: the status quo, Washington, leftism, Nancy Pelosi, Fannie and Freddie, and deficits in trillions, not billions.

Everyone who votes is going to be pretty much voting yay or nay on all of that. And nothing can change that story line now.

In the St Louis’ Riverfront Times, an interview follows up on a Tea Party appearance of rock drummer Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker of Velvet Underground.

?In April 2009, WALB-TV aired a story about a Tea Party rally in nearby Tifton, Georgia. About two-and-a-half minutes into the feature, one “Maureen Tucker, Tea Party Supporter” was quoted as saying, “I’m furious about the way we’re being led toward socialism. I’m furious about the incredible waste of money, when things that we really need and are important get dropped, because there’s no money left.”

Eighteen months later, the news story somehow ended up posted on YouTube, and the blogosphere started buzzing. Could this actually be Moe Tucker, former drummer for the Velvet Underground, one of the most influential and iconic rock bands of all time? All signs pointed to yes. It certainly looked like Tucker, and it was well known that she’d moved to southern Georgia with her family decades earlier. The Huffington Post confirmed the story by reaching Tucker at home…

…We were curious to know more from Tucker herself, so we tracked her down and asked for an interview. She agreed to answer some questions via email.

Mike Appelstein: In the now-infamous videotape, you indicated that you’re furious about the way we’re being led toward socialism and “incredible waste of money” being spent. Could you elaborate a bit on these sentiments?
Moe Tucker: No country can provide all things for all citizens. There comes a point where it just isn’t possible, and it’s proven to be a failure everywhere it’s been tried. I am not oblivious to the plight of the poor, but I don’t see any reason/sense to the idea that everyone has to have everything, especially when the economy is so bad. I see that philosophy as merely a ploy to control.

My family was damn poor when I was growing up on Long Island. There were no food stamps, no Medicaid, no welfare. If you were poor, you were poor. You didn’t have a TV, you didn’t have five pairs of shoes, you didn’t have Levi’s, you didn’t have a phone; you ate Spam, hot dogs and spaghetti. We all survived! I am not against food stamps, welfare or Medicaid, if only they would oversee these programs properly! …

…Have you always had conservative views?
To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that. My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats. I make decisions on an issue by issue basis. I’m far more of an independent than a conservative or liberal. I don’t agree with all of either side, and I think anyone who claims to is either a fool or a damn liar. …

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Peter Wehner reviews possible explanations for Obama’s condescension.

…The president is also, consciously or not, creating a narrative to explain the defeat he and his party are about to be administered. The reasons are multiple — from the latent bigotry and racism of the Tea Party movement, to the lies of the GOP, to foreign-money corruption our politics, to the inability of the voting public to think clearly.

All this is nonsense, of course – and, for Obama, it is self-destructive. All of us, including political leaders, experience hardships and setbacks in life. In order to succeed, we need to respond to them in a way that is both honest and intelligent. And for that to happen, we need to see things as they are. We need to be grounded enough, and humble enough, to comprehend errors of our making. That is the sine qua non for adjusting to new facts and circumstances and to interpreting experiences in a way that will be beneficial.

President Obama seems almost incapable of such a thing. Rather, he is busily constructing an alternate reality. He is choosing to live in a world that begins with “Once upon a time.”

The president of the United States, it appears, can’t handle the truth. He and his party will suffer mightily because of is. So, alas, will our country.

Even Dems see that Obama does not learn from his mistakes. In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus worries that Obama will not be able to adjust.

Uh-oh. President Obama seems to have learned nothing from the disaster of the “cling-to-guns-and-God” talk that almost derailed his campaign in 2008. He’s back at it—blaming voters for failing to “think clearly” because they’re “scared” about the economy…

…JustOneMinute suggests, mockingly, that this is an improvement over Obama’s 2008 “cling” speech because

now Obama’s critics are scared rather than racist or stupid. There’s hope for us!

…Now I’m scared! What yesterday’s comments suggest isn’t just that Obama will get clobbered in the midterms. It suggests that after he gets clobbered he won’t be able to adjust and turn the setback into a longterm victory the way Bill Clinton did. Clinton reacted to his 1994 midterm loss by acknowledging his opponents’ strongest arguments and pursuing a balanced budget and welfare reform. Obama seems more inclined to just tough it out until the economy recovers and the scared, confused voters become unscared and see the light. Meanwhile, he’ll spend his time in a protective cocoon. …

John Steele Gordon has excellent commentary on Rich Lowry’s article about economic growth in Texas.

…It is often pointed out that the states make great laboratories for political-science experiments. And an experiment has been underway for quite a while testing the liberal model — high taxes, extensive regulation, many government-provided social services, union-friendly laws — against the conservative model — low taxes, limited regulation and social services, right-to-work laws. The results are increasingly in. As Rich Lowry reports in National Review Online, the differences between California and Texas are striking. Between August 2009 and August 2010, the nation created a net of 214,000 jobs. Texas created more than half of them, 119,000. California lost 112,000 jobs in that period. …

…And people have been voting with their feet: A thousand people a day are moving to Texas. It will likely gain four House seats next year, while California for the first time since it became a state in 1850 will gain none. …

And Jennifer Rubin points out that California and Texas have comparable illegal immigrant numbers.

John, your apt analysis got me thinking again about the impact of immigration, including illegal immigration, on California’s declining fortunes. As I wrote earlier this month, there is ample evidence that illegal immigration is not a significant factor in California’s woes. Your analysis sent me back to some data on the influx of illegal immigrants into two states — California and Texas — with radically different economic results.

It turns out that Texas has nearly as big an issue with illegal immigration as California. A September 2010 Pew study has these tidbits:

Unauthorized immigrants accounted for 3.7% of the nation’s population in 2009. Their shares of states’ total population were highest in California (6.9%), Nevada (6.8%) and Texas (6.5%). … California had the largest number (1.8 million) of unauthorized immigrants in the 2009 labor force, and they made up a larger share of the labor force there (9.3%) than in any other state except Nevada (9.4%). Texas had an estimated 1 million unauthorized immigrants in the labor force in 2009, which represented 8.7% of the labor force.

In other words, the sharply divergent economic policies and political environments of the two states have much to do with their radically different economic outputs; illegal immigration appears to be negligible factor.

In NRO, Rich Lowry reports on economic growth in Texas. The state government’s restraint has given the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” a new meaning.

…According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.

What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot…

…During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas’s job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. …

Texas is a model of governmental restraint. In 2008, state and local expenditures were 25.5 percent of GDP in California, 22.8 in the U.S., and 17.3 in Texas. Back in 1987, levels of spending were roughly similar in these places. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 spiked spending everywhere, but each time Texas fought to bring it down to pre-recession levels. “Because of this policy decision,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes, “Texas’ 2008 spending burden remained slightly below its 1987 levels — a major accomplishment.”

Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn’t have an income tax — in contrast to California’s highly progressive income tax — and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it’s a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade. …

David Harsanyi asks what’s up with feminists.

…As you’ve heard, nepotism’s never-ending gift to California — the nation, really — Jerry Brown, is in a tight gubernatorial race against Republican Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO. In leaked audio tapes, a Brown campaign aide is heard mulling over the pros and cons of using the word “whore,” and no one challenges him.

It’s time to release that righteous feminist anger, right, sisters? No?

Perhaps these days the word “whore” is more accepted as a gender-neutral definition of politician. I leave these linguistic questions to you. The National Organization for Women wasn’t too offended and endorsed Brown only a day after we learned about the incident. And even if the entire Brown brouhaha is overblown politics — and, actually, I think it is — you can’t help but wonder if a Republican would ever survive a similar scandal.

…Admittedly, I comprehend precious little about women. Yet, it remains a mystery to me why more women aren’t offended that a small group defines what real “women’s issues” are, or dictates to everyone which words and ideas they should all find offensive. …

Rich Lowry posted an open letter to the Ohio Democrat Party Chairman in the Corner. The opening alone will make you want to read more.

Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic party who famously called the tea partiers “f******,” has attacked one of our bloggers. My letter in response follows:

Dear Chairman Redfern,

I hesitate to take your time with a missive like this because I know you are busy losing a governorship, a Senate seat, and conceivably as many as six House seats in the great state of Ohio. Managing such a massive political failure can’t be easy, so I don’t want to do anything to distract you from it. …

Michael Barone wonders how the Dems who changed their votes on Obamacare are faring in their campaigns.

…To put these numbers in perspective, it’s highly unusual for an incumbent House member to trail a challenger in any poll or to run significantly below 50 percent. But these three Democrats are running 5 to 10 points behind Republican challengers and none tops 40 percent.

…Stupak promptly announced he was retiring after 18 years. Republican Dan Benishek is currently leading there by an average of 44 to 27 percent in five polls.

Two of the Stupak five, freshmen Steve Driehaus of Ohio 1 and Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania 3, are in dreadful shape. Driehaus trails by an average 51 to 41 percent in his Cincinnati area district; Dahlkemper trails by an average of 45 to 37 percent in her Erie area seat.

Another two are from West Virginia. Alan Mollohan, first elected in 1982, lost in the May primary; Nick Joe Rahall, first elected in 1976, won his primary and seems well ahead for November. …

In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz is just as confused as the rest of the Liberals, but he does appear to understand that blaming the voters isn’t a viable strategy.

…On the merits, journalists are right that Obama’s accomplishments have been minimized. Health care reform, however it pans out, was a huge achievement; the overall package remains unpopular, the individual parts (such as not excluding kids for preexisting conditions) not so much. Tightening financial regulation was a heavy lift against the forces of Wall Street. Even the much-derided stimulus law saved plenty of jobs.

All that has been overshadowed because many voters believe the president bobbled the economy while setting his sights on social engineering. But here, too, the short attention span of today’s journalism played a role. The health care and banking battles were covered ad nauseum, but once they passed, the press lost interest and moved on to mosque mess and the Koran-burning preacher and whatever other diversions were available.

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

Who’s to blame for the coming electoral tsunami? We ought to be careful about dumping on the most convenient scapegoat, those moronic voters. In politics, it’s not that complicated: you either deliver or you pay the price.

Jillian Melchior writes that the political defeats in D.C. school reform may be an opening for a bigger reform movement, in Commentary.

School-reform champions Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee put the pressure on D.C.’s next mayor this weekend with a dead-on op-ed in the Washington Post. There’s a justified perception that teachers’ unions are a political force to be reckoned with. But despite their recent electoral loss, famed reformers like Rhee and Fenty have opened the opportunity for parents and their children to become an entity to be feared, too.

…interest in school reform appears on the rise, and a large percentage of the public supports holding teachers accountable and taking a stand against the unions that allow bad teachers to hold on to their jobs, raises, and benefits at the expense of American children.

Among the most interesting of these recent developments is the buzz surrounding the documentary Waiting for Superman, which has pointed a public finger at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. But interest in genuine reform extends beyond the film. Want statistical proof? The latest Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll reported that 72 percent of public-school parents wanted teachers to be paid “on the basis of his or her work.” A September Time poll also revealed a public that would favor Rhee and Fenty’s approach; 66 percent opposed tenure for public-school teachers; 71 percent wanted to establish merit pay; and a plurality thought teachers’ unions kept schools from improving. Also worth examination is the survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, which shows a markedly pro-reform attitude.

Rhee and Fenty may no longer be in office, but here’s hoping they remain in the spotlight. Across the country, the political mood is surly and dissatisfied, but what reformers like the Tea Partiers have too often lacked is an articulate and experienced figurehead to organize behind. Fenty’s defeat and Rhee’s resignation may open up a bigger political opportunity. Whereas before, Rhee and Fenty were empowered to affect reform only in D.C., influencing the rest of the country by example, now they have the opportunity to become the voice of a national school-reform movement.

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In the WSJ, Mark Helprin reminds us of the slowly tightening vise that grips Israel. Netanyahu has been wise to wait before striking until the president is rebuked by voters. But then, he must act. 

… Partly as a result of the steady development of Saudi air power in response to Iraq and Iran, Israel’s potential antagonists are closing the gap in numbers and quality, and the Israeli Air Force does not offer the same margin of safety that once it did. With the Arabs’ approaching 1.3/1 advantage in first-line aircraft, 2.9/1 in second-line aircraft, and an enormous 12/1 advantage in mobile air defense, many new options open if Arab unity coalesces as it did prior to the three major Arab- Israeli wars, in all of which Israel’s existence was at stake and the result unpredictable. If Turkey is included, as it might be, Israel’s prospects become seriously darker.

Other than a direct nuclear strike, what it most has to fear is that a combination of states will throw all their aircraft against it at once while advancing a surface-to-air-missile umbrella to threaten Israeli planes and provide sanctuary for its own. Though the Israeli Air Force is qualitatively superior and its imaginative responses cannot be counted out, the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass, are potentially a mortal threat. For if the Israeli Air Force is sufficiently degraded, Israel’s prospects on the ground will follow proportionately.

In light of the fact that the conventional balance can change and is changing, one of the many purposes of Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons is not merely to wait for a lucky shot at Tel Aviv but to neutralize Israel’s nuclear deterrent so as to allow a series of conventional battles to advance Israel’s downfall incrementally. …

David Harsanyi makes fun of the White House campaign machine gone awry. Perhaps they misunderstood the concept of October surprise.

So who’s left to demonize? The Girl Scouts? Rotary Clubs, maybe?

…A recent ad by Democrats makes the charge — dutifully echoed through the blogosphere and by talking heads — that the Chamber was part of a cabal out to “steal our democracy,” accepting foreign cash and then using the funds to campaign against candidates on the left. Though, admittedly, they have no proof of any wrongdoing, Democrats have threatened that investigations will soon uncover this reprehensible criminal activity.

…”Stealing democracy,” as you may know, loosely translated, means: Holy crap, Republicans are going to win an election.

…If the United States Chamber of Commerce — composed of some of the most moderate, milquetoast, government- friendly saps in the country — are now on the Enemies List, who exactly does the president think is reasonable? If the crony capitalists aren’t good enough for Barack Obama, who is? …

Craig Pirrong hopes that Obama keeps insulting the electorate.

No, seriously:

‘At a Saturday-evening fundraiser held in the home of a wealthy Massachusetts hospital executive, President Obama suggested Democrats are having difficulties in midterm campaigning because Americans simply aren’t thinking clearly. … “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama told the assembled Democrats, who paid $15,200 a person to attend. “And the country is scared.”…

The mind boggles.  It’s hard to know whether he believes this or not, or which alternative is worse.  Let’s consider.  Doesn’t believe it: we have  president who’s willing to heap slurs on the emotional balance of those disenchanted with him to rationalize his political nosedive.  Believes it: we have a delusional president who is so invested in his Olympian self-image that he is incapable of responding to feedback that screams that he’s careened off course, and actually believes that diagnosing vast swathes of America as emotionally crippled PTSD victims is a winning political pitch.

Whatever the explanation, I hope he sticks with it.  The more he condescends, the lower his fortunes, and those of his party, will descend.

Jennifer Rubin also criticizes the complainer in chief.

Mickey Kaus considers Obama’s outbursts against the electorate to be “a form of political malpractice—making yourself look good to supporters, and to history, and to yourself, at the expense of the fellow Dems who are on the ballot.” But this is vintage Obama. It is always about him and his inability to reconcile his own self-image with the results he has achieved and the reaction he engenders. …

…he reverts to partisan sniping, at times sounding rather loopy:

“He swiped repeatedly at Republicans, invoking Abraham Lincoln at one point and positing that the 16th president would have trouble winning the Republican nomination if he were a candidate today.”

Because the modern GOP is in favor of slavery? Because, well … oh forget it. Even his insults are incoherent these days.

Obama has proved to be weak in a crisis, as Juan Williams candidly observed in June. He’s wasn’t up to the BP oil spill or terrorist attacks. And he’s not very good at managing his own political crisis. I suppose teaching law school, perpetually running for higher office, and writing semi-fictional books about himself weren’t the best preparation for the presidency.

Ed Morrissey picks up on an astounding piece. Obama has been piling it high when discussing shovel-ready projects, and David Brooks had this from the President’s mouth a year ago.

And of course, this wouldn’t have been news all the time while Barack Obama kept claiming that these “shovel ready jobs” had prosperity just around the corner, right?  Brooks says that the admission came in an off-the-record session with the President, which kept him from reporting it.  I wonder if Brooks or anyone else would have been that particular had George Bush admitted “off the record” that he knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2003 or 2004, while continuing to make the argument that the war was necessary because of them.  What happened to sourcing as “a senior administration official”?  Did it not occur to Brooks that Obama was lying about these jobs over the past year to defend his economic policies, and that Brooks might have had a responsibility to make that known?  Good to know that the New York Times prints all the news that fits — its agenda. …

Michelle Malkin also comments on shovel-gate and Brooks giving up his journalistic cred for the object of his political affection.

How much of a tool is New York Times columnist David Brooks?

This much: On the PBS NewsHour last night, Brooks admitted that President Obama told him a year ago that he knew that the “shovel-ready project” propaganda he employed to pass the massive porkulus bill was a steaming load of bullcrap.

Brooks’ New York Times colleague Peter Baker reported the newsworthy admission in an upcoming Sunday magazine piece. It’s an admission that received much deserved attention here in the blogosphere this week and that invited much deserved derision from Republican critics of the stimulus boondoggle.

Why didn’t Brooks report Obama’s damning admission sooner? In another serving of steaming bullcrap, he claims it’s because Baker was more skilled at getting Obama to talk on the record. Seems to me the real reason Brooks didn’t report it is because he had his nose so far up his bromance love object’s you-know-what that he didn’t see the scoop dropped right in his lap. …

In the Washington Examiner, Linda Chavez explains that the president’s ignorance and irresponsibility is being funded by taxpayers.

…When entrepreneurs fail, they’ve lost their own money and that of investors who have freely chosen to take the risk.

Government programs, however, play with other people’s money — since government has no money of its own. When government programs fail, the consequences aren’t born by the people making the decisions but by the taxpayers.

So when Obama finally realizes there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project, he’s admitting he’s wasted our money — billions of dollars — not his own. But his only answer is to raise taxes so he can spend yet more. It’s the kind of thinking that dooms his presidency and our economy.

In Der Spiegel, Matthias Schulz writes how a genetic mutation, lactose tolerance, affected the demographics of ancient Europeans. Schulz explains how archaeologists think that the first milk drinkers of Europe originated in the Middle East, but started drinking milk after a genetic mutation occurred when the culture had migrated to central Europe.

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture — and their miracle food, milk. …

In a bid to solve the mystery, molecular biologists have sawed into and analyzed countless Neolithic bones. The breakthrough came last year, when scientists discovered that the first milk drinkers lived in the territory of present-day Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

…The beginnings can now be delineated relatively well. About 12,000 years ago, the zone between the Zagros Mountains in present-day Iran, Palestine and Turkey was transformed into a giant field experiment.

…Oddly enough, the Mesopotamian farmers didn’t touch fresh milk. A few weeks ago, Joachim Burger returned from Turkey with a sack full of Neolithic bones from newly discovered cemeteries where the ancient farmers were buried.

When the bones were analyzed, there were no signs of lactose tolerance. “If these people had drunk milk, they would have felt sick,” says Burger. This means that at first the farmers only consumed fermented milk products like kefir, yogurt and cheese, which contain very little lactose. …

…As a result of “accelerated evolution,” says Burger, lactose tolerance was selected for on a large scale within the population in the space of about 100 generations. …

…The new food was especially beneficial for children. In the Neolithic Age, many small children died after being weaned in their fourth year of life. “As a result of consuming healthy milk, this could be greatly reduced,” Hamburg biologist Fritz Höffeler speculates. All of this led to population growth and, as a result, further geographical expansion. …

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At the Campaign Spot at NRO, Jim Geraghty blogs about a speech he gave about the change that is coming.

From the Jolt . . . where if you subscribed, I wouldn’t have to tease you with an excerpt each morning:

Jim’s Rant at AU

The following is more or less the chat I gave at American University last night, with our old friend Byron York and a name you’ve seen in these parts regularly, Patrick Ruffini.

***

So what’s going to happen on Election Day?

Usually when you’re talking about wave elections, you compare it to some massive natural disaster. It’s a landslide. It’s a tsunami. It’s a political earthquake.

We’re now in the territory where we need some new terms. Perhaps we can call it ‘Political Climate Change.’ “Mass Extinction Event” seems to cover it. For a lot of Democrats opening the ballot box is going to feel like opening the Ark of the Covenant, complete with heads exploding and faces melting. Instead of provoking the Wrath of God, they’ve provoked the Wrath of the Electorate.

Start with the Gallup generic ballot numbers. As Republicans, we’re used to rooting for a tie. Usually, if Republicans are down by 3 or less, they feel pretty good. If it’s a tie, Republicans feel like they’re set to have a really good year. “Ahead by 17” isn’t really on the usual scale. You’re left tapping the screen and asking if it could possibly be right. …

Tony Blankley comments that recent White House staff replacements signal the president is going to double down on stupid..

…Based on the recent appointments of the two most powerful staff positions in the White House, it appears that the White House is descending deeper into the bunker in anticipation of the expected shift in congressional majorities next year. The selection of Pete Rouse for chief of staff and Tom Donilon for national security adviser are both in-house promotions. Moving deputies up to principal rank is more typically seen in the seventh and eighth years of a White House administration – when an administration often has lost its instinct for innovation and creative responses to changing events. Moreover, in each case, a senior figure is being replaced with a staffer. Rahm Emanuel was a congressman who was in the senior leadership of the Democratic House when he became chief of staff. Gen. James L. Jones had been supreme allied commander in Europe and four-star commandant of the Marine Corps before he became national security adviser last year.

Mr. Donilon and Mr. Rouse – both with good careers as staffers – have never held a principal position. They may well rise to the occasion – even as Gen. Jones seemed to descend at his White House occasion – but they start in the hole as major political forces in their own rights. Worse, they both are known as political Mr. Fixits rather than serious policy players, being more suited for executing presidential orders than helping the president see and move toward different strategic visions of his presidency.

Evidence of this emerging bunker mentality was compounded when the president said on a radio show last week that if the GOP wins in November, it will be hand-to-hand combat next year.

…As Politico reported over the weekend: “No matter how bad things get, Rouse and Obama have no plans to break up the small group of campaign veterans who surround the president – nor are they likely to bring in the outsiders many Democrats think the White House sorely needs.” …

In the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden follows up on the Clinton rumors.

…Bill’s energetic reappearance on the campaign trail comes just as rumours, some of them eagerly fuelled by the Clinton camp, swirl that Hillary might replace the hapless Joe Biden as Obama’s vice-presidential running mate in 2012 or even challenge the President for the Democratic nomination if his popularity continues to slide.

Neither option makes much sense for Hillary, whose performance as Secretary of State, in which she has been supportive of the US military and sought to stiffen Obama’s spine in Afghanistan, has won admirers even on the Right.

Becoming vice-president would tie her to Obama on domestic policy. Through political good fortune (not to mention calculation), she has been out of that arena for the past two years, meaning that there are no Clinton fingerprints on unpopular health care, bail-out or stimulus legislation. …

In Popular Mechanics, Erin McCarthy interviews C.J. Shivers about his new book, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War.

…Why did the Soviet Union think a lightweight, automatic rifle was needed?  

The Soviet military had faced the world’s first mass-produced assault rifle—the German sturmgewehr, or storm rifle—in battles on the Eastern Front in World War II. It was impressed and wanted its own version. The AK-47 was fundamentally a conceptual copy of the German weapon. The Soviet Union was exceptionally skilled at copying its enemies’ ideas and was proud of its espionage and intelligence successes in obtaining enemy equipment and grasping the significance and utility of its opponents’ gear. In this case, it wanted an equivalent: a compact rifle, with modest recoil and weight, that could be fired on automatic or semiautomatic and that used smaller ammunition than the rifles of its time. Some people think of the Kalashnikov as revolutionary in design and idea, but it was evolutionary. In hindsight, it marked a natural step in a progression that had been under way for decades—a weapon midway between the large rifles and small submachine guns of the era, the ultimate compromise arm. This had many benefits, including that because the weapon used lighter, lower-powered ammunition, it would be less expensive to manufacture and supply and less burdensome, and each soldier could carry more cartridges per combat load. It all made military sense, and the Soviet arms-design community understood this immediately and went to work on its conceptual knockoff of the pre-existing German arm. …

…How did the AK become so widely disseminated, and what about it made it such a ripe candidate for dissemination? 

One common misperception is that the AK-47 is reliable and effective, therefore it is abundant. This is not really the case. The weapon’s superabundance, its near ubiquity, is related less to its performance than to the facts of its manufacture. Once it was designated a standard Eastern Bloc arm, it was assembled and stockpiled in planned economies whether anyone paid for or wanted the rifles or not. This led to an uncountable accumulation of the weapons. And once the weapons existed, they moved. Had the weapon not been hooked up to the unending output of the planned economy, it would have been a much less significant device. If it had been invented in Liechtenstein, you might have never even heard of it.  …

Marty Peretz tells Carter to get a life.

I remember Ted Kennedy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 1980. It was an unusual candidacy because there was already a Democrat in the White House and he intended to run for a second a term. That president was Jimmy Carter, poor man. Poor haughty man.

…Now, the then incumbent president Carter has written another apologia, mawkish and arrogant at once. It is called White House Diary, and it has received near zero currency.  But it puts the blame for his loss on Teddy.  Not only that: Jimmy puts the blame for the defeat of his health care legislation on Teddy, too.

…Carter lost because inflation was above 10%, and unemployment was close to 7.5%, and you couldn’t get gasoline at the gas station. Moreover, our diplomatic personnel were still in captivity after a year in Tehran. And Carter himself had declared the country in spiritual crisis…and it was, because of him.

…And I? For whom did I vote. Ronald Reagan. Anybody was better than Carter. And anybody still is.

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Spengler explores several facets of Iran’s computer security problems.

Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran’s most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens’ industrial control code to plant malware in Iran’s nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. …

…Even the software that the Iranian authorities use to block Internet access is apparently stolen. Wikipedia reports, “The primary engine of Iran’s censorship is the content-control software SmartFilter, developed by San Jose firm Secure Computing. However, Secure denies ever having sold the software to Iran, and alleges that Iran is illegally using the software without a license.”

…A country that steals its software cannot build its own, even if the sort of individual who excels at software development wanted to live in Iran. Most of those who can, leave. A 2002 study reported that four out of five Iranians who received rewards in international science competitions subsequently left Iran; too few Iranians have won international awards since then to gather comparable data. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund noted that Iran had the worst brain drain of 90 countries surveyed.

Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange. …

In Reason, Nick Gillespie doesn’t think, judging by their past performance, Republicans will stop the spending.

More signs that the economy is sluggish and that the American Century is over for real:

The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year that ended Sept. 30 will total $1.29 trillion. That’s down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 – the highest deficit on record.

But don’t worry, America. The political class is dedicated to keeping America’s record-setting-deficit record going:

The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2011 budget year, which began on Oct. 1, will climb to $1.4 trillion. Over the next decade, it will total $8.47 trillion.

And they’ve even got a secret weapon up their sleeve to make sure this happens: The imminent election of large numbers of Republicans who played such a key role in the massive 104 percent increase in inflation-adjusted government spending during the George W. Bush administration (which was signing the checks for most of FY2009). …

Michael Barone comments on Democrat desperation.

…Back in January, the president attacked the Supreme Court for ruling that corporations and unions have First Amendment speech rights and pointed to the possibility that foreigners might try to influence American election outcomes. Now he and his spokesmen on the campaign trail and on Sunday interview programs are charging that outfits like the Chamber of Commerce are smuggling foreign money into the campaign.

Their evidence? Well, there isn’t much, as even the New York Times, Washington Post and factcheck.org agree.

The smoking gun? The Chamber of Commerce collects $100,000 in membership dues from foreigners out of a $200,000,000 operating budget and spends some of that budget on campaign ads. But Obama uberadviser David Axelrod says it’s up to the chamber to prove it’s innocent.

There are a couple of odd things here. One is that the 2008 Obama campaign, by deliberately not using the address verification software most enterprises use to determine it’s really your credit card, took in a lot more illegal foreign money than its rivals. The Obama folks may be projecting their own sins on their opponents. …

Ken Langone writes that he couldn’t have successfully started Home Depot in the current business climate.  He writes this in an open letter to the President in the WSJ.

…A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that’s build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.

…If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.

…I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to improving our society and especially our health care. It’s worth adding that it makes little sense to send Treasury checks to high net-worth people in the form of Social Security. That includes you, me and scores of members of Congress. Why not cut through that red tape, Mr. President, and apply a basic means test to that program? Just make sure that money actually reduces federal spending and isn’t simply shifted elsewhere. I guarantee you that many millionaires and billionaires will gladly forego it—as my wife and I already do when we forward those checks each month to charity.

It’s not too late to include the voices of experienced business people in your efforts, small business owners in particular. Americans would be right to wonder why you haven’t already.

George Will looks beyond winning Congressional seats.

…After November, Republican eyes will turn to the prize of the presidency in 2012. Concerning which, McConnell sees cautionary lessons from three other years — 1946, 1954 and 1994.

In 1946, President Truman’s party lost control of both the House and Senate. In 1948, however, Truman won an improbable reelection running against the “do-nothing 80th Congress.” In 1954, President Eisenhower’s party lost control of the House and Senate. But two years later, Eisenhower was resoundingly reelected. In 1994, President Clinton’s party lost control of the House and Senate. In 1996, Clinton cruised to reelection, partly because of reckless behavior — e.g., the government shutdown of 1995 — by congressional Republicans.

Regarding House races, Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard notes that the Democratic Party has “an inefficiently distributed base of voters.” It “consists mostly of union workers, upscale urban liberals, and minority voters, many of whom are clustered in highly Democratic districts.” In many other districts, Democratic candidates depend on “independents and soft partisans,” the very voters who have defected from the Obama coalition of 2008.

…On Nov. 2, there will be 37 gubernatorial elections. On Wednesday, Nov. 3, when the 15-month dash to the Iowa caucuses begins, Republicans may be savoring gains of eight or more governors, to a total of at least 31. They also may have gained 500 seats in state legislatures, mostly by retaking seats lost in the last two elections. This would expand Republican power over the redistricting that will be based on the 2010 census. Polidata Inc. estimates that states carried in 2008 by John McCain will gain a net of seven seats (and electoral votes) and that states Barack Obama carried will lose seven. …

We have NRO shorts. Here are two:

While the Tea Party has been reading Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom, Alaska’s Joe Miller and West Virginia’s John Raese, Senate candidates both, apparently have been boning up on their Milton Friedman: Each has had intelligent and sober things to say about the minimum wage, which decades of economic analysis has shown to increase unemployment among the poor and unskilled, and which Friedman called “the most anti-black law on the books,” noting its exacerbation of joblessness among African Americans. Their Democratic opponents are howling, of course, never having quite got their heads around the fact that in their elementary economics textbooks, demand curves slope downward: The higher the price of x, the less x is demanded. Mr. Miller, a Yale law graduate who takes a narrow view of federal power, believes that Washington lacks the legitimate authority to impose a minimum wage on the states, while Mr. Raese has made the economically obvious point that an artificial wage floor will foreclose job opportunities for certain workers. American public policy is currently in the grip of three lifelong politicians without a milligram of business experience or economic acumen between them — lawyer Barack Obama, lawyer Harry Reid, and congressional heiress Nancy Pelosi — and it shows. When it comes to economics, Democrats are as reliably anti-science as flat-earthers trying to explain away evolution, and their dinosaur policies are long overdue for extinction.

Geert Wilders has made his career in the Netherlands on a group of related propositions: There are more than enough Muslims in the country, their Koran is a fascist book like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the time has come to protect Dutch culture. A lot of Dutch people share these opinions. Five years ago Wilders founded the Freedom party, and in the recent general elections the party won 24 seats in a parliament of 150. Dutch politics are splintered. Two other conservative parties need the support of Wilders if they are to form a coalition government. Discussions are continuing while Wilders stands trial on the grounds that he has been “inciting hatred” against Muslims. He could be fined and sent to prison. Jan Moors, one of the judges in the case, has accused him of being “good at making statements, but then you avoid the discussion.” Critics, and Muslims among them, make out that Wilders is some sort of fascist, and he replies that he is an elected parliamentarian speaking for all his fellow citizens and exercising his right of free speech. What’s at issue is whether Muslims are to have special privileges enshrined in law, and it is no exaggeration to say that the future far beyond the Netherlands hangs on it.

A review in the WSJ of a new book on the contest between Hitler and Stalin. The title is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Reminds Pickerhead of some lines from a poem by Anna Akhmatova; “She loves, loves blood. This Russian Earth.” She penned that in 1921 before anybody had any idea the number of people Stalin would kill. 

… Among his other goals in “Bloodlands,” Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, “Bloodlands” gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn’t purely a “death camp,” lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.

Yet Mr. Snyder’s book does make it clear that Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose “national” sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

Stalin then turned on other target groups in the Soviet Union, starting with the kulaks—supposedly richer farmers, whom Stalin said needed to be “liquidated as a class”—and various ethnic minorities. In the late 1930s, Mr. Snyder argues, “the most persecuted” national group in Europe wasn’t—as many of us would assume—Jews in Nazi Germany, a relatively small community of 400,000 whose numbers declined after the imposition of race laws forced many into emigration at a time when this was still possible. According to Mr. Snyder, the hardest hit at that time were the 600,000 or so Poles living within the Soviet Union.

Convinced that this group represented a fifth column, Stalin ordered the NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, to “keep on digging out and cleaning out this Polish filth.” Mr. Snyder writes that before World War II started, 111,091 Soviet Poles were executed. This grim period is little known in Poland itself, but its detailed recounting here shows how a determined totalitarian machine could decimate a national group. Apologists for Stalin, in the West and elsewhere, have insisted that his Great Terror was needed to prepare the Soviets for a coming showdown with Hitler. Mr. Snyder destroys this argument. …