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Victor Davis Hanson presents a lesson from the president’s strategy book on how to destroy an economy.

It is hard for a president to turn a recession into a long-term downturn in the United States, given the inherent resiliency of private enterprise and America’s open and free markets. But if you were to try, you might do something like the following.

First, propose all sorts of new taxes. Float trial balloons about even more on the horizon. Subordinates should whisper about a VAT/national sales tax. Other aides should revisit campaign talk about lifting the caps on income subject to payroll taxes. A centerpiece of the effort would be to insist on bringing back the Clinton income-tax rates — but this time targeting only high earners and not putting commensurate caps on federal spending. For insurance in making things worse, raise capital-gains taxes. And why not add a new health-care tax surcharge? Let inheritance taxes kick back in. … The trick is to dissuade businesses from taking risks, by making clear that any new profits are illegitimate and therefore will go to the government.

Second, business expansion is predicated on confidence in the future. Destroy that, and depression can become far easier to achieve. Often the decision to hire or to buy new equipment is psychological in nature — predicated on hope in the larger business climate. So to ruin that landscape, you might unleash a barrage of anti-business, anti-wealth rhetoric to remind job creators that they are already too rich from exploitative practices. The president himself might lead the attack against Wall Street, CEOs, doctors, and insurers. Now and then it would be wise to spice it up with a nice socialist quip such as “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” …

Perhaps because the president is in the NYTimes magazine today with a pre-mortem, Charles Krauthammer has a pre-election post mortem with his choices of some of the more notable election facts  

Rising star. Marco Rubio, soon-to-be senator from Florida. He has the ingredients of a young Obama — smart, inspirational, minority (Cuban American), great life story. Headed for a meteoric rise.

Fastest falling star. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida. Facing disaster in the Republican primary against Rubio, he becomes an independent, flip-flops on one issue after another, and is now running about 16 points behind. Just two years ago, there was talk of him as a Republican vice presidential candidate. Today he’s nowhere man.

Most shameless attack campaign (national). President Obama suggesting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is secretly using foreign money to fund its campaign ads. There’s not a shred of evidence that this is true. When Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod for evidence, he responded, “Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” That’s like some lunatic claiming that Obama secretly says Muslim prayers at night that no one can see and no one can hear. You ask: What’s your evidence? He says: What’s yours that he is not? You say: No one’s ever seen or heard him do that. He says: Aha, that’s exactly my point.

The president has done another interview. Jonah Goldberg says to get out the shovel.

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on Meet the Press how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.”…

Only now it turns out that the president was shoveling something all right when he was talking about shovel-ready jobs — a whole pile of steaming something.

In the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, Obama admits that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready” when it comes to public works.

It’s not that Obama was lying when he said all that stuff. It’s just that he didn’t know what he was talking about. All it took was nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus money and 20-plus months of on-the-job training for him to discover that he was talking nonsense. …

Jonah also suggests some reading.

I know it’s already been widely discussed, but I really do think everyone should read the Peter Baker profile of Obama. It is definitive document of sorts that I suspect will be invoked for months and years to come. For Obama’s defenders — however few of them are left — it’s no doubt a sympathetic portrayal. But for everybody else, it’s a pretty astounding indictment of the insularity and arrogance of this administration. The White House view: Our greatest sin was trying too hard to get all of the policies right and failing to appreciate the evil of our opponents and the gullibility of the American people.

Nouriel Roubini has a interesting proposal for tax reform that might actually stimulate the economy. This from an article in Foreign Policy(?).

…Near double-digit unemployment is the root of the problem. Without job creation there’s a lack of consumer spending, which represents 40 percent of domestic GDP. To date, the U.S. government has responded creatively and massively to the near collapse of the financial system, using a litany of measures, from the bank bailout to stimulus spending to low interest rates. Together, these policies prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. But they also created fiscal and political dilemmas that limit the usefulness of traditional monetary and fiscal tools that policymakers can turn to in a pinch.

With interest rates near zero percent already, the Federal Reserve has few bullets left in its holster to boost growth or fend off another slump. This lack of available good options was patently on display in August when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke with a tinge of resignation about new “quantitative easing” interventions in the mortgage and bond markets — a highly technical suggestion that, until the recent crisis, amounted to heresy among Fed policymakers. It certainly hasn’t helped that the U.S. federal deficit has reached heights that make additional stimulus spending, of the kind that helped kindle the mini-recovery of early 2010, politically impossible.  

…Start with the one thing that everyone loves to hate: taxes. Forget the political hot potato over the size and shape of the cuts — there’s an easy way to do this. For the next two years, Obama should reduce payroll taxes for both employers and employees. The reduction for employers will lower labor costs and allow the hiring of more workers; for employees, increased take-home pay will get people spending again. It’s not just about increasing foot traffic in the mall; households need to pay down the burden of credit cards, second mortgages, and other legacies of the years of easy credit. …

In National Review, Nathan Martin tells his experience of crashing MTV’s televised presidential town meeting.

…According to the White House record, here’s how it started:

Q    Mr. President, my name is Nathan Martin.  I actually help produce a conservative talk radio show, and I’m getting married in two weeks.

THE PRESIDENT:  Congratulations.

I went on and asked him about the inconsistencies of his administration in enforcing immigration law vs. drug law, and why California could flaunt federal law with the legalization of marijuana, but Arizona was swiftly reprimanded for “infringing on federal jurisdiction.”…

Rachel Adams, in Bad Rachel Blog, comments on how the teachers’ unions won and the children lost in D.C.

Michelle Rhee—the tough broad who spent nearly four years as D.C. schools chancellor in a pitched battle against the corruption-plagued, incompetence-ridden Washington teachers union to reform a rotten public school system—was forced out today by mayor-elect Vincent Gray in what surely must be seen as a kind of triumph for the union and a potential tragedy for the city’s underprivileged, mostly-black schoolchildren. 

…To think about the absolute indifference to this calamity of members of Congress on the left side of the aisle—to say nothing of Mr. And Mrs. Obama’s breezy unconcern—is to be no less disgusted: These people are tucking their own cute little kids safely away in private schools, many of them, but they “believe” in public education for the city’s beleaguered black children and actively deprive them of any way out.

This is a whipping, plain and simple. Miss Rhee tried to wrest away the whip and got a lashing from Mr. Gray and the union that filled his campaign coffers for her pain. I guess D.C.’s poor black children will be taking their lashing from the president of the United States, to wit, “It took time to free the slaves.”

Whale poop again. Last April we had a piece on the value of whale poo to the health of the oceans. Science Daily has a look at another study.

…Whales, they found, carry nutrients such as nitrogen from the depths where they feed back to the surface via their feces. This functions as an upward biological pump, reversing the assumption of some scientists that whales accelerate the loss of nutrients to the bottom. 

It is well known that microbes, plankton, and fish recycle nutrients in ocean waters, but whales and other marine mammals have largely been ignored in this cycle. Yet this study shows that whales historically played a central role in the productivity of ocean ecosystems — and continue to do so despite diminished populations.

Despite the problems of coastal eutrophication — like the infamous “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico caused by excess nitrogen washing down the Mississippi River — many places in the ocean of the Northern Hemisphere have a limited nitrogen supply.

…”We think whales form a really important direct influence on the production of plants at the base of this food web,” says McCarthy.

“We found that whales increase primary productivity,” Roman says, allowing more phytoplankton to grow, which then “pushes up the secondary productivity,” he says, of the critters that rely on the plankton. The result: “bigger fisheries and higher abundances throughout regions where whales occur in high densities,” Roman says. …

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Marty Peretz blogs on the administration missteps in Middle East peace efforts.

…The Times piece is by Mark Landler which means it is accurate. And accurate on a weighty topic: “U.S. Faces Risks and Advantages in Bid to Save Talks.”

Apparently everyone now regrets that the president and his siren, Hillary Clinton, made not building in the settlements the key to our entire Middle East policy. The basic objection to this is the crucial issue (or one of the really crucial issues) of where the territorial lines will be drawn. If Israeli settlers build here and not there will have no effect on the prospective borders. None. …

Here’s Malley’s wisdom on the matter: “The original sin was putting so much emphasis, an issue we couldn’t resolve…We’ve spent the whole year trying to undo the damage of that step.”

Jennifer Rubin notes that the attitudes of American Jews are changing.

The second AJC poll of the year has some interesting results…

A bare majority of American Jews (51 percent) approve of Obama’s overall performance, still higher than the nation as a whole, but not nearly the level of support (78 percent) he enjoyed on Election Day or for a good stretch of his term. American Jews’ specific views on Israel and Iran explain, in part, why they have become disenchanted with Obama:

American Jewish confidence in Obama’s approach to Iran has dropped with 43 percent approving of the administration’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue compared to 47 percent in March. Some 46 disapprove, up from 42 percent. Some 59 percent support and 35 percent oppose U.S. military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Some 70 percent support and some 26 oppose Israeli military action. …

These findings, in conjunction with the recent poll of all Americans that I discussed here, here and here, point to several important developments. In answer to the question of whether anything can wean Jews of their “sick addiction” to the Democratic Party, the answer seems to be “Obama.” At this rate, his level of support among Jews will roughly match the general population’s, an unheard of phenomenon for the past 75 years. …

Toby Harnden looks at criticism leveled at the administration by the mainstream. Harnden suggests Bob Schieffer’s question to Axelrod of “Is that the best you can do?” is likely to be the epitaph for the administration.

…So the White House and the hapless Democrats running for re-election on November 2nd must be in near despair over David Axelrod’s interview with Schieffer yesterday. In it, the host of CBS’s Face the Nation was incredulous at Axelrod’s focus not on the economy or jobs or health care or the Islamist threat or the wars America is engaged in but, er, the possibility that the US Chamber may be funding ads with foreign money. A charge, of course, which would be called racist if Republicans had levelled it against Obama.

You can watch the exchange here…

Did you get that last comment from Schieffer? “I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge Democrats can make three weeks into the election is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?” Ouch. …

Jennifer Rubin highlights some well-written criticism of David Axelrod’s attacks, and add her own excellent commentary.

Ed Gillespie is justifiably steamed at the White House. He writes:

“In their latest attempt to distract voters from their job-killing policies, President Obama, his White House and senior Democrats in Congress have added to their long list of bogeymen the outside groups that seek to help elect Republicans in November. They threaten congressional investigations, discuss private tax information and level baseless accusations of criminal activity against those who have been public in seeking to defeat Democratic candidates and their liberal agenda. Without a trace of irony, powerful Democratic officeholders lament that many who support these groups wish to remain anonymous. …”

And if that were not enough, Obama’s closest political hack, Tailgunner David Axelrod, insists that no proof of wrongdoing was needed, “that it was up to the chamber to prove it hadn’t done anything wrong.” In the West Wing, apparently, the American principle is that you’re guilty until proven innocent, and our highest elected and appointed officials are there to hurl the charges. …

Michael Barone puts together some pieces on the hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce accusations.

Glenn Reynolds nails this one: the Obama Democrats’ campaign riff against foreign donations to Democrats is bogus—and according to the New York Times, no less. This looks like a matter of projection, since it’s well documented that the 2008 Obama campaign did not put in place address verification software that would have routinely prevented most foreign donations. In effect they were encouraging donations by foreign nationals. …

And here’s our own Washington Examiner editorial from the time:

“Then there’s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that’s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers’ cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.”

The Obama campaign was happy to encourage mass illegal donations from foreign nationals. Now it’s making baseless charges that its opposition is doing the same thing. Hope and change! …

Mark Halperin is still drinking the cool-aid, but does take exception with the Obami’s partisan attacks.

…But Obama has exacerbated his political problems not just by failing to enact policies that would have actually turned the economy around, but also by authorizing a series of tactical moves intended to demonize Republicans and distract from the problems at hand. He has wasted time lambasting his foes when he should have been putting forth his agenda in a clear, optimistic fashion, defending the benefits of his key decisions during the past two years (health care and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for example) and explaining what he would do with a re-elected Democratic majority to spur growth.

Throughout the year, we have been treated to Obama-led attacks on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Congressman Joe Barton (for his odd apology to BP), John Boehner (for seeking the speakership — or was it something about an ant?) and Fox News (for everything). Suitable Democratic targets in some cases, perhaps, but not worth the time of a busy Commander in Chief. In the past few days, we have witnessed the spectacle of the President himself and his top advisers wading into allegations that Republicans are attempting to buy the election using foreign money laundered through the Chamber of Commerce, combining with Karl Rove and his wealthy backers to fund a flood of negative television commercials. Not only is this issue convoluted and far-fetched, but it also distracts from the issues voters care about, frustrating political insiders and alienating struggling citizens…

Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the senate race in West Virginia.

West Virginia’s Senate seat is slipping away from the Democrats. In a wave election year, the voters there may decide it is more important to keep their governor home and to send to Congress someone to block Obama’s agenda. So Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin is trying to run from and against the Obama agenda:

In an interview on Fox News, Manchin said he is open to repealing the new healthcare law — the signature accomplishment of Democrats during Obama’s time in the White House.

The governor also took to the airwaves to tout his independence, releasing a TV ad in which he’s shown shooting a hole through the cap-and-trade bill favored by Obama and House Democrats. …

So far, it is not working. Republican John Raese has a lead of 4.5 points in the RealClearPolitics.com poll. It’s not clear that running against Obama is a viable strategy for Democrats, but neither is running on his unpopular agenda. In short, that’s why so many Democrats will lose in three weeks.

John Podhoretz has the latest poll numbers.

Gallup just released its weekly “generic” poll, and for the second week in a row it is forecasting a colossal wipeout for Democrats — with likely voters voting Republican by a margin between 12 and 17 points. Rasmussen, widely and unfairly considered biased towards Republicans, has shown a markedly smaller Republican lead, but this week its likely-voter number has Republicans besting Democrats by 8 percent. Meanwhile, statewide and district-wide polls suggest that a minor surge by Democrats at the end of September seems either to have evaporated or was never all that real in the first place. …

An 8-to-15 point Republican margin in 2010, which seems increasingly possible, will represent a partisan and ideological turnaround of 15 to 24 percent. That is without precedent in the modern era. At the presidential level, Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a landslide but still featured a shift away from Carter of 11 points among the electorate (Carter dropped from 51 percent in 1976 to 40 percent). …

…There’s no reason to think that independents and disaffected Democrats are going to become Republicans, the way the Perotistas did. But the goings-on after Barack Obama’s inauguration may have created a new swing-voting camp of anti-liberals, at least as far as Democratic party orthodoxy defines “liberal,” and how this new camp views the post-November political dynamic will define American politics for the next decade. …

Jay Nordlinger shares various thoughts, and includes an item that demonstrates the difference in character between W and Obama.

…I also have an item on Obama’s gracelessness — on his snippy, snotty remarks about conservatives, Republicans, and others not quite in love with him. Remember how he was supposed to have a “first-class temperament”? I say in my column that even third-class is pushing it. A reader writes,

I didn’t vote for George W. Bush either time . . . But one thing seems to draw little comment: He was subjected to the most intense and odious opprobrium in my lifetime, substantially worse than that flung at Nixon. There were the most vicious and vile accusations. And I cannot recall one instance where Bush lashed back or replied in kind. …

Here’s a stunning article from David Brooks on the ways government unions have destroyed state budgets.

…Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

…States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence. …

Jonathan Tobin has a great follow-up to his original commentary on Chris Christie’s refusal to bury New Jersey in more debt.

…Brooks acknowledges that the tunnel is needed but rightly notes that the state’s inability to afford it stems from the fact that our states and municipalities are drowning in debt largely generated by the costs of paying government employees and their pensions (an issue that Jeff Jacoby explores at length in this month’s issue of COMMENTARY). It’s all well and good to say that big infrastructure projects are exactly the sort of thing government should be doing, but the liberal addiction to public-sector spending has made that impossible. And the public-sector unions that dominate the Democratic Party make sure this never changes.

One reader reacted to my earlier post on this subject by claiming that what Christie has done is to try and live without debt, a bad policy for any government, business, or family. In fact, what Christie is attempting to do is establish the principle that there must be a limit to debt. Unless our states free themselves from the massive debt that government unions have created, it will become increasingly difficult for government to afford the basic services they are supposed to provide, let alone money pits like the Hudson River Tunnel.

Brooks laments the fact that the left won’t make the hard choices about which government expenditures to prioritize. But the problem here isn’t about priorities but a liberal philosophy that wants no limits on government’s power to spend and therefore tax. Under these circumstances, commonsense conservatives like Christie have no choice but to simply draw a line in the sand and say “no” to the tunnel. …

In the New Scientist, Andy Coghlin reports on a new archaelogical finding. The science piece today is a stunner. Paleontologists have found a 500,000 year old partial skeleton of a pre-courser of both Neanderthals and modern humans. It is evident the remains are from a 45 year old man who was infirm suggesting his tribe took care of him. Pickerhead has long been amazed by the human capacity for caring and sharing that it repeatedly demonstrated by discoveries in anthropology and other social sciences. Colin Turnbull’s Mountain People describes the almost complete societal breakdown of the Ik people, 1,000 hunter-gatherers, who were forced by the government of Uganda to leave their ancestral land and take up farming. Yet, while in their degraded state, they would be very cautious when a kill had been made to find wood that would burn without smoke so the feast could be enjoyed without discovery. Because if another individual happened on the scene, the meal would be shared.

It is impossible to read history and not conclude human beings are steadily improving in one significant way; we keep finding better and better ways to help those, who for one reason or another, are unable to cope with life as it has presented itself. Our battles with the left are not over whether we should help, but over what would be the most constructive ways. People who love freedom believe market based economies provide the abundance to improve the collective wealth, and therefore improve the physical and mental well being of our fellows. Of course, you must have superior education to see this. And then it is hard to prove this would be the result. We have to teach the left it is not enough to wish something will happen, you also must understand the unintended consequences of coercion by the state.

He was too old to hunt, a hunchback probably needing a cane for support, and suffered terrible lower back pain. But a member of the human family who lived 500,000 years ago is the most elderly ancient human ever found. The individual of the species Homo heidelbergensis has been named “Elvis” after his pelvis and lower backbone were uncovered in Atapuerca, northern Spain. The hunter-gatherer was about 45 years old when he died.

…The fact that Elvis was so infirm suggests he was looked after by his contemporaries, which Bonmatí’s team say is good evidence that hunter-gatherers didn’t abandon the weak. He could not have been an active hunter, nor could he carry heavy loads. …

…A year ago, the same team reported evidence from Atapuerca that a 12-year-old child with skull malformations was cared for by the same group.

“We have evidence building up that these people were caring,” says Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “This individual probably could move around, but couldn’t get his own food, so it implies a level of social support, and that he was valued by his contemporaries.”

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In the NY Daily News, Philip K. Howard from Common Good discusses needed changes in the government.

…What’s required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions – not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet – always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. …

The core principle of this overhaul should be this: Restore free choice at every level of responsibility.

For example, let all public schools operate with the same freedoms, and accountability, as charter schools. Give officials the responsibility to balance different interests – not be forced by legal threats to give away scarce common resources to whoever threatens a lawsuit. …

…Cleaning out old mandates and entitlements would allow political leaders to make choices to meet today’s needs. Radically simplifying law would allow people, including members of Congress, to actually understand it. …

Michael Barone interviews Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels about a possible presidential run.

…And he says that, if he runs, he’ll be a different kind of candidate. As for “the federal fiscal picture…can we agree that the arithmetic doesn’t work? We’re going to have higher and higher levels of debt.”

He goes on. “This is a survival-level issue for the country. We won’t be a leader without major change in the federal fiscal picture. We’re going to have to do fundamental things you say are impossible.”

…He’s also got some more short-term proposals — a payroll tax holiday to stimulate the economy, reviving the presidential power of impoundment (not spending money Congress has appropriated), a moratorium on federal regulations. …

Robert Costa reports that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey just won the first Tea Party poll.

The New Jersey governor wins a 2012 straw poll in Richmond:

Attendees of the inaugural Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention selected New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as their number one choice for President in 2012 by a narrow margin in one of the first presidential straw polls of the 2012 campaign, giving Gov. Christie early recognition in a potentially crowded field of candidates. A total of 1,560 individuals cast ballots in the straw poll that was conducted here Oct. 8-9.

Former Alaska Governor and GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin came in second, and Congressman Ron Paul was third in the unofficial poll, the first Tea Party straw poll ever conducted and an early indicator of preference for individuals affiliated with Tea Party organizations. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors update us on the latest chapter of the global warming scandal.

…Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, took to the pages of the Washington Post Friday…

Mann warns that Republicans would launch “a hostile investigation of climate science.” But investigation is, in fact, warranted.

Harold Lewis, physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been a member of the American Physical Society, the second-largest association of physicists in the world, for 67 years — most of the organization’s existence. A couple of days before Mann’s piece appeared, Lewis tendered his resignation.

…Lewis’ letter charged that climatologists have a monetary motive to promote global warming. Then he jabbed none other than Mann, arguing that Penn State “cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for” pouncing on Mann for his role in Climate-gate.

That scandal found prominent scientists unscientifically conspiring to keep dissenting researchers from publishing their findings. As to next month’s elections, the public clearly has a stake in sending people to Washington who keep the taxpayers’ money from such charlatans.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole posts Dr. Harold Lewis’ resignation letter in full. It is well worth reading, as it may help to restore faith that there are still honorable scientists who seek the truth.

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:

This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment. …

In Popular Mechanics, Kalee Thompson discusses the dangers of commercial fishing and one economic activity where the media needs to shed more light.

…the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks commercial fishing as America’s most lethal job. Adjusted to the size of the workforce, the 2008 fatality rate for U.S. fishermen was five times that of truck drivers, eight times that of police officers and 19 times that of firefighters.

…Between 1992 and 2007, a staggering 1903 American commercial fishing vessels sank, according to a comprehensive Coast Guard report. As a direct result, 507 people died, accounting for more than half of the 934 commercial fishing deaths during that 16-year period. Most of the remaining fatalities were due to falls overboard or a variety of grisly equipment-related accidents.

It’s no coincidence that the number of lost boats and lives is far higher for fishing than for any other type of waterborne industry. Passenger ferries, cargo ships and virtually all other commercial boats are held to much higher regulatory standards. All but the largest factory-style fishing vessels remain uninspected, which means that ensuring a boat’s seaworthiness—including the strength of its hull, the stability of its design and the integrity of its watertight compartments—is solely up to the ship’s owners. …
…Hiscock helped to draft legislation, now languishing in Congressional committee, that is crucial to lowering fishing’s unacceptable death toll. If the bill passes, the new regulations would require Coast Guard inspections for all fishing boats more than 50 feet, as well as stronger construction requirements for new boats, more stringent regulations for officer licensing and mandatory crew training. Meanwhile, boats keep sinking. …

…That single federal law governing commercial fishing boats—the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988—mandates that ships carry life rafts, fire extinguishers, signal flares and a registered emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB). In cold waters, a full-body neoprene survival suit is required for every person on board. Modest as it is, the law has had a big impact. After its implementation in the early 1990s, the death rate among shipwrecked crewmen fell by close to 50 percent. …

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Craig Pirrong shares comments on the new National Security Advisor from the Obami, and sharply criticizes Obama’s judgment.

We will soon have a bona fide political hack as National SecurityAdvisor.  One whom SecDef Gates slammed in Woodward’s book:

In the book “Obama’s Wars,” Woodward writes that, “Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect.”

“The secretary later told Jones that Donilon would be a ‘disaster’ as Obama’s national security adviser,” Woodward wrote.

The man he is replacing, Jim Jones, was even more scathing:

…“He had never gone to Afghanistan or Iraq, ‘or really left the office for a serious field trip,’ ” Jones said of Donilon in Woodward’s book. “As a result, he said, ‘you have no direct understanding of these places. You have no credibility with the military. You should go overseas.’ ” …

…“You frequently pop off with absolute declarations about places you’ve never been, leaders you’ve never met, or colleagues you work with,” Woodward quoted Jones as saying about Donilon.

…Jones was no prize as NSA, but he had spent his life in, you know, national security.  In contrast, just what do you learn about national security while serving as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae? Or as a consultant for Goldman and Citi?

…His appointment is proof of the abject politicization of national defense under Obama. National security as the continuation of domestic politics by other means.  Yes, Bryan, there is inevitably a political component to defense policy.  But in his subordination of security to domestic political considerations, Obama has gone beyond the pale. …

Toby Harnden lists ten reasons why we should be concerned about Tom Donilon’s appointment.

8. Donilon is close to Joe Biden. Biden has got it wrong on just about every major foreign policy issue in modern times. Enough said.

9. Donilon is a former lobbyist. Remember how Obama was going to change how Washington worked and rid the city of lobbyists? Well now his top foreign policy adviser is a former lobbyist for Fannie Mae who consulted for Goldman Sachs.

10. The Obama administration is unravelling. Republicans can gloat about this but it is bad news for Americans and the world that Obama has lost several top economic aides, his chief of  staff and now his top foreign policy adviser BEFORE the mid-term elections. It shows a degree of crisis and disarray that cannot be good in policy terms.

We’ll see how Donilon works out but, to put it mildly, this is not an appointment that inspires much confidence.

John Steele Gordon responds to criticisms of NJ Governor Chris Christie for just saying no.

Both Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert last week bemoaned the decision by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey to put the kibosh on a multi-billion-dollar project to build a second railroad tunnel under the Hudson River. The project, which was originally budgeted at $8.7 billion had crept up — in the time-honored way of government projects — to over $11 billion, and many thought it would reach $14 billion before all was said and done. New Jersey would have been responsible for much of the cost overruns, and Governor Christie thought the state, deeply mired in debt already, could not afford it. And so he killed the project.

…When we began the Interstate Highway System, the national debt was about 60 percent of GDP and falling. We had run budget surpluses in seven of the previous 10 years. When we went to the moon, the national debt was 39 percent of GDP and falling. It is now over 90 percent and rising rapidly. And the move from 40 percent of GDP to 90 percent was not because of moon shots or Manhattan Projects. It was so no one in Washington (and many state capitals) ever had to say no to anyone, especially public-service unions. …

…The people of New Jersey had processed that information, and that’s why they elected Governor Christie. I suspect that people in the rest of the country have also processed it, and that’s why the political establishment is going to get clobbered in three weeks.

George Will opines that whether or not the Dems keep majorities in Congress, Obama loses.

…Since 1966, liberal overreaching has been difficult. After November, it will be impossible, for many years. For Obama, the worst result next month might be for Democrats to retain control of both houses of Congress. If they do, their majorities will be paralyzingly small. And their remaining moderates will be more resistant to the liberal leadership: The moderates will have survived not because of, but in spite of, those leaders.

Today, if you see Obama in a political ad, you are almost certainly watching a Republican ad. And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that more than twice as many people view House Speaker Nancy Pelosi negatively (50 percent) than positively (22 percent).

If Democrats retain control of Congress, Obama will seek reelection while being perceived as responsible for everything in Washington, where everything is perceived to be dysfunctional. And anti-Washington fever may be worse than it is today, because the 2010 elections will not seem to have changed very much. …

Schumpeter’s Blog at The Economist highlights a National Affairs article on government unions from Daniel Disalvo.

NATIONAL AFFAIRS is shaping up to be a worthy successor to “The Public Interest”, one of the great periodicals of the post-war era.

The current issue contains a superb essay, by Daniel Disalvo, on America’s public-sector unions, which have an extraordinary power to force the state to dance to their tune, squashing innovation, reducing productivity and undermining competitiveness. Given that America needs to reinvent much of its antiquated state apparatus, particularly its schools, if it is to remain competitive with the emerging world, I suspect that the country’s future depends on its ability to master, or sideline, these ever-mightier institutions. Some choice extracts:

…Yet as skilled as unions may be in drawing on taxpayer dollars, many observers argue that their greater influence is felt in the quality of the government services taxpayers receive in return. In his book “The Warping of Government Work”, Harvard public-policy scholar John Donahue explains how public-employee unions have reduced government efficiency and responsiveness. With poor prospects in the ultra-competitive private sector, government work is increasingly desirable for those with limited skills; at the opposite end of the spectrum, the wage compression imposed by unions and civil-service rules makes government employment less attractive to those whose abilities are in high demand. Consequently, there is a “brain drain” at the top end of the government work force, as many of the country’s most talented people opt for jobs in the private sector where they can be richly rewarded for their skills (and avoid the intricate work rules, and glacial advancement through big bureaucracies, that are part and parcel of government work)….

Thus, as New York University professor Paul Light argues, government employment “caters more to the security-craver than the risk-taker.” And because government employs more of the former and fewer of the latter, it is less flexible, less responsive, and less innovative. It is also more expensive: Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone has shown that, between 2000 and 2008, the price of state and local public services has increased by 41% nationally, compared with 27% for private services….

In the National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Daniel Hannan about his new book on the dangerous path America is taking.

Daniel Hannan could be the ultimate tea-party candidate, waving his pocket Constitution, citing the Founders, and warning that we are in danger of losing America itself. Hannan even holds public office. Just not in America. He’s a Brit — and a member of the European Parliament — with a love for the Red, White, and Blue. It’s out of that love that he’s written The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America. He talks about it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: “The United States is becoming just another country.” How far along are we?

DANIEL HANNAN: The abandonment of American particularism started with the first Roosevelt but really took off with the second. Like most bad things, it happened from good intentions. FDR saw himself as the champion of the masses against the lobbies. Convinced of his moral rectitude, he tolerated no constraints on his power. He sidelined the legislature, ignored the conventional two-term limit, ruled by executive order, tried to pack the Supreme Court and constructed a massive federal bureaucracy, much of which is still in place. 

You don’t need to look far to see parallels with the past two years. A Democratic president assumes office, bringing a massive majority with him to both Houses. He takes over during a financial crisis that has been blamed on a failure of capitalism. He’s determined to “do something” — and that something involves extending government and spending a great deal of money. The economic ill effects are already becoming clear; but the political consequences, as power is shifted from the 50 states to Washington, from the legislature to the executive, from the elected representative to the federal czar, from the individual to the government, are far more deleterious. …

Kirk Johnson, in the NY Times, has a fascinating article unraveling the mystery of the dying bees.

…Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

…Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. … But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.

The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for. …

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Today’s Pickings From the Webvine is a don’t miss collection of blog posts focused on one of the major defects of the left vision of governance. The occasion for this was granting of exemptions to Obamacare by Kathleen Sebelius of HHS. A number of our favorites; Streetwise Professor, W. W. in Democracy in America Blog, Jennifer Rubin, Yuval Levin, Ed Morrissey, Peter Wehner, WSJ editors, have cogent thoughts. One blogger pulled up this from Federalist Paper 62; “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”

Read Pickings and remember why it is we fight against these people in Washington.

If you thought government was out of control before, just wait. Craig Pirrong explains how Congress’ gifts of discretionary control to federal agencies means we are going to be ruled by thousands of bureaucrats and their whims.

HHS Czarina–I mean Secretary–Kathleen Sebelius has deigned to grant waivers from Obamacare mandates to big companies like McDonalds and Jack in the Box, and some big unions.  Get ready for this Brave New World, and not just in health care.

…In the terms of the economics literature, Obamacare, Frank-n-Dodd, etc., are incomplete contracts that do not specify actions in all eventualities.  Instead, they largely create governance mechanisms and delegate residual control rights.  In the event, the rights of control are delegated to political appointees and staffers at Federal cabinet departments and agencies.

These control rights determine bargaining power.  And what that means is that in health care and finance–meaning, in just about every economic activity, because virtually every business intersects these sectors–virtually everything will be a negotiation between the government and those in its thrall–meaning the rest of us.  (The word thrall in its noun form, by the way, is a synonym for” serf.”)  These control rights also determine the allocation of the bargaining surplus–who gets the goodies, and who gets screwed. …

…This corporatist, highly personalized, transactional system (all words that describe the current Russian government, by the way), will condemn the US to years of stagnation.  They will be a drag on growth, and provide an incentive for able individuals to devote their talents to negotiating for rents with their governmental overlords, rather than thinking of and implementing new ways to create things that people value. …

The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog has W.W. discussing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the crucial importance of limiting government power with clearly stated laws.

…Hayek draws out the difference between “a free country” and “a country under arbitrary government”. A country counts as free only if its government is bound by the rule of law, which, according to Hayek, “means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand”. Typically, these rules, once fixed, are written down and then published through official state organs. The idea is that politically-determined rules need to be relatively fixed and publicly known in order to create a stable and certain framework in which individual planning and complex social coordination can flourish. The goal of replacing arbitrary government with the rule of law implies for Hayek, among other things, that executive discretion ought to be reduced “as much as possible”. …

…For Hayek, the rule of law means that these constraining rules must not play favourites, but rather must embody ideals of impartiality, generality, and equality before the law. Hayek’s proposal for a generality or non-discrimination amendment to the constitution (defended here by James Buchanan) nicely illustrates what he took to be the practical upshot of his ideal of the rule of law. …

Jennifer Rubin weighs in on how giving government officials’ arbitrary latitude to decide how rules will be enforced greatly increases government power, and greatly increases the amount of resources used to curry the favor of bureaucratic tyrants, rather than producing something of worth in the economy.

…This is one more example of the pattern we have seen since the closing weeks of the Bush administration. As the bailouts and mind-numbingly complex legislation multiplies, the private sector becomes rife with rent-seekers, looking to spin the dials and eke out some preferential treatment from the heavy hand of government. CEOs are chosen for their political and PR skills, not their prowess as wealth creators. Business judgment is clouded and distorted as businessmen must look over their shoulders to avoid the wrath of  bureaucrats and elected officials.

The fact that these judgments are unmoored to any fixed rules and depend on the whim of government officials makes it all the worse. If the rules are unclear and the name of the game is about access, the opportunities for corruption multiply. In fact, it’s hard to tell what corruption is. …

Yuval Levin brings our attention to a slippery slope that increases government power and corruption, and weakens the economy and innovation.

One of the problems with massive, complicated government regulations is that they create a lot of room for regulator discretion, and therefore a lot of room for unequal treatment of different players in the market. Many opponents of Obamacare argued before the legislation was enacted that it would do just that throughout the healthcare sector—would empower the federal government to pick favorites rather than allowing for simple uniform rules that enable the kind of competition and consumer choice that can actually help control costs.

We can already see this happening in practice, even long before most of Obamacare’s most significant rules and regulations go into effect. The Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday that 30 corporations (including McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and a New York teachers’ union) would receive exemptions from a rule that would have required them to raise the minimum annual benefit in their employee insurance plans.

The exemptions themselves are good news, since the rule would have forced these companies to drop their employee coverage, leaving almost a million workers without the insurance they had before Obamacare. But it means that these companies now need permission from the administration to offer their employees a benefit they have offered for years. And of course, many other companies—those without the lobbying operation of a company the size of McDonald’s, or without the access to liberal policymakers that a NY teachers’ union  has—can’t get the same permission, and so can’t compete on a level playing field, or offer coverage that might entice the best qualified people to work for them. This kind of government by whim, and not by law, is the essence of the regulatory state. We are about to see a whole lot more of it—unless the health-care law enacted in March is repealed.

Ed Morrissey blogs about big government helping out big business, while everyone else with less power gets Obamacare expenses. He makes a good point of the arrogance of lawmakers, with little to no experience in the real world, thinking that they know how to run a segment of the economy better than everyone else.

…First, let’s point out that the law turned out to be unworkable, almost before it even got started.  Dictating percentages for administration costs in insurance plans isn’t the job of the federal government anyway, but more to the point, that issue is obviously not determinative in value to the consumer — as these waivers proved.  This shows what happens when people with no experience in an industry decide that they can construct it better than the market has structured itself.

The proper action would have been to repeal at least this portion of the law in order to give a level playing field to everyone.  By granting a few dozen waivers at the outset, though, the White House has amplified the uncertainty and arbitrariness in ObamaCare even further.  At least insurers and employers had a figure that they could use for planning.  Now there is no standard at all, except for whatever Kathleen Sebelius decides she likes — and whom she wants to favor.

The Rule of Law depends on an environment with clear regulation and unbiased enforcement.  From the start, ObamaCare lacked any clarity in regulation.  Congress filled the bill with the phrase “The Secretary shall determine” in place of establishing rules and regulations for the massive regulatory regime Congress created.  Now, the White House has added arbitrary enforcement to uncertain regulation and opaque processes.  This is not the Rule of Law, but the Whim of Autocracy.

Peter Wehner also comments on the fallout from implementing the monstrous legislative mess that Congress passed.

In interpreting a key Department of Health and Human Services announcement, the New York Times reported that so far, 30 insurers, employers, and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, have been given one-year waivers by the government on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as “mini-meds.” In the words of the Times, “the waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.”

This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government. Private companies have to bow before its throne, asking for waivers and massively complicating their own lives. The federal government is now in a much stronger position to pick winners and losers and rig the game. …

…The waivers are also the Obama administration’s attempt to minimize the negative impact of ObamaCare less than a month before the midterm election. It’s now clear that the new health-care law was very poorly constructed and is having enormous implementation problems. To issue waivers to undo the damaging effects of a new law is a very bad sign. No wonder so few Democratic candidates are running on their support for ObamaCare – and why so many Republican candidates are running hard against it. …

Clayton Cramer’s Blog has excellent quotes from the Federalist Papers on some of the problems our recent lawmakers have created for our nation.

Ask the authors of Federalist 62.  First, the problem of the health care reform bill that came to 2700 pages:

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

…And why employers are reluctant to hire right now:

“In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy. …”

The WSJ editors comment on the foreclosure moratorium.

…Yes, the same crew… that ran roughshod over its own transparency rules—not to mention the established customs of the House and Senate—to restructure American medicine is now appalled that some paperwork at private businesses may have been incorrectly processed. To be clear, bank employees appear guilty of sloppy work, and problems in the back office should be corrected, but freezing activity in a $2.8 trillion financial market is the last thing this economy needs and is in no way proportional to the problems reported so far.

Now President Obama is refusing to sign a previously noncontroversial measure to have states recognize notarized documents from other states. Among other things, the bill would have streamlined the process of moving people out of homes they can’t afford and therefore would have helped to allow housing markets to clear and begin to heal. …

If evidence emerges of policies or actions that wrongly threw people out of their homes, by all means investigate and prosecute violations of law. But allowing people to live in homes without paying for them is not cost-free. That cost will be borne directly by investors in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage servicing companies, and ultimately by American taxpayers, who now stand behind 90% of new mortgages, thanks to guarantees by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

The bigger damage here is to the housing market, which desperately needs to find a bottom by clearing excess inventory and working through foreclosures as rapidly as possible. The moratoriums further politicize the housing market and further delay a housing recovery. In an economy and a financial system engulfed in Washington-created uncertainty, the political class has decided to create still more.

Thomas Sowell looks at Jerry Brown’s previous record and other issues in the California gubernatorial race.

…One appointment by Governor Jerry Brown ought to tell us a lot about his ideology. His most famous– or infamous– appointment was making Rose Bird chief justice of the California supreme court.

She over-ruled 64 consecutive death penalty verdicts and upheld none. Apparently no judge or jury could ever give a murderer a trial perfect enough to suit Rose Bird.

To hear Rose Bird and her supporters tell it, she was just “upholding the law.” But, fortunately, the California voters saw right through that pretense, and realized that she was doing just the opposite– imposing her own personal opposition to the death penalty in the guise of interpreting the law. No California chief justice appointee had ever been voted off the bench by the voters before Rose Bird, but she was roundly defeated when 67 percent of the voters voted against her in a confirmation election required by California law.

Two of her like-mind colleagues on the California supreme court were likewise voted off the bench. They, too, were appointed by Governor Jerry Brown.

The question is not whether you are for or against the death penalty. If you don’t like the death penalty, you can vote to repeal it. But it is not the job of judges to deprive the voters of their right to choose the laws they want to live under.

This is part of a much larger arrogant political ideology, in which anointed elites impose their own notions, in utter disregard of the laws passed by the people’s elected representatives.  …

Thomas Sowell has more commentary on the coming elections.

Some of the longest-serving members of Congress, whose party has overwhelming majorities in both houses, are having far closer election races than they are used to. These include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to mention 18-year veteran Senator Barbara Boxer.

…Usually, the incumbents can talk about their “experience.” But experience at what? Deception? Earmarks? Reckless spending? …

…The big question for the election next month is whether the voters keep their eye on the ball and judge candidates by what policies they advocate or whether they can be thrown off the track by red herrings.

We have already seen in 2008 what can happen when voters fail to pay attention to a presidential candidate’s track record, and let themselves be dazzled by rhetoric, symbolism and media hype. We are losing not only our jobs but our country— and this could be our last chance to stop the Obama-Pelosi-Reid juggernaut.

David Warren takes us down memory lane with Penguin Books.  

They look so frail, now — this “parcel of Penguins” that has resurfaced from my own distant past. They are from a time less than half a century ago, yet to a person who has lived the intervening years, they may come as archaeological relics.

I am referring, of course, to paperback books, not birds from Antarctica. The collective noun provides a happy play on words, for I believe “parcel of penguins” is correct for the birds — as opposed to a rookery, crèche, or huddle of them. Every child of the English language discovers, or ought to have his moment of discovering this wonderful world, in which we speak of a “siege of bitterns,” a “clattering of jackdaws,” a “musket of lyrebirds,” a “gaggle of geese.” And in case one has forgotten, today we have Wikipedia.

A “parcel of penguins” is quite literally what one used to receive, through the post, when far away from home. They were printed on paper not only cheap, but light; they were 7-1/8 by 4-3/8 inches strictly (a Golden Section); they tied together in a nice secure block. And no gift from home could be more welcome.

I have spoken with a man who was raised under Communism, in Hungary. He spoke of the thrill when a parcel of Penguins made its way to him, through the Iron Curtain. In another case, I recall such a parcel travelling into the mountains of Nepal, as birds not flightless. …

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Nile Gardiner has some surprising poll numbers on the change in attitude toward W.

Several months ago a huge billboard appeared near Wyoming, Minnesota, with a beaming photo of George W. Bush with the caption “Miss me yet?” The answer to that question is clearly yes, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, which shows the former president staging a remarkable political recovery despite having largely disappeared from public life since leaving office:

By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago.

“Democrats may want to think twice about bringing up former President George W. Bush’s name while campaigning this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

This has to be one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in decades. And as this week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll showed, nearly 25 percent of Democrats now believe “a return to Bush’s policies would be good,” a staggeringly high figure. …

Charles Krauthammer indicts the Democrat Congressional leadership for their reckless, irresponsible actions.

…For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling — largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.

That’s not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.

As if this were not enough, Congress adjourned without even a vote — nay, without even a Democratic bill — on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This is the ultimate in incompetence. After 20 months of control of the White House and Congress — during which they passed an elaborate, 1,000-page micromanagement of every detail of American health care — the Democrats adjourned without being able to tell the country what its tax rates will be on Jan. 1.

It’s not just income taxes. It’s capital gains and dividends, too. And the estate tax, which will careen insanely from 0 to 55 percent when the ball drops on Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Nor is this harmless incompetence. To do this at a time when $2 trillion of capital is sitting on the sidelines because of rising uncertainty — and there is no greater uncertainty than next year’s tax rates — is staggeringly irresponsible. …

The NY Daily News editors tell us what happens when Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder insist on trying a military criminal case in a civilan court.

The disastrous folly of trying Al Qaeda enemy combatants in civilian court stands proven beyond a reasonable doubt in the case of the first Guantanamo detainee brought to New York to face justice.

There is abundantly conclusive proof that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani participated in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. At least 5,000 were wounded.

…These facts come courtesy of Ghailani’s own mouth. He revealed them under interrogation while in clandestine CIA custody before transfer to Guantanamo. Therein lies the legal absurdity.

The CIA grilled Ghailani in the interest of national security – to prevent further terrorist attacks – and not as a run-of-the-mill criminal suspect with full U.S. constitutional rights. …

In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Patrick McIlheran has a great piece following a visit to Wisconsin by New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

We and Jersey reached this pass not because public employees are greedy. They aren’t. They just took the offered deal. Were your boss to say you could get premium-free health, free pension, high pay and ironclad security, of course you’d take it. I would.

Nor is it because unions are greedy, exactly. Their purpose is to maximize what members get, and they’re doing it. Where they can be faulted is that they’ve become huge players in politics, electing the officials with whom they bargain.

The main fault lies with those elected officials. They have, over decades, tended to give in, buying themselves peace with taxpayer money. Both Republicans and Democrats have been among the spineless.

… Unless fiscal conservatives who are willing to push hard on labor costs and spending make it into office, the public sector will ever more resemble a racket existing chiefly for the enrichment of public servants. …

It is truly amazing to watch a politician who demonstrates responsibility and accountability. Jonathan Tobin blogs about another instance where Governor Chris Christie is halting the spending spree by New Jersey’s government.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is still acting as if he means what he says about controlling the costs of government. By canceling the long-planned construction of a second commuter tunnel under the Hudson River today, Christie has reaffirmed the principle that government should not try to do more than it can afford. A close look at the finances of the scheme showed that cost overruns were likely to send the bill on the project to as much as $14 billion, almost $6 billion more than the original estimate. That means that New Jersey — which is to say, New Jersey’s taxpayers — would have to pay at least $8 billion of that amount, the remainder being contributed by New York’s Port Authority and the federal government. But in the absence of givebacks by the state’s civil-service unions, whose contracts and pensions threaten to send the state into the red even if the tunnel were not to be paid for, Christie said no, to the utter consternation of the unions, the rest of the political class, and New York Times’s columnist Paul Krugman.

Other politicians (like Christie’s predecessor Jon Corzine, who authorized ground breaking on the project without thinking about the costs to the taxpayers) are shocked by Christie’s chutzpah. The idea that government should only undertake those projects it can pay for without having to further bilk the taxpayers is considered a shocking concept.

Krugman, the Times editorial page, the unions, and many of the politicians who have worked for this project all think the mere fact that the tunnel is needed justifies any amount of debt to build it. They also seem to think that worrying about where the extra $6 billion will come from is just silly. …

Peter Schiff writes that the time for government inaction is now.

…In Crash Proof, I talked about how our economy suffered from the co-morbid diseases of asset bubbles, excessive debt and consumption, and insufficient savings, capital investment, and production. These conditions did not arise as a result of market forces, but from foolish monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies that distorted market forces. The proper cure would have been to remove the distortions and allow the markets to correct.

…By electing to bail out the financial sector, prop up housing prices, allow excess spending and borrowing to continue, and maintain superfluous government and service-sector jobs, the government has pushed our economy to the edge of a very dangerous precipice.

The right choice is to admit past mistakes and reverse course. The Fed must raise interest rates aggressively, shrink its bloated balance sheet, and allow the real recession to finally run its course. It will be much more painful now than it would have been in 2008, but at least this time the pain will end and real recovery will take hold. By forcing the federal and state governments to slash spending, sound monetary policy will allow market forces to rebuild a solid foundation upon which future prosperity may be built.

The wrong choice is for the Fed to continue quantitative easing as planned, allowing the government to grow at the expense of the economy. This will widen the economic imbalances that lie at the root of our problems. As a side effect, the US dollar will continue spiraling downward as it becomes clear to foreign creditors that the Fed has no interest in protecting their investments. A weaker dollar will lead to higher inflation and higher interest rates, which will make the Fed’s task that much more difficult.  

In the end, our bubble economy will not just deflate, it will burst. The dollar will collapse, consumer prices will skyrocket, real credit will completely evaporate, millions more will lose their jobs, and our economy will change in ways few of us can imagine. Our standard of living will plummet and legions of middle- and upper-class Americans will be impoverished. It is not a pretty picture, but unfortunately, it’s the one our government is painting. Unfortunately, we are running out of time to change artists.

David Goldman has a short post on the lost government jobs.

The biggest contributor to the 95,000 reduction in non-farm payrolls was declining state and local government employment. I’ve been warning about that all year. Municipal finances were an extension of the real estate boom and are having their Wile E. Coyote moment.

We’re in a miserable meta-equilibrium. The collapse of the Obama administration is good for the economy — it can’t do any more damage — but the Republicans will not be in any position to roll back the damage already done, for example, Obamacare. That leaves us in a 2% or so growth environment.

David Harsanyi tells Republicans not to give into the Left’s fear tactics on trade protectionism. And Harsanyi makes a key point that tariffs amount to taxes that Americans will pay on imports.

…We’re losing manufacturing jobs. Scary stuff. Which candidate is going to explain to the voters that outsourcing has allowed the American workforce to trade up to better jobs, and allows companies to grow their businesses and expand their workforces?

Which candidate is going to point out that manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 20 years because there has been an incredible rise in the productivity of the American worker? The output at U.S. factories was 37 percent higher in 2009 than it was in 1993.

…”Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell,” Rudy Giuliani once explained, near perfectly. “That’s the view of the future. What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past.” …

Jeff Jacoby also makes logical points against protectionism. We have featured writers who note that government regulations stifle manufacturing in the US. Blaming the Chinese for the government’s anti-business practices is the easy way out, and politicians are happy to have a scapegoat.

THE POLICIES of the Chinese government make it possible for Americans to acquire a vast array of products at affordable prices. For that high crime and misdemeanor, the US House of Representatives voted last week to punish China.

The vote on HR 2378, which would authorize punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States — which include everything from clothing, furniture, and toys to refrigerators, computers, and sporting goods — was a lopsided 348 to 79….

…But what exactly is so awful about selling good stuff cheap to tens of millions of US consumers?

…The protectionists claim that forcing China to revalue the yuan would boost US manufacturers, adding as many as a million new jobs to American payrolls. That too is debatable. Economist Mark Perry argues that it is the breathtaking increase in US manufacturing productivity, not the value of Chinese currency, that is largely responsible for the disappearance of so many manufacturing jobs in recent years.

Not many firms welcome tough competition, so it isn’t hard to understand why US exporters who compete directly with Chinese firms want to see Congress rig the trade by slapping punitive tariffs on imports made in China. Their concern is with their bottom line; they aren’t thinking about the millions of American households that would be forced to contend with higher prices. …

Jennifer Rubin follows up on the BP oil spill commission’s findings, and comments on Obama’s lack of administrative judgment.

Some on the right, joining the president’s usual defenders, were sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill. A president isn’t all-powerful. We can’t expect him to prevent or repair all mishaps. True, but there were well-founded criticisms (from the affected governors, for starters) about the federal government’s response. It turns out Obama did indeed mismanage things from start to finish:

The Obama administration was slow to ramp up its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, then overreacted as public criticism turned the disaster into a political liability, the staff of a special commission investigating the disaster say in papers released Wednesday.

…And then there is the most egregious error — the drilling ban, which was legally suspect and economically disastrous for the region.

It is true, as in so many areas of policy, that expectations for the president are unreasonably high. For that, he has only himself and his advisers to blame, for constructing a messianic campaign and operating with an alarming degree of hubris. But the “unfair expectations” defense is a bit of a dodge. In truth, Obama and his team do not perform well in a crisis, lack management skills, and repeatedly fail to gauge public reaction. That’s not a matter of unreasonable expectations; that is a lack of competency and a failure to meet the minimum requirements of the job.

In the Weekly Standard, John McCormack reports on more Obami bad behavior aimed at their political opposition.

The inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department will investigate the allegation that an Obama administration official may have improperly accessed and discussed private taxpayer information.

At an August 27 press briefing, a senior administration official, who appears to have been Austan Goolsbee, discussed the tax status of Koch Industries–a private company that has come under fire from top Democrats, including President Obama himself, for funding conservative and libertarian political causes.

…But on September 24, Republican senators wrote in a letter to the inspector general that they were unsatisfied with this explanation. Senator Chuck Grassley and other Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee requested that the inspector general look into the “very serious allegation that Administration employees may have improperly accessed and disclosed confidential taxpayer information.” …

Instapundit posts one reader’s response to a Chinese dissident winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

UPDATE: Reader David Gerstman writes:

Last year Thomas Friedman was writing that America needed to be more like China and adopt one-party democracy.

Two weeks ago he told us that America needs to be more like China and adopt green technologies.

Yes, this Thomas Friedman.

So now can we expect a Thomas Friedman column telling America to adopt the policy of harrassing the families of Nobel Prize winning dissidents? I guess not, we don’t have Nobel Prize winning dissidents here; political opposition is legal here. Still do you think that we might see a Friedman column soon condemning China? Or is China’s enlightened leadership above criticism in Tom’s benighted opinion?

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Marty Peretz shows how the president’s efforts have little positive effect outside the US either.

Reuters reports on the brotherly friendship of Tehran and Damascus. It is not a new relationship. In fact, it goes back many years. But since Barack Obama imagines he can change the world by telling his supporters that this is what he’s going to do he sent messengers and missives to the two tyrannies. Nothing came of these courtships, and certainly nothing came of the American effort to get Iran to cease its pursuit of nukes.  

…Almost nobody notices the disasters of U.S. policy outside our borders because the disasters within our borders are so climactic. One of the president’s most ambitious ventures was to bring Syria to heel. He sent many emissaries to Dr. Assad. Their visits all flopped.

But Obama is still pressing Israel to leave the Golan Heights, and Secretary Clinton is trying get Syria to soften the views of the Palestinians. The president and the secretary of state don’t recognize failure. So they court more humiliation.

We have more musings from David Warren. He could be channeling his inner Christopher Hitchens as he writes about religious violence.

…Western security forces are at present trying to prevent anticipated Mumbai-style “soft target” attacks on perhaps five European airports. Should such attacks proceed, we will blame lapses in the same security operations. We will, so far as we are politically correct, avoid talk about the motives for such attacks — which are drawn by the terrorists themselves from religious teachings, principally in the Koran.

Now, if these terrorists were only Buddhists, or Christians, or followers of any of the other religions of mankind, we could openly discuss the connections between ideas and consequences.

David Harsanyi thinks that any power grabs by this administration should be looked at closely.

…My unease over the case of Anwar Awlaki — an American citizen penciled in for targeted assassination by the Obama administration — isn’t based on any conspiratorial daydreams about Barack Obama wanting to randomly knock off citizens.

There is no doubt, in fact, that Awlaki is a despicable character, a member of radical Islamic networks, dangerous and deserving of a most gruesome fate.

In other words, the administration has a straightforward case to make. Yet, when Awlaki’s father asked a court to enjoin the president from killing his despicable son, the administration asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the case by invoking “state secrets.”

With that, the Obama administration argued that the president should be empowered to order the execution of a U.S. citizen — outside a war zone and without exhibiting an imminent threat to other citizens — without any oversight from the judicial or legislative branches of government. And by using the protection of state secrets argument, the administration is also asserting that the public has no right to know why. …

…Clearly, there are legitimate uses for state secrets during a time of war. But let’s face it, we are in perpetual war. If conservatives oppose the intrusive domestic policy of this administration, it defies logic for them not to question a unilateral decision that abuses state power — even if the decision is helpful in a cause they deeply believe in. Does the cause of national security overpower any concern? …

From CNN, Gloria Borger gives a liberal’s view of why the Dems are doing so badly. She understands that the push for Obamacare was a bad move, but she thinks too much of the opinions of political strategists.

…”If we had been cutting deals [with the Democrats], our base voters would have deserted us,” admits one top GOP campaign operative. “We had to prove who we were to get back on the map, and back in their good graces.”

So they did. If conservatives were disappointed that Bush was a big spender, these Republicans would unanimously oppose spending, including the stimulus package. If voters were wary of big government, they would rail against any new government, especially health care.

“This was a matter of proving to our base that we could be trusted again,” says this strategist.

So even when Congress debated financial reform, the GOP felt no danger in opposing it. And in the end, Obama got little credit. Why? The populism that fueled the 2008 campaign has been replaced with the anti-government sentiment of 2010. They don’t trust the government to fix anything, even evil Wall Street.

The GOP frontal attacks were relentless. The Obama White House was wary of allowing its “post-partisan” president to get too partisan. “[Obama] let the Republicans beat him up for far too long without counterpunching,” says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin. “That’s not happening anymore, but we let them [the GOP] get away with framing the debate for too long.”

The problem for Obama was twofold: His ambitious agenda fed into the GOP narrative. And the GOP narrative was designed to reflect the public’s overwhelming view of government — ineffective and untrustworthy. …

While it is interesting to see how a mainstream lib like Borger looks at the Dems failures, her take leaves a lot to be desired. For example she writes as if the GOP leadership developed a set of cojones only after watching a town hall meeting revolt against Arlen Specter in August 2009. In truth, in one of their finest hours, the leadership of the party opposed the $787 billion stimulus plan right from the very start of the new administration as you will see in this ABC News story dated February 13th 2009 on the bill’s passage in the Senate. In fact, other than three squishy RINOs in the Senate, all Republicans voted against the “stimulus” that has proven to be useless. We only have the opening ‘graphs of the article, but you can click on the link if you want to read it all.

… Three Republicans who supported the measure on earlier votes once again cast their votes for the stimulus package. And, as expected, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, provided the necessary 60th vote for passage. He cast his vote at 10:46 p.m. after the Senate held the vote open for several hours while he flew back from his home state.

Voting in the Senate started at 5:30 p.m., but Brown was attending his mother’s wake at the time and could not secure a commercial flight back to Washington. Eager to ensure the bill’s passage, the White House stepped in and arranged for Brown’s flight back.

Brown now will return to Ohio on an Air Force plane for his mother’s funeral Saturday.

Only 98 senators voted because there is no second senator from Minnesota yet seated, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who has brain cancer but came to the Capitol earlier in the week to vote on procedural motions, did not vote.

An earlier Senate version of the bill passed the 61-37. In that vote, as with today’s, the only Republicans to support the bill were Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

House Republicans Balk

Earlier today, the House passed the stimulus bill by a vote of 246-183, although a week of negotiations and lobbying by President Obama failed to convince a single Republican to support the bill. …

In the WSJ, William McGurn advises the president to prove he cares about education.

That deafening roar you hear—that’s the sound of Barack Obama’s silence on the future of school reform in the District of Columbia. And if he doesn’t break it soon, he may become the first president in two decades to have left Washington’s children with fewer chances for a good school than when he started. …

…This debate over education is now coming to a head in Washington. In the first months after he took office, Mr. Obama kept quiet when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) killed off a popular voucher program that allowed low-income D.C. moms and dads to send their kids to the same kind of schools where the president sends his own daughters (Sidwell Friends). This was followed by the president’s silence last month during the D.C. Democratic primary, in which the mayor who appointed the district’s reform-minded schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, went down to defeat. …

…In the past, Mr. Obama has himself spoken honestly about the obstacles to reform, including the close relationship between the teachers unions and his party. This past weekend, Mr. Chavous, now head of the Black Alliance for Educational Opportunity, published an open letter in the New York Times saying it’s time for the president to walk the walk. Along with the recent release of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” Davis Guggenheim’s superb new film on the children robbed of their dreams by the failing public school system, it all adds to the sense that the moment for Mr. Obama to make himself heard is now.

Tony Blankley thinks we may be at the beginning of a monumental change in government.

The New York Times has written in explaining why the political parties have lost the confidence of the public: “Their machinery of intrigue, their shuffling evasions, the dodges, the chicanery and the deception of their leaders have excited universal disgust, and have created a general readiness in the public mind for any new organization that shall promise to shun their vices.”

The New York Evening Post, in explaining the same condition has written that the people “saw parties without any difference contending for power, for the sake of power. They saw politics made a profession, and public plunder an employment. … They beheld our public works the plaything of a rotten dynasty, enriching gamblers, and purchasing power at our expense.”

The dates of those articles were November and December 1855 (See “The Origins of the Republican Party” by William E. Gienapp, Oxford University Press, 1987).

When those words were written, the Whigs and the Democrats were the two great parties. The Whigs soon went extinct, the dominant Democrats went on to lose every White House election between 1860 and 1912 except for the elections of Grover Cleveland. The Republicans came into being and won all the those elections the Democrats lost.

I have a sense that we may be in the early stages of a similar transformation of our party system as 155 years ago, when the Jacksonian party system failed. …

Toby Harnden comments on an unusual campaign ad from Christine O’Donnell.

…O’Donnell had many weaknesses as a candidate. But  is that she is, as the ad states, like “you” – an ordinary American who’s struggled to pay the bills, done some silly things (dated a witch in college!), exaggerated her CV a tad and been looked down on by elites. Despite being in her 40s, she has a little girl lost kind of demeanour that, as The Other McCain points out, makes her “awfully hard to hate”.

Again and again on the campaign trail, I hear statements about Sarah Palin – the harder-edged prototype for O’Donnell – along the lines of  “when I first heard her, I thought, ‘She’s like me’”. That ability to get people to identify with you on such an elemental level in politics is a powerful thing (though not necessarily enough in itself to win national or even statewide elections). …

…Her new ad says: I’m just like you ordinary Americans and when they’re mocking me they’re mocking you. Which is why Christine O’Donnell might just be crazy like a fox.

From the Economist’s Democracy In America Blog, W. W. blogs about the ad.

BY NOW, you’ve probably seen, or heard tell of, Christine O’Donnell’s new campaign ad in which the Republican Senate candidate from Delaware begins saying, “I’m not a witch”. Ms O’Donnell issues this denial softly, with an air of wearied but good-humoured bemusement. “I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you”, she clarifies—just an ordinary Jane, a regular ol’ non-witch.

This ad is delightful. There’s something inherently great about watching a Senate candidate earnestly deny that she is a witch. But is this ad another ridiculous nail in Ms O’Donnell’s coffin? I don’t think so. In fact, like the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, I think it does just what it is supposed to do.

I take Ms O’Donnell’s message to be that she has been made the target of all manner of scurrilous slander, so desperate are her opponents to keep her from office. But why? As she says, “I’ll go to Washington and do what you’d do”, and this is terrifying to corrupt establishment politicians who subsist on dirty tricks and back-room deals. They’re scared of common people like me and you, Ms O’Donnell seems to say, hence all the bizarre stuff they’re saying about me, which is what they’d say about you were you in my position, which you are, because I’m you. …

John Stossel has an eye-opener on some of the fallout from Obamacare.

…Health insurers Wellpoint, Cigna, Aetna, Humana and CoventryOne will stop writing policies for all children. Why? Because Obamacare requires that they insure already sick children for the same price as well children.

That sounds compassionate, but — in case Obamacare fanatics haven’t noticed — sick children need more medical care. Insurance is about risk, and already sick children are 100 percent certain to be sick when their coverage begins. So if the government mandates that insurance companies cover sick children at the lower well-children price, insurers will quit the market rather than sandbag their shareholders. This is not callousness — it’s fiduciary responsibility. Insurance companies are not charities. So, thanks to the compassionate Congress and president, parents of sick children will be saved from expensive insurance — by being unable to obtain any insurance! That’s how government compassion works.

In 2014, the same rule will kick in for adults. You now know what to expect. …

The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Mario Vargas Llosa who was the subject of a WSJ Interview in June 2007 which found its way into Pickings June 24, 2007.

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Michael Barone reviews recent polls that could indicate historic change in Congressional seats. He also looks at a few specific races.

…However, Gallup also shows the results for two different turnout models. Under its “high turnout model” Republicans lead 53%-40%. Under its “low turnout model” Republicans lead 56%-38%.

These two numbers, if translated into popular votes in the 435 congressional districts, suggest huge gains for Republicans and a Republican House majority the likes of which we have not seen since the election cycles of 1946 or even 1928. For months, people have been asking me if this year looks like ’94. My response is that the poll numbers suggest it looks like 1994, when Republicans gained 52 seats in a House of 435 seats. Or perhaps somewhat better for Republicans and worse for Democrats. The Gallup high turnout and low turnout numbers suggest it looks like 1894, when Republicans gained more than 100 seats in a House of approximately 350 seats.

Having said that, caution is in order. Gallup’s numbers tend to be volatile. Its procedures for projecting likely turnout are very sensitive to transitory responses. They’re useful in identifying shifts in the balance of enthusiasm. But they can overstate the swings to one party or the other.  Scott Rasmussen’s latest generic ballot numbers among likely voters show Republicans with only a 45%-42% lead, much less than the 48%-38% lead he reported two days ago. That’s based on a three-day average, indicating Democrats fared relatively well on the most recent night of interviewing. Perhaps Barack Obama’s attempts to gin up enthusiasm among Democratic voters are bearing fruit. Or perhaps one night’s results were an anomaly.  …

John Fund comments on the change in tune from the Dems.

…Democrats I spoke with last night downplayed the Gallup numbers, pointing out that Gallup’s surveys have been somewhat volatile this year and other polls (such as those by Scott Rasmussen) show a much smaller GOP edge among likely voters, on the order of three percentage points. That would translate into a GOP House gain of 35 to 40 seats, hovering just around what Republican would need to take control of the Speaker’s gavel.

But regardless of where likely voters are right now, it’s a strange political year when Democrats start consoling themselves with Scott Rasmussen, whose polls they have long disparaged as being biased towards Republicans.

Nile Gardiner also blogs about the polling news, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

Over the weekend I wrote a piece on how some liberal elites, not least at The New York Times, remain in denial over the scale of the disaster the Left is facing at the polls in November. Well, I hope they’re taking a close look today at the latest Gallup poll, which is enough to make any White House adviser weep.

Gallup’s new survey of more than 3,000 adults, including over 2,700 registered voters (1,800 of whom are highly likely to vote), shows Republicans with “a double-digit advantage” under two separate scenarios – lower and higher turnout. Under the higher turnout scenario, the GOP lead is 13 percentage points, while under the lower turnout scenario it is even higher, at 18 points…

…If Gallup’s poll prove correct on November 2nd, which of course remains nearly a month away, the scale of the Republican victory will be absolutely huge. There is no doubt about it – Gallup’s latest survey is explosive, and points to history in the making for the latest conservative revolution to hit America.

 Rep. Paul Ryan is interviewed by National Review’s Robert Costa about fiscal reform.

Earlier this year, Rep. Paul Ryan, a 40-year-old Republican congressman from Wisconsin, published “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” his blueprint for balancing the budget. Despite much fanfare, Ryan’s proposal — which rigorously tackles federal entitlements, taxes, and spending — was left out of the House GOP’s “Pledge to America.” The omission, he says, does not signal a retreat by him or his party. …

…Ryan says that his GOP colleagues on the Budget Committee are stalwart in their commitment to entitlement reform. “The culture on the Budget Committee is great,” he says. “Anybody who studies this problem or digs deep into the numbers is seriously frightened about the future of this country. They realize the urgency of the moment. After a sober review of the fiscal condition of this country, most people just put politics aside.”

“I spend a lot of my time looking at these baselines,” Ryan says. “Most people don’t know this stuff. Most people in Congress don’t understand just how quickly our fiscal situation has deteriorated. And now the Left thinks that you can keep raising taxes, as if there were no consequences to that.” To fight back, Ryan says Republicans need to focus on two things: “economic growth and reforming the structure of spending.” …

Robert Samuelson discusses the importance of entrepreneurs to the economy.

…American workers are roughly split between firms with less or more than 500 employees. In healthy times, older companies of all sizes do create lots of jobs. But they also lose jobs, as some businesses shrink or vanish. On balance, job creation and destruction cancel each other. All the net job increases occur among startups, finds a study of the 1992-2005 period by economists John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the Census Bureau. Because most startups are necessarily small, this gives a statistical edge to tinier firms in job creation. But, the study says, the effect entirely reflects the impact of new businesses.

… Panner, a registered Democrat, criticizes complex accounting, employment, and health care regulations imposed by federal and state agencies that consume scarce investment funds and time. The fragmented system of business oversight imposes a bureaucratic bias, perhaps unintended, on startups. Any one rule or tax may seem justifiable; but the collective effect can be crushing.

It’s all about risk-taking. The good news is that the entrepreneurial instinct seems deeply ingrained in the nation’s economic culture. Americans like to create; they’re ambitious; many want to be “their own bosses”; many crave fame and fortune. (Panner is already involved with a new startup, TownFlier. It has five employees.) The bad news is that venture capital for startups is scarce and political leaders seem largely oblivious to burdensome government policies. This needs to be addressed. Entrepreneurship won’t instantly cure America’s jobs’ deficit, but without it, there will be no strong recovery.

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David Harsanyi comments on a controversy in the Denver Jewish community.

As a Jew, I’m often asked why my fellow tribesmen are so predictably left-wing. And since we Jews are in constant telepathic contact, I can answer the question. For Jews, liberalism isn’t an ideological choice; it’s a spiritual stand-in. The religion of the average American Jew is liberalism.

So when we talk about the “Jewish community,” we mean a rock-ribbed flank of the Democratic Party. When a spokesperson from a national organization lectures us about “core Jewish values,” he is referring to secular left-wing orthodoxy. …

…Now, I wouldn’t have much problem with boycotts or ignoring Bible thumpers, but philosophical diversity and consistent indignation are evidently not Jewish “values.”

Where, for instance, are complaints from the 80 percent of American Jews who support a president who actively pressures Israel into agreements that threaten her existence, and at the same time bows to robed princes and pleads for the friendship of the most illiberal nations in the world?

Where were calls for boycotts of the Democratic National Convention, where among other Jew-friendly participants like Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson, the gregarious Al Sharpton mingled with the Jewish core values crowd…

George Will reviews a new book on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s letters, and shares some excerpts.

…”Everyone,” Moynihan liked to say, “is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Now, thanks to Steven Weisman’s meticulous editing of “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary,” everybody is entitled to Moynihan’s opinions. Some tidbits from the feast:

By 1966, the civil rights movement’s task was to become “a protest movement against situations rather than statutes” — to change from upholding legal rights in the South to addressing problems of class in the North.

…The 1972 presidential campaign “was a routine exercise: Republican moralism, Democratic hysteria, voter indifference.” …

P.J. O’Rourke is interviewed in the NY Post about his new book and more.

…”Long before I was ever a war correspondent, my first experience with pieces of dead bodies — was at LaGuardia. It was Christmas 1975, and I was upstairs when the bomb went off in the locker on the level below. Killed 11 people. The presumption was that it was Puerto Rican nationalists. They were the bombers of the day.

“So I’m sitting at the bar at LaGuardia, waiting for my plane. Ka-WAMMMM! I had just ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks. Bartender turns to me, says, ‘You want to make that a double?’ Swear to God.”

So O’Rourke, whose cousin lived a couple of blocks from the West 11th Street townhouse where several members of the Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up in 1970 and whose girlfriend was in the crowd when National Guardsmen killed five student protesters at Kent State two months later, is amused by chatter about “polarization” today. “Bull – - – -,” he says. “Anyone who lived through the Civil Rights era knows this is nothing compared to the polarization — anger, hatred, murder — that went on then. Or to take a better example, 1860. That’s polarized. This is arguing.”

O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. …

Rob Long, in the National Review, writes witty commentary on the pessimism of the Green fascists. Since the left wants the government out of the bedroom, we want the creeps out of our bathrooms.

…To an environmental bureaucrat, the world looks better when it’s dingier. Bright lights are too festive. Powerful showerheads are too luxurious. To maintain the proper downcast attitude, they want to make sure we’re all a little less comfortable.

It’s all about less with them. As far as the environmental movement is concerned, we’re running out of everything — polar icecaps, sea turtles, crude oil — and the trick is to cut our appetites down to size, to stop wanting to stand under a gushing showerhead in a bright morning bathroom and think, I can handle what’s coming at me today.

It’s not about showerheads and wattage. It’s about optimism. Either you think a more prosperous world is a good thing — that prosperity and ingenuity can solve most of our pressing problems — or you don’t. Either you think that being able to afford an expensive showerhead is a component of a complicated web of incentives designed to inspire the next Thomas Edison to invent something useful — like, say, a battery-powered car or a brighter energy-saving light bulb — or you think that we’re done, we’ve invented everything already and we need to divvy up a shrinking pie. For the Left, there are no light-bulb moments in the future. …

In Media-ite, we learn Fox News is happy to be living rent-free inside the president’s head.

News Corp’s recent donation to the Republican Governors Association given editorial positions at, in particular, Fox News certainly turned heads among Democrats and gave President Obama even more fodder to challenge the company. Yet in light of all the criticism, it seems that the only thing they’re surprised about at Fox News is that the president cares about them at all.

Speaking with an unnamed executive while researching the motivations behind News Corps’ donation, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg mined a gemstone of a quote that expresses something quite far from the fear or concern a news organization in any other country would feel when the current White House administration is so preoccupied with what’s going in within:

An executive at Fox News who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity expressed “astonishment” over Mr. Obama’s focus on the network. “We are so in his head,” he said. “Can you believe with all the other things going on in this world he’s preoccupied with Fox News?” …

Scott Adams takes a perverse view of things.

One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products. The problem with this analysis is that young adults have most of the guns and muscles. So isn’t the younger generation complicit in stealing from itself? …

Last, to close out our night of humor, we have an article from the Jerusalem Post about Nancy Pelosi’s claim she will continue to be speaker of the house.

… In the weekly briefing, Pelosi said that she believes the Democrats have a chance to retain their congressional majority. A week before, speaking to a women’s group in New York, Pelosi said that she “fully expects to be speaker of the House five weeks from now,” the paper reported. …

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Jennifer Rubin blogs about the Middle East peace process. Says that even liberals see what is happening.

Even Richard Cohen has figured out that it is not Bibi’s intransigence but Obama’s incompetence that is at the root of the non-peace-talks impasse. He writes:

“Obama ought to confer with someone who knows the region — and listen to him or her. Trouble is, many experts have told him that his emphasis on settlements was the wrong way to go. As late as last week and the succession of meetings held at the United Nations, it was clear that Netanyahu would not ask his Cabinet to extend the settlement freeze. Yet not only did the White House reject this warning, the president repeated his call for a freeze. “Our position on this issue is well-known,” Obama told the U.N. General Assembly. “We believe that the moratorium should be extended.” Well, it wasn’t. …

…The pattern repeats itself – Obama beats up on Israel, fails to deliver concessions to the PA,  and then commences begging with the parties not to break off talks and embarrass the U.S. president. Granted, Abbas is no Anwar Sadat, but Obama has made both himself and the PA president look weak and ineffective. …”

In Contentions, Evelyn Gordon shows how Obama’s past actions have hurt his current negotiations with Israel.

I suspect Netanyahu resorted to this flimsy excuse because the real reason is too undiplomatic to state publicly: Obama, by his own actions, has shown he views presidential promises as made to be broken. And Israel’s government is loath to incur the real damage of extending the freeze (which J.E. Dyer ably explained here) in exchange for promises that will be conveniently forgotten when they come due.

Israel, after all, received its last presidential promise just six years ago, in exchange for leaving Gaza. In writing, George W. Bush said the Palestinian Authority must end incitement and terror, voiced support for Israel “as a Jewish state,” vowed to “strengthen Israel’s capability” to defend itself, and said any Israeli-Palestinian deal should leave Israel with the settlement blocs and “defensible borders” and resettle Palestinian refugees in the Palestinian state rather than Israel. He also promised orally that Israel could continue building in the settlement blocs.

But when Obama took office, he denied the oral pledge’s very existence, infuriating even Israeli leftists. As Haaretz’s Aluf Benn wrote, it was possible to argue the policy should change, “but not to lie.” …

John Steele Gordon says that the Dems are the butt of jokes by liberal comedians.

Jon Stewart tears you to shreds, and the audience eats it up big-time (h/t Instapundit). For someone like President Obama, with an ego the size of a Midwestern state, this must be very, very painful to watch. For the rest of us, it’s a lot more hilarious than Steven Colbert’s recent Congressional testimony.

But because all great humor, political or otherwise, must be grounded in truth and the realities of human nature, it must also be very frightening to Obama, in particular, and Democrats, in general. When the people in a mainstream audience fall out of their chairs when Jon Stewart suggests that the slogan for the Democratic campaign this fall should be “We came, we saw, we sucked,” that’s a pretty good indication that the Democrats have lost the country and no longer control the political narrative.

I don’t think the Democrats will be laughing on Nov. 2.

Victor Davis Hanson comments on the Obami’s divisiveness.

…In Obama’s world, there is no such thing as legitimate skepticism of his policies, even though they seem to millions to be radical and contrary to the notions of limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom, notions that have long set us apart from our Western constitutional cousins in Europe. Instead (as can be seen in his latest Rolling Stone interview), those who oppose his policies — from the tea-party groups that resent his background to that destructive force on the national scene, Fox News — represent darker forces.

Looking back at 20 months, we see this Nixonian them-vs.-us world in which good progressives battle against those who make more than $250,000 per year; greedy doctors taking out tonsils; police who stereotype and act stupidly; Arizonan xenophobes who snatch kids out for ice cream; Islamophobes who would deny constitutional rights to Muslim moderates at Ground Zero; and racists who have traditionally stood in the way (mutatis mutandis, as they do now) of freeing the slaves.

All this psychodrama is beneath a president. It is a prescription for tearing the country in two — and about the dumbest thing you could do just weeks before an election.

Peter Wehner has some Rolling Stone quotes from the president and opines on what they may signify.

Barack Obama’s recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine paints a portrait of a president under siege and lashing out.

For example, the Tea Party is, according to Obama, the tool of “very powerful, special-interest lobbies” — except for those in the Tea Party whose motivations are “a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president.”

Fox News, the president informs us, “is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Then there are the Republicans, who don’t oppose Obama on philosophical grounds but decided they were “better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve problems.” Now there are exceptions — those two or three GOPers who Obama has been able to “pick off” and, by virtue of supporting Obama, “wanted to do the right thing” — meaning that the rest of the GOP wants to do the wrong thing. …

In the WaPo, Michael Gerson notes the arrogance in Obama’s criticism of everyone.

President Obama’s latest interview with Rolling Stone magazine is revealing precisely because it is so typical. Everyone — really just about everyone in American politics — is chided, challenged, instructed, judged or admonished in one way or another. The president’s condescension is universal.

…Some of these criticisms may be legitimate. Piled atop each other in a long interview, they indicate a president disappointed with a nation that can’t manage to live up to his own high standard of public service. The professor issues his grade: all of us need improvement.

A critic who is angry can be confronted as an equal. A critic who is disappointed is asserting his superiority. The method is inseparable from smugness. The view from Olympus may be broad, but it makes a leader distant from the ants below. …

Rick Richman counters Obama’s self-pitying argument that he inherited this mess. Not to mention that Obama has compounded the problems.

As the President and Vice President whine about the whining of their shrinking “base,” as being insufficiently appreciative of the superhuman efforts to confront our problems, they might remember the old saying that “in times like these, we should remember there have always been times like these.” Victor Davis Hanson writes that the problems Obama has faced have not, in fact, been worse than those that other presidents confronted as they entered the presidency:

A recession and 9/11 were not easy in 2001. And 18% interest, 18% inflation, 7% unemployment, and gas lines by 1981 greeted Reagan. Truman took over with a war … a wrecked Asia and Europe, a groundswell of communism, a climate of panic at home, and a soon to be nuclear Soviet Union … capped off soon by a war in Korea. …

John Podhoretz has some positively weird quotes from the prez.

Here are some things Barack Obama said this evening to Democratic donors (I quote from Mark Knoller’s Twitter feed):

“Now’s not the time to quit…it took time to free the slaves…ultimately we’ll make progress.”

“I need you to be fired up.”

“There better not be an enthusiasm gap, people.”

Ordinarily, I don’t think it’s wise to second-guess the communications or rallying skills of a man who garnered 69 million votes. I don’t know if I ran for office that I’d get 6900 votes. But wow. This is some terrible, terrible communicating.

I mean: It took time to free the slaves??? …

Byron York reports that there is no rest for the weary.

It’s often remarked that President Obama has enjoyed a number of getaways, vacations, and mini-vacations during his 20 months in office. But at a Democratic fundraiser Thursday night, the president said, “I’d appreciate a little break.”

…According to the pool report, Obama thanked Phillips for the work he and his wife have done for Team Obama. Then the president mentioned that Phillips and Douglass have an opulent place in Italy and wondered why there had been no invitation to visit. “I’d appreciate a little break and some Tuscan sun,” the president said, according to the pool report. “Some pasta. I can use it.”

Obama reportedly spoke about 15 minutes. After the dinner, he left the Phillips/Douglass home and headed to DAR Constitutional Hall, where he addressed the Democratic National Committee rap concert/fundraiser. Then, it was back to the White House by 9:45 pm, where the president presumably was able to get a little rest.

Toby Harnden looks at Florida’s senate race. He notes that no one is talking about Obama. And happily, Crist’s defection isn’t hurting Rubio.

Representative Kendrick Meek, the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in the November 2nd mid-terms, also neglected to let Mr Obama’s name pass his lips during an appearance with the former vice-president in a union hall.

…Two years ago, every Democrat in the country was invoking Mr Obama’s name as they hoped to ride on his coat-tails to electoral victory. This year, he is a near-pariah, with many of the party’s candidates doing everything they can to distance themselves from him.

…This year, Mr Meek is trailing badly in a three-horse race. Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate, backed by the anti-government Tea Party, was initially viewed as too Right-wing for Florida. He now has a seemingly unassailable 13-point lead, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll.

Behind Mr Rubio, who is on 46 points, is Governor Charlie Crist. The Florida governor, a centrist who pulled out of the Republican primary race when it became clear he would lose, is on 33 points, with Mr Meek at just 18. …

David Warren discusses the possible computer strike on Iran’s nuclear reactor.

It would appear that a significant thing has happened — an act of war with extraordinary consequences — without anyone getting visibly upset. Perhaps I am understating: but the cyber worm attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Bushehr may well have put it out of commission as effectively as any cruise missile strike by the Israeli or U.S. air force.

We cannot know the extent of damage. Iran is a mostly closed society; the Russians who designed and largely built that reactor have been operating no differently than they did during the Cold War; Pentagon sources seem themselves puzzled; Israelis, if they know something, are not telling; and so on. We can infer that something very bad has happened to the Bushehr reactor from scattered reports, but cannot be sure what that was, or if the cyber worm used to make the bad thing happen was (as various computer security experts have speculated) “Stuxnet.”

They became aware of Stuxnet several months ago, and immediately began trying to reverse engineer, to discover how it works and what it is meant to do. Also, mapping reports of its appearance as sleeping “malware” in thousands of the world’s major industrial computer control systems. (A peculiar concentration was found in Iran, with secondary concentrations in Pakistan and India.) …

David Goldman isn’t sure if the computer strike on Iran is true, but that it is plausible, and reminds us something similar has happened before.

Except for one established fact — that it’s been done before — I wouldn’t touch the Iranian cyberwar story with a barge pole. Lies, half-truths and misinformation surround live intelligence operations like nested hedge-rows, and to ask anyone truly in the know about such things is the equivalent of saying, “Lie to me.” The Israeli spook site Debka (entirely unreliable) reports that the damage to Iranian industrial controls from the “Stuxnet” worm is serious, citing Iranian media threats that Iran will wage a “long-term war” on Israel and the United States–the presumed malefactors–in retaliation. …

…The first documented large-scale cyber attack produced one of America’s most stunning covert victories of the Cold War. In mid-1982, a Siberian natural gas pumping station exploded with the force of three kilotons of TNT. …

No doubt there is an element of psy-ops. Computer controls are finicky at best, and if the Iranian systems are compromised in some way, they cannot know how many “logic bombs” will go off in the future, or which of their IT people might be wandering about with a USB drive containing additional worms. I have no way of sorting truth from psywar. How cool would it be if the story checked out?

In case you need another reason to clean out Congress, Andrew Phillips and Pete Donohue, in the NY Daily News have a story. 

The city will change the lettering on every single street sign – at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million – because the feds don’t like the font.

Street names will change from all capital letters to a combination of upper and lower case on roads across the country thanks to the pricey federal regulation, officials said Wednesday.

…The changes are among many in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices that regularly changes to improve road safety, highway administration spokesman Doug Hecox said. The mixed upper- and lowercase rule was adopted in 2003, but municipalities were given until 2018 to comply completely, Hecox said.

“If it’s such a pressing safety issue, why won’t it be done until 2018?…” said Paul Kelly, 66, a retired Manhattan resident. …