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Liberals, as personified by the New Yorker, have suddenly come to the realization they have made a mistake making fun of Clarence Thomas. Walter Russell Mead has a post in The American Interest that will please freedom lovers.

Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom.  All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.

Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.

In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.

Writes Toobin:

“In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.”

This is one of the most startling reappraisals to appear in The New Yorker for many years. …

… Toobin is less interested in exploring why liberal America has been so blind for so long to the force of Clarence Thomas’ intellect than in understanding just what Thomas has achieved in his lonely trek across the wastes of Mordor.  And what he finds is that Thomas has been pioneering the techniques and the ideas that could not only lead to the court rejecting all or part of President Obama’s health legislation; the ideas and strategies Thomas has developed could conceivably topple the constitutionality of the post New Deal state. …

… What we didn’t know, and what the world at large didn’t know until very recently, was that the New Deal constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked.  Intellectually its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.

In the case of the Second Amendment, the collapse has already come.  Back in my Pundit High days, anyone who dared to suggest that the Bill of Rights gave individuals the right to bear arms would have been laughed out of the class as an ignorant yahoo.  These days, that is the accepted view of the US Supreme Court and most of the legal profession.  The resurrection of the Second Amendment proves that the “dead letter” clauses of the Constitution can come back to life — and suggests that Clarence Thomas understands how this can be done. …

… As Toobin tells the story, the revival of the Second Amendment was the first great triumph of the new approach.  Thomas and others assembled a mountain of evidence that convinced increasing numbers of legal scholars that the Second Amendment must be read as conferring an individual right to bear arms — not merely a generic endorsement of the right of each state to maintain a militia.  More, this right was intended as political: to check the power of the state to overawe and crush the people.  As a result, the once seemingly unstoppable movement toward gun control has gone into reverse gear.

The startling possibility now beginning to dawn on some observers is that these same methods applied to the Tenth Amendment would lead to a much more far reaching revision to constitutional doctrine.  The text of the Amendment is simple and short:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The standard interpretation is that this merely restates an assumption that undergirds the Constitution as a whole and so has no special meaning or significance in law.  If reading the rest of the Constitution leads you to uphold some act or law as constitutional, this amendment would not affect that judgment.  Therefore it can be and usually is ignored.  That is certainly what we were told to do with it in the hallowed halls of Pundit High.

But there is another view of this amendment. …

Yesterday we had a piece on how the media have over used the word “unexpectedly” when describing the Obama economy. Thomas Sowell has written about one unusual economic feature.

Many in the media are saying how unusual it is for our economy to be so sluggish for so long, after we have officially emerged from a recession. In a sense, they are right. But, in another sense, they are profoundly wrong.

The American economy usually rebounds a lot faster than it is doing today. After a recession passes, consumers usually increase their spending. And when businesses see demand picking up, they usually start hiring workers to produce the additional output required to meet that demand.

Some very sharp downturns in the American economy, such as in the early 1920s, were followed quickly by bouncing back to normal levels or beyond. The government did nothing — and it worked.

In that sense, this is an unusual recovery in how long it is taking and in how slowly the economy is growing — while the government is doing virtually everything imaginable. …

Alan Krueger has made a career out of bad scholarship. He is now the administration’s top economist; joining his sinking theories to a sinking ship. James Pethokoukis has the story. Krueger and his sidekick Card had determined from a telephone survey that raising the minimum wage in New Jersey resulted, not in a decrease of employment, but an increase. However, more careful researchers using actual payroll records showed what a normal sentient human would expect – a decrease in employment following a minimum wage hike. Or course that has not stopped the Dems from trumpeting Krueger’s study for years. So now this failed economist will be promoting the “secret sauce” for jobs we’re going to hear about next week.

… Krueger, who was Tim Geithner’s economist over at Treasury, is probably best known for his 1990s study that showed raising the minimum wage in New Jersey didn’t increase unemployment among fast-food workers. But that study seems to have been debunked. This is just one example (among many):

“We re-evaluate the evidence from Card and Krueger’s (1994) New Jersey-Pennsylvania minimum wage experiment, using new data based on actual payroll records from 230 Burger King, KFC, Wendy’s, and Roy Rogers restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We compare results using these payroll data to those using CK’s data, which were collected by telephone surveys. We have two findings to report. First, the data collected by CK appear to indicate greater employment variation over the eight-month period between their surveys than do the payroll data.  …  Second, estimates of the employment effect of the New Jersey minimum wage increase from the payroll data lead to the opposite conclusion from that reached by CK. For comparable sets of restaurants, differences-in-differences estimates using CK’s data imply that the New Jersey minimum wage increase (of 18.8 percent) resulted in an employment increase of 17.6 percent relative to the Pennsylvania control group, an elasticity of 0.93. In contrast, estimates based on the payroll data suggest that the New Jersey minimum wage increase led to a 4.6 percent decrease in employment in New Jersey relative to the Pennsylvania control group.”

But for good or ill, I don’t think Krueger’s ideas will have much impact on the Obama White House.  Krueger won’t even be sitting in the job when Obama rolls out his new jobs plan on Sept. Moreover, it’s the political shop running policy right now, not the propellerheads. And the reelection team believes little can be done to alter the economy’s path over the next 15 months. Any big stimulus plan, even assuming effectiveness, would open Obama to GOP charges of being a reckless spender. Better, they think, to instead make the case that Obama has the best ideas to improve the economy over the next four years, not Rick Perry or Mitt Romney. In short, the Obama reelection plan is the Obama jobs plan. Krueger’s job will be explain away the bad jobs and GDP numbers and tell American why the GOP is wrong.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks this last vacation was a “Vineyard Too Far.”

By Sunday afternoon, the Gallup tracking poll showed a 17-point spread in the president’s approval rating — 38 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. Such polls are fickle and can go up and down quickly, often depending on unwarranted and unfair perceptions and media hype, hinging on everything from hurricanes to killing bin Laden. That said, these recent abysmal numbers might suggest that for the first time, a considerable number of Americans is starting to be turned off not just by Barack Obama’s economic policies, but by Barack Obama himself. But why now?

The president’s latest Martha’s Vineyard vacation was a public-relations disaster, wholly unnecessary, and in part responsible for Obama’s most recent slide in the polls. Part of the problem was purely coincidental and no one’s fault: Who could have expected that while the president of the United States was resting on an exclusive private beach on a tony island on a calm August day, millions of Eastern Seaboarders around him would be engaged in a media-driven frenzy of emergency preparation and evacuation?

Yet most of the negative perception was the president’s own doing. …

Nile Gardiner wonders if the White House is going to rein in Michelle’s spending.

… It is unclear what the total cost to the taxpayer actually amounts to. According to one estimate provided by the Daily Mail, the First Lady stands accused by sources inside the White House of spending “$10 million of US taxpayers’ money on vacations alone in the past year.” Judging by the amount of vacation time Michelle Obama has taken and the level of security and staffing that she has, this sounds like a plausible figure. It would be in the public interest to have the exact numbers provided by the White House so that Americans know precisely how much of their money is being spent on vacations.

There does appear to be an unhealthy sense of entitlement on the part of the First Lady, which seems in poor taste at a time when 14 million Americans are out of work, the housing market is collapsing, and the United States is facing the strong possibility of a double-dip recession. Perhaps Mrs Obama could take a few tips on austerity as well as humility from her British counterpart Samantha Cameron, who has just one assistant, in contrast to at least 17 personal staff for the First Lady, and doesn’t feel the need to travel en masse with an entourage at taxpayers’ expense. The vast majority of Americans are making significant sacrifices at this time of economic turmoil, and tens of millions are struggling even to make ends meet. It’s time for both the President and the First Lady to exercise a bit of fiscal responsibility, not least when they are spending other people’s hard-earned money.

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Jim Geraghty writes in the National Review about the media’s use of “unexpectedly.”

… For about three years now, conservative bloggers have chuckled at how frequently the unveiling of bad economic news comes with the adverb “unexpectedly” in media reports. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, and others have often asked, unexpected to whom?

“I think it’s a combination of cognitive dissonance, the terra nova nature of the post-bubble economy, and a healthy dose of partisanship,” suggests Ed Morrissey, who has blogged about the ubiquitous adverb regularly at HotAir.com.

Perhaps the perpetual surprise reflects a media desire to focus on pockets of growth or prosperity — at least with a Democrat in the White House. In a widely diversified $14 trillion economy, one can almost always find some areas of economic improvement.

Certainly, a media that wanted to paint a more dire portrait of the economy would have no shortage of material to work with. There’s considerable evidence that America’s problems in job creation are much worse than the most widely cited numbers would indicate. …

A Corner post says there’s no change.

Following his recent vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama took some time away from his preparations for a “very specific” jobs speech, due sometime next week, to sit down with NBC’s Brian Williams and discuss his economic agenda.

Obama: “Well, look, we anticipated that the recovery was slowing. The economy is still growing, but it’s not growing as fast as it needs to. I’ve got things right now in–before Congress that we should move immediately, and I’ve said so before I went on vacation and I’ll keep on saying it when I–now that I’m back. We should be passing legislation that helps small businesses get credit, that eliminates capital gains taxes so that they have more incentive to invest right now. There are a whole host of measures that we could take, no single element of which is a magic bullet, but cumulatively could start continuing to build momentum for the recovery.”

Pretty familiar talking points, yes? Which is why this clip is so fascinating — it was filmed on August 29 of last year. Feeling that “recovery” “momentum” yet? Obama did speak today, though, to announce his new choice for chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Here’s what he said:

Obama: “Next week, I will be laying out a series of steps that Congress can take immediately to put more money in the pockets of working families and middle-class families, to make it easier for small businesses to hire people, to put construction crews to work rebuilding our nation’s roads and railways and airports, and all the other measures that can help to grow this economy. These are bipartisan ideas that ought to be the kind of proposals that everybody can get behind, no matter what your political affiliation might be. So my hope and expectation is that we can put country before party and get something done for the American people.”

Same talking points. Same crummy economy. Can’t wait for the speech!

Scott Turow comments on the Strauss-Kahn case.

In one of those ironies that novelists relish, the on-again-off-again rape prosecution of the former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn seems to have gravely damaged the political careers of both the prosecutor and the defendant. …

… The political dust will settle where it may. But as a professional matter, both as a former prosecutor and current criminal defense lawyer, I give Mr. Vance passing grades. The most dubious decision he made was to bring an indictment so quickly, rather than taking more time to investigate. But even there, New York law forced his hand somewhat. Mr. Strauss-Kahn was in jail and Mr. Vance had five days either to seek an indictment or let Mr. Strauss-Kahn go. In hindsight, Mr. Vance should have tried to work out an arrangement with defense lawyers so that he could fully examine the background of the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, especially since the wealthy Mr. Strauss-Kahn was bound to hire a team of investigators to exhaustively scrutinize her life.

But beyond a mistake due in part to being cornered by the law, I think Mr. Vance performed well. The collateral damage to the career of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who resigned in disgrace from the I.M.F., was clearly unfair, but that was caused largely by his sensational arrest, which Mr. Vance had no choice about effecting. The prosecutor had received allegations, seemingly corroborated by the brief investigation at the crime scene, of a violent felony allegedly committed by a man about to fly overseas and place himself beyond the reach of any United States court. Any responsible law enforcement professional would have detained Mr. Strauss-Kahn and sought to question him and gather evidence, including DNA. …

Robert Samuelson makes the case for the pipeline from Canada’s oil sands to our Gulf Coast.

When it comes to energy, America is lucky to be next to Canada, whose proven oil reserves are estimated by Oil and Gas Journal at 175 billion barrels. This ranks just behind Saudi Arabia (260 billion) and Venezuela (211 billion) and ahead of Iran (137 billion) and Iraq (115 billion). True, about 97 percent of Canada’s reserves consist of Alberta’s controversial oil sands, but new technologies and high oil prices have made them economically viable. Expanded production can provide the U.S. market with a growing source of secure oil for decades.

We would be crazy to turn our back on this. In a global oil market repeatedly threatened by wars, revolutions, and natural and man-made disasters — and where government-owned oil companies control development of about three-quarters of known reserves — having dependable suppliers is no mean feat. We already import about half of our oil, and Canada is our largest supplier, with about 25 percent of imports. But its conventional fields are declining. Only oil sands can fill the gap.

Will we encourage this? Do we say yes to oil sands? Or do we increase our exposure to unstable world oil markets?

Those are the central questions raised by the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline connecting Alberta’s oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Texas Gulf coast. The pipeline requires White House approval, and environmentalists adamantly oppose it. …

The New Yorker continues to cheerlead for Obama. Abe Greenwald catches the latest.

Apparently Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind Libya policy has been vindicated. Or so we’ve been hearing from the president’s overjoyed friends in the media. The latest is David Remnick, who writes in the New Yorker, “Part of Obama’s anti-doctrinal doctrine is that it insists on the recognition of differences in a way that Bush’s fixed ideas did not.”

In other words, our thoughtful president, unlike our cowboy president, grasps critical nuances of culture, region, and politics. This, in turn, allows him to tailor his policies to meet each unique challenge—like Libya—on its own terms. Bravo. Except this oft-told tale fails to explain why Obama has handled every wildly varying case of threatened democrats—whether in Honduras, Eastern Europe, Iran, Egypt, or Libya—in the exact same way: indifference followed by tepid, last-second support for freedom.

Considering the thousands of Libyan lives lost to the president’s lead-from-behind strategy, his supporters’ boasts are indecent. …

Fred Barnes says the media’s Obamalove is hurting his presidency.

As a rule, the press is the scourge of presidents. They’re expected to endure unending scrutiny, mistrust, and badgering—plus hostility if they’re Republicans—by a hectoring herd of reporters and commentators in the mainstream media. But there’s an exception to the rule: President Obama.

It’s counterintuitive, but Obama has been hurt by the media’s leniency. Both his presidency and reelection prospects have suffered. He’s grown lazy and complacent. The media have encouraged him to believe his speeches are irresistible political catnip, though they aren’t. His overreliance on words hasn’t helped.

The kind of media pressure that can cause a president to sharpen his game, act with urgency, or take bolder steps—that has never been applied to Obama. If it had, I suspect he’d be a more effective, disciplined, energetic, and popular president today. Ronald Reagan is a good role model in this regard. When the media attacked him over gaffes in the 1980 campaign, “Reagan responded like all competitive men by working to improve himself,” says Reagan historian Craig Shirley. “Experience taught him to be better and try harder.” He took this lesson into the White House.

I don’t want to exaggerate the media’s baneful influence on Obama. It’s hardly the main reason for his decline. It’s a secondary reason, and it continues to have an impact.

Absent pushing and prodding by the press, the Obama presidency has atrophied. His speeches are defensive and repetitive and filled with excuses. He passes the buck. With persistently high unemployment and a weak economy, Obama recently declared, in effect, “I have a plan. See you after my vacation.” …

Toby Harnden has fun with Irene hype. Since the storm was mostly media hype for an empty suit, maybe it should be renamed Hurricane Obama.

For the television reporter, clad in his red cagoule emblazoned with the CNN logo, it was a dramatic on-air moment, broadcasting live from Long Island, New York during a hurricane that also threatened Manhattan.

“We are in, right, now…the right eye wall, no doubt about that…there you see the surf,” he said breathlessly. “That tells a story right there.”

Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.”

The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.

Across the screen, the “Breaking News: Irene Batters Long Island” caption was replaced by stern advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): “Stay inside, stay safe.”

The images summed up Hurricane Irene …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Jimmy Fallon: A new study says eating healthy adds $380 to your grocery costs yearly. Or as Americans put it, ‘Cool, I saved $380 this year!’

O’Brien: A brawl broke out during Vice President Joe Biden’s recent speech in China. Apparently, someone was blocking the exit.

Letterman: You know that big East coast earthquake, 5.8 down in D.C. It was so strong that Nancy Pelosi’s hair actually cracked.

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Mark Steyn writes on the ”deprived” youth in Great Britain.

… In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, “Newsnight” immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education. …

Charles Krauthammer celebrates the King Memorial.

It is one of the enduring mysteries of American history — so near-providential as to give the most hardened atheist pause — that it should have produced, at every hinge point, great men who matched the moment. A roiling, revolutionary 18th-century British colony gives birth to the greatest cohort of political thinkers ever: Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Jay. The crisis of the 19th century brings forth Lincoln; the 20th, FDR.

Equally miraculous is Martin Luther King Jr. Black America’s righteous revolt against a century of post-emancipation oppression could have gone in many bitter and destructive directions. It did not. This was largely the work of one man’s leadership, moral imagination and strategic genius. He turned his own deeply Christian belief that “unearned suffering is redemptive” into a creed of nonviolence that he carved into America’s political consciousness. The result was not just racial liberation but national redemption.

Such an achievement, such a life, deserves a monument alongside the other miracles of our history …

David Warren understands why he likes Rick Perry. Hayek is in the middle of it. The first sentence in the following pull quote is one to think about for a long time. It might more sense to trade “educated” for “intelligent.” Then it would read, “There are some issues that are too simple for educated people to understand.”

… There are some issues that are too simple for intelligent people to understand. Most moral issues are like that. The problem isn’t distinguishing between right and wrong. That is not always as plain as day, but usually it is. The problem is finding a way to justify doing the wrong thing. And once you think you have found it, the people still arguing for doing the right thing may be dismissed as “simplistic.”

On the grand economic questions, “simplisme” has long been decried. John Maynard Keynes, a truly brilliant man, and an entertaining one with wide cultural interests, made wonderfully entertaining arguments for doing the wrong thing, many of them ingeniously counter-intuitive. “Public economists” (on the analogy of “public intellectuals”) such as John Kenneth Galbraith in the last generation, and Paul Krugman in this, stand in direct succession to him: same attitudes, same habits.

Lord Keynes’ great rival, Friedrich Hayek, exploded many of the economic fallacies upon which Keynes depended, along with many of the facts which Keynes massaged to fit his own passing needs. But Hayek’s strongest criticism is too lightly passed over. He said that Keynes was interested in economic theory only as a means to influence current policy. He had not, in fact, the “intellectual chastity” to examine anything on its own terms. …

Josh Kraushaar columns on Rick Perry for the National Journal.

… With Obama’s job-approval rating now below 40 percent in Gallup’s latest survey, nominating a candidate based on electability is becoming a nonissue for Republicans. If the economy fails to grow — and the current economic forecasts are grim — it’s hard to see Perry’s style being a serious impediment to becoming president. The notion that a three-term governor of the second most-populous state in the country is somehow unelectable simply because of his Texas twang strikes me as fanciful.

If Obama is in trouble, Perry should be able to hold the states Bush carried in 2004. He could be stronger in some of the Southern battlegrounds, like North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia. But he’d probably face a higher hurdle winning suddenly-competitive Democratic-leaning, Rust-Belt states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, where his style could wear thin and Romney would be a better match for the electorate.

No two elections are alike, but in style and substance, this year’s Republican primary and general election are shaping up to be replays of the 1980 presidential race: President runs as an outsider looking to clean up Washington, but deals with the harsh reality of an economy out of control; a Republican primary pitting an outspoken conservative governor of a large state, considered unelectable by Democrats and the establishment, against a moderate blue-blood preparing for a candidacy for some time.

Reagan, the famous cowboy, dispatched George H.W. Bush and went on to win 489 electoral votes in 44 states. We’re about to see if another cowboy will repeat the trick.

Toby Harnden’s weekly American Way column was on Mitt Romney.

… In essence, Romney’s campaign calculates, everything voters like about Perry they already know – but before the primary race is over, the voters are going to know a lot more about the Texas governor.

Romney is nothing if not steady and his business career made him intensely competitive. He has already shown resilience and determination.

Jibes about Romney’s wealth and whispers about his Mormon religion can be overplayed. Neither subject was raised by a voter in four lengthy question-and-answer sessions in New Hampshire. The only person who asked about Romney’s decision to rebuild his $12 million house in California to make it four times bigger (he says this is to accommodate his 16 grandchildren) was a reporter.

Presidential campaigns are often referred to as marathons and Romney has so far paced himself like a long-distance runner. The 2012 race could also be viewed as being between Romney the tortoise and Perry the hare. But another analogy is the Indy 500 race, a brutal 500-mile contest in which some cars crash into each other allowing others to speed past.

Romney will never be the most exciting, inspiring or even most likeable of candidates. He’s plainly more comfortable running an organisation than running for office. That does not guarantee, however, that he will not ultimately prevail and emerge as the Republican nominee.

IBD editors note the fall in employment in Illinois since the January tax hikes.

As another manufacturer leaves, Illinois leads the nation in job loss in July. The free fall began with a tax hike. When will liberals learn when you tax something, you get less of it?

The states were envisioned by the Founding Fathers as islands of sovereignty, laboratories of democracy, each free to discover what works and what doesn’t. In Illinois, the experiment of taxing your way back to prosperity has failed miserably.

The passage of a 67% income tax hike in January 2011, as well as higher corporate taxes, has coincided with a downturn in state employment. Since the enactment of this massive tax increase, Illinois has lost 89,000 jobs.

This move by Illinois Democrats in the state legislature and Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has helped drive businesses such as Blue Island, Ill..-based Modern Drop Forge Co., an automotive parts company with 240 employees, out of the state, in this case into the welcoming arms of Republican Gov. Mitch Daniel’s Indiana. …

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We start with a hoot of a column from Kinky Freidman who ran against Rick Perry in 2006.

… I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

These days, of course, I would support Charlie Sheen over Obama. Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay. …

… There exists a visceral John Wayne kinship between Israelis and Texans, and Rick Perry gets it. That’s why he’s visited Israel on many more occasions than Obama, who’s been there exactly zero times as president. If I were Obama I wouldn’t go either. His favorability rating in Israel once clocked in at 4 percent. Say what you will about the Israelis, but they are not slow out of the chute. They know who their friends are. …

More in this vein, but not quite so lovingly, from Walter Shapiro at the New Republic.

What Rick Perry has achieved in his inaugural strut on the political stage is unprecedented in the annals of modern conservative history from Barry Goldwater to Sarah Palin. It is not just that the Texas governor has dominated the news cycle, overshadowed the Iowa Straw Poll, vaulted over every GOP contender except Mitt Romney in the national polls, and reduced Karl Rove to sputtering frustration. All that is admittedly impressive for a first-time candidate whose name was familiar to only half of Republican voters just a few weeks ago.

But what sets Perry apart and earns him his niche in the far right corner of Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with the gyrations of the 2012 campaign. Indeed, Perry is not only a presidential candidate, but also a cowboy-booted sociological experiment. It is almost as if Perry’s political persona was constructed by bundling together all the fears and phantoms in the left-wing anxiety closet. Since the hysteria of the 1950s Red Scare, no Republican figure has matched Perry in his God-given ability to give liberals the heebie-jeebies. Others can rival the governor’s disdain for academic achievement (Palin), his cross-on-the-sleeve religiosity (Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee), and his antipathy to Social Security and Medicare (Paul Ryan and Barry Goldwater). But never before has a top-tier presidential candidate embodied the whole lethal package—and more: …

… But whatever his underlying beliefs, Perry could give both Bachmann and Palin lessons in liberal baiting. The swagger and the bristling self-confidence suggest a political leader who is often wrong, but never in doubt. It is all so reminiscent of another wrong-way-Corrigan president. Intellectually, it is easy to remember the Texas-sized enmities that divide the Bushies and Perry. But emotionally, every time liberals hear that Perry twang and those dropped “g’s,” the instinct is to quake at stumbling into a horror-movie remake entitled, Mission Accomplished 2: Return to the White House.

One more Perry item. This time from Roger Simon.

Despite being the longest serving governor of one of our most populous states, a state currently generating more jobs than the rest of the country combined (or close), Rick Perry is supposed to be a dummy. At least, that’s what some of the lefty blogs and pundits would have us believe — you know, brainy types like Ed Schultz.

I am a graduate of two so-called elite Ivy League universities and I never noticed this problem when I met Perry. But never mind. Maybe an intellectually-challenged reputation is good to have from a stealth point of view. Remember Tom Sawyer and that fence?

Unfortunately, however, the jig is up. As of the last few days “Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America” has been making the rapid rounds on Kindle (#2 in “politics and current events”). This download is actually a longish chapter excerpted from a work-in-progress by Sasha Issenberg — “The Victory Lab” — about new, scientifically-based campaign techniques said to be transforming the American electoral process. …

So what does one of Obama’s supporters think of him now? Mort Zuckerman writing in the WSJ. 

The rising impatience with the leadership of President Obama was epitomized on Aug. 8 in the middle of one of the now-habitual Wall Street roller coasters. His speech on the economy was 53 minutes late. What showed on TV screens was an empty White House podium, an image suggestive of the absence of leadership. When the president did speak, the best he could come up with was “We’ve always been and always will be a triple-A country.” The market’s response was a Bronx cheer, a drop of another 300 points.

Mr. Obama seems unable to get a firm grip on the toughest issue facing his presidency and the country—the economy. He now asserts he is going to “pivot” to jobs. Now we pivot to jobs? When there are already 25 million Americans who are either unemployed or cannot find full-time work? Does this president not appreciate what is going on?

Fewer Americans are working full-time today than when Mr. Obama took office. We have lost over 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone, and long-term unemployment is at a post-World War II high. The public’s faith in his ability to deal with the economy has plunged. As Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times put it, “Can this president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many have lost theirs?” Even Jimmy Carter didn’t plumb the depths of national dissatisfaction revealed in the stunning Gallup poll taken Aug. 11-13. …

Michael Barone finds yet another instance of the private sector making government goofs look like fools.

Not long ago I wrote about how the private sector outraces and laps government. While governments dither and dispute, the private sector discovers.

The example I mentioned then was energy. For years, governments, national and local, have been promoting wind and solar power, to little practical effect. Curiously, the biggest wind power producer is Rick Perry’s Texas. But wind power isn’t reliable, and both wind and solar cause serious damage to the environment.

In the meantime the oil and gas industries — the favorite target of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats — have developed new techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that have vastly expanded recoverable American energy supplies.

Now across my laptop comes news of another area in which private-sector actors have overtaken government. Again an older technology has been improved and adapted to fill a need while government dithers.

The old technology in this case is buses.

While the Obama administration has been desperately seeking to spend $53 billion on so-called high-speed rail lines, private businessmen have developed Chinatown and Megabus lines that provide intercity service that has attracted legions of price-conscious travelers. …

George Will was in Wisconsin looking over the union wreckage.

… Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.

Progressives want to recall Walker next year. Republicans hope they try. Wisconsin seems weary of attempts to overturn elections, and surely Obama does not want his allies squandering political money and the public’s patience. Since 1960, no Democrat has been elected president without carrying Wisconsin.

Walker has refuted the left’s sustaining conviction that a leftward-clicking ratchet guarantees that liberalism’s advances are irreversible. Progressives, eager to discern a victory hidden in their recent failures, suggest that a chastened Walker will not risk further conservatism. Actually, however, his agenda includes another clash with teachers unions over accountability and school choice, and combat over tort reform with another cohort parasitic off bad public policies — trial lawyers.

As the moonless night of fa$ci$m descends on America’s dairyland, sidewalk graffiti next to the statehouse-square drinking fountain darkly warns: “Free water .?.?. for now.” There, succinctly, is liberalism’s credo: If everything isn’t “free,” meaning paid for by someone else, nothing will be safe.

Howie Carr says so long to the prez.

And so farewell, Barack Obama, don’t let the hatch door of Air Force One hit you on the way out of Massa-tu-setts, as you pronounce it.

The first family came in separate planes, and they’re leaving, ditto. Hey, it’s only money, our money.

Even before Irene, this wasn’t much of a presidential vacation compared to the earlier ones. An Obama vacation on the Vineyard has been downgraded from Cat 3 to tropical storm. It’s hard to get excited about the arrival, yet again, of the second coming of Herbert Hoover.

He’s already had at least two visits to the political ATM here this year, not to mention his wife Mooch-elle’s shakedown cruise a couple of months ago. What do they say? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and familiarity breeds contempt.

And what was that bunkum from Obama about a “historic” hurricane? Right now it’s only a tropical storm, and he’s trying to conflate it into the Blizzard of ’78. But hey, he and his whole administration, whenever they talk about the economy, they sound like weathermen. Whether it’s the tsunami, or the drought, or the financial crisis … it’s gotta be somebody else’s fault. …

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Alana Goodman writes on the Israeli litigators who kept the “Freedom Flotilla II” in port.

At a radical left-wing coffee shop in Washington, D.C. last month, Code Pink founder and “Freedom Flotilla II” passenger Medea Benjamin woefully recounted the moment she realized her boat, the Audacity of Hope, wouldn’t be legally permitted to leave a port in Greece to sail to Gaza.

“There was something called a ‘complaint’ that was put against our boat,” Benjamin explained to a crowd of anti-Israel activists stuffed into the back room of the restaurant. “Well, it didn’t take long for somebody to uncover that the person, or entity, that lodged the complaint was none other than this right-wing Israeli law center based in Tel Aviv, that knew nothing about our boat and certainly had no interest in the passengers’ safety.”

The “right-wing” law center that caused Benjamin so much grief is Shurat HaDin – the Israeli group that single-handedly took down the “Freedom Flotilla II” simply by filing creative lawsuits. In total, nine out of the 10 boats in the flotilla never touched Israeli waters, largely due to Shurat HaDin’s work. …

Yesterday we had a couple of posts on Biden’s one child remarks in China. Today Kirsten Powers has more in the Daily Beast.

Joe Biden is known for occasionally clumsy remarks. But his recent error in China is far more serious than a momentary gaffe.

The vice president told an audience at Sichuan University in Chengdu:  “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family.” 

This was an appalling statement coming from an American leader. What’s next? Will he say he isn’t “second-guessing” and “fully understands” that women are stoned for adultery in Iran?

Chai Ling, a two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and former leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement, told me she was “shocked and troubled” by Biden’s statement. Ling founded the organization All Girls Allowed to fight the one-child policy, which affects most couples and is designed to limit growth in China, which at 1.3 billion people is the world’s most populous country.

“On behalf of all the Chinese women and girls,” she says, Biden’s “statements are very hurtful. The one-child policy means the child has to be killed, whether it is forced or coerced through pressure. The women don’t feel like they have a choice. In a culture that is not welcoming to women who get pregnant and keep the baby they will be persecuted, financially and politically by the government.” …

To put a human dimension to this controversy The Financial Times has a story that will move you.

One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.

I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness – so that it could have a chance to live.

For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago – a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?

This child’s mother had chosen the spot carefully: only steps from one of the best hotels in Shanghai, beside a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise patronised mostly by foreigners. I had been meeting my friend John there for a quick doughnut fix, and it was he who heard the baby’s cries as he chained his bicycle to the alleyway gate.

“There’s a baby outside!” John exclaimed as he slid into the seat beside me, still blustery from the cold. “What do you mean, there’s a baby outside?” I asked in alarm, bolting out of the door to see what he was talking about.

What I found was a scene whose every detail spoke of maternal care, and anguish: the multicoloured quilt was bright, thick and tied just so – the corner lay over the child’s face, to protect it from the pre-Christmas chill. Beneath the angry bundle lay two plastic carrier bags bulging with brand new baby clothes, tins of infant formula, packs of nappies and scrubbed-clean bottles, the only love note a mother could dare to leave for a child she would never know. China’s version of the stork myth is to tell children they were found in a trash can; in the case of the baby in the alleyway, that story was too close to the truth for comfort.

“There, there, little guy,” I crooned as I awkwardly picked up the quilt bundle, which immediately stopped crying. The doughnut shop staff had already called the police to report the abandonment, so I knew I would not have long with Baby Doe (or Baby Donuts, the nickname suggested irresistibly by the location). I knew that the police would call for an ambulance, too, that would whisk the child away. So for half an hour I cradled the infant (which I only later discovered was a six-week-old girl) and bawled.

I cried for the baby, for the mother, but most of all I cried for my own children: abandoned at the far more dangerous ages of one and six days old – and in weather possibly far colder. I cried for women I do not know, who were forced to discard the children who became my daughters. I cried for the fact that they may never know their child is safe, and cherished. …

David Harsanyi writes on the left’s selective use of science.

So every now and then, liberals are treated to a big self-righteous laugh at the expense of some backwoods Christian conservative candidate who “ignores science” by doubting evolution or global warming — or, gasp, both.

Much, for instance, has been made of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent suggestion that evolution is a “theory that’s out there“ with ”gaps in it.” He even insinuated that evolution and creationism should both be taught in schools — because folks are “smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

Sanctimony to red alert!

Now, I have no interest in watching my kids waste their time with creationism, but unlike progressives, I have no interest in dictating what other kids should learn. Remember that these folks, bothered by the very thought of their offspring’s hearing a God-infused concept in school, have no problem forcing millions of parents to accept bureaucrat-written curricula at government-run school monopolies. They oppose home schooling. They oppose school choice. They oppose parents choosing a religious education with their tax dollars.

As a voter, like me, you may find Perry’s view on creationism disconcerting and a sign of an unsophisticated candidate. But the fact is that the progressives’ faith-based devotion to government is far more consequential than Perry’s faith-based position on evolution. …

Karl Rove likes the work of John Boehner.

The politician who has done more than any other to set the national agenda this year will soon return to Washington. It is not President Barack Obama. It’s House Speaker John Boehner.

After his annual August bus tour to help re-elect House Republicans, Mr. Boehner will spend a short vacation next week at his house in West Chester, Ohio, where he’ll relax by cutting his lawn with something not often seen on Martha’s Vineyard: a Toro push mower.

It’s been a remarkable run for Mr. Boehner. It began even before he became speaker, during last December’s lame-duck session, when outnumbered House Republicans outmaneuvered Democrats and Mr. Obama on taxes.

Mr. Boehner won by shifting the debate from whether wealthier Americans should pay their “fair share” to whether it is wise to raise taxes amid high joblessness and sluggish growth. It worked. Mr. Obama started by calling for higher taxes. He ended by signing a two-year extension of all the Bush tax cuts.

We go from a DC winner to a piece by Peter Wehner about the DC whiner-in-chief, who now, with Irene moving up the East Coast will have another excuse.

Now more than halfway through his third year in office—with the economy flat-lining, American prestige evaporating, and public anxiety spiking—Barack Obama is the most vulnerable incumbent president since Jimmy Carter. The election is still 14 months away, but it’s not too early to see the broad outlines of the GOP’s case against the president.

Economic Malpractice: Obama inherited a tough economy, but his stewardship has in many respects made the situation worse.

The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent (it was 7.8 percent the month Obama took office). July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level that the Obama administration said it would not exceed as a result of its stimulus program. Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression, while the share of the eligible population holding a job (58.1 percent) has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.

The housing crisis is also worse than in the Great Depression. Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago. Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency. And from the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slow growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was an anemic 1.3 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent. Even more problematic for the president, there are virtually no signs that things will improve anytime soon. He now has to hope for an economic miracle.

Given this atrocious record, Republicans should repeatedly affirm what Obama’s senior counselor, David Plouffe, has acknowledged: The president “owns” the economy. It’s the product of his handiwork. And if Obama is reelected, we will get more of the same. The Republican theme for the 2012 campaign should consist of two words: Had enough? …

Pickerhead has not worried readers about the president’s household expenses, travel, vacations, etc. etc. However, the news that the president and his wife arrived for their Vineyard vacation four hours apart in separate planes is impossible to understand. Follow the link in Powerline’s post to the Daily Mail article. Makes it sweet they’ll have to leave Sunday or Monday because of the hurricane. Tip of the hat to God.

Human Events tells us the Obama administration is issuing regulations for goatherds.

The Obama administration is setting new workplace regulations to assist foreign workers who fill goat herding positions in the U.S. , including employee-paid cell phones and comfy beds.
 
These new special procedures issued by the Labor Department must be followed by employers who want to hire temporary agricultural foreign workers to perform sheep herding or goat herding activities.  It describes strict rules for sleeping quarters, lighting, food storage, bathing, laundry, cooking and new rules for the counters where food is prepared.
 
“A separate sleeping unit shall be provided for each person, except in a family arrangement,” says the rules signed by Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training administration at the Labor Department.
 
“Such a unit shall include a comfortable bed, cot or bunk, with a clean mattress,” the rules state. …

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Mark Steyn reacts to Biden’s comments on one child per Chinese family. 

Peter Kirsanow suggests my new book may get the blame for the earthquake. I’m happy to take credit for the downgrade and the London riots, but to the best of my recollection there’s no ‘quake in there. However, since he brought it up, I’d like to put in a word for my book’s general line on China re Joe Biden’s disgusting remarks on Beijing’s one-child policy and its attendant industrial-scale ”gendercide”. My views on this have been well aired in this space over the years.

China is a weak power. When I point that out, people think that’s the good news. It’s not. As I say in the prologue to my new book;

“That’s actually worse news than if China was cruising to uncontested global hegemony – because it means that Beijing’s calculations on how the Sino-American relationship evolves are even less likely to align with ours. China has to maximize its power before demographic decay sets in. In other words, it has strong incentives to be bold and to push, hard and fast.”

Nevertheless, we owe ‘em a ton of money. Which means you can figure for yourself the likelihood of an American vice-president standing up in public and expressing his repugnance at the wholesale slaughter of China’s baby girls. A few lines before the passage above, I quote Jonathan Swift’s “Run Upon The Bankers”: “They have his soul, who have his bonds.” China has our bonds, and thus in a certain sense they have our soul. Or at any rate Joe Biden’s. …

Peter Wehner too.

In his remarks at China’s Sichuan University, Vice President Biden, in response to a question, said, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.  The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”

This is a remarkably obtuse and morally disgraceful statement. The policy the vice president is so understanding of, after all, involves forced abortion, involuntary sterilization, and gendercide. As Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, put it, “China’s One Child Policy causes more violence to women and girls than any other official policy on earth. To merely mention the economic consequences is to turn a blind eye to the terrible human suffering caused by forced abortion. Chinese women are literally dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables and forced to abort.” …

Here’s a cheery thought. Richard Posner says we’re not in a double-dip recession. We are in a depression.

If the notion that we are merely living through the aftereffects of a mere “recession” that ended in 2009 sounds somewhat ridiculous, that’s because it is. If we were being honest with ourselves, we would call this a depression. That would certainly better convey both the severity of our problems, and the fact that those problems have no evident solutions.

The American economy currently has both a short-term problem and a long-term problem. The short-term problem is that the economy is depressed; it is growing more slowly than the population, with the result that per capita income is declining. The high rate of un- and underemployment is a factor, but is itself the product of other factors, having mainly to do with the reluctance of over-indebted consumers (over-indebted in major part because of loss of equity in their houses, the major source of household wealth) to spend, the reluctance of the impaired banking industry to make risky loans, and the reluctance of businesses to invest and to hire, which is due in part to weak consumer spending and in part to profound uncertainty about the nation’s economic future.

The roots of this catastrophic situations lie primarily, I think, in the incompetent economic management of the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve. The persistence of the depression, however, is due in part at least to surprising failures of the Obama administration—poor leadership, poor management, the sponsorship of incomprehensibly complex health care and financial regulation laws that have created widespread uncertainty that has discouraged consumption and investment, and the inability to explain the nature of the economy’s problems to the general public. These failures caused the stimulus enacted in February 2009 to be botched in both in its design and its administration, resulting in the discrediting of deficit spending as a response to depression. …

Byron York says today’s deficits are not caused by entitlements, but by spending.

… There is no line in the federal budget that says “stimulus,” but Obama’s massive $814 billion stimulus increased spending in virtually every part of the federal government. “It’s spread all through the budget,” says former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin. “It was essentially a down payment on the Obama domestic agenda.” Green jobs, infrastructure, health information technology, aid to states — it’s all in there, billions in increased spending.

As for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP — it has no specific line in the budget, either, but that is because it was anticipated to pay nearly all of its own cost, which it has.

Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period — $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively — but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren’t big problems in previous years. “We’re getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year,” says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today’s deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they’ll do it. …

Richard Epstein asks and answers the question, “How is Warren Buffett like the Pope?”

They are both dead wrong on economic policy.

The terrible economic news from both Europe and the United States has led to much soul-searching on both sides of the Atlantic. How did we get here, and how can we get out of this jam? In my past columns for Hoover’s Defining Ideas, I have insisted that both economies will be able to extricate themselves from their deep slumps only by promptly reversing those policies that have brought them to the brink. A successful and sustainable political order requires stable legal and economic policies that reward innovation, spur growth, and maximize the ability of rich and poor alike to enter into voluntary arrangements. Limited government, low rates of taxation, and strong property rights are the guiding principles.

Unfortunately, many spiritual and economic leaders are working overtime to push social policy in the exact opposite direction. At the top of the list are two prominent figures: Pope Benedict XVI and financier Warren Buffett.

…rather than heed the advice of the Pope and Mr. Buffett, we should take our guidance from another public figure: the late Reverend Ike. Many years ago, he said, “the best thing you could do for the poor is not be one of them.” Government should give everyone at least that opportunity.

Andrew Malcolm is following events in Libya.

The vacationing Barack Obama was walking through the woods on Martha’s Vineyard today, when he decided to give a speech to the nation on Libya.

Fortunately, a podium was growing nearby, along with the all-important presidential seal.

So, the Real Good Talker did speak. For about seven minutes. And, as usual, his full text is below.

Obama said Kadafi’s hours are numbered, though some resistance continues. …

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NY Times’ Joe Nocera writes on NLRB v Boeing.

… In April, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, accusing it of opening the South Carolina plant to retaliate against the union, which has a history of striking at contract time. The N.L.R.B.’s proposed solution, believe it or not, is to move all the Dreamliner production back to Puget Sound, leaving those 5,000 workers in South Carolina twiddling their thumbs.

Seriously, when has a government agency ever tried to dictate where a company makes its products? I can’t ever remember it happening. Neither can Boeing, which is fighting the complaint. J. Michael Luttig, Boeing’s general counsel, has described the action as “unprecedented.” He has also said that it was a disservice to a country that is “in desperate need of economic growth and the concomitant job creation.” He’s right.

That’s also why I’ve become mildly obsessed with the Boeing affair. Nothing matters more right now than job creation. Last week, President Obama barnstormed the Midwest, promising a jobs package in September and blaming Republicans for blocking job-creation efforts. Republicans, of course, have blamed the administration, complaining that regulatory overkill is keeping companies from creating jobs.

They’re both right. Republicans won’t pass anything that might stimulate job growth because they are so ideologically opposed to federal spending. But the Democrats have blind spots, too. No, the Environmental Protection Agency shouldn’t be rolling back its rules, as the Republican presidential candidates seem to want. But a fair-minded person would have to acknowledge that the N.L.R.B.’s action is exactly the kind of overreach that should embarrass Democrats who claim to care about job creation. It’s paralyzing, is what it is. …

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review with a good Op-Ed on the foolish policies coming from the administration.

… First, by the government’s own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years.

In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America’s medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother’s recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow.

Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent. …

…In its first 26 months, reports The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., federal regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will add some $9.5 billion in new costs.

Bottom line: What’s required from Obama is a complete about-face, the shelving of his flawed economic philosophy and a reversal of his counterproductive policy prescriptions.

In spite of Paul Ryan’s demurral we have some more background from Stephen Hayes on the possible Paul Ryan entrance to the 2012 race.

For months the Republican presidential campaign has been a sleepy affair. The biggest news was that one supposedly top candidate had refused to criticize the frontrunner. Riveting.

The last week changed all of that. Michele Bachmann, once regarded as a sideshow candidate, won the Iowa straw poll, narrowly beating Ron Paul, still regarded as a sideshow candidate. Then would-be contender Tim Pawlenty dropped out. And whatever momentum Bachmann might have gained was halted by the announcement of Texas governor Rick Perry, who not only emerged as a first-tier candidate but is leading in at least one national poll.

Images from the campaign suddenly dominated television newscasts. Perry demonstrated his considerable skills in retail politics. Frontrunner Mitt Romney, whose team had anticipated just such a conservative surge, kept his attention on Barack Obama, whose own campaign swing through the all-important Midwest was all politics, despite the laughable claims of the White House to the contrary.

But some of the most interesting developments last week took place away from the cameras in the solitude of the Rocky Mountains, where Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan consulted with friends and family about whether he should join the race. Ryan has been quietly looking at a bid for nearly three months, since Indiana governor Mitch Daniels called him to say he wasn’t running. But that consideration took a serious turn over the past two weeks, following a phone call with New Jersey governor Chris Christie in early August.

Ryan and Christie spoke for nearly an hour about the presidential race, according to four sources briefed on the conversation. The two men shared a central concern: The Republican field is not addressing the debt crisis with anything beyond platitudes.

Ryan, on the other hand, is the author of the detailed “Path to Prosperity” budget that passed the House last spring. His plan proposes structural reform to ensure the long-term viability of Medicare and other entitlements. …

Every Friday, Jennifer Rubin asks her readers to respond to her Friday Question. Last week she asked who else they wanted to enter the race. The answers favored Ryan.

… The most frequently named candidate, however, was Ryan. Two commenters gave the best case for his candidacy. Zoltan Newberry writes:

“Somebody has to be the second president elected from the House. Ryan is the perfect 0bama foil. He is patient and kind while Obama is brittle and testy. He is utterly genuine while Obama is phony. Ryan is the boy next door, the guy you can count on. People respond warmly to him. Paul Ryan is low-key and likable while the current WH occupant is high-strung, high-maintenance and extremely arrogant. Ryan has great intellectual credentials and has always been an authentic conservative thinker. His relative youth would contrast nicely with our hapless president’s tired, old act. I think Ryan could get out there and impress voters as a modern version of Abraham Lincoln, and, God knows, we really need a person like that, somebody who is authentic, somebody who is the real deal.”

The StatistQuo adds:

“He is the future. All but four House Republicans are on record in support of Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” No Republican presidential candidate has a pro -growth, tax reform, budget reform, assertive foreign policy agenda, who though he is a social conservative does not wear his social conservatism on his sleeve. He showed poise and adroitness in the post-“Path to Prosperity” town meetings in Wisconsin.

He has already bested Obama in the impromptu Obamacare debate in Baltimore and would be unfazed sharing a debate stage with Obama. He will be welcome by both Beltway AND Tea Party Republicans. He has the intellectual heft to confidently defend his and his party’s positions. And being young, Ryan defies the stereotype of Republican leaders like Reagan, Dole, McCain, who were a tad long in the tooth when they were nominated. I believe, throwing granny off the cliff notwithstanding, Paul Ryan is Barack Obama’s worst nightmare.” …

Jeff Jacoby devotes two columns to Perry’s pledge to make Washington, DC inconsequential in our lives.

WHEN TEXAS Governor Rick Perry announced his campaign for president last weekend in a speech to the RedState Gathering in Charleston, S.C., he saved his best line for the end. “I’ll promise you this,’’ he said to exuberant cheers and applause, “I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your life as I can.’’

To a Democrat steeped in the big-government tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society, there could hardly be a greater heresy.

For liberals, perhaps the only thing more absurd and disagreeable than the prospect of a Washington with radically reduced influence in American life is a presidential candidate pledging to make that reduction a priority. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and aide to Tip O’Neill, characterized Perry’s applause line as nothing less than a call for anarchy. The governor is saying “not just that the era of big government is over,’’ Matthews hyperbolically told his “Hardball’’ viewers on Monday, “he’s saying the era of government is over. . .. Let’s get rid of the government, basically.’’

But to countless libertarians and free-market conservatives, it is exhilarating to hear a candidate talk this way. And why wouldn’t it be? After all, large majorities of Americans consistently say they don’t trust the federal government and have little faith in the ability of Washington’s immense bureaucracy to solve the nation’s problems. In promising to curb Washington’s outsize authority, Perry is responding to an alienation from government that is very much a Main Street phenomenon. …

Jacoby expands on distrust of DC in the second column.

… it isn’t highways or veterans’ programs or minority voting rights that conservatives find so objectionable about Washington. When Perry speaks of making the nation’s capital “inconsequential,’’ he isn’t proposing to dismantle the Hoover Dam. Hard as it may be for liberals to accept, the Republican base isn’t motivated by blind loathing of the federal government, or by a nihilistic urge to wipe out the good that Washington has accomplished.

What conservatives believe, rather, is what America’s Founders believed: that government is best which governs least, and that human freedom and dignity are likeliest to thrive not when power is centralized and remote, but when it is diffuse, local, and modest.

“It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected,’’ wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821. In part that is because central planners and regulators rarely know enough to be sure of the impact their decisions will have on the innumerable individuals, communities, and enterprises affected by them. “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap,’’ Jefferson dryly remarked, “we should soon want bread.’’ The Beltway blunders of our own era – from the subprime mortgage meltdown to Cash for Clunkers to minimum wage laws that drive up unemployment – would not have surprised him. …

Andrew Malcolm finds an interesting pic of the first couple.

… Sunday morning the Secret Service packed all the Obamas in secure cars and headed for a private ocean beach.

Reuters’ sharp-eyed Kevin Lamarque snapped this revealing photo of the first couple in the car tuned out from each other during this quality time family foray.

Of course, Michelle Obama could have her iPod crammed with hubby’s recent speeches.

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Mark Steyn is tired of the imperial presidency.

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, 11 years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers) who charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species and issued her a $535 fine. If the federal child-abuser has that much time on his hands, he should have charged the cat, who was illegally transporting the protected species from his gullet to his intestine.

So 11-year-old Schylar and other middle-schoolers targeted by the microregulatory superstate might well appreciate Gov. Perry’s pledge. But you never know, it might just catch on with the broader population, too.

Bill Clinton thought otherwise. “I got tickled by watching Gov. Perry,” said the former president. “And he’s saying ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible – while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.”

This is the best argument the supposedly smartest operator in the Democratic Party can muster? If Bill Clinton wants to make the increasingly and revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the American president a campaign issue, Gov. Perry should call his bluff. If I understand correctly the justification advanced by spokesgropers for the Transportation Security Administration, the reason they poke around the genitalia of 3-year-old girls and make wheelchair-bound nonagenarians in the final stages of multiple sclerosis remove their diapers in public is that, by doing so, they have made commercial air travel the most secure environment in the United States. In that case, why can’t the president fly commercial.

Streetwise Professor leads off a couple of articles on the future of Europe.

The recent volatility in the market has been linked with the S&P downgrade, but the real epicenter is Europe.  The shock waves that commenced in Greece and then Portugal and Ireland have spread to Italy and Spain, and tremors are being felt in France as well.

Europe has two choices: amputation or gangrene.

The amputation option is to jettison the Euro project by lopping off the weak Med countries, and letting them respond to fiscal crisis in the old fashioned way, through a currency devaluation that would permit these countries to become more competitive, and which would reduce the real burden of their debts. …

… Gangrene kills slowly, but it kills.  It is difficult to see how Europe can survive in the long run as currently constituted, with the rot progressively eating its way from country to country.  Amputation is a shattering experience, but it can be survived, and can increase the odds of long term survival.  But politicians typically choose to avoid pain today even if it is beneficial in the long run.  Which means that Europe’s future is bleak indeed.

Noted European historian Walter Laqueur tries to understand what has happened.  

“The twenty-first century may yet belong to Europe.” Thus said the late Tony Judt, author of a widely praised history of Europe after the Second World War. Historians are not necessarily prophets, and our century has a while to go, but the prospects of such a future coming to pass are not brilliant at present. Tony Judt was in good and numerous company at the time, in America even more so than on the Continent, and the reasons for such misplaced optimism (which has now quite often given way to panic) will no doubt be studied in the years to come.

Some five years ago in a book entitled The Last Days of Europe I dealt with Europe’s decline—and was criticized for my pessimism. And yet I now feel uneasy facing the apocalyptic utterances of yesterday’s Euro-enthusiasts. For even if Europe’s decline is irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

At a time of deep, multiple crises in Europe it is too easy to ridicule the delusions of yesteryear. The postwar generations of European elites aimed to create more democratic societies. They wanted to reduce the extremes of wealth and poverty and provide essential social services in a way that prewar generations had not. They had had quite enough of unrest and conflict. For decades many Continental societies had more or less achieved these aims and had every reason to be proud of their progress. Europe was quiet and civilized.

Europe’s success was based on recent painful experience: the horrors of two world wars; the lessons of dictatorship; the experiences of fascism and communism. Above all, it was based on a feeling of European identity and common values—or so it appeared at the time. Euroskeptics suspected it was simply a community of material interests; it began, after all, as an iron, steel and coal union. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, saw the dangers ahead. He later said that he would have put the emphasis on culture rather than economics if he had to start all over again.

When did things start to go wrong? It would seem the immediate crisis is certainly one of sovereign debt, of common currency and of other financial issues. It was no doubt a mistake to believe that an economic union could be established in the absence of a political one. And yet, did the current crisis perhaps happen because the European idea (meaning the welfare state), the basis of the scheme, was eroded? …

Speaking of failed enterprises, Ed Morrissey speculates on the idea Obama may quit.

… Some will scoff at the notion that Obama and his large ego would walk away from the office, but LBJ was also rumored to think pretty highly of himself.  It’s a low-probability outcome, but it isn’t a zero probability outcome.  Obama’s ratings have tanked this year along with the economy, and he hasn’t come up with an original thought on economic policy since Porkulus.  The leaks of his rumored plan sound a lot like Porkulus II, a sequel to a flop.  This gives the impression that Obama has run out of ideas, and as Noonan argues in her piece, his attacks on Republicans for their supposed refusal to pass a plan he has yet to even submit to them sounds like a man who realizes that he’s out of ideas, too.

But the decision may end up being out of his hands if the political environment doesn’t improve.  Obama’s numbers are plummeting in places Democrats can hardly afford to lose.  In Pennsylvania, where Obama will top a ticket that also includes Bob Casey’s bid for a second Senate term, he’s either at 43% approval (Quinnipiac) or at 35% (Muhlenberg).  Wisconsin turned Republican last year and a series of elections this year confirmed it, and Herb Kohl’s seat in the Senate is up for grabs.  Obama can be expected to drag down the ticket in Virginia (James Webb’s seat is open), Florida (Bill Nelson), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Maryland (Ben Cardin), and Michigan (Debbie Stabenow). …

Last week we closed with the student loan piece from the Atlantic. There’s some follow-up with a scary graph. Alert readers will note a contradiction. The article in the Atlantic noted student debt was approaching $1 trillion while this piece says it has ballooned to $550 million. We will follow up on that.

You think the housing bubble was enormous? Meet the education bubble. On Wednesday, an article here by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus explained the debt crisis at American colleges. But some startling statistics will help to make their analysis a little more tangible. The growth in student loans over the past decade has been truly staggering.

Here’s a chart based on New York Federal Reserve data for household debt. The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period.

This chart looks like a mistake, but it’s correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.

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What we saw during the bus tour of the Mid West was the president accusing the GOP of wishing failure for the country so they would have political success. Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts about that charge. Perhaps in his old career he would have called it projection.

… The charge is not just ugly. It’s laughable. All but five Republican members of the House — moderate, establishment, Tea Party, freshmen alike — voted for a budget containing radical Medicare reform knowing it could very well end many of their careers. Democrats launched gleefully into Mediscare attacks, hardly believing their luck that Republicans should have proposed something so politically risky in pursuit of fiscal solvency. Yet Obama accuses Republicans of acting for nothing but partisan advantage.

This from a man who has cagily refused to propose a single structural reform to entitlements in his three years in office. A man who ordered that the Afghan surge be unwound by September 2012, a date that makes no military sense (it occurs during the fighting season), a date not recommended by his commanders, a date whose sole purpose is to give Obama political relief on the eve of the 2012 election. And Obama dares accuse others of placing politics above country?

A plague of bad luck and bad faith — a recalcitrant providence and an unpatriotic opposition. Our president wrestles with angels. Monsters of mythic proportions.

A comforting fantasy. But a sorry excuse for a failing economy and a flailing presidency.

Warren Buffett, wise investor, is campaigning for higher taxes for the “rich.” Pickerhead thinks if Buffett cared so much about public service, he might have issued some warnings about Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s dangers to our economy. These were organizations he knew well. Berkshire Hathaway first bought heavily into them in 1988. At that time he owned 3.2% of Freddie Mac. The maximum allowed by law according to notes in the 1988 statements. Then in 1992 the holdings went up to 8.2% without any apparent note on how the law was changed. In 2000 that position was liquidated for a profit in the range of $3 billion. During 1988, Berkshire also started investing in Coca-Cola. A holding now worth $13 billion. So Buffett unloaded Freddie and Fannie while he let profits ride elsewhere. What did he know? And why didn’t he share that with the country from 2000 to 2006 when there might have been a chance to prevent the worst excesses of the real estate bubble? 

Peter Ferrara in Forbes points out the folly of Buffett’s present campaign for higher taxes. Like they say, no fool like an old fool. Then again, maybe he’s just continuing to be greedy, since his large holdings in insurance companies would benefit from higher taxes on income and estates.

And another thing; every time a hurricane hits and some enterprising soul gathers up and sells generators and the like in the stricken area, they are routinely maligned by the media for profiting from other’s misery. Yet Buffett was roundly admired in 2008 for his usurious investment in Goldman Sachs. ($5 billion of perpetual preferred stock with a juicy 10% coupon, as well as warrants that give it the right to buy $5 billion of common stock at any time in the next five years for $115 — 8% below Goldman’s closing stock price) Goldman stock spent the better part of the last two years north of $150 per share. You do the math. Sorry for the rant, here’s Ferrara;

Warren Buffett is performing a gross public disservice in creating urban myths about the nature of the tax system in America.  Those myths will mislead millions of Americans about the fundamentals of their own country.

Buffett began his media offensive with an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday, “Stop Coddling the Super Rich,” where he complained that taxes need to be raised on “the rich” so they can pay their fair share.  He reported that he paid 17.4% of his income in federal taxes, and claimed “If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine.  But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.”  That is inaccurate.

Official IRS data shows that for 2007, before President Obama was even elected, the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined.  That top 1% paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes, almost twice their share of income.  When Ronald Reagan entered office, the top 1% paid 17.6% of all federal income taxes.  That is why Jack Kemp always used to say if you want to soak the rich, cut tax rates. …

… A central factor that Buffett doesn’t understand is the multiple taxation of capital.  He complains about the 15% capital gains tax rate as unfair, since his secretaries pay higher income tax rates.  But the capital gains tax is only one layer of taxation on capital income.  Capital income is also subject to the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, and the death tax.  As the Wall Street Journal explained yesterday,

“Mr. Buffett makes most of his income from his investments, particularly from dividends and capital gains that are taxed at a rate of 15%.  What he doesn’t say is that much of his income was already taxed once as corporate income, which is assessed at a 35% rate (less deductions).  The 15% levy on capital gains and dividends to individuals is thus a double tax that takes the overall rate on that corporate income closer to 45%.” …

… The Journal started its editorial yesterday on Buffett’s tax confusions by saying, “Barry Kilgore, the man who made the Wall Street Journal into a national publication, was once asked why so many rich people favored higher taxes.  That’s easy, he replied.  They already have their money.”  But my own son, soon to graduate from college, who understands people and their motivations better than most, had a better insight.  “Buffett just likes the attention,” Peter Ferrara, Jr. explained.

Remember Chauncey Gardner from the movie Being There. The character played by Peter Sellers said many soothing yet meaningless things. The president did his best imitation last week. Politico has the story of a reporter who followed Obama’s advice.

At Wednesday’s town hall in Atkinson, Ill., a local farmer who said he grows corn and soybeans expressed his concerns to President Barack Obama about “more rules and regulations” — including those concerning dust, noise and water runoff — that he heard would negatively affect his business.

The president, on day three of his Midwest bus tour, replied: “If you hear something is happening, but it hasn’t happened, don’t always believe what you hear.”

When the room broke into soft laughter, the president added, “No — and I’m serious about that.”

Saying that “folks in Washington” like to get “all ginned up” about things that aren’t necessarily happening (“Look what’s comin’ down the pipe!”), Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.”

“Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor catches the ignorant One yet again.

Whoops!  He said it again.

Several weeks ago Obama blamed high unemployment on ATMs and the like.  He was widely ridiculed for those remarks, and rightly so.  But apparently he believes it, because he said virtually the same thing yesterday:

“One of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is – businesses have gotten so efficient, that, uh, when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller? Instead of using an ATM. Or, used a travel agent instead of going online. A lot of jobs out there that used to require people now have become automated.”

And the world is supposed to wait with bated breath for his jobs proposal?  What will it be?  To ban the internet?

This reminds me of the famous Milton Friedman story:

‘ There’s a story about Milton Friedman in China that may be apocryphal but illustrates this point. In observing hundreds of Chinese workers clearing land for a new building using shovels, Friedman asked his hosts “Why are they using shovels? Why not use heavy equipment like an earth-mover?” The Chinese official said “If we did that, we’d lose all of those jobs!” Supposedly Friedman said “Oh, you’re trying to create jobs! I thought you were trying to build a building. If you want to create jobs, why not take away their shovels and give them spoons?” ‘

So maybe the jobs program won’t be based on shoveling money to shovel ready projects, but to spoon ready ones.

I have little patience with those who label Obama as a Marxist.  However, his economic conceptions do seem to be little more than warmed over crypto-Marxist drivel; he looks at the nation’s poor employment picture and sees a modern day version of Marx’s description of the plight of the handweavers.  This is not evidence of hardcore Marxism, just the kind of thing one picks up in the intellectually miasmatic swamps of progressivism that Obama has inhabited the last 30 odd years.  Abject ignorance of real economics is the default condition in those swamps, as we find out whenever Obama chooses to bless us with an exegesis on the subject.

Jonah Goldberg posts a letter from a reader who farms tobacco and employs migrant workers.

… Recently, the USDA inspectors show up and pull our workers out of the fields for hours of questions (while we still are paying them). They inspect our houses. Several items just not up to code say these inspectors in an accusatory and snide tone.  Threw a stack of regulations literally 8 inches high, small type, saying we are responsible to know and to account for each and every one.
 
Now we treat our workers very well, but we treat them like men, not children.  The house was “messy.”  My goodness, we need to hire a maid!  The screen door was not exactly square with the frame by an 1/8th of an inch.  Well many folks around here live in older homes that have settled.  The list goes on, but no item was such that our workers thought there was a problem.  The worst part is we were treated like criminals.  We are awaiting our fine for our failing to memorize every federal regulation applicable to us.
 
My dad is 67 and told the feds that he was out of farming due to this ridiculous bureaucracy and storm trooper treatment.  Their arrogant reply, “well the law lets us inspect your land and homes one year after you have left farming, so you can’t keep us off your land next year either.” …

Toby Harnden posts on the Vineyard vacation.

In some respects, you’ve got to give Barack Obama some credit. People would rightly criticise Bill Clinton for poll testing everything he did, including, famously, his 1995 vacation. But Obama? He wants to go to Martha’s Vineyard with his family, he knows that it’s a politically insane thing to do but he’s damn well going there anyway.

If you were a Republican campaign operative drawing up Obama’s programme, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something better than sending him to this exclusive island that is the playground for the east coast social, intellectual and financial elites.

Here in the United States, there isn’t the resentment of money and success that is so prevalent in Britain. Nevertheless, a sojourn on Martha’s Vineyard is the kind of thing that is available to very, very few Americans, a break that ordinary voters cannot imagine having.

Oh, there is perhaps one thing that GOP operative could add to the programme. Just before leaving for “the Vineyard” (as its habituees call it), how about a three-day presidential bus trip through the Mid-West in which Obama’s message is that he will not rest for a minute in tackling America’s jobs crisis? …

Yet another bubble burst is sneaking up on us. The Atlantic has the story of student debt. It has passed credit card debt, and is approaching $1 trillion.

How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford’s professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there’s more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.

As this semester begins, college loans are nearing the $1 trillion mark, more than what all households owe on their credit cards. Fully two-thirds of our undergraduates have gone into debt, many from middle class families, who in the past paid for much of college from savings. The College Board likes to say that the average debt is “only” $27,650. What the Board doesn’t say is that when personal circumstances go wrong, as can happen in a recession, interest, late payment penalties, and other charges can bring the tab up to $100,000. Those going on to graduate school, as upwards of half will, can end up facing twice that.

A fact of academic life is that the tuition-debt nexus keeps most colleges going. At Loyola University in Chicago, 77 percent enroll with loans, as do 85 percent in New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce. At historically black colleges, where endowments are low and students are often poor, it’s usually 90 percent. Nor is soaring private tuition the only reason. At public Kentucky State University, with only $6,210 in charges, 76 percent sign up for loans; so do 85 percent at the University of North Dakota, where state residents pay $6,934. What these figures suggest that borrowing is as much to finance living away from home as for bursars’ bills. …

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Wisconsin Interest magazine profiles Paul Ryan.

Ryan has become the ultimate political oxymoron – a Republican national media darling. To conservatives, this is akin to seeing Sasquatch roller skating down the street smoking a pipe. It simply doesn’t happen.

And yet there is Paul Ryan, on a CNBC panel out-nerding all the high-paid TV financial analysts. And there is Paul Ryan on the Sunday network talk shows explaining how America is in the midst of a slow-motion federal entitlement catastrophe. And there is Paul Ryan dismantling the health care bill at President Obama’s sham “summit,” while the president glares at him as if Ryan just told the Obama kids there’s no tooth fairy.

Ryan is a throwback; he could easily have been a conservative politician in the era before cable news. He has risen to national stardom by taking the path least traveled by modern politicians: He knows a lot of stuff.

Few members of Congress have attained Ryan’s mind-boggling velocity. Elected to Congress in 1998 at the tender age of 28, he is on everyone’s watch list. Fortune has anointed Ryan as President Obama’s foremost adversary. Conservative patriarch George Will has Ryan all but penciled in as the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012. America’s Cougar-in-Chief, Sarah Palin, listed Ryan as her favorite presidential candidate in 2012. The London Daily Telegraph ranked Ryan as America’s ninth most influential conservative, ahead of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

In fact, rarely does Wisconsin’s fiscal dreamboat give an interview these days when he’s not asked if he’s running for president in 2012; he steadfastly maintains that he will not. But why are people so suddenly so excited by a congressman from Janesville, Wisconsin? In other words…

What’s so damn special about Paul Ryan? …

David Harsanyi says we don’t want any more help.

… At a Minnesota town hall, for instance, the president offered this gem: “You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks. There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market.”

If only the common man had such insight into markets. Earlier this month, Ford reported that sport utility vehicle sales had increased 31 percent (car sales improved 3.4 percent) from a year earlier. General Motors also “bounced back” on the strength of its worldwide SUV sales. Who knows? If this administration didn’t harbor resentment toward useful and affordable energy, Ford could sell even more SUVs.

Just an example.

Now, considering the failure of Washington to help shake off this prolonged slump, it is no surprise that a recent Washington Post poll found that 73 percent of Americans — up from 52 percent last year and 41 percent a decade ago — doubt the ability of government to solve the nation’s economic problems.

I suppose it’s not surprising that this administration refuses to budge a single food stamp away from its faith-based beliefs. But if it really wanted to help, it would stop “helping.”

Andrew Malcolm says, “On Day 938 of his presidency, Obama says he’ll have a jobs plan in a month or so.”

… At his speaking engagements, Obama stressed the need to extend payroll tax cuts and to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and other union-made infrastructure kinds of stuff. Also some free-trade agreements. This was a repetition of what he had said on the first day of his Grand Ground Tour.

On his 938th day in office President Obama also said he would soon have a completed jobs plan. Maybe early fall, something like that. And he complained, “We could do even more if Congress is willing to get in the game.”

Tomorrow with all this heavy work in his rear-view mirror, the president is scheduled to join his family on Martha’s Vineyard for a nine-day vacation.

Kathleen Parker doesn’t like the bus. You know, the one made in Canada.

About that bus: What could the White House have been thinking?

Here the country is reeling from depression, recession and oppression, and the president decides to take a heartland tour in the visual equivalent of an armored hearse?

David Boaz tries to answer the question whether Obama is worse than Carter and Bush.

Conservatives have become so furious with President Obama that they forget just how bad some of his predecessors were. One Jeffrey Kuhner, whose over-the-top op-eds in the Washington Times belie the sober and judicious conservatism you might expect from the president of the “Edmund Burke Institute,” writes most recently:

“A possible Great Depression haunts the land. Primarily one man is to blame: President Obama.

Mr. Obama has racked up more than $4 trillion in debt.”

Yes, he has. And that’s almost as much as the $5 trillion in debt rung up by his predecessor, George W. Bush. True, on an annual basis Obama is leaving Bush in the dust. But acceleration has been the name of the game: In 190 years, 39 presidents racked up a trillion dollars in debt. The next three presidents ran the debt up to about $5.73 trillion. Then Bush 43 almost doubled the total public debt, to $10.7 trillion, in eight years. And now the 44th president has added almost $4 trillion in two years and seven months. …

For those who think the president will be Harry S, Obama, Michael Barone has a history lesson.

… Truman’s victory was due to two “F factors” — the farm vote and foreign policy — the first of which scarcely exists today and the second of which seems unlikely to benefit Obama in the same way.

When the nation went to war in the 1940s one out of four Americans still lived on farms. The 1948 electorate still reflected that America. Voter turnout was actually lower than it was in 1940, and the vast postwar demographic changes were not reflected in elections until turnout surged in the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

Truman promised to keep Depression-era farm subsidies in place and charged that Dewey and the Republicans would repeal them. That enabled him to run ahead of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 showing in 13 states with large farm populations from Indiana to Colorado and Minnesota to Oklahoma.

Without that swing in the farm vote Truman would not have won. Dewey, waking up to find that he would not be president as he and almost everyone expected, spotted that immediately the morning after the election.

Today only 2 to 3 percent of Americans live on farms. Farm prices are currently running far ahead of subsidy prices. Obama is not going to be re-elected by the farm vote.

The second F factor that helped Truman was foreign policy. As Ornstein correctly notes, Truman’s Cold War policies — the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan — were supported by Republican congressional leaders and by Dewey. Top Dewey advisers were taken into confidence by Truman’s foreign policy appointees. It was the golden era of bipartisan foreign policy.

But on one policy Truman went further than his top advisers or Dewey’s. When the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Truman’s advisers — men of the caliber of George Marshall and Omar Bradley — said that it was impossible to supply food and fuel to Berlin and we should just abandon it.

At a crucial meeting in July 1948 Truman listened to this advice. After others finished talking, Truman said simply, “We’re not leaving Berlin.”  …

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the many “seasons” stores use to focus on customers needs. The article is strange in that it moves from suggesting retailers spend their time trying to manipulate behavior to one more with more benign motives. Whatever your take, you’ll learn something about retailers’ efforts.

… In a suburb of Minneapolis, Supervalu runs a “lab store,” a model store not open to the public where the third-largest traditional grocery store company in the U.S. can test how new products look on its shelves and experiment with seasonal displays. Last month, Supervalu employees worked to create the perfect fall endcap, the shelves that anchor the end of the typical grocery store aisle. The goal—easy meals for parents pressed for time at the start of the school year.

Problems quickly became apparent. After setting up tuna in pouches, mayonnaise, peanut butter and bread on the lunch endcap, employees saw that the tuna pouches tilted slightly backwards. The tuna “didn’t present itself well to customers,” says Chris Doeing, a director of merchandising for Supervalu, which owns chains including Albertsons and Cub Foods. Tuna was booted from the endcap to a nearby shelf.

On endcaps, best-selling items often go on the larger shelves near the floor to grab people’s attention from farther away. Employees experiment with which size and shape products look best together. …